The Ninth Circuit Court has updated its Capital Punishment Handbook, a compendium of federal and state laws, and state statutes related to capital punishment issues and procedures. The Handbook can be viewed or downloaded from the Ninth Circuit website. The table of contents includes the following sections:

- Table of Authorities
- State Law Summaries
Chapter 1: Constitutionality and Other General Considerations
Chapter 2: Pretrial and Preliminary Stage Issues
Chapter 3: Guilt Phase Issues
Chapter 4: Sentencing Phase Issues
Chapter 5: Federal Death Penalty
Chapter 6: Habeas Corpus Proceedings

The Center for Responsive Politics has compiled a Lobbying Database that reveals the financial relationships of lobbyists, companies and politicians. The data is drawn from the reports that lobbyists and companies that hire them are required to file with the federal Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House.

The database can be searched by the names of individuals, an industry, interest group or federal agency that is lobbied.

Census Trax has amassed U.S. Census housing and demographic data, displaying it in pop-up boxes by Census block or zip code. Search by street or zip code to find population numbers and characteristics, housing types, vacancies and other data. Move your mouse around the map to get information on adjacent blocks and tracts. Census Trax currently covers only California and is free during beta testing.

The Library of Congress Ask A Librarian is a free service that connects you by phone or the Internet to a reference librarian who will answer your general or topic specific questions. One of their new categories is the law.

AskNow links you to reference librarians in real time and is available 24/7 through many local public libraries.

Highlight a word in a document to get instant spelling, antonyms, synonyms, definitions and suggested usage from Answers.com.

TechBargains is a comparative search tool for reviews and products related to electronics and computers. This site keeps an eye on specified products that go on sale, then sends you an email alert.

The National Conference of State Legislatures website tracks current news by state and topic in each of the state legislatures. Their legislative bill tracking tool is better than many of the states’ own search engines, enabling searches by keywords. A unique feature is the ability to compare, on one page, all appearances of your keywords in bills in all states. The site would be perfect if you could then receive automatic updates by email or in your newsreader. Read the rest of this entry »

Crash reports issued by the Iowa State Police are available, in an abbreviated, redacted form online. The index search fields are date, county and type of incident, any one of which, or all three can be selected. The returned results include the injured person’s name and town of residence.

The Michigan legislature has revised the Public Records Act to specify that criminal records in which there is not a conviction but an arrest are open to the public, according to this press release from the Michigan State Police.

Additional criminal history information, specifically arrest information pending a conviction, will be available to the public as a result of Public Act 310 of 2005, which establishes a state criminal history record information dissemination law. Previously, Michigan did not have a dissemination law so the state followed federal law which prohibits the release of non-conviction data to non-law enforcement entities.

The criminal records index can be accessed from the State Police site.
[Thanks to BRB for the tip.]

Close on the heels of the legislation, regulation and litigation over the privacy of telephone subscriber information is the examination of “caller-id spoofing”. The Florida Attorney General has issued subpoenas to a website that claims to sell “calling cards that allow parties to display fraudulent numbers on caller ID”. Reported at consumeraffairs.com, which also has an extensive set of links to prior articles on the whole telephone subscriber investigation blow up.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been investigating businesses that advertise products and tools that will enable the caller to display a self selected number on the receiver’s caller-id. The recent Wired article cites Orin Kerr, a law professor, who suggests that the proposed regulation of telephone spoofing may interfere with the 1st Amendment right to anonymous speech.

Just in case I haven’t sufficiently played out this theme, let me remind you that the federal government and the state Attorneys General are actively pursuing anyone they can identify who obtains or sells telephone subscriber information. [Just search PI buzz with the word telephone for all my postings.] This letter from the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce lists numerous companies from which they’ve requested detailed operational information, including customer names.

By calendar year since 2000, list the names of the top 20 customers, by revenue, for each of ARI’s data broker Web sites. With each customer listed, and for each calendar year, provide the total dollar amount paid by the customer to the data broker.

Some of the companies to which the Committee has has sent their inquiry are Richard J. Downing, owner of Piranha Investigations, Michele Yontef of Telcosecrets and Advanced Research, Inc.

Sprint Nextel filed another lawsuit seeking an injuction against yet another PI. The Sprint press release conveys their public attitude toward the practice of obtaining telephone subscriber data without the customer’s permission.

As we dig deeper into the origins of this fraud, we’ve determined that, in some cases, companies with no Internet presence whatsoever are handling the dirty work for these online operations…