A Tennessee appeals court upheld the state’s voter ID law Thursday, with the caveat that the state must accept Memphis library identification cards.

In a unanimous ruling, the state’s intermediate court held that the photo ID requirement did not impose burdens akin to a poll tax, and that the state’s justification for the law — alleged voter fraud — was a “compelling interest,” even though instances of in-person voter fraud are exceedingly rare.

Not surprisingly, the court held that the state was not required to show any evidence of the elusive voter fraud. This was a proposition set forth in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a 2008 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility to strike down laws like this one that threaten ballot access. What’s more, the Tennessee Court of Appeals arguably went beyond the scope of the Crawford decision in justifying its law, citing a 1891 Tennessee decision:

As the burden of having to acquire a photographic identification card is not substantial, neither does it rise to the level of imposing an “impossible or oppressive” condition on voting, and therefore the legislation requiring it is not void.

Calling a prerequisite to voting acceptable if it is not “impossible or oppressive” suggests that voting is more of a privilege than a right. Studies have shown that as many as 11 percent of Americans do not have a photo ID, and that those impacted by these laws are disproportionately minorities, the elderly and the poor.

Countless anecdotes in Tennessee and elsewhere show that obtaining a photo ID can be onerous even for those who take the time and expense to make an attempt. In Tennessee, senior citizens encountered obstacles because they never had a birth certificate, didn’t have a marriage license, wasn’t able to stand in line at the DMV, or told to pay an $8 fee to obtain what was supposed to be a free photo ID. Several of these problems may have been ones of implementation, but they highlight the risks of photo ID requirements that caused courts in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin to at least temporarily block these laws.

Yesterday’s Tennessee ruling appears to be a clear win for the state, but the Tennessee Secretary of State said he plans to appeal the order requiring the court to accept library IDs, staying that aspect of the ruling in the interim. The court had found that the state was improperly excluding library-issued cards because the library is a branch of the state.

Radcliffe Haughton, the man who reportedly killed three people and wounded four others at a Wisconsin day spa before taking his own life, should not have been able to legally obtain a firearm. Three days before Haughton’s mass killing, his estranged wife obtained a restraining order against him and he was ordered to turn over all of his firearms. Haughton’s wife was one of his victims.

Federal law prohibits possession of firearms by most people who are the subject of a domestic violence restraining order, yet Haughton was able to buy the firearm he used in his mass shooting thanks to a loophole that enables gun sales over the Internet without a background check. Worse, Haughton is far from the only person able to take advantage of this loophole:

In its “Point, Click, Fire” investigation of illegal online gun sales, NYC investigators found that 62 percent of private gun sellers, most of them online, agreed to sell a gun to a customer who admitted he probably couldn’t pass a background check. . . . The report found a number of high-powered rifles, like a Ruger Mini 14 assault rifle, for sale on Armslist.com . . . .

Armslist.com boasted 54,745 active listings as of Thursday. In Wisconsin alone, the site is advertising Rugers, a Bushmaster AR-15 and a Remington 7600 pump 270.

In one case documented by the New York investigation, an undercover investigator asked a seller if he was “one of those licensed guys” and said he couldn’t pass a background check. The seller responded with a laugh and said “no, I just take cash, and there you go!”

A new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll finds support building for a California ballot initiative that would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in that state. Although opponents of the ballot initiative retain a 45-42 edge in the poll, this is a significant shift from September, when 51 percent supported retaining state-sponsored executions and only 38 percent would vote to repeal them. Moreover, when voters are read the actual language that will appear on the ballot this November, which includes an explanation that repealing the death penalty is estimated to eventually save the state $130 million a year, a 45 percent plurality of voters express support for ending executions.

Regardless of whether California voters repeal the death penalty this year, the nation as a whole is trending away from it. Though death sentences remain legal in most states, actual executions are very rare in most of the country. According to a 2011 study by the Death Penalty Information Center, 32 U.S. jurisdictions — including California — executed no one in the previous 5 years and more than half of those jurisdictions executed no one after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Just 12 states executed someone in 2010, only 7 of which executed more than one person.

Over one-third of all U.S. executions took place in just one state — Texas.

Ernest Willis was on death row for 17 years in Texas before he was exonerated, thanks to new revelations about the flaws of outdated science on proving arson. The same type of faulty evidence was used to convict Todd Willingham, but he was executed a month before Willis’s exoneration. Now, Willingham’s family is asking for a posthumous pardon, submitting thousands of pages to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to hammer home one more time the devastating flaws in the 1992 testimony of the state fire marshal.

Willingham was accused of having killed his three daughters by burning down his own house. The evidence presented against him included testimony from the fire marshal that suggested accelerants were used in the fire, and testimony of a fellow inmate that was later recanted. Scientific evidence that existed when Willingham was alive called into question alleged indicators of arson, such as cracked windows. But when Willingham’s lawyers presented this evidence in 2004 and asked Gov. Rick Perry for time to reopen the case, Perry allowed the execution to go forward.

Months after his death, the Chicago Tribune published a definitive investigative report boldly headlined “Man executed on disproved forensics”:

Before Willingham died by lethal injection on Feb. 17, Texas judges and Gov. Rick Perry turned aside a report from a prominent fire scientist questioning the conviction. […]

“There’s nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire,” said [Gerald] Hurst, a Cambridge University-educated chemist who has investigated scores of fires in his career. “It was just a fire.”

[Kendall] Ryland, chief of the Effie Fire Department and a former fire instructor at Louisiana State University, said that, in his workshop, he tried to re-create the conditions the original fire investigators described.

When he could not, he said, it “made me sick to think this guy was executed based on this investigation. … They executed this guy and they’ve just got no idea–at least not scientifically–if he set the fire, or if the fire was even intentionally set.”

In 2009, the New Yorker ran a similarly scathing indictment of the evidence in Willingham’s case, in which Hurst called the theory that accelerant must have been used based on the temperature of the fire “nonsense” disproven by countless experiments.

Last September, in yet another disheartening moment, Texas Attorney General Greg Abott (R) halted an investigation into Willingham’s case. But state officials are now reviewing 26 arson cases that are based on the same false evidence. The state has a new fire marshal, which the Innocence Project of Texas’ Jeff Blackburn said represents a significant opportunity to get the science right, if not for Willingham’s family, than for the many others in Texas still serving questionable sentences for arson.