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Condemned murderer Phillip Workman received a stay of execution from the Tennessee Supreme Court less than an hour before he was scheduled to die by injection Friday.The piece of evidence that apparently spared Workman's life is an X-ray of the body of Memphis police Lt. Ronald Oliver, whom Workman was convicted of murdering in 1981.

Although the Supreme Court is usually solicitous of states' rights, that attitude appeared today to stop well short of endorsing the medical use of marijuana, which California voters authorized in a 1996 referendum. But several justices today questioned the government's approach, suggesting that its reasons for pursuing a civil injunction rather than criminal prosecution were not only tactical but cynical, perhaps even a misuse of the federal courts' authority to issue injunctions.

After months of speculation and investigation about his responsibility for racial profiling in New Jersey, the state's former attorney general, Peter G. Verniero, testified today.Presented with one document after another from a period stretching from 1996 to 1999, Mr. Verniero said "I don't recall" more than 150 times before an afternoon break in testimony.

Plato Cacheris, a lawyer for Robert P. Hanssen, an F.B.I. agent accused of spying for Moscow, lodged a complaint today over Attorney General John Ashcroft's comments this week about whether Justice Department prosecutors would seek the death penalty against Mr. Hanssen. He said Mr. Ashcroft's comments suggested that prosecutors would threaten Mr. Hanssen with the possibility of execution to pressure him into pleading guilty to obtain a reduced sentence.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Tuesday he will consider seeking the death penalty for Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent accused of passing some of the nation's most sensitive secrets to Moscow.

A lawyer for a Texas death-row inmate urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to make it easier for jurors to consider defendants' mental retardation in deciding whether to sentence them to life in prison or death.

The "crack baby" phenomenon is overblown, according to a study that suggests poverty and the use of cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs while pregnant are just as likely as cocaine to cause developmental problems in children.

Prosecutors in the LAPD corruption probe have quietly filed criminal charges against three former Rampart Division officers in connection with the alleged beating of a reputed gang member in 1998, according to court documents.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Constitution bars the execution of mentally retarded people as "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Customs officers have seized nearly $2 million (£1.4 million) in cash after it was flown into Britain on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive billionaire pardoned by Bill Clinton. Investigators are holding the cash under powers aimed at preventing drug traffickers moving their profits from country to country.

A former veterans hospital nurse convicted of killing four of her patients with injections of poison should spend the rest of her life in prison, a federal jury decided today.

Stephen Jones spoke to The Sunday Oklahoman about his concerns over an upcoming biography, ''American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing,'' which he expects will play down Nichols' role in the April 1995 bombing that killed 168 people. If prosecutors subpoena him in the pending state murder case against Nichols, Jones said, he would not object.

Sunday's Daily Oklahoman Article....Timothy McVeigh's lead trial attorney said Saturday he is willing to testify in the state case against Terry Nichols should McVeigh try to take sole blame for the bombing before his execution.

Swiss officials have announced that they were bowing to "social reality" and would take steps to remove the penalties for consumption of marijuana and hashish, also made from hemp, and lift some restrictions on their sale and production.

On Wednesday, lawyers try to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that federal anti-drug laws shouldn't prevent marijuana from being given to seriously ill patients for pain relief.

The total number of people incarcerated in the United States remained at a record high in 2000, the Justice Department reported Sunday.As of June 2000, 1,931,859 people were in federal, state and local facilities, a 3% increase over June 1999.

About 500 FBI employees with access to intelligence information will be given lie detector tests beginning next week, the first security reform to come from the arrest of alleged spy Robert P. Hanssen, officials said yesterday.

A four-year FBI investigation ended with 10 law enforcement officers in handcuffs, all accused of either theft or accepting payoffs to protect alleged drug shipments.

Lawyers for Abner Louima, who was tortured by a police officer in a toilet stall in a Brooklyn station house in 1997, have reached a tentative settlement with the city and the police union in his lawsuit, lawyers involved in the case said yesterday.

President Bush said Wednesday he is nominating Jimmy Gurule, a Notre Dame professor, to be the Treasury Department's point person on law enforcement. As undersecretary for enforcement, Gurule, professor of criminal law and litigation, would oversee enforcement activities including efforts to prevent drug smuggling, money laundering and counterfeiting and to trace guns and bombs used in crimes.

Taking emergency action, the U.S. Sentencing Commission yesterday sharply increased the guideline penalties for selling the party drug ecstasy. Beginning May 1, the punishment for importing or selling the "hug drug" will be more severe than for peddling powder cocaine.

In a victory for civil-liberties advocates and abortion rights groups, the Supreme Court today ruled that hospitals cannot administer drug tests to pregnant women without their consent and forward positive results to the police.

While New Jersey was under scrutiny in a Justice Department investigation of racial profiling, top state law enforcement officials including the former attorney general, Peter G. Verniero, were so anxious about appearances that they discouraged aides from providing data showing that the practice continued unabated, two lawyers from the attorney general's office testified today.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that some convicted killers in South Carolina have the right to tell jurors there is no chance of parole if they are sentenced to life in prison instead of death.

Lori Berenson, an American accused by Peruvian authorities of cooperating with leftist rebels of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement six years ago, used her first appearance in open court today to declare her innocence and to object to having to listen to her trial from behind bars.

Here in a state that has no death penalty and has not executed anyone for more than a half century, a federal jury today began to consider whether to sentence a former nurse to death.

Almost three years after the New Jersey Turnpike shooting that helped turn racial profiling into a national issue, high-stakes hearings began here today with testimony by state police officials who said the attorney general's office knew for years before the shooting that racial profiling was a common practice in traffic stops and searches.

The Fifth Amendment ``protects the innocent as well as the guilty,'' the Supreme Court said Monday in ruling that a baby sitter had a legitimate reason to fear testifying in a shaken baby case, even though she was not charged with a crime.

A judge said Monday he approves of Timothy McVeigh's agreement with a coroner and the government that no autopsy would be conducted after he is executed for the Oklahoma City bombing. But the judge said he lacks the authority to order that no autopsy be performed.

On Tuesday, a new trial of Lori Berenson is scheduled to begin, this time before a civilian court that the government hopes will show how much the Peruvian justice system has changed for the better in the four months since Alberto K. Fujimori resigned as president and fled the country to escape corruption charges.

Twelve weeks before marijuana is legally recognized as a medicine for chronic pain, state officials, doctors and patients don't know how the new law will be implemented, whether there will be a federal crackdown or even how patients will get the drug.

There are 2,700 "INS lifers" who have been locked away indefinitely in jails across the nation under orders of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. About 10 percent of them are in California. The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing their fate and could decide any day.

President Bush's legal advisers have told the American Bar Association that they want to end the group's nearly half-century role as a semiofficial screening panel for judicial nominees, lawyers involved in the discussions said today. The lawyers said they believed that the proposal reflected the administration's desire to shift the courts in a conservative direction and to satisfy many conservative Republicans who have long complained that the bar association has displayed a liberal bias in evaluating prospective federal judges.

Bud Welch, whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, has every reason to hate Timothy McVeigh.Instead, he is traveling the country, preaching against the death penalty and calling for forgiveness for McVeigh.

As depicted in the critically acclaimed movie "Traffic," the national crusade against drugs is a well-intentioned flop that squanders billions on efforts to disrupt supplies while doing little to curb demand through programs such as drug treatment and education. It is a message, apparently, that has not gone unheeded on Capitol Hill.

Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday appointed the first black state Supreme Court justice in state history to replace a judge who took a job in the Bush administration.

In 1983, Kenneth Waters, was accused of beating and stabbing a woman 30 times, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. His conviction motivated his sister to return to school and earn a law degree in the hopes of helping him earn his freedom. That could happen as early as Thursday. Waters found DNA evidence that could clear the way for a new trial for her brother, and his release after nearly 20 years in prison.

Five members of the Miami Police Department's SWAT team were charged Wednesday with lying to federal investigators during a probe of a 1996 drug raid in which a 73-year-old man was killed in a hail of 123 bullets.

The state Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to hear an appeal by two state troopers charged in a New Jersey Turnpike shooting that inflamed the state's racial profiling controversy.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said the FBI will expand the use of polygraphs on some FBI employees because of "the very important consequences of breaches" in national security. But even as he made the announcement earlier this month, Ashcroft conceded that "the polygraph is not a sure way," and estimated the machines have an error rate of about 15 percent.

The White House said Tuesday Michael Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor from New Jersey who played a prominent role in the Senate's Whitewater investigation was picked by President Bush to head the criminal division at the Justice Department.

Assembly Democratic leaders offered their proposal to loosen New York's stringent drug sentencing laws today, calling for the expansion of treatment options for drug offenders, for a reduction in the range of mandatory minimum sentences and for more discretion for judges to decide which drug felons should be given treatment rather than prison.

Lionel Tate, the 14-year-old boy sentenced to life in prison on Friday for killing a 6- year-old playmate when he was 12, will probably be granted an expedited clemency hearing, an official from the state office that handles such requests said.

A New York woman whose life sentence for terrorism was overturned by a Peruvian military court will be getting a new civilian trial, according to her parents.

Assembly Democratic leaders offered their proposal to loosen New York's stringent drug sentencing laws today, calling for the expansion of treatment options for drug offenders, for a reduction in the range of mandatory minimum sentences and for more discretion for judges to decide which drug felons should be given treatment rather than prison.

Lionel Tate, the 14-year-old boy sentenced to life in prison on Friday for killing a 6- year-old playmate when he was 12, will probably be granted an expedited clemency hearing, an official from the state office that handles such requests said.

Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president who reversed course and endorsed the death penalty when he ran for mayor four years ago, and who is again running for mayor of New York, said yesterday that he now supports a moratorium on executions, citing evidence that innocent people were being sent to death row.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will urge Gov. Jeb Bush to reduce teen Lionel Tate's life sentence for murder, which was required by Florida law after the Judge rejected defense requests for a new trial or a reduction to second-degree murder. ''I am prepared immediately to join with the defense ... and ask the governor and the Cabinet to hold a clemency hearing and reduce the sentence,'' prosecutor Ken Padowitz said.

The body of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh will not be autopsied after his scheduled execution May 16, his attorneys and an Indiana coroner agreed Friday. ''Mr. McVeigh has religious, ethical and philosophical objections to an autopsy being performed upon his body after the execution,'' his lawyers wrote in the agreement.

A prosecutor admitted posing as a public defender to help deputies capture an ax murderer, even though he knew it might violate ethical codes. Defense lawyers want his disbarred. He says he'd do it again.

Congressional lawmakers on both sides of the death penalty issue on Wednesday renewed their call for greater protections for defendants in capital cases, introducing the Innocence Protection Act of 2001.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the execution of a borderline mentally retarded man shortly after it had reinstated his execution order.The court issued the second ruling to allow it time to review the case.

The Georgia Supreme Court halted the execution of a convicted killer four hours before he was scheduled to die Tuesday. The court said it was delaying Ronald Keith Spivey's execution until it addressed whether electrocution violates the Constitution's ban on ''cruel and unusual'' punishment.

With the mother of the two sisters who were his victims asking that his life be spared because of his youth and mental deficiencies, Antonio Richardson is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday morning by the State of Missouri. He was 16 at the time of his crimes and has been classified as mildly mentally retarded by experts.

Ralph F. Boyd Jr., a Boston lawyer who headed a major crimes unit and worked on a federal firearms prosecution program, is President Bush's choice for assistant attorney general in charge of the civil right's division.

Former President Clinton is considering an offer to be questioned in private by senators about his last-minute pardons, an aide said Sunday.

The state attorney general's office says a new round of DNA tests have failed to link a convicted killer to the death of a 7-year-old girl. Michael Blair, a convicted child molester who has repeatedly denied killing Ashley Estell in 1994, was scheduled to die in July 1999. His execution was delayed when he appealed at the federal level. The defense asked last year for DNA tests of the hair, and the tests determined the strand could not have been Ashley's.

New York City must arrange continuing mental health care for inmates who are released from city jails until a lawsuit on the matter is decided, a state appeals court ruled yesterday.

Several 17th-century clay pipes found on the site of William Shakespeare's home may have been used to smoke marijuana, scientists reported Thursday. Though marijuana degrades over time, eight of those pipe fragments showed signs suggestive of marijuana, the scientists said. Two of the pipe samples tested also showed evidence of cocaine.

Florida Highway Patrolwoman Kathleen Grossett-Tate said the state's mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder never really dawned on her until her son, Lionel Tate, was convicted Jan. 25 of murdering Tiffany Eunick.Prosecutor Ken Padowitz said Friday he wanted the judge to uphold Lionel's conviction but said he would ask Gov. Jeb Bush to commute the boy's sentence.

The U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution of a convicted murderer in North Carolina on Thursday, hours before he was scheduled to die for killing a 71-year-old restaurant manager in 1987, a prison spokeswoman said.

The role of the American jury, the central vehicle for citizen participation in the legal system, is being sharply limited by new laws, court rulings and a legal culture that is moving away from trials as a method of resolving disputes.

Manslaughter convictions for three teenagers charged with stealing a stop sign and causing a fatal car accident were overturned by an appeals court and new trials ordered.

A meeting between Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and members of the Congressional Black Caucus turned tense and confrontational yesterday, doing little, lawmakers said, to heal the wounds left from Ashcroft's nomination battle and long-standing disputes over his stands on racial issues.

The D.C. police department is on the verge of posting the names of sex offenders on a government Web site and making the information available at police stations throughout the city, following the lead of Virginia and 26 other states, officials said yesterday. But a federal judge yesterday limited the amount of information the public will get.

Innocence Protection Act of 2001 Introduced in Congress

On Wednesday, March 7, the Innocence Protection Act 2001 will be introduced at a Capitol Hill news conference. The bill, co-sponsored by Senators Gordon Smith (R-OR), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Representatives William Delahunt (D-MA) and Ray LaHood (R-IL), signals the growing bipartisan consensus that flaws in America's death-penalty system have reached crisis proportions and reforms are urgently needed to prevent the conviction and execution of innocent people.

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

Fax the President as he prepares to fill Drug Czar cabinet post....Stop the War.Com by(Lindesmith-DPF), the nation’s leading organization working to end the war on drugs, is urging President Bush to appoint a drug czar who will “think outside the box,” as Michael Douglas’ character pleads for in the movie Traffic. Join their effort!

This morning the St. Louis Association for Retarded Citizens, the Missouri Catholic Conference, and Amnesty International held a press conference urging Governor Bob Holden to grant clemency in the case of Antonio Richardson. Antonio is scheduled to be executed by the State of Missouri on March 7th. At the time of the crime, Antonio was a borderline mentally retarded, neurologically impaired, 16 year-old; if executed, he would be one of the youngest offenders executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973. He was convicted of participating in the rape and deaths of two young women, and has now all but exhausted his avenues of relief. Please consider writing a letter to Missouri Governor Bob Holden protesting the imminent execution of Antonio Richardson

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.

Canadian justices will rule in the coming year whether to return Renee Boje to America to face a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for being present at a medical marijuana grow operation, or whether to grant her political asylum in response to the severity of America's cannabis laws. She fled the U.S. in 1998, at the advice of her lawyer. Renee Boje is asking her fellow American citizens to urge Canada to grant her petition for refugee status.

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

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

The Innocence Protection Act of 2001 is a carefully crafted package of criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing the risk that innocent persons may be executed. Most urgently, the bill would afford greater access to DNA testing by convicted offenders; and help States improve the quality of legal representation in capital cases. This analysis was prepared by the National Associaton of Criminal Defense Lawywers.

Barry Scheck's Senate Judiciary Committee Testimony on Post-Conviction DNA Testing

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

Introduced in Congress January 3, 2001, H.R. 17, The Younger Americans Act, will help coordinate and fund youth-mentoring, community service through volunteerism, structured academic and recreational opportunities, and other activities aimed at fostering the positive educational and social development of teens and pre-teens.

On November 7, 2000, Oregon voters approved an amendment to the Oregon Constitution, requiring conviction before forfeiture of assets. Please try to get a legislator in your state to introduce it in the next legislative session.

The Justice Department recently issued rigorous new guidelines designed to prevent abuses of the confidential informant system.The new guidelines will be only as good as the Justice Department's commitment to enforce them. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the nominee to head the department's criminal division, Michael Chertoff, a longtime organized crime prosecutor in New Jersey, must work closely with the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh, to make sure that the guidelines are scrupulously honored.

New York City and its police union have reached a tentative agreement to pay $8.6 million to Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was tortured by a white police officer in a Brooklyn precinct bathroom in 1997. Mr. Louima clearly deserves financial compensation for an unspeakable act of brutality. But his agony also requires another response: a firm commitment by the city to pursue recent reforms designed to improve the way the police treats the city's minorities.

No single moment in the history of US criminal justice matches the destructive impact of the New York legislature's 1973 session. That was when Governor Nelson Rockefeller set the tone for a national wave of prison-packing schemes with the drug laws that bear his name.

With last week's unveiling by Assembly Democratic leaders of their proposal to reform New York's harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws, the fight for serious drug-sentencing reform has been joined in Albany. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and his colleagues did not summon the courage to address reform until Gov. George Pataki spoke out on the issue. But they have now produced a stronger and more promising package than the governor's.

Racial and ethnic minorities have borne the brunt of widespread police abuses....Now comes Police Commissioner Kerik, who believes he can improve police behavior and repair police-community relations by turning, in part, to that key tool in the fight against crime — Comstat.

In sentencing Donta Page to life in prison without possibility of parole last week, three judges in Denver recognized a fundamental truth, one that society as a whole must learn: The essential core of humanity that resides in each of us - including the Donta Pages among us - must be respected, for to kill another human being as a punishment for a crime is to deny the intrinsic value of that humanity in all of us.

Tiffany Eunick was 6 years old in 1999 when Lionel, then 12, battered her to death. This was a horrifying crime that required a stiff but judicious penalty. Then last Friday, the youth, now 14, was sentenced to life without parole after his mother stubbornly refused to accept a plea bargain that would have carried a three-year sentence in a youth facility followed by 10 years of probation. It was an unbelievably harsh sentence to fall on one so young.

The fight to reform the nation's flawed and uneven death penalty system resumed in Congress last week with the introduction of a bill aimed at reducing the risk of executing innocent people. The bipartisan Innocence Protection Act of 2001 would address the problem of incompetent lawyering in death penalty cases by establishing new national standards for the representation of capital defendants, and by providing resources to help meet them. The bill is a special test for President Bush.

It is utterly pointless to forever lock up a child for a crime committed when he was 12, denying any possibility that he might grow up and away from whatever motivated that crime.

Andy Williams, the boy held in the Santana shootings, is 15. Many other school shooters have been about the same age or even younger. And the brain of a 15-year-old is not mature — particularly in an area called the prefrontal cortex, which is critical to good judgment and the suppression of impulse.

This is not about Antonio Richardson, a convicted murderer who is scheduled to be executed by the State of Missouri early Wednesday morning. I've seen no evidence to indicate that Mr. Richardson was innocent, and he seems to have fully exercised his rights of appeal. So it's not about him. This is about us.

The government argues that no privacy right attaches to the "waste heat" the device measures and that the images the device generates are too murky to reveal detailed or "intimate" information. But the information the government obtains need not be intimate to constitute a violation of privacy. The important point is that the government was not deploying the device merely to measure heat loss, but to obtain information about activities inside a private home.

Because of cancer, Floridians don't have the blood of Frank Lee Smith on their hands. Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, spent 14 years on Death Row for a crime he didn't commit. Metastasis, not justice, set him free. An inquiry into the actions of the lead detective, who may have contributed to this injustice with false statements, should go beyond that case and that detective.

The U.S. Supreme Court justices might have to hire a slick public relations firm to refurbish their image after the disastrous decision to hand the presidency to George W. Bush. The court, always on a higher plane than any other institution in the U.S. government, has fallen from its pedestal, and the justices must be wondering what they can do to change that. It must come as a surprise to the court that it no longer is revered or viewed as above politics.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has formally entered the Appeals trial of young Lisl Auman -- the girl who remains locked up in a cell at the Colorado State Prison for the Rest of Her Life with No Possibility of Parole for a bogus crime. Lisl is a living victim of a cold-blooded Political Trial that will cast a long shadow on Denver for many years to come -- she is the only person ever convicted in the United States for Felony Murder while in police custody when the crime happened. The NACDL brings a heavyweight presence to this case that will quickly level the playing field. Nobody needs a public fight with a team of Elite warriors from the NACDL. It will be like having to fight Joe Frazier every day for six months. There will be injuries, and there will be more than one trip to the Emergency Room this time. No more easy wins for the black hats. The worm is about to turn. That is also a good early bet. Take my word for it.

"The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers recognizes that the power to pardon, which is reserved to the president and the governors of the various states under the federal and state constitutions, is an essential safety valve to correct and relieve injustice, by allowing for the exercise of compassion; this power is guaranteed by those constitutions and should not be amended or abolished...."

The criminal defense bar says the DOJ is treating some lawyers in drug cases like criminals. The case of Donald Ferguson represents the first time a lawyer has been convicted of money laundering for simply accepting fees that originated in narcotics trafficking. "It is an important and very dangerous step by the Justice Department that could lead to a substantial chilling effect in the criminal defense bar," warns [Neal] Sonnett, former head of the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). "A lawyer may very well take a case knowing there's a threat of fee forfeiture, but few lawyers will take a case if they think there is a threat of their career ending and a prison sentence."

Florida's youngest prison inmates are also its most likely victims of reported assaults. Some attacks come at the hands of adults, others by juveniles. The weapons of choice: locks stuffed in socks used to smash faces, broom sticks, scalding water, food trays, toilet brushes, handmade knives, bare hands.

In the past three months, a host of powerful supporters, including journalist Hunter S. Thompson and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, have signed on to help Lisl Auman battle her sentence for the 1997 killing of Denver police officer Bruce VanderJagt. A compelling series of articles on the case, including an in-depth interview with Lisl Auman. For more information on Lisl's case, go to:  Lisl.Com

China executes more people each year than the rest of the world combined, although the exact number is a tightly guarded state secret. Qiu Xuanming, executed for tax evasion, had become one of hundreds, or even thousands, of condemned people in China whose organs have been "harvested" minutes after their death by gunshot to the back of the head.

One of the most disturbing trends in the prison industry is the rising popularity of the control unit prison, generally referred to as supermax. Modeled after the Illinois state prison at Marion, supermax prisons are rapidly becoming a common mode of incarceration...The simultaneous creation of a burgeoning impoverished population and the criminalization of poverty have combined to create a system devoted to locking up the poor.

Jennifer Thompson was the perfect witness. But she was mistaken, as a result of which Ronald Cotton spent 11 year in prison for a crime he did not commit. Thompson has become an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, using her newfound celebrity to talk about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. She appears frequently on television talk shows. Last June she went to Texas to demonstrate against the controversial execution of Gary Graham, whose death sentence was based largely on the testimony of one eyewitness.

Once again, US power is being projected abroad at a punishing social cost to a country we're "assisting."

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