Andy Love: Scalia and Thomas were featured guests at a retreat of wealthy Republicans and conservative leaders organized by Charles and David Koch, the brothers who finance right wing causes from the money they made from their energy conglomerate.
About Andy Love
Andrew Love has represented men and women on California's death row for 22 years. He also writes the blog Fair and Unbalanced.
Darryl Issa’s Contemptible Actions
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Andy Love: Issa’s relentless pursuit of the president, culminating in this investigation of a trumped-up scandal is nothing more than cynical political theater.
Jamming Too Slow on Student Loans
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Andy Love: While Democrats are merely trying to maintain the status quo, they should be building the groundwork for more progressive reforms to help students, such as 0% loans and/or free tuition as public colleges.
Supreme Court Matters
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Andy Love: Elections do have consequences, as they say, and the electorate needs to understand that the consequences this time around couldn’t be more serious. If ever there was a time for the President to run against the Court, it is now.
Evolving Standards Of Decency: Who’s Next?
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Andy Love: We, as a nation, are clearing evolving when it comes to the death penalty. There continue to be fewer death sentences imposed and fewer executions carried out each year. There are also fewer states retaining capital punishment.
Bend Over America: Supreme Court OK’s Strip Searches
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Andy Love: Earlier this week, in a — say it with me — “5-4 decision,” the United States Supreme Court held that corrections officials may strip search people who are arrested for all offenses, including those not involving drugs or violence, and without any suspicion that they may be hiding contraband.
The Frothy Mix of GOP Candidates
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Andy Love: Bill Clinton once said that “Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line,” but the distaste among the Republican rank-and-file for Romney has got to be deeply worrying to the Grand Old Party.
Replacing the Death Penalty
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Andy Love: Being on the front lines, capital defense practitioners have experienced first hand the unfairness, arbitrariness and unreliability of California’s capital punishment scheme.
Death Penalty: R.I.P. Gary Welch
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Andy Love: Three weeks ago, Welch attempted to kill himself by slashing his neck. He was quickly taken to the hospital by prison guards and was closely monitored thereafter.
Growing Consensus That California’s Death Penalty Must Be Replaced
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Andy Love: California’s death penalty is incredibly costly, and the money would be far better spent keeping kids in school, keeping teachers and counselors in their schools and giving the juvenile justice system the resources it needs.
Cut The Death Penalty From California’s Budget Woes
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Andy Love: As California cuts critically important funds, the state continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into one government program that is expensive, arbitrary and ineffectual: the death penalty.
Poster Child For California’s Broken Death Penalty
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Andy Love: Three trials. Three state appeals. Three state habeas corpus petitions. One round of federal habeas proceedings. Thirty-two years under sentence of death only to die of a heart attack. This is madness.
Herman Cain’s Prime Time Gig
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Andy Love: What Cain has done, thanks to the insanity of the Republican nominating process and a gullible and compliant media, is become another right wing celebrity.
California, Like Oregon, Has a “Compromised and Inequitable” Death Penalty System
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Andy Love: The only way to end the death penalty in California is by a ballot initiative, and the statewide signature‑gathering effort to place such an initiative on the November 2012 ballot is well underway.
Death Penalty: R.I.P. Paul Rhoades
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Andy Love: In a sworn statement in support of clemency, a psychiatrist noted that “Rhoades’ genetic and social history created a perfect storm of risk factors for drug addiction.”
Occupy Needs to Just Say No to the Super Committee
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Andy Love: The Occupy Movement will need to evolve if it is going to continue to have broad appeal and an effect on what happens in this country. The fact that this is on the mainstream media radar is, I think, a good sign and I think that Occupy can and will continue to be a force.
Duane Buck: Tolerating Racism In Capital Cases
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Andy Love: After we we take a collective sigh of relief that Hank Skinner obtained a last minute stay so that his lawyers can once again seek to have key evidence DNA tested, we must then sigh in despair over the result of another Texas death penalty case.
America’s Shame: Troy Davis, Hank Skinner, and a Cast of Thousands
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Andy Love: The death penalty, as legendary capital defender Steve Bright has said, is often reserved for the case with the worst lawyer not the worst crime.
Travesty of Justice Redux: Hank Skinner and the State of Texas
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Andy Love: Behind the bravado of Texas Governor Perry and unyielding position of law enforcement officials, there would be some hesitation to put yet another person to death while there remains lingering doubt as to his guilt. Apparently not in this case.
Condi’s World: Fantasies and Post Hoc Fallacies
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Andy Love: So, despite their best efforts to rewrite history, will Bush, Cheney and Rice be viewed as villains or inept clowns? The answer can be found in another philosophical proposition: The Unity of Opposites. They can be villains and clowns.
Ending California’s Wasteful Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death
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Andy Love: California’s death penalty needs to be abolished. Putting aside the philosophical and spiritual questions about the immorality of the death penalty, it is costly, arbitrary, discriminatory, and unworkable.
R.I.P. Christopher Johnson
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Andy Love: This is the 37th execution in the United States in 2011, the sixth in Alabama, which has the highest execution rate per capita in the country.
Romney Gets Borked
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Andy Love: Imagine if Bork hadn’t been Borked. There he would sit with the other radicals on the Court — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito,
Evolution/Devolution
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Andy Love: With recent polling that shows support for the death penalty has hit a 39-year low, and widespread discomfort over the execution of Troy Davis, a backlash is to be expected.
My Opposite
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Andy Love: I told him that one of the most compelling aspects of my work was delving into their life histories to understand how it was they ended up on death row. I found humanity in all of them.
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