The Supreme Court held oral argument today to decide if a man the Illinois courts determined to be wrongly arrested in 1994 can pursue a civil rights suit against the police who arrested him. In Wallace v. Kato, the plaintiff is appealing a 7th Circuit holding that federal rules require the suit be filed two years from the time of his arrestt, not from the time his arrest was ruled illegal (2002). The transcript of today's oral argument is available here. Additional details are reported in an Associated Press story by Mark Sherman.

Urban Homicide, which drives state and national murder rates, is the subject of a sad San Francisco Chronicle story by reporter Jim Herron Zamora. The Oakland murder of a young parolee is a typical example of a problem the major media does not give much focus ie; most murder victims are black as are most of the murderers. The claim that America's death penalty is racially biased ignores these facts. Yet we hear the bias claim almost every day on the news from DP opponents who either don't know or don't care who's doing the killing and the dying.