Citizen Cartwright

Bush administration 'torture' memos

Lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who provided the legal basis for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, will be cleared of professional misconduct allegations in a forthcoming report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, Newsweek says.

Campaign spending as free speech

The Supreme Court's ruling Thursday that corporations and unions can spend millions of dollars on campaign advertising has immediate implications for the November elections, and President Obama says he'll work with Congress on setting new limits.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says, "The government was picking winners and losers" under campaign finance limits, and the ruling restores free speech in campaigns.

Campaign finance and free speech

Even as Washington buzzes about the Supreme Court's imminent campaign finance ruling — whether restricting corporate, labor union and interest group spending on campaigns violates the First Amendment — other court decisions are rolling back campaign spending rules to the years before Watergate, The New York Times reports.

Congressional Democrats say that if the supremes rule against the current limits, they'll try to legislate new restrictions in time for the November elections.

Judges at risk

The Justice Department's ability to protect federal judges and prosecutors has "critical deficiencies," even as threats against them rise, the agency's inspector general reports.

Decline of the death penalty

In 2009, 106 people were sentenced to death — the fewest since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, NPR reports.

And the American Law Institute has abandoned its 50-year effort on the issue, according to The New York Times. 

The institute is a group of 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors that one academic describes as providing "the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”

A study the institute commissioned concluded that the system couldn't reconcile the goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It said capital punishment was beset by racial disparities; was expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics of judicial elections.

The institute essentially has concluded that "the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure,” says Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor.

Getting out of Gitmo

As if President Obama's effort to close the Guantanamo prison weren't complicated enough, heightened concerns about Yemen complicate it even more.

The administration already had been wary of repatriating the Yemeni detainees still held at Guantanamo out of concern that they'd end up back on the battlefield.

Now some Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., are joining Republicans who've been saying Yemenis shouldn't be sent home.

Then there's the problem of those two Saudis who were released from Gitmo to Saudi rehabilitation programs and then re-emerged as al Qaeda leaders in Yemen.

Gitmo inmates coming to U.S. soil

The White House is expected to announce on Tuesday that the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois will be the destination of no more than 100 detainees from Guantanamo.

Critics fear that extremists will use the prisons to recruit inmates to their cause and spread propaganda inside and out, Reuters reports. But Obama administration officials say there's no need for concern, citing the 300 people convicted on terrorism-related charges held already in U.S. prisons. They say such inmates are closely monitored by prison officials.

U.S. human rights policy: 'pragmatic'

After drawing fire earlier this year for going too easy on China's human rights practices, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out the Obama administration's approach in a speech Monday.

"Sometimes, we will have the most impact by publicly denouncing a government action, like the coup in Honduras or the violence in Guinea," she said. "Other times, we will be more likely to help the oppressed by engaging in tough negotiations behind closed doors, like pressing China and Russia as part of our broader agenda. In every instance, our aim will be to make a difference, not to prove a point."

Expansion of hate crimes law

A bill to include violence against gays and lesbians as a federal hate crime cleared the Senate Thursday and headed to the White House, where President Obama is expected to sign it.

Los Angeles Times

Closing Gitmo

A coalition of retired generals and liberal activists is launching an ad campaign and otherwise urging members of Congress to support President Obama's effort to close the prison.

CNN