Today Ben Wizner blogged on DailyKos on Tuesday’s hearing in Guantanamo, a continuation of Monday’s events. But even more fascinating was the exchange between the detainee, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, and the judge, Keith Allred, in which Hamdan commented on the no-win situation he’s in with the military commission system. Ben writes:

Both sides cannot win, of course. But this week’s proceedings have demonstrated once again that in the military commission system, both sides surely can lose. Hamdan loses no matter the outcome: in the “tales I win, heads you lose” world of Guantanamo detention, even an unlikely acquittal at trial would not lead to release, but to continued indefinite confinement as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” And the United States loses by squandering a historic opportunity to demonstrate to the world that it can provide impartial justice instead of pressing forward in a fatally flawed system that permits conviction by hearsay statements extracted through techniques long considered torture by civilized nations.

This morning, Hamdan slept in while his defense attorneys did what they could without his presence. His trial has been pushed back from May 28 to June 2.

Today’s San Antonio Current features an interview with Reverend Carroll Pickett, the subject of the award-winning new documentary, “At the Death House Door.” The film follows Pickett’s career at Texas’ infamous ‘Walls’ Unit in Huntsville, home of Texas’ death row, as he presided over 95 executions over 15 years as the chaplain there, including the world’s first lethal injection. After each execution, Pickett recorded an audiotape account of his trip to the death chamber. In the film, Pickett reflects on his personal journey, as well as the institutional changes that were made after his retirement, and what he hopes to accomplish as an anti-death penalty advocate.

Rev. Pickett, along with filmmaker Peter Gilbert, will be at the ACLU Membership Conference this summer in Washington, D.C., talking about the film and issues around the death penalty with other experts and special guests on a panel on June 9, called “Capital Punishment: Race, Faith, and the Courts.” The film will be screened at the conference as well.

In addition, the ACLU and the ACLU of Illinois are co-hosting, with Kartemquin Films, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, and the Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council, a 700-person screening in Chicago on May 28. After the screening, there will be a discussion featuring Pickett, Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Mills, filmmakers Steve James and Gilbert, Ed Yohnka of the ACLU of Illinois, and Rob Warden, director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.

“At the Death House Door” is currently traveling the film festival circuit and premieres on the IFC channel on May 29.

Dr. Mike Males of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice recently completed a detailed statistical study of the death penalty’s effects on homicide rates. His conclusion: ‘the death penalty is irrelevant to homicide.’

This conclusion is consistent with those of numerous other distinguished researchers, as John Holdridge and Cassandra Stubbs of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project have shown in an article on HuffPost.

In his report, “Death Penalty and Deterrence: The Last Word,” (PDF) Males analyzed FBI homicide data, Bureau of Justice statistics on state executions and homicide trends, and Census Bureau population figures in the period of 1984 to 2006, in which 1,051 state-sanctioned executions occurred.

This new study-a statistical analysis of numbers provided by the state and federal governments- will be difficult for even hard-core death penalty proponents to ignore.

Saturday’s New York Times reported on one of the less-covered issues surrounding Guantanamo: the fact that the infamous prison has become a ‘breeding ground for madness’ due to extreme conditions of confinement. In response to this charge, a military spokeswoman said that Guantanamo does not have solitary confinement, only ’single-occupancy cells.’

No joke.

Deficient care for the mentally ill was also the subject of hearing yesterday in Michigan, where the ACLU argued that Michigan prisons not meet constitutional standards for medical and mental health care. This problem came to light after a 21-year-old mentally ill prisoner died after being left unattended for four days in full, four-point restraints. The ACLU argued that case, Hadix v. Caruso, in district court yesterday.

CORRECTION: The previous version of this post misidentified the date of the New York Times article. The article was from Saturday, not Monday.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reports on the case of Francisco Castañeda, a man who died in February as a result of a lack of medical care for cancer while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in San Diego. The article reported that the government admitted to some liability for Francisco’s death:

A lawyer…said Monday the admission followed a government physician’s sworn statements that she knew a biopsy was the only way to determine whether Castañeda had cancer but never authorized one - a decision that was approved by officials at the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 
While it’s a rare occurrence for the government to own up to negligence, this admission should be taken with a grain of salt. Tom Jawetz, a Staff Attorney for the ACLU’s National Prison Project who’s currently litigating a case against ICE for inadequate medical treatment at the San Diego facility, says:

The admission of medical negligence comes just six weeks after the federal judge who reviewed Francisco’s medical records said that those medical records ‘bespeak of conduct that transcends negligence by miles.’So while it’s great that the U.S. admitted to medical negligence, that doesn’t even begin to explore the deeply disturbing treatment that Francisco was subjected to.There are still several additional claims pending against ICE and the individual doctors who tremendously failed him.

Just last year, in a Washington Post article about health care in immigration detention, the medical director for the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), Tim Shack, who reviewed Francisco’s case, said: “I don’t see this as improper care. I think this is good care…It’s just unfortunate that this had a bad outcome.”

The government’s recent admission, which contradicts Shack’s statements to The Washington Post, shows the need for greater scrutiny of Shack’s other statements in that article.

Shack spoke to The Post about the case of Martin Hernandez Banderas: “I have 173 pages of records showing that he was properly monitored…He was not among the general population.He was receiving 24-hour care.”

This characterization of the care received by Banderas was grossly wrong and perhaps willfully misleading. 173 pages or 173,000, the records show Banderas complained for weeks about increasing pain and a foul odor coming from a growing wound that was turning black and oozing. But from January 11 through 15, 2007, on-site medical staff described the wound as healing, with “a normal, healthy tissue type odor” and “no sign of active infection, pus or purulence.” When Banderas was finally rushed to the hospital on January 17 - just two days later - doctors diagnosed him with a large, gangrenous ulcer in his foot and ankle and a potentially fatal bone infection that nearly cost him his leg.

In addition, DIHS’s own medical records show Banderas was in general population throughout his detention, except for a brief eight-day period when he received intravenous antibiotics in the infirmary. After those eight days, he was returned to general population for four weeks, where he was not given 24-hour care, and was actually left to change his own dressings over the weekends.

The government’s recent admission of medical negligence in Francisco’s case is literally too little, too late.

Last October, Francisco joined our attorneys from the National Prison Project on Capitol Hill to testify on the issue of medical care in immigration detention before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. You can read his testimony, or listen to a podcast, to learn more about what he endured while detained in ICE custody.

This week, Ben Wizner, Staff Attorney for the ACLU’s National Security Project, is in Guantanamo as a human rights observer for the military commission hearing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, and blogged about yesterday’s hearing in our DailyKos diary.

The last time we were in Guantanamo observing detainee hearings, the ACLU’s Jamil Dakwar noted the trend among detainees to refuse representation by appointed U.S. military defense lawyers. It happened again yesterday, as Hamdan tried to dismiss his lawyers.

But the biggest story of yesterday’s hearing was the testimony-on Hamdan’s behalf-of Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for military commissions. As he’s stated in numerous interviews in the past, Davis asserted that the commissions were rigged from the beginning, and said he was pressured to bring trials during this election year:

…Many of Davis’s direct conflicts were not with Haynes but with Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, the legal advisor to the commissions. Hartmann was particularly intent on prosecuting the “9/11 cases.” He told Davis that the election was coming up in 2008, and “if we don’t get these cases started, the commission system will implode. Once we get the victims’ families energized, we’ll be rolling, and when the train is rolling, it will be hard for the next president to stop.

It’s hard to determine which is worse: the military using the families of 9/11 victims for political gain in an election year, or the Bush administration riding roughshod over the rule of law in a rush to convict the detainees.

We know a couple of 9/11 families who disagree with this administration of “justice.”

Today the Supreme Court delivered a disappointing decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the lawsuit the ACLU brought against Indiana for its restrictive law that required voters to show a state-issued ID when voting. The 6 to 3 decision found that the voter ID law didn’t place an undue burden on the Indiana citizens’ right to vote.

The most incomprehensible part about this decision: that the Supreme Court is allowing Indiana to try a fix a problem that never existed in the first place. As we pointed out in September, Indiana has never had a case of in-person voter fraud, which is exactly the kind of voter fraud that this voter ID law would ostensibly prevent. Walter Dellinger and Sri Srinivasan put it best in an article in Slate in January, when the case was argued before the high court:

[T]his kind of fraud would be an exceedingly irrational way to attempt to affect the outcome of an election. For starters, the impersonator would need to know that the actual registered voter would not herself be showing up to vote. If the real voter had already voted, the impersonator would be exposed at once. And in any event, why would any sane person risk going to prison to influence an election by one vote? It is all the more implausible to imagine an army of impersonators coordinating their efforts on a scale that could affect an election, let alone doing so without being detected.

The silver lining of this dark election year decision? This isn’t over. There are more than 20 states with similar laws and the today’s decision opened the door for future lawsuits. This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this issue.

My latest Civil Discourse comic tackles the government’s Terrorist Watch list, which has almost million names. Who’s on it? Toddlers, dead people, congressmen, and Iraq War vets. You know, the people most likely to harm America. See the ACLU’s watch list counter for more info.

Common names like “Robert Johnson”are listed without specific details. So far, 12 Robert Johnsons report being interrogated at airports . In an attempt to find the elusive John William Anderson they detained a six-year-old. Sometimes you really can be too careful.

The artist formerly known as Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam. Apparently, that’s too Islam-y for the government so he’s on the no fly list as well. (He should change it to an unpronounceable symbol, like Prince did, just to mess with them). Were he to be allowed on a flight, the coach section could spontaneously break out into a rendition of “Peace Train.” The airline industry is suffering enough. We don’t need anyone reminding them of trains at this point-especially peaceful ones.

Friday was the last day for the public to submit comments to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) republished No-Match rule. Last year, along with the AFL-CIO and National Immigration Law Center, we brought a lawsuit against the prior version of the rule.

As a result of our lawsuit, district court Judge Charles Breyer prevented the No-Match rule from taking effect in October 2007. After that decision, DHS said it would go back and address some of the concerns with the original No-Match policy, and reissue the rule. On March 26, DHS republished the rule-but they didn’t change a thing. Not a single comma or letter is different from the original rule. The burden is now on DHS to go before the court and attempt to justify the same, republished rule.

Regardless of DHS’s attempt to repackage the same old thing, the rule remains fundamentally flawed. According to DHS’s own study of the impact the No-Match rule would have on the American economy, 70,000 people authorized to work in the U.S.-whether they’re U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, or immigrants legally authorized to work here-will be forced into unemployment because of flaws in the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) database. Other estimates put the number at closer to 165,000 (PDF). According to the SSA’s own Inspector General, 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies- from things like name changes, misspellings, and various other clerical errors-in the SSA’s database belong to native-born U.S. citizens. That’s more than 70 percent.

In addition, a study conducted for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Richard Belzer, former economist with the President’s Office of Management and Budget, found based on DHS’s own numbers that the estimated collective cost to employers to enforce the No-Match policy is $1 billion to $ 1.6 billion per year. When Belzer took into account the flaws in DHS’s analysis, he came up with an aggregate cost to employers of $ 7 billion to $ 11 billion per year.

Belzer also found that the overall social costs of the rule would dwarf the costs to employers. He concluded that were No-Match to take effect, it would drive many workers, desperate to make a living, into an underground economy where employers don’t pony up payroll taxes and workers don’t contribute to Social Security. With No-Match in effect, the U.S. economy is at risk of losing $770 million per year in tax revenues. (Not to mention that this underground economy is outside the federal government’s attempts to enforce immigration law through workplace enforcement, thereby circumventing No-Match itself.)

Even President Bush admits that the U.S. economy has seen better days. So it’s puzzling that he would allow DHS to attempt to enforce such an unbelievably bad law, a law that could be so destructive to the U.S. economy that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes it. No-Match is bad for U.S. citizens and other lawful workers, and could be catastrophic to the U.S. economy.

Today Chris Hill, State Strategies Coordinator for our Capital Punishment Project, blogged in DailyKos about the ongoing racial disparities in death penalty sentences in the U.S., and especially when it comes to punishing certain crimes. He writes:

The 2003 Amnesty study found racial bias in the death penalty systems of North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey. The problem cited by Amnesty in most of those states was that defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white and that the racial configuration most likely to receive capital punishment is black defendants convicted of killing white victims.

Similar studies have shown the existence of the same racial bias in the death penalty systems of California, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Maryland and North Carolina. An American Sociological Review article from 2007 showed that minorities capitally sentenced for killing white people were more likely to have their sentences carried out than minorities who kill non-whites. One of the authors of the study said, “[w]hite lives are still valued more than black ones when it comes to deciding who gets executed and who does not.”

As state executioners get back to work in light of last week’s Supreme Court decision in Baze v. Rees, these kinds of disparities demand more investigation and a remedy.