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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (1753)	7/18/2005 1:42:05 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542596

"It's possible, of course, that the evidence presented by military prosecutors is exaggerated, maybe even wrong. The evidence required to designate a detainee an "enemy combatant" is lower than the "reasonable doubt" standard of U.S. criminal prosecutions. So there is much we don't know." The "truth" or something like it, may eventually come out, but the claims of Allawi, about documents not yet verified, and the self serving reports by folks who defected to he West, are not very good evidence. That Saddam would have put out feelers to Al Qaeda, in order to get them to leave him alone would surprise me not at all. Why it would make the folks who wrote this article think Saddam and AQ were a team, surprises me. Saddam would have known they were a threat to him- as some of their rhetoric indicates. Seems to me if you looked at the Saudi connection to Al Q you'd find a lot more travel and a lot more money, and we didn't invade them.... I didn't find much new in the article, and it's funny where it turned up on the net: frontpagemag.com Gosh just look at that fair and balanced T-shirt! Hard to take anything seriously when it's written by partisans who start out with a conclusion, and write an article in order to justify it. Happens on both sides of course, but it's never very convincing. No doubt the article will make people who already believe in the connection even more convinced they are right, and people who want actual proof, will wait for actual proof.

To: Bill who wrote (1753)	7/19/2005 5:02:10 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542596

Executed Man May Be Cleared in New Inquiry By KATE ZERNIKE Published: July 19, 2005 ST. LOUIS, July 18 - The corner of Sarah and Olive looks almost nothing as it did 25 years ago when a 19-year-old drug dealer named Quintin Moss was gunned down from a slow-moving car. The boarded-up houses have been replaced by a new townhouse development marked by sleek stone gates; the drug dealers and prostitutes are gone. Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times "Every prosecutor conceptually has the notion that someone innocent can be convicted," said Jennifer Joyce, the St. Louis circuit attorney. And the man convicted of the killing, Larry Griffin, was executed 10 years ago. Yet the city's top prosecutor has decided to re-investigate the murder as if it just happened, out of new concerns that the wrong man may have been put to death for the crime. Prompted by questions raised in a report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, hopes to decide once and for all whether Mr. Griffin was guilty or innocent - though she acknowledges that 25 years later it may be hard to do more than show the flaws in the earlier prosecution. Still, should Ms. Joyce, the St. Louis circuit attorney, demonstrate Mr. Griffin was not the killer, as the report and even some members of the victim's family contend, it would be the first proven execution of an innocent person, so far as death penalty advocates or opponents can recall. Though dozens of people have been exonerated while on death row - from 30 to 75 in the last two decades, depending on which side of the debate is talking - proving Mr. Griffin's innocence would hand death penalty opponents the example that they have lacked in arguing for the abolition of capital punishment. Already, Ms. Joyce's decision last week to investigate has prompted newspaper editorials to suggest that the case could be cause for a moratorium on the death penalty. Even some death penalty supporters say that her willingness to officially re-open the investigation is a remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, development in the debate. "If they prove that he was innocent, that would be the gold standard," said Joshua Marquis, the prosecutor in Clatsop County, Ore., and a frequent speaker in support of the death penalty. "I'm not sure opponents of the death penalty would start prevailing, but they'd be able to say to people like me, 'What about Mr. Griffin?' " Still, Mr. Marquis said, "innocence is very different than saying this guy maybe didn't do it." And it is hard to sort out an absolute truth 25 years later. Unlike many cases that have resulted in exonerations, this case has no DNA evidence. The man whose testimony is now being challenged died last year. Other witnesses have changed their stories; memories are hazy. And like the debate about the death penalty itself, beliefs about what really happened here that June afternoon in 1980 are colored by race. The prosecutor has seen three exonerations since taking office in 2001. "Every prosecutor conceptually has the notion that someone innocent can be convicted," Ms. Joyce said. "I've seen it firsthand." Her decision to revisit the Griffin case followed the report by the NAACP group, which began investigating the case last year after people here expressed long-simmering doubts about Mr. Griffin's guilt. The report contends that three other men killed Mr. Moss. Mr. Moss's family joined the NAACP group in raising questions about Mr. Griffin's guilt. According to the report and interviews, Mr. Moss's siblings had warned him to get out of town in the summer of 1980; people said he was a target because he was believed to have killed Dennis Griffin, a reputed drug dealer and Larry Griffin's older brother. On June 26, Mr. Moss was at the corner of Sarah Avenue and Olive Street, a crime-infested strip known as the Stroll, when a 1968 Chevrolet Impala drove by slowly. Two black men leaned out and shot him 13 times, killing him almost instantly. Another man, standing 75 feet away, was hit by a stray bullet but told the police he did not see the gunmen. The car was found abandoned that night with the murder weapons, as well as a traffic ticket made out to Reggie Griffin, the 19-year-old nephew of Larry Griffin. At Larry Griffin's trial a year later, the only eyewitness testimony came from Robert Fitzgerald, a career criminal from Boston and an admitted drug addict who was in St. Louis in the federal witness protection program. Mr. Fitzgerald said he and a friend had heard the shots from behind the hood of a car while replacing a battery.