Texas pool party incident shows that Jim Crow’s ‘black codes’ may still be in effect

(theGrio)  Swimming while black is a crime? Or having a black pool party? Maybe the police in Texas have lost their minds. Then again, maybe the Lone Star state still denies black people the freedom to assemble, just like the black codes.

A police officer was placed on administrative leave after a video surfaced of police detaining, manhandling and cursing at black teenagers at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The officers reportedly broke up the party after complaints in the neighborhood that there were too many black young people in the area. An officer is seen pinning a 14-year old girl to the ground and grabbing her by the breasts, and pulling a gun on young men who attempt to intervene. “Call my mama, oh God!” the young woman is heard shouting as the officer forces her to the ground. “On your face!” the officer orders her as he slams her, crying, to the ground, face first.

Video visitation: Jails and corporations profit from the poor

(theGrio)  Video visitation is coming to a county jail near you.

Families can take advantage of new technology and talk to their loved ones through video conferencing. On the surface, the concept sounds good.

What could go wrong? What’s wrong is when you mix prisons and profits and companies make money off the backs of prisoners and their loved ones.

Texas is embarking on a revenue-generating scheme that is catching on across the country. Of the 254 counties on the Lone Star state, 13 have signed contracts with a private company to provide video visitation to inmates in county jails. Sixty percent of the people in Texas jails are awaiting trial and are guilty of nothing except not being able to afford to post bond, while the remaining 40 percent are serving a sentence.

Georgia wants to execute Warren Hill and violate the Constitution

Georgia is about to execute a mentally disabled man in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, the state of Georgia will execute a man that everyone agrees is mentally retarded.  A state court determined that a decade ago.  The execution would violate the U.S. Constitution if carried out, but apparently that standard is not good enough for the Peach State.

Warren Lee Hill, Jr., who has an I.Q. of 70, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on July 23.  His original execution date of July 18 was postponed due to changes in the state’s execution drug protocol.  Georgia, which once used a three-drug cocktail, has opted for a single drug dosage of pentobarbital—a sedative used to put down dogs and cats that has been banned for export by the European Union.

On July 18, Texas used pentobarbital to execute Yokamon Hearn.  Hearn was a mentally impaired man who, according to his defense, suffered mental impairments due to his mother’s prenatal drinking, and abuse from his parents.

In his order denying relief to Hill, Superior Court Judge Thomas H. Wilson wrote that Hill meets the criteria of mental retardation by a preponderance of the evidence.  In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court  mandated the states to protect people with mental retardation because there is a “special risk of wrongful execution” because of their disabilities.

Writing for the majority in Atkins, Justice Stevens opined that the mentally disabled should not be executed because it provides no deterrent effect, and that such offenders are not culpable to deserve such a form of retribution.  He added that with reduced capacity, mentally retarded defendants face a risk of wrongful conviction. They are poor witnesses, may give less meaningful assistance to their lawyers, and their demeanor may give an impression that they lack remorse.

“Those mentally retarded persons who meet the law’s requirements for criminal responsibility should be tried and punished when they commit crimes,” Stevens wrote.  “Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct.  Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings against mentally retarded defendants.”

However, Georgia sees things differently.  Georgia requires defendants to prove they have an intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt—the strictest standard in the nation.  And experts agree Georgia is an outlier, as the only state in the Union with such an unreasonably high burden of proof and an impossible standard to meet.  Yet, the state judge believes that Hill does not meet Georgia’s standard, and that Georgia’s standard does not violate the U.S. Constitution.

Many have already spoken out on this case.  Several jurors from the case said they would have sentenced Hill to life without parole if they had the option.  Former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn Carter called for clemency, and the victim’s family called for a commutation of his sentence.  Mental health advocacy groups, including the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, the Arc of Georgia and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) have called for a stay of Hill’s execution as well.

Further, the international community has voiced its opposition to the execution.  Christof Heyns—the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions—said Hill’s execution “would be a fatality in violation of international as well as domestic law.”

Georgia has a history of problems in its application of the death penalty, often making big mistakes by playing fast and loose with justice.  In 2005, the state of Georgia granted a posthumous pardon to Lena Baker.  A black maid who was executed in 1945 for killing a white man she said enslaved and beat her, Baker was the only woman executed in Georgia’s electric chair.  Her last words were "What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself ... I am ready to meet my God."

And last September—despite strong indications of innocence, an international outcry and a petition of 1 million signatures— Georgia sent a man named Troy Davis to his death.  The execution of Troy Davis, despite the absence of a murder weapon, physical evidence or DNA linking him to the crime, placed the spotlight on Georgia and the injustices of the death penalty.  This, in a state where five death row inmates have been exonerated.

And Georgia is in the spotlight once again, as it plans to execute Warren Hill, a mentally ill man.   And as the state decides to go it alone— flying in the face of the Constitution— the attention it receives is an embarrassment.

The Death Penalty as Ritualized Mob Violence

The execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia has outraged many, placing the gruesome and barbaric practice of capital punishment under the microscope.

A black man who at the least was apparently innocent— and at most definitely innocent— was executed despite serious questions about his case.  Most of all, there was ample evidence that Davis was not the man who killed Mark MacPhail, a white off-duty police officer in 1989.

When a white conservative audience cheered presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry over his execution record at a recent debate, it underscored what is wrong with the death penalty.

Even as 138 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973, surely many innocent souls were executed.  But Perry asserted that he does not lose sleep over the notion that someone among the then-234 prisoners he put to death was innocent.

“No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which — when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that’s required,” said Perry.

The governor added, “But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed.”

The shock value of Perry’s assurances that his death machine is thoughtful–the U.S. Supreme Court just stayed two Texas executions—was matched only by the bloodlust of the lynch mob that applauded him.  I say lynch mob because the death penalty, like the motives of a bloodthirsty mob seeking vengeance, was never about guilt or innocence.

Capital punishment is ritual mob violence, plain and simple.

No one claims that the death penalty deters crime, because it doesn’t, and there is no need to go there in any case.  There is no need for a cost-benefit analysis with a form of punishment so purely ritualized— up to the serving of the last meal to the condemned person, symbolizing that which he or she does not deserve.

And diehard supporters of capital punishment will focus on the need for justice and finality for the victims’ families.  Yet they will not entertain the role that race-, class- and politics-driven biases, not to mention outright incompetence and malfeasance, play in the administration of state-sponsored death.

Ancient peoples used the scapegoat as the personification of their hatred, fears and frustrations.  They sacrificed the scapegoat to transfer their sins and cleanse society.  In modern times, scapegoats have served a more rational role of preserving the status quo.

As the social psychologist Eliot Aronson has theorized, people in adverse situations may be inclined to lash out at the source of their problems, but may find it hard to retaliate against the direct cause of their frustrations.  So they lash out against those who are hated, visible and powerless.

Scapegoaters unite to eliminate the perceived cause of their problems, even the randomly selected perpetrator, as social thinker René Girard posits.  Even if there was an actual crime, the mob would not seek the actual perpetrator.  The actual perpetrator is probably a member of the community, and his elimination would bring retaliation.  Rather, a random scapegoat is targeted. Yet, the community will believe that the scapegoat is guilty, that she is actually responsible for the community’s problems.

And the ritual killing either will bring relief to the mob, or further fuel their anger.

Scapegoats are victims of a highly psychological process, but economics and politics are involved as well.  In America, blacks have served historically as the consummate racial scapegoat—blamed for failed policies, accused of committing crimes real or imagined, targeted for violence and their economically exploited.   Stereotypes justified the violence visited upon black people, and a regime of slavery and Jim Crow normalized the dehumanization of people of color.

It is no accident that prisoners of color, particularly blacks and Latinos, are disproportionately represented on death row, or that a vast majority of executions take place in a small number of Southern states where lynching and racial violence were commonplace.  And lynchings were public spectacles where tickets were sold, the spectators had picnics, and members of the crowd kept body parts of the victim as souvenirs.

In the early twentieth century, Southern states, fearing the passing of an anti-lynching statute by Congress, brought lynching into the justice system.  The courts assured the mob that black defendants would receive a quick guilty verdict, provided the mob allowed the system to do its part.

Indeed, the courts served as an effective venue for racial violence.  Between 1924 and 1972, when the Supreme Court found capital punishment unconstitutional, Georgia executed 337 blacks and only 75 whites.

One of those 337 was Lena Baker, the only woman to die in Georgia’s electric chair, known as “Old Sparky.”.  A black maid, her crime was being in an abusive and exploitative relationship with her employer Ernest B. Knight, a white man, who kept her as a slave, threatened her life, and locked her up for days at a time.  One day Baker fought back in an act of self- defense.  The two “tussled” over a pistol, which fired, killing Knight.  She was found guilty of murder by an all-white-male jury, in a trial that lasted less than a full day.  The jury came back after less than a half hour of deliberation.  Baker was pardoned posthumously in 2005, 60 years after her execution.

So the Troy Davis execution, like so many before him, was a lynching.  Remember that with ritualized killings, guilt or innocent is beside the point.  Someone must die, and anyone will do.

The Texas GOP Is A Grand Old Piece of Work

The Texas Republican Party, that bastion of tolerance, goodwill and forward thinking, just released its policy platform. I can't say I was surprised by the contents therein, but nevertheless, I was taken aback by the stunning absurdity emanating from a "mainstream" political party. And they run the state! Of course, these were the folks who gave us the revamped Texas Board of Education, with its textbook whitewashing of the slave trade, and its crimes against truth and reason masquerading as legitimate curriculum changes.

So, in its 25-page manifesto, the Texas GOP really provides a clear sense of its convictions. Some of the positions in the platform are mundane and without distinction, but the devil is in the details. And for people who claim to be Christians, there's little Christ and a lot of devilishness in there.

With regard to government power, the platform calls for the elimination of all executive orders, and the repeal of all previous executive orders. It strongly rejects D.C. statehood and "adding unconstitutional voting Congressional members," and supports non-participation in the census. Further, the Texas GOP platform opposes affirmative action and reparations based on "discriminatory criteria." And the party is against nationalization of land for protecting endangered species or conservation.

In the area of voting rights and elections, the party advocates for the repeal of motor voter laws, re-registering voters every four years, and felon disenfranchisement -- a Jim Crow remnant.

Not surprisingly, the Texas GOP supports public displays of the Ten Commandments, and penalties for desecrating the American flag, and the restoration of some Confederate plaque that was removed from the state's Supreme Court building.

Now here is where it gets really interesting, and Talibanic, dare I say, as if what you've already heard was not sufficiently out of pocket. On the issue of family values, whatever that means, the Republican's policy paper condemns homosexuality and opposes the legalization of sodomy and supports a prohibition on all pornography and strip clubs. Further, they would make it a felony to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, or for a civil official to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony. Of course, the platform is solidly anti-abortion and anti-reproductive rights for women. And it supports lifting the bureaucratic restrictions on corporal discipline for foster children, because foster kids really need more beatings in their life.

Social security would be eliminated under the Texas GOP plan, as would what they euphemistically call "ObamaCare."

Apparently, sex education is a no no, other than the teaching of abstinence before marriage. And the teaching of multiculturalism is out because Martin Luther King, Jr., a Republican, would have wanted it that way.

To round out an astonishing set of policy positions, the Texas Republicans are against any regulations on gun ownership. Oh yeah, and they declare that this is a Judeo-Christian nation. And there should be capital punishment for rape convictions (like the good old days). Deep water oil drilling should resume in the Gulf of Mexico, employers should be able to discriminate, and the minimum wage law should be repealed, they say. No more birthright citizenship -- citizenship by birth would be limited to those born to a U.S. citizen. Finally, the Texas GOP assert that the U.S. should get out of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, one of the standard bearers of the Texas conservatives, Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), recently created some controversy when he apologized to BP for Obama hooking up that $20 billion fund to pay for damages related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In fact, Barton called the fund a "shameful... shakedown." Other Republicans such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Tea Party poster boy Rand Paul expressed their opposition to the fund.

Barton and the Texas Republican Party appear to have a great deal of compassion for the plight of poor behemoth oil companies who wreck the Earth, with oil spills of biblical proportions through corporate malfeasance. Ultra-conservatives reserve their outrage for the times when they believe the rights of large corporations are infringed. And they seek to criminalize homosexuality and those who are different. Yet the Lone Star GOP is not outraged by the crimes committed against the environment, against God's creation, about which these so-called Christians seem to care jack.

This policy paper represents the culmination of bad political decisions that have turned the Republican Party into the hot mess it has become. The Texas case is just an extreme example of the problem. Nationally, the Republicans hitched their wagon to a Southern Strategy that depended on the scapegoating of black people and manipulating white fears for votes. Fundamentalist Christian conservatives and the religious police were a part of the mix, as were pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation right-wingers. Moderate whites fled the party, as did all but a few token people of color. So what remains of the base -- for the most part -- is a dwindling coalition of white nationalists, the morality police and the exceptionally greedy.

Texas -- good barbecue, hot weather, and a brutal history of racial violence. We can add to that one of the most egregious public policy documents in recent memory. Blue Texans, as you know, your work is cut out for you.

Governor Rick Perry And His Texas Death Machine Are In Big Trouble

When criminals are about to be caught, they try to hide their wrongdoing. When drug dealers hear the police sirens, they dump the stash in the alley or flush it down the toilet. When the Nazi officers in the concentration camps heard the allied forces approaching, they destroyed—and in many cases murdered—the evidence. There’s something about the light of day when it shines its truth upon you.

And when a Texas state commission started looking into a report that a faulty arson investigation apparently put an innocent man to death, Gov. Rick Perry replaced the commission and called the dead man a monster.

Because that’s what Southern hick town justice is all about.

Cameron Todd Willingham is now a free man, but unfortunately it took death to release him from the confines of his prison bars. He was executed on February 17, 2004 for the 1991 arson deaths of his three children. Gov. Perry refused to grant him a 30-day stay, despite questions about his guilt. According to a bogus forensics report, Willingham’s house was intentionally burned down.

In 2005, Texas instituted a forensic science commission to investigate mistakes and wrongdoing by forensic scientists. Baltimore fire expert Craig Beyler, who was hired by this commission to look into the Willingham case, concluded that there were no scientific grounds to characterize the fire as an act of arson. As The New Yorker reported, Beyler said the approach of the arson investigator in the case denied rational reasoning, was based on "folklore and mysticism rather than science," and violated "not only the standards of today but even of the time period." This, in a state whose fire investigators typically had a high school diploma, and unlike other states, no requisite experience and no specialized training or qualifications.

So, the Texas commission was reviewing Beyler’s report, and Gov. Perry, running for reelection, eliminated the members of the commission before they could issue their findings. Pure politics. After all, we don’t want people going around and talking about the execution of innocent people.

Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, could find herself in deep trouble. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. For a state such as Texas— with such abysmal standards of integrity in its criminal "justice" system—you must wonder what she did to stand out among the crowd.

Keller refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment of lethal injection. The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed. Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim. "We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent," Judge Keller said. "We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can’t come back later and change their minds."

Keller was unrepentant, and Perry said the execution of Willingham was appropriate based on the "totality of the issues". Ex-governor Mark White suggests that Texas might have to do away with the death penalty altogether, given that it does not deter crime and is unfairly administered, with a risk of executing the innocent. Bad habits are hard to break, and with 423 executions since 1974, including 152 under Gov. George W. Bush, Texas has the most voracious appetite for capital punishment. But perhaps the Willingham case is what is needed to end the barbaric practice.

My take on this subject is that the death penalty never was intended to be fair, as it is a holdover from Jim Crow lynching. Capital punishment was an effort to transplant lynchmob justice into the courtroom and make lynching official, if not respectable. A broken system that was designed to be broken—just clean it up and no one will notice, they thought. Guilt or innocence is of little concern here, as finality reigns supreme. And Judge Keller essentially said as much. It is no accident that the states of the former Confederacy— the states with the most violent racial history, a deep legacy of extrajudicial terror and killings— have been among the most enthusiastic executioners. Interestingly, those states also seem to have the lowest educational and health standards. Typically, the inmates on death row are people of color, and poor white folk like Mr. Willingham, those who lack resources and are unable to afford the best justice money can buy. We will never know how many people have been wrongfully executed. But Cameron Todd Willingham certainly would not have been the first. And perhaps we will never know how many opportunistic individuals have built their political careers on the corpses of the executed, whether guilty or innocent.

Rick Perry and Sharon Keller now have ethical clouds hanging over their heads. They utilized death as a political tool, but now, ironically, the death machine that helped bolster their careers could be their undoing. Yet, both are appropriate spokespersons for the death penalty. They have helped perpetuate an inherently unjust, incompetent and capricious system that legalized the lynchmob.  

Cross-posted from BlackCommentator.com.

Nothing Good Comes Out of Texas

bushorchimp.com

By David A. Love
Published in BlackCommentator.com
September 13, 2007

Eddie Murphy once said, "My friends always told me: 'You better not go to Texas! They'll f*** you up!'" For African Americans in particular, that state has a troubling legacy of racism and violence.

In recent years, there was the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and the mass arrests of the Black population of Tulia, Texas on bogus drug charges.

These days, it seems that the individuals and ideas that are doing the most damage to America come out of Texas. Is it something in the water? The air, perhaps? Sadly, the people of Texas are determined to scrape the bottom of their state barrel, collect whatever it is they have scraped up, and present it to the rest of the country as a cruel and tasteless gift.

Of course there was Karl Rove, the "dirty-tricks" Nixon protégé who masterminded the criminal enterprise that is the current White House.

There was attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, crony extraordinaire who placed loyalty to the president above all else, including the Constitution. There was Tom Delay, exterminator and former G.O.P. congressman who gerrymandered the Texas electoral map into a Republican majority, and was indicted for money laundering and conspiracy to violate election laws.

There was No Child Left Behind, a sham program based on smoke and mirrors, a Texas model for high-stakes, corporate-style accountability in the schools that cooked the books, Enron-style, and covered up the high dropout rates of Black and Latino students.

Most of all, there is the Decider himself, the commander-in-chief who arguably was elected to the presidency twice through theft, and appealed to some people, at least initially, because he was the type of person with whom you wanted to have a beer. Of course, and not surprisingly, history already has been written on the worst presidency in American history, before the repudiated Bush presidency has even ended.

As governor of Texas, Bush presided over a killing machine that is the state's death penalty system. Recently, Texas executed its 400th person since reinstating capital punishment in 1982. And the state, while only 10 percent of the U.S. population, has been responsible for one third of the executions. We will never know how many innocent people have been sent to their deaths under the hick town justice of the Lone Star state.

A direct descendant of the extrajudicial lynchings so popular in the Jim Crow-era South, the death penalty in Texas is a product of frontier justice: racist, expedient, and arbitrary. And it is particularly popular among conservative evangelical Christians. It is no accident that 41 percent of death row inmates in Texas are Black, or that 79 percent of Texas executions involve a white victim. And a public defender system is a new concept in Texas. Remember, this is the state where a court once upheld the conviction of a man whose lawyer slept during trial. And they had no trouble executing juveniles and the mentally retarded until prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court.

The case of inmate Kenneth Foster is a good example of all that is bad about the death penalty, and the way in which Texas metes out its curiously arbitrary, sketchy and racially-tinged form of punishment. Foster was sent to death row under a questionable Texas law known as the law of parties. Under that law, the death penalty is imposed on anyone involved in a crime where a murder took place. This means that you don't actually have to kill anyone in order to receive a death sentence. As for Foster, who is Black, he was driving a car with three passengers, one of whom left the car, got into an altercation and shot a man to death in 1996.

Apparently, the law of parties was too problematic even for the current manager of the Texas killing machine, Gov. Rick Perry. Foster's state-sponsored murder was scheduled for August 30, 2007, amid statewide protests and calls from the European Union that Texas enact a moratorium on the death penalty. Perry responded to these outside agitators: "230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas."

Then, days later, despite his tough talk, the governor stopped Foster's execution, the first such intervention of his seven-year tenure. This happened following a 6-to-1 vote by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, recommending a commutation of his sentence to life. An unusual occurrence, to be sure, but it shows that even a backward state such as Texas is susceptible to public pressure and international outrage.

Sparing Foster's life is a step in the right direction, but it can't stop there. Texans must resist the stranglehold that its regressive forces have on their state. The Texas Republican Party runs Texas. The state party's platform, which can be viewed as a blueprint for Bush's policies, proclaims that "the United States of America is a Christian Nation," and that "Our party pledges to exert its influence to...dispel the 'myth' of the separation of church and state." It also states that "We reject the establishment of any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns."

Further, "[t]he Party supports the termination of bilingual education programs" and "urges Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development, and phase them out as soon as possible." The Texas GOP platform also prohibits reproductive health care services in high schools, opposes the Endangered Species Act, and hopes to rescind U.S. membership in the United Nations.

To be sure, there is a long tradition of great Texans who have dared to speak truth to power and fight to make things right. The late Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland and Molly Ivins, as well as Bill Moyers and Jim Hightower are but a handful of people who come to mind. However, it seems that the generous spirit these people represent is being forsaken. The good people in Texas need to have their voices heard, and must refuse to allow the state's bottom feeders to speak for them. Come on Texans, prove me wrong.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love