The Justice Department released the names of 55 prisoners still being held in Guantanamo Bay three years after the Obama administration’s Guantanamo Bay Task Force cleared them for transfer. The disclosure comes a month after the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the names and will help the detainees’ attorneys publicly advocate for their release.

DOJ previously suggested releasing the names “could confuse, undermine, or jeopardize our diplomatic efforts . . . and could put at risk our ability to move as many people to safe and responsible locations as might otherwise be the case.” Late last week, however, they announced that they no longer fear doing so will endanger diplomatic efforts:

In the over two years since the Task Force completed its status reviews, circumstances have changed such that the decisions by the Task Force approving detainees for transfer no longer warrant protection. The efforts of the United States to resettle Guantanamo detainees have largely been successful – they have resulted in 40 detainees being resettled in third countries because of treatment or other concerns in their countries of origin since 2009. In addition, 28 detainees have been repatriated to their countries of origin since 2009. Consequently, the diplomatic and national security harms identified in the Fried Declaration are no longer as acute. In Respondents’ view, there is no longer a need to withhold from the public the status of detainees who have been approved for transfer.

More than a third of the men who have been languishing in Guantanamo for the past three years are from Yemen, which is not considered stable enough to receive the detainees. One name not included on the list was Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who died earlier this month after the Department of Defense twice recommended he be transferred out of Guantanamo.

The Justice Department recently lost a case in which they attempted to block detainees’ access to counsel. The ACLU has also sued for the names of prisoners in indefinite detention, conditional detention and prosecution.

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said she supports legalizing medical marijuana during a radio interview with Boston’s WTKK-FM Monday. In answering a question about the Massachusetts ballot initiative, she recalled sitting with her father on his death bed, when “there was some discussion” about whether marijuana would have helped:

You know, I held my father’s hand while he died of cancer, and it’s really painful when you do something like that up close and personal. My mother was already gone and I was very very close to my father. And it puts me in a position of saying, if there’s something a physician can prescribe that can help someone who’s suffering, I’m in favor of that. Now, I want to make sure they’ve got the right restrictions. It should be like any other prescription drug. That there’s careful control over it. But I think it’s really hard to watch somebody suffer that you love.

Listen:

Warren’s statement comes as public support for decriminalizing marijuana is growing. A poll in May found that 56 percent of Americans now support legalizing marijuana and regulating it like states regulate alcohol and tobacco. In Massachusetts, a more recent poll found 59 percent of voters support legalizing marijuana specifically for medical use.

Should Massachusetts voters approve the measure on the November ballot to legalize medical marijuana in the state, Massachusetts will join 17 other states and the District of Columbia, which already have some statute in place decriminalizing medical marijuana. In spite of this growing movement among the states, federal officials are continuing to crack down on dispensaries, enforcing federal law even where state laws allow those dispensaries.

Arkansas and Montana will also hold ballot initiatives on medical marijuana this year, and Colorado, Washington and Oregon will consider measures to decriminalize marijuana for both medical and recreational uses. An initiative to legalize medical marijuana in North Dakota was blocked by the Secretary of State, and the North Dakota Supreme Court recently upheld that move.

The Wall Street bailouts happened in no small part because the big investment banks had America over a barrel in 2008. The banks could grow larger and larger, taking riskier and riskier investments, knowing full well that the world could ill afford to allow them to fail and send shockwaves throughout the economy. Indeed, the collapse of Lehman Brothers only proved this point, as it dealt such a severe blow to the economy that American lawmakers were not willing to allow another blow to happen again. The $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program followed shortly after Lehman fell apart.

These events happened because the government had precious few options in 2008. It could allow more banks to collapse and usher in a second Great Depression, or it could bail out the very same Wall Street firms that caused the crisis in the first place. Worse, so long as these were the only options on the table, Wall Street would go on taking the same risky investments that tanked the economy — knowing full well they could extort a new bailout from Congress if they had to.

One of the most important provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — one that even top Bush Administration officials such as former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has praised — is its “orderly resolution authority” provision, which creates a third option for financial regulators. Under this provision, regulators can gradually wind down a toxic bank, minimizing the impact of the bank’s collapse on the world economy while simultaneously ensuring that the bank largely goes out of business and its executives have to suffer the consequences of their reckless risk taking. At its heart, orderly resolution authority is about eliminating Wall Street’s ability to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer.

Last week, three Republican Attorneys General joined a lawsuit brought by several conservative groups seeking to eliminate this authority and return to the days when Goldman Sachs could demand bailouts like a mafia don seeking protection money. Fortunately, their lawsuit is unlikely to prevail.

Boston College Law Professor Kent Greenfield does an excellent job of explaining why the AG’s leading legal theory is wobbly at this link, but their lawsuit is so fundamentally flawed that it is unlikely a court will even reach the merits of their attack on the resolution authority in the first place. Their core claim relies on speculation piled on conjecture mixed with uncertainty:

Section 210(b)(4) of the Act abrogates the rights under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code of creditors of institutions that could be liquidated, destroying a valuable property right held by creditors—including the State Plaintiffs—under bankruptcy law, contract law, and other laws, prior to the Dodd-Frank Act. Section 210(b)(4) exposes those creditors to the risk that their credit holdings could be arbitrarily and discriminatorily extinguished in a Title II liquidation, and without notice or input. Title II’s destruction of a property right held by each of the State Plaintiffs harms each State, and is itself a significant, judicially cognizable injury that would be remedied by a judicial order declaring Title II unconstitutional. . . . In addition to destroying the State Plaintiffs’ valuable property rights, Title II exposes the State Plaintiffs to a present and ongoing substantial risk of direct economic harm, in the event of the Treasury Secretary’s and FDIC’s liquidation of a financial company for which a State Plaintiff is a creditor.

This is pretty thick stuff, but the important part is this: the AG’s are saying that they are invested in institutions that “could be” liquidated under the resolution authority, and if this happens there is a “risk” that their investments could lose their value. The plaintiffs are suing over something that hasn’t happened yet, may never happen, and if it does happen may or may not actually cost them money.

Simply put, this is not allowed. As the Supreme Court explained in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, a plaintiff cannot bring a lawsuit based on “conjectural” or “hypothetical” injuries. If the judge hearing this case follows well-established law — something which, admittedly, does not always happen when conservative judges consider laws that were signed by President Obama — they will dismiss this attack on the resolution authority swiftly.

A police officer in Houston shot and killed a man on Saturday, claiming that the man was threatening them and that he “[f]ear[ed] for his partner’s safety and his own safety” at the time of the shooting. The circumstances of the shooting, however, raise serious questions about just how threatening the shooting victim could have been:

A Houston police officer shot and killed a one-armed, one-legged man in a wheelchair Saturday inside a group home after police say the double amputee threatened the officer and aggressively waved a metal object that turned out to be a pen. . . . [Police spokeswoman Jodi Silva] said the man came “within inches to a foot” of the officer and did not follow instructions to calm down and remain still.

“Fearing for his partner’s safety and his own safety, he discharged his weapon,” Silva told The Associated Press.

Police did not immediately release the name of the man who was killed. They had been called to the home after a caretaker there called and reported that the man in wheelchair was causing a disturbance.

The owner of the group home, John Garcia, told the Houston Chronicle that the man had a history of mental illness and had been living at the house about 18 months. Garcia said the man had told him that he lost a leg above the knee and all of one arm when he was hit by a train.

This is not the first example of Houston police using a questionable amount of force against a mentally ill suspect. A 2007 study determined that Houston police unnecessarily used Tasers on the mentally ill, even when police were warned about the person’s mental health condition.

When police investigated the death of Brian Epp, they determined that John McNeil was merely acting in self-defense when he shot Epp for allegedly loitering on his property, threatening him and his 19-year-old son with a knife. They didn’t charge him with any crime. But 274 days later, McNeil was prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison, theGrio explains:

The case relates to events on December 6, 2005, when McNeil received a distress call from his teenage son that a man was lurking around in their backyard.

“John called 911 and told the police he was on his way home,” said his wife, who is living with advanced stage cancer. According to testimony, the man, Brian Epp, a hired contractor with whom McNeil had past disagreements, had already pulled out a knife on McNeil’s 19-year-old son.

When McNeil returned home, Epp, who is white, refused to leave, despite being asked several times. McNeil and eye-witnesses testified that he fired a warning shot but when Epp charged towards him with his hand in his pocket he shot out in self-defense.

Witnesses corroborated this account, as well as McNeil’s fear of Epps. A couple who had also hired Epps testified at trial that they carried a gun around him because of his threatening behavior. Nevertheless, McNeil, a black property owner who has now been in jail for almost six years for the death of a white trespasser, lost his appeal before the Supreme Court in 2008.

McNeil’s case is, in many respects, the mirror image of the infamous shooting of Trayvon Martin earlier this year. In Florida, a “Stand Your Ground” law that often enables shooters to literally get away with murder initially protected George Zimmerman from prosecution, although he has since been charged with second-degree murder, and Zimmerman could still escape justice because of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. McNeil, on the other hand, has now lost six years of his life in spite of what appears to be a much clearer case of self-defense under Georgia’s “Castle Doctrine,” a more limited law that permits the use of deadly force to defend one’s own property.

Civil rights groups are now calling for McNeil’s immediate release, pointing to the Trayvon Martin case to show that laws intended to apply equally to all races discriminate against African Americans whether they are the alleged perpetrator or the victim.

“We are victims at both ends of the gun,” said Marcus Coleman, who leads the Atlanta chapter of the National Action Network.

The mayor of McNeil’s hometown, Wilson, N.C., has also joined in calling for McNeil’s release. In a letter to Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, he said, “I have read the entire trial transcript and I believe it’s clear that John only acted to protect his family.”

In the Georgia Supreme Court’s opinion, the one dissenting justice, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, wrote unequivocally that McNeil should have been protected by Georgia’s “Castle doctrine,” writing: “the evidence was overwhelming in showing that a reasonable person in McNeil’s shoes would have believed that he was subject to an imminent physical attack by an aggressor possessing a knife and that it was necessary to use deadly force to protect himself from serious bodily injury or a forcible felony.”

McNeil, who had no other criminal history, has a second appeal pending. If he loses that, he will have to file a clemency request with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles.

“The John McNeil case is unique in the Southern and American criminal justice system,” said Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, in an interview with theGrio. “You just can’t find a case where a black man on his property shoots a white armed aggressor and the black man is defended by two senior white detectives, white eyewitnesses, a black female Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court, all who challenge the conclusion of and prosecution by a white DA.”

Donald Heller is a former prosecutor who authored the 1978 California ballot initiative that reinstated the death penalty in that state. He’s now become one of the most outspoken advocates of Proposition 34, which will repeal his handiwork from more than three decades ago and replace the death penalty with life sentences without the possibility of parole. In a column in the Los Angeles Daily News, Heller explained his change of heart:

I made a terrible mistake 33 years ago, but it is one that can be corrected. People are working hard to give voters the opportunity in the next election to replace the death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole. If given that chance, I call upon all Californians to join me in voting yes to abolish capital punishment. . . . I never contemplated the staggering cost of implementing the death penalty: more than $4 billion to date and approximately $185 million projected per year in ongoing costs. . . .

A gross miscarriage of justice can happen, even in California. I am convinced that at least one innocent person may have been executed under the current death penalty law. It was not my intent nor do I believe that of the voters who overwhelmingly enacted the death penalty law in 1978. We did not consider that horrific possibility.

A recent poll found that 50 percent of likely California voters prefer life without parole to execution, while only 42 percent support the death penalty.

On Friday, ThinkProgress reported that a Pennsylvania Tea Party group vowed revenge against two state supreme court justices who joined a recent decision that unanimously rejected a lower court order upholding a voter suppression law. Now, the Florida GOP wants to play this game as well:

The party announced late Friday that its board voted unanimously this week to oppose the retention of Supreme Court Justices Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince, who were all appointed by Democratic former Gov. Lawton Chiles and who have ruled against several major priorities of Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration.

If the justices are not retained, Scott would appoint replacements.

“While the collective evidence of judicial activism amassed by these three individuals is extensive, there is one egregious example that all Florida voters should bear in mind when they go to the polls on election day,” said spokeswoman Kristen McDonald in a statement. “These three justices voted to set aside the death penalty for a man convicted of tying a woman to a tree with jumper cables and setting her on fire.”

The Florida GOP’s decision to base its PR campaign against these justices around a death penalty decision is rather ghoulish, but it is both familiar and unsurprising. Twenty-six years ago, California Republicans led a $5.6 million campaign to oust California Chief Justice Rose Bird and two of her colleagues. Although the campaign outwardly focused on the death penalty, its top supporters included the Independent Oil Producers Agency, the Western Growers Association, the late anti-tax activst Howard Jarvis and the Free Market Political Action Committee. Bird’s opponents knew they couldn’t run an effective campaign by attacking her for being insufficiently friendly to wealthy corporations and other interest groups, so they chose instead to hide their true motives by focusing on the death penalty.

In 1996, Tennessee conservatives ran a similar playbook, ousting Justice Penny White because she voted to overturn a single death sentence. Significantly, only 19 percent of the state’s voters participated in the retention election, demonstrating the ability of a well-funded campaign to shape the outcome of a judicial race, since the campaign only needs to rally a small group of voters in these very low profile elections.

It now appears that the Florida Republican Party is operating off the same playbook. Like the California corporate and anti-tax groups that helped turn out Rose Bird, however, it is likely that the Florida Republicans are far more concerned with giving control of the state supreme court to Rick Scott than they are with eight year old death penalty cases.