by TChris

If a police officer doesn’t know why a suspect is fleeing, it’s reasonable for the officer to shoot the suspect to death and ask questions later. As you pause to consider the absurdity of that proposition, ask yourself why a government lawyer would consider it reasonable for an officer to shoot and kill an unarmed teenager who had just stolen $10 in a burglary. And then ask whether a lawyer who expressed that belief should serve on the Supreme Court.

As an assistant to the Solicitor General, Judge Alito weighed in on a case involving an officer who was investigating a possible burglary. The officer heard a door slam, then went to the backyard where he “shined his flashlight on a youth who appeared to be unarmed and who was trying to climb a six-foot-high chain link fence to escape.” The officer “seized” the kid by shooting him in the head.

by TChris

Before and during the Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court, Arlen Specter seemed quite concerned about the limits of judicial power. In particular, he thought the Court had overreached in limiting or striking down legislation enacted by Congress, including the Court's decision declaring unconstitutional a portion of the Americans With Disabilities Act that prohibited state governments from discriminating in employment on the basis of disabilities.

Sen. Specter seems to be satisfied with Judge Alito’s views on abortion after quizzing him today. But why isn’t Specter asking Alito the very question that consumed him earlier this year -- whether Alito respects the authority of Congress to legislate?

Alito doesn't think Congress has the power to regulate machine-gun possession, or to broadly enforce the Family and Medical Leave Act, or to enact race or gender discrimination laws that might be effective in remedying race and gender discrimination, or to tackle monopolists. Alito thus neatly joins the ranks of right-wing activists in the battle to limit the power of Congress and diminish the efficacy of the judiciary.

Will Specter ask Alito why he voted to strike down the Family and Medical Leave Act as it applies to state governments -- a position that was too extreme even for former Chief Justice Rehnquist? Is Specter still interested in ferreting out adherents of the Constitution in Exile movement, who believe courts should strike down a variety of health, labor and environmental laws as beyond the scope of congressional power? Why is Specter suddenly silent on these issues? (More on Alito’s record of judicial activism here and here.)

What do we make of the news today that Judge Alito was once a defendant in a civil suit for damages resulting from a traffic accident in which his wife was the driver and which was settled for an undisclosed sum?

When it comes to personal injury lawsuits, you can't really judge a lawsuit by its pleadings. The plaintiff will put his injuries in the most severe light while the defendant will say it wasn't his fault and the plaintiff wasn't really hurt that bad. Still, the disparity between the plaintiff's complaint and Judge Alito's explanation warrants further examination.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Key West: Time again for the annual NORML drug law seminar at the Pier House in Key West. This is the 22d.

Today is the end of the hurricane season, and there was, in Key West sytle, a ceremony for the burning of the hurricane warning flags at sunset, at the Pier House beach, and CNN even thought enough of it as a symbol of the end of a horrendous hurricane season to broadcast it live. Fitting for Key West, the mayor gave a tribute to the dead and displaced from hurricanes throughout the United States, and it was sounded on a conch shell by a man in a pirate costume.

We've all read the glowing recommendations of former law clerks of Judge Alito. Here's a non-glowing report from a former Third Circuit clerk who worked not for Alito, but for another judge.

From 1996 to 1997, I was privileged to clerk for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Over the course of that year, my judge sat on a number of cases with Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. One of these cases stands out in my memory and gives me pause when it comes to Judge Alito’s commitment to judicial restraint.

One of those cases involved the murder conviction of Clifford Smith. The clerk, Michael J. Zydney Mannheimer, who is now Assistant Professor of Law at Salmon P. Chase College of Law, Northern Kentucky University, relates events establishing Judge Alito's determination to uphold the conviction. He concludes with this important observation:

The Justice Department released 470 pages of documents about Judge Sam Alito to reporters Monday on highly techical legal issues -- and gave them three hours to read them

Despite the lack of time to fully digest them, as the New York Times reports, at least one thing was abundantly clear:

In several of the memorandums, however, Mr. Alito makes a series of arguments espousing a broad view of law enforcement authority and a skeptical view of proposals to protect individuals from legal investigations.

The Washington Post reports the memos show Alito was hostile to foreigner's rights:

As a senior lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that immigrants who enter the United States illegally and foreigners living outside their countries are not entitled to the constitutional rights afforded to Americans.

Abortion is not the critical issue in Alito's nomination. Freedom and the right to life for the already born is more important.

by Last Night in Little Rock

I-40 Exit 125 @ US65, Conway AR: Exxon, Mobil, Shell, and Phillips 66: $1.849, and they've been that low since Wednesday.

That's slightly more than half the $3.599 I paid over Labor Day weekend. Crude oil was $56.34 last week, down from a high of $70.85 August 30.

Thanks to Berkeley law professior Liu Goodwin for pointing out in an LA Times op-ed that there are issues besides abortion that are cause for concern over Judge Sam Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court -- particularly his past rulings in death penalty cases.

Capital cases make up a substantial portion of the Supreme Court's docket each year. From 2000 to 2005, the court decided only three cases involving abortion but more than three dozen cases involving the death penalty. In this area, the Supreme Court often serves not only in its typical role of deciding unsettled questions of broadly applicable law but also as a court of last resort to correct errors and prevent injustice in individual cases.

Goodwin reviews Alito's record in capital cases:

People for the American Way have launched their new anti-Alito ad, Fool Me Once. You can watch it online. From the text:

President Bush is trying to fool Americans into thinking that Sam Alito is a mainstream judicial nominee, which is why PFAW is committed to exposing the truth about Alito’s record and his judicial philosophy. This ad recounts troubling Alito rulings and legal positions, including his voting to uphold a strip search of a 10-year old girl without a valid warrant, his unsuccessful effort as an appeals court judge to declare a law regulating machine guns unconstitutional, and his declaration while in the Justice Department that the Constitution does not protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

Here are the reasons PFAW opposes Alito. And here's a handy guide where you can read about Judge Alito's decisions, with free links to the opinions themselves.

Fox News is refusing to air the ad.

More than 2,000 delegates of the Union of Reform Judaism met this weekend in Houston and passed a resolution opposing the nomination of Judge Sam Alito for the Supreme Court. The resolution is based on Judge Alito's record with respect to abortion, women's and civil rights, federal power and the separation of church and state. The group represents 900 synagogues with 1.5 million members. It is the only branch of Judaism that recognizes civil unions between same-sex couples and ordination of gays. From the text of the resolution :

• Judge Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court “would threaten protection of the most fundamental rights which our Movement supports including, but not limited to, reproductive freedom, the separation between church and state, protection of civil rights and civil liberties, and protection of the environment;”

• On choice, women’s rights, civil rights, and the scope of federal power particularly as it relates to civil rights and environmental protection, Judge Alito’s nomination “has engendered a national debate on one or more issues of core concern to the Reform Movement so that the outcome of the nomination is likely to be perceived as a referendum on that issue and will have significant implications beyond the individual nomination;”

by TChris

In his application to join the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, Judge Alito emphasized his pride in working against abortion rights and “racial and ethnic quotas,” and pointed to his “disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause and reapportionment.” Alito’s apparent zeal to retrench the progress that the law has made in each of those areas is cause for alarm. Today, Sen. Biden singled out the least contentious of those issues -- reapportionment -- to question whether Alito has embraced a view of the law that is well outside the mainstream.

"The part that jeopardizes it (Alito's nomination) more is his quote in there saying that he had strong disagreement with the Warren Court particularly on reapportionment - one man, one vote," Biden told "Fox News Sunday." "The fact that he questioned abortion and the idea of quotas is one thing. The fact that he questioned the idea of the legitimacy of the reapportionment decisions of the Warren Court is even something well beyond that," Biden said.

Biden dropped the F-word -- filibuster -- as a remedy if Alito seems primed to reshape the law to suit an extreme agenda.

Via Halcyon at Daily Kos: The ACLU has sued a New Orleans parish prison for locking up 45 inmates without food or water during Katrina. The suit also alleges abuse by prison guards during this period.

Some prisoners claim that deputies forced them into their cells by shooting bean bags, macing and tasering them; once they were returned to their cells, some deputies handcuffed the cell doors to prevent them from escaping. As the locked cells began to flood, prisoners hung signs out of the broken windows for help, and others jumped into the water below. According to the testimonials, deputies and members of the Special Investigation Division shot at some of the prisoners who were attempting to escape the rising water inside the jail, and several prisoners report that they witnessed fellow prisoners getting shot in the back.