Prisoners Rights

The Supreme Court on Friday bowed out of deciding whether the president has the power to imprison people in the U.S. indefinitely without a trial -- avoiding a showdown the Obama administration did not want. The court granted the administration's request to dismiss the challenge to the president's authority from suspected Al Qaeda sleeper agent Ali Saleh Kahlah Marri, who was detained by the military for 5 1/2 years without charges.

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's treatment of Al Qaeda captives "constituted torture," according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document. The report, an account of alleged physical and psychological brutality inside CIA "black site" prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Such maltreatment is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Convention.

A federal judge who provided the Bush administration with legal advice on what constitutes torture declined to respond Thursday to a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman calling on him to explain his actions to the American public. Judge Jay S. Bybee, of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel when he described the intensity of pain that could legally be inflicted.

In the bitter debate over the nation's counter-terrorism policies, former Vice President Dick Cheney has introduced an assertion that substantially raises the stakes. Twice in the last two weeks -- including during his speaking duel with President Obama on Thursday -- Cheney has said that the Bush administration's approach may have saved "hundreds of thousands" of lives. It is a claim that goes beyond anything Cheney or former President George W.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about controversial interrogation programs, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used against detainees.

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has argued that the worth of the Bush administration's aggressive interrogation program was proved in two secret CIA memos that he urged be released. But those documents, and others that were finally unsealed Monday, are at best inconclusive -- attesting that captured terrorism suspects provided crucial intelligence on Al Qaeda and its plans, but offering little to support the argument that harsh or abusive methods played a key role.

The former head of the state Department of Corrections testified Tuesday that he did not learn about a pattern of violence at Corcoran State Prison until years after the San Joaquin Valley penitentiary had become the most violent in the nation. At the fifth and final scheduled day of hearings before a joint legislative committee on violence at Corcoran, former corrections Director James H. Gomez attributed its problems to the state's massive prison buildup beginning in the mid-1980s.

Under a proposed law expected to be enacted within days, California will significantly increase its control and scrutiny of out-of-state juvenile camps where hundreds of the state's troubled youths are sent from their home counties. Prompted by the death of a Sacramento boy who was physically abused at a camp in Arizona, legislation designed to prevent such recurrences has passed the state Senate and Assembly. It awaits the expected signature of Gov.

California prison officials are moving to erase some of the last vestiges of the prisoners rights movement, laying plans to revoke privileges long cherished by inmates. The California Department of Corrections is removing weights that many inmates pump to bulk up muscles. And in an even more fundamental step, the department proposes to take away many of the lawbooks that inmates use to challenge their confinement.

A big "what if" hangs over the sanity trial of condemned triple murderer Horace Edward Kelly Jr.: What if the jury charged with deciding whether the San Quentin inmate is sane enough to be executed concludes that he is not? The short but fuzzy answer, by a state that has not faced this issue in nearly half a century, is that the 38-year-old inmate would probably be sent to a mental institution, treated for his psychosis and then executed after doctors brought him back to mental health.