During a Wednesday House oversight hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder that overwhelmingly focused on the invasive government search of Associated Press phone logs and the IRS, one House member took the opportunity to grill Holder on another Department of Justice issue that has provoked criticism from the left. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) tore into Holder over his approach to marijuana, asking why his Justice Department is “continuing to put people in jail,” even as polling shows a majority of Americans believe the plant should not be illegal:

One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of people do not think marijuana should be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department is continuing to put people in jail, for sale, and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag. And it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country by having a Prohibition in the late 20th and 21st century. We saw it didn’t work in this country in the 20s. We remedied it. This is the time to remedy this Prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.

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In addition to the majority support for decriminalizing marijuana cited by Cohen, an even greater proportion of Americans say they think the United States is losing the so-called “War on Drugs” and that states should be allowed to decide whether marijuana is legal.

Holder said shortly after two states passed ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana that he would announce a DOJ policy on a federal response. But six months later, his only answer has been that he expects an announcement “relatively soon.” Regional federal officials, meanwhile, have re-upped crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries, sending threat letters to dispensaries in several cities in Washington and California. And what started as a Drug Enforcement Administration crackdown has now developed into new DOJ action by regional U.S. attorneys. Just this month, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag filed federal forfeiture actions to seize the real estate that houses two Bay Area medical marijuana dispensaries seemingly in compliance with state and local laws, including the largest dispensary in Berkeley and another dispensary that serves the Mission region of San Francisco. Haag has filed a similar action against the largest U.S. dispensary with locations in Oakland and San Jose, suggesting a strategy to hamper the industry by targeting the largest players.

Members of Congress have introduced several bills to square state laws with the federal marijuana prohibition.

A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,099. This number also appears to be growing rapidly. Just a few hours ago, it was at 4,096.

Veterans and others suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder have long reported anecdotally that marijuana provides unique relief for their symptoms, but past attempts to perform scientific studies have foundered because access to a legal supply of marijuana is blocked by federal agencies. A new study released this week averted this obstacle in a brain imaging study that did not require a marijuana supply, and concluded that cannabis may mitigate the flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, and other symptoms that plague PTSD sufferers. Medical Daily reports:

A new study by researchers at the New York University School of Medicine and their collaborators across the U.S. suggests that there is a connection between the number of cannabinoid receptors in the brain and the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to an NYU press release.

Cannabinoid receptors, or CB1 receptors, are part of a large system of chemicals and signaling pathways from the brain to the body, NYU says. They play a role in the formation of memories, and in transmitting messages about appetite, pain, and mood to the body. Studies have shown that certain chemicals, like cannabis, can combine with naturally produced neurotransmitters to activate CB1 receptors, which in turn can impair memory and reduce anxiety. […]

“There’s not a single pharmacological treatment out there that has been developed specifically for PTSD,” said lead author and NYU researcher Alexander Neumeister in the statement. “That’s a problem. There’s a consensus among clinicians that existing pharmaceutical treatments such as antidepressant simply do not work.” In fact, he added, anecdotal evidence has shown that some PTSD sufferers who use marijuana, a cannabinoid, experience more symptom relief than with antidepressants.

The reason researchers were able to link their brain research to marijuana is because it contains its own cannabinoids, which can and have been isolated to medically treat individuals with neurological disorders. This study, conducted by a major medical institution and published in a reputable scientific journal, is groundbreaking. But it also reinforces the loss to the medical and scientific communities from federal government resistance to support research on the drug.

If clinicians want to actually know how marijuana works, they will have to conduct studies using marijuana. Legal access to marijuana is controlled by one federal agency with a mission to combat drug abuse. A panel made up of representatives from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Health and Human Services must approve a proposal for legal marijuana access. In 2011, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine who specializes in treating veterans designed a triple-blind study to test marijuana that earned approval by the Food and Drug Administration. But when Dr. Sue Sisley requested marijuana from the panel, they turned back her request, providing a range of contradictory and confusing justifications that are difficult if not impossible for Sisley to address in a subsequent request, and effectively block access to the drug for this study.

Studies like this one are needed not just to put scientific backing behind the anecdotes and to better adjust prescriptions of the substance to the some 30 percent of veterans who suffer from PTSD. They are also crucial to disputing the Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of marijuana as a Schedule I dangerous drug with no currently accepted medical use, and Congress’ position that marijuana is illegal even for medical purposes. In 2011, the DEA once again refused to reschedule marijuana, citing an absence of rigorous study, and a federal appeals court declined to disturb that ruling. Plaintiffs argued that it is precisely the Schedule I designation that prevents the funding and marijuana access needed to perform larger-scale studies. The Schedule I designation — more severe than the designations for cocaine and opium poppy – also means the federal government recognizes no sanctioned use for the substance in spite of 19 state medical marijuana laws, and prescriptions cannot be written for marijuana.

Another study released just this month found that inhaled marijuana can abate Crohn’s disease symptoms in those who did not respond to conventional treatments. According to a 2011 survey performed in Canada and the United Kingdom, some half of Crohn’s disease patients use medical marijuana to treat their symptoms. The primary prescription drugs used to treat this disorder can cost $25,000 a year without insurance, and vary in effectiveness. This study was conducted in Israel, where medical marijuana research is encouraged by the government.

Under fire for the Justice Department’s surveillance of AP reporters’ phone records, the White House is pushing to revive a “media shield” bill to protect reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) received a call Wednesday from the White House asking him to reintroduce his 2009 bill.

The last media shield bill was thwarted when Wikileaks exposed thousands of pages of secret government documents, killing the political will to bring the legislation to a floor vote. Even before that, however, the Obama administration refused to support Schumer’s legislation unless it excluded reporters who publish leaks deemed to cause “significant harm” to national security.

Though the administration’s renewed interest in the media shield could signal regret over the AP scandal, the compromise bill may not have protected the AP from the DOJ’s subpoena because of this exception for national security leaks. However, Schumer argued the legislation would have made a difference:

In a statement, Mr. Schumer referred to the A.P. subpoena: “This kind of law would balance national security needs against the public’s right to the free flow of information. At minimum, our bill would have ensured a fairer, more deliberate process in this case.”

It is not clear whether such a law would have changed the outcome of the subpoena to The A.P. But it might have reduced the chances that the Justice Department would have demanded the records in secret, without any advance notice to the news organization, and it may have allowed a judge to review whether the scope of the request was justified by the facts.

As the New York Times notes, the media shield compromise language would actually help the government pursue reporters to root out leaks of classified information — “Judges could not quash a subpoena through a balancing test if prosecutors could show that the information sought might help prevent a future terrorist attack or other acts likely to harm national security.”

The bill would, however, protect journalists from civil suits attempting to force them to give up sources or information. It would also require the information seekers to prove why their need trumps the need for unfettered media.

If the United States and all the other countries of the world were to line up by voter participation rate, we would find ourselves ranked lower than war-torn countries like Sierra Leone, massive countries like Indonesia, and baby democracies like East Timor.

Despite our status as the world’s oldest democracy, just over half (53.6 percent) of voting-age Americans cast a ballot in 2012. In fact, of 169 countries ranked by turnout level, the U.S. has the ignominious honor of taking 120th place.

There are plenty of reasons for our fledgling turnout rate. We hold elections more frequently than most countries. Many voters find it hard to take time off during a Tuesday in early November to vote. An increasing number of states have passed new laws designed to inhibit certain people from casting a ballot. The list goes on.

Other countries have been able to achieve far higher levels of participation with the help of various initiatives designed to encourage citizens to vote. Some, particularly compulsory voting, may be right for the United States and others may not, but it is instructive to consider how other countries have structured their elections to make them as accessible as possible.

Here are a number of these reforms, in no particular order:

1. Automatically registering everyone to vote. Some countries like France (71.2 percent turnout) and Sweden (82.6 percent turnout) automatically register their citizens to vote, removing a major hurdle in the electoral process. France automatically registers citizens when they turn 18, while Sweden and other Scandinavian countries use tax registration rolls to produce voter lists.

2. Weekend voting. Many countries including Australia (81.0 percent turnout), Greece (69.4 percent turnout), and Brazil (80.6 percent turnout) put Election Day on the weekend. This helps ensure that as many people as possible can participate and won’t be prevented by work requirements.

3. Nationwide Election Day registration. Canada (53.8 percent turnout), for example, allows citizens who haven’t registered to do so when they get to the polls on Election Day, rather than barring them from participating.

4. Lower voting age. Not all nations set the voting age at 18. Many like Brazil (80.6 percent turnout), Nicaragua (71.8 percent turnout), and Austria (75.6 percent turnout) allow 16-year-olds to vote.

5. Compulsory voting. Dozens of countries, ranging from Uruguay (96.1 percent turnout) to the Dominican Republic (70.2 percent turnout) to Singapore (55.3 percent turnout), require citizens to vote. Some of the countries actually enforce the requirement, usually with a small fine for people who don’t cast a ballot; $20 in Australia for those without a good excuse, for instance. Other countries either don’t have penalties for non-voters or don’t enforce penalties on the books.

6. Online voting. A few countries have started to dip their toes into the online voting water. Most notably, Estonia (55.5 percent turnout) has been allowing its citizens to cast a ballot online since 2005. In 2011, a quarter of all Estonians utilized the option. They have yet to face major security breaches in the system.

7. Fewer elections. Elections are often unsynchronized in the United States, with local elections taking place on different dates than federal elections, to say nothing of primaries, recalls, and the like. Many other countries hold all their elections on a single day, in part to avoid voter fatigue.

In 2008, Montez Spradley was convicted for the murder of a grandmother shot dead in Center Point, Alabama. Although the jury recommended a sentence of life in prison without parole, an Alabama trial judge rejected the recommendation and sentenced Spradley to death. But that death sentence was struck down along with the conviction, when an appeals panel deemed the trial so error- and bias-ridden that it was a “miscarriage of justice.”

Now, as Spradley’s case enters the early stages of retrial, the ACLU has uncovered even more potentially damning evidence about prosecutors’ handling of his case, revealing yet another way in which commonplace prosecutor misconduct can lead to improper sentences to death. Spradley’s ex-girlfriend testified this week that she was offered a $10,000 reward in exchange for testifying against Spradley, and that prosecutors threatened to take away her children and prosecute her for perjury if she did not do so. AL.com reports:

At the court hearing today Alisha Booker testified that she lied at the 2008 trial that Spradley had confessed to her in a church about killing Jason.

Booker testified that after having denied any knowledge of the murder to police in 2004, she stepped forward later to tell police that Spradley had admitted it because she was mad at him. She said that at the time she stepped forward she was pregnant with her and Spradley’s third child. She said she learned he was cheating on her.

“I just felt he was doing me wrong at the moment,” Booker said.

As she began to testify that she had lied in her 2008 testimony, Wallace asked her if she knew that she could possibly be charged with perjury. After meeting in the judge’s office with her attorney for a few minutes she returned to the stand and continued her testimony. [...]

Booker said she had told law enforcement that she had lied and didn’t want to testify. She said they told her it was too late and that she had to stick to the story or she could go to jail for a long time and her kids put in foster homes. She said the detectives had told her she was a single mother and should take the reward money.

A prosecutor and the lead detective in the homicide case denied the allegations during today’s hearing.

The rewards offered to Booker were part of two local programs to incentivize witnesses to come forward with information about the crime. These rewards programs can be a helpful crime-fighting resource, when used properly. But they also create perverse incentives to provide false information, particularly when a witness merely provides testimony that is not corroborated by others or accompanied by physical evidence. Because prosecutors maintain primary control over access to this and other crucial information about a case, they are constitutionally required to divulge to defendants the existence of such a reward, or of any other exculpatory evidence, even though it may undercut prosecutors’ case. In this case, prosecutors dispute many facts, but they do not dispute that Booker was given a reward, nor that they failed to disclose that reward.

The under-appreciated U.S. Supreme Court decision that articulated this prosecutor obligation celebrated its 50th anniversary this week, but punishment for prosecutors who fail to comply with Brady v. Maryland remains largely non-existent, meaning those inclined to withhold evidence are still unlikely to be deterred by the law, and perhaps even less likely to be discovered.  This is one of several cases to reveal these blatant Brady violations even in instances where a defendant’s life is at stake, and in which judges subject to the politics of re-election use a dangerous Alabama policy to “override” jury decisions about the death penalty. And while Spradley earned a retrial, another judge exercising judicial override could once again sentence him to death.

In an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren last night, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) threw cold water on hopes that the Justice Department’s surveillance of Associated Press reporters’ phone records could lead to legislation preventing similar incidents in the future. Gowdy noted that the surveillance occurred in no small part because Republicans demanded such an investigation in 2012:

GOWDY: Greta, you were an attorney. There are lots of privileges — husband-wife, priest-penitent, attorney-client, none of them unqualified. So when you have a major national security leak, which is a compelling issue, and you juxtapose that with the right of the media to do its job and provide oversight, there’s a conflict. And there’s no federal statute on point. But the Supreme Court has said if there is a compelling interest, which there certainly is in national security cases, and the information is relevant which it has to be to justify a subpoena, and you have no alternative means of getting the information, then the Department of Justice had no choice. . . .

Think back a year ago. We had the attorney general and other Department of Justice employees, and we grilled them over national security leaks. And here they are doing what we asked them to do, investigate the leak.

While Gowdy’s admission that Republicans supported a probe into national security leaks like the one that led to the DOJ probe of AP is welcome, his willingness to largely excuse DOJ’s actions does not bode well for reform. When journalists face surveillance by law enforcement, many sources will be too frightened to talk to reporters, and that will lead to the public being less informed. The AP probe presents a strong argument for requiring law enforcement to obtain a warrant from a judge before they can obtain phone records from journalists — indeed, DOJ itself should support such a requirement, because a judicially issued warrant enables them to resist scandal after their investigations become public — but such a reform will almost certainly require an act of Congress.

Although there were initial signs that congressional Republican lawmakers would react to the DOJ probe with their typical degree of outrage, many GOP lawmakers are now responding with a collective “meh.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the second highest ranking member of the Republican caucus, said that he has “questions” about the AP surveillance, “but I’m wiling to wait and see how this plays out, whether it was narrowly targeted or whether it was a net that was too broadly cast.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) similarly offered up an uncharacteristic willingness to wait “before offering an opinion.”

Of course, there are still lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, who remain bothered by the probe. But the chances of reform now seem low.

On July 4, Adam Kokesh hopes to lead 1,000 protesters armed with guns into Washington, D.C. to advocate for open carry. In Kokesh’s eyes, a crowd armed with guns compares to the nonviolent civil disobedience practiced by Mahatma Gandhi.

Kokesh answered the Washington Post through a series of text messages:

Suppose the D.C. police, as they have promised, block the marchers from crossing into Washington? How should they respond?

“With Satyagraha,” Kokesh, 31, texted The Washington Post. That is a term used by Mahatma Gandhi to describe his strategy of nonviolent resistance to British rule in India. [...]

Did his response of “satyagraha” mean violence is unacceptable?

“Only if absolutely necessary in defense of life or limb,” he wrote.

Satyagraha, in Gandhi’s words, is “a way of life based on love and compassion.” Gandhi explained that “[i]n the application of Satyagraha I have discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy.”

Compare Satyagraha to Kokesh’s event description on Facebook. Although Kokesh claims his march will “peacefully turn back” if confronted with “physical resistance,” he ominously warns the march will be violent if “the government chooses to make it violent.” He also proclaims that “[w]e will march with rifles loaded & slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated & cower in submission to tyranny.”

Because open carry is illegal in D.C., the police chief has already warned that “passing into the District of Columbia with firearms is a violation of the law and we’ll have to treat it as such.” Even open carry groups like Gun Owners of America are wary of the march, which is now at over 4,000 Facebook RSVPs.

Kokesh is not alone in trying to link guns to civil rights movements. The argument has at times been taken up by the National Rifle Association and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.