“God save the United States and this honorable court.”  With this traditional blessing a hearing on the case titled United States vs. Alvin Clay began at the Thomas E. Eagleton courthouse in St. Louis.

Just how honorable is the court?  Time will tell.

Defendants always face an uphill climb in the appeals process.  They don’t call it United States vs. Alvin Clay for nothing.  To win in this game, Alvin Clay and his attorney, Shirley Lobel, have to convince a panel of three judges to side with a convicted felon against “this honorable court”.

Courts are honorable by definition, no matter what they do. 

As Shirley Lobel argued this morning, if Donnie McCuien had done what he promised to do, there would be no case to prosecute against Alvin Clay.  At trial, McCuien swore that he never intended to do rehab work on five properties, that he had never done a lick of rehab work in his life, and that Alvin Clay knew all of this.

As Ms. Lobel repeatedly stated this morning, this is a case about knowledge.  Records demonstrate clearly that Alvin Clay had no direct knowledge of the fraudulent loan agreements Ray Nealy sent to loan companies or the get-rich-quick schemes Donnie McCuien sold to gullible investors.  Clay just knew he was subcontracting rehab work to Donnie McCuien in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.

Alvin Clay and Assistant US Attorney Steven Snyder don’t have much in common.  Clay is young, black and  big; Snyder is older, white and on the small side.  Snyder is still licensed to practice law; Clay, thanks to Mr. Snyder, has been forced to surrender his law license.

But Snyder and Clay are united in one particular: both men were scammed by the same street hustler.  (more…)

I am sitting in a Holiday Inn in St. Louis having just re-read Shirley Baccus-Lobel’s excellent appeal brief on behalf of Alvin Clay.

The Clay case has placed the federal judicial system in a pickle. Alvin Clay was convicted on the uncorroborated word of Donnie McCuien. Subsequent to Clay’s trial in June of 2008, virtually every statement McCuien made under oath has been exposed as a lie. It got so bad that the government decided to hand a sweetheart deal to the final defendant in the case rather than go to trial. There was no way they were going to put a proven liar back on the stand.

But Alvin Clay remains convicted. He has surrendered his law license and, if the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals doesn’t get this case right, the Little Rock attorney will be doing time in a federal prison.

“Respectfully,” Baccus-Lobel argues in her brief, “the uncritical lens with which the government viewed McCuien’s self-serving statements assured the portrayal of Mr. Clay as a wrongdoer would not be disturbed.”

The government got the conviction it was looking for. Sure, their star witness has turned out to be an embarrassment but, hey, nobody’s paying attention so it doesn’t matter.

That’s the degree of cynicism we are dealing with here. (more…)

A new poll by the New York Times and CBS News suggests that  Tea Party activists aren’t disaffected rednecks damaged by the current recession.  In fact, they are wealthier and better educated than most Americans.  They are more likely than most Americans to give a rosy assessment of their personal financial standing and are just as likely to describe their current tax burden as “fair”. 

Most Tea Party folk don’t think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

So what is the Tea Party crowd so upset about?

A follow-up study shows a majority of Tea Party supporters  supporting big-ticket government programs like Social Secuity and Medicare.  They want smaller government, but seem unwilling to cut the programs generating the lion’s share of federal expense.

So how, exactly, do the Tea Party people differ from standard Republicans and the general public? (more…)

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

Addendum: This post was written in the months leading up to the 2010 trial of Curtis Flowers.  It was commonly believed that Doyle Simpson’s gun was the murder weapon.  But it ain’t necessarily so.  The murder weapon was similar to Doyle’s gun, but that’s all that can be said with confidence.

Alan Bean, May 8, 2018

The case against Curtis Flowers stands or falls with Doyle Simpson.  The state has demonstrated that four innocent people were murdered with Doyle’s .380 automatic.  If Curtis is the killer he had to get his hands on Doyle’s gun.

In five trials over fourteen years, the State of Mississippi has used two hapless and unhappy witnesses to demonstrate how Doyle’s gun ended up in the hands of Curtis Flowers.

Doyle Simpson says he placed the murder weapon in the glove compartment of his 1980 Pontiac Phoenix the night before the murders.  The next morning, between 10:45 and 11:00 am, he says he discovered that the gun was missing.

In trial 5, Doyle Simpson claimed that investigators originally thought he and Curtis Flowers were co-conspirators.  “They had said I give Curtis the gun,” Simpson said, “that he didn’t break in my pocket in my car.”

Doyle knew the authorities had four options.  They could make the case that he was the lone killer; they could charge Doyle and Curtis as co-defendants; they could try Curtis (with the cooperation of Doyle Simpson) as the lone gunman, or they could eliminate both Curtis and Doyle as suspects and look elsewhere. (more…)

Frank Rich’s latest column on the unwillingness of American leaders to take personal responsibility for anything has the ring of familiarity.  A lot of prominent people have made disastrous decisions in recent years (invading Iraq, stoking a speculative stock bubble) but no one wants to ‘fess up.  As the body count rises and the ranks of the unemployed swell, the closest we ever seem to get to an apology is the generic “no one saw the meltdown coming” or “everyone thought we’d find WMD” explanations.

Actually, a whole lot of economists predicted the bursting of the Wall Street bubble and a holy host of prophets warned against going after Saddam and his WMD.  There was just one problem, none of the experts stalking the corridors of power made the right call.  This is not a matter of bad luck.  Bad advice will be embraced with an unholy passion if it suits the needs of the moment.  Neo-cons had been itching to invade Iraq since Bush the elder resisted the temptation to march on Baghdad.  Expert willing to sign off on the invasion idea flourished in an administration riddled with neo-cons. 

Similarly, those benefiting from the steady expansion of the speculative bubble on Wall Street heaped praise and money on economists willing to give madness the name of sound economic policy.  Economists, for the most part, rise in the ranks of their profession by keeping rich people happy.  Hence, they are frequently wrong.

Politicians were unable to sound a warning because, red or blue, they survive by keeping their finger on the pulse of popular opinion. 

Smart, informed, intellectually honest people quickly discover how hard it is to make a living shouting “the emperor has no clothes.”  So long as the emperor is doling out the big bucks to scam artists, knaves and fools will prosper.

Besides, it feels to good to strike camp with the majority, to lose yourself in the happy horde of normalcy.

To be out of step is to be alienated.  Alienation is painful, even if the majority is blissfully marching off a cliff.

As Rich suggests, conformists rarely have to pay the price for their mistaken augery because, hey, everyone else was wrong too so, even though my projections led to disaster they were throughly mainstream.  Better to be wrong and in the mainstream than right and on the fringes. 

That is why Friends of Justice refuses to stop talking about the mass incarceration, the death penalty, the mechanics of wrongful conviction and the racial dynamics driving this madness.  This isn’t a popular message.  We want to believe in the basic fairness of a criminal justice system that rarely impacts anyone in middle class suburbia.  We want to believe the war on drugs is winnable.  We like to think that insitutional racism went out with Bull Conner and the boys.  But when you spend quality time with folks on the poor side of places like Tulia, Jena, Church Point, Bunkie and Winona the glaring inequities of the system stand out like a bishop in a brothel.

We don’t speak from ivory tower isolation or from the cloistered halls of a well-financed think tank; we speak from a personal experience too ugly to be ignored.

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham isn’t impressed with Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month.  Here’s the relevant quote:

“The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he “focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia’s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.”

Meacham’s short column in the New York Times is pasted below.

Southern Discomfort

IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while — a long while. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he wrote, “except the jump backward, maybe.” (more…)

When you feel compelled to voice minority opinions, it’s always nice to find somebody who agrees with you.  Robert Perkinson, a history professor and activist from Hawaii, has just published “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire”.    Perkinson recently spoke with Adam Culbreath, program officer for the Soros Justice Fellowships and their conversation was published on the Open Societies Blog.

Texas Tough: An Interview with Robert Perkinson

Your new book, Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire, paints a pretty dismal and disturbing picture of the history of incarceration in the state.

There’s not much happiness in the history of imprisonment—an inmate who had done forty-three years once wrote to me, “prison is always bad, sometimes worse”—but there is even less in Texas.

In the South, the ethic of rehabilitation never really took hold. Prisons were built not to educate or cure but to impose vengeance and extract labor. So even though good intentions have gone awry in Northern prisons, bad intentions have gone to even worse places in the South. (more…)