The law and the jungle

Regular readers will know of my ambivalence about the death penalty. There is much that is troubling about capital punishment, including the fact that it gives far more power to the state than any of us should be comfortable with. But some crimes are so depraved that nothing short of the ultimate punishment seems appropriate.

An interesting and underreported phenomenon is the movement of some conservatives to the drug-legalization position. A recent convert is columnist Mona Charen, who cites Milton Friedman's opinion that the war on drugs keeps the price of drugs artificially inflated and amounts to a favor by the government to drug lords.

Reading Kevin Leininger's column today  on the possibility of a countywide smoking sort of took me back in time:

Smoking foes aren't overly interested in civics, of course. Tobacco Free Allen County, for example, claims it wants to protect workers and cites statistics purporting to show that 1,240 Hoosiers die from secondhand smoke every year and that fine-particle air pollution in Fort Wayne declined 94 percent after Council's ban took effect.

One more indication the coming short session of the General Assembly won't be as peaceful as some might hope:

Two Indiana Republicans want welfare recipients to pass drug tests before they can receive benefits.

[. . .]

Lincoln Plowman is a former Indianapolis police officer and City-County Council member who could get up to 30 years in prison after being convicted of bribery and extortion. He was taped in conversations with an undercover FBI agent accepting more than $5,000 in cash and requesting a $1,000 campaign contribution to help plan a strip club downtown.

Indianapolis attorney Richard Kammen has defended a lot of people facing the death penalty in his 40-year career, but now he has probably the most despicable client of all, Abd al-Rahim Mohammed Al-Nashiri, the accused terrorist charged in the 2000 USS Cole attack that killed 17 sailors and wounded several dozen others:

Good idea:

C-SPAN is asking the Supreme Court to drop its ban on cameras in the courtroom when it hears arguments over President Obama's healthcare reform law.

"Shrinking zone of privacy" question of the day: Should police be able to track you by placing a GPS unit on your car, without getting a warrant?

Every move we make:

The Supreme Court is considering whether police use of GPS devices to track criminal suspects requires a judge's advance approval.

The case being argued Tuesday could have implications for other high-tech surveillance techniques in the digital age.

[. . .]

The government argues that people have no expectation of privacy concerning their travel on public streets.

Nipplegate ends up being a bust:

A federal appeals court has ruled that the FCC acted improperly when it imposed a half-million dollar fine on CBS for broadcasting an image of Janet Jackson's exposed nipple for a fraction of a second during the 2004 Super Bowl. The court ruled that the broadcast was legal under the FCC's then-current policy of allowing "fleeting" indecency on the airwaves, and that it was unfair of the FCC to change the policy retroactively.