Author: Alan Bean

Supreme Court hands Hank Skinner a big victory

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By Alan Bean

Monday’s ruling by the Supreme Court has removed legal roadblocks standing between Texas death row defendant Hank Skinner and the testing of DNA evidence he says will exonerate him.  Prosecutors had argued that since Skinner was covered in the blood of the murder victim, no further testing was necessary.  Skinner’s defenders have asked why, if further DNA is unlikely to produce evidence helpful to Skinner, the state is so adamantly opposed to testing.

At NPR, Nina Totenberg provides her usual just-the-facts-ma’am analysis.  Dave Mann’s comments at the Texas Observer site reveal the deeper significance of this ruling: (more…)

Rick Perry’s Atheist Pope

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Eighteen months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed Williamson County DA John Bradley to head up the Texas Forensic Science Commission.  It was like turning over the Vatican to Richard Dawkins.  Bradley, like most Texas prosecutors, thinks forensic scientists have one role: helping the state convict bad guys; Perry’s atheist pope likes forensic testimony crafted to the needs of the prosecution.

Governor Perry put Bradley in charge of the TFSC to keep the Cameron Todd Willingham debacle out of the headlines during his primary fight with Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  Perry also tried to stack the commission with people who share Bradley’s worldview, but things haven’t worked out to the governor’s liking.  As Rick Casey demonstrates in this informative column in the Houston Chronicle, Bradley is unlikely to receive Senate confirmation. (more…)

Teachers are not the problem; poverty is

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By Alan Bean

The current assault on America’s teachers has been brutal and bipartisan.  The correlation between family income and student test scores has been clear  for decades, but no one, even our progressive President, wants to acknowledge the obvious. 

In the decades following the civil rights movement, everyone knew that if we sat back and did nothing for poor and struggling families and communities we would eventually be dealing with a great, sprawling undercaste.  The crisis in education is a function of poverty.  We had a choice: schools or prisons.  We chose badly.

There are bad teachers just as there are bad mechanics and bad dentists–that has always been a given.  But bad teachers are not the problem; poor and broken families are the problem.  America chose to leave her most at-risk citizens to their own devices and our teachers live with the consequences every day of the school year, Monday through Friday.  They take these consequences home with them.  The consequences come unbidden in troubling dreams. 

I am not dispassionate and neutral on this issue; my wife and all three of my children are teachers.  I live with these brave people and my perspective has been shaped by their passion and their pain.

You may have seen Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show last week.  This short essay, written for the New York Times, summarizes the thesis of Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” (more…)

What is Mission Mississippi?

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I just came across this review of “Mission Mississippi” in the Christian Century.  Mission Mississippi was founded in the early 1990s to facilitate conversation between black and white Christians in the Magnolia State.  But there’s a problem: social justice and other systemic issues are off the table.  Mission Mississippi is a book-length evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach written by Peter Slade, an Englishman.  Why, you may wonder, can’t black and white Mississippians discuss social issues?  If you even ask that question, you haven’t spent much time in Mississippi; it remains, as the title of Slade’s book suggests, a closed society.  The good news is that people are conversing across racial lines; the bad news is that they can’t discuss the stuff that really matters. (more…)

San Antonio Current reviews Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas

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Greg Harman of the San Antonio Current has published a review of my Tulia book.   “Taking Out the Trash is a complex narrative,” Harman says, “demonstrating that even in the starkest morality tales, human nature inevitably harbors innumerable shades and shadows. An indispensible offering in the growing Tulia canon.”

The full review appears below.

Tulia besieged: ‘Taking our the Trash in Tulia, Texas’

 By Greg Harman

The story of Tulia has propelled the careers of a handful of journalists and documentary filmmakers. And the now-infamous 1999 drug sting in the small Panhandle town that put 16 percent of the town’s black residents in jail on manufactured evidence by a crooked lawman was to be is being produced as a full-length feature film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. But the public story has been mostly the domain of outsiders, where out-of-state crusaders are able to unpack all the worst preconceptions of rural Texas — notions not challenged in the least by the obvious racism on display in Tulia a decade ago. (more…)

Hymns, prayers and earthquakes

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By Charles Kiker

On Sunday part of the scripture for the Sunday School class Patricia and I lead was from the sixteenth chapter of Acts, starting with the conversion of Lydia in Philippi, then to the exorcism of the spirit that possessed a slave girl. Now that slave girl and her spirit of divination was the source of considerable profit to her owners. So they were more than a little unhappy with Paul and Silas regarding this turn of events. The girl’s owners complained to the police, who arrested Paul and Silas, beat them, and threw them in the calaboose. So how did Paul and Silas respond? They had a prayer meeting and a hymn sing. (more…)

Is prison a down payment on hell?

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By Alan Bean

Megachurch pastor, Rob Bell has a new book coming out that claims hell is freezing over.  “Eternal life doesn’t start when we die;” Rev. Bell asserts, “it starts right now. And ultimately, Love Wins.”

Not surprisingly, Pastor Bell is being trashed by the evangelical establishment . . . and the book hasn’t even come out.

Have you ever noticed the strong correlation between a stout belief in hell and support for mass incarceration? I doubt anyone has done any polling on this, but there is a powerful narrative connection between hell and prison.  If God plans to toss the miscreant into the lake of fire at judgment day, why should we be concerned about rehabilitation here below?  God gives up on people; why shouldn’t we? (more…)

Careful Mike, your true colors are shining through

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By Alan Bean

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36

Last Thursday, potential presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee assured Stephen Colbert that Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim (as 31% of Republicans believe).  An encouraging sign, don’t you think?  It’s nice to know that the leading Republican candidate in the South sides with the sane two-thirds of his party on this important issue.

Then, four days later, Mr. Huckabee informed a conservative radio talk show host that Obama was raised in Kenya and that anti-imperialistic stories about the Mau-Mau uprising in the early 1950s, imbibed from his father and grandfather, likely account for the president’s liberal politics. (more…)

Osler: The death penalty replicates the actions of the killer

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn

The Illinois legislature has passed legislation that would end the death penalty in that state; now Governor Pat Quinn must either sign or veto the bill.  At this point, it’s a jump ball.  As Quinn weighs his options, Attorney General Lisa Madigan has submitted a letter brimming with horror stories.  Message: the sacred memory of the innocent victims demands a life for a life. 

Former prosecutor, Mark Osler, believes Madigan has the issue exactly wrong.   “The more heinous and despicable the crime committed by the offender,” he writes, “the more these victims’ family members wish to have nothing in common with him. They do not want to sink to his level, to replicate his actions by killing.”

Why the Legislature Is Right and Lisa Madigan Is Wrong About the Death Penalty

By Mark Osler

As Illinois Governor Pat Quinn continues to ponder a bill to abolish the death penalty, one document before him is a letter from Attorney General Lisa Madigan. In that letter, Madigan refers to several pending cases and urges the governor to veto that bill.

As a former prosecutor who now trains future prosecutors and works with family members of murder victims, I disagree with the Attorney General, even in the face of the gruesome circumstances she cites in her letter. The death penalty has failed in Illinois, and should not be resuscitated based on briefly-described anecdotes. (more…)

Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world’

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If Wisconsin workers wanted to live in North Carolina, they’d move there.  As Chris Kromm argues over at Facing South, union-busting politics is really about the Dixification of America. 

Southern workers to Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world!’

By Chris Kromm
In 1959, the state of Wisconsin, a hotbed of labor activism and progressive politics, became the first state in the nation to give public workers the right to bargain collectively.

That same year, 1,000 miles away in North Carolina, state lawmakers — stoked by Cold War anti-unionism and Jim Crow-era fears of interracial cooperation — took a step in the opposite direction, passing one of a few laws in the nation that still ban public employees from having bargaining rights.

Today, the issue of labor rights for public workers is once again on the national agenda, sparked by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) move on February 11 to rescind bargaining rights there. (more…)