Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, one of the country's most widely read history books, died on January 27, 2010. Shortly after, then-Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels got on his computer and fired off an email to the state's top education officials: "This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away."

But Gov. Daniels, now president of Purdue University, was not content merely to celebrate Howard Zinn's passing. He demanded that Zinn's work be hunted down in Indiana schools and suppressed: "The obits and commentaries mentioned his book 'A People's History of the United States' is the 'textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.' It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"

In the early 1990s an affiliation of Cochrane, Kapuskasing and James Bay's OPP detectives were assigned to investigate one of the largest claims of sexual and physical abuse against children in Canadian history. The testimony they amassed by talking to hundreds of survivors of St. Anne's Residential School in Fort Albany Ontario was horrifying. Residential Schools were a form of genocide - and the OPP's special investigation into St. Anne's provided 7,000 pages of stories that wouldn't be out of place in memoirs of concentration camp survivors, or of individuals trapped in a country where ethnic cleansing is a government policy.

The accounts of physical and sexual abuse are brutal and numerous - hetero and homosexual child rape, children being stropped and beaten with rudimentary whips, forced ingestion of noxious substances (rotten porridge that children would throw up, then subsequently be forced to eat), sexual fondling, and forced masturbation... the list goes on and on. But one of the most appalling and debasing examples of the indignity and the abuse suffered by children at St. Anne's is that of being strapped down and tortured in a homemade electric chair - sometimes as a form of punishment - but other times just as a form the amusement for the missionaries, who, while committing these acts, were supposedly the ones "civilizing" the "Indians".

As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales - now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee - prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand

On the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate's plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush's signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Washington's death was barely noted by the media, and the governor's office issued no statement about it. But the execution and the three-page memo that sealed Washington's fate - along with dozens of similar memoranda prepared for Bush - speak volumes about the way the clemency process was approached both by Bush and by Gonzales, the man most often mentioned as the President's choice for the next available seat on the Supreme Court.

During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas - a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who went on to become the Texas secretary of state and a justice on the Texas supreme court. He is now the White House counsel.

Carlos DeLuna was put to death in December 1989 for a murder in Corpus Christi. But he didn't commit the crime. Today, his case reminds us of the glaring flaws of capital punishment.

The Judge

Even for Justice Antonin Scalia, the crassest of the current United States Supreme Court justices, it was a particularly callous piece of writing. In 2006, in a case styled Kansas v. Marsh, the Court's five conservatives had just upheld a portion of Kansas' capital punishment law. The statute was interpreted to direct a sentence of death even if a jury found the "aggravating" and "mitigating" sentencing factors in equilibrium -- "equipoise," the Court lyrically called it. A tie, in other words, would mean death, not life.

For the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas had bent over backward to overturn a ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that had declared the law unconstitutional. The High Court's four liberal justices had voted to uphold the Kansas ruling. Justice John Paul Stevens, the Ford appointee, chastised Thomas for reaching out so aggressively to overturn a state court on a matter of state law. And Justice David Souter, the Bush I appointee, wrote about how such "equipoise" necessarily precluded a death sentence.

The Justice Department has acknowledged flaws in forensic testimony by the FBI that helped convict a man in the 1992 slayings of two Mississippi State University students, and federal officials have now offered to retest the DNA in the case.

The extraordinary admission and offer come just days before the man is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday and present a quandary for Mississippi officials about whether to stop the execution of Willie Jerome Manning, 44.

Manning's lawyers asked Gov. Phil Bryant (R) for a stay. Bryant spokesman Mick Bullock said in a written statement Friday that the governor is reviewing the facts of the case.

Federal officials found Manning's case as part of a broad review of the FBI's handling of scientific evidence in thousands of violent crimes in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Justice Department announced last summer an effort to correct past errors in forensic hair examinations before 2000 - at least 21,000 cases - to determine whether agents exaggerated the significance of purported hair "matches" in lab reports or trial testimony.

The FBI's investigation of 27 capital punishments could mark a watershed moment in the ongoing debate about the death penalty. After examining the DNA evidence from 21,700 cases, these were the top cases termed "potentially problematic."

According to the Washington Post, this review has already led to an 11th hour stay of execution in Mississippi this past May. For defenders of capital punishment, the investigation might yield a significant victory if DNA evidence verifies all 27 cases. However, the investigation might favor opponents of capital punishment if just one of the executed convicts is found to be innocent. It's worth noting: it is difficult to produce incontrovertible evidence of someone's innocence and far easier to simply cast doubt.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) signed a sweeping set of abortion restrictions into law Thursday morning, drawing a wave of revulsion, shock and horror from women's health and civil liberties advocates across the nation.

Chants of "Shame!" could be heard echoing through the Texas Capitol as Perry signed the bill, according to CNN. It seemed the protesters, locked out of Thursday's signing ceremony, could do nothing more than shout after weeks of an intense Democratic mobilization unlike anything seen in Texas for decades.

Despite their efforts, and temporary success in blocking the bill's passage during the first special session, Republicans simply ignored the crowds and outmaneuvered the small minority of Democrats after Perry called the legislature back.

As of today, abortions are now banned in Texas after 20 weeks of pregnancy and all but five of the abortion providers in the state officially face closure by 2014 if the law is upheld in court.

The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the "public interest," does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.

Thursday's response marks the first time the administration has officially answered one of at least four lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a secret U.S. snooping program the Guardian newspaper disclosed last month. The administration's filing sets the stage for what is to be a lengthy legal odyssey - one likely to outlive the Obama presidency - that will define the privacy rights of Americans for years to come.

The New York federal district court lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands a federal judge immediately halt the spy program the civil rights group labeled as "one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government."

The Guardian last month posted a leaked copy of a top secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion requiring Verizon Business to provide the National Security Agency the phone numbers of both parties involved in all calls, the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls.

The suit, brought on behalf of the ACLU's employees, alleges breaches of the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and names Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Keith Alexander and FBI Director Robert Mueller, among others.

"... the alleged metadata program is fully consistent with the Fourth Amendment. Most fundamentally, the program does not involve "searches" of plaintiffs' persons or effects, because the collection of telephony metadata from the business records of a third-party telephone service provider, without collecting the contents of plaintiffs' communications, implicates no 'legitimate expectation of privacy' that is protected by the Constitution," (.pdf) David S. Jones, an assistant United States attorney, wrote U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley in a Thursday filing.

NSA apologists say spying is only used for menaces like "weapons of mass destruction" and "terror." But those terms have been radically redefined.

One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn't normally consider terrorists.

The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism -- and remain in jail.

Blow jobs, cunnilingus and anal sex would all become illegal in Virginia if gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli II gets his way.

Cuccinelli, the state's attorney general, has made the reinstatement of the Crimes Against Nature Law a focus of his campaign, according to his website.

The law, struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003, states: "If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony."

While that includes everyone, gay or straight, young or old, married or single, Cuccinelli insists it's all about the kids. His site names 90 child molesters prosecuted under the law.

But, according to the Washington Post, he voted against a 2004 measure to amend the law so it would no longer apply to consenting adults because he said "homosexual acts are wrong."