Earlier Monday, Saatchi, 70, had said that photos showing his hands around his wife’s throat during what appears to be an argument on a restaurant’s patio had been misinterpreted. The photographs were published in the newspaper Sunday People, an arm of The Daily Mirror.

The images created an uproar in Britain, where several newspapers descended on the story and republished the photographs in online galleries. On Facebook, Lawson’s fans posted messages of support to her main profile page, as well as using the comment field of a story on griddles to give Lawson, 53, advice.

Lawson and Saatchi married in 2003. There has been no public statement about the incident from Lawson, but a family spokesman confirmed that “the chef and her children had moved out of their home,” CNN reports. Saatchi said Monday that she left to get away from the media around their house.

“Saatchi said the pictures showed a ‘playful tiff,’” The Guardian reports. “He told the London Evening Standard – for which he is a columnist – that the pictures gave a ‘more drastic and violent impression’ of the incident than had been the case.”

“About a week ago, we were sitting outside a restaurant having an intense debate about the children, and I held Nigella’s neck repeatedly while attempting to emphasize my point,” The Standard quotes Saatchi saying today.

A photographer captured the scene from outside the seating area. It was the publication of those photos Sunday that led to Monday’s probe by police.

The Mirror quotes a Metropolitan Police spokesman as saying, “This afternoon a 70-year-old man voluntarily attended a Central London police station and accepted a caution for assault.”

The altercation also drew the attention of other patrons.

“Onlookers were said to be shocked, saying Ms Lawson appeared to be trying to pacify her husband, placing a hand on his left wrist and at one point kissing him on the cheek,” The Standard reports. The newspaper relays this account from a witness: “It was utterly shocking to watch. I have no doubt she was scared. She was very tearful and constantly dabbing her eyes. Nigella was very, very upset.”

“Under British law, a caution is a formal warning given to someone who admits a minor offense, the AP reports. “It carries no penalty, but it can be used as evidence of bad character if a person is later prosecuted for a different crime.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week seeks to change that. The complaint (online here) argues that the copyright to the song, if it ever existed at all, “expired no later than 1921.” Warner/Chappell hasn’t responded to the suit yet; I left them a message this morning asking for comment, but I haven’t heard back.

The story of the song is long and weirdly complex. The short version is: A pair of sisters published a song called “Good Morning to You” in 1893. Over the next few decades, the song morphed into “Happy Birthday to You.” In the 1920s and ’30s, a couple versions of the birthday song were published in copyrighted songbooks.

But Happy Birthday to You was in wide circulation for years before it was published and copyrighted, and it’s not clear who wrote that version of the song, according to Mark Rifkin, one of the lawyers who filed the suit. (The plaintiff is a filmmaker who’s making a documentary about the song.)

The complaint goes through the history of the song in excruciating detail. One key detail: The complaint says the lyrics were published by the Board of Sunday Schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church in a 1911 book, long before copyrighted versions of the song appeared. Here’s the key page:

For more: a recent (pre-lawsuit) episode of On the Media had a good overview of the history of the song; this Reuters story has more on the details of the lawsuit. And see our recent story, When Patents Attack … Part Two! [Copyright 2013 NPR]

The case before the court involved a federal law that allows people to register to vote by mail using a federal form that requires the registrant to swear, under penalty of perjury, that he or she is a citizen. Arizona went further than the federal law and added a requirement that the registrant provide a passport, birth certificate or other proof of citizenship to register.

But the Supreme Court, by a 7-2 vote, invalidated the state requirement as pre-empted by federal law.

Writing for the court majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to “accept and use” the simple federal form, replaced more complicated state forms like Arizona’s. And the court said that if the state wanted to add requirements, it had to get permission from the federal Election Assistance Commission set up under the law. If the state was unable to prevail at the commission level, the court said, it could then appeal to the federal courts.

“No matter what procedural hurdles a State’s own form imposes, the Federal Form guarantees that a simple means of registering to vote in federal elections will be available,” Scalia wrote.

He added that if Arizona’s reasoning were to prevail, applicants would have to provide every additional piece of information the state requires on its state-specific form, and that would render the federal form purposeless.

“If that is so, the Federal Form ceases to perform any meaningful function, and would be a feeble means of increasing the number of eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for Federal office,” Scalia wrote.

The high court decision affirmed a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that included retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who, since her retirement, still sits occasionally as a visiting judge on lower courts. On Monday she was in the Supreme Court chamber when the decision was announced.

Dissenting from the ruling were Justice Clarence Thomas and the man who replaced O’Connor on the high court, Justice Samuel Alito.

What The Decision Means

The lead plaintiff in challenging the Arizona law was a school janitor named Jesus Gonzalez, who registered to vote, or tried to, on the day he became a U.S. citizen. His application was twice rejected by state officials, though the documents he submitted were among those the state listed as acceptable proof of citizenship. The first time he tried to register, he followed instructions on the state form and supplied his naturalization number. But, as it turned out, the state had no way to verify that number with the Department of Homeland Security. On his next try, he entered his driver’s license number — another document the state said would be acceptable. But, as it turned out, because he had obtained his license when he was a legal resident but not yet a citizen, the license was flagged as issued to a “foreigner,” unbeknownst to him.

Those challenging the Arizona law contend that these kinds of registration hoops were exactly what Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the 1993 law. The court’s Monday opinion upheld that purpose, says Nina Perales, litigation vice president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“What that means in real terms is that voters can register to vote using the federal postcard in Arizona, just as they can in every other state in the U.S.,” Perales said.

Voting-rights expert Richard Hasen of the University of California, Irvine, is not so sure the case is as straightforward as it may appear.

“At first glance it looks like it’s a victory for the federal government because Arizona is told that it has to accept this federal form for voter registration,” Hasen said. “But buried in the opinion are all kinds of potential arguments that states could make down the line so that they will not have to follow federal mandates on elections.”

Arguments friendly to states’ rights.

A Sigh Of Relief

Still, most voting-rights experts saw the court’s ruling as a strong affirmation of the federal government’s power to regulate how federal elections are conducted.

“What this decision is saying … is: You need to check with the federal government before you do those things and you do need to justify what you’re doing … before you just willy-nilly enact various different requirements” for voting, said Wayne State Law School Dean Jocelyn Benson.

Voting expert Richard Pildes of New York University Law School echoes that view. “What Justice Scalia has essentially said here for a substantial majority of the court is if you want modifications to these federal forms that have been required up till now, you have to go to this commission to get those modifications,” Pildes said.

Of course, the federal Election Assistance Commission is all but kaput these days, with Republicans in Congress blocking both personnel and funding. The commission has four members — two appointed by the Republican congressional leadership. Since 2009, the GOP nominees have withdrawn, while confirmation of the two Democratic nominees has been stalled.

Still, as NYU’s Pildes put it: “The court’s opinion does leave open some possibility that if all of this fails — if the commission is not active, if it doesn’t exist, if it can’t function — that the federal courts might ultimately have to decide some of these issues, but that’s a long, long way down the road, I would think.”

George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton notes in his blog for The Huffington Post that Scalia’s pronouncement that states have exclusive control over voter qualifications could actually hamper Congress’ power to protect voting rights. The opinion has the potential to bring into question a federal law that requires a state to register a U.S. citizen who moved from the state and now lives abroad, which would include many members of the military.

“Another thorny question left unresolved by the opinion is whether photo identification is itself a qualification the state can impose on federal elections (even in defiance of a federal statue to the contrary), or whether photo ID is simply evidence of a qualification like residency,” Overton wrote.

But, for today at least, civil rights groups were breathing a sigh of relief.

“Arizona’s law made it so difficult to run community-based voter drives, whether that was on a college campus or at a mall or at a church festival,” said MALDEF’s Perales, “because people were not physically carrying around documents proving their U.S. citizenship.”

Indeed, she says, that after the Arizona proof of citizenship law was enacted, voter registration dropped 44 percent in the state’s most populous county. And it wasn’t just Hispanics who were being turned down, Perales says. Eighty percent of those who were rejected were non-Hispanic whites.

Other Decisions

In other actions Monday, the court:

Ruled that juries, not judges, should have the final say on facts that can trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The 5-4 decision overturned the seven-year sentence of Allen Alleyne, convicted of robbery and firearm possession in Richmond, Va. Because the judge determined that Alleyne had “brandished” his weapon, his mandatory minimum sentence jumped from five to seven years. But the Supreme Court said that such factual judgments must be made by juries.

Ruled that prosecutors can use a suspect’s silence against him if he refuses to answer questions before he invokes his constitutional right to remain silent. The court’s 5-4 decision came in the case of Genovevo Salinas, who was tried for and convicted of murder. Before he was arrested or read his rights, Salinas answered some questions from police but refused to answer a question about a gun used in the crime, and his silence was used against him at trial.

Ruled that the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 does not allow lawyers to gather personal information about drivers from state databases when trying to find plaintiffs for potential lawsuits. Writing for the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that what lawyers have the statutory right to is information in ongoing cases in which they already represent someone. The law “has a limited scope to permit the use of highly restricted personal information when it serves an integral purpose in a particular legal proceeding.”

Ruled that when pharmaceutical corporations strike deals with their generic drug competitors to keep cheaper forms of medicine off the market, these deals are sometimes illegal and can be challenged in court. The court voted 5-3 that these settlements, known as pay-for-delay deals, are not immunized from possible antitrust attack because patent-related settlement agreements can violate antitrust law. (Justice Alito did not take part in this case.) The decision came in a case involving a company then known as Solvay that reached a deal with a generic drugmaker allowing the launch of a cheaper version of Solvay’s male hormone drug AndroGel in August 2015. Solvay agreed to pay the generic drug maker an estimated $19 million to $20 million annually for the delay. The FTC called the deal anti-competitive and sued.

[Copyright 2013 NPR]

But those who believe that government should make voting as easy as possible just gained a significant victory with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision slapping down an Arizona law that required potential voters to prove their citizenship.

In its 7-2 decision, the court ruled that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called motor voter law, trumped an Arizona law passed in 2004. The state law demanded that voters produce documentation of their citizenship at the time they registered to vote.

The federal law requires those registering in federal elections only to attest to their citizenship. The process is simple enough that people can register by postcard.

The high court’s decision on the Arizona law put an extra bounce in the step of officials at civil and voting-rights organizations.

“We are very, very pleased with the outcome today after several long years of litigation up through the district court and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. She was among officials from several voting-rights groups who spoke with reporters in a teleconference. “This is not just a victory [for the individuals on whose behalf MALDEF filed suit] but it’s a victory for voter registration organizations.”

After the Arizona law took effect in 2006, voter registration fell 44 percent in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county, which includes the city of Phoenix. The higher standard not only kept many people of Latino ancestry from registering — Perales told NPR’s Nina Totenberg in an interview that 80 percent of those whose voter registrations were rejected were non-Hispanic whites.

But the decision may not have been an unalloyed victory for voting-rights groups. Rick Hasen, an election law expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the Supreme Court’s ruling left states with the ability to wipe the smile off the faces of voting-rights advocates. In an analysis of the court’s decision, Hasen wrote:

“To begin with, Justice Scalia provided a road map for Arizona ultimately to win this very case when it goes back to the lower courts. The court wrote that Arizona should go back to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to ask it to reconsider its request to include the citizenship requirement on the federal form.”

Of course, the little-known Election Assistance Commission actually exists more in theory than reality now, as all four of its posts are vacant — a casualty of Washington’s partisan animus.

That led another California law professor, Tom Caso at Chapman University, who once served on The Federalist Society’s board, to say in a statement:

“The Supreme Court today opened the door to noncitizen voting … by striking down Arizona’s voter registration proof of citizenship requirement. The Court conceded that the Constitution granted Arizona the authority to restrict voting to citizens, but ruled that Arizona’s demand for documentation conflicted with a federal voter registration law. In order to ensure that only citizens are allowed to vote, according to the Court, Arizona must submit an application to a federal Commission that has no members for permission to change the federal voter registration application. The Court conceded that it may not have the power to require the Commission, which has no members, to take action on Arizona’s application.”

While important, the Arizona case isn’t the superstar voting-rights case of the current term. That would be Shelby County v. Holder, which challenges Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section requires certain state and local governments with a history of discrimination against minority voters, particularly African-Americans, to receive Justice Department approval before they change their election laws. That so-called pre-clearance provision could be struck down. The conservatives on the court appeared to be leaning in that direction during the oral arguments.

But Barbara Arnwine, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said she hoped the Arizona decision augured well for the court upholding Section 5.

“They do both fundamentally serve the same purpose,” she said of the motor voter and Section 5 laws in the conference call with reporters. “And you would hope if the court was being consistent that they would uphold this law because they serve the same purpose of guaranteeing to Americans, to all citizens, the right to vote unfettered by onerous practices — be they based on discrimination or be they based on unnecessary and unreasonable burdens on the right to vote.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

At more than 575 pages, the bipartisan bill introduced by Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Collin Peterson, D-Minn., the chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Agriculture, was .

When it was released in early May, Rep. Lucas called the bill, officially titled the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013, “a responsible and balanced bill that addresses Americans’ concerns about federal spending and reforms farm and nutrition policy to improve efficiency and accountability.”

The Obama administration doesn’t agree, saying today that the “bill makes unacceptable deep cuts in SNAP, which could increase hunger among millions of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, including families with children and senior citizens.”

The White House added that if the bill’s sponsors want to make budget cuts, they ought to reduce federal subsidies, such as crop insurance.

“Rather than reducing crop insurance subsidies by $11.7 billion over 10 years, as proposed in the President’s Budget,” the statement reads, “H.R. 1947 would increase reference prices for farmers by roughly 45 percent and increase already generous crop insurance subsidies at a cost of nearly $9 billion over 10 years to the Nation’s taxpayers.”

A summary of the bill released by the House Agriculture Committee says the legislation will “eliminate or consolidate over 100 programs,” in addition to enacting the “first reforms to SNAP since the welfare reforms of 1996, saving more than $20 billion.”

Among those changes, Republicans say, are two moves to keep states from adding more people to the food program than the law was meant to allow. Earlier today, Lucas tweeted a photo of a chart listing those reforms.

When the farm bill was released, Rep. Peterson said he believes “there are more responsible ways to reform nutrition programs,” but he added that “the bottom line is that this is the first step in the process and it is past time to pass a five-year farm bill.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]

The case dates from April of 2012, when the female midshipman reported that she had been sexually assaulted by three men after she went to a party in Annapolis.

“The woman woke up after a night of heavy drinking and later learned from friends and social media that three football players claimed to have had sex with her while she was intoxicated,” reports The Capital Gazette, citing a statement from, Susan Burke, the woman’s attorney.

“Burke said her client reported the allegations to Navy criminal investigators,” the newspaper reports. “The athletes were permitted to continue playing football pending the outcome of the investigation.”

The Gazette and other media outlets report that the case was put on hold for a period of time, before being taken up again. The men have not been publicly identified, but the newspaper says that officials placed a hold on one of the men’s graduation in light of the investigation.

In recent weeks, the female midshipman’s mother spoke to The Washington Post about her daughter’s case and accused the Naval Academy of letting her daughter down.

“It’s like, to the academy, it never happened, and it was all brushed away,” she said.

In late May, the woman’s attorney said the midshipman had been “ostracized” on the academy’s campus. She also noted that the Navy reopened the investigation after the woman got legal help.

Days before the woman and her attorney took their case to the media in late May, President Obama gave the commencement address at the Naval Academy, using the occasion to speak out against sexual assaults.

The problem of sexual abuse has bedeviled military branches in the United States and elsewhere.

Frustration with charges of sexual assaults and sexist emails sent between officers led Australia’s army chief to deliver a fiery and forceful speech against such actions last week. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

On today’s All Things Considered, NPR’s Sami Yenigun talks to a roomful of teenagers to see who uses which for what these days. (The answer, like most involving tech or teens, is subject to change like the weather.)

Some takeaways:

Facebook is for finding old friends, and maybe for arranging parties. (Unless they’re the kind of parties you don’t want the police knowing about. “Oftentimes, parties that are all over social media get busted by the cops really easily,” one 17-year-old tells Sami.)

Twitter is more for personal expression. “People be in their feelings on Twitter — they vent,” says Jamal Royster, 18.

Visual communication? It’s a different mode of connection. And as with text-based platforms, use cases vary among the teens Sami talked to.

Vine is where you publish (and watch) short video clips — seven seconds or so. People make all kinds of clever short films with the app. Check out Waka Flocka Elmo, a recent viral hit recommended by 17-year-old Jesse Aniebonam.

Instagram, a relative veteran in the pics-and-flicks category, is the go-to app when it comes to documenting your days and nights. “I Instagram everything,” says Grace Plihal, 18. “It’s kind of my way of showing myself to the world, I guess.”

(Interesting, that, given how much control Instagram gives users over the look and feel of what they post. “Showing myself” is a telling way to put it.)

But the observation that struck me most, when Sami told me about the shape of his story, was this one, from 13-year-old Caroline Lamb. There are times when you want to take a back seat to the story you’re telling, she suggests — and those are the times for Tumblr.

Here’s how she puts it in her own words:

Oh, one last entry: Snapchat is for selfies you don’t want to show up later — like when a college admissions counselor goes Googling for you. Users send snapshots back and forth using a proprietary app.

What makes ‘em different from the photos in the MMS messages you can send using most phones’ built-in text-messaging programs? Well, you can set Snapchat images to self-destruct: They disappear at most 10 seconds after the recipient views them.

So, Snapchat? It’s a near certainty that you don’t want to know what the teenagers in your life are doing with it. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

The Stanford team used functional MRI to compare the brains of 20 children who had autism spectrum disorders and 19 typical kids. In the typical kids there was a strong connection between areas that respond to the human voice and areas that release the feel-good chemical dopamine, says Vinod Menon of the Stanford University School of Medicine. But “the strength of this coupling is reduced in children with autism,” he says.

Connections between voice areas and areas involved in emotion-related learning also were weaker, Menon says. And he says the weaker the connections, the more trouble a child had communicating.

The results were reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Children with autism may not have the same motivation as other kids to listen to voices and to figure out what the words mean, Menon says.

Researchers have noted autistic children’s indifference to human voices since the psychiatrist Leo Kanner described the disorder in the 1940s. But they have struggled to identify an underlying cause.

The new study’s suggestion that motivation is the problem could explain why speech often comes late to children with autism even though the brain circuit involved in processing spoken words seems to function normally, says Coralie Chevallier, who studies communication in children with autism at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She was not involved in the study. “It really looks like it’s not that the circuit is broken, but rather that it’s not spontaneously made use of” because the brain provides no reward, she says.

The results also support a theory that children with autism lack a wide range of social skills because they simply aren’t as motivated as other kids to acquire them, Chevallier says. And she says if motivation is the problem, then many autism therapies are right to offer food or other tangible rewards to children when they do things like listen carefully.

“When you’re reinforcing the child’s behavior with M&Ms, or a piece of cookie,” she says, “you’re providing an extrinsic reason for the child to do something they didn’t want to do in the first place. So you’re working on motivation.”

The new study offers a stark reminder of just how different the world can be for people with autism, says Nancy Minshew of the University of Pittsburgh. The world is filled with all kinds of sounds that a typical brain can filter out so we can pay attention to spoken words. “But in autism, that’s not happening,” she says. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Sound like the makings of a Hollywood thriller? These are actually among the allegations being thrown about in a federal court case against America’s alleged “Potato Cartel.” It’s enough to make Mr. Potato Head blush.

A civil lawsuit that shifted into U.S. district court in Idaho – America’s potato country — last week alleges that the United Potato Growers of America has become a veritable OPEC of Spuds. The group’s members, who produce about 75 percent of the potatoes grown in this country, are accused of illegally conspiring to inflate ‘tater prices.

The allegations – which the potato growers deny — are being lobbed by the Associated Wholesale Grocers, which represents more than 1,900 retailers, according to its website. The grocers group is based in Kansas, where the suit was originally filed this spring.

In its lawsuit, the grocers accuse Big Potato of enforcing its pricing schemes through a variety of strong-arm, high-tech means, including using GPS systems and satellite imagery of farmland to make sure farmers aren’t planting more spuds than they’re supposed to. They were “using Spudnik, if you will, from the sky,” AP reporter John Miller, who recently wrote about the case, joked with Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. Growers who violated the production limits, the suit alleges, were fined $100 per acre.

At issue is whether the potato growers were engaging in predatory conduct or merely running a smart cooperative that helped its members avoid the cycle of boom and bust in the potato biz. According to its website, United Potato Growers of America formed in 2005, following the creation a year earlier of an Idaho cooperative with a mission to “manage their potato supply, matching it to demand to help their growers receive a reasonable price for their product.”

Mission accomplished, it would seem: In 2004, AP’s Miller says, a 10-pound bag of potatoes sold for about $8 or $9; by 2006, that price had shot up to $15 or so.

Now, under a 1922 law known as the Capper-Volstead Act, agricultural producers are allowed to band together to more efficiently market their products. And the potato folks clearly think they’re on the right side of the law.

In a statement, UPGA told NPR: “United Potato Grower’s goal has been to help growers provide quality potatoes at reasonable prices to American consumers. We have always acted openly and within the bounds of the law. We are confident in our legal position and look forward to a favorable outcome in court.”

But in recent years, the Justice Department has been scrutinizing just how far such antitrust exemptions should apply to large modern agricultural operations.

And the current lawsuit is quite similar to another lawsuit filed against the potato co-op back in 2010. The judge in that case, Miller says, rejected a motion to throw the case out of court. Instead, the judge says it remains an open question just how far growers can stretch Capper-Volstead’s antitrust protections. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

“An appeal from Pope John Paul II, an international campaign to overturn the death sentence and legal challenges helped to spare Cooper’s life,” reports The Indianapolis Star. “The Indiana Supreme Court commuted the death sentence in 1989 and sent her to prison for 60 years. She earned credits for an early release.”

Cooper admitted to killing Pelke as part of a robbery in which she and three other teenage girls went to Pelke’s house. Cooper, who was 15 at the time of the murder, said that she used a kitchen knife to cut Pelke more than 30 times. The other girls in the case have already been released from prison.

The case shocked the public, and Cooper’s death sentence drew protests and calls to spare her life. One of her supporters was Bill Pelke, a grandson of Ruth Pelke. He tells the AP that his grandmother would have been “appalled” by the thought of a young girl being executed.

Over the years, Pelke became friends with Cooper during her prison sentence. And yesterday, Pelke, who now lives in Alaska but has reportedly traveled to Indiana for Cooper’s release, told CNN that he plans to take her shopping when he meets with her.

Saying that Cooper is supposed to call him, Pelke tells CNN, “I told her whenever she got out, I’d treat her. I have a friend who would like to buy her an outfit, and I want to buy her a computer.”

The Star reports that Cooper has worked to rehabilitate herself, after some rough years in the first half of her prison sentence.

“I was very bitter and angry, so I was in a lot of trouble. I hated it. But I learned to adapt eventually,” Cooper told The Star in 2004. “I decided for myself it was time to really sit down and buckle down and get it, because it wasn’t gonna always be there.”

Cooper took classes in prison and earned her bachelor’s degree. “She also helped train dogs as companions for the disabled and, since 2011, has worked as a tutor,” the paper says.

In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that convicted killers could not be executed in cases where they committed the crime before they were 16. In 2005, the court abolished capital punishment for people under the age of 18, saying that such executions “violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment,” as NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported.

Back in 1985, Indiana state law allowed for the execution of killers who were age 10 and over. The former prosecutor who worked on Cooper’s case, attorney Jack Crawford, says he is now against the death penalty.

“When we asked for it, it was controversial because she was so young,” Crawford tells The Star. “But my feeling was that, if the law allowed for imposition of the death sentence on a teenager, this was the case because of the facts. I couldn’t imagine a worse set of facts for a defendant. But if it was ever justified, this was the time it was probably justified.” [Copyright 2013 NPR]