Gruesome execution of convicted murderer makes the point

U.S. residents, especially those in Utah, probably feel a lot safer today after the firing-squad execution of a convicted killer. Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, had been on death row since 1985, when he shot and killed an attorney during an escape attempt from a Salt Lake City courthouse, where he was on trial for killing a bartender in 1984. It was the third execution by firing squad in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Gardner's execution came hours after his appeal for a stay was denied by Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and the U.S. Supreme Court denied his last-minute appeal, according to the Reuters international news service. Herbert does not have the power to commute a death sentence but can issue a temporary stay. Gardner was shot in the chest by a 5-man firing squad and declared dead at 12:20 a.m. at Utah State Prison in Draper, Reuters said. He had been strapped to a metal chair and hooded, and a target was placed over his chest. The execution was witnessed by Jason Otterstrom, the son of the slain bartender, Melvyn Otterstrom, while Gardner's relatives held a vigil outside the prison. Gardner has asked his relatives not to witness the execution, Reuters said. Attorney Michael Burdell was the fatal victim in the courthouse shooting. A bailiff also was shot and recovered, but suffered health problems until his death in 1995. A Salt Lake City bishop called the firing squad execution "barbaric," Reuters said. "If you're going to do the death penalty, lethal injection would be the more human way," said Bishop John Wester of the city's Roman Catholic Diocese. "It emblazons in our consciousness the violence that guns wreck on our lives." But Gardner chose the firing squad himself, under the death penalty rules in effect at the time, Reuters said. Utah no longer offers the firing squad as an option for a condemned person.

Obama administration resorts to Bush path on detainees

News from Washington that the Obama administration is proposing exempting terrorism suspects from constitutional protections guaranteed to U.S. citizens raises troubling questions about the president's commitment to undoing the worst abuses of the last administration. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights to suggest that it is negotiable, or that it only was intended to apply to some of the people some of the time. Yet that is undeniably the basis of Attorney General Eric Holder's proposal that terrorism suspects -- in this case, the Pakistani immigrant who stands accused of trying to set off a bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1 -- no longer be allowed the protection of the so-called Miranda rule, according to the New York Times. The Miranda rule, which bars authorities from questioning suspects until they are advised of their right against self-incrimination -- comes from a landmark 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision interpreting the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from forcing citizens to testify against themselves, and the Supreme Court held in Miranda that police must advise suspects of this right before questioning begins to give full effect to its protection. But the Fifth Amendment is not the government's protection to give: it was made part of the basic law of the United States to prevent the government from accumulating too much power. As we well recall, Obama was elected in 2008 because the Bush administration developed the nasty habit of selectively enforcing rights that the United States previously knew to apply to everybody. Yet there was Holder on the NBC-TV show Meet the Press on Sunday, touting "big news" and recommending new limits on people's constitutional rights. “We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” Holder said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.” Holder also indicated for the first time that the United States now believes that bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad, who was arrested as he boarded a plane to leave the United States, had been trained by the Pakistani Taliban. Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Times that Congress did not have the authority to limit the Miranda ruling since it merely interprets the U.S. Constitution. “What’s troubling is that this is coming from the Obama administration,” Romero said. “The irony is that this administration supposedly stands for the rule of law and the restoration of America’s legal standing, and now they are trying to negotiate away fundamental Fifth Amendment rights that have been the cornerstone of our democracy.”

Guantanamo Bay cases leave constitutional doctrine in tatters

Word that the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to decide the fate of a group of Chinese Muslims held without charges for eight years at Guantanamo Bay again demonstrates the collapse of the separation of powers doctrine of the U.S. Constitution. Monday's three-paragraph ruling, which vacated a federal appeals court decision and asked the trial court to reconsider releasing eight Uighurs from the military prison into the United States, according to the New York Times, illustrates just how disoriented the legal system has gotten since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war on terror. That fundamental constitutional precepts have had to be ignored or openly violated to promulgate the government's response to the attacks is indicative of Washington's fundamental -- and potentially dangerous -- mistakes. But how little attention is being paid to reorienting the constitutional government and undoing the worst of those errors should be raising alarm bells all across the United States, and in the dozens of countries who modeled their own constitutional systems on the U.S. examples. Long the object of admiration by constitutional scholars and students across the country and the world, the concepts of separation of powers and of checks and balances -- under which the three U.S. branches of government maintain a kind of symbiotic relationship -- have been largely eviscerated by the concentration of power in the executive. That there is already a constitutional theory to explain this phenomenon -- the unitary executive doctrine -- contradicts the oft-repeated justification that the growth of executive power during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2008) was a reaction to the extraordinary circumstances of the war on terror. Under the separation of powers doctrine, the legislative and judicial branches are supposed to share complementary powers and protect their exclusive domains. But under the George W. Bush presidency, the executive decided what portions of what acts of Congress to follow, decided what if any rights it would afford criminal suspects, imprisoned suspects indefinitely without charge, set up a system of secret prisons, gave itself the authority to kidnap citizens of other countries and to ignore treaty obligations approved by the U.S. Senate. The judicial branch of the U.S. government has failed to defend its constitutional duties and, instead, has issued rulings that, in large part, permitted the executive to do precisely as it wished. In the Uighur ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court again avoided ruling directly on the issues and sent the case back to the trial judge in light of recent developments in the case -- among them, agreement by other countries to accept some or all of the detainees. The underlying appeals court decision that was vacated by the Supreme Court had overruled a trial judge's decision that the seemingly indefinite incarceration of the Muslims was impermissible under the U.S. Constitution.

Corporations are people, too

What does it mean that a doctrinaire conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court just eliminated the evolving theory of campaign finance reform? Well, it means a lot of things -- none of which bode particularly well for the future of elections in the United States -- but maybe it will finally force the right wing to stop labeling judges they don't like as "activist." And maybe, just maybe, it will convince U.S. citizens that who they elect to the White House really matters, since the five conservative justices who formed the 5-4 majority were nominated to the court by conservative Republican presidents. Maybe it's the term "conservative" that needs an overhaul, since the conservative majority voted to invalidate decades of jurisprudence aimed at protecting the society's interest in free elections while trying to place practical limits on campaign contributions. That's about as activist as it gets at this level! The ruling overruled two earlier Supreme Court decisions limiting the role of corporations and associations, like labor unions, in election campaigns -- a 1990 ruling upholding the constitutionality of placing limits on corporate campaign spending and the 2003 decision upholding the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold law. McCain-Feingold barred corporations from paid political advertising on television and radio for or against individual candidates in the last 60 days before a general election. In the abstract, of course, the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (No. 08-205) was inarguably correct. “If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, according to the New York Times, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” It's hard to argue with that, and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the decision. But as Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out in his 90-page dissent, the majority had erred by treating corporate speech as equivalent to human speech. "The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court's disposition of this case," Stevens wrote, joined by the other three members of the more-liberal wing, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Stevens read his dissent from the bench. In a way, the division on the court reflects the division in U.S. politics, where members of the two major parties in Congress seem almost irreconcilably at odds about the country's major challenges. Perhaps as a reflection of that divide, U.S. President Barack Obama was unusually critical of the Supreme Court in a statement after the ruling. “With its ruling today,” he said, “the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” Obama called on Congress to respond 'forcefully' to the ruling, perhaps by rewriting the invalidated law in a constitutionally acceptable manner. But it's hard to see, at least at this moment, how that can possibly be accomplished.

Major league baseball players buy some justice for the rich

Yesterday's federal appeals court ruling that U.S. agents overstepped their authority in seizing evidence from a Bay Area laboratory appears absolutely correct. As Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in the 11-judge panel's decision, the government was not permitted to take the results of steroids testing of hundreds of people -- many of them prominent athletes -- when it enforced a warrant for results of tests on 10 Major League baseball players, according to the Reuters international news service. Among the athletes whose steroid use was exposed by the documentation was Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees third baseman who admitted using performance enhancing drugs after Sports Illustrated magazine said he was mentioned, Reuters said. The ruling means the lab evidence probably cannot be used if the government decides to prosecute the multimillionaire players for perjury or any other charges U.S. officials come up with, assuming the decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is upheld when the case is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, as expected. This is how justice is figured out in our system. But it doesn't happen like that for everybody. This is justice for the rich. The biggest problem for the multimillionaire players is going to be how to put the revelations back into the bottle. But ordinary folks charged with crimes simply don't have the same kind of experience with the judicial system. Rich ballplayers are not going to be arrested and thrown into jail while their case plays out in court over months and years, but ordinary people -- who don't have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for bail -- probably will. Rich ballplayers will be defended by the best lawyers their ludicrously wealthy labor union can afford; ordinary folks will have to come up as money as they can get their hands on just to get an attorney to represent them. People need to get attorneys because most cases are not decided in the courtroom but in pretrial consultations with judges, where non-lawyers are not allowed. We have created a legal system that rewards the rich with unprecedented access and opportunity at the expense of lower middle-class and poor people. The courts have evolved from a search for truth to a battle of egos, and ordinary people -- and ordinary justice -- are the biggest losers.

New era of capitalism deepens -- Chrysler sale OK'd by high court

The new post-financial system collapse era of American capitalism took off in earnest today when the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its stay and cleared the way for Chrysler Corp. to be acquired by its union and Fiat, the Italian automaker. According to Cable News Network (CNN), the high court voted to turn down an appeal by Indiana state pension funds that had challenged the complex deal, removing the last impediment to the White House-backed sale. The court had delayed the sale Monday, apparently to review last-minute filings from the parties. The ruling means Chrysler, for decades the third-largest U.S. automaker, will emerge from bankruptcy owned primarily (55 percent) by the United Auto Workers trust with minority ownership (20 percent) by Fiat. The governments of the United States and Canada also will own smaller stakes, CNN said. "We are delighted that the Chrysler-Fiat alliance can now go forward, allowing Chrysler to re-emerge as a competitive and viable automaker," the White House said after the Supreme Court order, according to CNN. The quick action by the high court was vital to avoid Chrysler's liquidation, CNN said, because the automaker had shut down operations after its bankruptcy filing last month and was losing $100 million a day.