justice

When we elected you we didn’t expect miracles. We didn’t even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God’s sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DONT have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother’s son.

We’re counting on you.

via An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore | MichaelMoore.com.

Here are some of the key numbers:

* 5,542 offenses were classified as crimes against persons. Intimidation accounted for 48.8 percent of those crimes, simple assaults for 32.1 percent, and aggravated assaults for 18.5 percent. Seven murders were reported as hate crimes.

* 3,608 offenses were classified as crimes against property. The majority (82.3 percent) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism. The remaining 17.7 percent consisted mainly of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

* Of the 6,927 known offenders, 61.1 percent were white, 20.2 percent were black, and 11.0 percent were of an unknown race.

* 31.9 percent of hate crimes took place in or near homes; while 17.4 percent took place on highways, roads, alleys, or streets; 11.7 percent in schools and colleges; 6.1 percent in parking lots and garages; and 4.2 percent in churches, synagogues, or temples.

via FBI — Hate Crimes – Press Room – Headline Archives 11-23-09.

OpenJurist’s mission is to provide access to published court opinions without charge. Our collection includes approximately 647,000 opinions from the United States Supreme Court published in the United States Reports, and from the lower federal courts, particularly the United States Courts of Appeals, as published in the First, Second and Third series of Federal Reporter.

via OpenJurist | Making the laws of the land accessible to the people of the land..

Free, immediate and permanently available research results for all – that’s what the open-access campaigners want. Unsurprisingly, the subscription publishers disagree. Zoe Corbyn weighs up the ramifications for journals, while Matthew Reisz asks how books will fare

Stephen Hicks, a reader in health and social care at the University of Salford, has just uploaded nine of his journal articles to his university’s online open-access repository of institutional papers, and has another ten in the pipeline. Doing so had not crossed his mind before, and it won’t be compulsory until January 2010 last month, Salford mandated so-called “self-archiving”, becoming the 100th organisation worldwide to do so. But he was turned on to the idea after hearing Martin Hall, Salford’s vice-chancellor and an open-access advocate, speak.

Hicks didn’t make his decision for altruistic reasons or because Hall said it could increase his citations and impact. Rather, he chose to make the papers available because he receives a barrage of requests from other academics for access. Directing them to the repository seemed a logical way to save time and make his life easier. Uploading is straightforward, Hicks says, estimating that it takes about ten minutes per paper. He simply fills in an online form with the details of the peer-reviewed article and sends it, along with the final accepted version, to the repository. Staff there pick up the ball, working out whether the copyright policy of the journal that originally published the paper will allow it to be uploaded. “You don’t have to worry about copyright because the repository staff do that,” Hicks notes, while expressing disappointment that some of his articles haven’t gone online because the journals do not grant permission.

via Times Higher Education – Learning to share.

In a rare display of agreement between advocates who have spent years in fierce opposition, the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday paid tribute to the Department of Justice for its decision to try five of the alleged planners of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in a civilian federal court.

In a teleconference for reporters, the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said the decision to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 plotters to federal court in New York City “is an enormous victory for the rule of law.” Mohammed, known as KSM, is the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the decision at a news conference Friday at the Department of Justice in Washington. He said it was the most difficult decision he has had to make since becoming attorney general after the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January.

Holder also announced that the administration will use military commissions to prosecute other high-profile detainees now being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These include Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen.

via t r u t h o u t | Decision to Try 9/11 Suspects in US Court Hailed as “Victory for the Rule of Law”.

In Harris County, Texas, the death penalty is more likely to be imposed against black defendants than white defendants, and death is more likely to be imposed on behalf of white victims than black victims. These are the findings of Professor Scott Phillips, University of Denver. Phillips’s examination of these findings was distributed in his ACS Issue Brief “Racial Disparities in Capital Punishment: Blind Justice Requires a Blindfold,” just re-released in the latest edition of Advance: The Journal of the ACS Issue Groups.

Professor Phillips explains that his research indicates that the racial disparities arise in the District Attorney’s decision to seek the death penalty, rather than with the jury. He suggests that because the Supreme Court is unlikely to overrule McCleskey v. Kemp in the near future and find that capital punishment is unconstitutional based on statistical evidence of racial disparities, other means for reducing racial disparities in the death penalty should be implemented.

Phillips proposes that prosecutors’ offices that want to institute genuine race-blind processes for deciding whether to seek the death penalty should consider “desocializing” the decision to seek the death penalty. Concrete steps that District Attorney’s offices can take to reduce the social information available to judicial actors in the capital litigation process, he suggests, include eliminating information that might insinuate the race of the victim or defendant – “racial markers” – from all documents considered in the District Attorney’s decision whether to seek the death penalty.

via ACS Blog | Scott Phillips | American Constitution Society.

A five month CBS News Investigation has found a staggering number of rape kits — a collection of swabs and clothing that provide DNA evidence — have never been sent to crime labs for testing.

via Rape Kits Data, By the Numbers – CBS News.