By Alan Bean
Crimes rates and homicide rates are falling across the United States even as the nation is mired in the economic doldrums. Furthermore, no one can explain why.
As the article below suggests, the prevailing conservative consensus is generating predictable, but unconvincing explanations. (more…)
By Alan Bean
The state’s key witness in the six (6) trials of Curtis Flowers will be spending the next three years in federal prison.
When the trial of Patricia Hallmon Sullivan was first reported in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, her link to the Flowers case wasn’t mentioned. Fortunately Jimmie E. Gates eventually connected the dots.
By coincidence, Patricia Hallmon Sullivan was represented by Mike Horan of Grenada, a former assistant to Doug Evans, the lead prosecutor in the Flowers case. According to the Clarion-Ledger article (see below) Horan told Barbour that Sullivan’s testimony led to Flowers’ convictions.
So it did. Take Patricia Hallmon and her darling brother, Odell, out of the mix and the state’s case against Flowers fall apart. (more…)
By Dr. Charles Kiker
Faith played a major role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the concomitant dismantling of the old Jim Crow. To be sure, not all people of faith, maybe not even a majority and certainly not a majority in the South, held the Civil Rights movement in high regard. I remember hearing one active Baptist layman say shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, “He was a dadblamed communist, and somebody should have killed him a long time ago.”
But the faith and the liberation songs inspired by the Exodus from Egypt helped to sustain the civil rights movement through fire hoses, police dogs, beatings, and murders. And the civil rights movement insured the demise of Jim Crow I. The progress of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement created an officially color blind society. (more…)
By Alan Bean
Exoneration stories out of Dallas County are almost becoming routine, but this one is particularly gratifying.
And maddening.
Cornelius Dupree Jr. spent three decades in prison because the Dallas Police Department thought he and his buddy, Anthony Massingill, looked like rapists. They placed both men in a lineup. An eye witness also thought the two men looked like rapists.
Cornelius was 21 at the time, Anthony was 19.
The media likes DNA exoneration stories. Who doesn’t. Because guilt has been scientifically ruled out, we know who the good guys and bad guys are. Even the prosecutor is forced to admit that he messed up. (more…)
Roy Lee Russell in Dumas, ArkansasBy Alan Bean
Alvin Clay checked into the federal prison at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama on Monday to begin serving a five-month sentence.
Clay was convicted of participating in a real estate/money laundering scam.
(You can quickly get up to speed on the case by reading an earlier post, “Alvin in Wonderland“.)
But to understand why the federal government risked public embarrassment to convict an innocent man, you have to go back to the very beginning. (more…)
By Alan Bean
In another sign that the American mainstream is taking notice of a broken system of justice, USA Today has published “Justice in the Balance“, a series of articles focusing on prosecutorial misconduct, particularly in the federal justice system. The series began in September of last year and the most recent submission was posted on December 29, 2010.
According to writers Kevin McCoy and Brad Heath, “USA TODAY documented 201 cases since 1997 in which federal courts ruled that prosecutors had violated laws or ethics rules. Some of these violations put innocent people in prison, but in at least 48 cases defendants were later convicted, then had their sentences reduced or were even set free . . . Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct.” (more…)
Craig Watkins has been an inspiration to criminal justice reformers since he became Dallas County District Attorney in 2006. There aren’t many black prosecutors in Texas so Watkins’ narrow election victory provided some much-needed balance. But it went deeper than that. Watkins had the backing of South Dallas ministers, people who have felt the impact of mass incarceration in their congregations.
“We’re going to reduce this crime rate,” Watkins promised in his 2006 acceptance speech. “We’re going to address the underlying reasons why people are committing crime.”
After generations of convict-at-any-cost prosecution, prevention and redemption were to be the new watchwords.
For the most part, Mr. Watkins has delivered. He has cooperated with innocence programs and has created his own integrity unit to cull through old convictions for signs of wrongful conviction. The Dallas County DA isn’t solely responsible for the dramatic stream of DNA exonerations flowing from Dallas County, but he has certainly facilitated the process.
No one was surprised when Watkins cleaned house shortly after his election by firing several of the prosecutors he inherited from the Bill Hill administration. The new man was working with a new vision and needed assistant DAs who were willing to get with the program.
But it wasn’t long before Watkins’ admirers were lamenting his thin skin. A prolonged struggle with the County Commissioners punctuated by angry rants from the DA did little to enhance his stature as a statesman. (more…)
By Alan Bean
‘Tis the season for executive pardons–or at least it used to be.
The editorial board of the Washington Post is criticizing President Obama for making nine trifling pardons, most of which involve small crimes that date back decades.
In a slashing opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News, Scott Henson of Grits for Breakfast questions the prevailing practice of handing out a few scattered pardons like Christmas presents while ignoring entire categories of people who have fallen victim to ill-considered policies like putting non-violent citizens in prison for simple pot possession.
Meanwhile, NYT columnist Bob Herbert takes a stripe out of Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour and the political establishment of Mississippi for their shabby treatment of the Scott sisters. (more…)
Governor Hailey Barbour has suspended the sentences of Gladys and Jamie Scott. As the announcement appears below indicates, this was a political compromise. According to the governor’s announcement, “The Mississippi Parole Board reviewed the sisters’ request for a pardon and recommended that I neither pardon them, nor commute their sentence.” If no one in the wider world was paying attention, this would have been the end of the matter. But thanks to Nancy Lockhart, the civil rights community is well aware of this egregious case and, with Mr. Barbour already on the hot seat for his racial tin ear he had good reason to look for a third way. (more…)
By Alan Bean
On December 9, prisoners at six Georgia state prisons launched a coordinated strike. The silence from the mainstream media has been thundering.
Across America, prison labor remains a vestige of the old convict leasing system that Robert Perkinson describes in great detail in Texas Tough. Some inmates receive nominal wages–ranging from a dollar a day to a princely forty cents an hour; others, like the striking inmates in Georgia, work for nothing.
When discussing prison labor, it is important to avoid vague generalities. Every state has its own laws and practices vary widely. Sloppy references to the “prison industrial complex” can conjure images of multinational corporations earning massive profits from unreimbursed prison labor. This happens, to be sure, but more prison labor involves chores related to prison life: preparing meals, doing laundry, cleaning floors, landscaping, gardening and, in some prisons, large-scale agriculture. In most cases, private corporations aren’t involved, but there are plenty of exceptions.
It has been estimated that 80,000 inmates in America work directly for corporate interests, which suggests that only one-in-twenty-eight American inmates fall into this category. Most inmate labor mitigates the cost of incarceration–one reason why, since the days of convict leasing, it has been so popular. (more…)
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