The Justice Department's new victimization survey is out. Highlights include:

The violent crime rate fell 10% 2000-2001, due primarily to a significant decrease in the rate of simple assault.

The overall property crime rate fell 6% between 2000-2001 because of decreases in theft and household burglary rates.

For the first year since the redesign of the NCVS in 1992, in 2001 males and females were victims of simple assault at similar rates.

Santa Cruz officials are fuming over yesterday's pot club bust in which DEA agents arrested the clubs' founders and confiscated plants used by terminally ill patients. The club has operated with the support of the local authorities for years.

After the seizures, a few dozen people blocked the road demanding the return of the plants as DEA agents tried to depart. DEA called in the local cops to help.

"... some local police officers were irritated by the federal agents' actions. 'What a bunch of babies these DEA guys are,' said one disgusted Santa Cruz officer, who did not want to be identified. 'They're up there with all these agents, but they see a bunch of pot-smoking sick people on the road, and they have to call us for help.' "

More bad news on the immigration law front. According to Deidre Davidson in today's Legal Times article Into the Line of Fire,

"The court of last resort for many immigrants is about to undergo a radical transformation that lawyers say will result in more deportations and fewer grants of asylum. Attorney General John Ashcroft has announced new regulations that will slash jobs from the Board of Immigration Appeals and require the board to eliminate its entire backlog of cases by next March. The immigration rights community is outraged."

Among the new changes:

The size of the Board of Immigration Appeals will be slashed from 19 to 11 members. This is important because the Board handles 30,000 cases a year of people seeking asylum or fighting deportation.

"The Board of Immigration Appeals is not a federal court. It is part of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which is itself a division of the Justice Department. The judges and board members are DOJ employees -- not administrative law judges, who by law are given a level of independence from the agency whose decisions they review."

It is also separate from the INS which has the authroity to arrest, detain and prosecute illegal immigrants. But both the INS and the Board report to Ashcroft, and he can overule them at his pleasure.

According to immigration law specialists, the slashing of the size of the Board will result in less due process for those trying to establish a permanent home here and "scanty" review of deportation decisions.

"In addition to cutting the board's size, Ashcroft's new rules expand the streamlining efforts and require that almost every appeal be reviewed by a single judge, rather than a panel. Only cases that present "difficult or novel" issues will get a three-judge review. "

"By going to the single-board-member review, one board member would have much more power. The only way [Ashcroft] can neutralize the liberals on the board while going to a one-board-member system is to get rid of them."

"Ashcroft also is eliminating the board's power of de novo factual review, except in cases where lower-level judges are "clearly erroneous" in their finding of facts in a case. Other changes include shorter time limits for filing appeals and briefs and for issuing decisions. "

Critics charge that fewer judges will mean "cases will get more-cursory looks, and more lower-level decisions, most of which side with INS initiatives to seek deportation or deny asylum, will be upheld....They also say immigrants may find it more difficult and more expensive to get a lawyer willing to handle their appeals due to the shortened time frames for filing appeals and briefs. About 36 percent of the aliens who appealed to the board in 2001 did not have legal counsel, DOJ statistics show. "

The largest outcry is against the reduction of judges. "[The board's] legitimacy in the eyes of the public and among the immigrant community is based on its ability to act in an independent and fair-minded way," says T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and former INS general counsel. "If the attorney general uses his authority to pack and stack the board with members who tend to agree with the immigration service, that is not impartial justice."

Both the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the Marijuana Policy Project are abuzz with news that the Canadian Senate Special Committee has released a 600 page report recommending the legalization of marijuana.

Proceedings, testimony, research, general information and the full report can be found on this website of the Special Senate Committee on Illegal Drugs.

This just in from NORML....the DEA is raiding a center for terminally ill women:

"Sept. 5, 2002: We are outraged to report that the DEA is currently raiding the Women's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, a collective serving 300 seriously ill patients. WAMM Director Valerie Corral and Mike Corral are in handcuffs, and the DEA is destroying their garden.

WAMM is a non-profit collective representing the most severely ill (mainly terminal) patients....

D. Gieringer, Cal NORML"

Update: AP article on the raid.

LA Weekly is featuring the search for a new police chief this week. We agree with Joe Domanick, author of To Protect and To Serve: The LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams, and the senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the University of Southern California, in his strong support of William Bratton, former police commissioner for NY and Boston.

In Rethinking the LAPD: An Open Letter to Mayor Hahn: Be Bold, Domanick says:

"You must hire only an outsider, one unencumbered by decades of exposure to the ossified ethos of the LAPD. You need a veteran cop who's avid about different ways of doing business."

"I suggest William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner. He'd come to Los Angeles with a reputation as a reform leader with huge successes in turning around both the Boston and New York police departments. His selection would be an affirmation that you could identify, capture and attract that caliber of talent to the city of Los Angeles. "

"Bratton, moreover, would also be ideal in carrying out a major step toward reform that you, in fact, helped negotiate: the consent decree between the city and the U.S. Justice Department mandating major LAPD reforms. Bratton not only supports such reform, but he's already a member of the monitoring team overseeing the LAPD's compliance with the decree. "

We've endorsed Bill Bratton before, here, and here, and hope the powers that be in LA are listening.

If you are opposed to people being jailed for marijuana crimes, and you don't mind the whole world knowing about it, you might want to visit "NoJailForPot.com" and sign their open declaration, which states:

"I accept and declare to the world my support for the idea that by December 25, 2004, no one in the United States of America will be in prison for any non-violent activity related to the use, possession, cultivation, transportation or sale of hemp / marijuana."

The page is dedicated to "Peter McWilliams, writer, poet, civil libertarian, humanitarian and inspirational human being who died on June 14, 2000 as a direct result of government policies that cause non-violent users and cultivators of marijuana to be imprisoned."

We didn't sign, but we're thinking about buying their t-shirt.

UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent Michael Kirkland writes about the real reason America uses the death penalty in On Law: Execution as revenge.

The focus of his article is the execution of juvenile offenders. He ponders why America still allows it. For what purpose ?

38 states in the U.S. allow the death penalty. Of those, only 16 require that the minimum age of the offender at the time of the crime be 18. That leaves 22 states that allow kids who were 16 and 17 at the time of their crimes to be put to death.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 21 men have been put to death for crimes they committed as juveniles.

The only other countries that allow the execution of juvenile offenders are Islamic countries.

Kirkland makes the key point:

"But as a nation we are swiftly reaching the point at which we may have to ask ourselves: Do we really want take the ultimate revenge against people who did some truly brutal things when they weren't adults?"

"Are these adult death row inmates even the same people they were when they were teenagers? Is anybody? Are you?"

At last, a policy that never made anyone safer or stopped a terrorist act is falling by the wayside.

Beginning immediately, the airlines will stop asking baggage questions.

"Ticket agents have been required for the past 16 years to ask passengers two questions: "Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry an item on this flight?" and "Have any of the items you are traveling with been out of your immediate control since the time you packed them?"

"The questions are being phased out because they create a hassle and have never prevented a bombing or hijacking, said James Loy, head of the Transportation Security Administration."

Loy has other positive changes in store for us:

Passengers "will be allowed to carry drinks in paper or foam cups through metal detectors.

Next on the agenda may be random screening of passengers at airport gates, he said."

Mr. Loy is to be commended for getting these changes through after only one month at the helm. We need more like him.

And we hate those "random" screens.

The mother of a slain teen, used by the police as a police informant will receive a $ 1 million settlement. Chad MacDonald, 17, was beaten and killed by drug dealers in 1998 after working as a police informer in Orange County.

"City officials in Brea agreed on Monday to the settlement, the largest by a police department in Orange County history, about a month after a state appeals court reinstated a lawsuit by the family. The killing led to a law limiting the use of teenage informers."

A new Justice Department proposal would bar convicted immigrants' from returning to the U.S.

Immigration rights advocates are outraged:

"I think it's another example of the attorney general trying to disregard Supreme Court decisions with which he disagrees, and he promised in his confirmation hearing to follow the law of the Supreme Court," said Lucas Guttentag, American Civil Liberties Union's immigration rights project director. "

See our in-depth discussion of the rule last week.

The regulations are open for public comment through mid-October. After that, the Justice Department can chage them and decide whether to make them permanent.

Even more information is available at AILA (American Immigration Lawyers' Ass'n.)

Police arrested nine current and former McIntosh College students on drug charges Tuesday after a raid on a college dormitory that the police chief called "an open-air drug market like we've never seen in the city."

The investigation focused on McIntosh's culinary school. Police want the U.S. Attorney to try and close the dormitory down using the federal "crack house statute."

"Some students said police used excessive force Tuesday. Reporters and news photographers were present before the raid started and students were thrown to the ground and arrested, they said."

And the best comment of the day on the bust?

"Why do you need M-14s to arrest kids with weed?" asked 18-year-old Cecilia Self."