It's Craptastic!

President Bush said on Wednesday he would not choose his Supreme Court candidate based on their position on specific issues such as abortion or gay marriage.

"There will be no litmus test," he said, repeating his position during his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.

In Washington, Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, doubted Bush's pledge not to give candidates a litmus test on abortion.

"This president has no credibility -- to date, he has appointed more than 200 judges to the federal courts -- not one of whom supported a woman's right to choose," she said.

But Democrats and interest groups on the left promise a fight to block any nominee they view as too conservative.

Republicans in Congress have launched a new effort to speed up executions in the United States by limiting the ability of those sentenced to death to appeal to federal courts.

The "Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005," introduced into the House of Representatives by California Rep. Dan Lungren and in the Senate by Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl (news, bio, voting record), would limit the ability of defendants facing the death sentence to have their cases reviewed by federal courts in what are known as habeas corpus appeals.
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A study headed by Columbia University statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman of all 5,826 death sentences imposed in the United States between 1973 and 1995 found that 68 per cent were reversed on appeal.

The most common reasons were "egregiously incompetent lawyering, prosecutorial misconduct or suppression of evidence, misintruction of jurors or biased judges or jurors," said the study published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

Federal courts examining habeas corpus appeals overturned 40 percent of the cases that had previously been upheld by state appeals courts -- a fact the authors called worrisome.