“Transcript: Convertino told judge of hospital pictures; Ex-prosecutor said a witness was coming in with photos of Jordan facility, evidence shows.” The Detroit News today contains an article that begins, “Former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino told a judge at a closed-door hearing in 2002 he was obtaining photographs of a hospital in Jordan that he would present as evidence in the trial of four men accused of supporting terrorism, Convertino’s criminal trial in U.S. District Court was told Friday.”

“Mack jury selection nears end of candidates”: The Reno Gazette-Journal today contains an article that begins, “Judge Douglas Herndon brought in the third of four panels of potential jurors in the Darren Mack murder trial on Friday and approved four more people, bringing the number picked so far to 24 as they build toward a final group of 35.”

“Wiretapping Compromise Was Months in the Making”: The New York Times contains this article today.

“FBI works to bolster Al Qaeda cases; A 300-person task force has been gathering evidence for war crimes tribunals for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 others held at Guantanamo Bay; The concern is that information previously obtained through CIA tactics could be inadmissible”: This article will appear Sunday in The Los Angeles Times.

“Catherine Roraback, 87, Influential Lawyer, Dies”: The New York Times today contains an obituary that begins, “Catherine Roraback, a lawyer who pressed the Connecticut case that eventually led the United States Supreme Court to rule that laws banning the use of contraceptives were unconstitutional, a precursor to its Roe v. Wade decision on abortions, died on Wednesday in Salisbury, Conn.”

“A scolding, but no full hearing, in Barnes case”: The Philadelphia Inquirer today contains an article that begins, “A routine court session over the latest attempt to block the Barnes Foundation art collection from leaving Merion for Philadelphia turned to drama yesterday when a lawyer accused the judge of doing too little, too slowly, in the case.”

And The New York Times today contains a news brief titled “Fighting for the Barnes.”

“Ex-Prosecutor Alleges Pentagon Plays Politics; Pressure for ‘Sexy’ Guantanamo Hearings”: This article appears today in The Washington Post.

“Immunity push for telecom firms might not kill wiretap suits”: Today in The San Francisco Chronicle, Bob Egelko has an article that begins, “The Bush administration’s proposal to protect telecommunications companies from lawsuits for aiding the government’s electronic surveillance program won’t necessarily scuttle cases pending in San Francisco against the companies, a lawyer for AT&T customers said Friday.”

“Lawsuit against college to be pulled; Decision comes after North Harris allows access to blog about official”: This article appears today in The Houston Chronicle.

This past week was not the first time that this blog has posted online a decision that a federal appellate court claimed to have made publicly available in error: The earlier instance occurred in January 2007, as noted in posts that appeared that month here and here. The decision in question remains accessible online via this blog here (all but page nine) and here (the initially elusive page nine). In that instance, this blog received no communications from the issuing court requesting that the decision be taken off-line, even though Westlaw apparently did agree to remove the decision from its database following a request to do so from the issuing court.

On various occasions, clerks from numerous federal appellate courts — from the Clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court to the Chief Clerks of Court on various regional appellate courts — have emailed me to ask that the “How Appealing” blog be updated to include a post that would draw the attention of this blog’s readership to important notices posted at those courts’ web sites. Last week was the first instance in this blog’s more than five-year existence that the Chief Clerk of Court (or anyone affiliated with any appellate court, federal or state) ever called on this blog to take down from the internet a decision that the court itself had posted to the internet at an earlier time. And, of course, my reasons for not agreeing to do so appear here and here.

“Doctors appeal ruling on executions; A North Carolina judge had said the state medical board can’t bar members’ involvement”: Henry Weinstein has this article today in The Los Angeles Times.

“Naming Names at Gitmo: How Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz put himself in the middle of the prisoner-detention issue — and went to jail for it.” Tim Golden will have this very interesting article tomorrow in The New York Times Magazine.

Hugh Hewitt interviews Justice Clarence Thomas: The interview took place on Thursday and was the subject of yesterday’s broadcast of Hugh’s radio show. You can access some excerpts of the interview transcript via this post at Hugh’s blog.

The complete transcript of the interview can be accessed here. You can access the audio of the interview online, on-demand in two parts: part one and part two. Hugh’s radio show yesterday concluded with a bonus re-broadcast of an earlier interview that Hugh had conducted with Jeffrey Toobin. You can access that audio via this link.

Two interesting new posts from Law Professor Daniel J. Solove at “Concurring Opinions”: The posts are titled “Who, Exactly, Is a Journalist?” and “The Boy Who Cried ‘National Security’: The Need for Greater Skepticism About Government Secrecy.”

As noted in those posts, a comparison between the unredacted version of the Second Circuit‘s ruling in Higazy v. Templeton, which that federal appellate court initially released over the internet on Thursday only to shortly thereafter pull it offline without any meaningful public explanation, and the redacted version of that same decision issued yesterday can be performed by anyone who wishes to evaluate whether the redacted information should have been treated as confidential in the first place.

And you needn’t feel reluctant to perform this examination. As the first of Dan’s two posts linked above notes, “the Supreme Court held in Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U.S. 469, 496 (1975), that ‘[o]nce true information is disclosed in public court documents open to public inspection, the press cannot be sanctioned for publishing it.'”