Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton scores again...

Police pursuits, that staple of local television newscasts, have declined sharply so far this year, according to a review of Los Angeles Police Department statistics....Overall, chases are down 62% from last year.

...The decline drew praise from some of the LAPD's biggest critics as well as experts on police pursuits, who described it as a step in the right direction. "These are just astounding numbers," said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, which had long challenged LAPD pursuit practices.

Chief William J. Bratton, who championed a policy to reduce the number of pursuits, called the figures "good news all around." ... The new LAPD policy is shaping up to be one of the most tangible of Bratton's efforts to remake the department....Bratton said the report contradicts naysayers who had predicted that restricting chases would lead to fewer arrests and increased crime.

Traffic collisions have "plummeted." So have accidents involving officers.

Good going, Chief.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ( NACDL), through its new President, E.E. "Bo" Edwards of Nashville, today condemned the Bush Administration for agreeing with Colombia to resume the shooting down of planes of suspected drug runners:

Another Unwarranted Response to an Exaggerated Threat

Does our government honestly believe that it is acceptable to kill, or even take a substantial risk of killing, unidentified human beings, our citizens or not, just because they may be committing a non-capital crime? Evidently so.

"The Bush Administration speaks in terms of 'procedures to protect against loss of innocent life.' But these mere suspects are innocent until proven guilty, and not subject to the death penalty even if convicted. This administration continues to find the poor and dark-skinned expendable based on almost any fear-based pretext. In this case, we can kill in the name of fighting illegal drugs, which kill 20,000 per year by generous estimates, while subsidizing tobacco, which kills 400,000 per year.

"Just as importantly, should we as citizens, and the media as our watchdogs, continue to let it go on without questioning it?"

While browsing the NACDL website, we also came across this press release --we're excited to be serving in our new role.

Law. com reviews the most probable replacements for Larry Thompson, the number two man at Justice who recently announced his departure.

The 3rd edition of AntiPolygraph.org's free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, is now on-line and may be downloaded as a 1 mb PDF file.

This new, revised and expanded edition includes updated chapters on polygraph validity, policy, and procedure.

Also of possible interest is news that the American Polygraph Association's annual seminar held earlier this month featured a presentation on how a polygraph operator can rig the "test" when he "knows" the subject is guilty:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush gets a scolding today from the St. Petersberg Times for putting $60 million into new prisons while giving nothing for higher education.

In portraying the only two options as more money or inmates in the streets, the governor is embellishing to make his point. And his rhetorical excess wouldn't be so jarring if he showed a similar sense of urgency for young people who are not in trouble with the law. Louis de la Parte, a respected Senate budget chairman in the 1970s, used to display a poster in his office picturing a young man in a jail cell and advising that "it costs more to send a boy to prison than to college." In this case, the governor is asking for $60-million to house new inmates while the universities are denied $66-million to accommodate eight times as many new students.

If Florida would spend more on treatment and prevention, and provide alternatives to prison for drug and other non-violent offenders, the state wouldn't have so many prisoners, and would have money available for financially strapped colleges and students. It's a policy decision and it falls on squarely on Jeb Bush's lap. Floridians should hold him accountable for this come election time.

It's official. Deputy Attorney Larry Thompson is leaving the Justice Department. Thompson is the 6th Justice Department official to depart in recent months. As we noted yesterday , Thompson's departure has us concerned:

We like Larry Thompson a lot, and have always felt a little better knowing he was at Justice, hopefully providing some measure of moderation to Ashcroft. We don't like the list of possible replacements and are concerned that Larry's departure will be a bad omen for freedom and justice.

Apparently, Congress is concerned as well. The New York Times reports ,

Indeed, some lawmakers — both Republicans and Democrats — are already voicing concerns about the process for replacing the officials.

In the past three weeks, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, blocked Senate votes on the nominations of three assistant attorney general nominees.

Members of Congress have complained repeatedly about what they see as the Justice Department's failure to heed their concerns on the Patriot Act and other issues. And Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said today that he had one word of advice for the new batch of officials who will lead the Justice Department: "consult."

The attorney general "would be wise to consult Congress on the new people he wants to bring in and the newcomers would be well served by picking up the phone to work with Congress" on Justice Department policy, Mr. Schumer said.

Thompson will be going to the Brookings Institution for six months, and then back to his home in Georgia, to teach and perhaps practice law. He'd like to take some pro bono cases.

The incoming President of the American Bar Association, Dennis Archer, pledged today that the organization will conduct an examination into mandatory minimum sentences and lengthy prison terms.

The American Bar Association will look at whether mandatory minimum prison terms should be abolished, the group's new president said Monday. Over the coming year, the ABA will also consider whether federal sentencing guidelines should be relaxed so that prisoners face less severe terms, and whether some current prisoners should win pardons, ABA President Dennis Archer said.

Mandatory minimum sentences came into the federal system in 1986 under President Reagan. They were expanded in 1988. They have been sharply criticized ever since.

In 1986 Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which force judges to deliver fixed sentences to individuals convicted of a crime, regardless of culpability or other mitigating factors. Federal mandatory drug sentences are determined based on three factors: the type of drug, weight of the drug mixture (or alleged weight in conspiracy cases), and the number of prior convictions. Judges are unable to consider other important factors such as the offender's role, motivation, and the likelihood of recidivism. Only by providing the prosecutor with "substantial assistance", (information that aids the government in prosecuting other offenders) may defendants reduce their mandatory sentences. This creates huge incentives for people charged with drug offenses to provide false information in order to receive a shorter sentence.

A self-help group in California, composed mostly of those dying of AIDS and cancer, intend to make history with a civil rights lawsuit against the Feds over their right to use marijuana for medicinal purposes. The City and County of Santa Cruz have joined the lawsuit on their behalf.

An elderly woman leans unsteadily on her walker. A hip young paraplegic fellow glides his electric wheelchair past a dapper old man clutching a cane. Men wiry with AIDS sidle into folding chairs in the cramped meeting hall. A blind man hunkers at the edge of the throng. There is talk of housing and finances, discussions of dipping health and impending death.

They finish by flouting federal law.

Marijuana, deemed illegal by the U.S. for any purpose, is dispensed in small baggies to the group, most of them terminally ill with AIDS or cancer. They say their brand of medicine, justified under California's 1996 medicinal marijuana initiative, brings relief from pain and suffering.

Read the whole thing.

Justice Criticizes Lengthy Sentences:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court said today that prison terms were too long and that he favored ending mandatory minimum sentences for some federal crimes.

"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long," Justice Kennedy said in remarks prepared for delivery to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association. "I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences," he said. "In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise or unjust."

Justice Kennedy's criticism puts him at odds with Attorney General John Ashcroft, who wants prosecutors to monitor which judges impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend. Such oversight, critics say, could limit judicial independence.

We've had Attorney General Ashcroft's new sentencing guidelines for prosecutors for over a week, and were wondering when they'd become news. The answer is now. Here's Ashcroft, issuing new rules to his his prosecutors directing them to report departures in sentencing decisions, and to oppose them in many instances. The title of the article is misleading in our opinion--Ashcroft isn't seeking uniformity, he's seeking control.

We would have put up a fuss in court last Friday if, based on Ashcroft's new directive, the prosecutor had opposed our motion for departure on grounds that our client's criminal history category over-represented the seriousness of his past misconduct. To the prosecutor's credit, he agreed with us and Probation that the departure was warranted. So did the Judge and our client got the reduction from Category II to Category I, saving him 6 months on the sentence.

Nonetheless, we have serious concerns that Ascroft's directives will further erode the independence of the Judiciary. Also, if prosecutors are directed to oppose reductions, how credible will they be on sentencing issues? After all, they have no choice now but to oppose departures in many instances.

Here's more from the Associated Press, which says more appeals of sentencing decisions likely will result from this directive.

Ryan King, research associate at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group favoring alternatives to incarceration, said the effect of the amendment and Ashcroft memo is to further concentrate power in the hands of prosecutors in the criminal justice system.

"It's telling judges from the get-go, 'if you want to depart ... that you will be put on a list and you will be watched,'" King said. "We're no longer judging a case on the merits."

Today's Christian Science Monitor has an article When the only unknown is victim's name , examining the issue of whether its's time to end the policy of shielding the accuser's name in a rape accusation:

...beyond the media circus - or the question of what actually happened at the Cordillera Lodge and Spa - loom the larger ethical issues involved in sexual-assault cases, particularly ones with such high-profile defendants: What privacy is owed to victims? Is it fair to name the accused but not the accusers? Are personal details off limits? Has the Internet made this type of privacy a relic of the past?

Our view is that either both the names of the accused and the accuser should be kept private until trial, or, that both names should be public.

The Bryant case, however, has revived those questions. [Radio Host] Mr. Leykis justified naming Bryant's accuser by saying that, if rape is about violence and not sex, the victim shouldn't have stigma or shame. Others have wondered whether withholding victims' names actually contributes to rape's stigma, cultivating a silent shame. Many have also raised the issue of fairness to the accused: False charges of rape can, after all, ruin a life.

Only one paper in the country print names of sex assault accusers:

The editor and publisher of the Shelton-Mason County Journal, in Shelton, Wash., may run the only paper in the country that always prints rape victims' names - no matter their ages.....He stands by it both as a matter of journalistic consistency and for helping erode the stigma of rape.

Others - including a few feminists - agree with him. After the Central Park jogger case, Karen DeCrow, a former president of the National Organization of Women, wrote in USA Today: "Pull off the veil of shame. Print the name."

A tougher question is whether concerns about victims' privacy have gotten so extreme as to compromise defendants' rights. After all, being accused of rape brings stigma too - a fact not lost on Bryant's supporters. Mr. Gay often asks critics to imagine it's their father or brother or son on trial. That's the strongest argument for naming victims, says Ms. McBride of the Poynter Institute.

According to a new study by the National Academy of Sciences, lie detectors don't work.

We've always argued their value to law enforcement is not in truth telling capabilities, but in the pre-test interview, where the cops try to trick someone into cooperating or confessing (saying the polygraph will show they are lying so they better cut their losses and make a deal now, or that someone else has already given them up, or that they have evidence that they really don't have or in asking for and getting incriminating information to help build their case.) Thanks to Instapundit for the link, and he has some longer quotes.

Update: We just learned that the author of the polygraph article is Charles Pierce, the same Charles Pierce that sends all the letters to Eric Alterman over at Altercation, and guest-blogs for him sometimes.