June 28, 2008

• Scruggs sentenced to five years, maximum possible under his plea deal [YallPolitics and huge link-o-rama, Rossmiller, Folo noting the odd takes of Jim Hood and the NYT, Ted at OL, WSJ law blog (some, but not enough, press access to the hundreds of letters asking mercy)]
• Paul-Minor-was-framed crowd is back, asserting "prosecutors were unable to prove that Minor had bribed the judges in exchange for favors from the bench". Really? [Raw Story, YallPolitics and followup; Folo commenters carve up earlier Raw Story effort; Sun-Herald's Anita Lee on Scruggs angle courtesy Folo; background at OL]
• Before accepting at face value the imaginative Scott Horton conspiracy theories that have pushed the Minor (and Geoffrey Fieger!) causes, best explore the fact-check trail on earlier writings by this hyperbolic pamphleteer mysteriously admired by Andrew Sullivan [my earlier post here on Horton's wildly misleading and dubiously sourced coverage of the Minor case; Eugene Volokh, Matt Welch and commenters on a silently airbrushed whopper regarding the ideological valence of chancellor Michael Drake in the Chemerinsky/Irvine flap; Eugene Volokh again on supposed DoJ selective-prosecution statistics; John Hinderaker on the Bilal Hussein affair; Bob Owens on Baghdad reportage; David Frum on whether Voting Day in November was meant to supplant Guy Fawkes Day; earlier coverage at Overlawyered on Horton's wobbly Scruggsiana speculations and other matters, etc.].