Category: Criminal justice reform

“Death by Fire”: Frontline tackles the Willingham Case

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Cameron Todd Willingham and Governor Rick Perry

The PBS program Frontline will be airing a program on the Cameron Todd Willingham story, “Death by Fire“, beginning October 19.  Click on the link to watch a 30 second promo.  I have pasted the text version of the teaser below.

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

Several controversial death penalty cases are currently under examination in Texas and in other states, but it’s the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham — convicted for the arson deaths of his three young children — that’s now at the center of the national debate.

In Death by Fire, FRONTLINE’s season premiere, airing Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE gains unique access to those closest to the Willingham case — meticulously examining the evidence used to convict Willingham, offering an in-depth portrait of those most impacted by the case, and exploring the explosive implications of the execution of a possibly innocent man. (more…)

Willingham review is put on hold

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Cameron Todd Willingham with one of his daughters

A three-judge pane representing the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin has ordered Judge Charlie Baird to put an immediate stop to a hearing into the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. 

Here’s the good news: Judge Baird’s hearing concluded just before the order arrived.

Now the bad news: Judge Baird will not be able to hand down a formal ruling until the stay is lifted. (more…)

Texas Judge gets off on a technicality

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This story probably won’t get the attention it deserves.  It’s too complicated.  Here’s the simple version:
 
Michael Wayne Richard was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 27, 2007.  Earlier that day, the federal Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the claim that Kentucky’s three-drug lethal injection protocol constituted cruel and unusual punishment.  Since Texas uses a similar method of execution, Michael Richard’s attorneys wanted to file a federal writ asking that their client’s execution be stayed until the Kentucky case was decided.  A stay would have allowed Richard’s attorneys  to make an “Atkins claim” or mental retardation defense.  Unfortunately, they couldn’t file at the federal level until all state remedies had been exhausted.  They had two complicated writs to write and only a few hours to get the work done.  That’s where Texas Judge Sharon Keller enters the picture. (more…)

Pimping the Culture War

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Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter says that Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim; he’s an atheist. 

How does she know that?  Because Obama is a liberal, and all liberals are atheists.

Glenn Beck says Jim Wallis of Sojourners is a Marxist.  How does he know that?  Because Wallis believes in economic justice, liberation theologians talk about economic justice, and liberation theologians have been influenced by Marxist thought. 

Beck’s real target isn’t Jim Wallis, it’s Barack Obama.  Jim Wallis is Jeremiah Wright and Jeremiah Wright is Barack Obama, hence, the president is a Marxist.

Are Beck and Coulter serious?  Do they believe their own rhetoric?

Yes and no.  Yes, because their most bizarre statements “feel” right.  No, because Beck and Coulter are so concerned about getting the fans on the red side of the stadium cheering and the fans in the blue seats leaping in alarm that they don’t really care about the rightness or wrongness of their statements.  Or, to put it another way, a remark that gets the fans up and hollering is a good statement, and if the fans are sitting on their hands the message needs to be tweaked.

According to the New York Times, Ann Coulter recently shifted in a more gay-friendly direction (conservatives love gays; we just don’t like gay marriage) because she couldn’t compete with conservatives who are even more extreme than she is.  

The culture war is a marketing gimmick designed to keep the contributions rolling in.  It’s like one of those funny mirrors on the circus midway; what you see shouldn’t be mistaken for reality. (more…)

Prophetic Imagination, The Greatest Prayer, and Mass Incarceration

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By Charles Kiker

This is something of a response to and expansion of Alan Bean’s recent post, “Marcus Borg’s radical Christianity.” In this post Dr. Bean mentioned Walter Brueggemann and John Dominic Crossan in passing. I respond by expanding on the thought of those two scholars, and relate their perspectives to the issue of mass incarceration.

Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann is the author of The Prophetic Imagination. The second edition was copyrighted in 2001, so it does not qualify as a recent contribution. But it only recently came to my attention.

Brueggemann presents the Hebrew culture as represented by Moses as an alternative community to the royal, person negating culture of Egypt. The culture of Egypt was anti-freedom not only for humanity, but also for God. This counterculture to royalty and the perks of royalty persisted in Hebrew life for a couple of centuries or so before a new royalty, a counter-counterculture, took root under David and thrived under Solomon and his successors in both Hebrew kingdoms. The prophets beginning in the 8th century BCE, some of them at least, broke free from tradition to provide a new counter voice to the royal consciousness of privilege and power that had arisen in the Hebrew kingdoms.

Jeremiah was the prophet of pain; Deutero-Isaiah the prophet of hope. Pain is a necessary predecessor to hope, lament a predecessor to praise in the confrontation between the royal consciousness of privilege and power and the radical freedom of and in God.  I have this quote from Brueggemann written in the margin of my Bible at Psalm 23, “It is precisely those who know death most painfully who can speak hope most vigorously” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 67). Brueggemann cautions that social policy is not necessarily in the purview of the prophet, and that anguish is more fitting than anger as prophetic attitude. (more…)

Marcus Borg’s Radical Christianity

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Marcus Borg

Nancy Bean didn’t have a wish list for her birthday this year; she issued a birthday decree.  All five Beans were to purchase a copy of Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith and read at least the first five chapters.  We would then meet at our daughter Lydia’s home in Waco to discuss the book over birthday cake.

The discussion was loud, lively and long.  Sons Adam and Amos suspected that Borg’s version of Christianity existed primarily inside his own head.  Lydia gave the book thumbs up, but said she favored the more evangelical theology of NT Wright. 

Marcus Borg is part of an emerging cadre of Christian intellectuals calling for a new understanding of Christian theology, spirituality and ethics.  Anglican Bishop NT Wright, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, Roman Catholic theologian John Dominic Crossan and the “emerging church” writer Brian McLaren have also contributed to this project. 

They don’t agree on all points, of course, but Borg’s The Heart of Christianity comes as close to a consensus statement as you are likely to find.  Conservative scholars may quibble with Borg’s assertion that the Bible is “a human product;” but, increasingly, leading Christian thinkers are being drawn to similar conclusions. (more…)

Thomas Merton: “the saint is never offended”

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 Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who spent his later years at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  Merton’s mature thought combined insights from western and eastern spirituality.

Some men seem to think that a saint cannot possibly take a natural interest in anything created.  They imagine that any form of spontaneity or enjoyment is a sinful gratification of “fallen nature”.  That to be “supernatural” means obstructing all spontaneity with clichés and arbitrary references to God.  The purpose of these clichés is, so to speak, to hold everything at arms length, to frustrate spontaneous reactions, to exorcise feelings of guilt.  Or perhaps to cultivate such feelings!  One wonders sometimes if such morality is not after all a love of guilt!
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Montana Governor says he is conflicted about the death penalty

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Montana Governor, Brian Schweitzer

Montana’s Governor must decide whether Ronald Smith will live or die.

Smith is from Red Deer, Alberta, a midsize city located midway between Calgary and Edmonton.  He was drunk and high at the time of the murders and, the evidence would suggest, also mentally unbalanced.  Initially, he turned down a plea deal that would have taken the death penalty off the table.  Then he pled guilty and asked for the death penalty, telling a jury that he committed the crime because he wanted to know how it felt to kill.  Ultimately, he decided he didn’t want to die after all.  The case has been bouncing around in the legal system for a quarter century.

Stephen Harper, Canada’s conservative Prime Minister, had no intention of interceding on Ronald Smith’s behalf, but the Canadian courts forced his hand.  Canada, like virtually every other western democracy, abolished capital punishment long ago.  As in the United Kingdom, the death penalty died in Canada without much public clamor.  Most Canadians supported capital punishment in 1976 (as they still do), but leading public figures didn’t think public support made the ultimate punishment moral or even an effective deterrent.  (more…)

Blackburn: Stop using ‘junk science’ in the courtroom

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Jeff Blackburn

 

This opinion piece was published in the Houston Chronicle under the names of several authors, but the Amarillo Globe-News version simply mentions Jeff Blackburn, so I am assuming he is the author.   “Stop presenting ‘junk science’ in capital trials” Blackburn says.  You can find the heart of his argument pasted at the end of my remarks. 

The focus here is on Texas, but the problem is nationwide.  In the most recent Curtis Flowers trial, one ballistics expert testified that he could say with 100% certainty that the gun stolen from Doyle Simpson’s car was the murder weapon.  A second expert restricted himself to the obvious: the evidence didn’t lend itself to 100% certainty about anything.  All any competent ballistics expert could say for sure was that the evidence found at the crime scene was consistent with the .380 pistol allegedly stolen from Mr. Simpson’s car, but the shell casings could also have come from a similar weapon. 

Blackburn concentrates on expert witnesses who don’t know what they are talking about; but a lot of expert testimony is biased in favor of the prosecution because that’s where the money is.  Indigent defendants rarely have the money to hire their own experts and most capital defendants are indigent.  

In Blackburn’s opinion, the Cameron Todd Willingham case isn’t primarily about the execution of an innocent man; it’s about junk science. 

Do we really have to choose here? (more…)

Balko on prosecutorial misconduct

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Radley Balko

In his most recent column, Radley Balko discusses prosecutorial misconduct in the federal criminal justice system.  Abuse is rampant, he says, and prosecutors who break the rules rarely face consequences.  You can find the first two paragraphs below:

Misbehaving Federal Prosecutors

A USA Today investigation finds egregious misconduct at the Department of Justice, with few consequences.

Radley Balko, September 27, 2010

Last week, USA Today published the results of a six-month investigation into misconduct by America’s federal prosecutors. The investigation turned up what Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman called a pattern of “serious, glaring misconduct.” Reporters Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy documented 201 cases in which federal prosecutors were chastised by federal judges for serious ethical breaches, ranging from withholding important exculpatory evidence to lying in court to making incriminating but improper remarks in front of juries.

The list is by no means comprehensive, and doesn’t claim to be. I checked the paper’s website for examples of egregious misconduct reported here at Reason: U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan’s politically-charged prosecution of Pennsylvania doctor Bernard Rottschaefer; Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson’s outrageous persecution of the Colomb family in Louisiana; and the bogus Mann Act charges brought against Mississippi heart surgeon, Dr. Roger Wiener. None are among the cases in USA Today’s database. The paper should be lauded for its groundbreaking investigation, but as the reporters themselves acknowledge, they’ve really only scratched the surface. (The investigation also only looked at federal cases, which comprise just a tiny portion of the country’s total criminal prosecutions.)  You can find the rest of Balko’s column here.