When a nationally respected fire engineer rebuked an arson investigation that sent a Texas man to his death, the country took notice. The question of whether our state executed an innocent man spurred a national discussion, as media outlets from Nightline to The New Yorker explored whether the fiery deaths of Cameron Todd Willingham's three young children were a tragic accident or capital murder. A growing number of experts have rejected the finding that the fire was arson, arguing that investigators relied on folklore and junk science to reach that unsupported conclusion.

Although spurned by the United States, the International Criminal Court approaches its first review conference next year with several high-profile war-crimes prosecutions under its belt. More recently, the court grabbed headlines by issuing a warrant for the arrest of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, over alleged war crimes committed in the country's Darfur region. But the seven-year-old ICC faces stiff challenges in coming years, advocates say. Supporters of the court who gathered in New York this week -- including its chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo -- say second thoughts by some countries that signed on to the court, and criticisms that the ICC only goes after rights violators in weak countries, are just part of the challenge.

The Obama administration has secured commitments from nearly a dozen countries willing to accept detainees from Guantanamo Bay and is increasingly confident about its ability to transfer a large majority of the prisoners who have been cleared for release, according to U.S. and foreign officials. Six European Union countries -- Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain -- have accepted or publicly agreed to take detainees. Four E.U. countries have privately told the administration that they are committed to resettling detainees, and five other E.U. nations are considering taking some, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

The Supreme Court sent an important message when it ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that children under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed were not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults. The states have followed this logic in death penalty cases. But they have continued to mete out barbaric treatment - including life sentences - to children whose cases should rightly be handled through the juvenile courts.

Last year, state and federal courts put 37 inmates to death, the lowest number since 1994. This year, there has been a spike in executions-30 altogether, 16 in Texas alone-attributable largely to a backlog caused by a series of stays issued by the Supreme Court as it considered the constitutionality of lethal injections, stays lifted once the Court reaffirmed this preferred method of execution in April of last year. Still, the trend is clear. Executions have dipped steadily since the high-water mark of 98 a decade ago; death sentences have dropped dramatically from 328 in 1994 to 111 this past year. Capital punishment is in slow decline.

A group of pastors urged state legislators to pass a bill that would allow defendants to challenge the application of the death penalty by citing statistical racial disparities in the overall use of capital punishment.

The bill, which was introduced by state Reps. Larry Womble and Earline Parmon of Forsyth County, is needed to provide a check on a criminal-justice system in which racial bias plays a major role in determining who ends up on death row and who doesn't, said the Rev. Carlton Eversley, the president of the Ministers Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity.

The International Criminal Court affirmed its reason for being when it issued an arrest warrant on Wednesday for Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with crimes against humanity in Darfur. The charges include murder, rape, torture, the forcible transfer and extermination of targeted groups, and the pillaging of their property. These are war crimes that too often escaped punishment in the past - acts perpetrated by a merciless criminal endowed with political power. Well-meaning critics of the arrest warrant worry that its issuance now could interfere with efforts to reach a negotiated peace agreement between Bashir's regime and rebel groups in Darfur. Humane as the intentions behind these reservations may be, they are outweighed by the need for justice.

"Jesus for President!" So proclaims a progressive Christian movement aiming to tweak the national conscience. Recent trend lines in the country suggest an even more provocative tagline for our consideration: "Jesus for Parole." That's right. Jesus is imprisoned — at least in the view of an increasingly vocal set of Christians spurred into action by some deeply troubling truths about America and our bursting-at-the-seams prison system. The fact that violent crime, according to the Justice Department, has dropped over the same three decades of surging prison-population growth poses a complex tangle: Is less crime the product of get-tough enforcement and sentencing, or are we just incarcerating more low-level offenders who don't need to be in prison? Probably some of both.