Friends of Justice board member Mark Osler is featured in this USA Today article on the crack-powder sentencing disparity in the federal system. 

Federal sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine, a drug created for and marketed to a poor, predominantly African-American clientele, are one hundred times higher than sentencing guidelines for powder cocaine, the drug of preference among affluent, predominantly white users.  Osler, a former federal prosecutor and Baylor law professor, thinks this disparity should be eliminated completely.  I agree.

The article highlights the failure of the Obama administration to consider a single clemency appeal.  Thus far, the administration has refused to answer questions on the subject.  Although Obama is fully aware of the racist implications of the crack-powder sentencing discrepancy, he has also failed to address that issue since becoming president.

In a 2007 address at Howard University (in which he also demonstrated a nuanced grasp of then-current Jena 6 issue) Obama signalled his opposition to the 100-1 crack-powder sentencing discrepancy.  But that speech was intended for an African-American audience and was not widely publicized.  Now that his every word becomes grist for the culture war mill, Obama is reluctant to hand the opposition a potential weapon.

And make no mistake, responding to a single clemency petition or outspoken support for eliminating the crack-powder divide would open this president to a barrage of criticism. 

I attended a gathering this morning on the creation of a church in Arlington, Texas designed for ex-offenders.   Stan Basler, a pastor and attorney who leads the United Methodist Redemption Church in Oklahoma City asked a profound question: “Have we reached the point in our culture where vindictiveness becomes a virtue?”

You betcha!

That’s why a progressive politician like Bill Clinton ramped up the machinery of mass incarceration–he didn’t want to look soft on crime.

President Obama is following the same unfortunate (some would say, cowardly) path.

This is tragic.  Consider the sad story of Donna Stites.  Unless Donna is granted clemency she will die in prison.  Donna has so much to contribute in the free world and there is no earthly reason to keep her locked up.  But, in the current punitive environment, will Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels or President Obama even consider a clemency appeal? 

I hope so.  I hope Congress finds the moral courage to eliminate the crack-powder discrepancy.  I hope President Obama breaks with the politics of mass incarceration. 

But Obama won’t do the right thing without popular support. 

Thank you, professor Osler, for adding your voice to an important conversation.

Last week, Arizona passed the most aggressive immigration legislation in recent history.  The law is so sweeping that staunch conservatives like Karl Rove and Tom Tancredo have come out against it. 

Arizona’s new law, signed by the governor on Friday, requires immigrants to carry documentation verifying their immigration status. Police officers will now be required to question a person’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that person may be illegally in the country.

There are two obvious problems here.  It is almost certainly unconstitutional to require an American to provide documentation unless there is strong evidence of a crime or driving infraction.  Officers can’t just stop people on the street and ask for ID.

And what sort of reasonable suspicion would prompt a police officer to ask for proof of citizenship?  (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.)

On June 7, 2010, Curtis Flowers will go to trial for a sixth time on the same murder charges.  That has never happened before in the state of Mississippi.

It has never happened anywhere in America.

Why has it been so difficult for the state to get a final conviction?  The first three trials were overturned on sustained charges of prosecutorial misconduct.

The last two trials ended in hung juries.

In trial four, all seven white jurors voted to convict while all five black jurors held out for acquittal.  How do we account for this racial divide?

It comes down to life experience.  White jurors identify with the victims of a crime that left four defenseless people dead inside a Winona furniture store.  Bertha Tardy and Carmen Rigby were prominent members of the local white community; their deaths shocked and outraged their friends and families.  Young Bobo Stewart had his entire life ahead of him.

Race figures prominently in the Flowers saga, but this is also a story about relationship.  At the courthouse, a brother of the slain Robert Golden, an African-American, sits with the families of the white victims.  Like them, he sees this case through the lens of grief.

Black jurors in Montgomery County aren’t indifferent to the deep sorrow surrounding them.  They too want the person (or persons) responsible for the Tardy tragedy to pay.  But black jurors have a hard time seeing the Curtis Flowers they know as the triggerman. (more…)

Over at Religion Dispatches Lauri Lebo has a good piece on the “Texas Textbook Massacre”.  What lies at the root of this nasty exercise in historical revisionism?  According to Lebo, “the board is clearly rewriting history to fit a conservative agenda and a Christian dominant worldview.”

Not all Christians see this as a good thing.  Jesus proclaimed an upside-down kingdom in which the first would be last and the last first.  Jesus envisioned a church in which the servant is greatest of all.   You don’t create that kind of culture through censorship and propaganda.  Any attempt to force the larger society into a Christian mold is the death knell of true Christianity.

Can there be any real peace between “a conservative agenda” and Jesus-style Christianity?  What kind of a social studies text book would Jesus write?

At the end of her article, Lebo lists what she considers the ten most egregious changes to the social studies curriculum in Texas.  Note the shift from an inclusive worldview that celebrates diversity and honors “the least of these” to an exclusive conservatism that vaunts the folks in the big house while denigrating the shack-dwelling share croppers who are just lucky to be on the plantation. (more…)

Haley Barbour thinks that honoring the Confederacy while ignoring slavery “don’t mean diddly.”  The Mississippi Governor assures us that slavery was a bad thing and all that; it just isn’t worth mentioning.

I just got back last night from a week in Winona and the Mississippi Delta and I think I know where Barbour is coming from.  A professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS told me that the school was 41% African-American and over 50% white. 

“How do the white and black students get along?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” he said, “when you consider that almost all our white kids come from all-white academies created a generation ago to skirt federal integration orders.”

Talking about race and history in Mississippi is much like bringing up the Holocaust in Germany.  People avoid the issue. 

This explains why the Curtis Flowers story has received almost no coverage in Mississippi.  Nothing about this case makes any sense unless you understand the racial and historical context.  People can’t talk about Flowers without talking about race and history, so they just ignore the story.

Haley Barbour doesn’t see the point of bringing up a subject that makes black people angry and white people uncomfortable.  So, when Virgina Governor Bob McDonnell celebrated confederate heritage month without mentioning slavery he was simply exercising the gentile selectivity in which southern whites with political aspirations must become proficient.  It didn’t mean diddly.

Remember, the Mississippi state flag proudly incorporates the stars and bars.  Mississippians have no problem with black folks celebrating Martin Luther King Day so long as white folks are free to celebrate Robert E. Lee on the same day.  Celebrating only Dr. King would lend respectability to the civil rights movement; adding the Lee option allows white folks to celebrate the heritage of white supremacy.  Different strokes for different folks.  Ya’ll go to your black public schools and we’ll send our kids to lily white academies.  You celebrate civil rights and we’ll honor a culture rooted in slavery and Jim Crow.  Ya’ll vote Democrat, we’ll vote Republican and see who comes out on top.

You if you are black in Mississippi and you want to make it in the mainstream you must adapt to this good-natured apartheid.

Folks in Mississippi are very polite . . . and very nervous.

Fortunately, Haley Barbour’s “diddly” comment has sparked interest in the very issues Mr. Barbour disdains.  This Eugene Robinson column reflects the view from the left, while this instructive piece from Henry Louis Gates explores the complicity of African rulers in the slave trade, a topic Haley Barbour (and our friends at the Council of Conservative Citizens) may find more to their liking.  Those who accused Dr. Gates of wearing civil rights blinders need to check this out.  The slave trade, like the holocaust, reveals the “desperately wicked” condition of the human heart.  Nazis and Confederates have no corner on the sin market.   Hate and bigotry are spiritual diseases to which none of us are immune.

“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…)