Hope I die before I get old ...(the Who):

This excellent article in today's Tennessean highlights the growing problems facing states due to aging inmate populations and the cost of caring for them.

With all the double-digit and life sentences being handed out since the 1990's as a result of harsher sentencing laws, the question had to arise: What do we do with these prisoners once they turn 70, are no longer violent, and need increased medical care:

Every year, more inmates need treatment for hypertension, arthritis, Alzheimer's and emphysema and require physical therapy and hospice care. Many old or feeble inmates also must be housed separately because they can become targets for younger, tougher prisoners. The 50-plus set is considered ''senior'' by prison standards because hard lifestyles before prison often cause inmates to age about 10 years faster, experts say.

Kudos to Tennessee, which is "looking to lead the nation in elder-care corrections."

Officials are tracking details of the 50-plus inmates and working on plans to handle physical disabilities, life skill issues, elderly support groups and hospice care....

Tennessee is one of 16 states with facilities for frail and aging inmates, and it was among the first to establish them. Many of the state's healthier senior inmates are at the Wayne County Boot Camp. The DeBerry Special Needs Facility oversees the sickest prisoners, many of them seniors. DeBerry has 800 beds to house prisoners whose medical problems range from amputation to dementia to cancer.

Court rulings recognize that inmates deserve all the health-care opportunities of anyone else in the community.

Ridiculous law-enforcement news of the day: Police in Wausau, Wisconsin claim they can tell a drugged driver by whether his or her tongue has a green tint to it. This would be funny except that the citizens of Wausau have spent good money on a five week course to train two officers on the test. The officers,

...Bliven and Barnes were selected to train in the five-week course where they learned how a person's appearance, behavior, performance in psychophysical tests, eye exams and vital signs can tell them if they used drugs other than alcohol, such as marijuana, inhalants, stimulants and sedatives.

For example, Bliven and Barnes perform the typical field sobriety tests but also check muscle tone, pupil size, pulse and body temperature to detect any drugs in a person's system. A person using a stimulant will have very tense muscles, while a narcotics user's muscles will be relaxed, they said.

They also inspect a person's mouth and nose for signs of drugs, such as heat bumps or a green tinge on the tongue.

We predict this pseudo-science will never make it into a courtroom.

If only all states had this much sense....

Delaware has passed a bill that reduces the mandatory minimum sentences in some drug crimes in order to make more room for violent offenders. After passing in the Delaware House, the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 20 to 1.

The bill is a compromise among the Attorney General's Office, the state's Sentencing Accountability Commission and Stand Up for What's Right and Just, a citizens group dedicated to criminal justice reform.

Among the bill's most controversial provisions in the Senate was language that cuts the minimum mandatory sentence for cocaine trafficking from three years to two years, and increasing the amount of the drug needed to trigger the sentence from 5 grams to 10 grams.

Today, Arkansas, tomorrow the country?

Troopers' Flashflights Have a Nose for Alcohol

The next time an Arkansas state trooper stops a vehicle and points a flashlight inside, he may be doing more than illuminating the interior. He could be testing the air inside for proof that the driver has been drinking alcohol, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports.

The motorist would not even know it, which is causing some civil liberties advocates to question whether the practice violates the constitutional right against "unreasonable searches." Now 118 of the 320 state troopers are carrying "The Sniffer" flashlight, which conceals a "passive alcohol sensor" and alerts officers to alcohol in the air inside a vehicle. A row of tiny lights on the device will glow green, yellow or red depending on the amount alcohol detected. Officers can use that information as probable cause to conduct more field sobriety tests and make arrests.

Troopers have been carrying the $683 illuminators — paid for with a federal grant — for almost three months. At least a couple dozen arrests have been made after The Sniffer picked up traces of alcohol. The law enforcement agency is among hundreds in more than 40 states that use the technology, said Jarel Kelsey of PAS Systems International of Fredericksburg, Va., which markets the flashlights.

We've known in the U.S. for a long time that dog alerts on money are meaningless because almost all currency contains traces of cocaine.

Now, a new study by German scientists has revealed that cocaine is found on nearly all euro notes.

Prof Fritz Sögel and a team from the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg studied 700 euro notes from across the euro zone between January 2002 - the month the notes were launched - and last August.

Three per cent were found to be contaminated with an average of 0.4 microgrammes of cocaine particles, just days after the euro's launch, and this figure soared to 90 per cent in seven months.

The most highly contaminated notes, in the first study of its kind on euro notes, originated from Spain.

Reuters reports that in Colombia, criminals are using the drug scopolamine to turn crime victims into zombies. Curious that the article doesn't mention that scopolomine has been used by governments against suspected criminals for ages--as a truth serum.

Early in this century physicians began to employ scopolamine, along with morphine and chloroform, to induce a state of "twilight sleep" during childbirth. A constituent of henbane, scopolamine was known to produce sedation and drowsiness, confusion and disorientation, incoordination, and amnesia for events experienced during intoxication. Yet physicians noted that women in twilight sleep answered questions accurately and often volunteered exceedingly candid remarks.

In 1922 it occurred to Robert House, a Dallas, Texas obstetrician, that a similar technique might be employed in the interrogation of suspected criminals, and he arranged to interview under scopolamine two prisoners in the Dallas county jail whose guilt seemed clearly confirmed. Under the drug, both men denied the charges on which they were held; and both, upon trial, were found not guilty. Enthusiastic at this success, House concluded that a patient under the influence of scopolamine "cannot create a lie... and there is no power to think or reason." [14] His experiment and this conclusion attracted wide attention, and the idea of a "truth" drug was thus launched upon the public consciousness.

This is an outrage and it is not getting enough attention. The United States has just barred American lawyers from defending war crime suspects at the U.N. Tribunal for Yugoslavia. We expect lawyers to file motions to stay proceedings while this is resolved. You can expect a loud protest from the defense bar. Stay tuned.

An executive order is aimed a cutting off support to about 200 people and organizations in the former Yugoslavia blacklisted by the U.S. government. It outlaws providing goods, services and funds to those people.

....The list, published on a U.S. government Web site, includes all the suspects in proceedings at the Yugoslav tribunal, including former President Slobodan Milosevic and his entire family.

About 20 American lawyers are defending suspects at the Yugoslav tribunal, which was established in 1993 to prosecute those to blame for war crimes during Yugoslavia's violent breakup in the 1990s.

Here come more reports of botched NYPD No-Knocks

Senior Reason editor Jacob Sullum writes in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle about drug users who are productive, functional members of society . Sullum is also the author of the new book Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use ," which he describes as being about "people who lead responsible, productive, fulfilling lives despite their politically incorrect choice of intoxicants."

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has given an award to the Office of Drug Policy Control's ridiculous marijuana ads. What were they smoking? Talk about spin....

Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug among youth today. Research shows that marijuana can be addictive and can lead to a host of health, social, learning and behavioral problems at a crucial time in young lives.

Our take on the ads is here.

President Bush has nominated Christopher A. Wray to be Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice and Jack Landman Goldsmith III to be Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, at the Department of Justice. The position was formerly held by Jay S. Bybee.

Here is an organizational chart for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice.

Source for nomination information: Federal Yellow Book which also has biographies and pictures of both new nominees.

Let's not forget the Judges--here is a list of all of President Bush's judicial picks.

[hat tip to Neal Sonnett, Esq. Miami]

Here's another example of our morally bankrupt sentencing system:

A lawyer, Paul Siminovsky, is arrested for allegedly bringing bribes to a New York Judge. Both are on wiretaps, along with several others. The Judge is indicted but the Government needs someone to testify against the Judge to cement its case. Lawyer Siminovshky cooperates with the Government, agreeing to testify against the Judge, and avoids indictment on a felony charge and jail time.

Lawyers for some of the indicted parties, including the Judge and other lawyers, say discovery they received from the Government shows that lawyer Siminovshky was the driving force in the bribery scandal.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes responds, "Someone's got to help," and he added, "Without Siminovsky, we have nothing."