“The PR campaign has of course become the favored artifice for corrupting the independence and credibility of the truth-seeking and independent judicial branch of our government,” he wrote.
“These campaigns are usually energized—or at least, having been set off at the center, are carried forward around the circumference of the echo chamber—by people most of whom approach the law in ignorance, or with an ideological bias that, on the face of it, should disqualify them from fact-based, rational discussion.”
“And,” he continued, “these campaigns tend to be swallowed whole and regurgitated in the same form by some of the media.”
Lawton also had strong words for both the judicial system itself and some who have supported Davis.
In light of the rollercoaster of delay, said Lawton, “the criminal justice system has hardly bathed itself in glory.”
“The judiciary’s only currency—unlike the other two branches—is its credibility. There comes a point at which an obsessively punctilious focus on fairness (for one party only) becomes itself unfair. Unfairness has a corrosive effect on credibility.”
Lawton also questioned the motives of Davis’ supporters.
“If the only characteristic of a campaign of indignation attacking what must be the most open and accountable legal system on Earth was its naiveté, we could look upon it with a measure of equanimity, even perhaps amusement,” wrote Lawton. “But the campaign’s cynicism and manipulation are inimical to the law’s neutral truth-seeking purpose. That is—I speak now of the impulsive anti-death penalty folks—often, the ostensible purpose of enlightening the operation of the law has the effect of compromising its principles. Perhaps, I hate to suggest, on purpose, and even potentially fatally.”
Jared Feuer of the local Amnesty International office, who read Lawton’s comments late Tuesday afternoon, said, “To make this about manipulation … is not serving the cause of justice.”
I haven’t seen the full statement but here’s what is reported in the story:
The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a Georgia man to be put to death for killing a police officer two weeks after it halted his execution to consider his appeal.
Troy Davis asked the high court to intervene in his case and order a new trial because seven of the nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony. Former President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among prominent supporters who have called for a new trial.
MacPhail’s mother, Annaliese MacPhail, told CNN she had not yet been officially notified of the court’s decision, but “this is what we were hoping for, and I hope pretty soon that we will have some peace and start our life, especially my grandchildren — my grandson and granddaughter. It has overshadowed their lives.
“Right now, I’m kind of numb because I’ve been so edgy and keyed up about the whole thing,” she said. “And I haven’t had a chance to react.”
The human rights group Amnesty International USA, however, condemned the court’s decision.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is truly shocking, given that significant evidence of Davis’ innocence will never have a chance to be examined,” said Larry Cox, the organization’s executive director. “It is disgraceful that the highest court in the land could sink so low when doubts surrounding Davis’ guilt are so high.”
Another death warrant to be signed by a judge will come quickly.
October 10th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
David Kernell, who pleaded innocent earlier in the week to illegally gaining access to Governor Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo e-mail account, apparently has a history. Kernell, the 20-year-old son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell, lived for a time in Killeen, TX.
Tracey McDaniels, one of his Texas middle-school teachers, remembers him well. “He stood head and shoulders above everybody else… He was the kind of kid you could not forget.” It’s the rest of what McDaniels remembers that promises to complicate Kernell’s present predicament:
“He did the same kind of thing when he went to school here,” said McDaniels, a history teacher at Eastern Hills Middle School. “He and another kid found a way to get onto the school’s server – they just sat down and figured out the password.”…
The 20-year-old son of a state representative in Tennessee, Kernell attended Killeen Independent School District schools from 1999 through 2001, and last month was the focus of an FBI investigation into the hacking of the Alaska governor’s Yahoo e-mail account….
And McDaniels said all of it – the computers and politics – fits well with the seventh-grade student he remembers having in class at Eastern Hills.
“He was in TAG – the talented and gifted class – and he certainly lived up to it,” McDaniels said. “He was one of the smartest kids I ever taught, especially when it came to the social sciences and politics.”
Yesterday I embedded video of an interview with “computer security consultant, author, and renowned former hacker” Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick, who was convicted in 1999, spent five years in prison (eight months of it in solitary confinement), recently signed a book deal for a tell-all about his hacking stunts.
Mitnick is himself evidently still on some watch lists; he was detained at the Atlanta airport in October and released after a trip to Columbia. So he knows from whereof he speaks when he says of Kernell:
It’s unfortunate because it’s a young guy. He did something to probably show off that he can do it, and now he might suffer a felony conviction that will last him the rest of his life.
I get it that the kid done wrong. But I think it awfully sad that such a bright young man (an economics major no less; we need them now!) made such a terrible mistake in judgment.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled on Friday that same-sex couples have the right to marry, reversing a lower court decision that had concluded that the civil unions legalized in the state three years ago offered the same rights and benefits as marriage.
With the 4-to-3 ruling, Connecticut becomes the third state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. California legalized gay marriage in May 2008, and Massachusetts in 2004.
The justices noted in the majority opinion that they recognized “as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health … that ‘our decision marks a change in the history of our marriage law.’ ”
The case, Kerrigan v. the state Commissioner of Public Health, was brought by eight same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses by the Madison town clerk. They argued that the state’s civil union law was discriminatory and unconstitutional because it established a separate and therefore inherently unequal institution for a minority group. Citing equal protection under the law, the state Supreme Court agreed.
Here’s the short version from my good friend Dan Krisch, whose firm, Horton, Shields & Knox, represented 8 same sex couples who sought the radical right to be treated just like everyone else:
The basics (there are 3 separate dissents and an 85-page majority, so I’m cutting to the chase): Sexual orientation is a quasi-suspect class under the EP Clauses of our state constitution; denying same-sex couples the right to marry doesn’t survive the heightened scrutiny that comes w/quasi-suspect classification.
I admit to feeling a bit sentimental about the opinion, one for the merits, two for having clerked for CT SCT Justice Joette Katz after law school. Justice Katz joined a concurring opinion written by Justice Norcotte that explains precisely why civil unions just don’t cut it [READ ON].
Given that we are less than a month away from national elections, the biggest question about this decision is what impact, if any, it will have politically. Ironically, the court heard oral arguments more than a year ago, in the spring of 2007. The delay in reaching a decision had become something of a joke among lawyers. But it looks to me like the CT justices get to have the last laugh, since their timing was impeccable in terms of creating an impact. But — what kind of impact?
The ruling went beyond legalizing same-sex marriage. Palmer wrote that “sexual orientation constitutes a quasi-suspect classification for purposes of the equal protection provisions of the state constitution, and, therefore, our statutes discriminating against gay persons are subject to heightened or intermediate judicial scrutiny.”
Two of the three dissenters claimed that lesbians and gays are already a super-powerful group and therefore shouldn’t be seen as a suspect class. The third dissenter took the “marriage is about heterosexual reproduction and nothing else” route.
[S]tate Attorney General Richard Blumenthal noted that today’s decision cannot be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court because it was based on the state constitution.
As for the political implications, it’s hard to guess how and whether voters elsewhere will react to the decision. For that matter, we’ll have to wait and see whether McCain/Palin and/or the RNC try to exploit far-right anti-gay animus for electoral gain.
My hunch is, though, that given the financial crisis, and the fact that the sky didn’t fall when other states allowed gay couples to marry, today’s decision in Connecticut will have limited national implications. The issue just seems to lack some of the fear-factor the right relied on in previous years.
October 9th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
The indictment was handed down Tuesday and charges that Kernell reset the password on Palin’s e-mail account to obtain access to it, then posted the password in a web forum. Wired:
At least one other person successfully used that password to gain unauthorized access to Palin’s account. The indictment does not identify that individual.
The indictment says that once [20-year-old Tennessee student David] Kernell became fearful of a law enforcement investigation against him, he “removed, altered, concealed and covered up” files on his laptop computer.
If convicted of the charge, Kernell faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three year term of supervised release.
G4’s Attack of the Show asked former-hacker, Kevin Mitnick, about the case:
October 6th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
Over the past couple days we’ve had some compelling posts about the “race card” and “racism without racists” here at TMV. Those posts have drawn very vibrant comment threads; the kind of discussion that makes blogging vital. I hope I might add to and continue that discussion with this re-posting of a piece I wrote about a SXSW keynote address Malcolm Gladwell gave back in March 2005.
In it Gladwell recounts this story [video] from his book, Blink…
It seems the great conductors of the world once innocently believed that men were innately better musicians than women and orchestras were male bastions. When one day, through a set of fortuitous circumstances, a male maestro auditioned a woman he thought was a man (she auditioned from behind a screen) he hired her. And when screens were broadly adopted it became clear to everyone that women were every bit as talented musicians as men.
What once was “obvious,” that men were better musicians, is now obviously not.
His story is to illustrate the power and peril of subliminal snap judgments. Says Gladwell [@48:38 The “clip” feature is no longer supported]:
There are certain things about somebody that all of us are really really good at knowing right away, and certain things that we may think we’re good at knowing that we are profoundly not…
Sexual attractiveness, you can do like that…
When we have real experience with something we are good at making profoundly good snap judgments, but in almost every other situation where we do not have that level of expertise our snap judgments are bad. And as a society I feel we are way too cavalier about the products of our snap judgments.
After his talk, during the questions, Gladwell made this observation that I have seen made no place else [@50:29]:
I have become convinced since writing this book that juries should never be able to see the defendants in a jury trial; that that is just crazy. Why? Because the kind of snap judgments a jury is likely to make about a defendant from seeing the defendant are all irrelevant…
Every year someone stands up and points out that there are huge differentials in the conviction rates and sentences for blacks and whites convicted of the same crime. And yet we make that observation and kind of shrug and say, “Well, that’s America.”
We don’t have to live with that. Why don’t we do something about it?
I would bet every dollar I own that if we put the defendant in a backroom and had the defendant answer all questions by email that the gap between black and white defendants, the sentences and conviction rates would shrink.
October 6th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
A decision on whether or not the Supreme Court would grant cert in the case of Troy Anthony Davis had been widely-expected today. The Court apparently needs more time:
The high court issued orders Monday addressing the appeals of numerous cases, but none as to whether it will accept or reject Davis’ appeal. Instead, the court, in a listing on its docket, said it will meet in a private conference on Friday to consider Davis’ appeal.
On Sept. 23, the court halted Davis’ execution less than two hours before it was to be carried out. The court’s nine justices then met in conference on Sept. 29 to decide whether to accept the appeal. Now, they will meet once more to discuss the case.
The court did not say when it will issue a decision.
Earlier the CBS affiliate in Atlanta reported that the court decided not to intervene. Citing CNN; CNN has nothing on the case today.
With a Supreme Court decision expected tomorrow, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts argues today that sympathy for the family does not by itself lead to justice:
[T]he case against Davis is not exactly airtight. No murder weapon, DNA or other forensic evidence implicated him. He was convicted solely on the testimony of nine witnesses, seven of whom have since recanted. Two of them say police bullied them into fingering Davis. Of the two witnesses who are sticking to their stories, one is a man named Sylvester Coles. Some of the other witnesses now say he’s the one who shot MacPhail. […]
Last year, Brandon Garrett, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, studied 200 cases in which people were freed from prison after DNA evidence proved them innocent. He found that erroneous eyewitness identifications were the leading cause of wrongful convictions, occurring in 79 percent of the cases he studied… Yet on this flimsy basis we make decisions about someone’s life or death?
That’s ridiculous and obscene. And it is evidence of moral cowardice that we countenance the ridiculous and the obscene so complacently and complaisantly, never daring to look too closely at what is happening here because if we look we might accidentally “see,” and then, by God, we might be compelled to act, to admit that capital punishment is incompatible with justice and to gather the courage to say to families like the MacPhails, “Look, we feel your grief and our hearts break for you, but what you’re demanding we do is wrong, if for no other reason than that we, being human, just may, conceivably, make mistakes.”
Yes, we owe the Mac Phail family our compassion and understanding. But you know what? We owe Troy Davis’ family something, too.
SEE ALSO: FBI director William Sessions, a death penalty proponent, writes urging the Supreme Court to grant Cert.
October 4th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
Men and women were weeping, holding each other in the courtroom tonight as the verdicts were read aloud on OJ and his cohort. The courtroom rang with the woman reader’s voice, clipped, shrill even: both men
Guilty
Guilty
Guilty
Guilty
over and over, Guilty
Weirdly, truly weirdly, this Guilty verdict comes 13 years to the exact date of OJ’s acquittal on murdering two souls, Ron Goldman, and Nicole Brown Simpson.
Who else will be weeping tonight? Not likely OJ, who appears to still be the last century’s major example of public character disorder, but the Goldmans, Ron’s family… and no doubt the Browns, Nicole’s family… they will be weeping for many different reasons. It’s a dark, not a bright Kismet.
Yet it may be some sliver of victory for them, given that OJ will remain, as of this moment, in custody until sentencing… and the sentence, even at minimum will leave OJ in his late 70s when he might be released. If the judge chooses however, the sentence can be for Life. That too may bring what is called ‘cold comfort’ to the Brown and Goldman families.
The crimes this time around were not only gross theft. The crimes are kidnapping, armed robbery. All of it, thuggery.
But there has been another crime, one for which there is no court nor recompense other than that of public opinion; Thirteen years ago, OJ held himself out as an innocent black man persecuted, and has insisted ever since, that racial divides, rather than his own deeds, ought be the sole judging point of same oppressed OJ.
It’s one thing if his criminal charges from long ago, and his being brought to trial, were in fact racially motivated. That would be wrong.
But, many might say it is quite another to be accused and brought to trial because there is strong reason to suspect the suspect…. of an irreversible and heinous crime … repeatedly stabbing two unarmed people to death on the sidewalk….
Then, it’s the data, not the skin, that raises the essential questions to probe and determine.
The folktale Bluebeard– is one of the original stories about a criminal hiding behind “You don’t trust/like me/ give me a fair shake because I am simply different… my beard, you see, through no fault of my own, is an eerie blue color–
Yet in the Bluebeard tale, it is not the color of his beard, but rather his deeds of murdering those who will not submit to him, and his subsequent hiding of his murderous rages behind his public preening and gloating…
all these lead him, not to being convicted, but cut down into bloody pieces on the parapets by those who loved the souls he murdered….
One could say, today OJ was forced to the parapets. And what else? In the tale, those who’d been to Bluebeard’s castle and seen its finery and dined there, has long defended him when he was first charged with the mysterious kidnapping and disappearance of women…
but, they were hard pressed to continue their defending once the room where Bluebeard stored the macabre remains of his crimes was finally opened… and they saw that Bluebeard’s crimes formed a pattern of “Mine mine all mine,” followed by rabid obsession to force his mad will on others, thence followed by his “taking by force the gifts not yet given.”
It may be a similar realization for some of the people in our land tonight. Reluctantly, even.
In folklore and sagas, as in reality, there is often a ‘but for’ in the story…. that is, that the gifts of the anti-hero, could have, should have been saved to gold instead of mayhem.
So at the end of Bluebeard story as told in our family, there is no rejoicing. Just somber thought. About how it could have been for a man who began as unusual and gifted, but for…
October 3rd, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
On Sept. 23, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Troy Anthony Davis less than two hours before he was scheduled to be put to death. A decision on whether or not the court will grant certiorari and hear his case is expected Monday.
I am a member of the Constitution Project’s bipartisan Death Penalty Committee, which includes supporters of the death penalty, like me, as well as opponents. We are united in our profound concern that in recent years, and around the country, procedural safeguards and other assurances of fundamental fairness in the administration of capital punishment have been revealed to be deeply flawed. Two of our consensus findings from our report on the death penalty apply directly to Mr. Davis’s case. First, we condemned the kinds of procedural barriers that prevented the courts from addressing the merits of Mr. Davis’s case and we recommended that they be eliminated. Second, we insisted that capital defendants have competent lawyers with adequate resources, which Mr. Davis’s own lawyer stated (through no fault of his own) was not provided in his case.
Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist once wrote that the judicial system, “like the human beings who administer it, is fallible.” I agree. Especially when it comes to a human life, the courts should always be able to examine claims of innocence…
I hope the Court will grant certiorari to avoid a miscarriage of justice. At the very least, Mr. Davis’ substantive claims must be examined. The political process has failed Mr. Davis. Let us hope that the court of last resort rises to the challenge.
Now that the Bush Administration - regarded by many as the most right-wing, free-market, deregulation-oriented administration in living memory has opted for the largest tax-payer bailout of private business in world history - it’s a question of renewed relevance.
“Modern capitalist states are all welfare states. Enormous bureaucracies have been created to tax the rich, regulate business, provide subsidies and special schemes to the needy, thwart environmental harm and health hazards, and so on. The list is long and keeps growing.”
“Between 1970 and 2006, the number of pages in the U.S. Federal Register (which lists all regulations) shot up from 20,036 to 78,000. The number of regulators in the service of the federal government rose from 90,000 to 241,000. In the first six years of the George W Bush era (2000-2006), the number of pages of regulations increased by over 10,000, and regulators by over 65,000.”
“Two of the nationalized corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are by far the largest mortgage lenders in the world, with $5 trillion of mortgages and loans on their books. To put that in perspective, that’s five times the size of India’s GDP. … No nationalization in countries that profess to be socialist have ever been so large. … So much for the myth that the United States is a heartless capitalist ogre. In fact, it combines capitalism with welfarism and often tilts toward the latter when the two conflict.”
September 20th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
The White House has suffered yet another setback in its battle over the powers of the Executive Branch in light of a federal judge’s orders that Vice President Dick Cheney must preserve his records:
Vice President Dick Cheney must preserve a broad range of records from his time in office, a federal judge ordered Saturday, ruling in favor of a private watchdog group.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the records are not excluded from preservation under Presidential Records Act, which gives the national archivist responsibility over the custody of and access to the records at the end of a president’s final term.
The Bush administration had sought a narrow interpretation of the act to allow for fewer materials to be preserved by the National Archives.
“Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA’s statutory language,” Kollar-Kotelly said in her order. This position “heightens the Court’s concern” that some records will not be preserved without an injunction.
Cheney chief of staff David Addington has told Congress that the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government, AP reported. Instead, he said, the office is attached by the Constitution to Congress. The vice president presides over the Senate.
The issue is important in political terms due to the ongoing battle between the Bush administration and Congress over the powers of executive and legislative branches. However, the biggest impact — if the ruling isn’t eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court — will be on history. It really won’t be until the Bush administration is out of office that Americans will get a full picture of the administration — dimples and warts. This means some warts will be there to see as well. Also: Cheney remains one of the more shadowy figures in recent political history and this could make it easier for historians to assess his full role and the extent of his power in shaping the Bush administration.
September 19th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
LATER: Bob Herbert writing in the NYTimes, “Rushing to execute Mr. Davis on Tuesday makes no sense at all.”
———-
With a scant four days left before the scheduled execution of Troy Anthony Davis, Jimmy Carter & Bob Barr have called on Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole to reverse its decision to deny clemency:
The Carter Center released a letter Friday urging the state Board of Pardons and Parole to reverse its decision to deny clemency. The letter said flaws in Davis’ conviction and appeals warrant a closer look.
Barr wrote the board Wednesday saying he is “a strong believer in the death penalty as an appropriate and just punishment” but said the proper level of fairness and accuracy required for the ultimate punishment has not been met in Davis’ case.
With so many questions surrounding the case and Georgia intent on going through with the execution, is it really any wonder people see a conspiracy at work?
So what is one to make of what is being described as a ‘global financial meltdown?’
The sense one gets from Europe - particularly the Germans - is that while things are grim, and while this may mark the end of an ‘entire phase of capitalist development,’ - this isn’t the end of the world. In fact - it’s all for the best.
“The world doesn’t need as many large investment banks like Merrill Lynch and Lehman. … Here’s one way to look at the financial crises: out of the five major U.S. investment banks, only two remain. That’s capitalism. A major crash follows the biggest financial boom. The institutions that drove the boom - a good deal of the time - go over the Wupper - or over the Hudson. [In German, an expression for “going bankrupt” is to “go over the Wupper,” which is a river in Germany]. So is the adjustment over? It’s probably just the beginning.”
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers; the acquisition of what was the largest American broker, Merrill Lynch, by the Bank of America; and the way the once greatest insurer on earth - AIG - has had to beg the U.S. Federal Reserve for help; and the nationalization of mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - all of these dramatic events within the shortest possible time, herald the second phase of this great financial crisis. It is now clear that this crisis, which began with problems in the subprime mortgage sector, will probably bring to a close an entire phase of capitalist development.”
1 - Troy’s fingerprints didn’t match those found at the crime scene
2 - There was no gun residue on Troy’s fingers - in fact, no physical evidence at all connects Troy to this crime.
3 - So why is Troy on death row? Because of testimony from nine people who said that Troy pulled the trigger. But an astounding SEVEN of these nine people shave ince recanted their testimony in sworn affidavits, with several saying they were pressured to finger Troy by police (Of the two who haven’t come forward, one is said to be the police’s initial suspect, and the other testified that the shooter was left-handed, but Troy is right-handed).
The Board has received 25,000 faxes since Monday, they’ve broken all four fax machines. They’ve received so many emails that their server crashed. A friend reports they moved Troy to Death Watch yesterday. She shares an insider’s view that he has not given up hope.
In March 2008, the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, joined by two other Justices on the Court, wrote that,:
In this case, nearly every witness who identified Davis as the shooter at trial has now disclaimed his or her ability to do so reliably. Three persons have stated that Sylvester Coles confessed to being the shooter. Two witnesses have stated that Sylvester Coles, contrary to his trial testimony, possessed a handgun immediately after the murder. Another witness has provided a description of the crimes that might indicate that Sylvester Coles was the shooter.
September 16th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
Convicted of the 1989 killing of a Savannah police officer, Troy Anthony Davis is scheduled to be put to death in Jackson, Georgia at 7 p.m. on September 23. There is real reason to believe that he is being penalized for maintaining his innocence. He was denied clemency just six days before his Supreme Court hearing. He now faces near-certain death.
Mary Jean Goode, a retired nurse writing in the AJC today, says she’s pro-life. And as a citizen of Georgia she pleads do not kill in my name:
The burden of proof was circumstantial by all admission: no physical evidence of any description, no weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA. The conviction was made from the least reliable source: eyewitness accounts. Nine claimed to have seen Davis commit the crime. Seven recanted their testimony; two have not. One of those two is a suspect, and the other is a person who claimed to have seen no one do the shooting, but changed his testimony through interrogation. Troy Davis may not have proven his innocence at trial, but no one, with absolute certainty, has proven his guilt.
At a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2002, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia responded to a question on whether he thought the death penalty would inevitably lead to the condemnation of someone who is innocent. In the transcript, he replied: “Well, of course it will. I mean you cannot have any system of human justice that is going to be perfect. And if the death penalty is immoral for that reason, so is life in prison. You think you’re not going to have innocent people put in prison for life? It’s one of the risks of living in an organized human society.” Later he ventured to say that he felt the innocent rarely received the death penalty.
When the Georgia Supreme Court agreed to hear Davis’s motion for a new trial, but then denied the motion (pdf) on technical procedural grounds, dissenting Chief Justice Leah Sears wrote:
I believe that this case illustrates that this Court’s approach to extraordinary motions for new trials based on new evidence is overly rigid and fails to allow an adequate inquiry into the fundamental question, which is whether or not an innocent person might have been convicted or even, in this case, might be put to death.
On Friday the Georgia parole board upheld the death sentence. In a state with one of the strictest open records laws — a state employee, you can look my salary up online — the death deliberations of the parole board are ’state secrets’.
In March 1988, Crowe killed store manager Joseph Pala during a robbery at the lumber company in Douglas County, west of Atlanta. Crowe, who had previously worked at the store, shot Pala three times with a pistol, beat him with a crowbar and a pot of paint. […]
At Thursday’s hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.
We do know that malicious unlawful convictions happen. And that in other instances the refusal to admit guilt has been given as cause for further penalizing inmates. Troy Anthony Davis has maintained his innocence throughout. Is he being put to death for maintaining that innocence while a clearly guilty man was given clemency for good behavior?
Why has his death been scheduled for less than a week before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear his appeal? Even death penalty advocates should care when we kill a man despite the presence of actual reasonable doubt.
About one year ago, Rep. Henry Waxman noticed—not that it was hard to notice—that Vice President Cheney believed that his office is in a unique Constitutional position. That it is exempt from various government requirements that apply to every other branch of government.
Cheney’s claimed exemption, then, was on the requirement for executive agencies to report each year to the National Archives on the volume of documents that they classify or declassify.
At the time, Waxman wrote to Cheney:
It would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, has said: “[Cheney’s position] undermines oversight of the classification system and reveals a disdain for presidential authority”…”It’s part of a larger picture of disrespect that this vice president has shown for the norms of oversight and accountability.”
Well, Cheney’s disrespect for the norms of oversight and accountability and for other government requirements apparently continues.
In a Sunday LA Times article, “Suit seeks to save Cheney files,” Christopher Lee of the Washington Post describes how:
Historians and open-government advocates are concerned that Vice President Dick Cheney, who has long bristled at requirements to disclose his records, will destroy or withhold key documents that illustrate his role in forming U.S. policy for the last 7 1/2 years.
Although, according to Lee, “Cheney has not disclosed his plans for his papers, nor has he argued publicly that any are exempt from the 1978 law,” Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor and constitutional scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and others, including the American Historical Assn. and the Society of American Archivists, “are not reassured,” and were planning to file a lawsuit to protect the people’s records from just one more of Cheney’s infamous pre-emptive attacks. Good for them!
Fortunately, we only have five more months of this Imperial Presidency and Stealthy Vice Presidency. But perhaps, someone should ask the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate how she feels about these issues…if we can ever get her to grant an interview to the common press.
Footnote: By the way, has anyone seen our secretive VP lately? I wonder why he wasn’t at the Republican Convention. Someone told me he was in Georgia to announce a $1 billion package to help fix that state’s schools, hospitals, bridges, highways and other infrastructure. About time that we do something for our own country. Oops, sorry: Someone just told me I had the wrong Georgia. Oh well, our Georgia will have to wait until the next administration—if it is the right one.
The recantations of seven of the nine witnesses against him and support from Amnesty International, Hollywood celebrities, civil rights activists, the European Parliament, and Pope Benedict XVI have not stopped the Georgia Department of Corrections from ordering the execution to take place on September 23, 2008, at 7 p.m. EST.
Mr. Davis is charged with killing a police officer, based entirely on eyewitness evidence. There is no physical evidence in the case, and the murder weapon was never recovered. Seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony, with many claiming coercion and threats by the police who conducted the original investigation. One of the remaining witnesses has been accused of being the actual killer, and allegedly confessed to the crime. Mr. Davis has maintained his innocence from the outset, but has remained on death row for 17 years. In July, the European Parliament issued a resolution calling on Georgia to commute Troy Davis’s death sentence. More information at Troy Davis’s site and at Amnesty International USA.
Anyone concerned is urged to contact the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles and urge them to commute Mr. Davis’s death sentence. Amnesty International has created a web form, and traditional letters are encouraged as well, to the following address:
Georgia State Board of Pardons & Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, GA 30334
You can also fax a message to (404) 651-8502.
The date was set despite an appeal pending with US Supreme Court. The Georgia Parole Board has the power to commute the sentence to life without parole. A spokesman says no time has been scheduled for Davis’ attorneys to make pleas to the board.
August 13th, 2008 By DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
So the Supreme Court made a factual error in its ruling holding that the death penalty for child rape is unconstitutional. Since the error was definitely relevant (though not necessarily critical) to its ruling, some folks have been urging that the Court reopen the case (an issue I am pretty much neutral on).
Today, we find out via a recently released study that the Supreme Court also made a factual error in its ruling holding that the federal partial-birth abortion ban is constitutional (that being that abortion puts women at risk for mental health problems). So should the folks urging the former case be reopened be making the same claims for the latter?
August 11th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This is a Guest Voice original-report post by journalism professor and author Walter Brasch who is also an award-winning syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator, and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club.
‘Medaling’ With Free Speech at the Olympics
by Walter Brasch
President Bush sounded just like a liberal.
Yes, you read that right. Bush. Liberal. Same sentence.
At the new U.S. embassy in Beijing on the opening day of the Olympics, he said, “All people should have the freedom to say what they think.” Without even blinking, he also told the world, while directing his comments at the Chinese, “We strongly believe societies which allow the free expression of ideas tend to be the most prosperous and the most peaceful.”
The day before, in Tibet, he boldly said, “America stands in firm opposition to China’s detention of political dissidents and human rights advocates and religious activists.” He said he was speaking out “for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights, not to antagonize China’s leaders but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential.”
There was only one problem with the President’s comments. His actions the past seven years have proven he doesn’t believe what his speech writers told him to say. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems the great conductors of the world once innocently believed that men were innately better musicians than women and orchestras were male bastions. When one day, through a set of fortuitous circumstances, a male maestro auditioned a woman he thought was a man (she auditioned from behind a screen) he hired her. And when screens were broadly adopted it became clear to everyone that women were every bit as talented musicians as men.
