The ACLU of Ohio was one of several organizations that participated in a vigil in Mount Vernon after a serious attack on a boy because of his ethnicity. Only one of five assailants was charged and he pled to a relatively minor offense of ethnic intimidation.

The League of United Latin American Citizens of Ohio has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an independent investigation into a May 30, 2008, incident against a Hispanic minor.

Robert Cantu said he was dragged through a parking lot with a noose around his neck, and was the target of racial slurs.

In addition to conducting an independent investigation, LULAC is asking the DOJ to prosecute all parties involved in the incident, and investigate selective prosecution and police practices unfavorable toward minorities.

The drug court in Franklin County promises to help rehabilitate offenders and save taxpayers money.

Angela Hatem cradled her newborn son and started slithering toward the darkness of addiction.

Complications from the delivery of her youngest child in 2002 led to infections and 14 surgeries. Doctors, she said, handed her painkillers.

But after they cut her off, she found a street dealer to avoid withdrawal. To support her addiction, she turned to crime.

In 2007, Hatem was sentenced to four years in prison on 12 felony counts for cashing counterfeit checks with stolen account numbers from Franklin County Municipal Court.

The ABJ highlights a new report that discusses the many failings of relying on eyewitness accounts in police investigations.

Ask Clarence Elkins about the power — and unreliability — of eyewitness testimony. He spent eight years in prison, wrongly convicted of the murder of his mother-in-law. His conviction turned largely on the account of his niece. She was wrong. She eventually recanted her testimony. DNA evidence finally led to Elkins regaining his freedom.

Now the Innocence Project, headquartered in New York City and dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, has released a report offering a broad and revealing assessment of eyewitness misidentification. The research shows that of the 230 people who have been exonerated through DNA testing, 179 of the cases, or 75 percent, involved eyewitnesses erring in the identification. In 38 percent, multiple eyewitnesses misidentified the same innocent person.

Ohio executed another person today, putting the state on track to follow Texas with the biggest number of executions during 2009.

Marvallous Keene, notorious leader of the “Christmas killers” who murdered six people in December 1992, was pronounced dead at 10:36 a.m. Tuesday, July 21, after receiving an intravenous cocktail of lethal drugs at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility here.

“Marvallous, do you have a statement?” Warden Phillip Kerns asked before the drugs were administered.

“No,” Keene said, “I have no words.”

It was a somber affair. Seven relatives of Keene’s victims witnessed the half-hour execution process attentively but with little emotion. They said nothing throughout the execution. Keene’s two chosen witnesses, his attorneys from the Ohio Public Defender’s office, occasional dabbed at their eyes with tissues.

Enquirer reporter Jon Craig recounts his experiences as a witness to eight executions in the state of Ohio.

A killer’s mother collapses against the thick security glass separating her from her dying son, then passes out.

A Death Row inmate mumbles the name of the “real” killer as he becomes unconscious.

A defense attorney nearly misses his client’s execution after making a wrong turn. But then a court stops it at the last minute, anyway.

A normally unshakable reporter walks out of the Death House, pale and distressed.

These and other images bombarded me as I crossed the barbed-wire courtyard at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on Tuesday to cover my eighth execution since 1999.

Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Berding recently reconsidered a proposal that would limit panhandling in the city. The ACLU was a vocal opponent of such measures because soliciting for funds is protected free speech.

Just two days after he proposed the idea, Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Berding quietly dropped his proposal to tax panhandlers and require them to wear signs stating how much the city contributes to social service agencies on an annual basis. Despite the sudden flip-flop, Berding’s idea has inspired a similar concept targeting City Hall.

Jason Haap and Justin Jeffre, bloggers who operate The Cincinnati Beacon Web site, want a new law that would require all City Council members to wear a city-issued name badge whenever conducting public business. The badge would include their names, the amount they raised during their campaign, and how much that equals per vote.

[…]

But the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio issued a statement Thursday urging City Council to reject Berding’s proposal, and promising a lawsuit if it was approved.

“This is a transparent attempt to backdoor restrictions on the free speech rights of the poorest people in Cincinnati. Soliciting donations has time and again been classified as free speech, not as a business,” said Gary Daniels, the Ohio ACLU’s associate director. “It is clearly intended to unfairly target only the homeless and not others who may be soliciting donations in Cincinnati.”

By refusing to pass crucial prison reforms, Ohio legislators continue to ignore the staggering overpopulation of our system and risk the safety of many inmates and guards — all while draining taxpayer money.

The director of Ohio’s prison system has warned that lawmakers had to make a choice - either enact sensible sentencing reforms to reduce overcrowding or spend billions on new prisons.

Lawmakers left Columbus for the summer earlier this week without doing either.

“We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing,” said Terry Collins, director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. “We are operating at 132 percent of capacity. Some people may not get excited about that, but it’s not just about keeping people in prison. … It’s about them coming out and living next to you and me.”

Finally, the ABJ says that the findings by five federal investigator generals must be explored further immediately.

When Dick Cheney recently defended the Bush White House program of wiretapping without warrants, the former vice president returned to a familiar theme in the fight against terrorism. In early 2006, George W. Bush insisted that the program ”helped prevent attacks and save American lives.” Now the inspectors general of five federal agencies, including the CIA and the Justice Department, have offered their assessment. They found that the program’s effectiveness hasn’t been so clear.

Recall that the Bush team secretly launched the program shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. The New York Times disclosed the operation four years later, in 2005, to much understandable outrage, the administration circumventing laws requiring court approval. The National Security Agency operated the program, allowing eavesdropping on the international communications of Americans.

The inspectors general reported that intelligence officials ”had difficulty citing specific instances” when the wiretapping program contributed to thwarting terrorist plots. If the eavesdropping could be useful, it played a limited role in counterterrorism. The report concluded that other intelligence efforts produced more timely and detailed information.

The Plain-Dealer’s editorial on the government’s warrantless wiretapping program calls for further investigation by the Obama administration.

The five inspectors general of America’s most important justice and national security agencies have issued damning findings on the extent to which ideologically driven insiders in the George W. Bush White House distorted the usual legal checks and balances that govern warrantless surveillance and other domestic spying.

It’s a troubling account of political deception and constitutional subversion.

Yet their “Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance Program” released July 10 has been met with obfuscation from many Republicans and with silence from some Democratic lawmakers more interested in covering up their own inaction and their leadership’s effective acquiescence in some of these practices.

Such a reaction must not stand.

The Blade was one of three Ohio newspapers to editorialize on recent revelations about the Bush administration’s tactics in the War on Terror.

THE revelation by CIA Director Leon Panetta that the agency had a program to assassinate senior al-Qaeda leaders is not terribly surprising. The claim that former Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the CIA to not brief members of the congressional intelligence committees about it demands further inquiry.

In the past, we have argued that President Obama and Congress would be better off devoting their energy to solving current national problems rather than being distracted by questionable activities of the previous administration.
Nonetheless, the CIA program merits a full investigation.

The operation, whatever it was, violated a congressional briefing procedure put in place in the 1970s after previous CIA abuses. That safeguard was put in place to deter renegades like Mr. Cheney, who used self-selected intelligence that turned out to be false to push the United States into an unnecessary war in Iraq.

This legislation that would severely compromise a woman’s right to choose is currently pending in front of the Ohio General Assembly.

A bill was introduced by a western Ohio lawmaker last week that would create a requirement to obtain paternal consent before an abortion may be performed in the state of Ohio.

House Bill 252, introduced Friday by Rep. John Adams, R-Sidney, would enact section 2919.124 of the Revised Code. The enacted section, if the bill were to pass, would state that no person should induce or perform an abortion on a pregnant woman without the written informed consent of the fetus’ father, when the fetus is both “viable” or “not viable,” meaning that the fetus has developed, or not developed, to the point of being able to live outside of the uterus.

“There are instances when the baby is not a viable baby,” Adams said, “and in those instances, they (would) still need to get consent from the biological father.”

Another article outlining many of the problems with the federal government’s unfair “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Lt. Col. ?Victor Fehrenbach is a supremely patient man.

He fulfills his mission every day, just as he has done for 18 years, never knowing when his Air Force job will finally be terminated by the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

“It will probably be October,” Fehrenbach estimated. “The process takes at least four months.”

Even his personal meeting with the commander in chief last month probably won’t save his job as an assistant director of operations for the 366th Operations Support Squadron at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. But it has left him hopeful: “President Obama looks you straight in the eye. I have full faith this is a priority to him and very personal to him. He has experienced discrimination in his own life.”

A great editorial from the Middletown Journal on the passage of legislation that strips schools of the decision to say the Pledge of Allegiance or not.

An amendment offered by Butler County’s state senator, Gary Cates, R-West Chester, was part of the $50.5 billion, two-year state budget approved on Monday, July 13. But don’t be confused. Cates’ amendment does not address the state’s staggering budget crisis, which will force thousands of state-employee layoffs and program cuts, or Ohio’s rising unemployment rate in the general population.

Instead, it targets a single public school district in Ohio — Oberlin Schools in Lorain County — which, for the last 30 years, has not required the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in its classrooms.

So, thanks to Cates’ amendment, local boards of education across Ohio will be forbidden from adopting policies that would restrict the recitation of the pledge in classrooms or change its wording in any way.

A local activist writes about the need to close down Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and restore due process for all those suspected of terrorism.

Contrary to what some political pundits spout, the ACLU does not stand alone in calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw operations at Guantanamo and led troops in Iraq, agreed with President Barack Obama’s decision to close it.

Detractors of Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo detention facility raise claims that allowing these prisoners to be housed in the United States might pose a safety risk. However, the past record of successfully incarcerating convicted terrorists in the U.S. suggests that this concern is unfounded.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, terrorists currently housed on U.S. soil include some of the masterminds behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Many have been incarcerated for years without incident.

All of these men were tried in open court with constitutional protections, which has not been provided to the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The prisons where convicted terrorists would likely be held are super maximum-security facilities.

Guantanamo Bay has been a black eye on America’s long tradition of fairness and respect for the law. We must close the base in order to restore our most cherished constitutional protections.

Cara Greenberg

Yellow Springs

A victory for women’s reproductive freedom and availability of over the counter birth control.

Pharmacists are obliged to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they are personally opposed to the “morning after” contraceptive on religious grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In a case that could affect policy across the western U.S., a supermarket pharmacy owner in Olympia, Wash., failed in a bid to block 2007 regulations that required all Washington pharmacies to stock and dispense the pills.

Family-owned Ralph’s Thriftway and two pharmacists employed elsewhere sued Washington state officials over the requirement. The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which can prevent implantation of a recently fertilized egg. They said that the new regulations would force them to choose between keeping their jobs and heeding their religious objections to a medication they regard as a form of abortion.

The News Journal rightfully calls on the state to examine newfound evidence in the murder trial of Kevin Keith before it executes him.

The Ohio Supreme Court should look again at the case against Kevin Keith — the legal procedures and the evidence — before Keith is put to death for crimes that he may not have committed.

The 45-year-old former Crestline man is on death row for killing 24-year-old Marichell Chatman, her 4-year-old daughter Marchae Chatman and Marchae’s aunt Linda Chatman, 39, in a spray of gunfire at a Bucyrus apartment in February 1994.

Last week, the Ohio Innocence Project raised questions about Keith’s guilt based upon evidence not available to the defense at the time of Keith’s trial three months after the murders.

Keith has exhausted his regular state and federal appeals, losing his argument of innocence in lower courts. He has now asked the Ohio Supreme Court to consider his claim he was not the killer.

The story of one man who was found innocent after being wrongfully convicted of a rape, may bring needed changes to Ohio’s justice system.

James Vaughan came chillingly close to spending the rest of his life behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Some say his case is a testament to the justice system’s vulnerability to human error and carelessness.

Last year, Vaughan was convicted in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court of raping a 9-year-old girl. He faced a mandatory term of life in prison without parole and had been in jail for a year when he won a new trial based on a social worker’s previously unheard testimony. A jury overturned his conviction last month.

Now, the 30-year-old University School and University of Cincinnati graduate is trying to readjust to life untethered from the criminal justice system.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in two very important cases regarding reproductive rights and medical privacy.

Parents who are suing Planned Parenthood over an abortion clinic’s alleged negligence in allowing a teenage sexual-assault victim to obtain an abortion will not get access to clinic records on other patients, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

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Carrie Davis, the acting legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said the ruling had less to do with abortion than the privacy of medical records. The ACLU joined the case as a friend of the court.

“For any of us, this was very important in preserving the privacy of our medical records,” Davis said.