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A deaf man who is unable to speak and suffers from mental illness was mistakenly incarcerated at the D.C. jail for nearly two years, lost in a bureaucracy that relied on inaccurate computer records, mishandled his files and failed to realize the misdemeanor charge against him had been dismissed.

Finding that prosecutors had withheld critical evidence from a defendant, a Pennsylvania state court judge has thrown out the conviction of a man who was sentenced to death 11 years ago for setting a fire in his house in Allentown that killed his three young sons.

For the past five years, the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center has become a refuge for people who suffer from cancer, AIDS and other diseases and who say that only marijuana relieves their pain and nausea. But no one knows how much longer they will find safe harbor here.

Several anti-death penalty groups and women's advocates are backing the Andrea Pia Yates Support Coalition, a group organized by the Houston Area National Organization for Women to help the Clear Lake mother accused of drowning her five children.

Drug offenders spend a year more in prison on average than they did 15 years ago, and drug offenses now make up about one-third of federal criminal cases -- both the result of tougher drug sentencing, according to new figures from the Department of Justice Bureau of Statistics.

In a case being watched for clues to how the new Justice Department may administer the federal death penalty, the department is considering how to proceed against two men who have been charged in the execution-style murders of two college students.

Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is a man now free to speak his mind, which he does in public with unusual vigor for a judge. Lately he has been speaking out against a practice, adopted by judicial administrators in Washington, of monitoring the Internet surfing habits of judges and the thousands of other employees of the federal court system.

Carrying signs and banners denouncing the "racist" death penalty, hundreds of protesters thronged downtown Philadelphia on Friday to show support for death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal as his attorneys tried to persuade a judge to grant him a new trial.

The high court of Texas this afternoon postponed the execution of Napoleon Beazley, just a few hours before he was to be put to death for the 1994 murder of a businessman during a carjacking gone awry.

Attorneys for Kennedy family relative Michael Skakel said on Wednesday he has an alibi for the night 26 years ago on which prosecutors allege he murdered his teen-age neighbor, the first time his defense has made such a claim in court.

Thirty current and former police officers were arrested yesterday in Puerto Rico on charges of protecting cocaine dealers, the largest police corruption case ever brought by the FBI, the Justice Department said.

With three justices having disqualified themselves, the Supreme Court this afternoon turned down a stay of execution request from Napoleon Beazley, who is scheduled to be put to death in Texas on Wednesday.

Privacy advocates are especially concerned that the key logger on Nicodemo Scarfo's computer was planted on the basis of a simple search warrant and not a court-approved wiretap order, which is more difficult to obtain and carries far greater restrictions.

A special committee of federal judges has recommended the wide-scale monitoring of all the computers used in the judicial branch, over the objections of judges who regard the practice as a privacy violation.

A federal appeals court overturned a Texas death penalty on Monday for a man whose attorney slept through much of his trial for murder, in a case that has raised questions about justice in the state that leads the nation in executions.

Activists filed two more federal lawsuits against the city of Los Angeles and its police department on Monday, claiming that officers wrongly clubbed and shot people with pepper spray, rubber bullets and beanbags at demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention last year.

The case of Nathanial Beazley now scheduled to be executed on Aug. 15, is attracting international pleas for clemency because he was only 17 at the time of the slaying and because his co-defendants have since recanted parts of their testimony. His supporters also question whether prosecutors sought the death penalty simply to placate the son of the victim, Judge Luttig, a federal appeals court judge, who moved his office to Tyler for the trial and apparently consulted with prosecutors on jury selection.

A controversial ruling by the Oregon Supreme Court has prompted federal prosecutors there to suspend all major federal undercover investigations for the past year, halting everything from street-level drug stings to probes into organized crime and child pornography.

The Justice Department's inspector general has opened an investigation of alleged retaliation by senior FBI officials against agents who uncovered flaws in the bureau's handling of the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and its aftermath.

Although prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Andrea Yates, accused of drowning her five children in a bathtub, whether she will go to trial depends on a hearing ordered by state District Judge Belinda Hill to will determine whether Mrs. Yates is mentally competent to assist in her defense.

U.S. student John Tobin returned to the United States on Wednesday after being paroled from a Russian prison on drug charges and hints of espionage that strained U.S.-Russian relations.

Gregory Coleman -- who had testified that he heard Skakel twice confess to killing his teen-age neighbor Martha Moxley 25 years ago -- had died of a drug overdose.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the government to reveal the high-tech computer snooping technique used by the FBI to gather evidence against an alleged mobster.

The American Bar Association, in the first major overhaul of its ethics code, on Tuesday rejected a rule allowing disclosure of clients' secrets to prevent serious financial crimes but adopted a ban against lawyer-client sex.

The American Bar Association on Monday changed its ethics rules to allow lawyers to reveal clients' secrets in order to stop future deaths or substantial bodily harm that can be caused by toxins or defective tires. Opponents to the change argued that the new language would turn lawyers into ``stealth informants against their clients.''

A new study of capital punishment suggests that it is applied unequally in rural and urban areas and that defendants whose victims are affluent are more likely to get the death penalty.

A federal judge has ruled that conversations between members of Alcoholics Anonymous have the same sort of privilege as contacts between clerics and parishioners, and has overturned the conviction of a man who killed two people in Larchmont, N.Y., 13 years ago.

The American Bar Association is set to vote next week on the first overhaul of its 18-year-old code of ethics that guides lawyers in everything from when they can reveal confidences to when they can have sex with clients.

An all-star cast of veteran liberals, including former attorney general Janet Reno, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund President Elaine Jones, former judge Abner J. Mikva, Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe and former solicitor general Walter Dellinger, has joined forces to support a new legal organization to counter the conservative Federalist Society.

Congress Today

This week's schedule for the House and Senate, including Committee Meetings

Everything you need to effectively educate and lobby your elected officials about the Innocence Protection Act of 2001...from the Justice Project

Oppose This Amendment! Amending the Constitution is an extreme act that should be done only when there are no other alternatives available. The proposed victims' rights amendment would jeopardize the principle of innocent until proven guilty and the right to a fair trial.

Before one more execution is carried out, the federal government and each state that imposes capital punishment have an obligation to ensure that the sentence of death will be imposed with justice, fairness and due process. To address this concern, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) has introduced the "National Death Penalty Moratorium Act of 2001" (S. 233). This legislation would impose a morotirum on federal executions while creating a National Commission on the Death Penalty to review fairness in the administration of capital punishment.

Read the proposed Grand Juror's Bill of Rights--then contact your elected officials and urge passage!

Latest news articles on the Drug front by the Media Awareness Project

Roll Call's weekly news update covering events on Capitol Hill

The latest headlines from the political front, updated twice daily by The Hotline and the National Journal

Everything you need to effectively educate and lobby your elected officials about the Innocence Protection Act of 2001...from the Justice Project

Full text of S. 486, Innocence Protection Act of 2001, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy and others on March 7, 2001. An identical bill was introduced in the House.

Full text of S. 191, Bill to Abolish the Federal Death Penalty, Introduced in the Senate by Sen. Russ Feingold on January 31, 2001

The United States, rarely shy about condemning other nations for human-rights abuses, will get a dose of its own medicine when the World Conference Against Racism opens in Durban, South Africa, on Friday. The target: America's "war on drugs" and the charge that it is inherently racist because black men are being imprisoned for drug offenses at 13 times the rate of white men.

Only the United States refuses to abandon capital punishment for juveniles. Every other country with the penalty - including such rogue nations as Syria, Yemen, Cuba, Indonesia, and Russia - exempts juveniles from the executioner's blade. Currents of decency are running strong against capital punishment worldwide. Surely the United States should join.

It can come as no surprise that where the prosecutor has the power, the savvy, the initiative and the lawbooks at hand, while the defendant's lawyer (if there is one at all) is out in the hall, then indictments can mount up quickly...The prosecutor's edge was memorably captured by former federal judge and convicted felon Sol Wachtler, who said a grand jury, if asked, will indict a ham sandwich.

The war on drugs is at that juncture where race, gender and class relations get entangled in a massive web of fear and loathing, strangling the spirit of liberty and egalitarianism woven into the very fabric of this country. With so many people in jail, there are now 1.3 million children in America with one or both of their parents behind bars. I propose that we grant a one-time pardon to imprisoned drug dealers who have not been convicted of serious violent felonies on the condition that they complete a long-term drug treatment program (if appropriate) and also graduate from a highly structured business apprenticeship under the close supervision of probation officers.

Texas has always had a brutally peculiar take on what constitutes justice. A veteran Dallas defense lawyer, reminiscing last year, said, "At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses."

Texas should not be executing anyone who was a minor at the time the offense occurred. (Nearly all the nations of the world and most states in the United States have ended this foul practice. But not Texas.) At the same time, the capital punishment system in Texas is so blatantly riddled with racism that you end up with a Confederate-flag-waving juror as one of 12 all-white jurors passing judgment in a capital case on a black defendant.

Amnesty International accused the United States yesterday of "contempt for international law and common standards of decency" for the planned execution this month of a convicted murderer who was a juvenile, aged 17, at the time of his crime.

When people start identifying with the victims of law enforcement, they stop accepting its systematic abuses.... We would also witness huge improvements in crime control if police and prosecutors were held accountable for misconduct. Criminal justice abuses are threats to the public safety as well as to individual rights. When the innocent are persecuted, the guilty roam free.

According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), there are only two states--California and North Dakota--that still prohibit the incarceration of children under the age of 16 in adult facilities. Only six states require that inmates under 18 be housed in separate units from the adult prison population.

A world effort to force an end to the US death penalty is gaining strength.

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Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Jim Dwyer. Reads like a novel but much scarier because it's all true. A page-turner!

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