Author: Alan Bean

Obama administration backs away from mass deportation

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By Alan Bean

The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the mass deportation of the undocumented.  As Maria Hinojosa’s excellent (and disturbing) documentary, Lost in Detention asked whether “the worst of the worst” were being deported (the administration’s official line) or if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel were scrambling to meet a self-imposed quota of 400,000 deportations.  Lost in Detention focused on the thousands of people who have been detained indefinitely while their cases proceed slowly through the immigration bureaucracy.  In the meantime, children have been separated from their children and wives from husbands.

It’s an unprincipled mess.

The new policy will begin with a pilot program targeting only those accused of a felony.  Since being in the country without documentation does not rise to the level of a crime, those with no criminal record will not be treated like dangerous criminals.  According to the New York Times, immigration officials

will focus on cases of immigrants who have been arrested for deportation, but who are not being held in detention while their cases proceed.  Immigrants who are deemed to qualify for prosecutorial discretion will have their cases closed, but not dismissed, officials said. That means that agents could re-open the deportations at any time if the immigrants commit a crime or a new immigration violation. Immigrants whose cases are closed will be allowed to remain in the United States, but they will be in legal limbo, without any positive immigration status.

The new policy is a lot like don’t ask, don’t tell, a pragmatic compromise driven by the lack of a national consensus.  Hopefully, the days of mass deportation are over–at least for now.  Media coverage, particularly Ms. Hinojosa’s compelling documentary, have given the Obama administration a black eye and damaged the President’s standing with Latino voters. 

Advocacy is the art of embarrassment.  Homeland Security officials insist that the 400,000 will be met, but, if this new policy takes hold, that seems unlikely.  There simply aren’t that many bad actors out there.

U.S. to Review Cases Seeking Deportations

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The Department of Homeland Security will begin a review on Thursday of all deportation cases before the immigration courts and start a nationwide training program for enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers, with the goal of speeding deportations of convicted criminals and halting those of many illegal immigrants with no criminal record. (more…)

Baptist scholar reviews Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas

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This review of Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas appears in the current issue of Christian Ethics Today, a journal published for pastors and ethicists on the thoughtful end of the Baptist spectrum.  Dr. Larry McSwain was Professor of Church and Community, Dean of the School of Theology and Provost of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1970-1993.  Since 2003, he has been Associate Dean of the Doctor of Ministry Degree Program and Professor of Leadership at the McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, GA. 

Alan Bean, Taking Out the Trash in Tulia, Texas. DeSoto, TX: Advanced Concept Design Books, 2010.

This is a difficult book to read.  It is difficult not because of the vocabulary, the writing style, nor overblown conceptualization.  Its content is shocking, earthy, and so realistic as to surprise most Christian Ethics Today readers. It is difficult to accept the reality of the story told here, but it is a story that can be repeated across communities of the nation, large and small.

Alan Bean collected dozens of vignettes of events surrounding the arrest for drug dealing of nineteen black residents of Tulia, Texas in 1999.  There were 132 indictments in the Texas panhandle generated by the testimony of an undercover policeman named Tom Coleman.  Some in the community were incredulous that there could be that many drug dealers in the relatively small, poor black community of Tulia.  The saga of the surprise arrests in the early morning that brought defendants to the court house in various stages of undress soon moved to the courtroom where incompetent defense attorneys, suspect legal procedures, and dominant white juries assured the conviction and excessive sentencing for each.

The characters of the book could be taken out of a Flannery O’Connor short story.  Joe Moore is an older black hog farmer who is a key leader in the community arrested with the group and sentenced to 90 years in prison.  Gary Gardner, an overweight, arthritic “redneck” wheat farmer with an uncontrollable foul mouth is a long-time advocate of civil rights, offended by the treatment of blacks in Tulia, and enters the fray for justice.  Alan Bean is a central character in the book: a Canadian with a Ph.D. in church history, married into the Kiker clan of Tulia, a guitarist and composer of folk music, he becomes a central opponent of the criminal justice process at great person sacrifice for himself and his family. 

In response to the multiple convictions with little due process for the black residents of Tulia, Bean and his family, Gardner, Charles and Patricia Kiker and leaders of the black community form Friends of Justice to take up the cause for black defendants labeled “scumbags” in the local press.  The knowledge of networking skills of this leadership group of Friends of Justice soon has locals organized for protests at the state capital in Austin and drawing the national press and civil justice organizations to Swisher County to challenge the veracity of Tom Coleman and the justice process.  After years of effort, the details of which require reading the book, Coleman’s credibility was challenged, convictions were overturned, and the Texas justice system paid heavy judgments to the defendants and their attorneys.

Dr. Larry McSwain

This is a book worth reading for its analyses on multiple levels of insight.  It is a remarkable analysis of the social changes affecting American agriculture with the consequences of growing racial polarization in small towns.  Its anthropological insights into the black culture of a small community and the interactions between black and white neighbors are on the level of classic studies such as Street Corner Society.  The impact of a few dissenters to the dominant ethos with all of the conflict it generated in the community is a study in community change and the power of a determined few. The role of small town newspapers is analyzed historically in both positive and negative ways. The attention of national media in bringing pressure on local entities is a case study in the importance of outside resources to create change.  And finally, the role of a few families with deep community roots who choose to live against the grain of the community’s values and the costs paid for their stubbornness is worthy of study by those who would be prophets of change in their own hometown.

Larry L. McSwain, McAfee School of Theology

          

What’s to be done with Rogue Prosecutors?

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By Alan Bean 

According to Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast, a bill designed to qualify the absolute immunity currently enjoyed by Texas prosecutors was introduced by Rep. Lon Burnam in the most recent legislative session.  It didn’t make it to the floor.  District attorneys and state legislators have traditionally marched in lock step.  Politicians shore up their tough-on-crime credentials by passing more and more laws and stiff sentences.  Prosecutors use these laws to leverage plea bargains.  It’s a win-win.

Unless you are an innocent defendant.

The Dallas Morning News op-ed referenced below offers some solid suggestions for reining in prosecutorial power and Henson adds some additional suggestions of his own.  But at the root of the problem lies a stubborn fact: we don’t have enough prosecutors in the system to handle the work load.

Consider these quotes from William Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. 

The explosive growth of the nation’s prison population after 1970 did not coincide with an explosion in the numbers of police officers, prosecutors, and defense attorneys.  On the contrary: while prison budgets shot up, spending on police, lawyers, and courts rose more slowly, and the number of personnel rose less still.  The number of local officers increased roughly 20 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, the same percentage rise as in the general population; the number of local prosecutors grew by a similar amount.

. . . Spending on lawyers for indigent defendants fell by more than half from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.  While these trends took hold, the number of felony prosecutions rose at least two-and-a-half times . . . The justice system became, more and more, an assembly line in which cases are processed, not adjudicated.

. . .The greater the ratio of cases to personnel, the smaller the opportunity to examine carefully the evidence on which the government’s case rests.  And that opportunity was already small: even before the huge run-up in felony prosecutions, the tendency was for plea bargains to be struck early in the process, before either side had a chance to do much investigating.  That tendency is even stronger in today’s justice system because pleading cases out quickly is a necessity, not a convenience.  The upshot is that noninvestigation is the norm in American criminal litigation, careful gathering of evidence the exception.

As the Curtis Flowers case demonstrates, under-investigation and noninvestigation are the primary reasons for wrongful conviction.  Prosecutors are desperate to settle cases quickly and cheaply.  If we’re serious about curbing prosecutorial misconduct, we need more prosecutors, more police officers, more judges, more courtrooms and more defense attorneys.  I know this is unwelcome news given the prevailing mania for belt-tightening, but it’s true.

‘How to curb rogue prosecutors,’ or, ‘The gathering clouds’

 Grits linked the other day to a Dallas News editorial (behind paywall) published over the weekend (Nov. 12) titled “How to curb rogue prosecutors” which opened:

One thread running through many criminal exoneration cases in Texas involves prosecutors who failed their legal and moral duty to justice and fair play.

Too many of them appear to have been more interested in winning a conviction than airing the whole truth, even at the expense of someone’s liberties.

Lawmakers need to unravel these tangled messes, then find ways to build safeguards against willful or sloppy miscarriage of justice in a district attorney’s office. (more…)

Terrifying love: TheCall comes to Detroit

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By Alan Bean

 Leave it to TheCall to make love sound alarming, even terrifying.

 there is only one Messiah in Islam, and it’s Jesus.

All the passionate music, jubilation, and spiritual energy cannot hide the meanness of spirit that would perpetrate this kind of fraud.

TheCall hit Detroit last week.  Lou Engle’s format set the template for Rick Perry’s The Response event earlier this year and the message is straight out of the New Apostolic Reformation playbook.

On the surface, it’s all about love, compassion, and reconciliation; but, as the quotations above suggest, the vision behind the carefully choreographed emotion is dark indeed.  Especially if you’re gay . . . or Muslim.

Haroon Moghul, a Sunni Muslim from New England, flew to Detroit to experience TheCall from the inside.  His report, originally published in Religion Dispatches, appears below.

Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit

By Haroon Moghul

I’m the one they’re after. I’m “the enemy,” the believer in the “false idol,” “the darkness” Jesus needs to cast out of America, the reason they’re spending all night in Detroit’s Ford Field, sending prayers over Michigan mosques “like sending special forces into Afghanistan.” And there are thousands of them, come because Pastor Lou Engle asked them to.

Founder of TheCall, Engle warns that an Islamic movement is rising in Dearborn, Michigan—“Ground Zero” for America’s spiritual future (and site of a new TLC reality show, All-American Muslim). When I heard the goals for TheCall Detroit—healing America in a time of crisis, accomplishing racial reconciliation, and (here’s where I come in) bringing Jesus to Muslim hearts—I figured a Muslim in the crowd could be a nice twist. (more…)

Bloomberg evicts Occupy Wall Street Protesters

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Last night, the NYPD, at the bidding of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, ordered the evacuation of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park.  The NYT story provides most of the pertinent details, but the more than 1,000 comments that follow tell the real story.

One reader asked why the Occupy protesters couldn’t hold nice, orderly gatherings like the Tea Party.  If the Koch brothers would fork over a few millions dollars (as they did for the Tea Party organizers) that might happen.  In fact, money from the ultra-right organizations created and sustained the Tea Party movement; Occupy Wall Street runs on the conviction of the occupiers plus nothing.

This op-ed, published in the Washington Post, tells the story from the protester’s perspective: (more…)

Psychopaths and gun violence

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By Alan Bean

Fifteen years ago, David Kennedy decided to do something about street violence in Boston.  The first step was to discern who was doing most of the shooting and why.  “When it came to any particular shooting,” he says in his new book Don’t Shoot, “it was practically obligatory to tack on ‘senseless,’ ‘inexplicable,’ ‘irrational.'”  But when Kennedy analyzed the data he discovered that the most of the gun violence could be traced to “a small number of very exceptional kids whose names we know doing things we understand pretty damned clearly.”

Gun violence isn’t spread evenly across communities, it’s concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods.  In Boston, the mayhem was largely relegated to “sixty-one crews (gangs), with between 1,100 and 1,300 members” living in six sections of the city.  The problem is driven by “3 percent of the right age group in those neighborhoods, 1 percent of the right age group citywide,” Kennedy writes.  “All the gang turf put together was less than 4 percent of the city; it generated nearly a quarter of Boston’s serious crime.” (more…)

A white preacher celebrates the black church

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By Alan Bean

Eddie Glaude, a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton, set off a fire storm last year when he performed last rites over the black church.  “The Black Church is dead,” Dr. Glaude announced.  I didn’t notice it at the time, but Joel Gregory, the dean of Texas Baptist preachers, wrote a spirited rebuttal to Eddie Glaude for the Huffington Post.

In the course of a post-worship lunch this Sunday at Fort Worth’s Broadway Baptist Church, Joel Gregory’s name came up.  I learned that he was teaching a Sunday School class at Broadway a few years back but was forced to withdraw (the story went) when the congregation decided to publish pictures of gay couples in the church directory. 

The repercussions of that decision were immediate.  The congregational infighting became so intense that the Rev. Brett Younger (a fine preacher in his own right), was forced to submit his resignation.  Broadway had already been expelled from the Southern Baptist Convention and withdrew from the Baptist General Conference of Texas to spare everyone an ugly fire fight on the convention floor.  Finally, I was told, Joel Gregory was asked to withdraw his membership at Broadway.  He was teaching homiletics at Truett Theological Seminary on the campus of Baylor University at the time and pressure was applied in high places.

Dr. Gregory is full of surprises.  I was surprised to learn that he had been a member at Broadway, one of the flagship “moderate” churches in Texas Baptist life.  There was a time when Gregory was the fundamentalist camp’s most articulate frontman.  I’m not sure his core theology has changed much over the years, but his spirit has softened considerably. (more…)

Fetal personhood and civil rights

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William Wilberforce as portrayed in "Amazing Grace"

By Alan Bean

Personhood USA, the group arguing that personhood begins the moment of conception, is promoting itself as a latter day embodiment of the civil rights movement.  Days after a “fetal personhood” amendment was rejected by 60% of Mississippi voters, Personhood Florida’s Bryan Longworth is undaunted.  William Wilberforce didn’t end slavery in England the first time he tried, Longworth says, and his group isn’t about to give up simply because voters in the most conservative state in America aren’t buying the fetal personhood argument.

The reference to Wilberforce caught my attention.  Nancy and I saw Amazing Grace in an Amarillo movie theatre in 2007.  We were weighing our options at the time.  Did we really want to stay in the criminal justice reform fight?  Sure, we had won some important victories, but when you live in the Texas Panhandle you have few illusions.  Every struggling rural community of any size is sustained by a state prison and there appears to be zero support for ending mass incarceration.  When you have repeatedly slammed your head into a brick wall you sometimes think how nice it would feel to stop. (more…)

DNA leads police to new suspect in Morton case

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Mark Alan Norwood, 57, was held Wednesday at the Williamson County Jail on a capital murder charge after his arrest at his Bastrop home.
Mark Alan Norwood

Five weeks ago, Michael Morton was released to the free world after DNA evidence made it clear that he hadn’t killed his wife, Christine, twenty-five years ago.  Now Williamson County police have arrested Mark Alan Norwood, a man linked to the killing by the same DNA evidence that cleared Morton.

Tests in 1986 could only confirm the presence of human blood on the bandanna. But forensic testing in June identified the blood and an attached hair as Christine Morton’s.

The lab also found cells that were soon matched to Norwood because his DNA profile was listed in a national felony database after his 2008 arrest in California for possessing narcotics, resisting arrest and possessing a dangerous weapon.

As Melanie Wilmoth noted in a recent post, this is a classic case of prosecutorial tunnel vision.  Convinced they had the right man, the district attorney withheld important evidence from defense counsel. 

Mark Osler’s excellent op-ed on the Hank Skinner case could easily be applied to the injustice perpetrated against Michael Morton.  Prosecutors live in an echo chamber.  Surrounded by people who share their zeal for justice and sealed off from meaningful contact with the defendant, district attorneys and AUSAs have their view of the world reinforced at every turn.  The thought that they may have everything wrong never occurs to them.  

It doesn’t help that the powers of the prosecutor have been growing steadily over the past thirty years while judicial discretion and the influence of jurors has receded.  DAs are widely seen as representatives of the people, and so they are.  But when the people are blinded by fear and ignorance, prosecutor must keep their wits about them.  Do these men and women who wield such incredible power understand the dynamics of tunnel vision well enough to safeguard themselves against it?  I have my doubts.

Man arrested in 1986 Morton slaying has long criminal history

By Chuck Lindell and Patrick George

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

GEORGETOWN — A former carpet layer now working as a dishwasher in Bastrop was arrested Wednesday in the brutal 1986 beating death of Christine Morton, a Williamson County mother whose husband was wrongly convicted of her murder.

Mark Alan Norwood, 57, was arrested without incident at his Bastrop duplex, Williamson County Sheriff James Wilson said. Charged with capital murder, Norwood was being held at the Williamson County Jail on $750,000 bail. (more…)

The passion of the prosecutor

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The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has issued a stay of execution in the Hank Skinner case so relevant DNA evidence can be tested.  The prosecutors in this case remain adamant that Skinner should die with the evidence untested.  Mark Osler (a Friends of Justice board member who teaches law at the University of Saint Thomas in Minnesota) says that what looks like baffling intransigence from the outside springs from the best of motives.  But then, so did the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Osler’s insights originally appeared on the CNN site. AGB

Texas prosecutors won’t stop rush to execution

By Mark Osler, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: 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.

 As the nation and the world’s attention turned to the impending execution of Hank Skinner in Texas before a late stay by a Texas court, one question seemed paramount: “Why the rush?” The answer to that question is buried deep inside the psychology of prosecutors and the culture of Texas.

Skinner was scheduled for execution on Wednesday for the 1993 killing of his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two sons, until the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the top criminal court in that state) issued a stay late on Monday. (more…)