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For the first time in nearly 20 years, the American Bar Association is considering an expansive update of ethics rules for lawyers, which if approved would give attorneys more freedom to divulge their clients' secrets if such revelations would prevent fraud, injury or death.

Andrea Yates, accused of drowning her five children in a bathtub was indicted Monday on two charges of capital murder. Shortly after a Harris County grand jury returned the indictments, lawyers for Andrea Pia Yates filed a notice of intent with the 230th State District Court that they plan to mount an insanity defense.

A man with two death sentences for murders in Harris and Montgomery counties won a stay of execution Tuesday that will allow the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to consider its first appeal under a new law allowing DNA testing.

Civil libertarians are rallying behind a Columbus, Ohio, man who was sentenced to seven years in prison on pornography charges for writing his fantasies of torturing and molesting children in a private journal -- even though he did not disseminate the material.

A Bronx man was freed from prison yesterday by a federal judge who said that he never would have been convicted of murder if the jury had known 13 years ago that a guilt- racked teenager had admitted committing the crime to a priest, a lawyer and others.

In response to the tens of thousands of offenders under 18 who have come under their supervision in the last decade, adult jails and prisons have quietly taken steps to cope with the special needs and dangers of adolescents in an adult correctional population.

The whistle-blower in a massive police corruption scandal was released from prison on parole to a secret location on Tuesday, fearing for his safety after alleging that he and fellow officers framed, beat, and even shot innocent people.

Mario Marquez was one of six retarded inmates executed since 1990 by Texas, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington. The debate about whether any mentally retarded person should be executed has intensified recently, as state governments and the Supreme Court are addressing the issue.

U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft said on Monday that he would halt efforts by immigration officials to deport an HIV-infected 4-year-old Thai boy who was brought to the United States as a pawn of smugglers.

The Oregon Democratic Party today endorsed a drive to impeach five U.S. Supreme Court justices for the decision that effectively gave President Bush his office last year.

Prompted by new insights into the psychology of eyewitnesses to crimes, New Jersey will become the first in the nation to give up the familiar books of mug shots and to adopt a simple new technique called a sequential photo lineup, which has been shown to cut down on the number of false identifications by eyewitnesses to crime.

Some of Georgia's best-known lawyers made a plea today for improving Georgia's system of defending poor people accused of crimes, arguing that the state needed to change one of the lowest-funded and most disorganized defense systems in the nation.

The Senate confirmed federal judges today for the first time since the Democrats took control in May, including Roger Gregory, who was initially named to the bench by President Bill Clinton in a recess appointment after the Republican-run Senate stalled his nomination.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has warned that a recent Supreme Court ruling could result in the release of thousands of immigrants with criminal records into American cities and said he was considering steps to force nations to take them back.

A confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration compromised dozens of prosecutions across the United States by falsely testifying under oath and concealing his own arrest record, but the DEA continued to employ him for 16 years despite detailed knowledge of his wrongdoing, according to interviews, court records and an internal report by the agency.

Stung by accusations of abuse, corruption and cover-ups, the Miami Police Department is under intense scrutiny by federal prosecutors and the department's own investigators, who are reviewing a string of police shootings in recent years.

New Jersey's highest court ruled today that children who are found guilty of sexual offenses before age 14 are not automatically subject to decades of public warnings about them and their crimes.

Hundreds of FBI weapons and laptop computers have been stolen or lost over the last decade, including one handgun used in a homicide and at least one laptop that contains classified information, Justice Department and FBI officials said yesterday.

Several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee conducting Hutchinson's confirmation hearing expressed concern about racial profiling and what steps he would take to ensure the DEA didn't engage in it.

7/17/01... Lawsuit Alleges Oklahoma May Have Killed Wrong Man. ...Reuters

A lawsuit filed in the wake of a police forensics scandal in Oklahoma City alleges an innocent man may have been executed based on shoddy evidence analysis, the defense lawyer who filed the suit said on Tuesday.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a speech at F.B.I.headquarters today that the public trust in the law enforcement agency had been eroded by recent missteps, among them a case in which an F.B.I. agent pleaded guilty to spying for Russian and another in which the bureau failed to turn over thousands of pages of investigative reports to defense lawyers in the Oklahoma City bombing case.

President Bush's top immigration advisers are weighing plans to allow the more than three million Mexicans living illegally in the United States to earn permanent legal residency, officials involved in the deliberations said today.

Enrico St. Cyr, the Haitian immigrant whose victory before the United States Supreme Court last month changed the fate of thousands of legal immigrants facing deportation proceedings, has been released from prison.

Facing two civil rights lawsuits, the New York Police Department yesterday rescinded a two-year-old policy under which people arrested for minor offenses at protests were jailed overnight rather than given summonses to appear in court later.

Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was tortured and sodomized by police officers inside a precinct station bathroom in 1997, will receive an $8.7 million settlement from New York City and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.

Authorities investigating the disappearance of Chandra Levy have begun an inquiry into whether Rep. Gary Condit obstructed justice by allegedly urging a lover to deny their relationship, an official said Wednesday.

American ex-hippie guru Ira Einhorn slit his throat on Thursday in a dramatic protest against a French court ruling that he should be extradited to the United States to face trial for murder.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft turned up the heat yesterday on the FBI, bestowing broad new powers on the Justice Department's inspector general to investigate wrongdoing in the bureau.

A federal jury on Tuesday spared the life of a Tanzanian man convicted of the deadly 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania when the panel could not agree on whether the man should be executed.

Trying to deflect intense public scrutiny, the lawyer for Representative Gary A. Condit said tonight that the congressman would provide the police with any information or material they seek, including DNA evidence, in their investigation of the disappearance of Chandra Ann Levy.

The head of the nation's oldest civil rights organization vowed on Monday to fight any effort by the Bush administration to stack the U.S. Supreme Court with ''strange conservative-thinking individuals who want to set back the hands of time.''

The ranks of mentally ill children and teenagers in the country who, doctors, advocates and officials say, are trapped in psychiatric hospitals and in other institutions for lack of treatment programs outside have swelled to the thousands.

An Oklahoma hospital that was the sole supplier of execution drugs to the state prison system has stopped providing the chemicals after an anti-death penalty group questioned the practice, officials said on Friday.

An Oklahoma hospital that was the sole supplier of execution drugs to the state prison system has stopped providing the chemicals after an anti-death penalty group questioned the practice, officials said on Friday.

Dozens of inmates on death row lack lawyers for their appeals, in part because private law firms are increasingly unwilling to take on burdensome, expensive and emotionally wrenching capital cases, death penalty lawyers say.

The Tampa Police Department has placed three dozen security cameras with face-recognition software in a downtown district popular with locals and tourists. Now, everyone who visits the district, Ybor City, for a burger or a beer runs the risk of having his face digitally scanned and the noses, cheeks and chins checked against a mug-shot database of murderers, drug dealers and other criminal suspects with arrest warrants.

They are not preparing for the Olympics, nor are they athletes in the usual sense. They are four-legged rookies studying in the new state-of-the-art U.S. Customs Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Canine Enforcement Training Center, equipped with heated floors and the latest in audiovisual technology.

The authorities here are investigating how a 14- year-old boy died this week while participating in a rigorous boot- camp program for troubled youth in the desert west of Phoenix.

Attorneys for a Texas mother who admitted drowning her five children formally indicated on Tuesday they would mount an insanity defense, filing a motion challenging their client's mental fitness to stand trial.

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is worried that innocent people may have been executed in the United States, and said in remarks this week that ''serious questions'' are being raised about the death penalty.

The complicated case of Andrea P. Yates, the mother charged with drowning her five children in a bathtub, has raised a complicated question: In a county that has sent more people to death row than any other in the nation, will prosecutors seek the death penalty against her?

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 threat of the death penalty has forced lawyers for Russell Weston Jr., the man accused of killing two Capitol police officers three years ago, to resist needed treatment in order to protect their client's life; if competency is not restored, no trial or execution can take place. But the court's embrace of the peculiar idea of administering medicine in order to enable punishment is dismaying.

Gov. George Pataki made a fresh offer this week to reform the draconian drug laws that have clogged New York State's prisons with more than 10,000 nonviolent drug users, many of them serving mandatory sentences for relatively minor offenses. It should breathe new life into a flagging effort in Albany to revamp the unjust and unworkable Rockefeller drug laws enacted three decades ago.

This page welcomes the push for competent lawyers and DNA testing in capital cases. But we also hope that the current national dialogue will lead to a new consensus that "reforming" the death penalty, a practice abhorrent to a civilized society, is ultimately an unsatisfactory quest. Abolition should be the goal.

This page welcomes the push for competent lawyers and DNA testing in capital cases. But we also hope that the current national dialogue will lead to a new consensus that "reforming" the death penalty, a practice abhorrent to a civilized society, is ultimately an unsatisfactory quest. Abolition should be the goal.

The kind of empathy for Andrea Yates, as a white, middle class mother, unfortunately, does not often extend to the typical capital defendant who may come from a different racial background, and almost always comes from a different class background than the jury.The closer you look at individual cases, the clearer it is that the government-sanctioned execution of human beings is an inappropriate, inequitable, intolerable penalty. It would be wrong to execute Andrea Yates. And it will always be wrong to have one standard of justice for (a mentally retarded person) and another for people like Ms. Yates.

Bad defense lawyers are probably the chief cause of wrongful convictions. Correcting this problem must be a goal of any bill intended to protect the innocent.

Despite the promise of the Statue of Liberty, noncitizens have rarely been treated as constitutional equals in this country. Yet in two surprising decisions handed down last week, the Supreme Court has come close to recognizing that immigrants are persons entitled to the same basic constitutional protections that apply to citizens. Underlying both decisions is the court's fundamental recognition that, as "persons" living here, noncitizens are entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights not explicitly limited to citizens. Last week, the court was at last willing to say that those protections limit the power of Congress and the executive branch to do as they please with the lives and liberty of the millions of immigrants who live among us.

Lest we forget--just over six months ago, the Rehnquist Court stole an election in broad daylight. In fear of the truth, the Scalia Five intervened to block all votes from being counted, an action "unprecedented" (both historically and judicially) in US history. Though the June 12 "anniversary" went unnoticed by the media, we must never forget.

McVeigh's execution was troubling on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin. It was alarming to watch the procedural impatience, the official "just get it over with" mentality, despite defense lawyers' not having had a chance to go through more than 4,000 pages of FBI documents that no one disputes ought to have been turned over before McVeigh's trial.

As the United States prepares to free hundreds of immigrants with criminal records, people who came to this country merely seeking asylum will remain jailed indefinitely under Justice Department guidelines just released. Many have been locked up since they first set foot on U.S. soil – some for years.

The Real Price of Prisons: There are more people behind bars in the United States today than ever before. Since 1980, the inmate population has more than quadrupled to two million -- an unprecedented explosion that is incurring unprecedented costs to all Americans.

After nearly six years in prison for a 1993 home invasion robbery it is now agreed he did not commit, Mr. Stewart has in a 10-day whirlwind of activity passed a lie detector test, seen his conviction vacated, and been released from an Orange County prison in time to be reunited with his family for the Fourth of July.

Because glowsticks are also commonly found at raves, where partiers wave them about during their dance-floor kinetics, they have become a curious casualty of the government's war on drugs.

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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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