CNN video Cal lawyer vs BofA

Scientology on trial in France- BBC

Gregorio de la Rosa, and his son

Raymondville, Texas:
Do you remember the Wackenhut corporation? Apparently they've changed their name and are now the GEO group, but they still run private prisons for a profit and they get themselves in hot water due to their employees' wanton or grossly neglectful behavior. They just lost in their attempt to persuade a Texas appeals court to overturn a 42.5 million dollar judgment for wrongful death:

Houston Chronicle, "Appellate court upholds judgment in inmate's death"

A Willacy County jury had ordered Wackenhut Corrections Corp., now known as The GEO Group, and Warden David Forrest to pay the civil judgment to the family of Gregorio de la Rosa Jr."We find that Wackenhut's conduct was clearly reprehensible and, frankly, constituted a disgusting display of disrespect for the welfare of others and for this state's civil justice system," the Thirteenth Court of Appeals said in last week's ruling affirming the Willacy County civil judgment returned in 2006.

De la Rosa died a few days before his expected 2001 release, when two inmates used padlocks stuffed into socks to beat him to death.

and, from The Brownsville Herald, a PDF of the 114 page opinion. (Raymondville is Deep South Texas, near Brownsville, which is right on the border with Mexico and one of the chronically economically-deprived areas in the state. In the Rio Grande Valley the recession isn't something new but a continuation of the Nixon/Ford era one. ( The Valley is also heavily Democratic, but this is Texas and you know, funding priorities being what they are-- what can you do? )

The Thirteenth Court of Appeals issued its opinion in the case of Wackenhut Corrections Corporation and Warden David Forrest versus Gregorio de la Rosa Sr. His son, Gregorio de la Rosa Jr., was beaten to death with a lock wrapped in a sock while he was an inmate at the Wackenhut private prison in Willacy County on April 26, 2001.

CLICK HERE for the 114 page opinion.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Murder one

Melinda Henneberger writes in Slate:

On today's episode of "Hey, a Girl Can Dream", my man Benedict decides that as long as he's in the neighborhood, he should stroll on over to the Supreme Court and spend a couple of minutes protesting the death penalty, by lethal injection or otherwise. The high court is a short walk from the White House, where the president told the pope that Americans "need your message that all of life is sacred.'' And what better way to get that message out?

Maybe Il Papa didn't say anything because he knew the court was discussing capital punishment and child rape, the latter a sore point for the Catholic church. I have to believe ole JP2 would've spoken out, irrespective of the fallout. In a related article, "The Supreme Court jump-starts the machinery of death", Dahlia Lithwick writes:

Fisher says that if you look at the pair of recent cases that banned capital punishment for mentally retarded offenders (in 2002) and juvenile offenders (in 2005), it's clear the social consensus is trending away from the death penalty. Then, Roberts jumps in to argue that the "evolving standards of decency" test should not be a one-way ratchet. Does this trend "only work one way?" he asks. "How are you ever supposed to get consensus moving in the opposite direction? … Do 20 states have to get together and do it at the same time?"
[...]
Roberts says the clear trend that matters is not the one Fisher points to but rather that "more and more states are passing statutes imposing the death penalty in situations that do not result in death."
[...]
Roberts continues in this vein: The cases declining to allow capital punishment for minors or the mentally retarded, he says, are "qualitatively different" from the distinction here between child rape and murder, because they focus on the "culpability of the offender" as opposed to the nature of the offense. And Kennedy adds that "even the countries of Europe which have joined the European Convention on human rights" permit the death penalty for treason. He says that on the continent, "You can slaughter your fellow citizens, but if you offend the state, you can be put to death." Then, Scalia asks Fisher if he thinks "treason is worse than child rape." Fisher replies that all the professional sex-assault groups and social workers have lined up against making child rape a capital crime.

Why Kennedy and Scalia decided go down the nonsensical side road of comparing treason with child rape is beyond me. It makes me wonder if it's a gesture of contempt for the plaintiff(and the defense), suggesting their minds were made up. Lithwick's article is 1695 words, and not once does she mention anybody discussing the question of whether or not a mandatory death sentence for child rape makes rapists more likely to kill their victims. My sense is this is in fact the case, and it's a much more important than Scalia's asinine question about child rape and treason.

The court upheld the law regarding lethal injection, and although they discussed allowing child rape to be a capital crime that's not what this past week's decision(Baze v. Rees) was about, at least not principally.

I don't know if the death penalty is wrong in the abstract. Certainly most of the people sentenced to death are probably terrible characters, and there is some evidence it can have a deterrence effect. But I note the series of overturned convictions for capital crimes, and I believe that the death penalty as it's practiced certainly is wrong, and part of that is us. People lie, or hide rather than testify, or forget or conflate or confuse events. Zealous cops and prosecutors make mistakes, evidence gets lost, or even worse, "lost", juries decide based on prejudices, etc. There's no reason to believe that putting together some blue-ribbon panel of experts to "fix" the death penalty will fix human nature. The Dallas Morning News says that there have been 16 overturned cases in Dallas county alone :

The disturbing spate of DNA exonerations of Texas inmates is the most powerful argument for freezing Texas' machinery of death. Dallas County has the distinction of having more discredited cases than any county nationwide. Just this week, a 16th wrongful conviction was announced here. Thomas Clifford McGowan Jr. spent 23 years imprisoned by the state stemming from a rape in Richardson that he didn't commit.

How many people have been wrongly executed without getting that review of evidence after 6 or 10 or 17 years? We'll never know, but we can be pretty sure the number isn't zero.



The same problems exist with child rape convictions, although possibly to a lesser degree. But for a different practical reason, executing child rapists is a terrible idea. I'm flabbergasted that so many people think of it in terms of vengeance and don't seem to be concerned that a child rapist, having raped his victim and knowing he's liable to be executed if he's caught even if he lets her live, now has the perverse incentive to kill his victim and dispose of her to make sure she never talks. When the law encourages this, the law acts to protect the righteousness of the uninvolved.

Why don't people think about this? Do they see it as an irrelevant question?


see also Reuters: "The death penalty in the United States" and

Wall St. Journal Lawblog:"should the death penalty extend to non-homicides?"
[893-482]

Wexler and impeachment

from the stalwart Jonathan Schwarz:

"Rep. Robert Wexler has set up with Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin a web site calling for impeachment hearings for Cheney. The significance of this is that they're all on the Judiciary Committee, where the hearings would be held -- and Wexler is seen as "moderate" (he's not even in the progressive caucus) and is listened to by other Congressmembers in a way, say, Kucinich is not. This indicates the Democratic center of gravity is shifting on impeachment."

www.wexlerwantshearings.com

is it possible to remain hopeful while being exceptionally cynical about the likely end result? I don't know-- I try to be as positive as Jon Schwarz, and franky wonder from time to time how he manages it. So, I encourage you to click over and sign Wexler's petition, which I'm told has had over 60,000 signatures in the 1st 48 hours.

this n' that

stylin' in Montevideo. photo: cardomain.com

via groovy Avedon:

Piracy not raiding CD sales" The enforcement arm of the Australian music industry has dismissed damaging overseas research that found illegal music sharing actually increased CD sales. The study, conducted by two researchers at the University of London for the Canadian Government, found people downloaded songs illegally because they wanted to hear them before buying or because they were not available in stores."

and, 3/7ths of a Paul Goyette post:

2. Some interesting analysis of a couple of the presidential candidates' speech patterns by Mark Liberman.

4. A style guide for citing blogs, from the National Library of Medicine.

7. And I wanted to mention, before we get too far along into the month, that it's National Novel Writing Month again. If you have that great idea, you should get started now...

(you still have 21 days and 4 minutes;PG mentioned this on the 2nd, unlike slothful me. If you don't read locussolus regularly, how is that my fault? Anyway, get to work!)

a Delara update; no. 2

courtesy savedelara.com

Indigo wrote to Rob to let us know about Care2, whose URL has recently changed. Care2 is another website discussing Delara Darabi, the young Iranian lady I told you about before(also here), who is scheduled to be executed, and about whom an international effort and online petitions to stop said execution are afoot.

and a reminder, the English-language online petition is here.

Jean Charles de Menezes

photos:reuters, daily mail(UK) of Charles de Menezes, and his mother Maria.


July 2005,from Wikipedia's entry:

Initially, police falsely claimed that he was wearing bulky clothing, had vaulted the ticket barriers and run from police. The government also issued information that he was staying in the UK illegally. It soon become clear that de Menezes did not vault and run from the police, but police did not correct the misinformation until the correct information was leaked to the press. They later issued an apology, saying that they had mistaken him for a suspect in the previous day's failed bombings and acknowledging that Menezes in fact had no explosives and was unconnected with the attempted bombings.

August 21, 2005, from The Sunday Times,
Executed: "Anatomy of a police killing"

The real story of how an innocent man was shot by police is only now beginning to emerge. Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas investigates the accusations of incompetence and cover-up The day after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police at Stockwell Underground station, his grieving relatives and one of his closest friends filed into a mortuary to identify his body. They found him covered in a thin sheet and his face, unmarked, was ghostly white.

Gesio de Avila, a friend and fellow worker, looked carefully over the body, confused by de Menezes’s peaceful repose. Where were the wounds from the seven bullets to the head that killed him?

“Every bit of colour had left his face, but apart from that it was normal,” de Avila said last week. “There was a bandage on his head behind his ear and when I looked closer, I realised what had happened. He had been shot several times in the back of the head. It was like he had been killed by bandits.”

wikipedia, cont'd:

...Later, a security agency source said: “This take-out is the signature of a special forces operation. It is not the way the police usually do things. We know members of SO19 have been receiving training from the SAS, but even so, this has special forces written all over it.” [1]

[1] Cusick, James. "A COVER-UP? AND IF SO ... WHY?", Sunday Herald, 21 August 2005. (expired link)

December 2005 – Rigoberto Alpizar was fatally shot at Miami International Airport by two United States of America Federal Air Marshals in similar circumstances.

BBC:"Probe after Miami airport killing"

Investigations have begun after US air marshals on board an American Airlines flight on Wednesday shot and killed a man who started acting suspiciously.

May 11th, 2007, CNN: LONDON, England (AP) --

No disciplinary action will be taken against 11 officers involved in a surveillance operation that ended in the death of a Brazilian man who was mistaken for a terrorist and gunned down in the subway days after the 2005 London transit bombings, a police commission said Friday.

Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot seven times in the head by Scotland Yard anti-terror officers as he sat on a London subway train July 22, 2005 -- two weeks after four suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 commuters on three subway trains and a bus, and a day after a failed set of attacks.

a Delara update

(the banner above is supposed to take you here. I'll fix it later.)

from myspace's Help Delara bulletin:
Subject: Delara's final appeal is filed

According to Etemaad newspaper, the final appeal to Iran's head of judiciary was filed by Delara Darabi's attorney. Abdolsamad Khoramshahi told the newspaper " In murder cases, confessions alone are unacceptable and only serve as a supporting cause to help the judge verify the facts. Delara only once in the beginning after her arrest- with a specific intention- accepted the responsibility of murder but for the past three years she has been screaming that her confession was false and she is innocent. Obviously reenactment of the crime scene which was promised by the judge who issued the death sentence would easily help discover the facts

Khoramshahi is hopeful that Ayatollah Shahrudi, head of Iran's judiciary would stop the death sentence.

where credit is due: earlier I said there was a dearth of discussion of Delara's situation in the blogosphere. First, let me praise Jonathan Schwarz and Avedon Carol for mentioning Delara's plight. I wrote to roughly a dozen bigshot lefty bloggers regarding ms. Delara, and Jon n' Avedon responded. You other guys, well, no X-mas cards for you. Coincidentally, I note that conservo majordomo Glenn Reynolds, whom I didn't contact, posted about Delara, here.