April 27, 2002
The Bush administration has a problem for which it has suggested no good solution: Although hundreds of the suspected Al Qaeda members being held at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan appear to be would-be mass murderers, few seem to have been individually implicated in provable war crimes or terrorist acts. Should the Pentagon release such people-as domestic law enforcement officials would be legally...
February 16, 2002
Federal District Judge Charles Pickering Sr. of Mississippi has the misfortune of being the first Bush federal appeals court nominee openly targeted by liberal groups and Senators determined to block the President from transforming the lower courts-and, if he gets a chance, the Supreme Court-into conservative bastions.
January 12, 2002
Is John Walker a candidate for the firing squad? Or a mixed-up kid who should be sent to bed without his dessert? Measuring the known facts (and much remains unknown) of this bizarre case against laws and judicial precedents, the answer appears to be that Walker is a traitor who may be hard to convict of treason, who does not appear to deserve the death penalty (unless evidence not yet public...
October 29, 2001
In investigating the Sept. 11 attack, few tasks are more difficult--and potentially more ominous--than unraveling the role of a mysterious Iraqi official named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. Until last spring, al-Ani was listed as the chief of consular affairs in the Iraqi Embassy in Prague. But last month U.S. officials were told by Czech intelligence that al-Ani had been spotted having a...
May 26, 2001
Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he's white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death-penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said: "I'll let the...
May 19, 2001
The Supreme Court delivered a timely reminder of the social costs of our "war on drugs" with its May 14 decision rejecting a medical-necessity exception to the federal law criminalizing marijuana. Meanwhile, President Bush has moved toward abandoning his own best instincts and repeating his predecessors' mistakes by endlessly escalating a $20 billion-a-year "war" that-as most...
April 21, 2001
Congress and the President have a chance this year to show that they care as much about avoiding the execution (and imprisonment) of innocent defendants as they do about punishing the guilty ones. They can adopt the Innocence Protection Act, a bipartisan proposal co-sponsored by death penalty supporters and opponents who agree that you can be tough on crime without punishing innocent people. The...
February 24, 2001
Here we go again. Another criminal-congressional tag-team crew investigating Bill Clinton. This time, it's to determine not whether he lied under oath about sex-which Clinton essentially admitted at long last on Jan. 19-but whether, on the very next day, he sold a pardon, or two, or a few before he left office.
February 17, 2001
The uproar over ex-President Clinton's abuse of his pardon power in some cases has overshadowed his salutary use of it in others-in particular, his commutations of the savagely severe prison terms of more than 20 nonviolent, nondangerous bit players in drug deals. These clemencies were long overdue palliatives to the cruel and irrational sentencing laws that sailed through a drug-crazed Congress...
January 27, 2001
Mr. Clinton admits and acknowledges ... that he knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers, in violation of Judge [Susan Webber] Wright's discovery orders ... in an attempt to conceal ... the true facts about his improper relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.... He engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice in that his discovery responses interfered with the conduct of the Jones...
