ILL-ADVISED WATER GIVEAWAY

ILL-ADVISED WATER GIVEAWAY
Los Angeles Times: States have the legal right to their own water with one major exception: The federal government can keep the rights to water springing from federal lands -- Indian reservations, national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and the like -- if it is needed to serve those lands.
The Clinton administration applied the rule strictly, reserving the right to a maximum amount of water to protect the environment as needed. But now the Bush administration is backing away from tough enforcement of the rule, opening the way for the states to claim increasing control over water that should remain in federal jurisdiction. This is a mistake. Last year, the Department of the Interior abandoned a claim to Snake River water surrounding a wildlife refuge in Idaho. This fall, the administration indicated it would reduce its hold on the Gunnison River in Colorado even though national park officials said reservation of the full flow was needed to protect the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park downstream.
Now, the Bush administration says it will get by with considerably less water, freeing up supplies for urban areas. Environmental critics say there are other sources to meet demand without tapping the federal water. If the federal rights were transferred to the state, the water would not be available when needed for wildlife, fisheries and river bank vegetation.
Not enough water
If there's not enough water for the Colorado monument at some point, the government can buy water elsewhere, an Interior Department official said. What kind of logic is that -- give it away and then buy it back? Fortunately, there is little immediate threat to federal waters in California, although there is a bitter dispute along the Klamath River on the California-Oregon border over the allocation of water to area farmers, a wildlife refuge, Indian reservations with treaty rights and the salmon fishery. The problem: not enough water.
In California, state, federal and municipal projects take much of the water arising from the national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and other federal lands. Congress decreed that part of the federal Central Valley Project supply must go to protect the environment, although farmers bitterly disputed the amount of water taken for this purpose. Cal-Fed, a new state-federal water venture, establishes an environmental water account to safeguard waterfowl and fish.
But there is no guarantee the environment will be protected if the administration becomes too generous in giving away federal -- the people's -- water.
HOW BIG A FIG LEAF?
Washington Post: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments recently in the case of Miller-El v. Cockrell, the latest death penalty appeal from Texas' hyperactive execution factory. At issue in this case is how obviously discriminatory jury selection needs to be before the Constitution requires that a capital murder conviction be thrown out. Prospective jurors cannot constitutionally be struck from a jury pool because of their race. The question is how large a fig leaf prosecutors need to defend a capital trial at which African Americans were systematically excluded from jury service.
Thomas Joe Miller-El was convicted of a brutal murder in Dallas in 1986. His trial took place against the backdrop of a long history of conscious efforts by city prosecutors to keep blacks off juries. A 1963 training manual for prosecutors stated: "Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well educated." A 1969 update said prosecutors should bar from juries "any member of a minority group which may subject him to oppression" and warned that "minority races almost always empathize with the Defendant." While this was no longer stated policy by the time of Mr. Miller-El's trial, veterans of the office testified that at least some prosecutors still observed an unwritten norm of keeping blacks out of the jury box. A study by the Dallas Morning News at the time of Mr. Miller-El's trial found that prosecutors had eliminated 92 percent of African Americans using peremptory challenges, which enable parties to remove otherwise qualified jurors, in 100 trials studied.
Black jurors
And the exclusion of blacks is precisely what happened in Mr. Miller-El's case. A pair of prosecutors -- who also helped prosecute other cases in which courts later found discriminatory jury selection -- appeared to manipulate the rules to minimize the chances of blacks being chosen. And they then used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 of 11 qualified black jurors. The only African American they allowed on the jury was a man who said that lethal injection is "too quick. They don't feel the pain. ... What I call punishment is back to the old Indian days. ... Pour some honey on them and stake them out over an ant bed."
The state contends that the jurors were struck on the basis not of race but of their statements in questionnaires and in individual interviews. But Mr. Miller-El's attorneys argue that the prospective black jurors were questioned differently from how the others were questioned, and that comparable answers caused blacks to be struck and others not. As a general matter, courts ask only that prosecutors identify a reason for a strike that is valid and race-neutral. And the lower courts that have reviewed this case have taken Texas' word that it was the prospective jurors' statements, not their race, that prompted these strikes. This is clearly wrong. We don't doubt that if the court focuses narrowly on what took place in the jury questioning, this case will be a close one.