Judge Slammed For Allowing An Execution
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Rarely are computer problems matters of life and death. But they were in Texas a month ago, the New York Times reports, and now a judge who allowed a man to be executed because his technical-difficulty-plagued lawyers couldn't get to the court in time to file a final appeal is drawing a national outcry.
Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Appeals, turned away the last appeal of a death row inmate because the rushed filing was delayed past the court's 5 p.m. closing time. As a result, Michael Richard was executed for a 1986 sexual assault and murder - the last person to die in Texas while the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the constitutionality of lethal injection.
Keller has said that she didn't know that Richard's defense lawyers in Houston were having computer problems when they asked the court for 20 more minutes to deliver their final state appeal to Austin hours before the scheduled execution on Sept. 25. Without a definitive ruling from the state court, the lawyers could not properly appeal to the United States Supreme Court to block the execution.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed a complaint against Keller - the first judicial complaint the group has ever filed.
Now lawyers' groups are filing complaints against Keller left and right. One group is circulating a petition calling for the court to accept electronic filings.
Keller defended her actions in the Austin American-Statesman, saying "I just said, 'We close at 5.' I didn't really think of it as a decision so much as a statement."
Two days after Richard was executed, the Supreme Court blocked another lethal injection in Texas, and there have been no executions since.
Giuliani's Advisor Advocates Bombing Iran, ASAP
The New York Times reports that "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani has been getting foreign policy counsel lately from "a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers."
Most controversial among them is Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran "as soon as it is logistically possible." Others include Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States' ban on assassination.
The campaign says Giuliani's not swallowing all these guys' ideas; but the guys' themselves argue otherwise. Podhoretz told the New York Observer that he recently met with Giuliani to discuss his new book, in which he advocates bombing Iran as part of a larger struggle against "Islamofacism," and "there is very little difference in how he sees the war and I see it."
Asked in a recent interview whether he agreed with Podhoretz that the time to bomb Iran has already come, he said: "From the information I do have available, which is all public source material, I would say that is not correct, we are not at that stage at this point. Can we get to that stage? Yes. And is that closer than some of the Democrats believe? I believe it is."
Chaparral Lover Reconsiders Burning Bush
There's just something about standing on the roof of your house battling a wildfire with a garden hose that takes the charm out of the dry, scrubby vegetation that's feeding the blaze - even if you're the founder of an institute crated to defend it.
So discovers the Wall Street Journal when it checks in with Richard Halsey, founding director of the California Chaparral Institute. Halsey has spent the four years defending the existence of chapparal, the term given to the wide variety of shrubby plants trees and bushes that dot Southern California's hilly landscape. His occasionally poetic Web site, Californiachaparral.com, compares the vegetation to a "carpet of green velvet."
He started his crusade in 2003 after the area's devastating Cedar fire, when fire officials began advocating increasingly aggressive measures like clear-cutting strips of chaparral to create fire breaks to minimize the destructive potential of wildfires.
"The problem is not the chaparral," he said this week. "The problem is people and the way they decide to place houses."
But after his century-old house had a brush with destruction, he admitted, "I have a greater appreciation now for the impact of vegetation near structures than I did before."
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