About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney's jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders.

Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show.

Monroe may be an outstanding person privately and an upstanding community citizen. But the fact is, he is a poster child for what's wrong with the legal guardianship problem. A story examining the issue in Wake County could not have been done without focusing on Monroe's success in earning a handsome living from a flawed system -- even though, as the story pointed out, he operated within the system.

. . . Justice Stevens said Massachusetts was due special deference in its claim to standing because of its status as a sovereign state. This new twist on the court’s standing doctrine may have been an essential tactic in winning the vote of Justice [Anthony] Kennedy, a leader in the court’s federalism revolution of recent years. Justice Stevens, a dissenter from the court’s states’ rights rulings and a master of court strategy, in effect managed to use federalism as a sword rather than a shield.

Despite the apparent transparency, the real story was probably one that no justice acknowledged: the inability of the court’s four most liberal members, Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg, to count on Justice Kennedy’s eventual vote. While four votes are sufficient to grant a case under the court’s rules, five are of course necessary to win it. The liberal justices, or at least their leader, Justice Stevens, may well have decided that refraining at this point was the wiser course, given the risk that the case might come out the “wrong” way, from their point of view, with an affirmation of the appeals court’s decision that would then become a hard and fast Supreme Court precedent.

Speaking on Thursday evening to the Sentinel, Lubet insisted he was not muzzling the parties when he asked them to stop communicating with the media. He acknowledged there was no motion before him to restrict the release of evidence to the media by prosecutors and that he did it "on the court's motion to see where we are on all the pre-trial publicity." And he vehemently denied he was acting more like a defense attorney than a judge from the bench, saying his concerns and directives were aimed at "both sides." "My sole intent is not to restrict freedom of the press but only to ensure Ms. Nowak and the state get a fair trial in the case," Lubet said. "My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I totally respect the freedom of the press."

Child pornography is, of course, unspeakably disturbing and repulsive. But if the stakes in combating it are to include three-digit prison sentences, there is reason to be skeptical about laws that revise the usual procedures and presumptions. Indeed, one way society can show that it is deadly serious about a crime is to allow those accused of it the best defense possible.

Roberts often joins Scalia — for two decades the court's most feisty voice from the right — in pelting lawyers with questions in staccato fashion, delivering well-timed wisecracks and often overshadowing the other seven justices during public oral arguments.

With the decision of the state attorney general's office to drop all charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans, no charge of rape or sexual assault exists. Mangum's claim has been vehemently denied by the three men indicted in the case and by their teammates, who believe they have been damaged by a false accusation. Attorney General Roy Cooper said his office concluded that the three are innocent. Mangum also has been widely identified on the Internet, including on mainstream sites such as Wikipedia. Because of these circumstances, and in order to more fully report on the case and its aftermath, we decided to publish her name.

In the now-infamous Duke lacrosse rape fraud, the falsely accused men are white, the lying accuser is black, and racial demagoguery has fueled the prosecution. In other cases, such as that of Lamar Owens, the races have been reversed and suspicions of racially selective prosecution muted. In most, the men and women have been of the same race.

If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves. [Ed. note: I can imagine what they'd do!] So rather than relying on disparaging stereotypes and creating political and racial conflicts, all of us need to take a step back from this case and learn from it. The Duke lacrosse case has shown that our society has lost sight of the most fundamental principle of our legal system: the presumption of innocence.

That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.
. . .
[Gonzales' arrival saw] an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, 'whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty 'to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to 'execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Largely absent from the trial was any evidence to support Mr. Nacchio's theory that he believed Qwest could weather mounting financial problems because lucrative secret government contracts were headed Qwest's way. Lawyers for both sides and for clandestine government agencies had spent numerous hours in closed hearings arguing over classified evidence that Mr. Nacchio wanted to use. Mr. Nacchio's lawyers filed redacted briefs objecting to the court's exclusion of at least some of the classified evidence. The matter is expected to be a major point in Mr. Nacchio's appeal.

By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong's case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

A sly formulation. Whoever thought it up chose to focus on the legalistic question of whether Nifong can avoid having his case being thrown out before trial, while glossing over the more important question as to whether any reasonable prosecutor could believe the three defendants to be guilty and force them through the risk, expense, and trauma of a trial.

I was on jury duty last week, in a state criminal court in Manhattan. During the orientation on Wednesday, a court officer, with mixed pride and hyperbole, said his was the busiest courthouse in America.

I never saw so much as the inside of a courtroom. After a couple of days of milling around in an assembly room with more than 100 other potential jurors, the State of New York thanked us for our service and sent us home.