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As Iraqi Militants Launch New Attacks, Maliki Rejects Unity Government

As Iraqi Militants Launch New Attacks, Maliki Rejects Unity Government

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

BAGHDAD — Embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Wednesday sharply rejected calls to form a national unity government, striking a defiant tone in the face of U.S. pressure to share more political power as a rebellion by Sunni Muslim insurgents threatens his grip on the country.

Maliki’s rivals have urged a “national salvation government” that would demonstrate solidarity against the uprising led by an al-Qaida splinter group. But in a weekly address, Maliki, a member of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, dismissed the idea as “an attempt to eliminate the democratic experiment and to neglect the constitution.”

Even as he spoke, insurgents were launching attacks on a major air base at Balad, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, a former U.S. military installation that currently houses a range of Iraqi military hardware including surveillance planes and pickup trucks equipped with machine guns.

Officials in Iraq’s western Anbar province, which is largely in the hands of the Sunni militants, said Syrian warplanes bombed two sites near the Iraq-Syria border, ostensibly targeting border crossings that the Islamist militants had seized in recent days.

Iraqi state media had earlier attributed the air strikes to U.S. drones, which the Pentagon denied. The involvement by Syria, if confirmed, illustrates how the sectarian feud in Iraq could drag in the wider Middle East.

Maliki’s government, dominated by the Shiite majority, has come under growing pressure to cede more authority to minority Sunnis and Kurds. President Obama declared last week that if Maliki doesn’t form an inclusive national government, Iraq risks sliding back into civil warfare.

A senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters on Tuesday said the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the al-Qaida offshoot leading the insurgent movement, “continues to threaten the air base … as it moves south toward Baghdad.”

Ninety U.S. troops — the first of up to 300 advisers ordered to Iraq by Obama — have arrived in Baghdad, where they were beginning to establish a joint operations center with Iraqi forces to help counter the Sunni insurgency. Four additional teams totaling about 50 people were expected to reach Iraq in the coming days, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in Washington.

©afp.com / Ahmad Al-Rubaye

Supreme Court Rejects Florida’s Death-Penalty IQ Cutoff

Supreme Court Rejects Florida’s Death-Penalty IQ Cutoff

By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — A closely divided Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Florida’s strict IQ cutoff for determining a convicted criminal’s eligibility for the death penalty.

In a 5-4 ruling that affects other states as well, the court concluded that Florida’s rigid IQ threshold of 70 “disregards established medical practice” and creates the “unacceptable risk” that an inmate with intellectual disabilities might be executed, in violation of the Constitution.

“Our society does not consider this strict cutoff as proper or humane,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.

Instead, Kennedy and the court’s four liberal justices concluded, Florida must consider IQ testing’s standard error of measurement, as well as other factors, in evaluating intellectual disability. This is already the practice in most of the nation’s other death-penalty states.

“By failing to take into account the (standard error of measurement) and setting a strict cutoff at 70, Florida goes against the unanimous professional consensus,” Kennedy wrote. “The flaws in Florida’s law are the result of the inherent error in IQ tests themselves.”

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the dissenters, noted that nine other states besides Florida effectively impose strict IQ cutoffs of 70 when determining eligibility for the death penalty. These other states also might face new pressure to change their practices.

“It is quite wrong for the court to proclaim that ‘the vast majority of states’ have rejected Florida’s approach,” Alito wrote. “The states have adopted a multitude of approaches to a very difficult question.”

The state tally is important to justices on all sides, because it can measure what the Supreme Court calls the “evolving standards of decency” concerning criminal penalties and punishments. Citing these evolving standards, for instance, the high court in 2005 banned the death penalty for those who commit crimes under the age of 18.

Kennedy wrote the 2005 opinion, as well.

Freddie Lee Hall, the 68-year-old convicted murderer who’s at the heart of the case decided Tuesday, has been on the state’s death row since 1978. He and an accomplice were convicted of murdering a 21-year-old pregnant woman and a Hernando County deputy sheriff.

The 16th of 17 children, Hall was “tortured by his mother and abused by his neighbors,” according to a 1993 dissenting opinion in the Florida Supreme Court. Hall was “functionally illiterate and has the short-term memory of a first-grader,” the dissenting opinion observed.

In nine separate IQ tests conducted throughout the years, Hall’s scores ranged from 60 to 80. Before one crucial hearing, he scored a 71.

The Supreme Court has previously decided, in the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia, that executing those variously called mentally retarded or intellectually disabled violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The court left the definition up to individual states.

“No legitimate penological purpose is served by executing a person with intellectual disability,” Kennedy wrote in the decision issued Tuesday. “To impose the harshest of punishments on an intellectually disabled person violates his or her inherent dignity as a human being.”

Florida imposes a three-part test, which under a state court ruling effectively starts with a rigid requirement that the inmate score 70 or below on the IQ test. If the inmate scores below the cutoff number, the state also will assess for “deficits in adaptive behavior” and an onset before age 18.

Medical professionals, Kennedy stressed Tuesday, consider an IQ test score to represent a range rather a fixed point. Test scores may fluctuate from day to day, depending on the testing environment, the test-taker’s health, previous practice or other reasons.

The term “standard error of measurement” reflects the range that a single test score may represent. A score of 71, for instance, is generally considered to reflect a range of 66 to 76.

“An IQ score is an approximation, not a final and infallible assessment of intellectual functioning,” Kennedy wrote.

Seth Waxman, formerly the Obama administration’s solicitor general, argued on Hall’s behalf before the high court. Another one of Hall’s attorneys, Tampa-based Eric Pinkard, praised the ruling Tuesday, saying that “the court has recognized that intellectual disability is a condition, not a number, and that consequently Florida cannot ignore the standard error of measurement inherent in all IQ tests.”

Taking account of the standard error of measurement means that an IQ score of 71 to 75 would fall within the range of intellectual disability, which used to be called mental retardation.

Under the new ruling, Pinkard noted, these defendants would be able to present additional evidence of intellectual disability, including testimony concerning their difficulties in adapting.

Jenn Meale, a spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, said Tuesday afternoon that Bondi’s office was reviewing the court’s ruling.

Photo: Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons

Supreme Court Rejects Free-Speech Suit From Anti-Bush Protesters

Supreme Court Rejects Free-Speech Suit From Anti-Bush Protesters

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The free-speech right to protest against the president does not guarantee that opponents can be as close to the chief executive as supporters, the Supreme Court said Tuesday, throwing out a suit brought by critics of former President George W. Bush.

Instead, the justices said Secret Service agents have broad authority to protect the chief executive, and this includes forcibly removing groups of protesters who might threaten his safety.

The decision is one of several in which the high court has turned away claims that the Bush White House maintained an “unwritten” policy of using the Secret Service to keep protesters away from the president when he appeared in public.

In Tuesday’s opinion for a unanimous court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said nothing in the law would forbid Secret Service agents from acting quickly to move people who could be seen as threatening.

The decision tosses out a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union over an incident outside a restaurant in Jacksonville, Ore., in the fall of 2004. Bush was in the area campaigning for re-election and decided to stop for dinner at an outdoor restaurant a few blocks from where he would spend the night.

Two groups had assembled. One was made up of supporters, and a second group, numbering about 200, were opponents who carried signs critical of Bush and his policies. When the president sat down in the dining area, the protesters could be heard from just a half-block away. Secret Service agents decided to move the group of opponents two blocks away. This removed a potential threat from someone firing a gun or tossing an explosive, the agents said later.

But the group of supporters stayed nearby, and they could be seen by the president as his motorcade left the restaurant.

Several of the protesters joined a lawsuit against the Secret Service, alleging agents violated the 1st Amendment by denying them “equal access to the president.”

A federal judge in Oregon and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco cleared the suit to proceed. Those judges said the agents had placed the protesters at a “comparative disadvantage in expressing their views.”

But the Supreme Court disagreed in a case called Wood vs. Moss and said agents had violated no clearly understood constitutional right.

“No decision of which we are aware would alert Secret Service agents engaged in crowd control that they bear a 1st Amendment obligation to ensure that groups with different viewpoints are at comparable locations at all times,” Ginsburg said.

Two years ago, the court also threw out a lawsuit brought by a Colorado man who was arrested by Secret Service agents for confronting and criticizing Vice President Dick Cheney on a Denver street.

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier