Double Murderer Facing Execution: A habitual sex offender, convicted 13 years ago for the rape and murder of two young Arlington, Texas teachers is scheduled to be executed today, as reported by Fort Worth Star Telegram writer Nathaniel Jones. The two victims, Wendie Prescott, 22 and Christine Vu, 25, were found in 1996, bound with duct tape and strangled to death in their bathtubs. Police said that Dale Devon Scheanette, stalked the young women before raping and killing them three months apart. DNA evidence linked him to the murders, and also to the sexual assualt of five other women in Arlington, Grand Prairie and Lancaster.
More on Extraordinary Rendition: The WSJ has this story by Evan Perez on the Obama Administration's nonchange in position in the "extraordinary rendition" case, noted in yesterday's news scan.
"This is not change. This is definitely more of the same," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers argued against the government in the appeal on Monday.
Liberal supporters of Mr. Obama are watching how the administration handles other polarizing issues, including calls for possible criminal prosecutions of Bush officials for tactics that critics say led to torture of terror detainees. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the Justice Department's move suggests that "the chances of bringing a criminal case are getting lower and lower." Mr. Obama has said he wants to look forward, not backward.
Alaska AG Talis Colberg has resigned, reports Anne Sutton for AP."Rick Svobodny, head of the state's criminal division, was named acting attorney general."
Was Green executed last nite?
[Strange. One of the services we use reported this as a new story, but it was last year. I've deleted the item. -- KS]
It's off topic, but I thought I'd take a shot--does anyone know what the status of the federal lethal-injection litigation is? The last I'd heard was that it was still in the DC District Court. What's going on? I can't find anything at all on the net. I do know that at least four federal death-row prisoners have already exhausted all their other appeals.
Sorry again for going off-topic but I couldn't figure out how to e-mail CJLF.
E-mail can be sent to CJLF through this page:
http://www.cjlf.org/contact.htm
Thanks for the link but I'm unable to send an e-mail through my Mac mail program. I'd have to send it directly from my e-mail account. Any chance you could nonetheless post some info on the federal lethal-injection situation? Thanks
A temporary email address that forwards to my real one is "ks_temp" followed by the at sign, followed by our domain, cjlf.org. We don't post real addresses on the Internet because harvesting by spammer robots has, in the past, resulted in addresses getting so much spam that we had to abandon them.
I do not yet have an answer on the federal death penalty, but I have an inquiry out.
Thank you very much.