The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to repeal a city-wide ban on medical marijuana dispensaries, thwarting a referendum on the measure. The battle over medical marijuana has come to a head in LA, where some 1,000 dispensaries emerged after a ballot initiative legalized prescriptions of the drug statewide in 1996, but some city legislators and federal prosecutors oppose the city’s industry.

The LA Council passed a measure in July to prohibit dispensaries in the city, claiming that the sheer number of shops has made the industry impossible to regulate. In response, advocates collected the required number of signatures to hold a referendum on the initiative, and the council had the option to either repeal the ban or allow a referendum.

Last week, federal prosecutors started targeting shops in Los Angeles, and some council members said they hoped the crackdown would achieve what they were hoping to achieve through the ban. Not so for Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who has been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. He said before the vote, “Where does anybody go, even a councilman go, to get his medical marijuana?”

Mitt Romney tried to moderate his immigration positions on Monday before tonight’s debate in Colorado when he said he would not take away the temporary visas from undocumented immigrants who benefit from Obama’s deferred action policy. “I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,” he told The Denver Post. He added that before those two-year visas expire, “we will have the full immigration reform plan that I’ve proposed,” although he gave no details about his immigration plan.

Today, his campaign confirmed to the New York Times that Romney would end the program to grant deportation deferrals to young undocumented immigrants who qualify:

Romney campaign confirms to NYT they will halt deferred deportations for undoc immigrants when he takes office, if elected

— Julia Preston (@JuliaPrestonNYT) October 3, 2012

Romney campaign: he will honor deportation deferrals granted but halt the program when he takes office, seek “permanent” fix

— Julia Preston (@JuliaPrestonNYT) October 3, 2012

As many as 1.7 million DREAM Act-eligible undocumented immigrants could benefit from the policy, which gives them temporary legal status to work in the U.S. More than 80,000 people have applied for deferred action since the policy went into effect on August 15, but the Huffington Post reports that the wait time for the process can take up to four to six months. In the first month, 29 undocumented immigrants received deferrals, so it is likely that most of the applicants will not receive an answer before the inauguration in January.

The Philadelphia chief justice who supervised the prosecution of a death penalty case now headed to the state’s high court is refusing to recuse himself.

The case concerns Terrance “Terry” Williams, who won a reprieve from his scheduled execution after his attorneys presented new evidence that they said had been suppressed at the trial. According to testimony before Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, who issued the stay, police and the prosecution coached a key witness at Williams’ trial to claim that robbery was the motive for the crime, rather than sex abuse, even though the witness informed the authorities that there was a “relationship” between Williams and the two men he killed. Williams’ statement that he was sexually assaulted by the men he killed was supported by some 26 child abuse and sexual assault experts.

Now the case is now being appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Ronald Castille sits. Castille oversaw Williams’ case when he served as Philadelphia district attorney and “wrote a note approving that his staff seek the death penalty against Terry,” according to one of Williams’ lawyers.

Castille reportedly has a history of refusing recusals in cases he oversaw as district attorney, even though his oversight of the prosecution makes it impossible for him to appear a neutral arbiter.

As The New York Times’ Lincoln Caplan writes:

With the decision not to recuse himself in this case, Mr. Castille has underscored his obtuseness about what basic fairness requires. He has diminished his position, the court he sits on and the rule of law in Pennsylvania. Even if the court upholds the trial court’s stay and order, as the merits dictate, its ruling will be badly tainted. And if it does not, the ruling will simply not be trustworthy.

Williams would become the first person executed in Pennsylvania in 13 years, and the first in 50 years who had not already abandoned his appeals. His clemency petition was supported by 22 former prosecutors and judges, 34 law professors, 40 mental health professionals and more than 36 religious leaders. It was accompanied by a letter from 26 child advocates and sexual abuse experts who said the “evidence of abuse in this case is clear.” Even the widow of one of the victims submitted a letter asking that his life be spared.

The warrant for Williams’ execution expires Wednesday at midnight, after which Gov. Tom Corbett would have to sign a new death warrant.

In a 4-3 ruling Tuesday afternoon, the Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned the sexual assault conviction of a man who had sex with a woman who “has severe cerebral palsy, has the intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old and cannot verbally communicate.” The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define physical incapacity for the purpose of sexual assault as “unconscious or for any other reason. . . physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act,” the defendant could not be convicted if there was any chance that the victim could have communicated her lack of consent. Since the victim in this case was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” the Court ruled that that victim could have communicated lack of consent despite her serious mental deficiencies:

When we consider this evidence in the light most favorable to sustaining the verdict, and in a manner that is consistent with the state’s theory of guilt at trial, we, like the Appellate Court, ‘are not persuaded that the state produced any credible evidence that the [victim] was either unconscious or so uncommunicative that she was physically incapable of manifesting to the defendant her lack of consent to sexual intercourse at the time of the alleged sexual assault.’

According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), lack of physical resistance is not evidence of consent, as “many victims make the good judgment that physical resistance would cause the attacker to become more violent.” RAINN also notes that lack of consent is implicit “if you were under the statutory age of consent, or if you had a mental defect” as the victim did in this case.

Anna Doroghazi, director of public policy and communication at Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services, worried that the Court’s interpretation of the law ignored these concerns: “By implying that the victim in this case should have bitten or kicked her assailant, this ruling effectively holds people with disabilities to a higher standard than the rest of the population when it comes to proving lack of consent in sexual assault cases. Failing to bite an assailant is not the same thing as consenting to sexual activity.” An amicus brief filed by the Connecticut advocates for disabled persons argued that this higher standard “discourag[ed] the prosecution of crimes against persons with disabilities” even though “persons with a disability had an age-adjusted rate of rape or sexual assault that was more than twice the rate for persons without a disability.”

Could David Koch buy a United States senator for less than 0.3 percent of his personal fortune?

Thanks in part to the Citizens United Supreme Court case in 2010, any corporation, non-profit, super PAC, or individual can spend an unlimited amount of money to advocate directly for or against political candidates. Outside groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and American Action Network have sprung up in recent years, spending hundreds of millions to help candidates of their choice. In the presidential race, for instance, outside spending groups have spent more money on Mitt Romney’s behalf than Mitt Romney’s campaign has.

Under these campaign finance rules, ThinkProgress decided to investigate how expensive it would be to buy all available television ads for the month prior to the election, virtually guaranteeing victory for the favored Senate candidate. We looked at North Dakota, which is home to one of the most competitive Senate races this year between Rep. Rick Berg (R) and former Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp (D), to see what it would cost for an outside group to buy up every single ad slot for network TV in the month of October.

An analysis of ad rate cards for each of North Dakota’s 19 ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC affiliates showed that if every minute of ad time was available for the month of October — estimating about 15 minutes of advertising per hour — the total cost would be, at most, about $90,414,275. Of course, during prime time network programming, many of those ad slots are reserved for national advertisements, so the actual cost would likely be significantly lower than $90 million. But by buying every single 30-second slot for those thirty-one days, a group would not only be able to run tens of thousands of political messages — it would block the other side from being able to get its message out to viewers.

Federal law does offer some protection for a federal candidate in this situation. Those running for president and Congress are entitled to “reasonable access” to advertisements. Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, told ThinkProgress that TV stations generally “keep some degree of ad inventory open for candidates,” but “as long as they come up with someone halfway decent and not ridiculous,” the Federal Communications Commission tends to leave it up to the stations how much access is “reasonable.” And because these protections do not apply to outside groups, a group could completely freeze out independent expenditures for the other side.

This possibility exposes yet another flaw in the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United v. FEC. In Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the 1990 precedent that was overruled in Citizens United, the Court upheld a ban on political expenditures by corporate donors because “the unique state-conferred corporate structure that facilitates the amassing of large treasuries warrants the limit on independent expenditures.” These large treasuries enable many corporations to drown out all other voices — such as by buying up nearly every single ad slot in contested U.S. Senate race — while spending only a fraction of their vast sums of money. Yet Citizens United tossed out the longstanding rule preventing corporations from gaining “an unfair advantage in the political marketplace” via “resources amassed in the economic marketplace.”

The benefits of owning a senator are enormous. Beyond controlling one of the 100 most powerful legislators on Capitol Hill, arcane Senate rules, such as the filibuster and secret holds, give each individual senator an extraordinary level of influence. It’s not difficult for one obstructive senator to bring the entire American legislative process to a halt until he gets his way.

Could an outside group afford it? Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS reportedly have a combined budget of at least $300 million. The Koch Brothers, who made their vast fortune in the oil and consumer products industry, are each worth approximately $31 billion. It goes without saying that having a senator from an oil states who owes his seat to their backing would be a shrewd business decision for the Koch Brothers. A cheap Senate seat could also tempt a company like Exxon-Mobil, for whom $90 million would amount to just 0.22 percent of its $41 billion total profit in 2011.

Indeed, with control of the Senate potentially at stake, an array of outside groups are already pouring millions of dollars into ads trying to sway the election. It is impossible to know how effective a $90 million ad campaign would be, but it could certainly drown out virtually all other voices. And studies have shown that television ads are hugely influential in who wins elections — and the candidates who spend the most usually win.

Of course, because it’s already October, an array of groups and campaigns have already reserved ad slots in North Dakota for the month. But, because of our inept campaign finance rules, nothing would stop Rove, Koch, or anyone else from effectively purchasing a small-state Senate seat in this manner in 2014. Read more