NEW YORK — Prosecutors don’t always do the right thing. But they did one thing right in the case of Naveed Haq in not asking for the death penalty. Because the Supreme Court has said it’s unconstitutional to execute the mentally ill. The court got that right.

But here’s what they got wrong: lethal injection. Because just this term, the justices ruled that the three drug cocktail preferred by a majority of states is not cruel and unusual, despite evidence to the contrary. Most states that still have the death penalty use lethal injection to do the deed because our Constitution requires that if you’re gonna kill people for their crimes, you can’t be cruel about it.

Washington, where Haq is on trial, is only one of two states that will allow the condemned to choose hanging. They rarely do, because like everyone else, inmates believe lethal injection to be more humane. But it’s not. The American Veterinary Association has rejected lethal injection as too cruel and unusual for pets.

So here’s where the Supreme Court got it wrong. We need to treat people, whatever their crimes, with at least as much humanity as animals. And that’s the Last Word.

–Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK — I went to a celebration at the Innocence Project last week. It was only the second gala they’ve had since the project was founded 16 years ago.

Last year, the first such celebration was held to mark the 200th exoneration in this country based on post-conviction DNA testing. And even with all the wrongful convictions, the misidentifications, the false confessions, the lost years of freedom — even with all of that, there is something to celebrate when innocent people finally achieve justice and when the real perpetrators of crime are brought to it.

But now it’s time to look ahead to an even greater purpose: preventing wrongful convictions before they happen. All those years innocent people have spent behind bars should not be in vain. Their cases can teach us how these mistakes happen in the first place. If we can fix the system where it’s broken, then we will really have a reason to celebrate. And that’s the Last Word.

–Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK — And what more is there to say about the McGreevey, Matos McGreevey mess? Should she have known better? Should he have known himself better? Maybe, but there is one lesson we can all take away from their sordid affair. And it’s a lesson about how not to get a divorce.

So, some dos and don’ts when you say “I do”: Do think about whether you should get married at all. Do communicate with your partner about who you are before you do. Do think about whether to have children and, if you do, do keep their best interests at heart. Don’t lie about who you are. Don’t lie to yourself about who your partner is. And if you do make a mistake or somehow fall out of love with your spouse, do the right thing by her and the children you chose to have.

That means, if you do say “I do,” then do remember your promises. And keep them. And at the very least don’t humiliate your spouse with a public display of your irresistible impulses. Most of all, don’t work through your divorce demons in court. It’s undignified. And it simply doesn’t work. That’s the Last Word.

–Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK — Eliot Spitzer may have topped Jim McGreevey in terms of sex scandal sordidness. But now, as the divorce goes to court, Dina McGreevey is in a very different situation from her fellow former first lady Silda Spitzer. “I was essentially in the dark,” she told the New York Times, “…he never told me he was gay.”

But some are saying she knew more than she’s letting on, because the New Jersey press has reported three-way sexual trysts with the former governor and his wife. And if that’s true, her critics say Dina had to know her husband was gay.

Well, it’s true that most political wives are savvier than they present themselves to be. Who knows, for example, what Mrs. Spitzer knew about her husband’s sexual habits? But Dina McGreevey is a different sort of political wife. One who’s fortunes are more tethered to her ex-husband than Silda Spitzer’s will ever be because Dina never graduated from college. And now she’s forced to tell her story to Oprah and to tell-all in print. Silda’s Harvard law degree is a far more dignified contingency plan.

So listen up, women: get a degree, a career, a job. As much as you love your husband, you may just want something else to fall back on. That way his bad behavior won’t be the Last Word on your future.

–Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK –Jim McGreevey is back in the news. His was not the first sex scandal to bring down a politician and it certainly wasn’t the last. Just in the three years since Governor McGreevey left the statehouse and his wife, we’ve also lost Governor Spitzer here in New York to a sex scandal. Toe-tapper Larry Craig is holding on to his Senate seat for dear life. And don’t forget Detroit’s mayor and prolific sex text messenger, Kwame Kilpatrick.

Ah, the private foibles of middle-aged politicians. Is it weakness? Perversion? Corruption? Or is it just to be expected? I mean, do we really think politicians are having more illicit sex now than they have in the past?

What’s changed? Not the men. Not the sex. But here’s what has: the news media that now prefers to report on sex rather than to utter the real dirty word in politics, “issues.”

Gas prices, the mortgage mess, health care, the war. It’s time we start to focus on what our governors and other elected officials are doing in office. Not on what they’re doing in bed.

And that is the Last Word.

–Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK — I love my job but there are things I hate about this business. Like when we hype a story for weeks and then just let it drop because the people involved continue to be torn apart by whatever event made them a story in the first place.

As usual, Jami Floyd has the Last Word.

That’s exactly the case in Texas with the polygamy ranch raid last month. We reported that story every day for weeks — all about alleged sexual abuse at the ranch — none of it yet proved, by the way. But, now that the media brouhaha has died down, don’t think the story is over for the children taken from their mothers, because here iw what has been proved and not widely reported:

These children are now on an odyssey through the Texas child welfare system. Children who had never eaten processed foods, had never watched television. And Wal-Mart? They don’t sell those prairie dresses.

Imagine the shock of being flung headlong into potato chips and the likes of Hannah Montana. All of this in the context of a child welfare system that was underfinanced and already failing the children in its care, even before it took on 462 new cases.

What were they thinking? I’m thinking they weren’t.

And that’s the Last Word.

– Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK – Naveed Haq did a terrible thing. And he admits pulling the trigger again and again. But he says he’s not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jami Floyd has the last word on the insanity defense.

There is a huge chasm between our everyday understanding of crazy and the legal definition of insanity. The legal standard is almost insurmountable.

Ninety percent of those who raise the insanity defense are diagnosed as mentally ill, but the defense works in only 26 percent of cases. The legal test in most states, including Washington state, is just too narrow. I know prosecutors say it needs to be narrow to prevent abuse. Heck, five states have abolished the insanity defense altogether. Watch the latest trial update

Talk about crazy. The prisons are full of people who belong in mental health facilities. It doesn’t serve justice. Instead of intolerance for the mentally ill, we should reform the law of insanity which in many states dates back to the pre colonial period.

Isn’t it time to take into account all that we now know about mental illness that we didn’t know hundreds of years ago? I think it is.

And that’s the Last Word.

– Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK – All weekend, people have been asking me what I think about the acquittals of those three cops who shot and killed Sean Bell.

Jami Floyd gets the Last Word again.

Most of all, I feel for his parents and fiancée who sat in that courtroom, day after day, quietly hoping for justice. Then they heard the judge say the words “not guilty.”

Now, I know there has been case after sorry case of unjustified killings of black men by cops in this country. But each one has to be evaluated on its own merits. And everyone is presumed innocent, police included.

Even with 50 shots fired, the prosecution failed to make its case beyond a reasonable doubt because it couldn’t prove the cops were not in fear for their lives. And that’s what the law required.

So now, Sean Bell’s family should take it to the Department of Justice. Because federal prosecutors can likely prove his civil rights were violated — even if state prosecutors can’t prove a crime.

And that’s the Last Word.

– Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK – It’s cases like this one that makes me glad to be a lawyer because, whatever the emotions of the Sean Bell trial, as lawyers we look at the evidence and only the evidence.

Jami Floyd has the last word on Sean Bell.

Of course, sympathies and emotions have run high ever since Sean Bell was killed after his bachelor party and on the morning of his wedding. To many police officers, the accused cops have been made scapegoats merely to placate an angry public. That’s not the case. Nor is it the case that the detectives are cold-blooded killers.

No, the only question in this case was whether they were criminally reckless in firing on Bell and his friends — beyond a reasonable doubt. And the fact that the cops fired 50 times is not itself grounds for conviction. It’s just part of what the judge had to consider.

In the end, Judge Arthur Cooperman’s duty was not to second-guess the cops, not to place the victim on trial. His job was to subject all the testimony to the intense scrutiny justice requires. To ascertain what really happened and why. And then, to apply the law. And that’s what he did, like it or not.

That’s the Last Word.

– Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

NEW YORK — Last night my son, who is all of five years old, couldn’t fall asleep. He was afraid, he told me. And lots of kids are afraid at night. But he wasn’t afraid of monsters under the bed or in the closet. Instead he was afraid of kidnappers.

And not the kind most kids worry about. “No, mommy,” he told me, “like the ones who took those prairie kids.”

The prairie kids he was talking about, of course, are the children removed from the polygamy ranch in Texas. And the monsters my son is afraid of are the state agents who took them from their mothers.

I wanted to tell my little boy not to worry. To tell him that the police don’t just take little children from their mothers without proof that a child is in danger. But I couldn’t tell him that because apparently they do.

So last night my son fell asleep in an America in which he felt a little less safe from the government that is supposed to protect him. And that makes me angry. As a mother and as an American.

And that’s the Last Word. Watch the Last Word on video

– Jami Floyd, In Session anchor