Category: “Social Justice”

Journey Back to Parchman, Hank Thomas

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Hank Thomas in 1961

Fifty years ago, Hank Thomas entered Parchman prison as a Freedom Rider.  I highlighted this distressing chapter of the Mississippi civil rights struggle in a post designed to establish historical context for the Curtis Flowers case.  Recently, I shared a personal encounter with Parchman when I unsuccessfully attempted to visit Curtis Flowers.  Last week, Hank Thomas was greeted with smiles and handshakes; in 1961 he was welcomed to Parchman by sneering guards.  

Reilly Morse, a senior attorney and a founding staff member in the Biloxi office of the Mississippi Center for Justice, has shared his reflections on Hank Thomas’s return to the notorious plantation prison.  Hank’s personal account is pasted below.  Both articles appear in the most recent edition of Facing South, a publication of the Institute for Southern Studies. (more…)

Legal nightmare ends for the Richardson family

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Mark and Vergil Richardson

District Judge Robert Mohoney has dropped all criminal charges against Mark Richardson, Vergil Richardson, Jermichole Richardson and Xavier Richardson, bringing a three-year legal nightmare to an end. 

This ruling comes as no surprise.  Once Judge John McCraw Jr. forced the presiding judge, John Miller, to recuse himself, the outcome was virtually automatic.  Judge Mahoney was appointed to replace Miller and it didn’t take him long to make the only sensible call available to him.

The big surprise in this case is that charges were filed against these defendants in the first place.  No one has ever accused the Texas Attorney General’s office of being soft on drug crime, but when Nicole Habersang reviewed the facts she knew what she had to do.  That’s when things got really strange.   When Ms. habersang filed a motion requesting that charges against all but one defendant be dropped, Judge Miller refused to cooperate.  (more…)

Mississippi parole board takes up the Scott Sisters case

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Supporters of Jamie and Gladys Scott are beginning to believe that this legal travesty will soon be rectified. 

An October 12th column by Bob Herbert of the New York Times appears to have ruffled feathers in the Magnolia State.   Herbert suggested that double life sentences for a robbery netting $11 might sound ludicrous but “This is Mississippi we’re talking about, a place that in many ways has not advanced much beyond the Middle Ages.”

Will Herbert’s comments make the Mississippi Parole Board more or less likely to do the right thing?  According to an even-handed article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the attorneys and activists calling for justice in the Scott sisters case take a more hopeful view.

Is Mississippi captive to a medieval mentality? (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…)

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…)

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.

Eddie Long’s Gospel

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Bishop Eddie Long

My post on Bishop Eddie Long has been raising eyebrows. Many readers agree with my critique of the “prosperity gospel”; others find it offensive. One reader, who asked to be taken off my distribution list, was horrified by my perceived willingness to throw Bishop Eddie to the wolves before he has his day in court.

A few words of clarification are in order.

Eddie Long’s guilt or innocence is not my primary concern. The state of Georgia has filed no charges against the Bishop; this is a civil case. When the weak find themselves on a collision course with the strong, my sympathies are with the weak (the strong can take care of themselves). Eddie Long has always been the man with all the power. Having transformed himself into an authority figure of superhuman stature, the pastor assumed the mantle of responsibility.

Pastor Long has compared to himself as David up against Goliath. That image should be reversed. Yesterday, thirty-two pastors came to Long’s church to commiserate with him and show their support. Goliath received that kind of encouragement from the Philistines; David was on his own. (more…)