Tonight, George Zimmerman — who is currently facing second degree murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin — participated in a highly unusual interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity.

Hannity asked Zimmerman if he regretted getting out of his car to follow Trayvon, carrying a gun, or anything at all about the night he killed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman said he regretted nothing because he believed “it was all God’s plan.” He also said there isn’t anything he would do differently in retrospect.

Watch it:

Earlier, Zimmerman did reiterate his apology to Martin’s family, which he first made during his first bail hearing. He added he would like an apology from Spike Lee and other critics, stating “if I did something wrong I would apologize.”

Georgia death row inmate William Lee Hill Jr., set to be executed on Monday, has officially filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court. The appeal, filed yesterday, argues that Hill should not be executed because he is mentally retarded.

Last week the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole denied both Hill’s request to commute his sentence to life in prison and his request for a 90-day stay but his execution, originally scheduled for today, was delayed because of Georgia’s decision to change the chemicals it uses in executions. The delay gave Hill and his lawyers time to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

The case highlights a controversy stemming from a 2002 Supreme Court decision , Atkins v. Virginia. Although the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute mentally retarded individuals, it left it up to the individual states to determine how to assess mental retardation.

While many states use a standard called “preponderance of evidence,” Georgia is the only state to require a much stricter standard, “beyond a reasonable doubt” in making this assessment.

Hill and his lawyers argue that a 2002 determination by a judge that Hill has an IQ of 70 and is mentally retarded by a preponderance of the evidence standard makes his imminent execution unconstitutional, and critics think that the Supreme Court should take Hill’s case and clarify their ruling in Atkins. John Henry Blume, a law professor at Cornell said: “[i]t’s been frustrating to watch as the promise of Atkins has been eroded in many states through the implementation of both definitions and procedures which make it virtually impossible to prove that anyone has mental retardation.” Christof Heyns, a United Nations human rights expert, weighed in on Hill’s case earlier this week agreeing that his planned execution is unconstitutional and asserting that it would also violate international law.

Hill’s appeal is a last ditch effort to stay his execution. The U.S. Supreme Court has already declined to hear an appeal by Hill once this year.

–Alex Brown

Bright and Truvia on the day they were released from state prison

Two Louisiana men who spent 27 years in state prison before a judge overturned their 1975 murder conviction are filing suit over civil rights violations. Gregory Bright and Earl Truvia have filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages for each year they were wrongfully behind bars, accusing prosecutors under former District Attorney Harry Connick of withholding critical evidence from their case.

The jury deliberated for merely 12 minutes before returning guilty verdicts for Bright and Truvia. They never heard about the two other suspects in the murder case who had been questioned earlier by police, and they were not presented with the evidence about the criminal, drug and mental health history of the lone witness who testified against Bright and Truvia. Prosecutors failed to reveal that the woman who claimed she saw Bright and Truvia with the murder victim on the night he was killed was a paranoid schizophrenic who testified under a false name to hide her background.

The Times-Picayune reports that the two men are attempting to set a precedent with their civil rights case that will persuade the Supreme Court to rule more harshly against district attorney prosecutors in future cases:

Truvia and Bright are hoping ultimately that more cases of alleged prosecutorial misconduct will reverse the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling last year, voiding a $14 million judgment for former death row inmate John Thompson. In that case, the high court found that the district attorney’s office could not be held liable for failing to train prosecutors to turn over evidence based on a single case, and that Thompson had failed to prove a pattern.

Attorneys for Truvia and Bright claim they’ve unearthed new evidence showing that the “custom, policy and practice (of Connick’s office) was to conceal exculpatory evidence.”

“If (the Supreme Court) would have had our evidence, that probably would have pushed Thompson over the edge,” said William Mitchell, one of the attorneys for the men.

Defense advocates from advocacy organizations like the Innocence Project argue that the Thompson decision relieves prosecutors of the full weight of their responsibility for their convictions. There have been 294 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S. since 1989, and exonerations for death row convicts in particular may come too late. Countless cases of wrongful conviction spurred the Justice Department and the FBI to recently launch the largest-ever review of post-conviction criminal cases.

On Tuesday, Circuit Judge David Flanagan ruled that Wisconsin’s new Republican-authored law requiring all voters to show photo identification to vote poses a “substantial burden” upon voters, and permanently barred it from taking effect. Flanagan explained that Wisconsin’s constitution bars the costly and difficult process of attaining photo identification from being an obstacle to voting.

“Act 23 addresses a problem which is very limited, if indeed it exists,” Judge David Flanagan wrote. “…Given the sacred, fundamental interest at issue, it is clear that Act 23, while perhaps addressing a legitimate concern, is not sufficiently narrow to avoid needless and significant impairment of the right to vote.”

Today, a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that 10 million people in states with Voter ID laws live more than 10 miles from state offices offering photo identification. In Wisconsin, no such offices are open on the weekends. The price of photo identification ranges from $8 to $25, which many people cannot easily afford. “It certainly looks and feels like a poll tax,” Keesha Gaskins, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, said of the new costs required to vote.

A study released earlier this year by the Brennan Center found that Voter ID laws could collectively disenfranchise 3 million people nationwide this year. ThinkProgress reported on 95-year-old Wisconsinite Florence Hessing, who was barred from voting because she was born via midwife and did not possess an acceptable birth certificate. A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study found that approximately 300,000 Wisconsinites lack photo identificatoin.

A spokeswoman for Wisconsin’s Department of Justice, which defended the law in court, said state lawyers are currently reviewing Flanagan’s decision but will likely appeal the ruling.

– Ben Sherman

Yesterday, Obama for America, President Obama’s official re-election campaign committee, filed suit against Ohio officials in federal court arguing that Ohio’s new limits on early voting are unconstitutional. The suit names two Republicans, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Jon Husted, and seeks a court order invalidating recent statutes that change the last day of early voting.

The new limits on early voting create a disparity between two groups of Ohio voters. The last day of early voting for families of armed forces members and civilians overseas is the Monday before an election, while the last day for all other voters is the Friday before an election. November’s Presidential election will be held on a Tuesday.

“This lawsuit, at bottom, seeks to treat all Ohio citizens equally under the law,” Donald McTigue, general counsel for the Obama campaign in Ohio, said today on a conference call with reporters after the complaint was filed in federal court in Columbus, the state capital. [...]

The state’s early-voting laws were enacted after the presidential election in 2004, when long lines and broken equipment forced voters to wait as long as seven hours to cast their ballots, according to an Obama campaign press statement released today.

With Monday-deadline early voting in place for the 2008 presidential election, about 30 percent of voters took advantage of it, according to the campaign.

The different deadlines for early voting were instituted when the Republican-controlled legislature tried to undercut a state referendum that would have repealed HB 194, a controversial law that curtailed voting rights in the state. The law originally changed the last day of early voting for all voters to the Friday before an election, along with eliminating the requirement that poll workers direct voters to the proper precinct, and making it harder to vote absentee. When it appeared that the referendum was gaining steam, the legislature repealed some parts of the law in an attempt to subvert Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to referendum. The repeal eliminated the change in early voting, but, because the limit on early voting for everyone but families of armed forces members and civilians overseas had been duplicated in another bill, resulted in two different deadlines.

–Alex Brown

Our guest blogger is Billy Corriher, associate director of research for Legal Progress.

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), two conservative scholars have come up with another legal argument for attacking health care reform. In a paper released Monday, Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon argue that an IRS regulation implementing the ACA’s tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies is “illegal.”

The IRS rule provides credits and subsidies to those enrolled in new health insurance exchanges operated by the states or the federal government, but the scholars claim the ACA limits tax credits to those enrolled in state exchanges. Adler and Cannon argue that middle-class Americans enrolled in federal exchanges should not receive tax credits to help them afford health insurance.

If their argument was accepted by a court, governors would have the power to drastically undercut the ACA’s reforms. Some Republican governors have thus far refused to set up exchanges for their states. The federal government will step in to create exchanges in these states, but without subsidies and credits, the federal exchanges could be unworkable. The ACA’s preexisting condition rules and limits on setting premiums could lead to a rise in premiums, so the tax credits and subsidies are essential.

As it is, the Republican governors’ intransigence amounts to nothing but grandstanding, but if this new argument prevails, the refusal to create state exchanges could leave citizens in those states without any affordable health insurance option. Some of the harshest critics of the ACA are Republican governors who preside over states with alarmingly high percentages of uninsured persons. As with the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, Republican governors seem to think they might score political points by passing up money from the federal government to help them expand health coverage.

If Republicans thwart the operation of health insurance exchanges, their constituents will pay the price. For example, 25 percent of citizens in Texas are uninsured, but Governor Rick Perry is leading the charge to resist Obamacare. If the argument from Adler and Cannon gains traction, Perry’s recalcitrance could mean that Texans, unlike citizens in states that set up exchanges, would not receive tax credits to help them pay for health insurance.

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