Tag Archives: civil liberties

60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

by SFGJrg Posted on May 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The changes required by Brown v. Board of Education decision were not immediate, but they were profound and lasting. Today, schools in the South are the least segregated for black students in the nation.

Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. In honor of the Brown anniversary, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a report that analyzes the progress of desegregation since 1954. According to the report, starting in the 1980s, schools began to ditch integration efforts and shift focus to universal education standards as a way to level the playing field for students in unequal schools. In 1991, when the Supreme Court ruled that school districts could end their desegregation plans, it put the nail in integration’s coffin.

Black students integrating a Clinton, Tennessee, school in 1956 Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress

Today, the picture of American schools is far different than what the 1954 ruling seemed to portend. The UCLA report notes that Latino students are the most segregated in the country. In major and mid-sized cities, where housing discrimination historically separated neighborhoods along racial lines, black and Latino students are often almost entirely isolated from white and Asian students—about 12 percent of black and Latino students in major cities have any exposure to white students. Half of the students who attend 91-100 percent black and Latino schools (which make up 13 percent of all US public schools) are also in schools that are 90 percent low-income—a phenomenon known as “double segregation.” And the Northeast holds the special distinction of having more black children in intensely segregated schools (where school populations are 90-100 percent minority) in 2011 than it did in 1968. In New York state, for instance, 65 percent of black students attend schools that are intensely segregated, as do 57 percent of Latinos students.

Bused to a white school, New York City children face parent protests in 1965. Dick DeMarsico/Library of Congress

Even in the South, where Brown made such a profound difference, school integration is being rolled back. The chart below shows the percentage of black students attending majority white schools in the South over the last 60 years. You can see the progress made after Brown—and how rapidly it’s dissolving.

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60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

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Will Rick Perry Execute A Mentally Disabled Man Tonight?

by PollyGandy Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Update (5:24 pm): The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed Robert Campbell’s execution on the grounds that the new evidence of his intellectual disability was “more than sufficient” to warrant a closer look by the courts. His lawyer, Robert C. Owen, said in a statement, “Given the state’s own role in creating the regrettable circumstances that led to the Fifth Circuit’s decision today, the time is right for the State of Texas to let go of its efforts to execute Mr. Campbell, and resolve this case by reducing his sentence to life imprisonment. State officials should choose the path of resolution rather than pursuing months or years of further proceedings.“

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has presided over more executions than any other governor in American history. He’s ignored pleas for clemency for people who committed crimes as juveniles, who were mentally disabled, or who were obvious victims of systemic racism. He even signed off on the execution of a likely innocent man. So the odds don’t seem good for Robert Campbell, a man set to be executed in Texas tonight. This is despite the fact that new evidence has surfaced showing that the state withheld information documenting an intellectual disability that should make him ineligible for the death penalty.


Meet Six Texans Who Were Executed or Condemned Despite Profound Mental Illness

Unlike Clayton Lockett, the Oklahoma murderer whose botched execution last month has become a rallying cry for abolishing the death penalty, Campbell is actually something of a poster child for all that’s wrong with capital punishment in this country.

Four months after his 18th birthday, Campbell commit three armed car jackings. In one of those, a 20-year-old bank employee, Alexandra Rendon, was kidnapped at a gas station, sexually assaulted and shot to death. Campbell was quickly arrested, largely because he drove Rendon’s car around his neighborhood, gave her coat to his mother and her jewelry to his girlfriend as gifts, and basically blabbed to everyone that he’d been involved in the crime. He wasn’t alone during the commission of the crime. But his co-defendant, Leroy Lewis, was allowed to plead guilty and is already out on parole.

But Campbell, who is black, went to trial in 1992 in Houston during a time when prosecutors there were three times more likely to pursue a capital case against African-American men than against white men. He had an incompetent lawyer whose many missteps included failing to either investigate his case or to present evidence that would have mitigated his sentence, notably the fact that Campbell was mentally retarded. (This term generally isn’t used anymore to describe people with intellectual disabilities—except with regard to the death penalty, where it has a specific definition in the law.)

More bad lawyering over the years, along with hostile Texas courts, left Campbell without many avenues to appeal, even though in 2002, the US Supreme Court banned the execution of the mentally disabled. What’s more, Campbell’s lawyers only recently discovered that prosecutors and other state officials long had substantial evidence of his limited cognitive functioning—including school records and test results placing his IQ at 68—that should have spared him from the death penalty. Yet they failed to turn it over to defense counsel until just days before his scheduled execution. Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals nonetheless denied Campbell’s request to stay the execution, despite clear concerns from several judges on the court that his claims of mental retardation were compelling and justified further review.

“It is an outrage that the State of Texas itself has worked to frustrate Mr. Campbell’s attempts to obtain any fair consideration of evidence of his intellectual disability,” said Robert C. Owen, an attorney for Mr. Campbell. “State officials affirmatively misled Mr. Campbell’s lawyers when they said they had no records of IQ testing of Mr. Campbell from his time on death row. That was a lie. They had such test results, and those results placed Mr. Campbell squarely in the range for a diagnosis of mental retardation. Mr. Campbell now faces execution as a direct result of such shameful gamesmanship.”


Read Marc Bookman’s essay: “How Crazy Is Too Crazy to Be Executed?“

Campbell’s attorneys have filed an emergency request for relief with the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where his odds also seem relatively slim. The Fifth Circuit is notoriously hostile to death penalty appeals. One of its judges, Edith Jones, is famous for reinstating a death sentence for a man whose lawyer slept through his trial. She has said publicly that the death penalty provides criminals with a “positive service” because it gives them an opportunity to get right with God right before the state kills them. She’s also facing an unusual ethics complaint over allegedly racist remarks she made at a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania last year, where she reportedly claimed that blacks and Hispanics were predisposed to crime and “prone” to violence. Notably, too, she insisted that defendants who raise claims of mental retardation “abuse the system” and she criticized the Supreme Court’s decision prohibiting the execution of the mentally disabled. (She’s said that anyone who can plan a crime can’t be mentally retarded.)

If Campbell can’t make any headway with the Fifth Circuit, his next appeal goes to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who reviews emergency death penalty appeals for the Fifth Circuit and is on the record as opposing the ban on executing the mentally retarded. (He also objected to the ban on executing juveniles.) So Campbell’s best hope, at least in the short run, is Perry, the three-term GOP governor with presidential aspirations. Perry has the authority to issue a 30-day stay of execution, and if the parole board recommends clemency, as Campbell’s lawyers are requesting, he could commute Campbell’s sentence to life in prison.

Execution politics aren’t pretty. As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton left the campaign trail in 1992 to personally oversee the execution of a brain-damaged man, Ricky Ray Rector, and prove his tough-on-crime bona fides. Perry, though, has long and documented track record of executing hundreds of people already, and the politics of the death penalty have unexpectedly and quickly started to change. A vote for clemency isn’t likely to affect Perry’s future political prospects. In this case, it might even help them. He has a few hours more to decide.

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Will Rick Perry Execute A Mentally Disabled Man Tonight?

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What It’s Like to Visit Your Mom in Prison on Mother’s Day

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on May 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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My foster sister is in prison. Her four children see her briefly once a month, as part of a 368-mile round-trip that takes up their entire Saturday. (Before she was transferred last month, the trip measured 404 miles). She has missed so many milestones and special events in her children’s lives: first days of kindergarten, Christmases, birthdays, Halloweens, first school dances. More than three percent of American children have a parent behind bars; so many that even Sesame Street thought to address the issue in a heartbreaking video and a recent initiative. With Mother’s Day upon us, I have to wonder: As kids grow up, what’s it like when the person they love most is locked away?

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What It’s Like to Visit Your Mom in Prison on Mother’s Day

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America Moves One Small Step Closer to Ending Solitary Confinement

by LouisCooper Posted on May 9, 2014

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) introduced a bill that would require a federally appointed commission to study the use of solitary confinement in US and state prisons and juvenile detention facilities and recommend national standards to reform the practice and ensure it is only “used infrequently and only under extreme circumstances.” The attorney general would be tasked with implementing these standards. The legislation has six cosponsors, all Democrats, and comes on the heels of a number of states, including Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas passing their own bills to study the practice.

Tens of thousands of Americans are held in solitary confinement each year. Some have been in solitary for decades. “Our approach to solitary confinement in this country needs immediate reform,” Richmond said in a statement Thursday. “Do we feel comfortable putting a man or woman in a dark hole for decades on end with no additional due process? Is this practice consistent with our values? I don’t think so. I know we are better than that.”

Richmond’s bill says that the federal commission must recommend standards so that the use of solitary confinement is limited to fewer than 30 days in any 45-day period, unless the head of a corrections facility determines that prolonged solitary confinement is necessary for the security of the institution, or if the prisoner requests it. The proposal would require that prisoners receive “a meaningful hearing” with access to legal counsel before being placed in long-term solitary confinement, and entitle them to have their cases reviewed every 30 days.

The national standards required by the bill would include a number of other reforms, including limiting the use of involuntary solitary confinement to “protect” vulnerable individuals—for example, prisoners who are transgender—and improving access to mental health treatment for prisoners placed in solitary. The legislation also mandates that correction officials avoid placing juveniles in solitary for any duration, “except under extreme emergency circumstances.” (Between April and September of last year, four juvenile correctional facilities in Ohio imposed almost 60,000 hours of solitary confinement on 229 boys with mental-health needs.) The bill requires the attorney general to publish a final rule adopting the national standards, and would reduce federal grant funds given to states for their prison programs by 15 percent each year until the states comply with the new standards.

A United Nations torture expert said in 2011 that solitary confinement should not be used for more than 15 days. Richmond’s bill does not embrace that recommendation. But human rights groups say the bill is a great first step, and recommend its passage. “The introduction of this legislation will help us take a step toward more humane prison practices and shine a light on the tens of thousands of human beings condemned to suffer in prolonged solitary confinement,” said Jasmine Heiss, senior campaigner at Amnesty International USA, in a statement.

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America Moves One Small Step Closer to Ending Solitary Confinement

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Will American Pot Farmers Put the Cartels out of Business?

by DaniloPoirier Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

For the first time ever, many of the farmers who supply Mexican drug cartels have stopped planting marijuana, reports the Washington Post. “It’s not worth it anymore,” said Rodrigo Silla, a lifelong cannabis farmer from central Mexico. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”

Facing stiff competition from pot grown legally and illegally north of the border, the price for a kilogram of Mexican schwag has plummeted by 75 percent, from $100 to $25, the Post reports:

Farmers in the storied “Golden Triangle” region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, which has produced the country’s most notorious gangsters and biggest marijuana harvests, say they are no longer planting the crop…increasingly, they’re unable to compete with US marijuana growers. With cannabis legalized or allowed for medical use in 20 US states and the District of Columbia, more and more of the American market is supplied with highly potent marijuana grown in American garages and converted warehouses—some licensed, others not.

As notes David Downs of the East Bay Express, this is a really big deal. In the past decade, Mexican drug cartels have murdered an estimated 60,000 people. The DEA annually spends more than $2 billion to deter the transport of illicit drugs across the border. “So now we have both the DEA and cartel farmers screaming bloody murder about legalization,” Downs points out. “Sounds like we’re on the right track.”

Of course, the American pot boom is also creating problems of its own, with some Mexican traffickers moving north to California and other states to set up vast “trespass grows” on remote public lands. To be sure, the illicit market for weed will prop up criminal syndicates for as long as pot remains illegal, yet this week’s news is some of strongest evidence to date that legalizing and decriminalizing pot will ultimately make everyone safer.

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Will American Pot Farmers Put the Cartels out of Business?

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The People Giving Lethal Injections: Untrained, Incompetent, or Just "Complete Idiots"

by JurgenWampler Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma has heightened the debate over lethal injection. The United States has encountered a shortage of the drugs historically used in capital punishment as pharmaceutical companies have largely refused to make them, export them, or sell them to prisons for use in executions. Death row inmates have filed dozens of challenges to the lethal injection protocols that states have sought to keep secret. Meanwhile, states are trying ever more desperate measures to procure the old drugs or cook up new cocktails to try on inmates.

But as Lockett’s torturous execution showed, the drugs are only part of the problem. In his case, prison staff apparently failed to properly insert the IV into his femoral artery—a procedure that requires professional medical skills—and the drugs were injected into soft tissue rather than the bloodstream, leaving him writhing in pain and forcing officials to halt the execution. (He ended up dying of a heart attack, anyway.)

Historically, lethal injection has been plagued with problems just like those that occurred in Lockett’s case, and they are due in large part to the incompetence of the people charged with administering the deadly drugs. Physicians have mostly left the field of capital punishment; the American Medical Association and other professional groups consider it highly unethical for doctors to assist with executions. As a result, the people willing to do the dirty work aren’t always at the top of their fields, or even specifically trained in the jobs they’re supposed to do. As Dr. Jay Chapman, the Oklahoma coroner who essentially created the modern lethal injection protocol, observed in the New York Times in 2007, “It never occurred to me when we set this up that we’d have complete idiots administering the drugs.”

States typically have had few requirements for those serving on an execution team. At one point, in Florida, the only criteria was that a potential executioner be at least 18 years old. Wardens, prison guards, phlebotomists, paramedics, and nurses are sometimes in the mix. After botched executions, judges have occasionally ordered states to have a board-certified anesthesiologist involved—a requirement that tends to prompt a moratorium because few of those doctors will participate. The actual makeup of execution teams is often a state secret that officials work hard to conceal. Not surprisingly, although things often go wrong, individuals are rarely held accountable. One the rare occasions when details about execution teams are released, they only seem to confirm Chapman’s observation. Here are a few examples of what’s known about people who’ve been involved in administering lethal injections over the years.

By far the most notorious individual in the history of lethal injection, Dr. Alan Doerhoff was the dyslexic surgeon who oversaw 54 executions in Missouri, where he alone was in charge of deciding how to kill people. Doerhoff was the subject of more than 20 malpractice lawsuits during his career, and he was disciplined by the state medical board for concealing lawsuits from a hospital where he worked. Two Missouri hospitals banned him from practicing in their facilities.

The state worked for years to keep Doerhoff’s identity secret. But in a legal challenge by a Missouri death row inmate, he was forced to testify and eventually was unmasked. In his testimony he admitted that his disability made it hard for him to properly combine the death drugs, which he sometimes mixed up, and that, on his own, he’d started “improvising” and reducing the amount of anesthesia given to condemned prisoners by half. Unbelievably, the federal government actually used Doerhoff to create the protocols for federal executions and to oversee them. (He reportedly oversaw the execution of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.)

See page five of this report for a graphic illustration of Doerhoff’s handiwork on Missouri inmate Timothy Johnson—the botched IV insertion into the femoral artery is the same sort of problem that apparently occurred in the Lockett execution. Doerhoff had defended groin insertions as having “all benefit…There’s no way it can fail. And no risk to the inmate.”

A federal judge eventually banned Doerhoff from participating in executions in Missouri, which responded by making it a crime to reveal the identity of a current or former member of the state’s execution team. Doerhoff’s public exposure and track record apparently didn’t prevent Arizona from hiring him to oversee an execution there in 2007.

In 2006, testimony in another federal challenge to lethal injection revealed that the execution team leader at California’s San Quentin State Prison had been disciplined for smuggling illegal drugs into the facility before he was put on the team. Another team leader had been diagnosed with and was disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder, a problem hugely amplified by participating in executions.

After the botched 2005 execution of Stanley Tookie Williams in California—his vein collapsed after several unsuccessful attempts to insert an IV—the nurse responsible for the IV issues said that the execution team responded to the problems by saying “shit does happen.”

In Maryland, during a legal challenge to that state’s lethal-injection protocol, it was revealed that the person responsible for injecting drugs into the condemned man had been fired by a local police department after refusing to cooperate with an internal investigation. He had also been charged with poisoning and killing a bunch of neighborhood dogs. This apparently made him the perfect person to join the Maryland execution team, which also included someone who’d been suspended for spitting in inmates’ food before it was given to them.

Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, says that in the wake of all the litigation over their lethal-injection protocols, states have attempted to at least provide better training for the people on their execution teams. But given how few people are really interested in becoming professional killers, especially the doctors needed to make sure the process goes smoothly, botched executions are likely to continue, regardless of what sorts of drugs the states come up with.

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The People Giving Lethal Injections: Untrained, Incompetent, or Just "Complete Idiots"

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Ted Cruz: Conservative Darling. Grandstanding Senator. Campaign-Finance Reform Ally?

by KristinaEllzey Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

For the first time since the McCutcheon v. FEC decision, the Supreme Court’s latest ruling further rolling back restrictions on the flow of money in American politics, members of the Senate on Wednesday tackled the onslaught of “dark money” washing through 2014 races and the future consequences of McCutcheon. (Short answer: More wealthy Americans pumping more money into political races in 2014 and beyond.)

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens headlined Wednesday’s hearing, organized by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). Stevens took a decidedly progressive tack in his remarks, declaring that “money is not speech” and calling on Congress to write campaign-finance rules that “create a level playing field” for all political candidates. But perhaps the more revealing set of comments came from an unlikely source: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the self-styled populist always trying, as he reminds us, to “make DC listen” to the little guy.

In short, Cruz, who’s as conservative as they come, may have more in common with the campaign-finance reform crowd than he realizes.

He raised eyebrows, for instance, as he described his vision for America’s campaign finance system. “A far better system,” he said, “would be to allow individual unlimited contributions to candidates and require immediate disclosure.” The unlimited contributions part of that statement is standard conservative fare: If billionaires like Tom Steyer or Sheldon Adelson or Michael Bloomberg want to underwrite their preferred candidates with bottomless dollars, go ahead and let them. But the latter half—”require immediate disclosure”—is significant. It’s a break from GOP leaders including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus who’ve soured on the idea of disclosure. Angus King later said he was so struck by Cruz’s comments that he’d scribbled them down. Might Senate Democrats have an unlikely ally in Cruz if and when the DISCLOSE Act gets another vote?

At the hearing, Cruz went on to assail his fellow members of Congress for caring more about hanging onto their seats than pursuing real legislative solutions. “Our democratic process is broken and corrupt right now because politicians in both parties hold onto incumbency,” he said. “We need to empower the individual citizens.” Funny thing is, that’s what Democrats who support the Government By The People Act and other fair elections programs want as well. Fair elections backers say candidates spend too much time raising money from wealthy individuals, which not only shrinks the field of people who can run for office but arguably makes those candidates who do run more receptive to well-heeled funders. Give candidates a reason to court lots of small donors—say, offering to match donations of $150 or less with six times that in public money—and you expose them to a diverse array of people. Meanwhile, your Average Joe, without his Rolodex full of well-to-do friends, can now mount a competitive bid for office. If Cruz wants to “empower the individual citizens,” fair elections is one way to do it.

Not that Cruz hung around long enough on Wednesday to hear these kinds of ideas. He high-tailed it out of the hearing after delivering his remarks. Maybe he had a fundraiser to get to.

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Ted Cruz: Conservative Darling. Grandstanding Senator. Campaign-Finance Reform Ally?

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A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

by Seymour89E Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters won’t be forced to present a photo ID to gain access to the ballot thanks to a new federal court decision. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman ruled on Tuesday that the state’s voter ID law violates the constitutional rights of minority and low-income voters. In his decision, Adelman cited the Voting Rights Act to invalidate the 2011 Wisconsin law—passed by the state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker—that implemented a photo ID requirement for all voters.

Voting rights advocates despaired last summer after the Supreme Court blocked Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a key provision of the law that required the government to approve any voting changes in states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination (Wisconsin was not one of those states). Since that decision, states previously covered by Section 5 have rushed to add voter restrictions. But based on Adelman’s logic, these controversial photo ID requirements that have been implemented across the country run afoul of a part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court left untouched.

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A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

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WATCH: Cliven Bundy’s Anti-Government Beliefs, Animated Fiore Cartoon

by JuanBoettcher Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Cliven Bundy’s Anti-Government Beliefs, Animated Fiore Cartoon

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WATCH: Hillary Clinton Blasts Edward Snowden for Fleeing to Russia and China

by KendraSoileau Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton didn’t have to directly deal with Edward Snowden’s leaks when she was secretary of state. Clinton had already stepped down from her post by the time the Guardian published its first revelations on the expansive scope of spying by the National Security Agency. But at an event at the University of Connecticut on Wednesday night, Clinton made it clear that she’s no fan of the NSA leaker, insinuating that Snowden had cooperated with countries hostile to the United States and unintentionally aided terrorist organizations. “I don’t understand why he couldn’t have been part of the debate at home,” she said.

Clinton questioned Snowden’s intentions in fleeing the country before offerring his information to the public. “When he emerged and when he absconded with all that material, I was puzzled, because we have all these protections for whistleblowers,” Clinton said, when the moderator asked if there had been any positive effects for security policy following the NSA leaks. “If he were concerned and wanted to be part of the American debate, he could have been. But it struck me as—I just have to be honest with you—as sort of odd that he would flee to China, because Hong Kong is controlled by China, and that he would then go to Russia, two countries with which we have very difficult cyber-relationships, to put it mildly.”

Clinton also suggested that Snowden had inadvertently helped terrorists. “I think turning over a lot of that material—intentionally or unintentionally, because of the way it can be drained—gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like,” she said.

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WATCH: Hillary Clinton Blasts Edward Snowden for Fleeing to Russia and China

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