Hours before his scheduled execution at 6 p.m. today, the Mississippi Supreme Court has issued a stay to Willie Jerome Manning, whose death sentence was upheld in a 5-4 court ruling last week even though the state refused to test available DNA evidence, and the FBI deemed major pieces of evidence in the case “unscientific” and “invalid.” As a consequence, Manning will not be executed tonight and will have more time to continue arguing his case.

Late Tuesday afternoon, an 8-1 majority granted Manning’s last-ditch motion, which included new letters from the Department of Justice describing how crucial hair samples were improperly tested, and testimony improperly linked bullets near Manning’s home to bullets at the crime scene. Manning was convicted in the 1992 abduction and murder in part based on testimony that the hair samples were likely his because both he and the hair strands were African American. The trial also featured testimony from a jailhouse informant, which studies have shown is particularly unreliable.

In California, even medical marijuana dispensaries legally complying with state and local laws are being targeted by the federal government in a new round of crackdowns. But there are many cities and towns in the state that have imposed their own medical marijuana bans. And on Monday, the California Supreme Court dealt one of the biggest blows to the state industry since a law was first passed in 1996, upholding those bans as not preempted by state law. The court ruling upholding a ban in Riverside, Calif. could affect some 200 others jurisdictions that have some sort of dispensary restriction or ban on dispensaries that would be legal under state law but federally illegal (since all marijuana is federally illegal), and resolves conflicting legal rulings by lower California courts. The court explained:

As we have noted, the CUA [Compassionate Use Act] and the MMP [Medical Marijuana Program] are careful and limited forays into the subject of medical marijuana, aimed at striking a delicate balance in an area that remains controversial, and involves sensitivity in federal-state relations. We must take these laws as we find them, and their purposes and provisions are modest. They remove state-level criminal and civil sanctions from specified medical marijuana activities, but they do not establish a comprehensive state system of legalized medical marijuana; or grant a “right” of convenient access to marijuana for medicinal use; or override the zoning, licensing, and police powers of local jurisdictions; or mandate local accommodation of medical marijuana cooperatives, collectives, or dispensaries.

The bans, of course, make it more difficult for the state to implement a legal system for medical marijuana, which is why other jurisdictions have struck down local bans. In Massachusetts, a decision from Attorney General Martha Coakley issued shortly after the passage of that state’s ballot initiative held that Massachusetts law does not allow for flat-out bans of dispensaries, because it would frustrate the law’s “legislative purpose.” Coakley noted, however, that different state laws and structures may dictate different results. What’s more, California’s law differs from those in other states in that it creates a voluntary state-wide system for dispensaries to regulate themselves so that they can comply with state restrictions. Local jurisdictions have their own more specific or mandatory licensing schemes.

One thing Monday’s decision does achieve is suggest why these state marijuana laws are not likely to fall under a legal challenge by federal authorities claiming they are preempted by federal drug law, which some have mulled in response to two state ballot initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana. As the court explains, the state medical marijuana laws “remove state-level criminal and civil sanctions from specified medical marijuana activities,’ but do not create a comprehensive state system, or grant a “right of convenient access.” Other state statutes are somewhat more robust than California’s in licensing state dispensaries. None, however, create a state-run system for dispensing marijuana or a right to use marijuana for any purpose, both of which likely would be preempted by the federal Controlled Substances Act because they create a direct conflict with the criminal law, rather than simply eliminating some actors from punishment under state law.

Mississippi is set to execute a man Tuesday night without testing available DNA evidence from a hair sample in his case. ThinkProgress reported last week that a 5-4 court upheld the decision not to test the evidence, in spite of a prosecutor’s inconclusive logic linking the hair sample to Willie Jerome Manning simply because they were both deemed African American. Now, as the Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen reports, the Department of Justice has intervened to point out that even prosecutors’ conclusion that the hair sample was African American was unscientific and invalid. A letter Manning’s lawyers filed in court reads:

We have determined that the microscopic hair comparison analysis testimony or laboratory report presented in this case included additional statements that exceeded the limits of science and was, therefore, invalid. In response to inquiries regarding whether the errors identified in the notification letter had any bearing on the examiner’s opinion regarding the racial classification of the hair, the FBI states the following: The scientific analysis of hair evidence permits an examiner to offer an opinion that a questioned hair possesses certain traits that are associated with a particular racial group. However, since a statistical probability cannot be determined for classification of hair into a particular racial group, it would be error for an examiner to testify that he can determine that the questioned hairs were from an individual of a particular racial group. Thus, an examiner cannot testify with any statement of probability whether the hair is from a particular racial group, but can testify that a hair exhibits traits associated with a particular racial group.

By not testing available DNA evidence using new scientific techniques that were not available at the time of his 1994 trial, Mississippi is choosing to ignore readily available scientific evidence in favor of flawed conclusions based on shaky racially charged testimony, as well as jailhouse informant testimony, which studies have found is particularly susceptible to manipulation. But as Cohen points out, there’s something else the DNA would do. If it is not Bryant’s, it is likely somebody else’s and that person will be identified only by testing the hair sample. Failure to do so reflects the deep institutional government interest in preserving the integrity of completed convictions, even at the expense of finding a different dangerous perpetrator or sparing an innocent person’s life. Manning is still awaiting word on whether Gov. Phil Bryant will grant clemency, and a court could still respond to the most recent motions by Manning’s lawyers.

In several West Coast cities, federal officials are initiating a new round of crackdowns against dispensaries that are seemingly complying with state medical marijuana law. In Seattle, 11 dispensaries received shutdown warnings. In San Francisco, almost half of the city’s small number of state-licensed dispensaries received similar warnings. And in neighboring cities like San Jose, several others were warned.

The cease-and-desist letters from the Drug Enforcement Administration warn harsh federal punishment, including as much as 40 years in jail even for landlords that rent to marijuana dispensaries. They also warn that they if properties do not cease marijuana activity within 30 days, the agency will pursue what’s known as civil forfeiture, in which the federal government threatens to seize the facility and other assets if the marijuana business continues. For those who are renting space, this means the landlord is effectively asked to evict its marijuana tenant — a process that has proved difficult, as state and federal courts handling eviction proceedings resist this federal intervention.

This is not the first round of crackdowns in any of these cities, which have forced shutdowns of dispensaries considered “models” in their community, or festered in prolonged legal battles. But these crackdowns are particularly symbolic, because they come en masse, in the wake of ballot initiatives in November to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana in two states, and because they are being executed post-sequester, even as prominent law enforcement officials like Attorney General Eric Holder have warned that the blunt cuts threaten public safety. Polls since the November ballot initiatives found that a majority of Americans now support marijuana legalization, and that an even greater percentage think the states should decide whether marijuana is legal.

DEA spokeswoman Jodie Underwood said the letters went out to those who were within 1,000 feet of a school or other prohibited area. She said because the feds can’t go after all dispensaries, they target those that are closer to sensitive areas as a means of enforcing federal drug law. “DEA enforces federal drug laws, and these letters have nothing to do with any pending legislation or state law,“ Underwood told the Seattle Times. “As we continue to identify locations, additional letters will be sent out.”

And while the crackdowns have focused on those alleged to be less than 1,000 feet from prohibited areas, dispensary owners say it’s almost impossible to keep within that distance in dense city settings. Even those who have been meticulous about measuring the distance and cited their facilities right outside of the 1,000-feet limit say they were targeted this week.

Particularly noteworthy is that in spite of San Francisco’s size and culture, the city now hosts only about 15 permitted medical marijuana dispensaries that have been deemed in compliance with state and local law (some others closed during earlier rounds of crackdowns). Compare that to Seattle and San Jose, which both have more than 100. Los Angeles has several hundred. Out of San Francisco’s 15 dispensaries, seven received letters this week — a move that could have the effect of eviscerating the local industry of regulated dispensaries. While an official White House policy on Washington and Colorado’s recreational marijuana laws is still pending, the DEA’s current approach suggests that even state law-abiding recreational dispensaries may be subject to the same type of crackdown, in the absence of federal legislation to exempt those states.

Leading the movement to fight back against the private prison industry, New Hampshire rejected all bids last month to house private prisons in the state, and passed a bill in the House to prohibit the private facilities that profit from incarceration. But the bill died in the Senate Thursday along party lines, with opponents saying they wanted to retain the flexibility to contract with private facilities in the future. The New Hampshire Union Leader reports:

Supporters of the bill said private prisons often maximize profits at the expense of prisoners who are separated from their families. They said private prisons focus on driving costs down while paying scant attention to rehabilitating inmates, which the state has an incentive to do to keep them out of corrections system once they are released.

But opponents say the state should not tie its hands and it needs the flexibility in the future, particularly in an emergency if a prison burned.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Morse, R-Salem, said there are no contracts on the horizon for using private prisons or turning the state’s prison system over to a private company to manage.

The bill is not needed, he said, adding that the discussion began two years ago when former Gov. John Lynch proposed looking into prison privatization.

Opponents also said they wanted to have the option to use private prisons in the event of an emergency, even though the bill contained a provision that explicitly allowed the state to transfer inmates to a private facility in an emergency. New Hampshire’s new governor has been vocal in her opposition to private prisons, and under her leadership, the state recently rejected every proposal to site private prisons in the state, citing their insufficient understanding of court-mandated standards of inmate care. A legislative change, however, would have prevented new proposals from being solicited and considered next year.

Private prisons have a perverse incentive to lobby for imprisonment in a country that already has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. In 2012, both GEO Group and Management & Training Corp. contributed to the campaigns of Republican state officials whose agency commissioned studies of private prison proposals. And Corrections Corporation of America had in the past contributed to the campaigns of then-Gov. John Lynch, who had solicited the private prison bids. As of April 2012, all three private prison firms had at least two lobbyists in the state.

Maryland became the 18th state to abolish the death penalty Thursday, as Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed the bill he vied for into law. The law will not affect five prisoners currently on death row, but O’Malley will consider whether to commute their sentences, according to the Associated Press.

While Maryland is the sixth state to eliminate the penalty in as many years and the first to do so south of the Mason Dixon line, other southern states are headed in the opposite direction. Florida just passed a bill (not yet signed into law) to speed up the death penalty, with legislators saying, “this is not about guilt or innocence,” while Mississippi is slated to execute an inmate next week without having tested available DNA from the crime scene. Nonetheless, the general trend away from the death penalty may have constitutional implications.

Mississippi has set an execution date for Willie Jerome Manning next week, without ever having tested readily available DNA from the scene of the abduction and murder in which Manning was convicted. In a 5-4 decision Thursday, the Mississippi Supreme Court said DNA testing was not necessary due to the “overwhelming evidence in his case.”  The Innocence Project provides background about the nature of that evidence:

Manning was convicted of the abduction and murder of Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller in 1992 on mostly circumstantial evidence, including the testimony of a jailhouse informant who had previously given a statement implicating another person. No physical evidence has ever linked him to the crime, and he has consistently maintained his innocence. He has been seeking post-conviction DNA testing for years, insisting that technological strides made in the past 20 years could prove him innocent of the crime.

During trial, the prosecutor reasoned that a hair sample found in the victim’s car belonged to Manning because both Manning and the hair sample were African American. Dissenting Justice Leslie King pointed out, ”Should a DNA test demonstrate that the African-American hairs found in Miller’s cart did not belong to Manning, then the infirmity in the prosecution’s emphasis on the importance of the evidence would be exposed. And it would certainly raise reasonable questions regarding Manning’s guilt.” But the majority nonetheless held such testing would not change the outcome of the case, disregarding the substantial evidence that informant testing is susceptible to bias and manipulation, and that the death penalty system is fraught with racial bias.

Even though DNA would supplant the prosecutor’s speculation about the hair sample with definitive scientific evidence, both the majority in Thursday’s ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court have refused to stand up for defendants’ right to raise the most robust defense possible. In a 2009 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a defendant who was willing to pay for a DNA test at his own expense was not entitled to the test, because allowing William Osburne to prove his potential innocence risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

Manning’s inability to access evidence in his own case is alarmingly common. Because it is law enforcement officers who investigate crimes, prosecutors are the gatekeepers to evidence that should be equally available to both parties, and they are institutionally positioned to block evidence that might threaten the convictions they’ve secured. Nonetheless, some states and law enforcers recognize that it is in everybody’s best interests to have all available evidence. Nine states have laws granting defense lawyers access to a national DNA database. And even Texas’ conservative attorney general recently came out in support of mandatory DNA testing. Manning’s execution is now scheduled for May 7, but his attorney has filed another motion asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision.

In New York City, marijuana is the most common reason for arrest, even though only possession of marijuana in public view is a crime. A dramatic spike in these arrests has accompanied the rise of the New York Police Department’s controversial stop and frisk tactic, and an equally controversial reported tactic of considering the marijuana in “public view” once a suspect is ordered by police to take it out of a pocket. Almost all of these cases end in plea deals, and most who are not charged with anything else plead guilty to a non-criminal violation such as disorderly conduct, even where the evidence would have shown that suspects did nothing wrong at all. Even these plea deals come only after arrestees have been detained, often for 8 hours or overnight in jail, and sacrificed an additional day to return to court.

But those who dare to actually defend the charge in court – particularly in the Bronx — find that there is no place in the legal system for misdemeanor due process. After a two-plus-year trek through the legal system with 54 clients who challenged their marijuana arrests in the Bronx, nonprofit Bronx Defenders found that prosecutors use chronic delay and mandatory court appearances to effectively kill every marijuana possession defense attempt. Rather than accept a plea deal, these defendants pled innocent. They showed up to court. And then they showed up again, waiting full days in court behind hundreds of other defendants before being told that the prosecutor was “not ready.” Since Bronx Defenders began this process in July 2011, not one of the 54 marijuana defendants had a suppression hearing – the initial hearing at which the prosecutors are tasked with producing physical evidence of the alleged crime. Courts so clogged with delayed cases that they have become little more than “plea bargaining mills,” as the New York Times puts it, treat misdemeanors as a particular afterthought, with threats of overly punishing sentences lorded over clients to extract a guilty plea and plow through overwhelming caseloads. As a result, a study released Wednesday concludes, it was “virtually impossible … to effectively litigate the constitutionality of street-level police behavior.” Take the story of 17-year-old Angel Cardona, whose name has been changed:

In the waning days of summer 2011, Angel Cardona … chatted with three friends—two female and one male—while waiting for a bus that would take him home for the night. Before the bus arrived, however, a marked police car pulled up to the bus stop. The officer in the passenger seat beckoned the teenagers over to the car and began to question the two young men in the group. A moment later the officers were standing on the sidewalk and Angel and his friends were lined up along a nearby railing and forced to assume the search position. One of the officers frisked Angel and then went through his pockets. The officer found a partially smoked marijuana cigarette in a small plastic box in Angel’s right front pants pocket. Angel was arrested and spent approximately 8 hours in police custody before being issued a desk appearance ticket.

Three months later, Angel and his mother, a home health aide who had taken the day off to accompany her son to court, arrived in Bronx Criminal Court for Angel’s arraignment. There they discovered that the police officer who had arrested Angel claimed, falsely, that he had seen Angel smoking marijuana on the sidewalk, resulting in a misdemeanor charge (simply carrying marijuana in one’s pocket is a non-criminal violation). […]

Almost 10 months later … Angel and his mother sat on a bench in the lower level of the Bronx Hall of Justice dejected, frustrated, and resigned to the realities of the criminal justice system. The prosecutor had not been ready for hearings or trial on either of the past two trial dates and had indicated that she would state “not ready” for a third consecutive time. At Angel’s first post-arraignment court appearance, the presiding judge had openly questioned Angel’s decision to request a trial and pressured him to accept the prosecutor’s offer. Angel stood his ground, and he and his mother made 3 more court appearances, missing school and work, respectively, on every court date. Each time, they waited for an opportunity to confront the officer who had unconstitutionally stopped, frisked, and searched Angel. But their patience (and Angel’s mother’s vacation days) had run out.

Rather than endure another 2-month adjournment on the potentially empty promise of a hearing, Angel accepted the prosecutor’s offer and pled guilty to disorderly conduct—392 days after his initial arrest. He promptly paid the $120 mandatory court surcharge and moved on with his life, but not before confessing a newfound disillusionment with the criminal justice system.

The Florida legislature passed a bill this week to impose new obstacles on challenging the death penalty in a state with the greatest number of exonerations. The bill’s intent was to shorten the time inmates wait for execution by imposing time limits for appeals and post-conviction motions, but DNA and other evidence often emerges years after a crime is committed – a concern that didn’t seem to faze Republican proponents of the bill who said swift justice is “not about guilt or innocence”:

“Is swift justice fair justice?” asked Democratic party Senator Arthenia Joyner, a Tampa attorney who voted against the bill. “We have seen cases where, years later, convicted people were exonerated,” she said. […]

But Republican Senator Rob Bradley said, “this is not about guilt or innocence, it’s about timely justice.” Frivolous appeals designed only for delay are not fair to victims and their families, he said. [...]

“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the bill in the House of Representatives, said last week during House debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.”

Florida has more people on death row than any other state except California. Since the state reinstituted the death penalty in the 1970s, one fourth of those sentenced to death were later exonerated. The initial bill set strict timelines for post-conviction motions and appeals that would have likely led to the execution of many of these exonereees, who were facing a death sentence for well over ten years before new evidence emerged in their case. But after several amendments, the most recent version passed by both houses states only that capital cases should be resolved “as soon as possible.” The changes may have been motivated by concerns over a legal challenge. A similar 2000 law was struck down by the state Supreme Court as a violation of separation of powers. Perhaps more alarming than the text of the final version is the intent of the legislators who proposed it to facilitate quick deaths without regard to guilt or innocence, particularly in a system rife with error and racial bias.

The New Jersey legislature reached a deal with Gov. Chris Christie (R) today on a bill aimed at ending preventable deaths because those who witness drug overdoses are afraid to call the police. The new bill passed overwhelmingly by the state legislature for the second time, after a partial veto by Christie, will provide some legal protection to those who witness a drug overdose and call for help. It will also expand immunity for those who administer the overdose antidote, naloxone.

Last year, Christie vetoed a similar “Good Samaritan” bill intended to incentivize individuals to report overdoses and administer life-saving drugs, but Christie came around to a compromise after lobbying from parents whose children had died from an overdose. The latest version passed again by both houses will provide legal immunity for anyone who calls 911, except those who have violated a restraining order. Christie also narrowed a provision to permit non-health professionals to administer the overdose antidote, allowing immunity to those who administer the antidote drug during an emergency, if the person believed in good faith that the victim was experiencing an opioid overdose. New Jersey On-Line reports:

In 2009, the last year for which statistics are available, there were 752 drug overdose deaths in New Jersey, many of them due to prescription overdose or a combination of prescription and illegal drugs.

The scope of the problem is staggering, said Diane Conforti of Rumson, whose 26-year-old son, Michael D. Garfole, died from an overdose. “Nurses have told me they go out and check the bushes around hospitals because kids bodies get dumped there,” said Conforti, a licensed clinical social worker.

Nationally, rates of overdose have more than tripled since 1990 and led to more than 38,000 U.S. deaths since 2010, according to David Sheff, the author of a book on addiction. Most lethal overdoses come from street drugs like heroin as well as prescription pain medications like Oxycontin.

Eleven states have enacted Good Samaritan laws for drug overdoses, and ten have laws that provide some immunity for administering naloxone, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. The measure is the latest move toward a new approach on drug reform that emphasizes public health over criminalization of drug use.