The Austin American-Statesman (registration required) reports that University of Texas law students, lawyers and civil rights advocates are contending that Army Intelligence questioning of people on the UT campus in Austin was an unjustified attempt to dampen free speech on the campus. The agents visited the UT Law School this past Monday to request a list of participants in a Feb. 4 conference at the UT Law School on women’s issues in Muslim countries. When informed that the conference was open to all citizens and that no such list existed, the agents interviewed students and asked for the contact information of the female who organized the conference.
Although the investigation of this conference is perhaps a bit over the top, the self-righteous reaction of some UT students and faculty members is even more so. The United States is at war, and reasonable intrusions on U.S. citizens’ civil liberties during war time are legal. Denouncing intelligence agents publicly simply because they are doing their job reflects a widespread attitude in current American society that it is unnecessary to sacrifice for the war effort. I am quite glad that the parents and grandparents of these UT students and faculty members did not have the same attitude during WWII.

The NY Times reports today on an interesting study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies that concludes that Texas, generally thought to be the death penalty capital of the U.S., actually sentences a smaller percentage of people convicted of murder to death than the national average because the conventional view fails to take into account the large number of murders in Texas.

“Texas’ reputation as a death-prone state should rest on its many murders and on its willingness to execute death-sentenced inmates,” wrote the authors of the study, “It should not rest on the false belief that Texas has a high rate of sentencing convicted murderers to death.”

As a percentage of murders, Nevada and Oklahoma impose the most death sentences, at 6 and 5.1 percent. In Texas, the percentage is 2 percent. The rate in Virginia, another state noted for its commitment to capital punishment, is 1.3 percent. The national average is 2.5 percent; the median is 2 percent.
Using the same analysis, the study concluded that blacks are actually underrepresented on the nation’s death row in that blacks commit 51.5 percent of all murders nationally, but only comprise 42 percent of death row inmates.