Over at Talk To Action, Rob Boston gives Newt Gingrich a stern caning for wanting to make the judiciary the lap dog of Congress. It is hard for all of us to live with judicial opinions that vary considerably from our vision of the good; but that’s just part of living in a constitutional democracy. It is also hard to abide presidential priorities different from our own, and, if we support the sitting president, it’s tough to watch a recalcitrant Congress derail good policy. But again, that’s part of the American experience. The only alternative, as Mr. Boston suggests, is to scuttle our entire system of government.
Friends of Justice wants to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of mass incarceration, but the criminal justice reform movement won’t succeed until we change the climate of opinion. Only when the electorate is clearly on the side of change will politicians opt for sane alternatives to the wholesale warehousing of humankind. No one can undo the errors of others (real or imagined) by executive fiat; we must work within the system we have inherited, warts and all.
American style democracy ain’t perfect, Lord knows, but true conservatives like Winston Churchill appreciate the miracle of an abiding political consensus to which all parties willingly submit even when they hate the results the system is producing.
James Kirchick’s article in the Weekly Standard throws fuel on the “is Ron Paul a racist?” fire. In the 1980s, Paul sponsored a newsletter that regularly spewed racist and anti-semitic venom while endorsing every conspiracy theory coming down the pike. Paul says he didn’t write the articles and never edited the newsletter. He also claims that the racist views that were a regular feature of the publication he financed never reflected his true feelings
An extended version of Kirchick’s take on Ron Paul has been published in the New Republic and now appears on the CBS site. In this piece, Kirchick argues that Paul’s racism is consistent with his libertarianism.
Paul’s indulgence of bigotry . . . isn’t an incidental departure from his libertarianism, but a tidy expression of its priorities: First principles of market economics gain credence over all considerations of social empathy and historical acuity. His fans are guilty of donning the same ideological blinders, giving their support to a political candidate on account of the theories he declaims, rather than the judgment he shows in applying those theories, or the character he has evinced in living them. Voters for Ron Paul are privileging logical consistency at the expense of moral fitness.
As proof that he can’t be a racist, Paul notes that “the blacks” are beginning to rally to his libertarian banner.
Kirchick can’t understand why Paul’s racist associations haven’t attracted public scrutiny. The lack of interest is probably explained by the simple fact that, until very recently, Paul wasn’t viewed as a serious candidate. If, like Newt Gingrich, Paul suddenly roared to the front of the pack, his background would get a lot more attention.
Is Ron Paul a hater?
Let’s begin with what we know for sure: the Republican candidate had a lot of racist and anti-semitic friends back in the day. And as Kirchick points out below, Paul’s regular appearances on the Alex Jones program suggests he is comfortable with nutty conspiracy theorists.
Full disclosure: I once appeared on the Jones program in connection with the ill-starred Tulia drug sting. (But Paul is a regular guest who appears to have endorsed, for instance, the idea that 9-11 was produced and directed by the American government.) I have also been the victim of a Weekly Standard hatchet job, so I am willing to cut a little slack.
I like Ron Paul. He is generally right about drugs and militarism, although I find his Austrian school economics hard to stomach. It is refreshing to hear a presidential candidate espousing unpopular opinions–something you rarely hear from Democrats or Republicans these days. (more…)
In 2010, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, rocked the civil rights community back on its heels. Alexander accused the criminal justice reform movement of seeking legal solutions to a moral problem, of fighting for affirmative action while abandoning the victims of a brutal and counter-productive drug war, of telling pretty stories about wrongfully convicted poster-boys while ignoring the social nightmares unfolding in poor communities of color.
If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration, and if our advocacy does not upset the prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste system, none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial equilibrium. Challenges to the system will be easily absorbed or deflected, and the accommodations made will serve primarily to legitimate the system, not undermine it. We run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing the larger war.
In 2011, two books by white males revealed that Michelle Alexander is not the only American scholar in search of a new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz, and Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America by David M. Kennedy are not books written in response to Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Stuntz and Kennedy are white male academics who see mass incarceration and the war on drugs as unmitigated disasters. These authors tackle America’s racial history head on. Most importantly, they agree with Alexander that a movement to end mass incarceration must begin with a new moral consensus. (more…)
Enrique Salazar, Irma Muniz, Ramsey Muniz, Alan Bean and Ernesto Fraga
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice is on the road again. Thus far we’ve held sit-down meetings with folks in Waco and Houston, Texas, and the Louisiana towns of Crowley, Lafayette and New Orleans. The agenda is broad. Over the next year we plan to engage every advocacy organization in TX, LA and MS working on indigent defense, juvenile justice and immigrant rights issues. The long-range goal is to create a collaborative platform that makes it possible for a number of diverse groups to participate in a single narrative campaign. The big goal is to allow advocacy organizations to pursue their distinct (and limited) agendas while addressing the larger issue of mass incarceration.
At this point, we’re mostly listening. We want to learn more about how our natural allies see the world, what worries and excites them, and how they feel about working with organizations that focus on a different piece of the mass incarceration pie.
While Melanie Wilmoth and I are on the road we’re also spending time with the families of Jace Washington and Kelvin Kaigler, two young men from Slidell, Louisiana who, in unrelated cases, were framed by jailhouse snitches.
On Friday, we will be visiting with Ramsey Muniz, an icon in the Texas Latino community who is serving a life sentence for a crime he did not commit. Over the past few months we have been working through all the legal documents related to this bizarre case and will soon be releasing a narrative summary.
While we’re on the road, three families with heart breaking stories have reached out to us. The patterns are familiar. Little or no investigation. Over-investment in snitch testimony. Overworked defense counsel. Prosecutorial tunnel vision. In virtually every case, legal remedies have been exhausted, but the power of story in inexhaustible.
We spend a lot of time with the affected community for a number of very practical reasons, but brushing up against the human consequences of mass incarceration heads the list. We need to remember why we do what we do.
Some found it shocking when Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber granted convicted double-murderer Gary Haugen a reprieve Tuesday, setting aside Haugen’s scheduled December 6 execution. Haugen, who killed another prisoner while serving a life sentence for a previous murder, had waived all appeals.
In a previous term as governor, Kitzhaber allowed two men to be executed, and he explained Tuesday that “I simply cannot participate once again in something that I believe to be morally wrong.” A medical doctor with an active license, the governor also referred to his oath as a physician to “do no harm” as he announced Haugen’s reprieve and a moratorium on executions for the remainder of his term in office. Notably, in issuing a reprieve (or delay) rather than commuting Haugen’s sentence, Kitzhaber left open the possibility of Haugen’s execution under a future governor.
As the news spread, many people reacted with anger. Kitzhaber has been called a coward and worse. This wave of anger, though, should not distract from two important truths: first, that Kitzhaber’s actions are within, not without, the basic rules of our democracy; second, that Kitzhaber is a proxy for the thousands of people in this country who have had to live with doubt and even regret because they were thrust into the death penalty process while doing their civic duty as jurors, judges or lawyers.
In 1984, Oregon voters chose by referendum to reinstate the death penalty. The legislature formulated rules for capital punishment. Prosecutors elected, as they could, to pursue the death penalty against Haugen. A jury heard the evidence, and 12 Oregon citizens voted to have Haugen put to death.
The courts that heard Haugen’s appeals (up to the point he dropped them) found the process fair. Then, after all of this, Kitzhaber chose not to finish this expensive and consuming project. Kitzhaber’s choice is anti-democratic, it does frustrate the will of prosecutors, it must be confounding to those 12 jurors, and it constitutes a tremendous exercise of power based on just one person’s sense of morality. It is also wholly within the genius of American government.
Oregon and other states have incorporated executive clemency into their systems of criminal law, drawing on the example laid out in the United States Constitution. The framers of the Constitution chose intentionally to give the executive that power, knowing full well that it would necessarily run contrary to popular will.
If you are angry with Kitzhaber for using that power, also direct your anger at Alexander Hamilton, who was a driving force behind the institution of executive clemency in the United States. Here is part of what Hamilton said about it in Federalist Paper 74: “Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. … On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men.”
The anti-democratic institution of clemency that is generating such anger is contrary to the voters of Oregon, yes. However, we should not forget that that same institution is ancient, principled and an integral part of the broad scheme of justice that wiser men than I have constructed.
A second buried truth is revealed within the tortured way in which Kitzhaber announced his decision. During a prior term as governor, in 1997, he had allowed two executions, and it seems clear that he was deeply troubled by his role in those killings. How could he not be? It is a heavy responsibility to participate in a deliberative process that identifies a citizen to be put to death by the state. However, Kitzhaber is just the exposed tip of an iceberg of human emotion. Beneath him are thousands of others who have been forced by the institution of capital punishment to live with their role in an intentional death.
Among that group are lawyers, witnesses and judges, but perhaps most sympathetic of all are the jurors. They are plucked from their daily lives by the government and suddenly thrust into the most important role of all — they must vote, unanimously, after deliberation, on whether someone will live or die. If they vote for execution, they must file back into that hushed, tense room, look that person in the eye and say in the most public of ways that they have chosen him to die.
I have known some of those jurors. Years later, even if they were convinced they were right, they revealed deep and dark emotions related to what they had done. At best, that service was seen as a difficult but worthwhile sacrifice, and at worst as a moment they too often relived while filled with doubt.
Kitzhaber is right to say that the capital process is fatally flawed. It is unfair to some defendants, yes. But a system that tries many, condemns some to die and executes few is also cruel and unusual to those who work within the process. It is primarily inflicting pain on victims’ relatives who wait in limbo, on jurors who relive those discussions, on prosecutors whose hearts are hardened while their efforts are frustrated and on the budgets and reputations of the states that choose to go on with it anyway.
Kitzhaber is not wrong to declare a moratorium, but he would be better advised to fully commute the sentences of those on death row and urge his fellow citizens to be done with the whole mess that this process has become.
That kind of bold action is not cowardice. It is leadership.
Mark Osler, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minnesota, is a former federal prosecutor and the author of “Jesus on Death Row,” a book about capital punishment.
Bill Moyers is the Edward R. Murrow of our day. When his PBS program, Bill Moyers’ Journal, went off the air last year, a gaping hole appeared in American journalism that has yet to be filled. Fortunately, in the last edition of his program, Moyers shared his bias: “plutocracy and democracy don’t mix.”
This message lies at the heart of the Occupy movement.
The text of Moyers’ brief essay appears below and you can find the video at Nation of Change.
Plutocracy and Democrary Don’t Mix
Bill Moyers
You’ve no doubt figured out my bias by now. I’ve hardly kept it a secret. In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.
Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don’t try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don’t mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy. (more…)
When the U.S. Census counts the population of the country every 10 years, who qualifies as a person? This week, the state of Louisiana filed a lawsuit which challenges the Census’ long-standing policy of counting all residents — citizens and non-citizens — and using those results to divide up seats in the U.S. Congress.
The lawsuit, which has broad implications for the political role of immigrants, comes after Louisiana lost a Congressional seat following the 2010 Census count. Thanks to the massive displacement after Hurricane Katrina — the city of New Orleans lost 30% of its population between 2000 and 2010 — Louisiana’s delegation fell from seven seats to six.
During the last 10 years, every other Southern state saw growth — in many cases fueled by new immigrants. Texas, for example, gained four Congressional seats thanks to its burgeoning population; the Census estimates two-thirds of the growth came in the Latino/Hispanic community.
New immigrants were also key to increases in size, and added Congressional seats, in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Nationally, about 22% of voting-age Latinos are not citizens.
In the lawsuit filed directly to the Supreme Court, Louisiana v. Bryson [pdf], Louisiana argues that the Census policy of counting non-citizens allows other states to gain clout “at the expense of states containing relatively few” undocumented immigrants, like Louisiana. Leave out the undocumented residents, Louisiana says, and it would still have seven Congressional seats.
Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell innocently says that “Louisiana’s complaint simply asks the court to require the federal government to re-calculate the 2010 apportionment of U.S. House of Representatives seats based on legal residents.”
If the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana’s favor, the fallout would be anything but simple. Aside from forcing 17 states to scrap their political maps on the eve of the 2012 elections, the law would fundamentally change how the Census works and immigrants are recognized in the country.
The U.S. Constitution originally said the Census should involve “counting the whole number of free persons,” which the 14th Amendment changed to “counting the whole number of persons,” including non-citizens.
Changing that mandate would be felt at every level of government and the economy. States and localities, which provide services like police, fire and medical treatment to undocumented residents, depend on billions in federal aid based on whole-person counts. Undocumented residents also paid $11.2 billion in taxes in 2010.
If the Supreme Court sided with Louisiana in saying that undocumented residents shouldn’t count in divvying up Congresional districts, they may be cornered into saying the Census can’t count them for other policy matters as well.
This isn’t the first time Louisiana leaders have dragged the Census into the immigration debates roiling the South and country. In 2009, U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) introduced an amendment to the bill funding the 2010 Census that would have required Census workers to ask residents if they were U.S. Citizens; the senate voted down the measure.
How appealing will be an argument to a bunch of originalists/textualists that the term “persons” in the Constitution does not include all people, and in fact excludes non-legal residents?
To the surprise of no one, the students of Arlington were once again denied a May holiday honoring civil rights legend Cesar Chavez.
Last night’s meeting of the Arlington ISD school board reminded me of the climactic scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. An all-white jury convicts the black defendant even though the case against him has crumbled to dust. As the article below suggests, last night’s decision was a foregone conclusion.
Last year, the statements of support for a Chavez holiday, mine included, were polite and deferential. This year was different.
I used my five minutes to address the elephant in the room. The school board trustees are both politicians and public servants, I said. There is no political upside to voting to rename a generic “May holiday” in honor of Chavez. The majority of voters in Arlington have little interest in honoring a Latino icon, and many would staunchly oppose the move. This is, after all, one of the most conservative demographics in America.
On the other hand, 65% of the students (and therefore a solid majority of the parents) are people of color who would love to see Chavez honored. There is a disconnect between the political imperative to please the voters and the moral imperative to do what’s best for the children. The heart sides with the kids; the head craves political security. (more…)
If you have read Taking out the Trash (and shame on you if you haven’t) you are already familiar with Will Harrell–he figures prominently in the story.
The civil rights activist had just arrived in Austin to assume his new duties as ED of the Texas affiliate of the ACLU when he saw Nate Blakeslee’s article The Color of Change in the Austin Chronicle. It was August of 2000 and the trial of Kareem Abdul Jabar White was just days away. When Will and Jeff Frazier walked into the Swisher County courtroom all eyes were on them. Prior to this moment, undercover agent Tom Coleman (and the occasional no-account defendant) were the only pony tail-sporting males to have ever set foot in this hallowed hall. D.A. Terry McEachern knew he was in trouble.
Will and his ACLU associates used the Tulia story, and the equally compelling Hearne case (think American Violet), to dramatize the egregious failings of the Texas criminal justice system. Working in the media and the state legislature, they made significant changes in Texas law while playing a vital role in the unwieldy coalition assembled to fight the injustice in Tulia.
Will Harrell can work with anyone (even preachers and Republicans) if it gets the ball over the goal line.
A few years ago, I spent a couple of evenings bar hopping with Will in wicked New York. He had just seen his old flame, Simone Levine, at a gala for the Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, and he couldn’t stop talking about her. “If I ever get married,” he told me, “she’ll be the one.”
It’s time to invite the Occupy Movement to church!
And Thanksgiving is the perfect occasion. Have some of the young protesters — the “99ers” as they’re becoming known — from this rapidly growing movement over for a big holiday dinner!
Our faith communities and organizations should swing their doors wide and greet the Occupiers with open arms, offering them a feast to say “thank you” for having the courage to raise the very religious and biblical issue of growing inequality in our society. (more…)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
n 2010, Michelle Alexander’s 
By Alan Bean
By Chris Kromm
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 