This story is saddening, jarring, shocking and well, i'll just block quote it...

Before he died Wednesday evening, death row inmate Dale Leo Bishop apologized to his victim's family, thanked America and urged people to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"For those who oppose the death penalty and want to see it end, our best bet is to vote for Barack Obama because his supporters have been working behind the scenes to end this practice," Bishop said.

A man is about to be executed next week by the State of Alabama, and both the judicial system and Governor Riley himself have denied requests for DNA testing that could prove his innocence.

Thomas Arthur, scheduled to be executed next week for the 1982 murder of Muscle Shoals' Troy Wicker Jr., has asked the state Supreme Court to grant his attorneys access to evidence in the case for DNA testing.

Attorneys for Arthur offered to pay for the testing and asked the court to delay the execution if tests can't be completed before the July 31 execution date.

"Without the benefit of DNA testing here, the state of Alabama assumes the intolerable risk of executing an innocent man," said Arthur's appeal, which was filed Monday.

Dale Leo Bishop is scheduled to be executed in Mississippi tomorrow at 6pm.  This would be a travesty.  Please help stop it...

(read on)

cross posted from The Dream Antilles and docuDharma

WaPO reports that Maryland police infiltrated and spied upon peace and death penalty abolition groups in 2005.  The information the cops gathered was apparently sent to other law enforcement agencies.  No crimes were alleged to have been committed by the activists.

That crushing sound you hear is the crumbling of the First Amendment.

Please join me below.

Interesting (if brief) story appearing locally in the DC area on the local news radio station WTOP.

(Cross Posted to UN Dispatch)

TheInternational Court of Justice (sometimes called the World Court--and not to be confused with the International Criminal Court) is a forum where United Nations member states can hash out legal disputes in a neutral setting.   The cases can range from the somewhat banal (like a dispute between Ukraine and Romania over Black Sea maritime rights) to the highly contentious (like Bosnia accusing Serbia of committing genocide in the 1990s).  

One of the more contentious cases before the court is Mexico's action against the United States to stay the execution of Mexican nationals being held on death row.

It seems Obama is sounding tougher on terror supposedly further "moving to the center." From a CNN interview to be aired Sunday afternoon:

In an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said bin Laden's actions have justified capital punishment.

"If he was captured alive, then we would make a decision to bring the full weight of not only U.S. justice, but world justice down on him," Obama said during the interview, the entirety of which is set to air Sunday at 1 p.m. ET.

Gee...Europe's justice, for example, doesn't agree with capital punishment(afaik.) Maybe he has the brilliant idea to implement the U.S.' or the Saudi Arabia's death penalty first and life sentences of the liberal world in Laden's memory later.

Warning: This is shameless self-promotion. Well, actually I'm not promoting myself but I book I co-edited with Jeffrey St. Clair and contributed essays to that was just released by AK Press called Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland. Check out our site at RedStateRebels.org.

OK, I'm actually including about 2 weeks' worth of events, but my point here is to give my personal take on the various post-Unity incidents that have left Obama's campaign in a bit of a funk compared to the heady "long primary" days.

I'm sure there were other events that I've forgotten; feel free to remind me in the comments (I'm basically looking at how he's handled various "he's moving to the middle!"-inducing incidents in the past few weeks).

Much has been written about the FISA bill, guns & Obama's refinement on his Iraq policy.

But to the most mind blowing inconsistency is Mr. Obama's support of the death penalty in more expanded ways than allowed under a conservative 5-4 majority in the supreme court.

Senator Obama's philosophy on this issue is contradictory to the humanity  he has sought to enrich his books and his speeches with.

After seeing the reaction of the Right to the recent Supreme Court decision regarding child rapists and the death penalty, I felt it was finally time to enter my thoughts into the national discussion.

Yeah I know Obama sold us out on FISA, the Fourth Amendment and the opportunity to hold Bush and the telecoms accountable for the most criminal abuse of the Constitution in American history, and that he appears ready to sign on to a bill giving presidents vast new powers to spy on citizens without any court oversight, but that’s just one issue.

The following is an excerpt from the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published this month by AK Press. To learn more about the book, please visit http://www.RedStateRebels.org.

The Errington Thompson Show is a progressive political talk show that airs on 880 AM (streaming) from the beautiful mountains of Asheville, NC on Saturday's at 9 am EST.  Today, we are talking with Linda Monk, constitutional scholar, about several recent Supreme Court rulings - guns, Exxon, Gitmo and more.  It should be fun.  You should join us!

The lamentation and rending of garments in the wake of Barack Obama's repeated, ill-advised comments on several issues (Wes Clark's comments, the death penalty, gun ownership, etc.) seems to have built itself into a Jupiter's spot of neverending self-powered cyclonic fury.  Woe is us, that we have been sold out by the Great Blue Hope!!  Change is a lie!!  Our country and Constitution have been sold up the river!!

There are all kinds of well-intentioned protests arising; "I will not donate any money..."  "I will not help to register any new voters..."  "I will still vote for him, but that's all!"

Well, I'm going to tell you what to do now.

SYFPH, and just run the damn play.

or Clark under the bus, or the shunning of Muslims, or the statement on E Jerusalem to AIPAC, or the flipping on DC gun ban, or his broken promise re campaign funding, etc. I am also particularly disturbed by Barack Obama's lack of moral fiber when it comes to his opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling against the death penalty for child rapists.

Today, when Axelrod showed up on Morning Joe and was confronted with a few of Obama's "center" moves, he took on the death penalty first. Or rather, he tried to. I wish I had one of those counter-clicker gizmos to register the # of times he stuttered and stammered (like this: "um ... uh... um... uh...um... uh... ") when trying to apply pretzel logic.

He choked on it.

By Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California

A panel of experts, including 10 law enforcement officers and prosecutors, unanimously  agrees that California’s death penalty is utterly broken. To fix it, we’ll  need to spend over $ 200 million per year. The current failed system already costs over  $ 137 million more each year than our alternative of permanent imprisonment. Today’s report forces all Californians to ask: how much we are willing to pay for our death penalty when we have an alternative that punishes criminals and protects our communities without making us bankrupt?

The 8th Amendment of the Constitution, in its prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, holds at its core the fundamental American values of fairness, dignity, and justice.  Last week's Supreme Court decision on Kennedy v. Louisiana reaffirmed these values by once again finding the death penalty as not only an ineffective deterrent against crime, but also incongruous with the nation's "evolving standards of decency and redemption that mark the progress of a maturing society." (Trop v. Dulles). The court appealed to the "precept of justice" in holding that punishment is to be proportioned to the crime, and in the case of capital punishment this is indeed "a narrow category."