Tuesday, Nov 18th
Last update08:40:45 AM GMT
Even "all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them," and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.
Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is "emblematic" of legal system failure.
A few years ago, Antonin Scalia, one of the nine justices on the US supreme court, made a bold statement. There has not been, he said, "a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred … the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."
Scalia may have to eat his words. It is now clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit, and his name – Carlos DeLuna – is being shouted from the rooftops of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The august journal has cleared its entire spring edition, doubling its normal size to 436 pages, to carry an extraordinary investigation by a Columbia law school professor and his students.
Hundreds of species of mammals in the Western Hemisphere may not be able to migrate with the projected speed of climate change, according to a new study released Monday.
"As they have in response to past climatic changes, many species will shift their distributions in response to modern climate change," the authors write in the study. "However, due to the unprecedented rapidity of projected climatic changes, some species may not be able to move their ranges fast enough to track shifts in suitable climates and associated habitats."
In Pennsylvania, there's an industrial revolution going on. Battalions of drilling rigs are boring into the earth to extract natural gas from an underground layer of shale called the Marcellus formation.
The first one came from coal mining. All over the state, you can see bright orange rivers and streams. The aquatic life was killed by acidic runoff from abandoned mines.
From water worries to well blowouts, the inherent risks of oil and gas extraction are often played down by those in the business. But another group of profit-seekers has every reason to keep a close eye on dangers for drillers: their insurers.
Underwriters now face a politically charged problem in the perceived threats to water supplies of hydraulic fracturing.
Outlandish is probably the polite way to describe a claim made by the U.S. State Department during a recent court hearing on the People's Mujahedin of Iran.
State Department counsel told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the U.S. government had never had access to Camp Ashraf, the town to the north of Baghdad where many PMOI activists have lived for decades.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the evacuation of a Hebron home taken by settlers last month after being informed that the expropriation of Palestinian homes and lands could complicate Israeli officials in war crimes litigation, Haaretz learned on Sunday.
Last month, Israeli security forces evacuated Israeli settlers from a house in a Palestinian neighborhood in Hebron, in a surprise move that ended an affair that sparked controversy across Israel and caused a rift in the government.
A U.S. judge has refused to release a draft conclusion by a CIA historian that blames the Kennedy administration for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Senior U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, sitting in Washington, ruled Thursday that the work, the fifth volume of a CIA history of the operation, is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, The Miami Herald reported. She said it was "rejected for inclusion in the final project."
If it seems as though the FBI is making a large number of terror busts these days, maybe it's because the agency itself is at least partly responsible for hatching the plots. That has some political observers wondering if the FBI's strategies are making the best use of the nation's limited counterterrorist resources.
"Many times," says Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, "suspects are warned about the seriousness of their plots and given opportunities to back out." But, the Times report indicates recorded conversations show that the warning is not always given, and that in some cases suspects are even encouraged to continue.
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