<< Strange Bedfellows Call for Limiting Faretta | Main | News Scan >>


News Scan

| 0 Comments

Tax/Crime Protest: In Oakland, California, shopkeeper Scott Silvera has tried for months to get mayor Ron Dellums' attention on the crime problem. "Finally, fed up, he vowed to stop paying sales taxes until he heard from the mayor's office," reports Phillip Matier in the SF Chron.

Gitmo Executions?: The military has updated its regulations to allow terrorists sentenced to death to be executed at Guantanamo, report Michael Melia and Andrew Selsky for AP. This change is based, as was the original Guantanamo siting of the detainment, on the theory that federal courts have greater habeas corpus review power if the prisoners are physically within the United States. As explained in CJLF's brief in Boumediene v. Bush, federal courts have habeas jurisdiction in the cases of alien enemies only if and to the extent that Congress has given it, and the physical location should be irrelevant under the Military Commissions Act.

Clinton and Terrorist Pardons: Debra Burlingame had this commentary yesterday about Bill Clinton’s FALN pardons. The Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym, FALN, had been linked to at least 146 bombings by 1996. The most gruesome attack was the bombing of the Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan. In August of 1999 Clinton granted clemency to 16 members of FALN, causing a major controversy. Among the guidelines overlooked in this grant was one widely considered vital: the prisoners actually asking for clemency.

Spy Powers Expanded. After a year of struggling to decide, the Senate approved Tuesday the bill to make permanent the surveillance authority set to expire Saturday. The Senate bill, unlike the House version, will give legal protection to the phone companies that participated in past surveillance efforts. Siobhan Gorhan reports for the Wall Street Journal that the 68-29 final vote was "more lopsided than many expected." "'We lost every single battle we had on this bill,' said Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who led the opposition to the immunity provision."

Republicans move to have Moratorium lifted on Executions. Yesterday in the Daily Herald, Christy Gutowski wrote about three Dupage Republicans urging Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift Illinois' moratorium on executions. They also propose changes to the circumstances making a murderer eligible for the death penalty. They propose raising the age for the child-murder circumstance from 12 to 16 but reducing the overall number of circumstances from 21 to 9. The text of the resolution is available here.

Leave a comment

Monthly Archives