The law and the jungle

If a plaintiff is already required to have his name and address on a sex-offendry registry, available to all Hoosiers, including in an online data base, how much more potential harm can for him can there be in not letting him sue the state anonymously?

If "three strikes and you're out" is a reasonable step, why isn't "two strikes and you don't get out early"? Donna Ellis says, reasonably, that if Charles Boney had not been released from prison early after he was sentenced for robbing her, his second conviction, he would not have been avaiable to take part in the slayings of a woman and her two children. Boney's lawyer is not so reasonable:

Is there a constitutional right to lethal self-defense?

Oddly enough, the matter hasn't been settled, and has been little studied by scholars . . . There's a smattering of other material on it, but quite little.

Since Indiana has strengthened its self-defense law, adding a no-retreat provision, this is of more than passing interest here.

The Indiana Supreme Court has picked a firm for an $85 million project to link up the courts in the state's 92 counties:

Now, this is a truly interesting twist in the smoking-ban debate:

After a hearing that was at times as theatrical as any play, a Denver District judge refused Monday to exempt Colorado's theater companies from the statewide smoking ban.

But Judge Michael A. Martinez's ruling in favor of the Colorado Department of Health could open the door for a larger battle over what constitutes freedom of expression.

In next Tuesday's election, Wisconsin voters apparently get to "advise" legislators whether they should consider instituting the death penalty. This does not seem a good course to one newspaper editor, who offers one of the most dishonest arguments you will ever hear, using an ad posted by the Indiana attorney general's office for a death-penalty specialist as his case in point:

As Wren noted in his e-mail to me:

Indiana's gambling attention isn't all focused on fine-tuning bingo rules and collecting casino taxes:

Twelve people were arrested Friday when police broke up an illegal high-stakes poker game in an apartment in East Chicago, Ind. Large amounts of cash and 19 cases of beer were also seized.

Could it possibly be true that some of the female acquaintances of men in jail might be lacking in decorum?

Revealing tops are out and bras are now a must for women visiting prisoners at the Vanderburgh County Jail.

Jail officials imposed a new dress code policy after several incidents in which women visiting the jail exposed themselves to male prisoners.

Ever read O'Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem"? A bum named Soapy tries to get arrested, in order to spend Christmas well-fed in a nice, warm jail, to no avail. A kind-hearted cop keeps thwarting his efforts because of the spirit of Christmas. Soapy finally has a religiously inspired insight in front of an old church, realizing he can still make something of his life and should be doing something more than trying to spend the night in jail, whereupon he is immediately arrested for loitering.

OK, this is visceral, not a logical, reasoned response, so I guess it wouldn't be a good idea to put me on the jury for Simon Rios, assuming the trial even takes place in our lifetimes. How far do we have to go, exactly, to make sure a trial is fair?

Defense attorneys for Simon Rios, a suspect in the deaths of his wife and three daughters, on Friday were granted their motion for a continuance of his February trial.