The New Yorker's David Grann has a new collection of his best reported work, entitled "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." It's a collection of the best of his incredibly fine work.

For any interested in witnessing the willfully slipshod and malevolent manner in which the state of Texas applies the death penalty, "Nightline" has done a follow-up segment to David Grann's New Yorker piece on the wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. The segment (in two clips, below) contains a variety of outrageous revelations, but perhaps none more shocking than this exchange between correspondent Terry Moran and John Jackson, the prosecutor in the case, who has since become a Texas judge:

Every time it seems that Texas's application of the death penalty cannot become a greater moral disgrace, officials in the state find a way to outdo themselves. A month ago, I linked to David Grann's exceptional profile of Cameron Todd Willingham--a man put to death in Texas who was almost certainly innocent--and less than two weeks ago, I noted the case of Charles Dean Hood, whose death sentence appeal to the state's highest court was rejected despite proof that the prosecuting attorney and the judge overseeing his case had a long-time (though only recently disclosed) sexual relationship.

Last week brought an update to Grann's story:

[On Wednesday,] the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, abruptly dismissed the chairman and two members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission investigating the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, which I wrote about last month in The New Yorker. The move came two days before the commission was scheduled to hear crucial evidence that Willingham was put to death, in 2004, based on arson theories that have since been disproven by modern science. The new chairman appointed by Perry promptly postponed Friday’s hearing, when the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler was supposed to testify regarding his findings.

For any who were not adequately shaken by David Grann's masterful article "Trial by Fire," about a man put to death by the state of Texas for a crime he almost certainly did not commit, Ta-Nehisi Coates points to a Salon article by Alan Berlow that simply beggars belief:

If anyone had any doubt that the Texas justice system operates in a parallel universe, look no further than the latest decision by the state's highest court in the case of death-row inmate Charles Dean Hood. On Wednesday the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) said it wasn't interested in examining whether there was a conflict of interest in Hood's 1990 trial simply because District Attorney Thomas S. O'Connell Jr., Hood's prosecutor, had had a long-term sexual relationship with presiding Judge Verla Sue Holland, an affair the two tried to hide for 20 years.

When former Democratic Rep. Jim Traficant was released from prison yesterday after 7 years behind bars, the AP reported that he "had his famously wild hair pulled back." Well, yes and no. The piled-high pompadour that had long been the congressman's calling card--the technical term for the style was, I believe, the "artichoke," and Traficant often joked that he trimmed it with a "weed-whacker"--was famous and wild, but it was not in fact his hair. When Traficant was incarcerated in 2002, it was revealed that his signature 'do was, in fact, a toupee, which came as a considerable shock, not because it looked like anything less, but because it seemed remarkable that anyone would pay money to perch such a thing on his own scalp.

Traficant's release offers the opportunity to revisit his career and that of the town, Youngstown, Ohio, whose less-than exemplary character he embodied. David Grann wrote about both back in 2000 in what was, if memory serves, the first piece I ever edited at TNR, "Crimetown, U.S.A." (Yes, I know this is two links to Grann pieces in a week, but these things sometimes happen.) Though Traficant would ultimately be nailed on bribery and racketeering charges, one of the more astonishing sections of the piece concerns an episode far earlier in his career when, appearing as his own attorney, he avoided conviction on corruption charges despite a signed confession and an audio tape of him conspiring with mobsters:

It is easy to disagree about the death penalty in the abstract, but anyone who doesn't harbor serious reservations about its application--the racial disparities, the often dubious safeguards, the eleventh-hour Death Row exonerees--isn't paying adequate attention.

From the Editors: As long as there have been politicians, there have been scandals. And the juiciest political scandals have always revolved around sex. With John Edwards finally admitting that he fathered a child with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, and torrid rumors circulating about an upcoming New York Times profile of New York Governor David Paterson, TNR decided to take a look back at the most famous of all sex scandals: Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.