Women have the option, within 72 hours of a birth, of handing over newborns to hospitals or fire stations without danger of being prosecuted, as long as the child has not been abused or neglected.
Mothers such as Sally Clarke and Trupti Patel have had to cope with the anxiety and stress of being prosecuted as well as being denied the chance to grieve for their children.
The courts ruled last year that he could not be prosecuted as long as he was president.
Given the way death-penalty crimes are prosecuted, as the wrongful-conviction scandals in Illinois a few years back showed, a certain number of mistaken convictions are essentially built into the process.
So, if anyone is to be prosecuted as the result of Wikileaks documents, it is the politicians who have gotten us into the quagmire that their adventures and illegal war in the Middle East have created, from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to those in the Obama administration that continue to wage foolish wars abroad.
The tactic, which dates to at least the Spanish Inquisition, has been prosecuted as torture by the U.S. military and condemned by the State Department when used by despotic governments.
Mike Feuer on Wednesday asked the City Council for $510,000 to hire 15 lawyers and assistants to handle the anticipated influx of misdemeanor prosecutions, which previously would have been prosecuted as felonies by the district attorney's office.
Jónsdóttir is struck by the fact that the only person who has been prosecuted as a result of the video was its alleged leaker, Manning.
No one has been prosecuted as a result of the investigation.
