As ThinkProgress reported this morning, a top Romney surrogate told socially moderate Republicans this week that the GOP presidential candidate wouldn’t actually threaten Roe v. Wade if elected president, despite months of campaign rhetoric to the contrary. In addition to attacking Roe, Romney’s promised more justices who will immunize powerful corporations from the law, who are likely to roll back key victories for equality, who think the wealthy should be allowed to buy elections, and who believe corporations are people.

Perhaps the most telling sign of how Romney views the judiciary, however, is an op-ed he published just a few months after Masschusetts’ landmark Goodridge decision, which recognized that marriage equality is required under that state’s constitution. In his op-ed, Romney compared Goodridge to the most infamous court decision in American history:

Beware of activist judges. The Legislature is our lawmaking body, and it is the Legislature’s job to pass laws. As governor, it is my job to carry out the laws. The Supreme Judicial Court decides cases where there is a dispute as to the meaning of the laws or the constitution. This is not simply a separation of the branches of government, it is also a balance of powers: One branch is not to do the work of the other. . . .

With the Dred Scott case, decided four years before he took office, President Lincoln faced a judicial decision that he believed was terribly wrong and badly misinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. Here is what Lincoln said: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” By its decision, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts circumvented the Legislature and the executive, and assumed to itself the power of legislating. That’s wrong.

Mitt Romney is no Abraham Lincoln, and Goodridge could not be any more opposite the Court’s pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott. Dred Scott claimed that 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.”

And yet, after drawing a comparison between extending the blessings of liberty to all Americans and keeping millions of innocents in shackles, Romney now wants to be able to choose the next justices on the Supreme Court.

[HT: Jeremy Hooper]

Doug Stankewitz.

California’s longest serving death row inmate will no longer be slated for execution, if a Monday ruling by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals stands. According to the Los Angeles Times, the appellate court ruled that Doug Stankewitz, convicted of murder in 1978, was improperly represented by his lawyers during the sentencing phase of his trial. The majority held that the incompetence was so gross as to justify vacating the death penalty sentence entirely:

The 9th Circuit majority said Stankewitz’s lawyer presented only a “paltry” amount of evidence in trying to persuade jurors against a death sentence, ignoring extensive documentation of the defendant’s “deprived and abusive upbringing,” potential mental illness, long history of substance abuse and use of drugs leading up to the murder.

Stankewitz was born into a filthy, poverty-stricken home without running water or electricity to an intellectually impaired alcoholic mother and an abusive, alcoholic father, the court said. By the age of six, Stankewitz already was severely emotionally damaged, the court said. Judge Raymond C. Fisher, writing for the court, said the jury might have opted for a life sentence had it learned of Stankewitz’s life story and his heavy use of drugs in the hours before the murder.

Cases like Stankewitz’s, where prisoners convicted of the death penalty languish in prison for dozens of years in fear of their impending death, are sadly common. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the average gap between sentencing and execution increased from roughly 6 years in 1984 to roughly 15 years in 2010. The reason for this increase in wait times appears to be a more extensive appellate process, but the byproduct of these reforms has been to increase the psychological suffering of inmates who have no way of knowing when they are going to be killed. The Center notes that several judges and justices have questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty on these grounds — former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “a punishment of death after significant delay is ‘so totally without penological justification that it results in the gratuitous infliction of suffering.’”

For this and other reasons, Stankewitz’s state of California is voting this November on a ballot initiative to abolish the death penalty. The abolitionist side is narrowing the polls as former proponents of the state’s death penalty change their minds and evidence suggests the punishment is busting the state’s budget. More broadly, the American death penalty sentences innocent people to die, is shot through with racial bias, and has not been shown to function as an effective deterrent.

Earlier this month, dozens of billboards appeared in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods in Cleveland and elsewhere warning that “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY!” and can lead to prison sentences of up to three and a half years. In no small part because voters are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud at the polls, the billboards were widely viewed as an effort to intimidate minority voters who are uncertain about their rights from voting. Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns the billboards that displayed the intimidating message, eventually agreed to remove the message and donate space on 10 billboards to display a counter-message clarifying that “VOTING IS A RIGHT. NOT A CRIME!”

Clear Channel explained that it would pull the billboards because they “violate our policy of not accepting anonymous political ads.” The identity of the big GOP funders behind these billboards has now been revealed:

Stephen Einhorn – a Wisconsin venture capital fund manager and major GOP donor – acknowledged Monday that he and his wife Nancy paid for dozens of anonymous billboards in and around Milwaukee and two Ohio cities warning residents of the penalties for committing voter fraud. . . . The Einhorns have made campaign donations to many Republican politicians, including Gov. Scott Walker, to whom they have given $49,750 since 2005, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

In addition to funding Wisconsin’s anti-union governor, the Einhorns both made maximum-dollar donations of $2,500 each to Mitt Romney’s presidential election campaign. Both Einhorns also gave to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) in addition to other GOP House and Senate candidates. Stephen donated $25,000 to the tea party group Freedomworks, and Nancy gave $30,800 to the Republican National Committee.

FBI statistics from 2011 show that the War on Drugs is going strong, with more people arrested for drug crimes than anything else. U.S. police arrest someone for a marijuana crime every 42 seconds, and 87 percent of those are for mere possession. These numbers are slightly down from the last two years, but drug crimes still represent more than eight percent of all arrests.

“Even excluding the costs involved for later trying and then imprisoning these people, taxpayers are spending between one and a half to three billion dollars a year just on the police and court time involved in making these arrests,” said Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore narcotics cop who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “That’s a lot of money to spend for a practice that four decades of unsuccessful policies have proved does nothing to reduce the consumption of drugs.” The group is urging passage of the three state ballot initiatives that would legalize and regulate marijuana in Washington, Colorado and Oregon.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade. He called Roe “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history.” And there is video of him saying that he wants to appoint Supreme Court justices who will reverse Roe.

Yet, at a Republican Jewish Coalition event on Monday, former senator and top Romney surrogate Norm Coleman (R-MN) was asked to address the concerns of “voters who are worried about the influence of religious conservatives on the Republican Party.” Rather than accurately convey Romney’s position on the issue, Coleman pretended that Romney would somehow be powerless against Roe:

The reality is, uh, choice is an issue for a lot of people, an important issue. President Bush was president eight years, Roe v. Wade wasn’t reversed. He had two Supreme Court picks, Roe v. Wade wasn’t reversed. It’s not going to be reversed.

Watch it:

Math is a notoriously difficult subject for Romney and his campaign, but there is a simple explanation for why President Bush was not able to overrule Roe. Overruling a Supreme Court precedent requires five votes, and the two justices Bush appointed — plus staunchly anti-Roe Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — add up to less than five. Now, however, three justices who have at times voted to uphold abortion rights are over the age of 74. If just one leaves the Court, the next president could easily appoint the fifth vote to kill Roe.

More importantly, while Coleman is correct that a shadow of Roe remains law today, it is simply false to suggest that Bush’s appointees did not succeed in significantly rolling back women’s reproductive freedoms. In their very first full term on the Court, Bush’s two appointees joined a 5-4 decision claiming abortion rights should be restricted because “some women come to regret” their own choices when they are allowed to make them. If President Bush had not replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, this decision would have come down the other way.

As a recent Center for American Progress Action Fund report explains, Roe is just one of many precedents that is at risk in a Romney Supreme Court. By contrast, should President Obama replace one of the Court’s conservatives, the result could be a new renaissance for democracy, consumers and workers rights:
Read more

Mitt Romney’s campaign has been training poll watchers in Wisconsin with highly misleading — and sometimes downright false — information about voters’ rights.

Documents from a recent Romney poll watcher training obtained by ThinkProgress contain several misleading or untrue claims about the rights of Wisconsin voters. A source passed along the following packet of documents, which was distributed to volunteers at a Romney campaign training in Racine on October 25th. In total, eight such trainings were held across the state in the past two weeks and 17 since late September.

One blatant falsehood occurs on page 5 of the training packet, which informed poll watchers that any “person [who] has been convicted of treason, a felony, or bribery” isn’t eligible to vote. This is not true. Once a Wisconsin voter who has been convicted of a felony completes his or her sentence, that person is once again eligible to vote.

The training also encouraged volunteers to deceive election workers and the public about who they were associated with. On page 3 of the packet, Romney poll workers were instructed to hide their affiliation with the campaign and told to sign in at the polls as a “concerned citizen” instead. As Kristina Sesek, Romney’s legal counsel who just graduated from Marquette Law School last year, explained, “We’re going to have you sign in this election cycle as a ‘concerned citizen.’ We’re just trying to alleviate some of the animosity of being a Republican observer up front.”

This packet could cause major problems if Republican observers across the state try to enforce such wrong and misleading information on Election Day. Even if they simply slow the voting process down, this could discourage voters waiting in line and drive drown turnout.

Here are four misleading or incorrect pieces of information distributed by the Romney campaign:

Here are the documents in full:
Read more

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice

• Posting may be light today on account of the hurricane.
• In spite of Hurricane Sandy, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday as scheduled, but it shut its doors today, rescheduling oral arguments for Thursday, Nov. 1.
• Yesterday, the justices took action on several cases. They declined to review the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision to strike the state’s proposed “personhood” amendment from the November ballot, but they agreed to hear an appeal by Texas death row inmate Carlos Trevino. The justices took no action on several closely watched challenges to the Voting Rights Act.
• The first of the Federalist papers were published 225 years ago this weekend. NPR talks with historian Jon Meacham about their relevance today.