j u s t c r i m

EJI Challenge to Alabama Prison Book Banning Sparks Nationwide Conversation About America's Racial History | Equal Justice Initiative

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week, more than 50 media outlets across the country raised critical questions about Alabama prison officials' recent decision to ban prisoners from reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name, because it contains embarrassing truths about American history.

Leonard Pitts's latest column for the Miami Herald profiled EJI's lawsuit against Kilby Prison officials who last year banned Douglas Blackmon’s historical account of how the South instituted a form of de facto slavery by mass arresting black men on nonsense charges and “selling” them to plantations, turpentine farms, and other places of back-breaking labor from the 1880s until the 1940s.

EJI's Bryan Stevenson explains that prison officials banned the book last year because they felt it was “too provocative, they didn’t like the title, they didn’t like the idea that the title conveyed. They didn’t read the book, but they were concerned about it and thought that it would be ‘too dangerous’ to have in the prisons.”

via eji.org

Hands Off My Genes

Most teenagers don't sit around contemplating the need for genetic testing. They may not even know the purpose of genetic testing. That all changed for me when I was 13, shortly after my baby brother celebrated his first birthday. He was diagnosed with a disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a genetic motor neuron disease that affects the muscles that control crawling, walking, head and neck control, and swallowing. In order to inherit SMA, both parents of a child have to be carriers of a mutated SMN1 gene. If both parents are carriers, their child has a one in four chance of being affected with SMA. While my sister and I are perfectly healthy, there is a chance that we could both be carriers of the mutated SMN1 gene. My brother's doctors have strongly advised that, should we choose to have children, our partners should at least be tested to see if they are carriers for the gene. It was the first time the concept of genetic testing came across my radar, but it certainly wouldn't be the last.

via www.aclu.org

 

[  " ... Unfortunately, as a result of the gene patents, there is only one lab that can do the testing and the tests cost too much. What does it mean when a gene is patented, exactly? It means that a genetic sequence that occurs naturally in the human body is essentially controlled by a private company... ]

Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia' is - gasp - hopeful

 

How does the world end? When it is in the hands of the cinematic master of human misery, dark Danish auteur Lars von Trier, as it is in "Melancholia,"  it ends in extraordinary, horrific, searing, aching and unthinkable ways. It is his most hopeful film yet.  Still firmly rooted in the filmmaker's esoteric, frustrating, provoking, demanding narrative style, the movie is also amazingly romantic — lush, ripe, rich, delicious. Its apocalyptic vision is encouraging in its hopelessness; its star, Kirsten Dunst, luminous in her anguish and devastation. Excessive in every way, and yet restrained. Everything and nothing that you'd expect a film called "Melancholia" to be.  By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film CriticNovember 11, 2011

via www.latimes.com

[ the finest film of 2011 ... Oscar is a dog ]

 

JURIST - Paper Chase: France constitutional court declares genocide denial ban unconstitutional

The Constitutional Council of the French Republic on Tuesday ruled  that a French law making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered a genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 is unconstitutional...

Paper Chase is JURIST's real-time legal news service, powered by a team of 30 law student reporters and editors led by law professor Bernard Hibbitts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. As an educational service, Paper Chase is dedicated to presenting important legal news and materials rapidly, objectively and intelligibly in an accessible, ad-free format.

via jurist.org

[ Free speech scores a victory en France ]

Show Me the Money: States, ABA Try to Figure Out When Campaign Cash Leads to a Judge’s Recusal - Magazine - ABA Journal

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy placed great faith in the appearance of impropriety in June 2009 when the court tried to determine how much spending on judicial campaigns is enough to affect a judge’s impartiality and cause the judge’s removal from a case.

The facts in Caperton v. Massey made the decision relatively easy. West Virginia coal magnate Don Blankenship had spent some $3 million in 2004 to help elect a state supreme court justice when Blankenship’s A.T. Massey Coal Co. had a case coming before the court. The Blankenship bankroll totaled more than the amounts raised by the two candidates combined and their supporters. Blankenship’s man won and joined in the vote to reverse a $50 million judgment against Massey.

Money may not buy love, but the $3 million bought Blankenship justice, at least until the U.S. Supreme Court took up the matter. The circumstances and the amount alone were enough to create a risk of bias, Kennedy wrote, so due process required newly elected Justice Brent Benjamin to recuse himself from the coal company’s case. “The facts now before us,” Kennedy wrote, “are extreme by any measure.”

via www.abajournal.com

California prisons clearing out - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

Images of California's overcrowded prisons are so striking that the U.S. Supreme Court included two photographs of the problem in last year's landmark opinion that forced the state to address the issue.

On Friday, state corrections leaders will announce they have made an important step toward their goal to ease overcrowding, finally getting rid of the last of thousands of bunks that were crammed into day rooms, gymnasiums and other spaces to hold inmates.

In a news conference scheduled to be held at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, corrections chief Matthew Cate and other officials are scheduled to announce the end of what the department itself calls "iconic images of (the) overcrowding crisis."

via www.sacbee.com

GWAR's Oderus Urungus Endorses Death for All Candidates on 'Wheel of Over-Sized Knives'

As part of our ongoing project to catalog the 2012 presidential election from a metal point of view, we've been soliciting presidential endorsements from noteworthy American metal musicians. Today: GWAR.

Oderus Urungus, Lord of Earth and lead singer of GWAR, sends a strong endorsement of murdering every presidential candidate on a gigantic wheel of over-sized knives. Though Urungus, a several-century old extraterrestrial, is not technically an American citizen, we felt it wise to publish his endorsement and add him to the list nonetheless. His statement follows:

Metal Endorsements Update: Testament and Lamb of God

via gawker.com

[ gwar ]

AALL Spectrum Available Online

March 2012 issue of  Spectrum is available online ...

The Verdict is Out: Why States Are Already Shifting Away from Alabama and Arizona's Failed Anti-Immigrant Experiment

On March 1, a federal Appeals Court in Atlanta will consider the constitutionality of anti-immigrant laws passed last year in Georgia and Alabama. And as with April's Supreme Court consideration of Arizona's "show me your papers" law, the legal stakes are high and the rulings much-anticipated. But in a sense, the verdict is already out. Constitutional questions aside, these laws are increasingly viewed as a failed experiment exacting intolerable human tolls, alarming economic costs and genuine political risks.

Last year, two dozen states considered "show me your papers" laws inspired by Arizona's S.B. 1070. Five states enacted similar laws, and for a moment, momentum appeared to surge in their favor. With nearly every one of this year's state legislative sessions now underway, it is clear that a shift is occurring. In state after state, legislatures that had vowed to adopt sweeping new immigration restrictions are now taking pause. What happened?

First, in Alabama, the one state where courts have allowed a broad set of novel restrictions to go into effect, a humanitarian and civil liberties crisis has ensued. Terrified parents have kept their children out of school to avoid the threat of immigration queries. Families have lost their water service because they lacked government-issued ID. Immigrants have been told by landlords that they are no longer welcome as renters, since their leases are unenforceable. And the law has unleashed widespread bigotry, fostering prejudice and a climate of fear and suspicion. Latinos buying groceries have been asked by check-out clerks for their papers, and children who do show up at school are asked why they haven't yet gone back to Mexico.

via www.aclu.org

Posthumous Proxy Baptism ... A cure for what forever ails ya

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Posthumous Mormon Baptism
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

 

Dealing With Dementia Among Aging Criminals - NYTimes.com

At the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, prisoners doing time for murder are caring for inmates with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Despite that, he has recently been entrusted with an extraordinary responsibility. He and other convicted killers at the California Men’s Colony help care for prisoners with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, assisting ailing inmates with the most intimate tasks: showering, shaving, applying deodorant, even changing adult diapers.

Their growing roster of patients includes Joaquin Cruz, a convicted killer who is now so addled that he thinks he sees his brother in the water of a toilet, and Walter Gregory, whose short-term memory is ebbing even as he vividly recalls his crime: stabbing and mutilating his girlfriend with a switchblade.

via www.nytimes.com

 

finding handheld neutrality

Handheld devices and platforms ... Best combo for on the fly tooling. And I am aware of Twitter http://twitter.com/briancrime

journal of law & policy: gender violence

Gender Violence in Prison & Hyper-Masculinities in the ’Hood: Cycles of Destructive Masculinity (Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 37, p. 89, 2011) on SSRN.

Abstract: This Article examines gender violence in male prisons and its impact on marginal communities — the slums, ’hoods, ghettos and barrios — where inmates return when released from prison. It is a qualitative study that analyzes documentary works on sex and gender violence in the correctional setting, including text, video, and film sources. The Article argues that social constructions of masculinity, including ideologies of patriarchy and heterosexuality, are the foundation for creating destructive masculinities in prison that seep into these communities by the return of disaffected inmates. The law contributes to inmate victimization, and in some systems, rules, policies, and procedures contribute structurally to the problem. Victims suffer long after they leave prison, including from post-traumatic disorders and health complications from sexually transmitted diseases. When such an individual returns, his problems become the community’s since he returns not merely as the chauvinistic sexist who entered, but someone far more menacing. Although his home community may already be defined by high rates of crime, violence, and poor public health, it is made more vulnerable by the release of inmates who return with ultra-masculine proclivities and high rates of disease infection. In the upcoming decades, marginal communities will absorb unprecedented numbers of released inmates at a social cost that is just at the beginning of calculation. What follows represents a contribution to the tally and to the continuing need for structural analysis of imprisonment’s collateral consequences. Examination of documentary works offers unique insight to this growing problem, and better, ideas for legal and cultural interventions.

Bikini Kill forever ...

 

Regulations.gov looks pretty cool ... I recall using print paper artifacts ...

Regulations.gov is your [NEW and/or EMERGING] source for information on the development of Federal regulations and other related documents issued by the U.S. government. Through this site, you can find, read, and comment on regulatory issues that are important to you.

Regulations.gov

On Indian Reservations, Higher Crime and Fewer Prosecutions - NYTimes.com

Violent crimes on Indian reservations, which occur at a higher-than-average rate, are prosecuted at a disproportionately low rate in federal court, new Justice Department data show.

The country’s 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape.

The low rate of prosecutions for these crimes by United States attorneys, who along with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally have jurisdiction for the most serious crimes on reservations, has been a longstanding point of contention for tribes, who say it amounts to a second-class system of justice that encourages law breaking. Prosecutors, however, say they turn down most reservation cases because of a lack of admissible evidence.

via www.nytimes.com

A More Conservative High Court Prepares to Consider Affirmative Action Case | ACS

by Jeremy Leaming

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority is seemingly preparing to provide a potentially fatal blow to affirmative action policy. After the high court announced earlier today that it would consider Fisher v. Texas, a white college student’s challenge to the University of Texas’ affirmative action policy, The Huffington Post’s Mike Sacks wrote, that affirmative action was heading back to the high court “and this time its prospects for survival are poorer than ever.”

As Sacks notes, in 2003 the Supreme Court upheld by a 5-4 vote in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan law school’s affirmative action program was constitutional. The law school’s policy, in part, was based on a longstanding commitment to “one particular type of diversity,” that is, “racial and ethnic diversity with special reference to the inclusion of students from groups which have been historically discriminated against, like, African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, who without this commitment might not be represented in our student body in a meaningful manner.”

via www.acslaw.org

Report: Suit Against Law Schools Not Good For Business | Inside Higher Ed

Moody's Investors Service said this week that a class action filed against 12 law schools last week could endanger those schools' financial positions, since they rely overwhelmingly on tuition revenue, and a lawsuit alleging that a school inflated graduation and employment statistics is not a strong selling point for attracting students. "The lawsuits are credit negative for the law schools given the potential for reputational damage leading to application and enrollment declines that would pressure tuition revenue," Moody's analyst Emily Schwarz wrote in the ratings agency's weekly credit outlook.

via www.insidehighered.com

BOOKS: "A Murder Case Gone Wrong" | Death Penalty Information Center

Raymond Bonner's new book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, is about to be published and was noted earlier by DPIC.  An excerpt from the book appeared recently in The Atlantic.  Andrew Cohen, also writing in The Atlantic, called it "the book of the century about the death penalty." Cohen commented that “Bonner's book comes at a crucial time in the modern history of the death penalty. It comes at a time when views are slowly hardening against the current unreliable and expensive system. It comes at a time when several states are looking to eliminate their capital regimes. It comes at a time when even the conservative Supreme Court has sent a signal that capital cases must be handled better. It's a book that surely comes too late for some death row inmates but perhaps just in time for others.” In Anatomy for Injustice, Bonner recounts the case of Edward Lee Elmore, a man with intellectual disabilities, who has been tried, convicted and sentenced to death three times for a murder, and was recently granted a fourth trial when the reviewing court acknowledged “grave questions about whether it really was Elmore who murdered [the victim].”  Read the excerpt from Anatomy for Injustice.

via www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

The Last Line of Defense - The Atlantic

Diana Holt, photographed by Joshua Drake

In our criminal-justice system, once a person has been convicted, no matter how shaky the conviction, the presumption of innocence disappears. The defendant is assumed to have had a fair trial. New evidence, even enough to sow a field of doubt, does not necessarily entitle a defendant, not even one on death row, to a new trial. The remarkable defense attorney Diana Holt learned these lessons the hard way after she took on the case of Richard Charles Johnson, in October of 1999.

via www.theatlantic.com

[ StandDown ]

And speaking of horror ... Iraq

Iraq: 65 Executions in First 40 Days of 2012 (Human Rights Watch) February 9, 2012

" ... The Iraqi government seems to have given state executioners the green light to execute at will. The government needs to declare an immediate moratorium on all executions and begin an overhaul of its flawed criminal justice system..." Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch       

  

Congress Demands Drones Over America | Center for Democracy & Technology

Congress is demanding drones in the air over the United States – without considering the civil liberties issues. Within the span of three days last week, the House and then the Senate passed a law – H.R. 658 – requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to speed up, within 90 days, its current licensing process for government use of drones domestically and to open the national airspace to drone aircraft for commercial and private use by October 2015. While the law requires the FAA to develop guidance on drone safety, the law says absolutely nothing about the privacy or transparency implications of filling the sky with flying robots.

As CDT and others have pointed out, drones are powerful surveillance devices capable of being outfitted with facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, thermal imaging cameras, open WiFi sniffers, and other sensors. Drones’ unique ability to hover hundreds or thousands of feet in the air – undetected, for many hours – enables constant, pervasive monitoring over a wide area. Without clear privacy rules, public and private use of drones can usher in an era of unparalleled physical surveillance. Without transparency requirements, citizens will not even have the basic right to know who owns the drone watching them from above. Congress, the FAA, industry bodies, and the American people all should play a role in ensuring that drones are used responsibly.

Congress

via www.cdt.org

Are America's Prison Towns Doomed? - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities

Over the last 30 years, Texas built over 90 prisons, quintupling the number of detention centers in the state and earning the title of highest state incarceration rate in the process.

As much as Texas ended up an outlier, it was by no means alone. All across the U.S. during the 1970s, '80s and early '90s, depressed villages and hamlets in need of an industry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Coal Belt, signed up to build oversized detention facilities on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and klieg lights, in the hopes of bolstering the local economy with taxes, jobs and associated retail.

But ever since the nation’s crime rate began leveling off in the late 1990s, with the total state prison population decreasing for the first time in 40 years, there haven’t been enough inmates to populate these new-found penitentiaries.

via www.theatlanticcities.com

[ something about deals with devils ... Karmic wheels ... chickens coming home to roost ]

Mad Max motorcycle girl ~ Return of the Cafe Racers

via www.returnofthecaferacers.com

the art of the motorcycle series ...

A Dozen Law Schools Hit with Lawsuits over Jobs Data - Law Blog - WSJ

The number of lawsuits accusing law schools of ”legerdemain” in their claims about post-graduate employment has quintupled.

Three complaints — against Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, New York Law School and Thomas Jefferson School of Law — were already out there. The schools have moved to dismiss the lawsuits, arguing that they strictly followed American Bar Association rules on job-placement data.

David Anziska, who filed the lawsuits in Michigan and New York, teamed with lawyers from seven other law firms to file a dozen more on Wednesday.

via blogs.wsj.com

Balkinization - [More Views On] "Understanding Perry v. Brown"

Balkinization Understanding Perry v. Brown (Wednesday, February 08, 2012):

Jason Mazzone asserts that the Ninth Circuit's decision yesterday in Perry v. Brown was "dishonest and foolish." It is neither. Judge Reinhardt's rationale did not, as Jason argues, rest upon any misreading of Romer v. Evans, nor did the panel hold, as Jason would have it, that "if the state gives you something it can't later take it away." Moreover, in declining to reach out to decide whether a state can ever limit civil marriage to heterosexual couples, the panel not only did not act foolishly; it acted appropriately, since resolution of that question--one that would affect the marriage laws in many states--was not necessary in order to resolve the case....

[restofpost]

 

ACLU Blog - "U.S. Supreme Court Confirms Ohio Can’t Be Trusted to Carry Out Executions "

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the state of Ohio’s appeal to continue with the execution of Charles Lorraine. The execution was put on indefinite hold by Federal District Court Judge Gregory L. Frost in July. In his ruling, Judge Frost said:

The only consistent aspect of Ohio’s execution protocols is that they are fraught with problems. Over the past five years, the state has had  three botched executions. The first was Joseph L. Clark execution in 2006. Mr. Clark’s execution was delayed significantly because of collapsed veins. Witnesses overheard him exclaim “It don’t work” during the procedure. The next botched execution took place in 2007, when the execution team could not locate suitable veins on Christopher Newton. The execution took so long, Newton had to go for a bathroom break.

The third, Romell Broom's 2009 attempted execution – during which officials tried unsuccessfully for over two hours to locate a usable vein – led the state to implement experimental procedures. Following the changes in procedures, several death row inmates have challenged the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection protocols.

via www.aclu.org

LAPD ... Chinatown

Balkinization dissects Perry v. Brown @ http://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/02/marriage-and-ninth-circuit-thumbs-down.html

Love this quote | Moore v. Parker 425 F.3d 250 (2005)

"I have no delusions of grandeur and I know my place in the judiciary. My oath requires me to apply the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States. I will continue to do as I am told until the Supreme Court concludes that the death penalty cannot be administered in a constitutional manner or our legislatures abolish the penalty. But lest there be any doubt, the idea that the death penalty is fairly and rationally imposed in this country is a farce..."  C.A.6 (Ky.), 2005.  Moore v. Parker 425 F.3d 250, 2005 Fed.App. 0406P

Shocking and unsurprising ... "City Has Highest Number of Marijuana Arrests in More Than a Decade"

This is shocking but unsurprising ... "City Has Highest Number of Marijuana Arrests in More Than a Decade" [ Wednesday, February 01, 2012 ]

http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/feb/01/city-hits-highest-marijuana-arrests-more-decade/