Lethal Injection. Missouri's revised protocol is better, but still not good enough, says Federal District Judge Fernando Gaitan. AP story here.
Death penalty opponents are marshalling their forces to convince Wisconsin voters to reject a November referendum on capital punishment. The state has not had the death penalty for 153 years according to a story in the Capital Times.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has rejected a murderer's jury instruction claim and upheld his death sentence. In November a special commission report on the state's death penalty is due. The previous Governor had imposed a moratorium on executions pending that report. The Associated Press story is here .
Andrea Yates NGRI of Murdering Her Children. Fox News reports that the jury has found the Houston mom not guilty by reason of insanity here.
Assault trial probes different explanations for how a cell phone became lodged in a woman's throat in a Kansas City suburb. The bizarre story here.
Law Restricting Sex Offenders Clears a Hurdle here.
The body of five-year-old Destiny Norton, who disappeared from the yard of her home a little over a week ago in Salt Lake City, Utah was found in the basement of a neighbor, who was charged with homicide. Full story here.
Cocaine Sentencing. The differential treatment of crack and powder cocaine in federal drug sentencing law would be reduced, although not eliminated, under a bill introduced by Senators Sessions, Cornyn, Pryor, and Salazar, the Washington Times reports here. (Hat tip: Doug Berman.)
While I am not completely familiar with Ga.'s new sex offender law, it seems that it goes a little far. It seems to me that the answer to the problem of sex offenders is not to create ever widening exclusion zones for a wide class of criminals (many of whom may not pose any danger), but to have stiff penalties for a subset of violent and dangerous felons.
Overpunishment of those who are not dangerous (e.g., one of the plaintiffs, whose crime was more of the Romeo & Juliet variety than sexual predation) is problematic since the society as a whole pays when people aren't as productive as they could be.
What should be happening, in my opinion, is a far more focused effort to identify the truly dangerous, violent offenders and to get them off the streets--permanently. Throwing a Romeo & Juliet offender in jail for 10 years for living near a bus stop is a waste of scarce crime-fighting resources.
Another thing that would help reduce sexual crimes in urban areas would be for the local police, in conjunction with the feds, to identify alien sex offenders with a view towards deportation. Of course, anyone deported for a violent offense who is subsequently found in the US should be sentenced to LWOP.