Even in death row cases, criminal defendants have no right to test potentially exonerating DNA evidence. In a move to prevent wrongful convictions in the state with the highest number of both executions and DNA exonerations, a Texas legislator is proposing a measure to require prosecutors to test available DNA evidence before seeking the death penalty. The bill’s chances of success were significantly bolstered with the unlikely support of one of the state’s most prominent and conservative legal figures: Attorney General Greg Abbott. The Dallas Observer’s Eric Nicholson reports on the move, in an aptly titled post, “Greg Abbott Backs DNA-Testing Bill, Continues Unprecedented Streak of Reasonableness”:

“There’s no reason to test these items more than a decade after the crime was committed,” Abbott said Tuesday at a news conference alongside the bill’s author, Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat. “We shouldn’t live with suspense. The family of the victim shouldn’t have to through this time after time after time in order to get certainty.”

Abbott is careful to frame his support for Ellis’ bill mainly as an effort to help victims’ families, but it comes, of course, in the wake of an embarrassingly high number of overturned convictions. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 53 prisoners have been freed by DNA evidence, two of whom were serving on death row.

Nicholson points out that Abbott may also support the bill as a means of strengthening support for the death penalty, which Ellis also supports. There are ever-growing reasons to believe that the death penalty is not a good idea in any case. But Texas, home to one-third of the entire country’s executions, should at the very least test defendants’ DNA before seeking to take their lives. And they should do more. Earlier this month, the chief justice of the state’s supreme court once again called for a commission to investigate all wrongful convictions, many with defendants who could have benefited from DNA testing whether or not they faced the death penalty, and many more in which DNA evidence was never available to begin with.

The corrosive influence of increased spending and politicking surrounding judicial elections has manifested itself around the country, most recently in the conviction of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice for corruption linked to her own judicial campaign. But moves to change the process for selecting judges face an uphill battle. This month, four former Pennsylvania governors – two from each party – are capitalizing on the recent conviction of  Joan Orie Melvin to highlight the problem of political influence on judges and vie for a constitutional amendment to change the process.

A bill endorsed by the governors would have candidates for appellate courts in the state approved by a commission and then nominated by the governor, insulating them from the fundraising demands of a judicial election that may sway judges’ decision-making.

“When it comes to statewide judges, very few voters know who they are, and if they do know who they are, it’s for the wrong reasons,” said former Republican governor Dick Thornburgh, now working for the law firm K&L Gates. The former governors warned in a call Monday that judicial elections give the dangerous impression that judicial elections are for sale and cast a “very dark shadow” over the integrity of what should be neutral arbiters. To pass such an amendment, the Legislature would have to vote on the issue in two consecutive sessions, and then hold a referendum.

In the Ohio Valley, where bingo night is serious business, false “bingo” calls can get you 90 days in the pokey.

Austin Whaley, an 18-year-old from Covington, Kentucky, learned this the hard way when he and several friends entered a local bingo hall and yelled “bingo” for comic effect. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “the crowd of mostly elderly women did not take kindly to Whaley’s bingo call.” The room filled with groans from those who’d thought they lost; upon realizing they’d been duped, “they started hooting and hollering and yelling and cussing.”

Park Hills Police Sgt. Richard Webster reported that Whaley’s antics “delayed the game by several minutes” and “caused alarm to patrons.” When Whaley refused to apologize after being caught, Webster cited him for second-degree disorderly conduct.

“Just like you can’t run into a theater and yell ‘fire’ when it’s not on fire, you can’t run into a crowded bingo hall and yell ‘bingo’ when there isn’t one,” said Park Hills Police Sgt. Richard Webster, the officer who cited Whaley. [...]

“He seemed to think he could say whatever he wanted because it was a public building. I tried to explain that that’s not the case. Just because it’s a public building doesn’t give you the right to run into a theater and yell ‘fire.’ You can’t go into a ballpark and yell ‘out,’ because people could stop the game.”

When Whaley appeared in Kenton District Court last week, the judge ordered Whaley: “Do not say the word ‘bingo’ for six months.”

As comical as it may be, sentencing someone to not utter the word “bingo” is likely a violation of the First Amendment.

The 1919 Supreme Court case Schenck v. U.S. introduced the “clear and present danger” test, which allows punishment for speech that would knowingly cause a panic, such as shouting “fire” in a crowded theater (this test has also been largely superseded by more speech-protective decisions). But yelling “bingo” in a bingo hall hardly lives up to the standard. Nobody flees for their life when they think they’ve lost the whimsical game of chance.

Bingo players may consider Whaley a jerk, but even jerks have constitutional rights.

Monday morning, the Republican National Committee released a lengthy “autopsy” of their 2012 electoral loss, much of which was devoted to the GOP’s weak standing among people of color. “It is imperative that the RNC changes how it engages with Hispanic communities to welcome in new members of our Party” the autopsy proclaims, and “the Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.”

One day later, Arkansas Republicans showed their mutual respect and spirit of caring for people of color by passing a law that will keep many of them from casting a vote.

Yesterday, the Arkansas Senate passed — on an entirely party-line vote — a so-called voter ID law requiring voters to show photo identification before they can cast a ballot. The same voter suppression measure already passed the state House with all but one of the votes for the bill coming from Republicans. These laws, which are popular among Republican lawmakers, accomplish little more than disenfranchisement. Even conservative estimates suggest that these laws will prevent 2 to 3 percent of registered voters from casting a ballot. And this impact is felt hardest by low-income voters, students and people of color — all of who tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans.

The most common argument raised in favor of voter ID laws is that they prevent in-person voter fraud, but this claim cannot be squared with reality. A person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud at the polls. A Wisconsin study found that only 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of such fraud. So voter ID laws disenfranchise a large chunk of voters — between 2 and 9 percent, according to different reports on their effect — in order to prevent a virtually non-existent form of voter fraud.

The bill will now go to Gov. Mike Beebe (D-AR), who should veto it.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced a bipartisan bill Tuesday to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that would grant new privacy protections for email and other cloud stored data. Under current ECPA standards the government doesn’t need a warrant to access the content of emails that are more than 180 days old — instead all it requires is an administrative subpoena — although some companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook have challenged that assertion on Fourth Amendment grounds.

Sen. Leahy,  the author of the original 1986 law, commented on how much times have changed since then:

“No one could have imagined just how the Internet and mobile technologies would transform how we communicate and exchange information today[...] Privacy laws written in an analog era are no longer suited for privacy threats we face in a digital world. Three decades later, we must update this law to reflect new privacy concerns and new technological realities, so that our Federal privacy laws keep pace with American innovation and the changing mission of our law enforcement agencies.”

A similar proposal was introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) earlier this month, and the House Judiciary committee heard testimony on reforming ECPA this morning. In written testimony submitted before that hearing by acting assistant attorney general and former White House lawyer Elana Tyrangiel, the Obama administration dropped its claim that police should be able to look at Americans’ email content without warrants for the first time, but promoted a number of other expanded government surveillance powers.

These expansions include giving federal agency’s civil attorneys warrantless access to American’s electronic communications and eliminating some of the privacy protections currently applying to company records in order to reveal who is sending or receiving email, Facebook, Twitter, and other similar types of messages.

When the ECPA legislation was first passed in 1986, most people couldn’t imagine that online data storage would approach the point where it was so inexpensive people would leave their data online, so it was assumed that email left in networked storage over 180 days could be considered abandoned — like garbage on the curb. But with the rise of cheap, or in many cases free, storage in the cloud the 180 days rule has essentially become a way for law enforcement to access most archived email without the same level of due process expected for personal communications. Civil liberties advocates advocated for ECPA reform for years due to these technological and social changes and came very close to succeeding last year when it was almost passed as an amendment to a video-sharing bill backed by Netflix, but the amendment was inexplicably dropped over the Christmas break.

Just earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and Center for Democracy & Technology announced a new coalition called the Digital 4th that, along with other broader groups including the Digital Due Process coalition, will advocate for privacy-driven ECPA reform, among other Fourth Amendment based privacy protections for current generation tech.

Throughout the early stages of his campaign for the Republican nomination for Secretary of State John Kerry’s open U.S. Senate seat, former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan has enjoyed the strong support of Plymouth County, Massachusetts Sheriff Joe McDonald (R). After McDonald “joked” that the nation would be better off if President Obama were assassinated at a Republican Party St. Patrick’s Day breakfast Sunday — at which Sullivan also spoke — the Senate hopeful is standing by his enthusiastic supporter.

On the same day as Sullivan received the endorsement of the Massachusetts Citizens for Life PAC, his campaign manager dismissed McDonald’s repeated allusions to President Obama being killed. In a statement to ThinkProgress on behalf of the campaign, Sullivan’s manager attempted to minimize the comments by noting that unnamed people once made the same suggestions about Republican presidents:

The people of Plymouth County know Sheriff McDonald to be a fine man and a very hard-working, accomplished sheriff. Mike didn’t hear the joke but urges great care on such topics. Movies and books were written that fantasized about assassinating President George W. Bush, but hardly an eyebrow was raised. Mike, for his part, has spent much of his adult lifetime protecting life and speaking softly from his own heart. He’ll continue to do that throughout the campaign and continues to appreciate the service of Sheriff McDonald.

McDonald’s Facebook page contains numerous posts about his efforts on behalf of Sullivan. One invites voters to support the Senate hopeful at the Massachusetts GOP’s yacht club straw poll earlier this month, several request support for his ballot access signature drive, and two show pictures of a joint appearance at a local shopping mall.

McDonald, for his part, also continued to stand by his controversial attempt at humor Tuesday, telling a local TV station that since he never used the words “kill” or “assassinate,” he believes “A joke is a joke. And reasonable, intelligent people understand when a joke is a joke.” When asked if he’d tell the joke in the future, he indicated that he might — but that he didn’t “want to be known for only one joke.”

Tuesday night, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) declared that an assault weapons ban would not be in the gun law reform package he was planning to bring to the floor for a cloture vote, a move expected by all sides of the debate. But in an surprising twist, Reid also suggested that a provision requiring gun purchasers to undergo background checks could also be excluded from the comprehensive package.

Though Reid cited a recent breakdown in bipartisan negotiations over the issue of whether dealers should retain records of background checks, failing to pass the measure would deal a major blow to gun violence prevention efforts. Advocating for universal background checks isn’t just an obvious political winner — it’s absolutely critical to keeping guns out criminal hands and, most importantly, preventing innocent people from dying from gunfire:

1. Universal background checks deter criminals from purchasing guns. This isn’t really a contestable point. 80 percent of crime guns are purchased through “private” sales, which means from unlicensed dealers at gun shows or other people currently exempted from having to run background checks under federal law. Forcing all sellers to run background checks both deters criminals from buying guns (if they fail the check they can be prosecuted) and prevents a check on sellers that might be inclined to sell to shady characters if they didn’t know they were committing a federal crime. Unsurprisingly, the best available research suggests that “states which do not regulate private gun sales, adopt permit-to-purchase licensing systems, or have gun owner accountability measures, like mandatory reporting of gun thefts, export significantly more guns used by criminals to other states that have constrained the supply of guns for criminals by adopting strict gun sales regulations.” That’s why the law needs to be federal — states with lax background checks are de facto shipping crime guns around the country.

2. They save lives. Johns Hopkins gun expert Daniel Webster recently studied what happened when Missouri repealed its “purchase-to-permit” law, which was essentially a universal background check requirement. Turns out that, while regional and national gun homicides were declining, Missouri’s spiked by 25 percent. If the federal law worked in reverse, reducing gun homicides by 25 percent would have saved 2,750 lives per year.

3. They’re virtually cost free. Background checks are very cheap, very quick, and easily accessible to virtually all Americans. So background checks wouldn’t really prevent law-abiding Americans from purchasing guns, but would significantly limit criminal access to firearms.

4. Americans are united around them. Poll after poll has confirmed that somewhere around 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks. The figure is basically identical among gun owners (87 percent) and slightly lower, but still overwhelmingly high, among NRA members (74 percent).

Reid, who has a relatively high NRA rating (for a Democrat), has expressed skepticism about some parts of President Obama’s comprehensive gun violence prevention package. Still, lawmakers will ultimately have to vote on background checks — as an amendment or part of a comprehensive plan — and those who oppose the measure, they’ll have to justify their position to the 90 percent of Americans who support it.