Yesterday the state supreme court in Arizona commuted to life without parole the death sentence of Frank Roque, the man who killed gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodi after 9/11 because he thought he was Muslim (thanks Atul for the news tip):

The high court unanimously agreed that Frank Silva Roque’s mental illness and low IQ were mitigating factors and should have resulted in the lesser sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole.

“We have such a doubt in this case, and therefore conclude that the death penalty should not be imposed,” Vice Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch wrote. “Because of the serious nature of Roque’s crimes, however, we conclude that he should be imprisoned for the rest of his natural life and never be released.”

A gracious reaction from the victim’s family:

“As long as he is away from society and our family, it’s fine,” said his brother, Rana Singh Sodhi, though he questioned the high court’s assertion that Roque is mentally ill.

“I don’t think mentally ill people can make those (deliberate decisions about) targets,” he said.

Not much to add here, but the news — a victory for justice, since the conviction was upheld, and (in my opinion) for humanity, since another life won’t be unnecessarily taken — seems significant enough to disseminate. Here’s Ennis’s post on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of Balbir Singh Sodhi’s death, last September. Continue reading →

Today, August 14, Pakistan marks the anniversary of its independence. Over the weekend the Pakistani diaspora celebrated, although this report from Devon Street in Chicago suggests the party was a muted and anguished one.

This morning, I took a tour of the Pakistani blogosphere and found it, as usual, disappointing. A few bloggers offered bombastic statements of national pride. Others commented on the party preparations, or lack thereof. There don’t seem to be that many Pakistani bloggers to begin with, nor Pakistani-American bloggers for that matter (a fact that we deplore here at the Mutiny), so I wasn’t really expecting anything in particular; even so, the paucity of offerings, in both quantity and quality, struck me as symptomatic of, well, something.

We get a lot of anti-Pakistan mudslinging here on the comment threads, and though we try to keep up with and get rid of the most egregious and bigoted statements, the best way Pakistan’s image could improve would be through a flood of free, contentious, provocative, educative speech by Pakistanis and their friends. The Web is only one venue, of course, and it is obviously biased toward those with access to computers and the Internet, but to not make better use of such a ready resource is really a shame.

So it’s with pleasure that I introduce you, on this Pakistan Independence Day, to Watandost, the weblog of Hassan Abbas, a Pakistani former government official and writer who now lives in Boston. It’s a one-stop shop for news stories and web links that will be of interest to anyone who wishes for a democratic and peaceful Pakistan within a democratic and peaceful South Asia.

Abbas doesn’t write original content at his blog: he posts useful stories and lets them do the talking. However, he is the author of a book that I wish I’d heard of earlier. It’s called PakistanÂ’s Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and AmericaÂ’s War on Terror, and here is part of the review in the Boston Globe by Farah Stockman: Continue reading →