By Alan Bean
Michelle Alexander was on the Colbert Report on Tuesday night. Colbert, as always, is hilarious and Alexander is characteristically eloquent (when you spend two years talking about the same subject you get your talking points down cold). But the most significant aspect of this exchange is the crowd reaction. They are clearly blown away.
By Alan Bean
If national support for gay marriage hovers just north of 50%, why did voters in North Carolina just show overwhelming support for a measure writing opposition to gay civil unions into the state constitution? (more…)
By Alan Bean
William Browning was a reporter for the Greenwood Commonwealth when Curtis Flowers went to trial for the fourth time. Now, Curtis is the only capital defendant in US judicial history (so far as I can ascertain) to be tried six times for the same crime. Browning realized the Flowers case was still in play when he stumbled upon Friends of Justice blogging from trial number six, and decided to pitch the story to Reason. (Thanks to then-editor, Radley Balko (now with the Huffington Post) Reason became the first publication to do a story on the Colomb case in Church Point, LA, another case Friends of Justice brought to light.)
As Curtis Flowers sits in his death row cell on the Parchman Plantation waiting for the heat of summer to transform his cell into a sauna and for the Mississippi Supreme Court to consider his appeal, Browning’s piece appeared in the April issue of Reason. Although he interviewed me for the article, the author didn’t give me a heads-up when it was published. I got the word this afternoon when I called Lola Flowers–Curtis had mailed it to her.
Browning clearly has no polemical axe to grind. He does a good job touching on the high points of an exceedingly complex legal history and ends with the sheer pathos of the story. Four good people died in Winona in the summer of 1996. I’m convinced that Curtis Flowers wasn’t the gunman; but somebody pulled the trigger, and dozens of lives will never be the same. (You can find still more background on the story on the Friends of Justice site.)
William Browning from the April 2012 issue
In Mississippi early in the summer of 2010, emotionally spent jurors, some of them in tears, recommended that Curtis Giovanni Flowers be put to death for a quadruple murder. The judge agreed with the recommendation, sending Flowers to death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. The trial had lasted two weeks, and from beginning to end the Montgomery County Courthouse was filled with an unnerving sense of déjà vu.
That’s because the 41-year-old Flowers has now been sentenced to death four times for the same crime. The first three convictions were thrown out on appeal by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The fourth, handed down June 18, 2010, is currently on appeal at the state’s highest court. Two other trials ended with hung juries. All told, Flowers has stood trial six times—a record in the history of American capital murder cases. He has become the judicial system’s answer to Groundhog Day.
Prior to Flowers, the longest running capital murder case was that of Curtis Kyles, whom New Orleans prosecutors tried five times for a 1984 murder. Kyles’ second jury sentenced him to death, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that conviction because prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense. After four mistrials due to hung juries, the charges against Kyles were dismissed in 1998, and he was released from prison, having spent 14 years behind bars.
“There is something shocking about the state repeatedly trying a case until it gets a jury to follow its will,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Cases like these, he argues, are why the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says no person should “be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” (more…)
By Hazel Taylor
This piece was originally published on onlineclasses.org.
If you want to learn more about the history of your city, explore the history of corruption within the city’s police department. Police corruption, which can include kickbacks, shakedowns, and protection of or even direct participation in illegal activities, has been around since the creation of the country’s first police force. Initially, the police were not asked to “serve and protect,” but to mediate between criminal and political kingpins as they fought each other for power. Some may say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But perhaps understanding the history of city and police corruption can help to provide the vision and leadership for a better future. Here are nine police departments with well-documented corrupt pasts.
Since its establishment in 1844, corruption has been a fact of police life in New York City. From the very beginning, New York’s underpaid and overworked police officers were expected to serve the needs of the city’s political leaders while collecting money from gang leaders, gamblers, and pimps for the privilege of operating relatively unmolested. Back in 1895, officer Alexander S. Williams, took advantage of his appointment as captain of the city’s 21st Precinct, which included the Tenderloin and Gas House districts, to collect money from criminals, including the madams of several brothels, and make a fortune as a result. Williams, who earned his nickname “Clubber,” once said, “There is more law in the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court.” After investigation by two committees, Williams resigned, went into the insurance business, and died a multimillionaire. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
New Orleans Mayor Landrieu released a hopeful, conciliatory statement in the wake of the sentencing of five New Orleans police officers to several years in prison for their roles in shooting unarmed citizens in the chaotic days that followed Hurricane Katrina. “We now have an opportunity to turn the page and to heal,” Landrieu said. “It is my commitment to the people of New Orleans to rebuild and reform the NOPD.” The first police force in the then-French New Orleans was established in 1803, only to be disbanded due to countless complaints from civilians. Given the history of the NOPD, Landrieu definitely has his work cut out for him.
By the end of the 19th century, the city of Chicago enjoyed the dubious reputation of being a haven for “dangerous classes;” a city that was more like an out-of-control frontier town “with an absence of moral virtue.” The Chicago Police department went without large-scale reform until 1960 when eight police officers from the city’s North Side or Summerdale district were charged with running a large-scale burglary ring. Known as the Summerdale Scandal, the case generated unprecedented media attention, and prompted the creation of a much-needed police superintendent role to oversee and enforce rules and regulations within the department.
The 1951 Bloody Christmas Scandal, a real-life scandal that appears in author James Ellroy’s book L.A. Confidential and its film version, involved as many as 50, mostly drunk, police officers who took time out from a Christmas party to beat six prisoners for more than 90 minutes. Since more than 100 people either witnessed or knew of the beatings, the incident became public, and prompted the city’s Mexican community to come forward with more charges of police brutality against citizens. In 1952, a grand jury succeeded in convicting only five of the officers involved, and none of them received a sentence amounting to more than a year in prison. And then there was the Rampart scandal and theRodney King beating.
Miami in the ’80s experienced an “epidemic” of police corruption due in part to the enormous amount of cocaine being smuggled into South Florida from Latin America. A cheap, deadly derivative of the drug known as “crack” would infiltrate other cities throughout the U.S., and transform many once relatively peaceful working class neighborhoods into war zones. Police corruption in Miami reached its height in 1986 when, as a result of an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, more than a dozen officers from the police department faced charges that ranged from drug dealing to murder.
Students of Civil Rights history know that Selma, Ala. was the location of abrutal assault on a group of peaceful marchers led by John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Selma Police Department led by Sheriff Jim Clark, as well as state troopers, and recently deputized members of the community. Law enforcement officers used nightsticks, horses, and tear gas to indiscriminately attack the peaceful demonstrators. Televised images of the attack inspired even more support for the Civil Rights movement. Sheriff Clark later lost his bid for reelection, went on to sell mobile homes for a while, and in 1978, was busted for conspiracy to import marijuana.
Ahome is a municipality in the Mexican state of Sinaola. Just last November, Ahome’s entire Police Department, 32 officers and commanders, were arrested by state police for the department’s connection to two powerful drug cartels. Amazingly, the director of the state police who carried out the arrest,“Chuytoño” Aguilar Iniguez, was at one time one of Mexico’s Attorney General’s most wanted men for his connections to kingpins within the Sinaloa drug cartel. After having fled to Cuba in 2004 while undergoing investigation for corruption, Iniguez was granted a sort of immunity in 2009 by a federal court, and returned to Mexico to profit from, er, whoops, we mean “fight” crime.
You know you’ve got a corrupt police department when it comes under the scrutiny of Human Rights Watch. HRW has stated that, “the Philadelphia police department (in terms of) corruption and brutality … has one of the worst reputations of big city police departments in the United States.” In the early 1990s, a group of PPD officers, some known throughout the city as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, conducted a series of unreported raids on crack houses where officers would steal from suspects. The arrest of Mumia Abu-Jamal for the murder of a police officer, and the public outcry at his being sentenced to death (this sentence was recently overturned), brought national attention to the PPD’s reputation for brutality and corruption.
In March 2012, a Baltimore police officer was sentenced for his part in what is known as the Towing Scandal, a criminal ring that included more than 50 other members of the Baltimore Police Department. Vehicles were towed from accident scenes by a towing and repair company owned by two police officers. Other officers were paid to participate in the scam, which generated hundreds to thousands of dollars for those involved. Accident victims were even encouraged by officers not to talk to their insurance companies.
By Alan Bean
Conflict is the heart of drama. The 20th century could be defined as the century of dramatized conflict. From suffragettes to union organizers to the religious right, dramatized conflict has been considered the path to power.
For a while, it worked, sometimes to tremendous effect. But when everyone is dramatizing conflict for political ends you get gridlock. You get trench warfare. You get the culture war.
So now comes Jonathan Merritt, the son of a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor, with an audacious statement: “Crucifying the culture war model could be the only hope for resurrecting American Christianity in a new century.”
I have been coming to much the same conclusion. Actually, I haven’t come to this conclusion; circumstances have driven me to it.
If you are part of a persecuted minority, adversarial drama can work. But if we are dealing with one large power bloc wrestling with another power bloc of equal size and strength, the tactic falls flat. Careers may be sustained, and money may roll in, but transformative change doesn’t happen.
Bob Allen’s article originally appeared in The Associated Baptist Press.
May 7, 2012
By Bob Allen
Three decades of culture war have failed to make America a more moral nation, and younger evangelicals today want to engage the public square in less partisan ways, says the author of a new book on faith and politics.
Jonathan Merritt
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Author Jonathan Merritt wrote a USA Today op-ed piece that ran the day before the official May 7 release of his new book, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars.
The son of former Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt, who serves on the staff of his father’s Atlanta-area mega church, said coming-of-age Millennials are forging a different path from Christians on both the right and left who have used the Bible as a political tool and reduced Christianity “to little more than a voting bloc.”
Merritt’s previous book, Green Like God, explored the generation of rising evangelicals’ move from concern about just abortion and gay marriage to a broader array of social issues such as creation care.
You can find the rest of the article here . . .
By Alan Bean
Americans of a conservative bent are having a hard time with the Trayvon Martin saga. The story suggests serious flaws in our system of criminal justice. The conservative mind has no problem with George Zimmerman stalking a young man he considered suspicious and isn’t troubled by the fact that Zimmerman killed an unarmed man yet wasn’t arrested.
But there are also narratives that those of the liberal persuasion tend to ignore because they reinforce the punitive consensus. Take, for instance, the story of Broderick Patterson, an eighteen year old Black male who was recently sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Eric Forrester, a seventeen year old White male. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has been following the story for the past two years.
The Black-on-White nature of the slaying conforms to a familiar pattern, but this case goes deeper than that. When the sentence was handed down, young Broderick directed a profane tirade (see the article below) at everyone associated with his sad fate. The jury received the brunt of his venom. (more…)
By Alan Bean
My thanks to Judge Ron Chapman for bringing this interview with economist Paul Krugman to my attention. Krugman thinks Barack Obama will lose the election if he doesn’t get his economic message straight, but that’s not what interests me. In his new book, “End This Depression Now”, Krugman calls for the creation of a New Deal era public works program designed to put able-bodied men and women back to work. I have been advocating something similar for several years and, although the proposal doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in the current political environment, it is nice to hear a prominent intellectual agreeing with me.
There may not be much President Obama can do to improve the economy between now and the election, but telling a clear story about why it remains weak could mean the difference between victory and defeat this November. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman fears the Obama team is getting that critical narrative wrong.
“They’ve tied themselves up in knots because they’ve bought into this notion that it would sound wrong to admit that they haven’t been able to do everything that they really should have done,” Krugman told TPM in an interview following the release of his new book, “End This Depression Now!” “It’s incredible — they can’t quite make up their minds on whether the theme is that Republicans are standing in the way of doing what has to be done, or things are really good and America’s back on track. The problem is that you can’t perceive both of those lines at the same time.”
Team Obama’s narrative — that the stimulative measures he took were precisely what the country needed, and as a result America is on the mend — is based on a gamble that the economy will be in a steady recovery come Election Day. But if outside factors diminish the outlook, it will leave voters with the impression that Obama’s approach itself was the problem, rather than the vigorous Republican resistance that forced him to scale back his ambitions.
“What they should be saying is, ‘We have the right ideas and we’re pursuing them as far as we can given the opposition from Republicans,’ which would be more or less the true narrative,” Krugman said. “They have decided that it sounds like weakness to say that we haven’t been doing everything that we should be doing. And so they have instead opted to always pretend that what they thought they were able to get is also exactly what they should have done. So they’ve never conceded that that first stimulus was too small, or that there really should have been a second round of stimulus. And that means that if things go badly, they end up owning it. They can’t say, ‘Don’t blame us, blame the do-nothing Congress.’”
In his book, which hit shelves May 1, Krugman laments the “shadow of economic catastrophe” we live in, and the opportunity cost of huge stockpiles of underutilized human and physical capital. The government should put that to work, Krugman says, first by reversing the state layoffs of teachers, firefighters and other employees, and then ideally with a New Deal-style public works push to rebuild American infrastructure by putting the unemployed to work. But even though GOP opposition makes that all but impossible, Krugman believes it’s a mistake for Obama not to go the extra mile and at least tell voters what more he would do if only he could.
“There is a political danger to Obama, which is that [Mitt] Romney can go around saying, ‘The economy is still lousy,’ which is true,” Krugman said. “And the fact that Obama has never made a really clear case for his own economic leadership hurts. Now, I still think Obama will probably win, because there are other issues, but they have created a trap for themselves on the economic policy front by allowing themselves to own a weak economy in a way that they shouldn’t, because a lot of the problem has been tortured opposition from the Republicans.”
The White House’s narrative developed amid strong political headwinds. Pressure not only from Republicans but many Democrats and even administration officials, along with a broad establishment consensus, compelled Obama to pivot to deficit-reduction, after the Democrats’ 2010 congressional losses and in the face of an exploding national debt.
When the ensuing negotiations with Republicans collapsed and nearly took the U.S. economy with it, Obama turned to his current narrative. Krugman worries that the story’s not strong enough, and there’s still some chance that the economic recovery could slip and toss the election to the GOP.
“We have a slowly developing cycle of an improving economy and improving household balance sheets that lead you on the road to recovery,” Krugman said. “But obviously a lot can go wrong if there’s some kind of major setback — problems in Europe could still hurt the United States, or a spike in oil prices as a result of what’s happening in the Middle East. … We could have morning in America still. But probably not in 2012. So I don’t think there’s going to be a strong enough recovery to make it easy for [Obama].”
By Aaron Graham
This op-ed recently appeared in the Washington Post. Aaron Graham is lead pastor of The District Church in Washington DC and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We originally met through my daughter, professor Lydia Bean, who was a graduate student at Harvard when Aaron studied at the Kennedy School. I got to know Aaron better when he worked as the lead organizer for Sojourner’s Dallas Justice Revival a few years ago.
The Washington Post
By Aaron Graham
We not only need people pushing from the outside, but also serving on the inside to help government fulfill its purpose of restraining evil, promoting justice and working for the common good.
We need more people like Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who learned to faithfully work in the government without selling out in the process.
What made their example so powerful is that they learned how to be good news in a culture that was completely foreign to their own. They were Israelites in exile in Babylon, far from home.
Yet rather than standing on the sidelines and bemoaning their lot in life, they decided to seek the welfare of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. Rather than standing in judgment toward the Babylonians for their significant belief differences they learned to adopt much of the local culture while still holding fast to their core beliefs.
They honored their government leaders, and worked hard to help make the country a better place for all to live in, but also maintained the integrity of their faith. They knew when to risk their lives and when to walk away from power.
When asked to worship a golden statue of the king, they refused even under threat of death. They trusted God and were delivered safe and alive from the fiery furnace.
When another king decreed that prayers only be directed to him, Daniel defied this order, trusted God, and was delivered safe and alive from the lions’ den.
They made a difference not because they had a grand vision to transform society, but because they were committed to doing the small things that made a difference in the long run.
Working in the government can be tough. Washington, D.C. seems to specialize in attracting highly talented, motivated and educated people, only to have them burn out a few years later. The lack of a true community in the city is what pushes many over the edge.
The good news is that there is a group of people, young and old, from different ethnicities that are learning to follow the example of Daniel. Rather than standing on the sidelines and blaming politics they are renewing their commitment to faithfully engage with government, whether that means pushing from the outside or helping build up from the inside.
Rev. Aaron Graham is lead pastor of The District Church and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Clarence Walker is a Houston based journalist and investigator with a primary focus on the criminal justice system.
By Clarence Walker
“Prosecutors are arguably the most powerful figures in the American Criminal Justice System,” according to a recent report by The Justice Project. Prosecutors decide which charges to bring, what plea bargains to offer, and what sentences to request. These decisions deeply impact the lives of defendants, victims, their respective families, and the general public.
“Given the special duties of prosecutors and the broad power they exercise in the criminal justice system, it is critical for prosecutors to discharge their duties responsibly and ethically,” writes the Justice Project.
Truth and justice shall always prevail in a court of law. Yet, at times, truth and justice seem shallow.
According to lawyers and criminal justice advocates, the intentional use of false testimony by prosecutors is rampant throughout the U.S. justice system. Law defines perjury as an instance when a person deliberately lies under oath. In drug cases or any other court proceedings, blatant “perjury can easily undermine a defendant’s right to a fair trial,” according to Chicago criminal defense attorney Leonard Goodman.
Goodman should know.
In 2009, Goodman represented Brian Wilbourn in a federal narcotics case in which the prosecutors knowingly allowed an informant to testify that Wilbourn was slinging dope to addicts at a Penthouse Apartment rented by co-defendant Rondell Freeman. In reality, Wilbourn was not anywhere close to the specific location on the dates specified in the indictment.
Goodman had solid proof that his client was elsewhere. “Mr. Wilbourn was safely locked away in prison when the informant testified that Wilbourn was selling drugs at the Penthouse between 2002-2005,” Goodman said.
“Federal cases are based on the word of informants who understand the only way to get a lesser sentence is to help government prosecutors convict others,” Goodman now says after the Federal 7th Circuit overturned Wilbourn’s conviction.
In reversing Wilbourn’s conviction, Judge Daniel A. Manion stated, “When the government obtains a conviction through the knowing use of false testimony, it violates a defendant’s due process rights.”
Even if a person is absolutely guilty of a crime but convicted on perjury, this grave error violates the “Bill of Rights” and thus creates an unconstitutional conviction.
“It’s a result-oriented process today, fairness be damned,” says Robert
Merkle, a former U.S. Attorney in Florida.
“No trial is perfect and sometimes mistakes are made but for a prosecutor to put perjury on the witness stand, that is scary,” says Mark Vinson, a former Harris County (Houston Texas) Chief Prosecutor now in private practice as a criminal defense attorney.
Legal experts say that most prosecutors are dedicated to performing ethically and professionally, but many prosecutors repeatedly commit misconduct because they realize they most likely will never face serious punishment.
Prosecutorial misconduct has serious financial consequences. County governments spend “hundreds of millions” in taxpayer dollars to retry cases in which prosecutors contributed to faulty convictions.
Few statistics are available documenting nationwide prosecutorial misconduct,
and there have only been a handful of instances where prosecutors were actually sanctioned for such conduct.
Based on extensive research, the author of this report discovered the following information on prosecutorial misconduct:
(1) A study conducted by the Center of Public Integrity found 11,452 documented appeals alleging prosecutorial misconduct between 1970 and 2002. Approximately 2,012 appeals led to reversals or remanded indictments.
(2) Out of 4,000 cases reviewed in California from 1997-2009, 707 cases of prosecutorial misconduct were found. Only 6 prosecutors were disciplined.
(3) A study of Texas convictions indicated that 91 cases since 2004 illustrate a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct. None of the Texas prosecutors were disciplined.
“This lack of accountability promotes the problematic culture that plagues prosecutors’ offices and can easily contribute to wrongful convictions,” the Justice research concluded.
What it really boils down to is that there are prosecutors with a “win-at-all-costs” mentality.
The following story highlights part one of a two-part “Drug War” series detailing prosecutorial misconduct in U.S. drug trials.
Case File #1: Brian Wilbourn
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Case# 07-CR-00843 & No# 09-4043
Judge: Joan Lefkow
Timeline: December 2007-2009
Defendant Brian Wilbourn was charged along with 16 other defendants with possession and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, heroin and marijuana at the Cabrini Green Public Housing Development in Chicago Illinois.
The DEA alleged that Wilbourn was part of the Gangster Disciples drug-dealing street gang. Rondell “Nightfall” Freeman was pegged as the ringleader of this faction of the Gangster Disciples street gang.
Wilbourn and three co-defendants were convicted by a jury on “eight out of nine counts” including a charge of conspiracy that carried 20 years to life in prison.
When the DEA announced federal charges against the defendants in December
2007, an agent said, “they were upending the gang’s flagrant drug dealing at public housing projects and other apartments in the Chicago area.”
Making reference to the upcoming Christmas holiday, Andy Traver, an ATF special agent in charge, cracked, “It’s a season of giving, so our gift to the people is to let them live without constant fear of this drug organization all around them. And our gift to Rondell Freeman and his organization is 20 years to life.”
In a twist of ironic justice, Rondell Freeman and his co-defendants did in fact get a gift. The Illinois 7th Circuit reversed the convictions of Freeman, Wilbourn, Daniel Hill, Adam Sanders, and another defendant — the only five out of 16 to have their cases tried by a jury.
“This was a case where prosecutors allowed an informant to testify falsely against my client Brian Wilbourn,” says Chicago attorney Leonard Goodman.
“Prior to trial I informed the government that my client was in prison from 2002-2005– when the informant said he saw Mr. Wilbourn selling drugs in the company of co-defendant Rondell Freeman.”
Despite Goodman’s alert that Wilbourn was incarcerated during the time period described in the indictment, the government plowed ahead in order to convict Goodman’s client.
Prosecutors conceded that Goodman submitted the certified documents to them in December 2008, two months before the trial started. However, the prosecutors later argued before Judge Lefkow that they could not accurately verify the dates of Wilbourn’s incarceration.
At trial, the prosecutors relied in part on informant Senecca Williams. Williams made a deal with the Feds – he would testify against the defendants in exchange for 5 years off of his sentence.
Attorney Goodman told the Chicago Tribune, “Everybody knows these witnesses will lie, saying whatever the government wants them to say to get a deal. The only difference in this case is we happened to catch one.”
Senecca Williams testified at length about the Penthouse, claiming that Wilbourn discussed sales and bagged up the drugs for distribution with Freeman and other players in the group.
Although two other informants testified for the government, neither informant could tie Wilbourn to the Penthouse Apartment.
Attorney Goodman cross-examined Senecca Williams on March 4, 2009. Goodman confronted Williams with the fact that his client was in prison from 2002-2005 and could not have been at the Penthouse Apartment discussing drug business like Williams said.
“Now Mr. Williams, isn’t it true that Brian Wilbourn was in jail from April 23rd of 2002 until September 2005?” Goodman asked. “I don’t know it to be true,” Williams replied.
Suddenly, U.S. Attorney Kruti Trivedi, objected and said, “That’s not true.” Defense Goodman appealed to the judge. “It is true, your honor.”
Judge Lefkow overruled the prosecutor.
Under intense questioning by Goodman, Williams confessed other misdeeds. Williams admitted that he once lied under oath in State Court around 2005 or 2006 to help Rondell Freeman beat a drug case.
Goodman questioned Williams:
(Q) “You would lie at Rondell Freeman’s trial in State Court because if he got convicted you might not get to live at the car wash, correct?”
(A) “Yes.”
(Q) “But you wouldn’t lie to save yourself 15 years of your life?”
(A) “No.”
The government made no attempt to correct Williams’ false testimony. Instead, the government bolstered Williams’ glaringly inaccurate testimony:
(Q) “Have you been truthful and tried the best of your ability to give approximate dates as you remember them?”
(A) “Yes.”
Attorney Goodman informed Judge Lefkow that he filed a motion to dismiss the counts against Wilbourn due to Senecca Williams’ false testimony.
“The government had an obligation under Napue vs Illinois (360 U.S. 264, 269, 79) to correct the record,” Goodman told the judge.
U.S. Attorney Rachel Cannon stated, “the government stipulated as to the dates of Wilbourn’s incarceration and if Mr. Goodman wants to argue to the jury that Senecca Williams perjured himself, he’s absolutely free to do that. Our argument will be Williams was wrong about the dates, but the facts remain true.”
Judge Lefkow responded to Cannon’s argument, “You know, you as the representative of the United States have an obligation to make sure the evidence you are presenting is truthful and accurate.”
Surprisingly, Cannon replied, “We stand by everything that’s been presented, your honor.”
Judge Lefkow denied Goodman’s motion to dismiss the charges against
Wilbourn.
During closing, Assistant U.S.Attorney Rachel Cannon asked the jury
to find Brian Wilbourn and the other defendants guility: “Williams did not lie,” Cannon explained, “Don’t think what he testified to about Brian Wilbourn’s involvement with drugs never happened.”
Goodman implored the jury to find his client not guility: “They put a liar on the stand and he got caught and the government still [has] the nerve to ask you to rely on Senecca Williams’ testimony to convict. You should be offended.”
Unfortunately the jury sided with the government and convicted all four defendants including Wilbourn.
On appeal, the government argued they did not knowingly use false testimony to convict the defendants. In reversing the convictions, Judge Lefkow made a finding that when Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Cannon “bolstered William’s false testimony it constituted prosecutorial misconduct.”
“Under Napue vs Illinois, the government had a duty to correct false testimony,” Lefkow opined.
All four defendants still remain in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Illinois pending a court date to resolve the related lesser drug charges.
Attorney Goodman felt rejoiced that his client no longer faced a life sentence.
“It is an important opinion because it stands for the principle that federal prosecutors are not above the law and that telling the truth is more important than winning.”
Next installment: How a bulldog lawyer exposed the entire court as a liar in a major cocaine case with connections to a Mexican Drug Cartel.
Investigative journalist Clarence Walker can be reached by email, cwalkerinvestigate@gmail.com.
By Alan Bean
To taze or not to taze? Here are a few common sense guidelines. Never use a gun when a taser will suffice. Never use a taser when physical restraint will do the job. Never use physical restraint when verbal persuasion will calm the situation.
But can outcomes be anticipated with clinical precision? Highly trained police personnel use better judgment than raw rookies, but when the smoke of danger hangs in the air the easy choice is to shoot first and ask questions later. In that case, the logic suggested by my guidelines is reversed: never shoot a man in the chest if a head shot is available; never use a handgun with a semi-automatic is within reach. Etc.
Taser fans note that tasers are less dangerous than guns, but is that always true? According to the study cited by this New York Times piece, tasers can induce heart failure and death. Frequently, the officer holding the taser had recourse to less drastic measures. Too often, a combination of fear and anger led to repeated and prolonged tasing far out of proportion to the actual threat.
There are no easy answers here, but there can be little doubt that some police departments are overly dependant on taser technology. A skilled officer can defuse most situations with a calm but authoritative manner; the young hot-shot escalates the tension by displaying too much swagger and not enough respect. Racial bias frequently plays into these scenarios, which is why so many tasing deaths are inflicted on minority suspects.
Tasing can be preferable to gun play, but the real issue here is professional police work. Are we willing to invest in quality law enforcement? If not, untrained rookies with itchy trigger fingers will continue to wreak havoc.
By ERICA GOODE
The electrical shock delivered to the chest by a Taser can lead to cardiac arrest and sudden death, according to a new study, although it is unknown how frequently such deaths occur.
The study, which analyzed detailed records from the cases of eight people who went into cardiac arrest after receiving shocks from a Taser X26 fired at a distance, is likely to add to the debate about the safety of the weapons. Seven of the people in the study died; one survived.
Advocacy groups like Amnesty International have argued that Tasers, the most widely used of a class of weapons known as electrical control devices, are potentially lethal and that stricter rules should govern their use.
But proponents maintain that the devices — which are used by more than 16,700 law enforcement agencies in 107 countries, said Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser — pose less risk to civilians than firearms and are safer for police officers than physically tackling a suspect. The results of studies of the devices’ safety in humans have been mixed.
Medical experts said on Monday that the new report, published online on Monday in the journal Circulation, makes clear that electrical shocks from Tasers, which shoot barbs into the clothes and skin, can in some cases set off irregular heart rhythms, leading to cardiac arrest.
“This is no longer arguable,” said Dr. Byron Lee, a cardiologist and director of the electrophysiology laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. “This is a scientific fact. The national debate should now center on whether the risk of sudden death with Tasers is low enough to warrant widespread use by law enforcement.”
The author of the study, Dr. Douglas P. Zipes, a cardiologist and professor emeritus at Indiana University, has served as a witness for plaintiffs in lawsuits against Taser — a fact that Mr. Tuttle said tainted the findings. “Clearly, Dr. Zipes has a strong financial bias based on his career as an expert witness,” Mr. Tuttle said in an e-mail, adding that a 2011 National Institute of Justice report concluded there was no evidence that Tasers posed a significant risk of cardiac arrest “when deployed reasonably.”
However, Dr. Robert J. Myerburg, a professor of medicine in cardiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said that Dr. Zipes’s role in litigation also gave him extensive access to data from medical records, police records and autopsy reports. The study, he said, had persuaded him that in at least some of the eight cases, the Taser shock was responsible for the cardiac arrests.
“I think when we put together the preponderance of what we know about electrical shocks with his observations, there’s enough to say that the phenomenon occurs,” he said. But he added, “I suspect the incidence of these fatal events is going to be low and can be minimized by the precautions.”
Police officers, he said, should take precautions when using the weapons and avoid multiple shocks, prolonged shocks and shocks to the chest.
“I’d rather see Tasers out there than bullets flying around,” Dr. Myerburg said. “But if you have a choice, if the circumstances allow you to avoid either, then physical restraint should be considered.”
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