As we first reported last week, Denver has established "John TV" in an effort to reduce prostitution. It was the highlight of Mayor Wellington Web's state of the City address--lots of cheers when he announced it.

The "show" will air on a Denver local cable channel and will feature mugshots of prostitutes and their clients. The pix will also be available on Denver's website

The cable news networks will chat about this for a while and then we predict interest will fade. How do the prostitutes feel about it? We like this statement, by one who was sentenced to a year and a day in jail earlier this week and plans to resume her business when she gets out: "Shaming has never done anything for anyone who has nowhere to go."

For the past two years State Representative Mike Lawlor (D-Conn.), Chair of the Connecticut House Judiciary Committee has been working with the Council of State Governments and many others to develop a response to the recent sudden increase in the number of mentally ill persons coming in contact with the criminal justice system. The goal is to end the vicious cycle that keeps returning the mentally ill to jail.

Their report was released in June and prompted a hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearing testimony is online.

The report is very impressive. So is the list of groups and individuals who developed it.

Some findings of the project: At Rikers Island, the length of stay for the average inmate was 42 days. For the mentally ill inmate, the average stay was 215 days. In 1955, the population in the state's mental health hospitals peaked at 559,000. In 1999, it dropped to less than 80,000.

Another death penalty case the Supreme Court decided this week that is not getting much attention is the Bass case out of Detroit. The Court not only refused to find the feds are racially discriminatory when seeking the death penalty, they reversed the Sixth Circuit's decision that documentation showing how the feds decide to seek the death penalty must be disclosed to the defense to prove such a claim. Text of Opinion

The Supreme Court bought into Solicitor General Ted Olson's argment that the Sixth Circuit ruling "threatens to stop federal death penalty prosecutions in their tracks." Lawyers for Bass dismissed Olson's claims about the potential disruption of all federal capital cases as "melodramatic hyperbole" and "doomsday warnings."

The Supreme Court ruling acknowledges a federal study in 2000 that found that of 882 capital defendants, 20 percent were white, 48 percent were black, and 29 percent were Latino. The Sixth Circuit found that statistics from the same study demonstrated that ì[t]he United States charges blacks with a death eligible offense more than twice as often as it charges whitesî and that the United States enters into plea bargains more frequently with whites than it does with blacks. (citing U. S. Dept. of Justice, The Federal Death Penalty System: A Statistical Survey (1988ñ2000), p. 2 (Sept. 12, 2000)).

The study concluded that the reason for the higher minority percentage of capital defendants is not bias--it is because they make up a larger percentage of the pool of federal defendants.

25 inmates are now on federal death row awaiting execution. The Supreme Court says each must make a ìcredible showingî that ìsimilarly situated individuals of a different race were not prosecutedî in order to survive a racial challenge to the application of the death penalty in his or her case.

How exactly are they supposed to do that if the Govenment won't turn over the data from which they either can substantiate their claim or realize its unfounded?

Talk about a Catch-22...

Even though the U.S. is not a party to the International Criminal Court which opens for business July 1, criminal defense lawyers are fighting to ensure defendants before the court are treated fairly. Thus, the formation of the International Criminal Bar this weekend in Montreal. Four members of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers were on hand, and as Past NACDL President Nancy Hollander told the Assembly, defendants before the court "will be people who will be hated, and the lawyers who represent them will be hated. But let it never be said that an accused appeared before the International Criminal Court without a lawyer by his or her side." In attendance were 350 lawyers from 48 countries and 68 international, regional, and national bars and numerous non-governmental organizations from around the world.

The death penalty could be a significant issue in this year's elections. Take for example, South Carolina, where death penalty opponent Alex Sanders is running against death penalty supporter and ultra-conservative Lindsay Graham. We all remember Graham for his prosecution of President Clinton in the House. Sanders opposes the death penalty for religious reasons. Always has. "I've been saying all of my life that I believe capital punishment is contrary to the will of God. I can't change my position on that." Graham's position: the death penalty is "good public policy." ("The State, Columbia, SC, March 9, 2002, page B! for those of you with Lexis or Nexis).

Sanders and Graham will face off in November over the Senate seat vacated by retiring Strom Thurmond. TalkLeft heartily supports Alex Sanders. This is one race we will be following closely.