WASHINGTON

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SEEKS TO THROW OUT MAJOR TERROR CONVICTION

The Justice Department has asked a judge to throw out the convictions of a suspected terror cell in Detroit because of prosecutorial misconduct, reversing course in a case the Bush administration once hailed as a major victory in the war on terrorism, legal sources said yesterday.

The department told U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen that it supports the Detroit defendants’ request for a new trial and would no longer pursue charges of material support of terrorism. That means the defendants at most would only face fraud charges at a new trial, the legal sources said.

The department’s decision came after a months-long independent investigation uncovered several pieces of evidence that prosecutors failed to turn over to defense lawyers before the trial last year and exposed deep disputes within the government over the course of the case and the quality of the prosecution’s evidence.

The announcement, expected as early as today, comes in the shadows of the Republican National Convention in New York, where President Bush and his allies are trumpeting his successes in the war on terror.

– Associated Press

1,000 STUDENTS ENROLLED IN D.C. VOUCHER SCHOOLS As the school year begins, more than 1,000 students are using a new voucher program to escape troubled public schools in the nation’s capital.

Officials running the nation’s first federally funded voucher program said the response was overwhelming. Seventy-four percent of students who applied for vouchers and were determined to be eligible are enrolled in participating private and parochial schools, and more applications are under review.

In 17 days last spring, the scholarship fund received inquiries from the families of about 8,500 students. More than 1,800 children met program income requirements, under which a family of four could not earn more than $34,400 per year.

“The fact that so many families applied for and accepted these scholarships shows the demand for quality educational options,” said Mayor Anthony A. Williams, who spent much of last fall building bipartisan support for the $12.1 million program, which provides up to $7,500 per child to cover tuition, fees, and other educational expenses.

Voucher advocates hope the experiment in the capital city, an idea debated in Congress for years before its passage in 2004,will energize the school-choice movement nationwide. The Bush administration views vouchers as a way to empower parents and free students from struggling schools. Mr. Bush has proposed another $50 million for vouchers initiatives next year.

Critics, including Democratic presidential contender John Kerry, say vouchers strip money from public schools and funnel it to private schools that face little accountability.

– Associated Press

SOUTH

WRONGLY CONVICTED OF RAPE, GEORGIA MAN IS EXONERATED BY DNA TEST

DECATUR, Ga.- A man wrongly convicted of rape, kidnapping, and robbery was freed yesterday after 17 years in prison – exonerated by a new test of DNA evidence and “unusually” helpful prosecutors. Clarence Harrison, sentenced to life in prison in 1987 on charges of sexually assaulting a hospital worker, walked out of a courthouse in DeKalb County surrounded by ecstatic friends and family. “I think I had given up years ago,” the 44-year-old Mr. Harrison said. “I think God just carried me on through it.” The Georgia Innocence Project, which represented Mr. Harrison, said it usually runs into roadblocks when working with prosecutors. “Many have not been terribly cooperative,” the group’s director, Aimee Maxwell, conceded. DeKalb prosecutors, however, were “unusually” helpful with Mr. Harrison’s case, she said. After Mr. Harrison asked the group for help last year, the district attorney’s office found evidence stashed in an old box and sent it to a lab for DNA testing. The new test confirmed Mr. Harrison was not guilty of the 1986 attack.

A motion for a new trial was filed on Mr. Harrison’s behalf, and prosecutors transferred Mr. Harrison to a local jail so he could walk out of the courthouse a free man. Judge Cynthia Becker granted the new trial request yesterday and then dismissed the charges. The courtroom erupted into applause and tears. – Associated Press

SCIENCE

RESEARCHERS DISCOVER TWO NEW PLANETS American astronomers say they have discovered the two smallest planets yet orbiting nearby stars, trumping a small planet discovery by European scientists five days ago and capping the latest round in a frenzied hunt for other worlds like Earth.

All three of these smaller planets belong to a new class of “exoplanets” – those that orbit stars other than our sun, the scientists said in a briefing yesterday. They define this new class by the planets’ smaller mass – roughly 14 to 18 times the size of Earth and equivalent to Neptune in our solar system.

The two planets announced yesterday were spotted by two separate teams of American researchers using telescopes in Hawaii and Texas.

Over the past decade, astronomers have found as many as 135 planets orbiting various stars, but all of them are giant gas planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn. Researchers don’t know the composition of these new, smaller planets or what they actually look like. One of them orbits very close to the star named 55 Cancri, which is about the same size as our sun and located 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. The other new planet discovered by American scientists orbits a star called Gliese 436, that lies about 33 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Leo.

– Associated Press