Minnesota declares that we should not be impounded in the butt by law enforcement. [City Pages]

1.Tribal courts

2. Get a goat or two chickens instead of marrying off your teenage daughter.

Thanx to conuly

Charles Pierce cheers on a couple of mild outbreaks of sanity in the criminal justice system.

Drone pursues cattle rustler.

Thanx to Fragano Ledgister on Facebook

ETA: It's a nonfiction Bat Durston story.

There is a really annoying petty irony to being falsely accused of failing to return the library's copy of Convicting the Innocent. I've settled that, though, and now I want to put in a plug for the book, which is written by Brandon L. Garrett and published by Harvard.

Convicting the Innocent studies the cases of 150 people who did serious prison time and have since been proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt by DNA evidence. It shows the problems with confessions, eyewitness testimony, and perhaps worst of all, jailhouse snitches.

For a long time, I was neutral on the death penalty. I don't have strong feelings about it, but most people do, in ways that cannot be settled by further factual evidence. What I do have strong feelings about is making sure we've got the actual perp, especially if we're going to kill the person we convict, and this book, and the specific case of Troy Davis, have convinced me that as long as there's a death penalty, we're going to kill innocent people, or at least people we aren't sure enough about.

Radley Balko on what's wrong with Caylee's Law.

A man did a video in which he sang a suggestive song, and spliced in pictures of children so it looked as if they were listening. For this act of abuse twice removed, he is going to jail.

Thanx to eatsoylentgreen

[British] Supreme Court rules gay asylum seekers can't be deported to persecution. Ours should do likewise.

Thanx to coyotegoth

There are times when the legal system could profit from allowing a writ of copulo non compos mentis (are you out of your fucking mind?). A judge attempts to approximate it in dealing with Orly Taitz, and rightly so.

(Surely by now someone has pointed out that he who has a Taitz is lost.)