A bill that would gut North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act was voted out of committee in the state Senate today. SB 416, An Act to Amend Death Penalty Procedures, was approved by the NC House of Representatives last week by a vote of 73-47, a veto-proof majority and awaits floor action in the Senate. The Senate is also expected to approve the bill by a veto-proof margin.

The Racial Justice Act, a historic piece of legislation enacted in 2009, allows North Carolina death row inmates to reduce their sentences to life in prison without parole in certain circumstances. Inmates must show that race played a substantive factor in “decisions to seek or impose the sentence of death in the county, the prosecutorial district, the judicial division, or the State at the time the death sentence was sought or imposed.” The law is unique in that it allows inmates to challenge their sentences based on widespread racial bias instead of having to prove that there was discrimination in their particular case.

SB 416 looks to change all of that. By limiting the use of statistics in proving widespread discrimination, the new bill looks dramatically scale back the Racial Justice Act:

The bill passed this week by the House would allow condemned inmates to present statistics only for the county or judicial district where the crime was committed, rather than statewide, and only covering a period of 10 years before the crime and two years after the imposition of the sentence. Statistics alone would not be sufficient to prove racial bias in imposition of the death sentence; defendants would have to come up with some other evidence.

“This bill guts the NC Racial Justice Act, plain and simple,” Scott Bass, director of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, said in a statement. “What legislators do not understand is that by passing this law, they not only shirk their responsibility to address documented racial bias in the system, they will also be costing taxpayers millions of dollars in extra expense and slowing resolution of death penalty cases by adding additional layers of appeals.”

“This bill is an attempt to sweep that evidence under the rug by allowing the state to ignore mountains of statistics pointing to the pervasive and disturbing role that race plays in jury selection and sentencing,” said Sarah Preston of the ACLU of North Carolina. “We cannot turn our backs on such evidence, as this bill seeks to do.”

Last year, Gov. Beverly Perdue (D) vetoed a similar bill that would have essentially voided the Racial Justice Act. The Racial Justice Act was invoked for the first time in April. In a 167-page decision, Judge Greg Weeks ruled that race unfairly tainted jury selection over a 20-year period, stating that race was “a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise preemptory challenges during jury selection.”

–Alex Brown

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) convened a Senate hearing yesterday to examine the implications of solitary confinement in the American prison system, the first ever hearing to address prison reform as a human rights issue.

A replica of a solitary cell — just 7 feet by 10 feet and bare except for a cot and a toilet — was placed at the front the hearing room during the proceedings as a stark reminder of the prison conditions that face inmates in prolonged isolation.

Anthony Graves, an former prisoner who spent most of his 18 years in prison in extreme isolation, gave one of the most emotional appeals against solitary confinement during his personal testimony:

I am death row exoneree number 138. I was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in Texas back in 1992. Like all death row inmates, I was kept in solitary confinement under some of the worst conditions imaginable with the…total disrespect of human dignity. I lived under the rules of a system that is literally driving men out of their minds.

I survived the torture, but those 18 years was no way to live. I lived in a small, 8 by 12 foot cage. I had a steel bunk bed with a very thin, plastic mattress and pillow that you could only trade out once a year. I have back problems as a result. [...]

Solitary confinement makes our criminal justice system criminal. Criminal. It is inhumane and by its design, it is driving men insane. I am living amongst millions of people out here, but I still feel alone.

Sen. Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, pointed out that addressing the practice of solitary confinement is a chance for the U.S. “to look in the mirror, to look at our own human rights record” and ask what our prisons say about our American values. Human rights groups — ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to Human Rights Watch to the National Religious Campaign Against Torture — have all called for an end to solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. United Nations experts have described the practice of solitary confinement as a form of torture.

With today’s announcement that the Obama administration will assert executive privilege over some “Fast & Furious” documents, a number of critics in Congress have suggested that this must mean the President was involved with the scandal. But this conclusion relies on a fundamental misunderstanding — or willful ignorance — on their part about what executive privilege is.

A spokesman for Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) immediately went on the attack, saying:

The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the ‘Fast and Furious’ operation or the cover-up that followed. The Administration has always insisted that wasn’t the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?

His leap was echoed by Rep. James Lankford (R-OK) at today’s House Oversight Committee debate of a contempt citation for Attorney General Eric Holder and by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

But there are two types of executive privilege: the robust “presidential communications privilege” and the more limited “deliberative process privilege.” The White House may invoke the latter to apply to executive branch officials outside of the president’s inner circle, as long as they were involved with the government’s decision-making process. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all asserted executive privilege in matters not involving presidential communications. And Bush Administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey invoked the same “deliberative process privilege” as recently as 2008, rejecting congressional subpoenas for reports of Department of Justice interviews with the White House staff regarding the Valerie Plame Wilson identify leak investigation.

Furthermore, the very man behind the witch-hunt against Holder, Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), has in the past recognized that same privilege for Bush administration deliberations.

In a May 2008 hearing, then-Ranking Minority Member Issa defended Bush EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson’s right not to answer questions, comparing her deliberations to the “speech and debate” protections enjoyed by Congress:

So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise — or it should come as a surprise to you that we are surprised that you are not going to tell us whether or not there were conversations within the executive branch that led to your independent decision.

The mere invocation of executive privilege can hardly be interpreted as any evidence of involvement by the president himself — something clearly absent in this relatively low-level screw-up.

Steven Perlberg contributed to this report.

In April, ThinkProgress reported on a Pennsylvania Super PAC using the same political ad firm as the U.S. Senate candidate it was supporting. The firm did media work for unsuccessful GOP candidate Steve Welch and made ads opposing his then-rival (and now GOP Senate nominee) Tom Smith for an outside group called Freedom Fund for America’s Future Inc. — but claimed a “firewall” within the firm insured no coordination between the two efforts.

Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald has identified a similar situation with a much bigger player:

Last week, Crossroads GPS, one of the conservative political nonprofits tied to Karl Rove, dropped $70,000 in ads attacking North Dakota Democratic Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp, bringing their spending to approximately $140,000 in the race so far. Heitkamp’s opponent is Republican congressman Rick Berg. It would be totally illegal for Berg’s campaign to talk to Crossroads GPS and tell them, say, where he thinks it would be most helpful for them to buy ads. But that doesn’t mean the message can’t be conveyed through an intermediary.

Last month, Berg’s campaign finance filings to the FEC showed that his campaign paid the Black Rock Group, a small but powerful Republican strategic consulting firm in Virginia, thousands of dollars for “communications consulting.” Meanwhile, American Crossroads, the “twin” organization of Crossroads GPS (they have the same staff, same offices and the same mission, just different tax and legal structures), is paying thousands of dollars each month to the same firm for “advocacy [and] communications consulting.”

While a Black Rock spokeswoman told Salon that Black Rock too has had “firewalls in place” to ensure the firm can “legally engage in federal campaign and independent expenditure or issue advocacy campaigns,” Seitz-Wald notes that the firm has just three partners — making it hard to imagine that the Crossroads team and the Berg team are completely unaware of what the other is doing. But, due to weak Federal Election Commission regulation, even if they were, it would likely be completely legal.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 5-4 Citizens United majority opinion argued that “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.” This loophole — and the overwhelming public opposition to the outside groups their ruling enabled — show just how wrong he was.

As a group of civil rights and voting rights groups filed another lawsuit against Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) error-riddled and likely illegal attempt to purge people his administration said were non-citizen voters from the voter rolls, the continued to go all-in on the effort.

Scott told reporters yesterday that even though his list contained hundreds of names of legitimate and eligible U.S. citizen voters, even if they were improperly removed from the voting rolls, that would be no problem.

MSNBC reports:

“Your vote’s always going to count,” Scott said, saying that he speaks from experience. Scott revealed during a radio interview last week that he voted by provisional ballot during two elections in 2006 because an election worker in Naples confused him for a man who had died. “They just said I got to vote on a provisional ballot,” Scott told reporters Tuesday. “The nice thing about our state – when something like that happens, we have a good process. So my vote still counted.”

But just because voters may vote by a backup system — provisional balloting — doesn’t make his purge legal or appropriate. In the last presidential election, the majority of Florida provisional ballots were not counted. And forcing legitimate voters — including Gov. Scott himself — to jump through hoops to prove their eligibility because the state relies on wildly inaccurate data is anything but a “good process.”

The Voting Rights Act and National Voter Registration Act exist to protect legitimate voters from having their right to vote abridged. While Scott is attempting to use the fact that his own right to to vote was improperly called into question as an justification for doing the same to other voters, the fact that his provisional vote ultimately counted would be of little context to those whose legitimate votes might not be counted.