Convention Against Torture

Does an individual have standing to sue and if so why do victims not do so? nybooks.com "What to do about gitmo" by david cole.

Not your Chevrolet's America

Chevy, "this is America"

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.

Thank you New Yorker Magazine, Atul Gawande et al.

Habeas and the Guantanomo Bay Prisoner Cases

Thanks to Scotusblog, at this link is a Supreme Court Order issued today remanding the case of four Britons released from Guantanomo, who then sued United States Military officials for misconduct in the treatment, allegedly torture. That means the opinion of the DC Circuit Court must be reconsidered in light of the Supreme Court Opinion in the case of Boumedienne, issued more recently this year. The opinion to be reconsidered was issued January 11, 2008 and is available at this link. If I can find it I'll post a link to the Boumedienne case as well.

Currents: Eddies and Flows

Re Carey v Musladin is Flawed (Sherry Colb, Findlaw)--Heart of Matter is:

events in a courtroom - overseen and approved by a judge - acquire a state action status that they would not otherwise have. And once the Court acknowledges that this is so, there is no reason to treat a "private" act in the courtroom as falling outside the scope of precedents that govern displays in the courtroom that undermine the fairness of a criminal trial.

I could not agree more.
[Sherry F. Colb, a FindLaw columnist, is Professor and Frederick B. Lacey Scholar at Rutgers Law School in Newark. Her book, When Sex Counts: Making Babies and Making Law will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in early 2007.]

Update: here by Prof. Amar (Findlaw, Wed. Dec. 20).

One More Torture Case Backed by Former Judges.

Washington Post Editorializes on Death.

Too Funny.

And learn lots about the politics of crime from NYT ("Right's Jailhouse Conversion")