Word: courting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...neglected to talk to the highway patrol officers who had investigated the scene, who testified that they set up the perimeter themselves. The prosecution capitalized on the error, dismissing the Vietnam scenario as a ludicrous ploy, and Johnson got the death sentence. The majority on the Missouri Supreme Court considered the defense's preparation good enough to let the result stand, because their mistake was not the "most likely" reason for the verdict and sentence...
...dissent, Judge White argued that the standard applied by the majority was unnecessarily restrictive. Expert testimony on Johnson's sanity had gone both ways, and U.S. Supreme Court precedent, White stated, would allow a new trial or sentencing if there was a "reasonable probability" of a different outcome had the defense lawyers not shredded their credibility at the outset. "While I share the majority's horror at this carnage," White wrote, "I cannot uphold this as an acceptable standard of representation for a defendant accused of capital murder...
However, the spurious charge of racism obscures a greater threat. Ashcroft began his campaign against White by arguing that he had voted to overturn a death penalty 14 times. Later, the tactics became more sophisticated, and White's votes were compared to others on the court (some of whom, Ashcroft appointees, had voted against more death penalties than he), but the count-the-numbers approach betrays a cynical assumption that any vote to reverse the death penalty is suspect, that the courts should rubber-stamp death sentences instead of conducting meaningful review...
David Scheffer, Ambassador at Large to United States war crimes policy and head of the U.S. delegation to the International Criminal Court negotiations, spoke at the Harvard Law School late last night...
...discussion, which was entitiled "Challenges to U.S. Policy on Atrocities: The International Criminal Court and War Crime Prosecutions," was sponsored by the law school's International Law Society...