Last month, a federal judge parted ways with conventional harsh penalties for medical marijuana by sentencing Tom Daubert to five years of probation and rejecting prosecutors’ recommendation of six to eight years in prison for his one-time participation in a medical marijuana dispensary, considered legal under state law. Daubert, who was represented by some of the best lawyers in the country and whose story was featured in an award-winning documentary, was one of the lucky ones. Richard Flor, one of Daubert’s partners who continued on with the marijuana dispensary after Daubert withdrew, died in federal custody in August. And many of the patients they once served now have nowhere to turn, after federal officials demolished the state’s industry, with raids on 26 dispensaries, and a threatened roll-back of the state law allowing medical marijuana.

But even with the light punishment, the longtime Montana lobbyist who had aspired to make his medical marijuana dispensary a model for compliance with state law is now a criminal in the eyes of the law.

Daubert had been a highly successful lobbyist and public relations consultant for more than 20 years before he was approached about helping with a medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2004. He held degrees from Princeton and the University of Montana. Now, at almost 60 years old, Daubert is required to inform his probation officer when he leaves the county, to let his officer into his house at any time of day or night, and to answer any question he is asked.

In an interview with ThinkProgress, Daubert describes the crushing consequences of the demolition of Montana’s medical marijuana community:
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The anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, which seeks to limit legal immigration, has put out a new, racist ad that tries to pit African Americans against immigrants. It features an African American man with his family explaining that he needs a job:

What I don’t understand is why our leaders are going to admit another million immigrant workers next year to take jobs when 3 million black Americans can’t find work. I mean, do our leaders really think black Americans don’t want to work? Let’s slow down mass immigration and save jobs for Americans — all Americans.

Watch it here:

Lest there be any doubt, this appeal to racial resentment has no basis in reality. In truth, immigration helps boost the economy. For example, if Congress passed the DREAM Act, the qualified undocumented immigrants who received legal status could pursue higher education and earn higher salaries, which leads them to spend more and pay more in taxes. That would lead to an economic impact of $329 billion and 1.4 million new jobs by 2030.

Persistently high unemployment rates for African Americans is a systemic problem that cannot be addressed simply by reducing the number of immigrants. Instead of getting rid of work permits, lawmakers should focus on programs for job training and job creation as well as vigorously enforcing policies that stop labor market discrimination in order to help African American workers.

It should not be a surprising, however, that anti-immigrant groups are touting spurious claims in order to push their agenda. In 2009, CNN aired an incendiary ad by the nativist front group Coalition For The Future Of The American Worker, warning that the government is letting in 1.5 million foreign workers a year to take jobs from the 15 million unemployed Americans. And an anti-immigrant California group ran a TV ad blaming global warming on immigrants. The lies and distortions do not change the fact that immigration is good for the U.S. economy, and it is contemptible to try to pit Americans against each other and against immigrants to stop it.

Judge Charles Lovell, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench in Montana, issue a sweeping, nearly entirely unexplained opinion striking down Montana’s limits on contributions to political campaigns. So long as the judge’s decision is in effect, it means that wealthy individuals will be free to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates for state offices in Montana.

Typically, a judge who issues a ruling of this significance will accompany it with a detailed explanation of their reasoning. Judge Lovell went a different route:

Having reviewed and considered the entire record and the parties’ arguments and evidence, the Court concludes that Montana’s contribution limits in Montana Code Annotated § 13-37-216 are unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The contribution limits prevent candidates from “amassing the resources necessary for effective campaign advocacy.” The defendants are therefore permanently enjoined from enforcing these limits.

The Court will in due course issue complete and extensive findings of fact and conclusions of law that support this order. They will be filed separately, though, so that this order can be issued before voting begins in the upcoming election.

To be fair to the judge, his ruling is not entirely unreasonable given the Roberts Court’s hostility toward campaign finance regulation. Six years ago, in Randall v, Sorrell, the Court struck down a Vermont law that capped donations at $400 for statewide offices and as low as $200 for state representatives. The Montana law caps donations to gubernatorial candidates at $500 and limits on donations to other offices can be as low as $130, so there is a reasonable case to be made that Judge Sorrell’s hand was forced by the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, it is very unusual for a judge to issue such an decision without a meaningful explanation. Among other things, Judge Sorrell’s unwillingness to explain himself handicaps the state’s ability to challenge his decision on appeal, because they will not be able to levy attacks at weak points that may exist in Sorrell’s reasoning.

Indeed, as election law Professor Rick Hasen points out, there is a good chance that Sorrell’s failure to explain himself will lead to his order being at least temporarily suspended: “I expect Montana will go immediately to the Ninth Circuit for emergency relief, and judging from the last time a judge decided an important election question just before the election without giving any reasoning, there could well be an order staying this result, at least for this election.”

Anti-gay activist Bob Vander Plaats, who was labeled the Iowa GOP’s “kingmaker” after Republican presidential candidates lined up to pay homage to him, was the architect of the successful effort to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices, and he’s now spearheading a new effort to remove a fourth justice. All four of the justices Vander Plaats opposes joined the state supreme court’s unanimous opinion recognizing that the Iowa Constitution does not permit marriage discrimination against gay couples.

At a rally last month, Vander Plaats explained why he is so offended by the targeted justices’ application of the state constitution. And then he compared marriage equality to slavery:

We must get back to the constitution. . . . It is the court that should be independent — free of politics — to uphold the constitution, not to trample on the constitution, not to insert politics in the constitution, and not to run the leftist agenda through the court system. That’s not their role.

The Iowa State Bar Association, they’ll tell you — they’ll say “Bob, this is only one opinion. It’s only one opinion. You can’t be that upset at a court because of one opinion.” One opinion: Dred Scott — blacks are property. One opinion: Roe v. Wade — we’ve killed sixty million babies off a court’s opinion. One opinion, the Varnum opinion and you are now seeing same-sex marriage infiltrate this state. One opinion, where a court legislates from the bench, when a court executes from the bench, when a court tries to amend the constitution from the bench, and when a court tries to do that, it is our responsibility as the people — the final arbitrators — to kick them off the bench.

Watch it:

Vander Plaats’ attempt to compare extending the blessings of liberty to all couples with a decision which claimed black people are “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” is obviously the most glaring part of his speech. But he should not be let off the hook for claiming that eliminating marriage equality in Iowa would remove politics from the state judiciary or “uphold the constitution.” In reality, the polar opposite is true.

The Iowa Constitution speaks with far more expansive language and with far greater clarity than the United States Constitution on the subject of equality. It provides that “[a]ll laws of a general nature shall have a uniform operation; the general assembly shall not grant to any citizen or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens.” Marriage discrimination grants marriage rights to straight citizens which do not equally belong to gay citizens. It is not at all surprising that the Iowa justices unanimously reached the decision they did in Varnum — the Iowa Constitution is unambiguous that marriage discrimination is not allowed.

So when Vander Plaats tries to take revenge against these justices by tossing them out of office, he is the one who injecting politics into the constitution and he is the one who is trying to run his agenda through the court system. Vander Plaats’ campaign is nothing less than an effort to make judges too scared to follow the law when the law conflicts with conservative views.

DNA evidence exonerated yet another death row inmate on Friday, after a Louisiana judge overturned the murder and rape convictions of 38-year-old Damon Thibodeaux. Thibodeaux had served 16 years in prison — 15 in solitary confinement – for the alleged rape and murder of his 14-year-old step cousin.

Thibodeaux was convicted based solely on a confession, recanted later that day, that he says was obtained after nine solid hours of threat-riddled, unrecorded police interrogation. Countering that confession was a dearth of any evidence corroborating that he was the perpetrator. In fact, it was later determined that the victim had not been sexually assaulted at all.

Thibodeaux now becomes the 300th person and the 18th death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence – an important marker for the emergence of DNA exonerations. But it would be a mistake to think that DNA is a magic pill to cure the ills of our criminal justice system. If anything, these exonerations say more about the high error rate in convictions than about the power of DNA, given that there is no DNA evidence in the vast majority of cases (even in Thibodeaux’s case, DNA evidence was initially unavailable), and that routine collection of DNA from suspects can have perverse and troubling effects. The Washington Post’s Douglas A. Blackmon explains:

When DNA testing was first introduced in the late 1980s, the revolutionary new techniques shattered a widely held view in law enforcement and the public that American courts rarely convicted the innocent. Since then, high-profile exonerations and the increasingly common reliance on such testing have led many to believe that DNA can resolve doubts about almost any questionable conviction.

It’s now clear, however, that there is no DNA evidence in the vast majority of cases. In the first 15 years of DNA testing, almost all exonerations fit a basic pattern in which the defendant was accused of rape, or both rape and murder — because sexual assaults are the crimes in which DNA is most likely to be recovered. Between 1989 and the end of 2007, a total of 214 people were cleared using DNA evidence. In all but 14 cases — more than 93 percent — the alleged crime involved a sexual assault of some kind, according to a review by The Washington Post.

In hindsight, those straightforward, obvious miscarriages of justice were the low-hanging fruit of DNA exonerations. Now their numbers are declining. In their place are convictions such as Thibodeaux’s, in which serious doubts have been raised but little clear DNA or other scientific forensic evidence exists to conclusively prove guilt or innocence. In Thibodeaux’s case, the absence of any incriminating DNA evidence became as powerful an argument for his innocence as any other element of the case.

Even more alarming, the law does not always permit testing even where DNA evidence is available. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2009 that an Alaska inmate had no right to test his own DNA evidence – even if he paid for it himself.

Three-hundred exonerations in, we have not come far enough toward addressing the underlying flaws in our criminal justice system, from the cruelty of solitary confinement to the unreliability of confessions obtained during unrecorded police interrogations.