The Department of Justice top leadership is joining Vice President Joe Biden in Philadelphia on Tuesday to hold another big press event announcing law enforcement stimulus grants, this time in the presidential battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Last month, the venue was Michigan. Read our previous report here.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli will represent the DOJ at the Philly news conference, where they will appear alongside embattled Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey. Polls show Corzine, who is running for reelection in November, trailing his Republican challenger, former New Jersey U.S. Attorney Chris Christie.

The Associated Press’s Devlin Barrett got the scoop on where the money will go in advance of the official annoucement. Barrett led with the news that New York, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Houston had been left out of the COPS program sweepstakes, in which the federal government picks up salary and benefits for local police for three years.

But we found it equally interesting that places like Mobile, Ala., and Salt Lake City, Utah, are getting COPS funds. Mobile is the home town of the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions, while another Senate Judiciary Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch, is from near Salt Lake. Both Sessions and Hatch have announced they will oppose President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

According to The AP, around 1000 localities are getting COPS money to pay for 4,699 officers.

The roughly 1,000 places getting COPS aid also include: Mobile, Ala., Mesa, Ariz., Tulare County, Calif., Monroe County, Fla., the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Baltimore, Providence, R.I., Salt Lake City, Utah, and Huntington, W.Va

Under the COPS program, the federal government pays the officers’ salary and benefits for three years, after which the local government is responsible for the costs.

Also slated to appear at Tuesday’s press conference are Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter — Democrats all. The Philadelphia police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, who is a former District of Columbia police chief, will also be there.

The $787 billion stimulus package, known as the  American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, was signed into law in February. It contained $4 billion for the Department of Justice to distribute to local and tribal law enforcement and the COPS program.

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder told black prosecutors in Memphis that the Civil Rights Division is “back and open for business” — a swipe at the Bush administration, which tried to dismantle it. (Read Holder’s speech, delivered near the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, here.)

Then on Monday, civil rights activists emerged from a meeting with Holder in Washington to say he’s expressed a commitment to pursuing ”cold cases” against 1960s-era civil rights offenders that have languished for years.

Alvin Sykes, the driving force behind the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, told reporters that perpetrators “should understand that this attorney general means business.”

The legislation, which was enacted last year, authorized up to $135 million over 10 years for investigations of civil rights-era killings. It also created a permanent cold case unit in the Justice Department. Congress, however, has not yet approved funding, though some money is included in the House and Senate appropriations bills for the DOJ now pending.

For a bit of background on the unsolved crimes bill, and the case of Emmet Till, who was beaten and shot to death in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, click here.

And some quick stats, as reported by The Chicago Tribune: According to the FBI, there are more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings that occurred before 1969 that are under review. Since 2007, there have been 28 arrests and 22 convictions, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group that tracks hate crimes.

Sykes, who spoke on the sidewalk outside the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Constitution Avenue, was joined by Haskell Slaughter Young & Rediker’s G. Douglas Jones. As U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Jones successfully re-opened and prosecuted the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963.

Jones emphasized the urgency of putting the law into motion. “Each day that passes, we lose potential defendants,” he said. Evidence falls through the cracks, he said. In some instances, apathetic law enforcers let investigations languish or abandoned them outright, forcing investigators of today to “reinvent the wheel,” Jones said.

Jones downplayed concerns about funding, saying it would come in time, and he and Sykes said they were heartened by Holder’s receptiveness. ”If you are a perpetrator…and you’re still out there, we and the federal government are coming after you,” Sykes said.

U.S. attorneys are accepting more FBI referrals for prosecution, convictions are up, and prison sentences are increasing, according to a report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Data examined showed “small but consistent year-by-year changes” during the past five years, according to TRAC, which acquired the information from the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys through a Freedom of Information Act request.

For example:

• Referrals prosecuted rose from 51 percent in FY 2004 to 58.2 percent in FY 2008.
• Convictions from FBI referrals improved from 79.2 percent in FY 2004 to 83.5 percent in FY 2008.
• In 2004, 10,056 individuals were sent to prison as a result of an FBI investigation and the median sentence was 30 months. The number of those sent to prison dipped slightly to 9,789, in FY 2008, but the typical sentence rose to 41 months.

The report concentrates on criminal enforcement activities tracked by federal prosecutors, but it does not thoroughly explore the classified surveillance and intelligence activities of the National Security Branch or the research activities of the Science and Technology Branch.

The data varied widely in different parts of the country. TRAC ranked the top five federal districts, based on the the proportion of FBI referrals that resulted in criminal filings:

1. Minnesota (Minneapolis)
2. California Central (Los Angeles)
3. Pennsylvania Middle (Scranton)
4. Florida South (Miami)
5. South Carolina (Columbia)

In each, more than three quarters of the referrals begot prosecutions. The records clearinghouse also ranked the five lowest districts — in which federal prosecutors acted on slightly more than a third of the FBI referrals:

1. Alabama Middle (Montgomery)
2. Mississippi South (Jackson)
3. Tennessee Middle (Nashville)
4. Kentucky West (Louisville)
5. West Virginia South (Charleston)

Five of the seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have announced their opposition to Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

The panel’s ranking member, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), announced his opposition to Sotomayor in an op-ed piece on Monday in USA Today, writing: “I don’t believe that Judge Sotomayor has the deep-rooted convictions necessary to resist the siren call of judicial activism.” Read the Sessions piece here.

Later on Monday, Sen. Charles Grassely, another Judiciary Republican, also said he would not vote for Sotomayor. Citing her rulings on gun and property rights, the Iowa Republican said in a statement: “I was not convinced that Judge Sotomayor understands the rights given to Americans under the Constitution, or that she will refrain from expanding or restricting those rights based on her personal preferences,

Judiciary GOP Sens. John Cornyn (Texas), Jon Kyl (Ariz.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) have also announced their opposition to Sotomayor, as has Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky).

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is the only minority member of the Judiciary panel to announce support for Sotomayor. Judiciary member Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) hasn’t said yet how he will vote.

The Houston Chronicle wrote this piece asking whether Cornyn’s opposition in Latino-heavy Texas would hurt him politically.

The Judiciary Committee will vote on Sotomayor’s nomination on Tuesday, with a confirmation vote before the full Senate expected before Congress’s August break. Her confirmation, however, is not in doubt. Democrats control the Senate by a wide margin, and five Republicans (including Graham) have announced their support.

John Yoo: soft-spoken but never shy. That’s the gist of this piece in the WaPo today.

John Yoo (Berkeley)

The tenured Berkeley law professor and former Justice Department lawyer, who authored memos sanctioning the waterboarding of terrorism suspects and wiretapping of American citizens, hasn’t wilted in the face of protests, withering criticism of his judgment and a pending ethics investigation. And as we reported here, he parted ways with the Justice Department earlier this month, after a federal judge refused to toss out a former detainee’s lawsuit accusing Yoo of violating his constitutional rights.

Still, there’s no cramping Yoo’s style.

From the WaPo:

While former colleagues have avoided attention in the face of such scrutiny, Yoo has been traveling across the country to give speeches and counter critics who dispute his bold view of the president’s authority. Now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he engages in polite but firm exchanges with legal scholars over conclusions in their academic work. This month, he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal defending his actions and labeling critics’ arguments as “absurd” and “foolhardy” responses to “the media-stoked politics of recrimination.”

Yoo’s expansive view of executive power, memorialized in his scholarship and in the Office of Legal Counsel memos for which he is now infamous, took hold even before his stints as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, according to the newspaper.

The Bush administration, seeking to adopt a more centralized approach to power, embraced Yoo — so much so, the White House dealt with him directly on several issues, to the chagrin of his superiors. The back-door communications eventually cost him his shot at running the OLC, and he left for Berkeley.

Despite protesters who have picketed the Berkeley campus and petitioned school leaders for his ouster, he appears unfazed. And why not? What can anyone do to John Yoo? Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has said he will not seek to prosecute the lawyers who authored the memos, and even if the Justice Department’s internal watchdog finds that Yoo fell short of professional standards, the five-year statute of limitations for allegations of attorney misconduct in Pennsylvania, where Yoo is licensed to practice law, has expired.

The criticism has strained his relationships with some former colleagues, according to the WaPo, but he and his wife, Elsa, the daughter of former CNN newsman Peter Arnett, still hang out with friends on the West Coast. And he writes a regular column for his hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, called “Closing Arguments.”

And he has supporters among his peers at Berkeley:

Jesse Choper, a Berkeley colleague of Yoo’s, said he thinks “very highly” of his scholarship, even if they disagree on some issues. “This is not a person who goes around raging or screaming at people — quite the opposite,” Choper said.

The WaPo points out that Yoo’s face-forward style contrasts his former Justice Department colleagues also under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility. Jay Bybee, who led the office while Yoo was there and is now a federal appeals judge in California, has told students and colleagues that he has some regrets about the memos. Steven Bradbury, the last to run the office during the Bush administration, has made himself scarce. He joined Dechert as a partner last week. Read about it here.

A former Department of Justice trial attorney resigned from a court monitor position in Detroit after a federal judge confronted her about  “meetings of a personal nature� with Kwame Kilpatrick, the scandal-plagued former mayor of Detroit, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Sheryl Robinson Wood

Sheryl Robinson Wood, a partner in the Washington and Baltimore offices of Venable LLP, resigned last Thursday. The incident became public on Friday, when U.S. District Judge Julian Abele Cook Jr. issued an order announcing Wood’s resignation. You can read the order here.

Wood was appointed to the court monitor position in 2003 “with the assistance of Kroll, Inc.,” the order says. Wood – who at the time was known as Sheryl L. Robinson — is a former employee of the international risk assessment firm, the Free Press said.

Wood was hired to ensure the Detroit police complied with agreements it signed in 2003 to avert a DOJ Civil Rights Division federal lawsuit over questionable shootings of civilians and other matters. Her team of monitors earned $183,680 a month, the newspaper said.

According to the Free Press, the Department of Justice alerted the judge to the “meetings of a personal nature” with Kilpatrick, who resigned last year after pleading guilty in a complex case involving text messages between him and his chief of staff, with whom the mayor was having an extramarital affair, and with whom he was discussing all kinds of illegal stuff, including their knowledge of “fronts” used in municipal bidding processes and their use of city funds for romantic getaways.

In March 2008 the Detroit City Council passed a non-binding resolution seeking Kilpatrick’s resignation. The only member to vote “no” was Monica Conyers, the wife of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, who recently pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and quit the Council.

Wood is a 1987 graduate of Howard University who received her law degree at George Washington University Law School. She is a former trial attorney at Main Justice in the Antitrust and Civil Rights divisions. She also served as deputy director of the DOJ’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Liaison.

Read her bio here.

The Justice Department has blinked on Guantanamo.

The government now says it will no longer detain Mohammed Jawad as an accused war criminal, after holding him for nearly seven years. The Afghan, whose exact age isn’t known, is one of the youngest detainees at the American facility in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba. Human rights groups say he may have been as young as 12 when he arrived.

But in a notice filed Friday in federal court  in Washington, the government said it will continue to detain Jawad while the U.S. considers lodging criminal charges against him for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at U.S. officers in Kabul in 2002.

This is the first time the Justice Department has abandoned  its authority under the laws of war to detain a person at Guantanamo as an unlawful enemy combatant.  The government  did so after government lawyers acknowledged that Jawad was tortured at Guantanamo – and that his statements couldn’t be used as evidence.

In a July 16 hearing in Washington, federal judge Ellen Segal Huvelle called the case against Jawad “an outrage,” railing at government attorneys Kristina A. Wolfe and Daniel M. Barish of  the Civil Division’s Federal Programs Branch.

“Your case has been gutted, Mr. Barish,” she said, referring to the government’s inability to use statements obtained through torture. “[S]even years and this case is riddled with holes. And you know it. I don’t mean you. The United States Government knows it is.” Later, Huvelle said: “This is an unbelievable case.”

For now, the government’s stance means that Jawad, who was brought to Guantanamo as an adolescent, will be moved from Camp Six,  one of Guantanamo’s maximum security sections, to a less harsh setting at the facility.

If Jawad is not prosecuted in the U.S.  on charges of throwing a hand grenade and wounding two U.S. military officers and their Afghan translator in Kabul in 2002, he could be sent back home to Afghanistan, where he was first picked up by Afghan police after the attack.

In a statement Friday, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the department has to decide whether it had enough evidence to prosecute Jawad in criminal court.

Jawad’s lawyers think the move is designed to give the government more time to plan – in a case that’s long gone haywire.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, who represents Jawad, said in an interview with Main Justice he has gotten information from “highly placed officials� in the Afghan government that  U.S. officials have been in talks with them about sending Jawad home.

He said the government has no lawful authority to hold Jawad at this point. And he said there’s no legal authority to extradite Jawad to the U.S. to be prosecuted.

Frakt said he and his co-counsel have been invited to meet with Justice Department lawyers next week to discuss Jawad’s case.

In the meantime, Jawad is the first person at Guantanamo to go from unlawful enemy combatant, to no longer an enemy.  Frakt said it’s an admission Jawad has been wrongfully detained for more than six years.

“They’ve never admitted that with anybody else,” he said.

Libby Lewis is a print and public radio journalist who formerly reported for National Public Radio.

Tony Mauro on the BLT points out the problem with former Solicitor General Ted Olson arguing before the Supreme Court in September on behalf of Citizens United, the conservative group challenging aspects of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

In its 2003 McConnell v. Federal Election Commission ruling, the Court upheld the law’s restrictions on corporate and union spending intended to influence federal campaigns. Olson was President George W. Bush’s Solicitor General at the time, and he argued for the government in favor of upholding the restrictions.

Now, Olson has switched sides. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner is arguing against the law, officially known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

Mauro quotes Steve Lubet at Northwestern University School of Law, an expert in legal ethics, saying Olson has a unique obligation as a former SG to rise above advocacy — otherwise the SG “becomes just like any other lawyer,” Lubet told the BLT.

Olson sent Mauro a nimble email response saying, essentially, that the SG actually is like any other lawyer — a hired gun to argue positions for a client, even if he doesn’t personally believe in them. Read more of Olson’s response here.

Christopher Schroeder, the Duke University law professor nominated June 4 to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, is slated for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Tuesday.

Christopher Schroeder (Duke)

Schroeder’s nomination for the DOJ office that oversees judicial nominations and legal policy has flown a bit under the radar. First, President Obama’s original choice for the job, Mayer Brown partner Mark Gitenstein, withdrew under fire from liberal groups outraged about his advocacy of tort reform on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Read our story about that flap here. (Gitenstein, a former staffer on the Judiciary Committee for Vice President Joe Biden when he was in the Senate, landed on his feet with a nomination to be ambassador to Romania).

Now, the committee vote on Schroeder will take place inside a media circus: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court is slated to come before the Senate Judiciary panel the same day.

At the same July 28 business meeting, the panel will also consider the nominations  of Thomas McLellan to be deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy; Alejandro Mayorkas to be director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security; and Cranston J. Mitchell to be a commissioner of the U.S. Parole Commission.

Schroeder’s nomination is uncontroversial, but it appears unlikely he’ll come up for a confirmation vote before the Senate recesses for its August break. Other DOJ nominees who’ve already passed through the committee are still waiting for a Senate confirmation vote, including Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel; Tom Perez to head the Civil Rights Division, and Mary L. Smith to head the Tax Division. Read our previous coverage here.

Pro Publica, the not-for-profit investigative journalism organization, has compiled a chart with information on the 31 Guantanamo detainees whose lawsuits that have been decided by federal judges. More than 150 similar lawsuits are pending, Pro Publica says.

Twenty-six of the men have been found to be eligible for release, while five have lost their cases, the organization found. Of the 26 found to be unlawfully imprisoned, 17 remain in indefinite detention.

View the interactive chart here.