justice

When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.

A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

via U.S. official resigns over Afghan war – washingtonpost.com.

According to the release, some of the key findings of the poll include:

* The death penalty was ranked last when the police chiefs were asked to name one area as “most important for reducing violent crime,” with only one percent listing it as the best way to reduce violence. The death penalty came in behind more police officers; reducing drug abuse; better economy and more jobs; longer prison sentences; and technological innovations such as improved laboratories and crime databases.

* The police chiefs ranked the death penalty as the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money. They rated expanded training and more equipment for police officers; hiring more police officers; community policing; more programs to control drug and alcohol abuse; and neighborhood watch programs as more efficient uses of taxpayers’ dollars.

* Almost 6 in 10 police chiefs (57%) agreed that the death penalty does little to prevent violent crimes because perpetrators rarely consider the consequences when engaged in violence. Although the police chiefs did not oppose the death penalty in principle, less than half (47%) would support it if a sentence of life without parole with mandatory restitution to the victim’s family were available.

via Poll of Police Chiefs Shows Death Penalty Ranked Least Among Crime-Fighting Priorities.

Sarah’s whole street reeks of pot. This is not hyperbole. When you turn the corner onto this lane of 1970s tract houses, you smell the tang: the sour, earthy, green odor that wafts up from lush marijuana plants steaming in the sun.

Sarah estimates that seven of 10 households on her semi-rural street, a couple miles from white-bread-suburban Rohnert Park, Calif., are growing weed. She ran into one neighbor at the hardware store, in the new section devoted to cultivation, with the special dirt, fertilizer and outsized plastic pots the growers use. Her next-door neighbors, two brothers, trade plant-sitting with her and let their pit bulls loose at night to patrol both yards. The women across the street have a small crop in their vegetable garden. And the new couple on the block, noticing the smell, mentioned they’d like to get in on it. In fact, she says, she doesn’t know anyone in Sonoma County who isn’t growing pot.

Sarah who, like all the marijuana growers quoted in this article, asked that her real name not be used doesn’t fit the image of a drug dealer. She’s 58, colors her hair strawberry blonde and wears souvenir T-shirts, jeans and Crocs. Her ranch-style, three-bedroom home is filled with furniture from Costco and cat-themed knickknacks. She seems as mainstream as they come — and she is typical of the new breed of marijuana producer in Northern California.

via How Are Some Middle-Class Families Coping with the Recession? Growing Pot | | AlterNet.

YouTube – dove evolution.

California is embarking on an unprecedented civil court experiment to pay for attorneys to represent poor litigants who find themselves battling powerful adversaries in vital matters affecting their livelihoods and families.

The program is the first in the nation to recognize a right to representation in key civil cases and provide it for people fighting eviction, loss of child custody, domestic abuse or neglect of the elderly or disabled.

Advocates for the poor say the law, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed this week, levels the legal playing field and gives underprivileged litigants a better shot at attaining justice against unscrupulous landlords, abusive spouses, predatory lenders and other foes.

Although some analysts worry that it could swell state court dockets or eat up resources better spent on other needs of the poor, the pilot project that won bipartisan endorsement in the state Assembly will be financed by a $10 increase in court fees for prevailing parties.

Anybody confronted with criminal charges has a constitutional right to an attorney, as set out in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gideon vs. Wainwright in 1963. But such a right does not apply in civil court, and the majority of citizens fighting what can be life-altering civil actions now attempt to handle their cases without professional guidance.

An estimated 4 million people seek to represent themselves in California in civil matters each year, the state Judicial Council estimates, not because they want to but because they can’t afford to hire a lawyer.

“How ironic that you can be arrested for stealing a small amount of food — a box of Twinkies from a convenience store — and you’re entitled to counsel. But if your house is on the line, or your child is on the line, or you’re being abused in a domestic relationship, you don’t have the same right to counsel,” said Assemblyman Mike Feuer, the Los Angeles Democrat who sponsored the bill.

via California gives the poor a new legal right — latimes.com.

Not about crime, but this local story breaks my heart. These were good kids. Our lives can be shattered so quickly:

What started as a weekend surfing trip to the Outer Banks ended tragically when a 15-year-old Pender County teen drowned Friday after his surfboard became entangled in a fishing pier.

The teenage boy, Craig Marshall, a student at Topsail High School in Hampstead, was surfing with a group of eight teenagers on Hatteras Island when the current dragged him into Avon Fishing Pier sometime around 11:30 a.m., said Bob Helle, the assistant chief with the Hatteras Island Rescue Squad.

Helle said the leash on Marshall’s surfboard – the cord that connects the surfer to his board – became tangled in the pylons, trapping him in the rough waters beneath the pier.

via Topsail High School student drowns while surfing near Hatteras | StarNewsOnline.com | Star News | Wilmington, NC.

This is a tale of two economies.

In one of these economies, employees on Wall Street are pulling in record salaries that average around $1 million.

In the other economy, workers’ wages are falling. “Pay cuts are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression,” writes Louis Uchitelle of The New York Times.

In the one economy, J.P. Morgan Chase is reporting a quarterly profit of $3.59 billion.

In the other economy, foreclosures are going through the roof.

In the one economy, the stock market flirts with the 10,000 mark.

In the other economy, 9.8 percent of Americans are officially out of work, and the actual number is almost twice that many, especially when you count the underemployed.

One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class.

The other economy is for everybody else.

And the people running the economy of the rich are the rich themselves. Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, has surrounded himself with people who made a fortune on Wall Street. His predecessor, Hank Paulson, headed up Goldman Sachs.

Is it any wonder, then, that they fixed the economy of the rich, and let the other one go?

And still today, Congress has not passed a bill outlawing the crazy and crooked trading on Wall Street that got us into this mess.

via Two Economies in America | The Progressive.

Lawyer competence was the topic of the day at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, as justices heard two cases involving claims of ineffective assistance of counsel that violated the Sixth Amendment.

In one, a lawyer’s flawed advice exposed his client to deportation. In the other, the defense lawyer in a capital case called his client sick and twisted during a closing argument, and minimized mitigating evidence that might have helped avoid the death penalty.

In the first case, Padilla v. Kentucky, a lawyer told his client Jose Padilla, a permanent resident alien arrested for drug trafficking, that pleading guilty as part of a plea agreement would not expose him to deportation. That advice was flat wrong.

Padilla sued in 2004, claiming ineffective assistance that deprived him of his constitutional rights. But the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that incorrect advice on matters that are collateral to the criminal case don’t make out a case of ineffective assistance under the Supreme Court’s Strickland v. Washington standard.

Most U.S. Supreme Court justices seemed wary of expanding the definition of ineffective assistance to include flawed advice on matters beyond the actual criminal case the lawyer is handling.

via Law.com – A Day About Bad Lawyering at the High Court.

Rachel Maddow:Obama brings another honor to America.

The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term today, and there are several key criminal cases before the justices. We’ll be watching closely to see how new Justice Sonia Sotomayor comes down on key criminal issues and whether the conservative bloc of the court further consolidates along ideological lines. It should be an interesting term. Here are five cases to keep your eye on this term:

via Five Supreme Court Cases to Watch Criminal Justice – Change.org.