Commentary by David A. Love

Maryland Death Penalty article in The Nation

2013-06-03T15:59:00.000-04:00

Check out my latest article in June 3 edition of The Nation magazine on the abolition victory in Maryland:

Click HERE for more.

Race and the Philly abortion doctor trial

2013-04-19T16:02:00.000-04:00

From theGrio:

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is accused of running a house of horrors. And we can all agree that the crimes for which he is accused are horrific, gruesome and unspeakable. But there is a story behind the story that some are missing in this case, and that is the issue of race.

As it turns out, Gosnell allegedly treated his patients of color—his regular clientele— differently from his white patients. White suburban women are said to have been brought into a separate area that was cleaner than the facilities reserved for poor, minority and immigrant patients. Gosnell reportedly provided better, more hygienic conditions for his white clients because they were “more likely to file complaints” about receiving second-rate care.

Read more HERE.

Scalia's shameful stance on the Voting Rights Act

2013-04-19T15:55:00.002-04:00

From theGrio:

On Monday at the University of California Washington Center, the high court judge said that the law an “embedded” form of “racial preferment.” According to Scalia’s interpretation, the Voting Rights Act was enacted as an emergency measure, but now amounts to a federal racial preference system for black people that discriminates against whites.

“Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes,” Scalia said. “Even the name of it is wonderful, the Voting Rights Act. Who’s going to vote against that?”

Read MORE.

Building the Grassroots Foundation to Abolish the Death Penalty

2013-04-09T09:06:00.000-04:00

The following are excerpts of a presentation I made at the Amnesty International USA Human Rights Conference in Washington on March 23, 2013. I spoke on a panel called "Abolishing the Death Penalty in Our Lifetime."

It is a pleasure to be here, and I want to thank Amnesty International for inviting me to join this panel.

I'm the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence. WTI was founded 10 years ago, originally as a project of Sister Helen Prejean of the book and the film Dead Man Walking. The mission of WTI is to empower exonerated death row survivors and their loved ones to become effective leaders in the movement to abolish the death penalty. WTI is the only nonprofit of exonerated death row survivors and their families. Our members spent an average of 10 years on death row for crimes other people committed. Since 1973, 142 death row prisoners in the U.S. have been released due to innocence.

Witness to Innocence has two purposes: First, we serve as a support network for former death row prisoners, and seek justice for the wrongfully convicted, including state and federal compensation. Second, our members work with state abolition groups across the country, testify before legislatures, and speak to audiences across the nation about their experiences and the compelling issue of innocence and the death penalty. WTI and its members were involved in repeal efforts in New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Illinois, Connecticut and most recently Maryland. And we're involved in Delaware, Colorado, Montana, Kansas, Arkansas, Alabama and other death belt states.

I'd like to provide some thoughts on how groups such as Witness to Innocence can help build the grassroots foundation necessary to win and sustain abolition.

Innocence. There are many important reasons to favor death penalty abolition. WTI categorically opposes the death penalty, and we emphasize the innocence message as a compelling reason. Innocent people were almost executed in the U.S., and innocent people such as Troy Davis,Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham certainly were executed. It is hard to debate a man such as WTI's advocacy director Kirk Bloodsworth, an innocent man and a death row survivor from Maryland, about the death penalty. Just ask Stephen Colbert.

Of the audiences who have listened to a Witness to Innocence speaker, 74 percent either maintained their position against the death penalty or shifted their opinion from favoring capital punishment (or being undecided) to being against the death penalty. More importantly, 46 percent shifted their positions from being in favor of capital punishment or undecided to being against the death penalty.

Coalition building.There is strength in numbers. To ensure that we are not merely preaching to the choir, and to broaden support for our cause, we must reach out to other people and organizations with common interests.

WTI is a U.S.-based death penalty abolition organization that belong to three coalition groups, including the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the Innocence Network (the umbrella group for all the innocence projects in the nation), and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which is based in Paris.

We also reach out to communities of faith, such as United Methodists, evangelicals, Catholic and Jewish groups, as well as communities of color, civil rights groups and legal organizations. In Philadelphia, where we are based, we are assembling a coalition of organizations to pressure the D.A. to issue a moratorium on seeking death penalty prosecutions.

Media. Typically WTI members speak at universities and churches, to audiences of a hundred or more at a time. But what if they are able to speak to audiences of thousands or millions at a time, such as when Kirk was in the New York Times or on the Colbert Report?

The way to permeate the public conscience and change the climate of public opinion is through media, such as press releases, op-eds, cable TV news, radio, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Put together a media strategy, publicize your campaigns and events, and increase your visibility and name recognition. View media as a part of your advocacy and activism.

Finally, make the death penalty relevant to people by framing the issue within the broader context of criminal justice and human rights. Some people don't care about the death penalty, or not as much as the people in this room. Some are too busy with their daily lives. Change that.

Death penalty abolition groups are focused on a single issue. But that issue invokes so many others.

The death penalty is the tip of the iceberg of an unjust criminal justice system, in which America, the world's largest jailer, throws away its perceived problems as a matter of social policy, rather than invest in people and communities, jobs and education.

The subject of innocence and wrongful convictions is tied to prosecutorial misconduct. Then there is the issue of racial justice, as people on death row are disproportionately of color, while the legal profession--including prosecutors, judges and defense lawyers -- are 90 percent white. Further, the race of the victim determines a death sentence, as 80 percent of executions involved a white victim, although whites are only half of all murder victims nationwide. Meanwhile, the all-white jury is a reality, as some prosecutors illegally exclude black people from jury service. In the South the practice is widespread. White jurors are 20 percent more likely to vote for the death penalty than their black counterparts.

Capital punishment also implicates questions of economic justice, class and inequality, since many on death row are poor and could not afford justice. And the solitary confinement that death row prisoners face--locked in a prison cell for 23 hours a day, awaiting execution without human contact-- is a form of torture as recognized under international human rights standards.

Our challenge is to help the public understand how the death penalty relates to all of the other pieces in the puzzle. We must demystify the death penalty and challenge the public's assumptions, give them the facts and educate them.

New York Times: A Death Penalty Fight Comes Home

2013-02-06T14:23:00.001-05:00

From the New York Times:

Kirk Noble Bloodsworth, a beefy, crew-cut man whose blue T-shirt read “Witness to Innocence,” took the microphone in a church hall here and ran through his story of injustice and redemption one more time. Twenty years ago, he walked out of a Maryland prison, the first inmate in the nation to be sentenced to death and then exonerated by DNA.

Link

Violence Begets Violence in America

2013-02-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

So, what do you make of a country where a third grader brings a gun to school to ward off bullies?

In Inkster, Michigan an 8-year old boy brought a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun to his elementary school two days in a row for protection, and to scare off three girls who were bullying him. The weapon was in the boy’s backpack and belonged to a relative. And surely somewhere in this nation of unacceptable levels of violence and gun worship, there are those who think that is a good thing, to arm children to protect themselves. More guns will make us all safer, right?

After the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, America, it seems, is waking up to the need to stem the tide of violence in this country. But there is nothing new here. Whether we look at the shooting sprees and mass murder of young white men in the affluent suburbs or rural areas, or the epidemic of gun violence in communities of color in Chicago and elsewhere, violence is part of the fabric of America.

From the beginning, this country has used violence to solve its problems. Years of dehumanization of others will do that to you. And this was always the case, from the enslavement of Africans to the genocide of the indigenous population, and from the regime of lynching in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, to the acts of terror waged against civil rights workers, antiwar protestors and organized labor.

Speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin Luther King said “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” Dr. King’s words are even more relevant today than when he spoke over four decades ago.

The U.S. has the most powerful army, accounting for 58 percent of the military expenditures made by the top 10 military powers. With high gun accessibility and the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, America leads in deadly gun violence. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. homicides are committed with guns, and 70 percent of the weapons seized in drug war-ravaged Mexico are traced back to the U.S. Gun proliferation is bolstered by an anachronistic and obsolete Second Amendment, and promoted by gun manufacturers, who bribe lawmakers and hold the public hostage in the process.

Further,

America

’s love affair with violence extends to its overly-punitive, disproportionate system of justice. With one quarter of the world’s prisoners, the

U.S.

is the largest jailer in the world. Prisons are the largest repository for the mentally ill, with more people receiving mental health treatment behind bars than in hospitals or treatment centers. As budgets for education and social services are slashed and jobs are scarce, the American way is to lock up and even kill our perceived problems rather than to build up people and rehabilitate them.

Moreover, our continued reliance on the death penalty in the

U.S.

is a prime example of what happens when a society perpetuates a vicious circle of violence. While capital punishment was long cast aside in Europe,Canada, Australia and elsewhere, the barbaric practice still finds a welcome home in America - at least for now. The U.S. is part of an unsavory alliance of nations who lead the world in executions - including China, Iran,Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. But the winds of change are blowing.

For a nation conditioned by violence, it is hard to break extremely old and equally bad habits. After all, people are comfortable with what they know, comfortable with what they were raised on. America can break the cycle of violence - however normalized it has become - and yet it must if it wants to break from its troubling past and become better than it was.

Slavery, civil rights and gun control

2013-01-23T15:22:00.000-05:00

From theGrio:

Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover has created controversy for comments he made on the Second Amendment. Speaking at a recent event at Texas A&M University, Glover said the purpose of the amendment was to preserve slavery and keep down Native Americans.

“I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms,” Glover said during his campus visit. “The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their land, or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.”

Similarly, responding to the argument that a gun control measure lacks the votes to pass through Congress, Fox News’ Shepard Smith compared guns and slavery. Smith offered, “If we stuck with the polls, though, we’d have had slavery a lot longer than we did.”

Glover and Smith are not the only people to make a comparison between gun control and social movements such as the struggle to abolish slavery. For example, others have made references to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Whether appropriate or not, slavery and civil rights have become part of the debate over gun control.

With regard to slavery, there is evidence that the Founding Fathers had that institution in mind when drafting the Second Amendment.

Go HERE for more

Maryland death penalty repeal

2013-01-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

From Huffington Post:

With the death penalty a hot topic of discussion in Maryland these days, lawmakers in that state have a golden opportunity to repeal an outdated, cruel and unjust practice.

Death penalty repeal is in the air. At the urging of the NAACP, Maryland CASE and others, Gov. Martin O'Malley and state lawmakers are paving the way for a repeal vote in the legislature. When it comes to government-sponsored executions, Annapolis needs to let it go, and apparently is about to do so. And the reasons why they should are clear.

Click HERE for more.

NRA vs. the Black Panthers

2013-01-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

From theGrio:

While today’s NRA takes hardline positions against even the most modest gun control measures, this was not always the case. Throughout its history, the NRA supported gun control, including restrictions on gun ownership, and was not focused on the Second Amendment.

But the organization had a change of heart in the 1970s when the Black Panthers advocated for an individual right to bear arms. Ironically, the Panthers were the founders of the modern-day gun rights movement, which became the purview of predominantly white, rural conservatives.

Why is Anthony Fletcher on Pennsylvania's Death Row?

2013-01-02T12:42:00.001-05:00

There was no movie made about Anthony Fletcher, but there should be one.

Although we don't know for certain how many innocent people sit on Pennsylvania's death row, we do know that six innocent men have exonerated in the Keystone state over the past 30 years. Those who are condemned to death in Pennsylvania are disproportionately from Philadelphia, and overwhelmingly black and Latino, with the highest proportion of racial minorities of any death row population in the U.S.

One of those Philadelphians is Anthony Fletcher, prisoner #CA1706, who has been on death row for two decades. Fletcher should be a free man today. And if there is justice, he will be a free man.

An honorably discharged Army vet who had learned to box in Germany and became a lightweight prizefighter, Anthony "Two Guns" Fletcher came from a boxing family. His uncles were fighters, and his mother Lucille was the first African-American female boxing judge in Philadelphia. Anthony was the sparring partner for Sugar Ray Leonard in preparation for his win over Marvin Hagler, and made a name for himself by beating such greats as Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, Harry Arroyo, Johnny Bumphus, Jimmy Paul and Livingstone Bramble. But a detached retina and a bout with Bell's Palsy slowed down his career.

Now Fletcher is in the fight of his life, a fight to prove his innocence, and a fight against an out-of-control justice system. And for years in Fletcher's hometown of Philly, under the reign of the infamous district attorney Lynne Abraham, that system kept tallies on expendable black men, aiming to win rather than seeking true justice.

Fletcher, then 37, was sentenced to death in 1993 for the robbery and murder of Vaughn Christopher. Christopher, 26, a crack addict, suffered two gunshot wounds. Fletcher does not deny that he was at the scene, but maintains he was railroaded. The devil is in the details, and those details point to a grave injustice.

Based on the account by Fletcher and people close to the case, Christopher had robbed Fletcher at gunpoint for $50. Weeks later, Fletcher saw Christopher from a distance while driving in his car, confronted him regarding the stolen money and punched him. Vaughn pulled out a gun from under his shirt. Fletcher quickly placed his hands on Vaughn's forearm in an act of self-defense. The gun discharged, two bullets struck Vaughn in the thigh and abdomen and he fell to the ground.

Christopher's injuries were not life-threatening. Yet he bled for hours in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and died because his mother, a Jehovah's Witness, refused a blood transfusion.

The D.A. said it was a homicide, and sought the death penalty for Fletcher. Lynne Abraham, who was known as "America's Deadliest D.A." for her overzealous use of the death penalty, did not pass up the opportunity in what was at best a case of self-defense, and as worst a simple assault if not an accident.

Fletcher maintains this was payback, given that Abraham wanted Fletcher to testify at a murder trial, in which a member of the Junior Black Mafia was tried for firing into Fletcher's car and killing his cohort. Anthony--who ducked to save his life and says he never saw the shooter-- attended the trial but changed his mind about testifying.

The prosecution painted Fletcher as a coldblooded drug dealer who murdered Christopher over a drug debt. Their case rested on the eyewitness testimony of Natalie Renee Grant, a self-professed addict who had a long criminal record. She testified that the incident stemmed from a drug deal and that Fletcher murdered Christopher execution-style and fled the scene. Anthony's bungling defense failed to challenge Grant's unsubstantiated hearsay testimony. Meanwhile, Grant--who faced with prostitution and theft charges--was given probation in exchange for her testimony.

Fletcher's witnesses were barred from testifying.

No gunpowder test was performed on Christopher's clothes, which the police misplaced, and his weapon was never admitted as evidence to prove it contained Anthony's fingerprints. Surely, had there been fingerprints, the prosecution would have used such evidence against him.

There were other problems with the case. For example, Fletcher and his supporters maintain the prosecution used as evidence falsified hospital records and an autopsy report containing photos of two African American men purported to be Vaughn Christopher.

In addition, the prosecutor claimed Anthony's nickname was "Two Guns' because he carried two guns on the street, a fallacious claim his defense lawyer failed to challenge. The defense also declined to allow his client to take the stand.

Further, the prosecution claimed Fletcher shot Christopher once in the thigh and once in the back, which does not square with the autopsy report. And Hydrow Park, the Chief Medical Examiner who conducted the autopsy, did not testify because the D.A. said he was unavailable and failed to notify him of the trial date.

Park's underling Ian Hood-- who was unlicensed in Pennsylvania and disciplined by the state board for pretending he was a licensed medical doctor- took the stand instead. Hood, who testified there was no physical struggle despite the bruise on Christopher's chest, recanted his testimony in 2003.

Meanwhile, Common Pleas Judge John Milton Younge vacated Anthony's sentence in 2004 and ordered a new trial, citing as prejudicial the failure of Dr. Park to testify, Dr. Hood's erroneous testimony-- which was contradicted by the autopsy report that proves Fletcher's innocence-and ineffective defense counsel. But the retrial never occurred, as Judge Younge pursued a Superior Court seat and the court failed to find a replacement judge. The D.A. appealed the decision, and four years later, the state Supreme Court ruled against Anthony Fletcher.

Allegations of missing and fabricated evidence, sketchy witnesses, prosecutorial misconduct and crappy lawyering. Don't forget racial overtones. These are some of the essential ingredients of the death penalty. And this is what put Anthony Fletcher and others on death row in Philly and elsewhere around the country.

Dr. King Can Help Build the Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance Movement

2012-11-29T09:17:00.004-05:00

BBC journalist Jihad Masharawi carries body of 11-month old son Omar in Gaza. (Reuters)

BlackCommentator.com:

There is a straight line linking the human rights struggles around the globe, and the movements of the past with the movements of today. And those who have lived through theU.S. civil rights movement, the teachings of King and Gandhi, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa believe they have much to teach Palestinian civil society and their nonviolent resistance movement in the occupied territories.

Just weeks before the recent violent conflict in Gaza that left 166 Palestinians and six Israelis dead-and more than 1,230 Palestinians injured, mostly women and children - a group of civil rights veterans and a new generation of human rights leaders led a delegation to the West Bank. The delegation came from the Dorothy Cotton Institute in Ithaca, New York, named after the colleague of Dr. King and education director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The institute trains leaders for a global human rights movement, and is building a network of civil and human rights leaders. And it was the first group of civil rights leaders to meet with leaders of the Palestinian movement.

Their goals are to increase the visibility of a nonviolent Palestinian movement that is unknown to many in the U.S., share lessons between the Palestinian and American movements, connect Palestinian leaders with their Israeli allies, and educate the American public about this movement and the need for social justice and change in the region.

In the U.S., the human suffering experienced by the Palestinian people is rarely acknowledged and often ignored, with the victims often dehumanized and scapegoated.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking via Skype with Kirby Edmonds, one of the members of the delegation in Ramallah. Mr. Edmonds, program director of the Dorothy Cotton Institute, shared what he was witnessing and experiencing in theWest Bank.

“One of the things I’ve been impressed by is their analysis of the situation,” he told me of the sophistication of those he met, also noting the Palestinians have learned lessons from the struggle against Jim Crow and apartheid. “They have made adaptations,” he added.

“They’ve landed on BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] as a most promising strategy. The mistake they’ve made is not shaping the narrative of who they are, and how important it is they have rights. The idea that they’re thugs and terrorists is just wrong,” Edmonds noted. “Humiliation provokes a violent response.”

Edmonds views the Israeli occupation as a global human rights issue. “The Dorothy Cotton Institute sees the need to put our shoulders to the wheel for a global human rights movement. Because the state involved in it defines itself as democratic, and so there is a great deal of moral ground on which to stand,” he said.

“The other issue is the place is important to two-thirds of the human population.” He concluded that resolving the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis will help resolve conflicts around the world, making the implications much larger than the people who live there.”

And Edmonds characterized the Israeli policy of occupation as a humiliating one, with laws promulgated to justify certain things. And Palestinians are sick and tired, echoing the days of the Jim Crow South or South African apartheid.

“Palestinians are barred from building in certain areas, their houses are demolished,”Edmonds told me from Ramallah. “All the Palestinians in a certain area get an order saying their houses will be demolished and they don’t know when. 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, and they blow the house down. It is clearly a violation of international conventions. And clearly a violation of human rights,” he said.

“The situation in East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem, what exists is a caste system that is more discriminatory than what happened in South African apartheid,”Edmonds noted of the Israeli system of class distinctions. A Palestinian’s citizenship status can be lost when traveling abroad, perhaps if they are studying in the U.S. for 4 years. They have to be able to prove Jerusalem is the center of their lives.

“People in the West bank are barred from entering Israel and East Jerusalem unless they get permits to do so. They have to pass through checkpoints to show their papers,” Edmonds said. “It is an example of policies that seem designed to provoke violent responses. Depending on what checkpoint it might be another 2 or 3 hours to get back home. It is extremely humiliating.”

Even more serious and problematic are administrative detentions, in which Palestinians have no access to lawyers, and are not told why they were arrested - a practice which can be imposed for up to 14 times without charges ever being made.

Then there are the arrests of children, particularly in areas in the West Bank where nonviolent demonstrations take place every week to protest the occupation. “The Israeli army will show up, enter the house and say who they’re after, take the teen out of house, blindfolded, put them in a Humvee, take them to an interrogation facility, and keep them for 4 days,” described Edmonds. “They will do things, they may say they have a right to an attorney, and after the course of hours intimidate the child into a confession. As a result, adult leaders end up arrested. This is a violation of the International Convention of Rights of the Child.”

Moreover, the policies of the occupation are changing the demographics of the area, with the goal of substantially reducing the Palestinian population in certain places. “The goal is reducing the Palestinian population from 30 percent to 12 percent”Edmonds argued.

“The task becomes making life so uncomfortable for people that they just leave, not just in Jerusalem but also in the West Bank. Herd them into four areas so that if there is some closure on the issue, Palestinians are unable to manage their own state. That is the policy behind creating Bantustans. The goal is to make Palestinian life so unbearable they can only live in certain places,” he offered.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians have nearly a century of nonviolent resistance to oppression. “The people we’ve been meeting with are not saying Jews shouldn’t be there,” Edmonds told me. “What the Palestinians are calling for is for people of conscience to put pressure on Israel so that this does not continue. ...It is what gives people hope,” he said.

Ultimately, according to Edmonds, the Palestinian people lack the political strength to do it alone. The Israeli government, he said, is able to behave as it does because it is a client of the U.S. “It is unlikely we can persuade the U.S.government to shift its policy because of civil society. It was civil society in South Africa that made change happen, it was not U.S. policy.”

Through their journey to the occupied territories, Kirby Edmonds and his colleagues are acting in the proudest tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, stayed true to the fight for civil rights at home and spoke out against the war in Vietnam. He railed against the triple, interrelated evils of militarism, racism and economic exploitation, and understood the linkages between violence and oppression in America and our promotion of war abroad.

And just as King condemned the billions spent on burgeoning defense budgets to mutilate and incinerate Vietnamese children - all at the expense of the war on poverty - then surely those who act in the spirit of King today can decry the billions spent on America’s militarization of Israel, the occupation, and the killing of innocent babies.

Of war and violence, King said “The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars?”

Meanwhile, in Israel and Palestine, a nonviolent resistance movement seeks peace-and justice. Part of that process includes tearing down the walls that separate people, and building bridges instead.

“Israeli society can no longer see what is happening on the other side of the wall,” Kirby Edmonds said of the current state of affairs. “The narrative that this is a land without people is easy to perpetuate.”

California's Prop. 34 Will Stop the Execution of the Innocent

2012-11-02T15:40:00.001-04:00

Proposition 34, the important ballot initiative in California, would eliminate the death penalty in that state. With 725 people on death row, including 19 women, California has the most death row prisoners in the nation, and one quarter of America's death row population. So, if the Golden State repeals its death penalty, the change would be historic, and provide an example for other states to follow.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. For example, executions are barbaric, outdated, and fly in the face of international human rights law. The death penalty is expensive, provides no deterrent effect, and represents pure retribution -- a visceral bloodlust that invokes a violent American past. But most of all, the death penalty -- as practiced in California throughout the U.S. -- is irretrievably broken.

Some of the most effective spokespeople for the Yes on 34 campaign are those who have experienced the evils of the death penalty firsthand. They are five of America's 141 death row survivors, innocent people who spent an average of nearly 10 years on death row. Over the past several months, they have spoken to audiences in the Golden State about their traumatic experiences.

Wrongfully convicted, Nathson Fields spent 18 years behind bars for the 1984 double murder of rival gang members--11 of them on Illinois' death row--before he was acquitted in 2009. Fields had been the victim of lying witnesses, and corruption, graft and greed on the bench. The judge in his case had taken a $10,000 bribe from his codefendant's lawyer, and was himself imprisoned for 13 years.

An innocent man wrongfully convicted for the murder of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads, Randy Steidlspent a dozen years on death row, and another five before he became a free man. An Illinois death row survivor, Steidl had been framed by the cops and the prosecutor. And he was also the victim of poor representation, a jailhouse snitch, and witnesses who fabricated testimony. Both he and Nate Fields would become leaders to abolish capital punishment in their state in 2011.

Juan Melendez spent nearly 18 years on Florida's death row, his conviction secured by the testimony of two questionable witnesses, including a sketchy police informant who received $5,000 for his testimony, and a co-defendant who was threatened with the electric chair, but ultimately received two years probation after testifying against Melendez. Despite the serious doubts surrounding the case, the Florida Supreme Courtupheld the case three times on appeal. Meanwhile, the real killer had confessed to at least 20 people, and the transcript of the confession was discovered 16 years after Juan's death sentence.

Meanwhile, Kirk Bloodsworth was the first death row survivor in America to be exonerated through DNA. Bloodsworth spent nine years in a Maryland prison -- two on death row -- for the 1984 rape and murder of 9-year-old Dawn Hamilton. The prosecution had withheld key evidence pointing to his innocence, and police failed to inform his defense about the possibility of another suspect. Meanwhile, the real killer had been incarcerated in a cell just one floor below Kirk's, serving time for unrelated crimes. Prior to his DNA exoneration, Bloodsworth's death sentence had been commuted to two consecutive life terms. The Innocence Protection Act, passed by Congress in 2000, established the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program, which helps states defray the costs of post-conviction DNA testing.

The only woman death row exoneree, Sabrina Butler Porter spent over five years in prison, including three years awaiting her execution. A teenage mother, Butler was convicted of felony child abuse -- the unthinkable crime of murdering her infant son Walter. The baby had not been abused, and Butler had attempted CPR in an attempt to revive him. The medical examiner changed the cause of death to a kidney malady.

Given the threat of executing the innocent, California would be well served to put its death penalty system to death. Capital punishment creates innocent victims, and only perpetuates a vicious cycle of violence. Such circumstances do not make us whole as a society.

And the late Coretta Scott King -- who lost both her husband and mother-in-law to assassination -- said that "An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder."

California voters now have a golden opportunity to break the cycle of bloodlust by ending a broken criminal justice policy. Costing billions of dollars, failing to address or deter crime, and condemning innocent men and women to death, this state-sponsored vengeance simply is not worth the price.

The Denver Presidential Debate: Obama vs. the Empty Corporate Suit Who Would Kill Big Bird

2012-10-05T09:50:00.000-04:00

Let me start off by saying that the Obama-Romney matchup in Denver was the worst presidential debate I’ve ever seen. I started off believing that we have to save the popcorn for Biden v. Ryan next week, and I’ll stick with that assertion.

In order to assess the debate, it is necessary to separate the style from the substance of the event. With regard to style, the moderator, Jim Lehrer, did a poor job providing structure, and added little to the debate. Better to have no moderator at all than a poor one.

Governor Mitt Romney was more assertive and hyper than his opponent, perhaps even overdone - reflecting a candidate who has been killed in the polls due to a number of factors, including his lack of personal appeal and the unacceptability of Republican policies. Romney was more animated than Obama, but not unlike a slick used car salesman trying to sell you a lemon, or in this case trickle-down Reaganomics.

Meanwhile, the president was more subdued, passive and professorial, perhaps too distant, and did not challenge Romney as he could have. Perhaps this was because Obama did not want to be seen as the “angry black man,” or maybe because his handlers told him to stay cool and ride the wave of high favorability and not rock the boat.

And with that said, now on to substance. Romney gave a better performance because he was acting - he lied through the whole thing, and otherwise he provided few specifics, as Obama pointed out. I suspect that if the media are worth their salt, they will make Romney account for the stories he concocted. The governor dealt with criticism of his economic policy - particularly the $5 trillion price tag of tax cuts and military spending increases - by changing his policy.

Meanwhile, Romney rewrote history by ignoring GOP obstructionism, and characterizing Obama as someone who refused to work in a bipartisan fashion on healthcare reform. The president did not challenge Romney on this point too much, or much of anything for that matter. And he certainly did not pin down his opponent on his videotaped remarks to donors, where Romney essentially wrote off 47 percent of the electorate.

Ultimately, the candidates provided substantive differences in philosophy regarding the role of government in the lives of people. Obama made a strong case for an active government role, citing the Transcontinental Railroad, the land grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences. He embraced the Obamacare label as his own, defended Social Security, talked about how he eliminated the middleman in federal student loans, and railed against corporate welfare. Moreover, he shared a vision of economic patriotism.

In sharp contrast, Romney shared a future for the nation in which federal responsibility for caring for the poor is left to the states, under the assumption that the states do a better job of those things. Regulation is an encumbrance, and investment in green jobs is a folly in Romney’s opinion. The elderly are given coupons for healthcare they will be unable to afford, kids borrow from their parents to pay for college, and Obamacare and PBS are eliminated.

For a debate on domestic issues, the evening is more notable for what was NOT discussed - for example, fighting the scourge of poverty, women’s reproductive rights, labor rights, a jobs program and dealing with the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Obama chose not to challenge his rival on key issues that implicate Republican extremism.

There was no word from the president on the GOP platform, their racist views on immigration, their plans to gut the social welfare state, the Jim Crow stance towards voter ID. No mention of the homophobia coming from the Republicans, or the push to ban abortion, including in cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the mother is in danger. Not a word about Romney’s offshore tax havens. No effort to debunk the governor’s self-proclaimed reputation as a job creator, when the facts point to his propensity for picking at the carcasses of companies, like the vulture capitalist he is.

Next week is bound to be far more entertaining, when Vice President Biden will presumably take Paul Ryan to the woodshed, where he will proceed to open a can of whoopass on him, and deservedly so. Plus, the next presidential debate will assume a town hall format, which is bound to favor Obama and remind the public that they don’t like Romney.

So America’s first black president went toe to toe with the whitest man in America. In the end, there isn’t much to see here, and I call it a draw. Romney had an edge on style, but will have to explain himself
for manufacturing his own set of facts. This debate did nothing to alter his image as an empty suit who will say and do anything to get elected, and a corporate tool who believes in nothing in particular
except winning and being rich, and making the rich richer.

Just to be safe, Obama must beware of low information voters who don’t know any better, and have been in a coma throughout this election season. He must come back the next time around caffeinated, hungry and ready with his A game. And he needs to attack Romney like one of his campaign ads. Obama had to play Jackie Robinson in 2008, but this is 2012 and he has a term under his belt. Sometimes black men have to get angry, especially if they’re fighting for something they believe in, like their job.

What would be gained if Terry Williams is executed?

2012-09-19T15:01:00.000-04:00

There's an execution planned in Pennsylvania, the first one in thirteen years. Gov. Tom Corbett signed a death warrant for Terrance "Terry" Williams. Barring intervention from the Governor, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, or the Philadelphia District Attorney, Williams will be executed on October 3.

But the execution should not go forward.

Two things stand out about the case of Terry Williams: First, he suffered a traumatic childhood of sexual and physical abuse, and ultimately killed two of his abusers. Second, a broad coalition of organizations, religious leaders, advocates and others-- including the widow of one of his victims and several of the jurors who convicted him-- are calling for clemency for Terry.

First raped at the age of six by an older boy in the neighborhood, and coming home crying and with a bloodied backside, Terry Williams just couldn't win from day one. His childhood was one of poverty, neglect and violence. Terry was brutally abused by his mother with fists, switches, belts and extension cords, and beaten by his alcoholic stepfather, who would smash through the boy's door to administer the beatings.

Throughout his youth, Williams was passed around by sexual predators, exploited as a sexual object by middle aged adult men who gained access to their teen prey with money, food and clothes. A middle school teacher betrayed his trust and repeatedly raped him. While in juvenile detention for a burglary, Terry was gang raped by two older boys.

And there was no one to protect Terry. No one stepped in to help this traumatized boy deal with the anger, shame, confusion, paranoia and self-hatred he experienced from years of manipulation and abuse. As a result of receiving no counseling or mental health treatment, Terry resorted to self-mutilation by banging his head against the wall, cutting himself and making himself bleed. Further, he attempted suicide in an effort to make the pain go away, and self-medicated in the form of alcohol and drug abuse.

But in the end, Williams lashed out at two sources of his pain, personified: Herbert Hamilton and Amos Norwood. Using their status to lure teenage boys, these two middle aged men-- a sports booster and a church leader, respectively-- sexually abused Terry. At 17, Terry killed Hamilton. And six months later, barely 18, he killed Norwood the day after Norwood raped him, for which Williams was given a death sentence.

However, the jurors were unaware of the history of sexual abuse. "I was not aware that the victim in that case had been having sex with Terrance other teenage boys," said one of five jurors now supporting life for Williams. "I also was not aware that Terrance had been abused by other men. That would have been a factor in my decision."

In addition, the jurors were not instructed that a life sentence in Pennsylvania means life without parole. Pennsylvania is the only state that does not require such an instruction in first- and second-degree murder cases. A number of jurors say they would have voted for life rather than death. "The reason that I opted for the death sentence was because I was under the impression that if we sentenced Terrance Williams to life in prison then he could get out on parole," said another juror. "If I had known that a life sentence meant life without parole, I personally would have votes for a life sentence, and I think other people probably would have voted for life too."

Mamie Norwood, the widow of the victim in Terry's capital case, wants clemency as well. She said that she forgave him several years ago after a process of prayer and self-reflection. "I do not wish to see Terry Williams executed. His execution would go against my Christian faith and my belief system. He is worthy of forgiveness and I am at peace with my decision to forgive him and have been for many years. I wish to see his life spared," she said.

Norwood and these jurors are not alone in seeking clemency for Terry Williams. Now, 35 child advocates, 36 former judges and prosecutors, 48 law professors, 49 mental health professionals and dozens of religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Philadelphia, have publicly called for a commutation of his death sentence. They join the European Union and numerous organizations such as Amnesty International, Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, Support Center for Child Advocates, and the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Moreover, thousands of people have signed a viral online petition at Change.org demanding clemency.

"With our years of experience in reviewing claims of rape and other sexual violence, we speak out clearly that a crime was committed against Terry, nothing less," wrote the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. "Under no construction of American law or societal norms, is the sexual exploitation of a 13 year old boy by a 50 year old man a relationship, homosexual or otherwise. It is rape and any suggestion to the contrary is offensive."

Meanwhile, a bipartisan state Senate commission wrote a letter to Gov. Corbett calling for a postponement of all executions.

Remorseful and a different person, Terry Williams' life is on the line--literally. What could possibly be gained by his execution? A star athlete and a freshman at Cheyney University when he was convicted, Terry suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and it got the best of him. We will never know what he could have been, but we do know that he was an exploited victim of violence, leaving a devastating impact on his emotional and psychological development. Executing him will only continue a vicious cycle of violence.

Pennsylvania Voter ID: It’s Always Something

2012-09-13T16:45:00.000-04:00

A challenge to Pennsylvania’s infamous new voter ID law is headed to the state Supreme Court. Unless the courts block the new law before November 6, all voters in the Keystone state will have to present an acceptable, state-approved photo ID when they go to the polls on Election Day.

For those Pennsylvanians who do not have the necessary identification, obtaining one has its challenges and hurdles.

Based on the state’s own data, 758,000 Pennsylvanians lack the proper identification—9.2 percent of the state’s voting population. In Philadelphia, 186,830 people— 18 percent of the city’s voting population—don’t have the ID.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), to obtain a photo identification card, the person must go to a driver license center with a completed application and a social security card. The applicant also must either have a certificate of U.S. citizenship or naturalization, a U.S. passport or a birth certificate with a raised seal, and two proofs of residency such as a lease, mortgage, utility bill, W-2 or tax form. Once the application is processed, the person’s photo is taken and the ID card is issued.

Those who have no such proof may bring their roommate as one proof of residency. Students at least 18 years old may supply a dorm room assignment, credit card bill, pay stub or bank statement as proof of residency. The homeless can use their shelter address, but must visit the driver’s license center accompanied by an employee of the shelter. That employee must have a shelter-issued photo identification card and a letter on shelter letterhead stating that the homeless person is staying at the shelter.

However, if the voter does not drive, does not have a birth certificate with a raised seal and was born in Pennsylvania, he or she can apply for a special voter card.

Applicants must present their name, address, social security number and proof of residency, and complete and sign a form stating they are registered to vote but lack the required ID. The DMV office then verifies the applicant’s birth with the Department of Health, and issues an ID for $10. If the office cannot verify the applicant’s birth, it will issue the non-driver ID if the Department of State verifies the applicant is registered to vote. This process takes up to 10 business days.

Civil rights and civil liberties groups criticize the voter ID application process for the barriers it presents for some voters, and its discriminatory impact on certain groups who are more likely to vote Democratic. They claim the voter ID requirement resembles the poll tax, literacy test and other tactics employed in the Jim Crow South to suppress and disenfranchise the black vote.

Meanwhile, conservative Republicans who support the voter ID law point to the need to protect the integrity of elections and combat voter fraud, although Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration cannot identify a single case where someone voted by impersonating someone else. Further, Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Turzai—the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House— said the voter ID law will help Mitt Romney win the state on Election Day.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania—one of the organizations leading the challenge to the law in court—argues that an estimated 37 percent of Pennsylvania voters think there is no voter ID law or are unaware of it. Meanwhile, the vast majority of those who lack a valid ID card believe they have a valid form of ID. According to the ACLU, demographic groups such as women, Latinos, the elderly, the poor, and younger voters are less likely to possess an acceptable ID.

The law poses a catch-22 for voters who need an ID to get an ID. For elderly African-American voters, who perhaps were born to midwives in the Jim Crow South and later moved to Pennsylvania, a birth certificate never existed, was destroyed, or contained errors. A number of the Pennsylvanians who are challenging the law are elderly African Americans who live in Philadelphia, the largest city in the Keystone state.

Gloria Cuttino, 61, lives in Philadelphia and was born in Summerville, South Carolina. For over a year, Ms. Cuttino has attempted to secure a birth certificate from South Carolina, but was told the state has no record of her birth. She would have to pay $100 to search census records, and hire an attorney to petition the court for a delayed birth certificate.

Dorothy Barksdale, 86, was born to a midwife in rural Virginia. Virginia has no record of Ms. Barksdale’s birth, and while she has voted in Pennsylvania for years and worked as a poll worker, her voting rights are in danger because she does not have a driver’s license. Similarly, Grover Freeland, 72, has tried unsuccessfully to obtain his birth certificate from New York. He does not have a driver’s license and has not driven in years, but the veterans card issued by the federal government is not acceptable under the Pennsylvania law.

Viviette Applewhite, 93, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the law, rode two buses to a DMV office to receive a temporary ID card, after years of being denied an ID. Applewhite’s Social Security card was stolen a number of years ago, and since she was adopted at a young age, the name on her birth certificate does not match the name on other documents.

Another barrier facing many Pennsylvanians is distance.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, nearly 2.3 million voting age citizens in Pennsylvania—24 percent of Pennsylvania voters— live 10 miles or more from the nearest government office issuing the ID.

In July, the Brennan Center issued a report highlighting the challenges facing hundreds of thousands of poor Americans in obtaining the proper voter identification. Pennsylvania is one of ten states with the most restrictive laws requiring citizens to produce a government issued ID in order to vote.

Further, of the 10 states highlighted in the study, Pennsylvania has the highest percentage of voting age people without access to a car—10.4 percent, or 985,414 voters. Of those citizens without access to a vehicle, 135,544—13.8 percent of all voters—live over 10 miles from a state ID center.

The 10 states cited by Brennan make up 127 of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency. With 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania favors President Obama in most polls. Yet, if thousands of legitimate voters are unable to obtain a valid photo ID in time for the election, this could influence the race in Pennsylvania and the national election.

Moving Towards a Worldwide Moratorium on the Death Penalty

2012-07-23T09:47:00.000-04:00

It was a good day at the United Nations. On July 3, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on member states to abolish the death penalty. And he called for a universal moratorium on the death penalty by 2015.

"The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process," he said. "Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering."

Mr. Ban gave the introductory remarks at a panel called "Moving away from the death penalty -- Lessons from national experiences" at U.N. Headquarters in New York. The event, a gathering of diplomats, legal practitioners and civil society, focused on those U.N. member states that have made positive steps towards abolition, and the human rights implications of the death penalty in those states that execute. Also presentwere Assistant Secretary-General Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Christof Heyns, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Speaking at the forum was Federico Mayor, president of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty, an initiative of the Spanish government that is supported by 15 countries. Mayor noted that one of the first steps taken by Spain after the Franco regime was the abolition of the death penalty.

A highlight of the forum was Witness to innocence member Kirk Bloodsworth, who spent eight years in prison, including two on Maryland's death row, for a murder that someone else committed. He was convicted of the murder and rape of a little girl. In 1993, Bloodsworth was the first death row prisoner to be exonerated through DNA testing. And he was released just months after his mother died.

Bloodsworth shared with an international audience the inherent problem of executing innocent people, of his experiences living in the hell that is death row, and the pain of being released from prison just a few months after his mother died.

Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project noted that only 5-10 percent of serious felonies have biological evidence for the purposes of DNA testing and proving one's innocence. Innocent people are sentenced to death for a number of reasons, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, incompetent lawyering, racism in the jury selection process, eyewitness misidentification, and others.

Reasonable people can differ about the death penalty, Scheck said, but no one can differ about the risk of executing innocent people. He also suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court would abolish the death penalty if the states demonstrate a trend towards abolition. The high court would conclude that the death penalty could not stand when limited to a small number of states in one region of the country.

In the past five years, five states -- New Mexico, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut -- have abolished the death penalty, for a total of 17 states that do not execute. And in November, California voterswill have the opportunity to repeal the death penalty in the nation's largest state, thereby eliminating a quarter of America's death row.

Meanwhile, in 2007, the U.N. General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution for a worldwide moratorium. The U.S. voted against it. Over 150 nations have done away with the death penalty or do not practice it. Moreover, in 2011 only 21 nations executed prisoners.

On the day of the U.N. event I had an interesting conversation with two men, diplomats from a Muslim nation. I expressed my unequivocal opposition to the death penalty, and they explained to me why they believed the death penalty was fairly applied in their country -- the concept of blood money.

With blood money, the family of the murder victim can demand a payment from the accused criminal. If the accused is able to pay the amount demanded by the family, that person is spared. Otherwise, he or she is executed. And the family may decide not to accept blood money altogether, and the execution will proceed.

Whether they realized it or not, the two men articulated good reasons for ending the death penalty. If a person may be spared, and another executed for the same crime, then one can argue that no one should have to die.

The U.S. maintains its own arbitrary form of justice, where many murders are potentially death-penalty eligible, but the ultimate decision is made by petty local officials -- district attorneys on the county level, and U.S. attorneys in the federal system. Those who are prosecuted and condemned are typically poor, disproportionately of color, and almost exclusively in cases involving white victims.

Some studies show that universally, executions provide no deterrent effect. Capital punishment represents pure vengeance and retribution operating as public policy. It leaves no room for rehabilitation. Moreover, we cannot bring an innocent man or woman back from the grave.

Surely the day will come when the international community declares a moratorium on executions. The death penalty is the ultimate human rights violation. As long as humankind upholds the sentence of death, it tears down its own humanity.

Georgia wants to execute Warren Hill and violate the Constitution

2012-07-23T09:43:00.000-04:00

Georgia is about to execute a mentally disabled man in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, the state of Georgia will execute a man that everyone agrees is mentally retarded. A state court determined that a decade ago. The execution would violate the U.S. Constitution if carried out, but apparently that standard is not good enough for the Peach State.

Warren Lee Hill, Jr., who has an I.Q. of 70, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on July 23. His original execution date of July 18 was postponed due to changes in the state’s execution drug protocol. Georgia, which once used a three-drug cocktail, has opted for a single drug dosage of pentobarbital—a sedative used to put down dogs and cats that has been banned for export by the European Union.

On July 18, Texas used pentobarbital to execute Yokamon Hearn. Hearn was a mentally impaired man who, according to his defense, suffered mental impairments due to his mother’s prenatal drinking, and abuse from his parents.

In his order denying relief to Hill, Superior Court Judge Thomas H. Wilson wrote that Hill meets the criteria of mental retardation by a preponderance of the evidence. In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court mandated the states to protect people with mental retardation because there is a “special risk of wrongful execution” because of their disabilities.

Writing for the majority in Atkins, Justice Stevens opined that the mentally disabled should not be executed because it provides no deterrent effect, and that such offenders are not culpable to deserve such a form of retribution. He added that with reduced capacity, mentally retarded defendants face a risk of wrongful conviction. They are poor witnesses, may give less meaningful assistance to their lawyers, and their demeanor may give an impression that they lack remorse.

“Those mentally retarded persons who meet the law’s requirements for criminal responsibility should be tried and punished when they commit crimes,” Stevens wrote. “Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings against mentally retarded defendants.”

However, Georgia sees things differently. Georgia requires defendants to prove they have an intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt—the strictest standard in the nation. And experts agree Georgia is an outlier, as the only state in the Union with such an unreasonably high burden of proof and an impossible standard to meet. Yet, the state judge believes that Hill does not meet Georgia’s standard, and that Georgia’s standard does not violate the U.S. Constitution.

Many have already spoken out on this case. Several jurors from the case said they would have sentenced Hill to life without parole if they had the option. Former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn Carter called for clemency, and the victim’s family called for a commutation of his sentence. Mental health advocacy groups, including the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, the Arc of Georgia and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) have called for a stay of Hill’s execution as well.

Further, the international community has voiced its opposition to the execution. Christof Heyns—the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions—said Hill’s execution “would be a fatality in violation of international as well as domestic law.”

Georgia has a history of problems in its application of the death penalty, often making big mistakes by playing fast and loose with justice. In 2005, the state of Georgia granted a posthumous pardon to Lena Baker. A black maid who was executed in 1945 for killing a white man she said enslaved and beat her, Baker was the only woman executed in Georgia’s electric chair. Her last words were "What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself ... I am ready to meet my God."

And last September—despite strong indications of innocence, an international outcry and a petition of 1 million signatures— Georgia sent a man named Troy Davis to his death. The execution of Troy Davis, despite the absence of a murder weapon, physical evidence or DNA linking him to the crime, placed the spotlight on Georgia and the injustices of the death penalty. This, in a state where five death row inmates have been exonerated.

And Georgia is in the spotlight once again, as it plans to execute Warren Hill, a mentally ill man. And as the state decides to go it alone— flying in the face of the Constitution— the attention it receives is an embarrassment.

40 years after Furman, the U.S. Death Penalty Is In Disarray

2012-07-06T10:19:00.001-04:00

June 29 marks the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia. In Furman, the high court abolished the death penalty on the grounds that it violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The decision also barred the use of capital punishment for rape convictions.

"The fact that the State may seek retribution against those who have broken its laws does not mean that retribution may then become the State's sole end in punishing. Our jurisprudence has always accepted deterrence in general, deterrence of individual recidivism, isolation of dangerous persons, and rehabilitation as proper goals of punishment," wrote Justice Thurgood Marshall in his concurring opinion. "Retaliation, vengeance, and retribution have been roundly condemned as intolerable aspirations for a government in a free society."

Marshall also addressed the issue of inevitably executing the innocent. "No matter how careful courts are, the possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony, and human error remain all too real. We have no way of judging how many innocent persons have been executed, but we can be certain that there were some," he noted.

"Whether there were many is an open question made difficult by the loss of those who were most knowledgeable about the crime for which they were convicted. Surely there will be more as long as capital punishment remains part of our penal law," Justice Marshall added.

Capital punishment was reinstated with Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, but at least for several years there were no executions in the U.S.

Forty years after Furman, problems still plague the death penalty, when in reality the problems never went away. And as long as there are executions, we'll continue to have a problem.

The writing is on the wall for those who offer to read it. Recently the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the death penalty law in that state, finding it is unconstitutional for the department of correction to make policy by deciding execution procedures and what lethal injection drugs to use. Rather, it is the legislature's job to decide that, and in any case Arkansas has not executed since 2005. Although the court did not find lethal injection or the death penalty itself unconstitutional in the 5-2 decision, state lawmakers would have to go back to the drawing board and write a new law. Actually, they should let it go and abandon the practice altogether.

In North Carolina, the state legislature passed a bill that would gut the Racial Justice Act. Signed into law by Governor Bev Perdue in 2009, the Racial Justice Act allowed death row convicts to challenge their sentences on the grounds that racial bias was a significant factor in their sentencing. The new scaling back of the law, if passed, would prohibit death row inmates from relying solely on statistics. This would effectively remove the "racial" and "justice" components of the original law, leaving exactly what conservatives and prosecutors wanted in the first place. And if the governor signs this regressive legislation, the Tarheel State will embrace its legacy of racial injustice, and demonstrate its failure to resist emulating its more backward neighbor to the South. Remember that when prosecutors keep blacks off juries due to racial motivations, both white defendants and defendants of color are harmed.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the state's Democratic Party passed a platform calling for abolition of the death penalty. And Hank Skinner--a Texas death row inmate who was granted a stay of execution in November in order to conduct a DNA test--has been given the green light to proceed with the testing. Skinner's stay of execution came as a result of pleas from death row exonerees and abolition activists. The problem with DNA testing is that key evidence in the case is missing. How convenient.

And how typical of Texas, where a man named Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for the arson murder of his three young daughters -- even though many believe no arson occurred. Another man, Carlos DeLuna, was put to death for a murder another man he resembled bragged about committing. Moreover, his innocence was proven posthumously by a Columbia law professor 23 years after the execution.

Texas is the place where an appellate judge wouldn't allow lawyers to file a last minute appeal in a death row case because 5pm was quitting time. Judge Sharon Keller closed the court, and the condemned man Michael Wayne Richard, was executed four hours later. Further, Kerry Max Cook, who spent years on death row and was released in a plea deal, was subjected to "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" according to an appeals court. Now trying to clear his name, Cook is accusing the prosecutor in his case of keeping the bloody murder weapon in his home as a souvenir. The DNA test was taken, and we await the results.

And finally, the SAFE California Act--a ballot initiative appearing on the November ballot--would abolish capital punishment and save the state $1 billion in five years if voters. If the measure passes, it would eliminate one-quarter of the nation's death row.

They say if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, not only is the death penalty irretrievably broken, it is inherently broken. Four decades after the Furman decision, this is as clear as ever. Had the death penalty been a product, it would have been judged as shoddy, defective and unreliable. It would have been recalled and removed from the shelves long ago.

These Low Information Voters Will Be Our Undoing

2012-06-20T10:29:00.000-04:00

The results of the recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tell you most of what you need to know about the state of politics in the U.S.

On the one hand, you have a governor who did not hide his desire to divide and conquer the unions, eliminate collective bargaining, decimate government services and serve a small cadre of wealthy, powerful and shady corporate interests. He was bought by the Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, and other criminal organizations. There’s even a possible federal indictment for him on the horizon, in connection with an embezzlement investigation that has already ensnared six of his associates and aides.

So, what’s going on here? No one can question the corrupting influence of money in politics, particularly since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Money is a big factor in elections, and when a few billionaires can decide which jerk to put in office, their money trumps the votes and drowns out the voices of the common folk. But still, the 1 percenters require voters to get their candidate in office and seal the deal. These people, known as “low information” voters - a charitable and technical sounding term for uneducated, ignorant or gullible - are the real problem.Yet, despite all this, Walker survived the recall, and it wasn’t even close. Plus, he did it with the support of 38 percent of union households - you know, the people Walker wants to crush. Various explanations have been given for the election results, including the notion that the people simply didn’t like the idea of a recall, or that the Super PACs flooded Wisconsin with money for their boy Walker, giving him a sizable financial advantage over the Democratic challenger and handing him victory. And he did it without the help of the Jim Crow-style voter ID bill he signed into law.

In the Wisconsin recall election, and countless elections throughout the country, both state and national, these low information voters vote against their economic interests and derail the democratic system. A democracy works only with an educated, informed populace, which the United States lacks and desperately needs if it will have any chance of overcoming its dysfunction.

White working class voters have made a pact with the devil - in the case of Republican Party, this should be taken in a literal sense - and now they (and all of us) are paying for it. Convinced that government programs are welfare - translated to mean the blacks and Latinos are getting freebees they don’t deserve - they will oppose them if doing so will hurt blacks more than whites. It is the legacy of the Southern Strategy that has allowed conservatives to politically capitalize on white resentment of black progress. That resentment is summed up in a scene from the 1997 film, Rosewood, a film depicting the massacre of a prosperous black Florida town by a white lynch mob. The following is an exchange between two white men in the film:

Man #1: You know he’s [Sylvester] got a piano? A ni**er with a goddamn piano. I’ve been working all my life, I ain’t got a piano.
Man #2: You don’t know how to play one.
Man #1: That ain’t the point. Old man Cummer, up that house of his, he’s got a piano. That ni**er’s got one, and I don’t.

The Rosewood massacre of 1923, like the Tulsa race riot two years earlier, was precipitated by claims that a black man raped a white woman. But the racial tensions in these massacres and others reflected an underlying social and economic competition.

And the culture wars, including gun worship, abortion bans, homophobia and immigrant bashing, become substitutes for concrete policies of economic uplift and social progress.While some working-class and poor whites have been content with being one rung above people of color on the totem pole, still they have remained on a very low rung and out of luck. There is a reason why the U.S.does not have a vibrant labor movement. And there is a reason why America maintains the flimsiest social safety net and the worst economic inequality of the advanced nations. It is because white members of the 99 percent - or enough of them, at least - have acted not in their own interests, but in the interests of the 1 percent. It is oppression by remote control, and the oppressed are made to feel like winners even as they emerge empty handed.

Faced with hard times, people have clear choices. Either they join forces across racial and ethnic lines and fight their common adversary, or they double down on the dumbness, thrive on misinformation and assign scapegoats. The Tea Party, which now prevails in national politics and owns a major political party, represents the latter of the two choices. It is this mindset that gives us creeps running state houses throughout the country - not just in Wisconsin. For example, the governor of Michigan is dismantling and disenfranchising majority-black cities, while the governor of Florida, the largest Medicare fraudster of all time in his old job, ispurging 182,000 Latino and black voters from the rolls.

And yet, once again, someone out there is voting for these people. Until we resolve this, America will never get any better.

American Trifecta: Broken Political, Economic and Justice Systems

2012-06-01T08:39:00.000-04:00

People are losing faith in a number of America's institutions because these institutions are failing miserably.

For example, take the U.S. criminal justice system. In one week we learned two things: First, Columbia law professor James Liebman and his students revealed that Texas executed an innocent man named Carlos DeLuna in 1989. DeLuna was executed for the 1983 brutal stabbing death of a young woman at a gas station. Forensic evidence was bungled or destroyed, and the crime scene quickly cleaned up. The actual murderer was Carlos Hernandez -- a man with a history of violence who bore a resemblance to DeLuna, and a self-proclaimed knife murderer who bragged about committing the crime. DeLuna's defense team even mentioned Hernandez to the jury as the real killer, but to no avail. Meanwhile, a condemned man maintained his innocence to his grave, and apparently all Latinos look alike to some key actors in the criminal justice system.

Second, and this relates to the first, the University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University announced the creation of a National Registry of Exonerations, a database of more than 2,000 prisoners wrongfully convicted of murder and rape since 1989. The authors of the database found, among other things, that death row inmates -- who are a quarter of those exonerated of murder -- are exonerated nine times more often than other murder convicts. And false convictions are typically the result of prosecutorial misconduct, perjury and bad eyewitness testimony.

In other words, the database confirms what many have maintained for quite some time, which is that the imprisonment and execution of innocent men and women are common, and far more common than you thought. Carlos DeLuna, Troy Davis and Cameron Todd Willingham may not be aberrations, but rather part of a troubling pattern.

Moreover, if the criminal justice system is allowed to exist in such a broken, dysfunctional and corrupt state, what does that say about the system itself, and those who allowed to administer it? After all, systems and institutions are made up of human beings, who have their own agendas, interests, foibles, flaws and prejudices that often conflict with the common good. Meanwhile, born and raised in the "land of the free," many were conditioned to accept things as they are, assuming our institutions work well and in our best interests. Everyone who is punished is guilty, and the innocent are protected, or so they believed. But that's not always the case.

Cracks in the criminal justice system reflect incompetence and negligence by some defense lawyers, judges and prosecutors. And prosecutors, at their worst, want to score a big win -- regardless of the tactics employed, and never mind issues of guilt or innocence of the accused, for that matter. So sometimes, they will strike black prospective jurors, coerce witnesses or hide or destroy evidence. Careers are built, livelihoods made and profits amassed through the human raw materials of the prison-industrial complex. And prisons and their contractors need warm bodies, sometimes dead bodies, to justify their existence.

If Carlos DeLuna and the exonerations database represent a turning point in the criminal justice system -- particularly the death penalty -- then other systems have had their turning points these days. For example, problems in the U.S. financial system, in the form of the Great Recession, the subprime mortgage fiasco and the student debt crisis, have precipitated a public discourse on economic inequality, and a critical look at capitalism itself. The conduct of commercial banks, engaged in risky casino gambling with other people's money, has led to renewed calls for re-regulation. Further, the injection of Bain Capital in this political season has placed the spotlight on vulture capitalism, where companies are chopped up and workers jettisoned, all for the profits of the few rather than the nation's economic well-being.

On the political side, it was the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, which gave a blessing to unlimited corporate influence in elections. This resulted in the birth of the Super PAC, the expansion of legalized bribery, and the ability of a small group of hyper-wealthy individuals to determine the outcome of the political process. Perhaps one of the more insidious examples of corporate influence peddling and the buying of lawmakers was ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, sponsored by major corporations, was responsible for a number of offensive policy initiatives across the country, including "stand your ground" laws implicated in the Trayvon Martin shooting death, forced, legislation mandating intrusive ultrasounds for pregnant women seeking abortions, and voter ID laws that stand to disenfranchise millions of people.

America's criminal justice system is broken, but so are its economic and political systems. That's quite a trifecta. In each case, the folks running the show are engaged in a winner-take-all proposition. In their adversarial worldview governed by pathological individualism, there always are winners (themselves and their friends) and losers (everyone else). As crimes are committed in high places, we are made to turn on the wrong enemies, powerless scapegoats from the poor and working class, and ethnic, racial and religious minorities. They make you believe that criminalizing, or killing, or deporting, or ostracizing these scapegoats will make your problems go away. And as they deflect attention from their own wrongdoing by way of smokescreens, they count on your undying allegiance to the system, and fealty to the status quo.

And yet, people are waking up. When citizens begin to question the institutions that have failed them and society for the benefit of the few, that's when real change has a chance to peek through the window. But we run the risk of missing that window of opportunity.

The Death Penalty is the Tip of America's Human Rights Iceberg

2012-05-21T12:41:00.001-04:00

There's a buzz about the death penalty in America these days. And nearly all of the conversation focuses not on how to maintain the practice, but rather on abolition.

Connecticut just decided to repeal the death penalty, following the lead of Illinois, New Mexico and New Jersey in recent years. Meanwhile, California voters will vote on a ballot measure that would eliminate one-quarter of the nation's death row.

Faced with the high cost, lack of deterrent effect and the inevitability of executing innocent people, some states are taking another look. Moreover, given the appalling specter of prosecutors striking black jurors and other forms of racial misconduct, North Carolina and Kentucky have enacted racial justice legislation to overturn racially biased death sentences.

With the European Union enacting an export ban on lethal injection chemicals to the U.S., states are scrambling to find out how to kill people. With diminished supplies, states are faced with the option of suspending executions altogether, or like a violence addict, purchasing the poisons on the black market. In other cases such as Ohio, they have abandoned the commonly-used, three-drug protocol in favor of a single drug such as pentobarbita l-- a more commonly found substance used to euthanize animals.

And so, as people are still put down like dogs in the land of the free -- despite the momentum for abolition -- capital punishment represents America's human rights blind spot. But really, this is about more than executions. Rather, it speaks to a nation that often pays lip service to upholding human rights, but debases and denigrates human life through its actions. The result is a callous culture of violence, neglect and disregard.

The U.S. ranked fifth in the world in capital punishment last year, in league with China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. A world leader in executions, America is the world's foremost leader in prisons. The U.S. claims one-twentieth of the global population, but one-quarter of the world's prisoners. A majority of these prisoners are poor and of color, poorly educated, poorly represented in the courtroom and failed by the system. The warehousing of people is big business, an unseemly union of criminal justice policy and profit motive.

Is it an accident that the world's prison leader also ranks near the bottom in income inequality, boasts the largest income inequality in the developed world? Hardly not. Inequality in the land of opportunity is far more than in Europe, Canada, Australia and South Korea, but also more than nearly all of Asia, West Africa and North Africa. The top 1 percent of Americans enjoy far more than elsewhere in the West in terms of executive pay and policies favoring the rich. This, as America's 99 percent receive far less government support for health insurance, daycare, pensions and education.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. preaches democracy to the rest of the world, it enacts voter ID laws that could potentially disenfranchise millions of citizens. Harder to vote, yet easier to purchase a gun. Leading the industrialized nations in handgun proliferation and firearms deaths, America is truly what Martin Luther King called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Lax gun laws, "shoot to kill" legislation and laws allowing concealed weapons in schools, churches, sports arenas and bars reflect the power of corporate arms manufacturers in U.S. politics. Made in America, the violence is exported to Mexico in the form of illegal weapons fueling the drug war carnage.

And this culture of violence extends to the death penalty, in a country conditioned by years of dehumanization, normalized through slavery and Jim Crow lynching. The death penalty is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to human rights violations in the U.S. It might be the most disturbing example of the human rights challenges facing the nation, and the challenges are many.

20th Anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots

2012-04-27T15:22:00.000-04:00

I have back-to-back articles this week on the 20th anniversary of the L.A. Riots, which resulted from the verdict in the Rodney King beating case. You can go to theGrio for an analysis on the past two decades of race relations in the U.S., and to the Albany Times Union for a piece on I wrote for the Progressive on racial profiling and police brutality.

theGrio: Mitt Romney has a Robert Bork problem

2012-04-24T11:08:00.001-04:00

I wrote a piece for theGrio on Robert Bork, the former judge, Supreme Court nominee and now adviser to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bork's extremist views on civil rights, women's rights and just about everything else raise a red flag. Click HERE for more.

Lethal Injection As the Death Penalty's Last Stand

2012-04-13T10:06:00.000-04:00

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America? All of it might come down to a basic issue of supply.

So, what do you do if you are a hangman who runs out of rope? To put it in more conventional terms, suppose you are a state that executes people by lethal injection, but you're running out of the lethal chemicals used to put people down like animals.

Perhaps you'd do what some states have done and buy your chemicals on the black market, so to speak.

In March, Judge Richard J. Leon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued an order and opinion banning the importation of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic and the first of a three-chemical cocktail administered to a condemned inmate. Once the inmate is unconscious, he or she is injected with pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the person, and potassium chloride, which causes death through cardiac arrest.

According to the judge, it was disappointing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broke the law by allowing shipments of the drug form foreign countries, unapproved for the purpose of executions. Without FDA approval, according to the judge, the sodium thiopental would fail to put the inmate to sleep, causing "conscious suffocation, pain, and cardiac arrest."

Judge Leon ordered the FDA to notify state corrections departments that they must surrender the drug to the FDA.

The drug is only available overseas, as the only U.S. manufacturer recently ceased production last year amid controversy over its use. Moreover, the European Union recently announced restrictions on export of the drug. But with sodium thiopental unavailable, the most logical replacement is pentobarbital. This replacement drug, which is a more expensive alternative, has been used by 12 states to put 47 people to death since 2010, according to the Death Penalty information Center, and is widely used to put down animals. In addition, the chemical is used to treat insomnia and as a seizure treatment for epilepsy.

Manufacturers of pentobarbital, including Danish manufacturer Lundbeck, Inc., have made it known to various states that they do not want the drug used for executions. States such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas apparently have stockpiled pentobarbital and say they have enough supply for this year's executions.

Texas apparently bought $50,000 worth last year and wants to block information on its stockpile, and the state has accused the anti-death penalty group Reprieve of "'intimidation and commercial harassment' of manufacturers of medical drugs used in lethal injections". Arizona has had its lethal injection protocols challenged, as inmates have sued the state for giving the state's corrections director too much discretion. Meanwhile, Ohio just resumed executions after a federally-imposed six-month moratorium because prison officials were not following proper procedures. And Alabama stayed an execution in March after the condemned inmate argued that Pentobarbital does not completely sedate and amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

With both domestic and international public pressure on the purveyors of death, it seems they're feeling the heat, as well they should. Willing executioners are in short supply, and former executioners have seen enough to know they want no part of it. Further, they have likely killed innocent people. Many doctors are unwilling to break their Hippocratic oath to do no harm, or are forbidden to do so.

Used to extinguish 1,100 lives in 35 states--some of them most certainly innocent--lethal injection is the prominent form of capital punishment in the U.S. Marketed as the clean, humane form of capital punishment, lethal injection was billed as the friendly, painless type of execution. But we should ask, how harmless can you really make a lynching?

If lethal injection falls out of favor, either through a dwindling supply of the poisonous cocktail of death, lack of public support or a court ruling, what do the states do after that? Do they return to the hangman's noose? That seems unlikely, reminds us too much of the strange fruit hanging from the trees that Billie Holiday used to sing about.

What about the electric chair, which has been known to cook people alive? Or the gas chamber, like the Nazis used to do?

Then there's the firing squad. Better yet, how about stoning, or drawing and quartering, which is really old school?

Here's a better idea. Just get rid of the death penalty for good. America is the only Western nation that executed people last year. And the U.S. is in the top five of nations that execute, putting us in league with China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen. We'll never get it right with the death penalty because executions are so wrong.

No matter how the state kills a person, you can't wipe the blood from your hands.

theGrio: Whites are mostly missing at Trayvon Martin rallies

2012-04-04T12:29:00.003-04:00

Why are white protestors largely missing in action at the Trayvon Martin rallies?

Across America, thousands of protestors are attending rallies for Martin, the 17-year-old black teen who was shot to death on February 26 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida. Even in Toronto, Canada and as far away as London, England, where racial profiling also occurs, demonstrators sported hoodies and demanded justice for Martin in front of the U.S. Embassy.

For people of all backgrounds in this country, Trayvon's death is striking a nerve. Over 2 million people have signed a petition on Change.org demanding justice -- a petition started by a Kevin Cunningham, a white man who studied law at historically black Howard University.And to be sure, many non-black people are attending the rallies. But it is worth noting that while blacks are anywhere from 12 to 33 percent of the population in the communities holding these rallies, 90 percent of the protestors appear to be black, based on media observations.

Go to theGrio to read more