The XX Factor: What women really think.

David Grann's Chilling Story of a Wrongful Execution

In a blockbuster New Yorker piece this week, David Grann persuasively demonstrates that in 2004, Texas executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham. It is chilling reading. Whatever you think about the death penalty, you can't want it to misfire. So how did we get here, to a legal regime in which a junk-science arson investigation was never questioned by indifferent defense lawyers, as Grann portrays them, nor by unsympathetic judges, parole board members, and Texas Governor Rick Perrry's office? ... (Read more in DoubleX)

"Not That Serious an Offense"

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard a case about the reach of the Federal Gun Control Act and whether it includes someone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence. The case was less about the Second Amendment than how to read a badly drafted 1996 law that tried to take guns out of the hands of domestic abusers convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence as opposed to violent felonies. Courtesy of the LA Times' David Savage, here’s a report of oral argument, which evidently went poorly for the proponents of disarming wife beaters. Of note in the transcript is the following exchange between Justice Antonin Scalia and Nicole Saharsky, the Justice Department lawyer arguing for the stricter interpretation of the law.

JUSTICE SCALIA: And this was misdemeanor assault and battery, wasn't it?
MS. SAHARSKY: Yes, that's right. I mean, I really—

JUSTICE SCALIA: So it's not that serious an offense. That's why we call it a misdemeanor.
MS. SAHARSKY: Well, I mean, certainly the offense is this particular case was serious. The charging document reflects that Respondent hit his wife all around the face until it swelled out, kicked her all around her body, kicked here in the ribs—

JUSTICE SCALIA: Then he should have been charged with a felony, but he wasn't. He was charged with a misdemeanor.