As some commenters have pointed out, the Times & other respected media outlets too often have erred on one side or the other when it comes to what is fit to print.

Writing as a person who once had a comparatively minor "Richard Jewell moment," I can tell you there is little that is more unsettling than being suspected of a crime one did not commit, especially when the suspicion was created by a (in my case very slightly) heroic act -- in some ways, I imagine it is worse than being caught for having actually committed a crime.

To have that suspicion made public, to be known in the public arena only as "a person of interest" would be mortifying & life-altering.

"The job of the news media is supposed to be to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." [Quoting Kristof's column]

NO, that is NOT the job of news media. The job is to report news. That construction presupposes the "comfortable" are blameworthy and responsible for the "afflicted". It presupposes the "afflicted" are blameless victims, not responsible for their plight.

This gag order is an unusual move for a federal judge. Though the Houston Chronicle and the Galveston County Daily News have covered the case for some months, the coverage of Kent has not been particularly vast, compared with other Houston stories. No gag orders were issued in the multiple Enron criminal trials where media coverage was far more extensive and federal judges here repeatedly sat juries from the 13 counties that feed the federal Houston jury pool.

Of all trials, one involving a public servant charged with violating the very laws he was appointed to a lifetime bench to uphold should be conducted in the light of day.

Light, after all, is what got this case to the courtroom in the first place.

Some federal and state courts are already putting a lot out there — all court documents, streamed audio of hearings, everything except what the judge ate for lunch — and that trend is spreading.

Public defenders are being hit so hard by budget cuts and growing caseloads that offices in several states are refusing to take on more cases because they say defendants' rights are being hurt. Other jurisdictions say they may follow suit.

Rather than being a man who tapped his foot to solicit gay sex from an undercover cop in an airport bathroom, U.S. Sen. Larry Craig is trying to protect the rights of Minnesotans who plead guilty to misdemeanors by mail, his attorney said Wednesday.

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig's attorney argued to have his disorderly conduct conviction thrown out for lack of evidence during arguments Wednesday before the state Court of Appeals.

The law says a judge has to find a person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and there's no indication in the court record of enough evidence to do that, [Craig's lawyer Billy Martin] said.

In pleas in felony cases, such findings of guilt are usually accomplished through a colloquy between the judge or an attorney and the defendant. Standing before the judge, the defendant is asked questions and admits to the crime.

But there is no such colloquy in a guilty plea by mail. Martin argued that without a judge's signature, there is no way to demonstrate that a court had found enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, even if the person voluntarily enters the guilty plea.

When Martin talked about how the senator used a mail-in plea form rather than appear in person, losing a chance for an on-the-record discussion before the court about the charge against him, [appeals court Judge] Kalitowski asked, "Didn't [Craig] waive the right to a colloquy when he signed the form?"

Martin said he did but that Craig did not waive the legal right that the complaint against him be adequate. He also argued that Craig's behavior didn't meet the standard for disorderly conduct because the law requires behavior to affect others.

“Angler” grew out of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of the same title that Mr. Gellman and Jo Becker (now of The New York Times) reported for The Washington Post in 2007, and this book remains heavily indebted to those articles. For that matter, this volume builds upon the pioneering work of many other reporters (most notably, Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times, and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post), whom Mr. Gellman mentions only glancingly, if at all, or in cursory notes at the end of the volume.

Michael Allison, chief executive of the Internet Crimes Group, a private company specializing in Internet security, said the hackers may have accessed Palin's account by using publicly available information to guess her password, or by using a small program called a trojan to capture her keystrokes.

"I would hope the authorities would be all over this," Allison said. "The only deterrent is that people know the certainty of being caught."

I certainly should think about a book, and in due course I will.  The series has been a lot of fun to pull together, and it's gotten a good response.  But for now I'm focused on preparing for my new job.

... [L]egal experts pointed to the General Assembly's passage of a host of far-reaching laws regulating areas as diverse as gangs and state employees' access to sexually explicit Web sites along with spam and late-term abortions. Some of those measures, enacted or amended over the past decade, put Virginia at the forefront of national legal trends, exposing the commonwealth to challenges from a variety of activist groups.

The Louisiana Supreme Court in Question:  An Empirical Statistical Study of the Effects of Campaign Money on the Judicial Function published in Volume 82 of the Tulane Law Review at 1291 (2008), was based on empirical data coded by the authors, but the data contained numerous coding errors.  Tulane Law Review learned of the coding errors after the publication.  Necessarily, these errors call into question some or all of the conclusions in the study as published.  The Law Review deeply regrets the errors.

The law review recently posted a note on its Web site saying the study was based on flawed data that called its conclusions into question. Vernon Valentine Palmer, the study’s principal author and a law professor at Tulane, acknowledged the errors, but said the corrected data appear to continue to support the study’s general conclusions. He also said that he was seeking an independent review of the study.

After I put up the post, early this morning, we had a conversation about it -- initiated by me, incidentally -- that follows from some recent efforts we have been making to keep the blog more focused on the Supreme Court -- that is, on activity directly before the Court, on the way predictably to the Court (for example, the domestic detention case from 4th Circuit), and in direct reaction to the Court (for example, the Guantanamo followups to the Boumediene decision).  With the rising popularity of our blog (the numbers last term were staggering for a blog), we are finding ourselves under a lot of pressure to cover more things -- reach out to issues we cannot be sure are Supreme Court material, announce meetings, do book reviews -- and so we have had to give some new thought to just what our niche is and ought to be.

On the bailout story, while no one had any problems with the substance of the post, it just was a little too remote -- at this stage -- from the Supreme Court so we thought it better to lay down an internal marker.  We do that sometimes because we think we are a responsible blog.  No one here likes to kill a story.  But no one here has the illusion that we can cover all of the legal world, even though, quite frankly, it might increase our audience if we tried to do that.  There are times when I would like to do a constitutional thinkpiece, on some issue that really fascinates me, and I think that is what got hold of me last night after reading the text of the Treasury bailout plan.  But I usually refrain from such impulses, remembering that scotusblog has to be true to its name, and its mission.

You and our readers (bless 'em all) can rest assured that if there is a lawsuit over the bailout, and we judge it is on its way to the Court, we will be all over it like a January snowfall in upstate New York.

Why had the journalists who knew about the Reasonover case failed to question a police investigation, a prosecution and a conviction so obviously flawed? Why hadn’t somebody written an exposé before the guards hustled Reasonover to the waiting prison van?

Some of those efforts would lead to feature stories that entertain and educate news consumers about important, interesting people within the criminal justice system. While preparing those stories, though, the reporters could also be looking for the police crime laboratory technician distrusted by defense lawyers because of an obvious prosecution bias; the sex crimes detective who’s racist; the defense lawyer who misses appellate deadlines, closing legal doors for possibly innocent defendants; and the prosecutor who refuses to institute an open-files policy for defense lawyers, leaving decisions about evidence that might point to innocence entirely in the state’s hands.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers said [Vandeveld] had made his assertions in a filing in the Guantánamo tribunal that, like all filings here, can be released only by a military judge.