Tag: travesties of justice

Here’s a trick question.  Is there anything wrong with a death penalty jury trial in which the prosecutor trying the case is having an affair while the case is going on with the judge who is trying the case?  I know.  It looks pretty unfair.  It looks pretty sleazy.  There really should be something the matter with this, right?  Shouldn’t the judge recuse herself?  Shouldn’t the case be assigned to a different prosecutor, all for the sake of the appearance of fairness?

But in Texas, ground zero for state killing, there’s no answer to these questions.  At least not today  Why?  Because the majority of the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’s highest court that considers criminal appeals, is wagging its finger at the defendant’s lawyers saying that the affair isn’t something that the Court will look at because the defense lawyers waited too long to raise the issue.  According to the Court, it’s OK to execute Charles D. Hood whether there was an affair or not because the defense waited too long to raise the question. You cannot make this stuff up.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Today’s New York Times tells the story of yet another travesty of justice from Alabama in a death penalty case.  This is the kind of thing that unfortunately is no longer a revelation.  It’s what you might expect.  And it’s happened over and over again.

Please join me in the Death Belt.

Cross posted from The Dream Antilles

According to the New York Times, the Obama Administration may modify the military commission rules to permit require have Gitmo prisoners plead guilty and be executed:

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

What a disgrace.  On Friday, the Connecticut legislature passed a bill abolishing the death penalty.  I asked readers of my essay to call or email Governor Rell to ask her please to sign the bill.  There was, I pointed out, a strong chance that the Republican Governor, a long time death penalty supporter, would veto the bill.

Today’s Hartford Courant says that Governor Rell vows to veto the measure when it gets to her desk.  It might take a few weeks to get there:

Just hours after the state Senate gave final legislative approval Friday to a historic measure abolishing the death penalty in Connecticut, Gov. M. Jodi Rell came out with an expected announcement:

She said she was going to veto the measure as soon as it hits her desk.

“I appreciate the passionate beliefs of people on both sides of the death penalty debate. I fully understand the concerns and deeply held convictions of those who would like to see the death penalty abolished in Connecticut,” she said in a statement.

“However, I also fully understand the anguish and outrage of the families of victims who believe, as I do, that there are certain crimes so heinous – so fundamentally revolting to our humanity – that the death penalty is warranted.”

What nonsense.  The families of victims are far from unanimous that the death penalty is warranted.  In fact, as the Courant pointed out in its photo caption, Friday “[f]amilies of victims of murder [spoke] at a press conference in support of a bill passed by the legislature Thursday that would abolish the death penalty. Pictured are Gail Canzano, at podium, Elizabeth Brancato of Torrington, State Representative Gary Holder-Winfield of New Haven, Rev. Walter Everett , Cindy Siclari of Monroe and Anne Stone of Farmington.”  So the Governor’s invocation of wishes of the families of victims rings hollow.

We can all easily understand how appealing revenge on killers might be, but the overwhelming majority of civilized societies in the world have now abandoned that barbarian argument.  Rell chooses, however, to dress up the old canard in victims’ rights clothing.  The fact is that she’s not doing anything for victims’ families by permitting the state to kill killers.  And she’s certainly not doing anything for the rest of us, in whose names these state killings will be carried out.  State killing doesn’t deter killing, and it doesn’t bring “closure” to the families of victims.

Governor Rell’s vowing the veto because she allegedly “believes” in the death penalty.  And when Republicans enact policies just because they believe in them– surely the memory of George W. Bush has not been forgotten– you know that irrationality has prevailed.

You might want to tell Governor Rell that the death penalty is a bad idea, that we can live without it, and that she’s making a mistake if she vetoes this bill.

Please telephone Governor Rell (860.566.4840) or email her ([email protected]) and let he know that it’s time for Connecticut to step into the 21st Century.  It’s time for her to sign the death penalty abolition bill.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Put in the simplest terms, the proponents of “prolonged detention” think that dressing up preventive detention with post detention procedures will make it constitutional.  Procedures= whip cream.  Detention= manure.  This will not make the prolonged detention policy palatable.  It will not preserve the sentiments behind the US Constitution.  And a debate about how many dollops of whipped cream are required will completely miss the point.  The point imo is that prolonged detention is in a single word unacceptable. It should not be countenanced. The idea should be shelved and abandoned.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Aung San Suu Kyi

Evidently, the military junta running Myanmar (Burma) has decided to make life for Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, even worse.  Today was the second day of her trial.  The New York Times reports:

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

The Times Record Herald reports that the New York Prison Guards Union has managed to kill a performance of an inmate musical production.  The prisoners, it seems, wrote a play, a musical to be exact, produced it, directed it, and act, sing and dance in it.  They were going to show it to prisoners at another, nearby prison.

Why has the production been canceled?  Because the guards’ union is mad at the Governor because of closings, supposedly for budgetary reasons, of work release centers in which union member guards are employed.  Not content to fight the Governor directly, not content to picket the Governor and the legislature, the Union has stepped in to stop the prisoners’ showing their play to other prisoners by threatening to picket the performance:

State prison officials have lowered the curtain on an inmate theatrical performance.

A troupe of 18 convicted murderers, robbers and other felons at Woodbourne Correctional Facility had been scheduled to perform an original play Wednesday at Eastern Correctional Facility in Ellenville.

But the state Department of Correctional Services has canceled the show because union workers threatened to picket.

“The commissioner does not want to jeopardize the program or the people in it by putting them in the middle of a statewide labor issue,” said DOCS spokesman Erik Kriss.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

What a colossal disappointment.  Remember when Barack Obama was going to severely curtail the use of the “state secrets” doctrine, throw the windows open, and let the sun shine in, dispersing Bushco’s unnecessary secrecy?  Forget about it.  That was just eyewash.

Yesterday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit the Obama Justice Department astonished the three judge panel by sticking with Bushco’s “state secrets” argument in the case of Binyam Mohamed.  

cross posted from The Dream Antilles



The Chinese Government is very afraid of these two women.

Seventy-nine-year-old Wu Dianyuan, on the right, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77, followed the law.  They applied for a protest permit.  They wanted to protest inadequate compensation for the taking of their homes in preparation of the Olympics.  They asked for the permit five times.  They didn’t get it.  They ended up instead being sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor.”

According to NY Times:

Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.

The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.

During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.

Mr. Li said his mother and Ms. Wang, who used to be neighbors before their homes were demolished to make way for a redevelopment project, were allowed to return home but were told they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. “Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” he asked. He said Ms. Wang was nearly blind.

Join me in Beijing.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Today the US Government tried unsuccessfully to move the Gitmo death penalty show trial of five “enemy combatants” toward a “trial” by arraigning the accused. Unfortunately for the US, today’s proceedings were a complete and utter joke show.  And a complete embarrassment.  And they were the previews of the upcoming Gitmo Joke Show “trial”

Reuters reports:

The accused al Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks stood in a U.S. military court on Thursday, sang a chant of praise to Allah and said he would welcome the death penalty.

“This is what I wish, to be martyred,” Pakistani captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the highest-ranking al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, told the Guantanamo war crimes court.

/snip

As the judge questioned him about whether he was satisfied with the U.S. military lawyer appointed to defend him, Mohammed stood and began to sing in Arabic, cheerfully pausing to translate his own words into English.

“My shield is Allah most high,” he said, adding that his religion forbade him from accepting a lawyer from the United States and that he wanted to act as his own attorney.

Isn’t that just a super beginning to the arraignment before a death penalty “trial”?  A “trial” that is supposed to lead to convictions and not acquittals?  A “trial” that is supposed to result in five executions?  But that’s not all.  Not by a long shot.

[Mohammed] criticized the United States for fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, waging what he called “a crusader war,” and enacting “evil laws” including those authorizing same-sex marriages.  /snip

The judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, tried to persuade the men to accept their military lawyers, but all refused.

Aziz Ali said he had barely been allowed to meet with his lawyer anyway and described him as “a signboard” hung up so the government could say, ‘Hey, we give these people lawyers.”‘

“All this is just a stage play,” he said.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

The New York Times reports that 270 undocumented workers who were arrested at a meat plant in Iowa in March, instead of being swiftly deported back to Guatemala, have instead been convicted of federal misdemeanors, sentenced to 5 months incarceration, and then will be immediately deported.  This marks a lamentable, new, harsher policy toward punishing defenseless undocumented workers who are selected for this special treatment.  And, let me say it, it’s a show designed to frighten and threaten and disrupt the other almost 15 million undocumented workers now in the US.

In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Isn’t that efficient and fast.  The poultry workers were arrested on March 12, they pleaded guilty in record time, and they were sentenced in short order.  How, you might inquire, did this happen so swiftly?  Where was their relentless, publicly funded defense?  Where were their trials, their juries, their appeals, the recognition by the defense that these kinds of proceedings need to be fought and fought hard?  Answer: none of that happened because the government used threats to cow the accused into pleading guilty.