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Obama: “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago”
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n some of his most extensive comments on U.S. race relations since entering the White House, President Obama on Friday gave a very personal perspective of the shooting of 17-year-old African-American Trayvon Martin and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman, offering an explanation for why the case has created so much anxiety within the African-American community.
“When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said this could’ve been my son. Another way of saying that is, Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Mr. Obama said in an unexpected appearance in the White House briefing room, where reporters were gathered to question White House spokesman Jay Carney. (Watch his full remarks in the video above)
“When you think about why in the African-American community, at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, it’s important to recognize the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and history that doesn’t go away.”
After a Florida jury on Saturday acquitted Zimmerman of murder, Mr. Obama gave a decidedly muted response, noting that the Justice Department was reviewing the case. Some civil rights leaders called for more action from the administration of the nation’s first African-American president.
The president on Friday laid out a series of actions the government could take to help ease racial tensions at the community level, as well as foster a better environment for African-American boys. He also spoke about the sort of negative experiences that are common for young African-American men — some of which he said he has personally experienced — that have prompted the passionate reactions to the Zimmerman verdict.
“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping at a department store, and that includes me,” he said. He spoke about hearing the locks click on car doors while crossing the street — something Mr. Obama said he experienced before he was senator — or seeing a woman nervously clutch her purse while in an elevator with an African-American man.
- Transcript: Obama’s remarks on race, Trayvon Martin
- Is Obama doing enough after the Zimmerman trial?
- Holder promises “compassion” and “truth” in Zimmerman case
“I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. It’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”
Mr. Obama said that government at all levels could help ease race relations by working with local law enforcement to create racial sensitivity training programs and best practices. As a state senator in Illinois, Mr. Obama helped pass racial profiling legislation that required training for officers on racial bias issues. He said that while police departments were initially resistant, it allowed them to build more trust with their communities.
Next, Mr. Obama said, “I think it’d be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kind of altercations and tragedies” that occurred in the Trayvon Martin case.
Obama calls for “soul-searching” in wake of Zimmerman verdict
The president acknowledged that Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law was not part of Zimmerman’s defense. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama said that kind of law does not necessarily send a positive message.
“If we’re sending a message in our societies … that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there is a way for them to exit from the situation, is that really going to be contributing to the peace and order?” he asked. “For those who resist that idea, I’d just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? Do we actually think he would’ve been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman because he followed him in a car?”
Mr. Obama also said the nation should consider how to “bolster and reinforce our African-American boys.”
“There are a lot of kids out there who need help, who are getting negative reinforcement,” he said, adding there is “more we can do to give them a sense their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest them.”
Mr. Obama added that he is not “naive about the prospects of some new, grand program,” but that business leaders, clergy, athletes, celebrities and others could help “young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed.”
The president said that national dialogues on race are not typically productive because “they end up being stilted and politicized,” but that it’s worth having conversations among families or churches.
Finally, he said the nation shouldn’t lose sight of its progress on issues of race and equality.
“When I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are,” he said. “That’s true of every community that I’ve visited all across the country.”
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The Reasons Behind the Slow Pace of Executions
Opponents of the death penalty have hit upon an effective tactic: Learn who is making the lethal drugs used in executions and publicly shame them. Now, death penalty states are fighting to make the names of the drugs a state secret.
States that impose the death penalty have been facing a crisis in recent years: They are short on the drugs used in executions.
In California, which has the country’s largest death row population, the chief justice of the state supreme court has said there are unlikely to be any executions for 3 years, in part due to the shortage of appropriate lethal drugs. As a result, state prosecutors are calling for a return of the gas chamber.
Ohio, which is 2nd only to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 2010, said it will run out of the drug it uses in executions, pentobarbital, on September 30. The state has 2 men scheduled for execution in November, and 8 more set to be killed after that. Every state’s supply of pentobarbital, which has been the principal execution drug, expires at the end of November.
The shortage has forced death penalty states to scramble on two fronts: They are hunting for new suppliers or different drugs to use, and enacting changes to public records laws to keep the names of suppliers and manufacturers of those alternative drugs secret.
The lack of lethal drugs, and the fight over keeping new ones secret, are partly the result of a remarkably effective campaign by opponents of the death penalty, who have, in effect, taken their efforts from the court room to the boardroom.
Each time a state has found a new source for a drug to use in executions, Reprieve, an anti-death penalty organization based in London, in collaboration with death penalty lawyers in the United States, has used freedom of information laws, the local news media, and the powers of persuasion to compel the drug’s manufacturer to cut off the supply.
“Who’s easier to persuade? The Supreme Court or a corporation that has financial interests?” said Clive Stafford Smith, a British-American, who was a death penalty lawyer in the South for many years before founding Reprieve. “You can make it not worth their while to allow their drugs in executions.”
The effectiveness of Reprieve’s campaign might well be behind the action taken last year by the state of Texas, which leads the nation in executions.
When a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Mike Ward, using the state’s Public Information Act, sought information about the drugs used in executions, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice fiercely resisted.
Some death penalty states, looking to solve their drug supply problems in a more reliable way, switched drugs – opting for pentobarbital, an anesthetic commonly used in putting animals to sleep. In one legal filing, Patricia Fleming, the agency’s assistant general counsel, said revealing the information about the drugs and who made them would invite “financial intimidation and negative publicity,” as well as “intensive lobbying” and “unrestrained harassment.” Referring to death penalty opponents, Fleming asserted that “essential to their strategy is knowledge of the private companies” that supply the drugs used in lethal injections.
The state attorney general ruled against her, and the department disclosed that it had enough pentobarbital at the time for 23 executions, Ward reported.
Death penalty states are now taking measures to keep anti-death penalty activists, and journalists, from learning the identity of suppliers. A Georgia law enacted in March provides that any information about a “person or entity that manufactures, supplies, compounds, or prescribes the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment” used in an execution shall be considered a “confidential state secret.” Already this year, at least 3 other states – Arkansas, South Dakota, and Tennessee – have amended their public records laws to exempt the names of suppliers from disclosure.
Lethal injection was first proposed as a method of execution in the 19th century by a New York doctor who argued it would be cheaper than hanging. It took 100 years or so for it to be used, but every state that set out to execute people eventually adopted it as the chosen method.
Generally, states have used a 3-drug protocol. The 1st was an anesthetic, sodium thiopental, intended to render the prisoner unconscious so that he or she does not experience the pain and suffering from the drugs to come. The 2nd drug, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes the diaphragm and lungs, making it impossible for the condemned to breathe. Finally, potassium chloride is injected, causing death by cardiac arrest.
In 2008, the Supreme Court, in Baze v. Rees, held that lethal injection did not run afoul of the Eighth Amendment proscription on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
But the Court recognized care had to be taken in the killing, so that it wasn’t unconstitutionally “cruel.” The most critical drug, it emphasized, is the anesthetic.
“It is uncontested that, failing a proper dose of sodium thiopental that would render the prisoner unconscious, there is substantial, unconstitutionally unacceptable risk of suffocation from the administration of pancuronium bromide and pain from the injection of potassium chloride,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.
The problems for death penalty states, and the opening for opponents of the death penalty arose when the only company that had governmental approval to make the anesthetic, Hospira, announced in 2011 that it was suspending production because of manufacturing problems at its plant in North Carolina.
Arizona, with 2 executions pending in late 2011, managed to find another source of sodium thiopental; but it didn’t want the public to know what it was or where it came from.
When lawyers for Jeffrey Landrigan, one of the men facing death, sought the name of the supplier, Arizona’s state attorney general refused to say. Ultimately, on the eve of Landrigan’s execution, the attorney general disclosed that the drug had come from Britain. He did so, he said, to allay fears that the drugs had been made in a Third World country and might be contaminated and unsafe.
Tennessee also acknowledged that one of its execution drugs had been made in Britain but refused to divulge the company’s name.
At Reprieve, Maya Foa, head of the lethal investigation project, searched through medical and pharmaceutical directories to identify British companies that made sodium thiopental.
The British company selling sodium thiopental to Arizona, Tennessee, and other states turned out to be a tiny wholesaler that operated out of the back of a driving school in a working class neighborhood in West London.
It was called Dream Pharma, and it was basically a 1-man operation. It also suddenly became more profitable, as states in America moved to improvise. Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, wrote a letter to Dream Pharma.
“You have played a significant role and hold responsibility for the potential deaths of many people in the United States,” he wrote.
Reprieve sent the letter, along with Dream Pharma’s address and phone number, to journalists, and articles appeared in British newspapers and on the BBC. Dream Pharma shut down. The company has declined to comment on its battles with Reprieve or the sale of drugs to the U.S. for executions.
Reprieve then successfully lobbied the British government to ban exports of any drugs to the U.S. for executions. Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in the early 1960s even though polls showed the public supported it.
With Hospira out of the business, states had become fairly desperate. That urgency was captured in government emails and documents obtained by death penalty defense lawyers.
“I have been given a task to obtain some Sodium Pentothal by any means available,” the director of the pharmacy in the Nebraska department of corrections wrote to her counterparts in several states. “Does anyone know where I might start looking?”
She eventually found a small wholesaler in Mumbai, India, which operated out of 2 rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building; it had no air conditioning, raising doubts about the safety and efficacy of any drugs stored there.
Reprieve again went to work, alerting local reporters and holding a news conference in Mumbai. Officials from India’s food and drug administration raided the offices. The company was quickly out of business.
In California, prison officials turned to hospitals throughout the state in search of sodium thiopental, without success. The warden at San Quentin explored buying some in Pakistan.
In the end, Arizona officials solved California’s problems, supplying 12 grams of sodium thiopental from its limited supply, a happy exchange according to government emails unearthed by death penalty opponents.
“You guys in AZ are life savers,” a California corrections officer wrote to his Arizona counterpart. “Buy you a beer next time I get that way.”
Some death penalty states, looking to solve their drug supply problems in a more reliable way, switched drugs – opting for pentobarbital, an anesthetic commonly used in putting animals to sleep. The 1st state to use it for an execution was Oklahoma, in December 2010, and it quickly became 1 of the execution drugs of choice.
This time, however, Reprieve was not up against a small entity. Only one company had government approval to sell pentobarbital in the U.S., and it was a major international pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck Inc. Headquartered in Denmark, it had some 6,000 employees worldwide; its American plant was in Kansas.
When Reprieve approached Lundbeck, in early 2011, the company said it was “adamantly opposed” to its drugs being used in executions – its primary use is in the treatment of epilepsy – but it said it had no control over what happened after its products were sold to wholesalers or distributors.
Reprieve ratcheted up the pressure. Every time Lundbeck’s pentobarbital was used in an execution, it issued a press release.
Anti-death penalty activists campaigned against Lundbeck on Twitter and Facebook, shareholders raised questions at the company’s annual meeting, a pension fund sold its shares, and the company’s place on an annual ranking of Denmark’s best companies fell from 17 to 40.
Lundbeck then did what it had said it couldn’t do: It devised a distribution system that would keep its pentobarbital from the states that conducted executions.
In April, Hospira announced that it was putting controls in place so that 3 of its drugs – pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride, and propofol – would not be used in executions.
Once again, that has left states trying to figure out what to do. In Colorado, a man who killed three teenagers and their boss in a pizza restaurant in 1993 is set to be executed in August. But the state does not have the proper drugs, causing the director of prisons to send an urgent plea to the state’s compounding pharmacies. At “compounding pharmacies,” pharmacists mix, or compound, the ingredients for drugs on site.
Last October, South Dakota became the 1st state to use a compound drug in an execution, and it did so twice.
Lawyers for one of the men to be executed, Robert Moeller, who had kidnapped, raped, and murdered a 9-year-old girl, filed a lawsuit to obtain information about the supplying pharmacy. The state resisted, and a federal judge sided with the state.
South Dakota was among the states to recently pass a law exempting the names of suppliers of lethal injection drugs from its public records law. The change was necessary, said South Dakota State Senator Jean Hunhoff, “because there’s been harassment that has occurred against non-protected manufacturers and pharmacists, thereby causing difficulty for the state in obtaining the necessary chemicals for the lethal injection.”
South Dakota’s law passed in the state senate without opposition, and the house by a lopsided 60-8.
(source: Pacific Standard Magazine)
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New ‘injection secrecy’ law threatens First Amendment rights in Georgia
July 17, 2013 (source :cjr.org)
Update: On Thursday afternoon, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Gail S. Tusan granted a stay of Hill’s execution, concluding, among other things, that the Georgia “state secrets” law “implicated” the First Amendment by blocking information she deemed “essential to the determination of the efficacy and potency of lethal injection drugs.” Georgia officials immediately vowed to appeal the ruling.
Original Story:
The pending execution of a cognitively disabled man in Georgia has brought to national light a new law there that has profound first amendment implications for journalists covering death penalty cases.
The so-called “Lethal Injection Secrecy Act,” passed in March, makes the identities of those companies and individuals who make and supply lethal injection drugs a “state secret” that may be shielded from disclosure to the public, the media, or even the judiciary. As a result of the measure, information about the purity and potency of the drugs that are to be used to carry out executions in the state are beyond the public’s reach. So are the identities of the doctors hired by the state to oversee executions.
The shield law was enacted at the request of the state’s Department of Corrections after Georgia officials were roundly criticized in 2011 and 2012 for seeking lethal injection drugs from unlicensed sources as they scrambled to replace diminishing supplies. In 2011, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia’s supply of “lethal injection” drugs because of federal concerns about how those drugs were obtained by state officials. The measure also directly benefits the dwindling number of pharmaceutical companies that produce and distribute the lethal drugs and that have been the subject of protests and boycotts for their role in the increasingly controversial practice of lethal injections.
The Injection Secrecy Act came into effect on July 1 and was immediately invoked by state officials in the case of Warren Hill, a convicted murderer who claims he cannot be executed because he is “mentally retarded” (a legal term of art) and thus falls within the protections of Atkins v. Virginia. In that 2002 United States Supreme Court decision, the justices, by a vote of 6-3, declared that executing the mentally disabled violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Georgia officials waited until the Injection Secrecy law was in effect, then scheduled Hill’s execution for July 15, relying on the new law to shield from Hill’s attorneys material information about the drugs to be used in Hill’s execution.
Last week, after Hill’s execution had been set for this past Monday, state officials revealed to his lawyers that they “had entered into agreements with an unknown compounding pharmacy and an unknown prescriber of drugs in order to procure pentobarbital,” a lethal drug to be used in Hill’s execution. But state officials, citing the new law, refused to provide any information about the identities or professional qualifications of the supplier or prescriber (or any information about the drug itself). So, on Monday, the day Hill was supposed to be given the lethal dose, his attorneys went to court in Fulton County, GA, seeking to enjoin the execution on the grounds that the Injection Secrecy law violates the Eighth Amendment and separation-of-powers principles. “Without any information regarding the origin or makers of the drug the Department of Corrections is planning to use to execute him,” the lawyers said, “Mr. Hill is left with no means for determining whether the drugs for his lethal injection are safe and will reliably perform their function, or if they are tainted, counterfeited, expired, or compromised in some other way.”
The trial judge delayed the execution, at least until Thursday, when she will continue to hear argument over the new state law. Nothing the State (or a state) does more profoundly impacts the public interest than when it seeks to take a life. Nowhere is the media’s interest in transparency and accountability more important than in capital cases. Hill’s lawyers did not challenge the law on First Amendment grounds. But it won’t be long before such a challenge is made to a law that so tangibly impairs the freedom of the press to report on matters of life and death.
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U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors
An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony, U.S. officials said.
The review led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May.
How accurate is forensic analysis?
Learn more about the reliability of each type of forensic analysis.
The discovery of the more than two dozen capital cases promises that the examination could become a factor in the debate over the death penalty. Some opponents have long held that the execution of a person confirmed to be innocent would crystallize doubts about capital punishment. But if DNA or other testing confirms all convictions, it would strengthen proponents’ arguments that the system works.
FBI officials discussed the review’s scope as they prepare to disclose its first results later this summer. The death row cases are among the first 120 convictions identified as potentially problematic among more than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files being examined. The review was announced last July by the FBI and the Justice Department, in consultation with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).
The unusual collaboration came after The Washington Post reported last year that authorities had known for years that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners may have led to convictions of potentially innocent people, but officials had not aggressively investigated problems or notified defendants.
At issue is a once-widespread practice by which some FBI experts exaggerated the significance of “matches” drawn from microscopic analysis of hair found at crime scenes.
Since at least the 1970s, written FBI Laboratory reports typically stated that a hair association could not be used as positive identification. However, on the witness stand, several agents for years went beyond the science and testified that their hair analysis was a near-certain match.
The new review listed examples of scientifically invalid testimony, including claiming to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion of all others,” or to state or suggest a probability for such a match from past casework.
Whatever the findings of the review, the initiative is pushing state and local labs to take similar measures.
For instance, the Texas Forensic Science Commission on Friday directed all labs under its jurisdiction to take the first step to scrutinize hair cases, in a state that has executed more defendants than any other since 1982.
Separately, FBI officials said their intention is to review and disclose problems in capital cases even after a defendant has been executed.
“We didn’t do this to be a model for anyone — other than when there’s a problem, you have to face it, and you have to figure how to fix it, move forward and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann said. “That tone and approach is set from the very top of this building,” he said, referring to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.David Christian “Chris” Hassell, director of the FBI Laboratory, said the review will be used to improve lab training, testimony, audit systems and research, as it has done when previous breakdowns were uncovered. The lab overhauled scientific practices when whistleblowers revealed problems in 1996 and again after an FBI fingerprint misidentification in a high-profile 2003 terrorism case, he said.
“One of the things good scientists do is question their assumptions. No matter what the field, what the discipline, those questions should be up for debate,” Hassell said. “That’s as true in forensics as anything else.”
Advocates for defendants and the wrongly convicted called the undertaking a watershed moment in police and prosecutorial agencies’ willingness to re-open old cases because of scientific errors uncovered by DNA testing.
Peter J. Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which supports inmates who seek exoneration through DNA testing, applauded the FBI, calling the review historic and a “major step forward to improve the criminal justice system and the rigor of forensic science in the United States.”
Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the NACDL, also praised the effort, predicting that it would have “an enormous impact on the states” and calling on the defense bar to represent indigent convicts.
“That’s going to be a very big job as this unfolds,” said Reimer, whose group has spent 1,500 hours identifying cases for the second round of review.
Under terms finalized with the groups last month, the Justice Department will notify prosecutors and convicted defendants or defense attorneys if an internal review panel or the two external groups find that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they claimed to link crime scene hair to defendants in reports or testimony.
If so, the department will assist the class of prisoners in unprecedented ways, including waiving statutes of limitations and other federal rules that since 1996 have restricted post-conviction appeals. The FBI also will test DNA evidence if sought by a judge or prosecutor.
The review will prioritize capital cases, then cases in which defendants are imprisoned.
Unlike DNA analysis, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same.
The federal inquiry came after the Public Defender Service helped exonerate three D.C. men through DNA testing that showed that three FBI hair examiners contributed to their wrongful convictions for rape or murder in the early 1980s.
The response has been notable for the department and the FBI, which in the past has been accused of overprotecting its agents. Twice since 1996, authorities conducted case reviews largely in secret after the scientific integrity of the FBI Lab was faulted.
Weissmann said that although earlier reviews lawfully gave prosecutors discretion to decide when to turn over potentially exculpatory material to the defense, greater transparency will “lessen skepticism” about the government’s motives. It also will be cheaper, faster and more effective because private parties can help track down decades-old cases.
Scientific errors “are not owned by one side,” he said. “This gives the same information to both sides, and they can litigate it.”
The review terms could have wide repercussions. The FBI is examining more than 21,000 federal and state cases referred to the FBI Lab’s hair unit from 1982 through 1999 — by which time DNA testing of hair was routine — and the bureau has asked for help in finding cases before lab files were computerized in 1985.
Of 15,000 files reviewed to date, the FBI said a hair association was declared in about 2,100 cases. Investigators have contacted police and prosecutors in more than 1,200 of those cases to find out whether hair evidence was used in a conviction, in which case trial transcripts will be sought. However, 400 of those cases have been closed because prosecutors did not respond.
On May 7, Mississippi’s Supreme Court stayed the execution of Willie Jerome Manning for a 1992 double homicide hours before he was set to die by lethal injection.
FBI cases may represent only the tip of the problem.
While the FBI employed 27 hair examiners during the period under review, FBI officials confirmed for the first time this week that records indicate that about 500 people attended one-week hair comparison classes given by FBI examiners between 1979 and 2009. Nearly all of them came from state and local labs.
State and local prosecutors handle more than 95 percent of violent crimes.
In April, the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors declined to order state and local labs to conduct reviews, but issued a public notice recommending that each laboratory evaluate the impact of improper statements on past convictions, reminding them of their ethical obligation to act in case of a potential miscarriage of justice.
FBI Lab officials say they have not been contacted by other labs about their review or who completed the FBI classes.
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Justice Department To Sift Through Evidence In Zimmerman Case, Look For Potential Racial Motive
July 16, 2013
MIAMI — The Justice Department will sift through trial testimony, interviews and other evidence during what is likely to be a months-long investigation into whether George Zimmerman violated Trayvon Martin’s civil rights when he shot the black teenager.
The key to charging Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer, lies in whether evidence exists that he was motivated by racial animosity to kill Martin, who was 17 when he was shot during a fight with Zimmerman in February 2012. And while Martin’s family has said the teen was racially profiled, no evidence surfaced during the state trial that Zimmerman had a racial bias.
Former Miami federal prosecutor David S. Weinstein says it will likely be months before a decision is made on whether to bring charges.
Zimmerman, 29, was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges after claiming he fired his weapon in self-defense only after Martin attacked him. His friends and family have repeatedly denied he harbored racial animosity toward blacks. Florida did not use its own hate crime laws against Zimmerman.
Legal experts say the FBI and prosecutors will go back through the interviews done before the state case began; look at all the forensics such as crime scene records and medical reports; and review the state’s witnesses to see if any who did not testify might have important information.
However, investigators are not limited to existing evidence; they can pursue new evidence and conduct new interviews as they see fit. For instance, federal investigators could look more closely at Zimmerman’s past for any evidence of racial bias.
“They are going to need to do a thorough vetting of the facts. It takes time,” said Lauren Resnick, a former prosecutor who obtained a guilty verdict in a 1991 New York hate crime case involving the stabbing death of an Orthodox Jew. Those defendants had been acquitted in state court.
In a speech Tuesday to an NAACP convention in Orlando, Attorney General Eric Holder said “I am concerned” about the Zimmerman case and pledged the Justice Department will conduct a thorough review.
“While that inquiry is ongoing, I can promise that the Department of Justice will consider all available information before determining what action to take,” he said.
The lone juror in the case who has spoken publicly – known only as Juror B37 because their identities have not been released – said Monday that she did not believe Zimmerman followed Martin because the teen was black.
Still, supporters of the Justice Department filing civil rights charges say additional evidence could exist in the federal investigation that didn’t come up in the state prosecution of Zimmerman, possibly even witnesses who have not previously been interviewed or did not come up in the state case.
“They have a separate set of evidence they’re looking at,” said Barbara Arnwine, president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “They might have additional witnesses that were never called upon by the state. I think they will make the best decision that is possible in this case and they will pursue what they think is legally possible.”
Several civil rights groups, including the NAACP, are demanding that the Justice Department bring federal charges against Zimmerman, and there have been numerous protests around the country about the outcome of the Florida trial.
During a news conference Tuesday, the Rev. Al Sharpton acknowledged there are hurdles. But he said there remains a fundamental question of “does Trayvon Martin and the Trayvon Martins of this country have the civil right to go home?”
He added: “… we have some experience on how to deal with hurdles and we see that as part of our strategy.”
Beyond the exact language of the law itself, the federal probe must navigate between sensitive racial and political issues that arose when Zimmerman initially wasn’t charged in Martin’s killing.
“Many people simply cannot process how an unarmed teenager is killed, and yet no one is held criminally accountable for his death,” said Marcellus McRae, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles.
Resnick said a federal jury would have to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had a racial motive when he began following Martin and that he did not act in self-defense when he fired his gun.
“There remains the serious challenge that prosecutors still have to prove the racial motive,” she said.
Zimmerman could get life in prison if charged and convicted under federal hate crime laws.
Generally, the Justice Department is reluctant to get involved in cases that have already been tried before a state jury, in part because of concerns about double jeopardy.
Perhaps the best-known example where federal prosecutors did intervene was the case of four police officers acquitted after a California state trial in the beating of motorist Rodney King, which triggered deadly riots in the Los Angeles area in 1992.
Two of the four officers were convicted in federal court of violating King’s rights, but that case differs from Zimmerman’s because they were acting as sworn law enforcement officials, not as a private citizen claiming self-defense.
In contrast, the Justice Department declined to prosecute New York Police Department officers after they were acquitted in the 2006 shootings of three men including Sean Bell, who was fatally wounded the morning of his planned wedding. The short Justice Department statement – issued in 2010, four years after the shooting – simply said there was insufficient evidence to proceed.
“Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence nor bad judgment is sufficient to establish a federal criminal civil rights violation,” the department said in the Bell case.
___
Associated Press writer Mike Schneider in Orlando and Shaquille Brewster in Washington contributed to this story.
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Texas man executed for killing during 2002 hold up- Quintanilla EXECUTED 7:32pm
July 16, 2013
John Manuel Quintanilla received lethal injection for gunning down 60-year-old Victor Billings at a game room in Victoria, about 125 miles southwest of Houston. The 2002 slaying came just a few months after Quintanilla had been released from prison after serving a sentence for several burglary convictions.
Asked to make a final statement before his execution, Quintanilla told his wife he loved her.
“Thank you for all the years of happiness,” he said.
He never acknowledged his victim’s friends or relatives, including two daughters, who watched through a window.
As the lethal drug began taking effect, he snored about a half dozen times, then stopped breathing. At 7:32 p.m. CDT — 15 minutes after being given the drug — he was pronounced dead.
Quintanilla’s wife, a German national who married him by proxy while he was in prison, watched through an adjacent window and sobbed.
Quintanilla, 36, became the ninth Texas inmate to receive lethal injection this year and the 501st since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982. His was the first of two executions set for this week; the other is planned for Thursday.
Quintanilla’s punishment was carried out after the U.S. Supreme Court refused two last-day appeals.
His lawyers contended his confession was coerced by authorities threatening to also charge one of his sisters and that the statement improperly was allowed into evidence at his trial in 2004. The lawyers obtained affidavits from two jurors who said the confession was a key to their decision to convict him.
“It is clear that Quintanilla would not have been convicted of capital murder if his confession had not been admitted — a fact confirmed by two of his jurors,” appeals lawyer David Dow told the high court.
The appeal also argued Quintanilla had deficient legal help during his trial and in earlier stages of his appeals, and that his case would give justices the opportunity to define filing rules in light of recent death penalty rulings from the court.
The Texas attorney general’s office said the appeal was without merit and improperly filed, and that the juror affidavits also were improper.
“There wasn’t any coercion whatsoever,” Dexter Eaves, the former Victoria County district attorney who was lead prosecutor at the trial, recalled last week. He also said that while the robbers, who fled with about $2,000, were masked, witnesses were able to “describe very clearly who the triggerman was.”
Court records show Billings, a retired chief deputy from nearby Edna in adjacent Jackson County, was at the game center with his wife on the Sunday before Thanksgiving in 2002 when the gunmen came in through a back door. Billings approached one of them and grabbed the barrel of the gunman’s rifle “so no one else was going to be hurt and paid for it dearly,” Eaves said.
He said Billings was shot three times, the last one fired while he was on his knees.
“A very cold killing,” Eaves said.
During questioning by detectives for an unrelated robbery some two months later, Quintanilla made references to the still unsolved Billings case, then led authorities to a canal where divers recovered items used in the holdup.
“They had the mask, the guns and his statements saying who did what,” Jim Beeler, Quintanilla’s lead trial lawyer, said. “He told them everything.”
Beeler said the trial judge overruled his objections and ruled the statements proper and admissible into evidence. He also said Quintanilla signed affidavits ordering that his defense team present no mitigating evidence during the punishment phase of his trial, where jurors deciding his sentence could have considered he had virtually no parental supervision while growing up.
“You want to argue your case, completely and totally,” Beeler said. “In that situation, we’re not being allowed to present our case, based on our client.
“It’s extremely frustrating.”
Prosecutors bolstered their case for Quintanilla’s future dangerousness by presenting evidence he attacked a jailer with a homemade weapon while awaiting trial.
“He did not do himself any favors,” Eaves said.
Quintanilla’s accomplice, Jeffrey Bibb, 33, is serving 60 years for murder and 50 years for aggravated robbery.
On Thursday, another Texas inmate is set for lethal injection. Vaughn Ross, 41, is to be executed for a double slaying in Lubbock in 2001.
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Texas: Rick Perry insists ‘justice system is color blind’ after Zimmerman verdict
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) on Sunday praised a Florida jury’s decision to find former neighborhood watchmen George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, and insisted that the case had not been influenced by race because “the justice system is color blind.”
“A very thoughtful case was made by each side, the jurors made the decision and we will live with that,” the governor explained to CNN’s Candy Crowley.
The CNN host, however, pointed out that critics of the verdict had asserted that the justice system was innately unfair and weighted against African-Americans.
“Do you think that?” Crowley asked.
“I don’t,” Perry insisted. “I think our justice system is color blind, and I think that, you know, again, you don’t find people that always agree with the jury’s decision. But that’s the reason we have the system we have in place, and I think, by and large, it may not be full proof, people may make mistakes in the jury system. On the civil side, you have that appellate process.”
“But in this case, I will suggest that 2 extraordinarily capable teams laid out the issues and that jury made the right decision from their stand point.”
Earlier this year, a New York Times editorial ripped the Texas justice system for executing a disproportionate number of African-Americans under Perry.
“Texas’s death penalty system is notorious for its high tolerance of ineffective counsel for defendants, overly zealous prosecutors, and racial discrimination in jury selection,” the Times wrote. “In Texas as well as other states, a black person who murders a white person is more likely to receive the death penalty than when the victim is black.”
(source: The Raw Story)
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The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement
At left, a photograph of Ronnie Dewberry, a prisoner in solitary confinement at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. The photo was received by his sister Marie Levin in 2012, after a rule change allowed prisoners in solitary to be photographed for the first time in more than 20 years. At right is Dewberry’s next-most-recent photo, taken in 1988.
In the largest prison protest in California’s history, nearly 30,000 inmates have gone on hunger strike. Their main grievance: the state’s use of solitary confinement, in which prisoners are held for years or decades with almost no social contact and the barest of sensory stimuli.
The human brain is ill-adapted to such conditions, and activists and some psychologists equate it to torture. Solitary confinement isn’t merely uncomfortable, they say, but such an anathema to human needs that it often drives prisoners mad.
In isolation, people become anxious and angry, prone to hallucinations and wild mood swings, and unable to control their impulses. The problems are even worse in people predisposed to mental illness, and can wreak long-lasting changes in prisoners’ minds.
“What we’ve found is that a series of symptoms occur almost universally. They are so common that it’s something of a syndrome,” said psychiatrist Terry Kupers of the Wright Institute, a prominent critic of solitary confinement. “I’m afraid we’re talking about permanent damage.”
California holds some 4,500 inmates in solitary confinement, making it emblematic of the United States as a whole: More than 80,000 U.S. prisoners are housed this way, more than in any other democratic nation.
Even as those numbers have swelled, so have the ranks of critics. A series of scathing reports and documentaries — from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International — were released in 2012, and the U.S. Senate held its first-ever hearings on solitary confinement. In May of this year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office criticized the federal Bureau of Prisons for failing to consider what long-term solitary confinement did to prisoners.
What’s emerged from the reports and testimonies reads like a mix of medieval cruelty and sci-fi dystopia. For 23 hours or more per day, in what’s euphemistically called “administrative segregation” or “special housing,” prisoners are kept in bathroom-sized cells, under fluorescent lights that never shut off. Video surveillance is constant. Social contact is restricted to rare glimpses of other prisoners, encounters with guards, and brief video conferences with friends or family.
‘Most of these people will return to our communities.’
For stimulation, prisoners might have a few books; often they don’t have television, or even a radio. In 2011, another hunger strike among California’s prisoners secured such amenities as wool hats in cold weather and wall calendars. The enforced solitude can last for years, even decades.
These horrors are best understood by listening to people who’ve endured them. As one Florida teenager described in a report onsolitary confinement in juvenile prisoners, “The only thing left to do is go crazy.” To some ears, though, stories will always be anecdotes, potentially misleading, possibly powerful, but not necessarily representative. That’s where science enters the picture.
“What we often hear from corrections officials is that inmates are feigning mental illness,” said Heather Rice, a prison policy expert at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. “To actually hear the hard science is very powerful.”
Scientific studies of solitary confinement and its damages have actually come in waves, first emerging in the mid-19th century, when the practice fell from widespread favor in the United States and Europe. More study came in the 1950s, as a response to reports of prisoner isolation and brainwashing during the Korean War. The renewed popularity of solitary confinement in the United States, which dates to the prison overcrowding and rehabilitation program cuts of the 1980s, spurred the most recent research.
Consistent patterns emerge, centering around the aforementioned extreme anxiety, anger, hallucinations, mood swings and flatness, and loss of impulse control. In the absence of stimuli, prisoners may also become hypersensitive to any stimuli at all. Often they obsess uncontrollably, as if their minds didn’t belong to them, over tiny details or personal grievances. Panic attacks are routine, as is depression and loss of memory and cognitive function.
According to Kupers, who is serving as an expert witness in an ongoing lawsuit over California’s solitary confinement practices, prisoners in isolation account for just 5 percent of the total prison population, but nearly half of its suicides.
When prisoners leave solitary confinement and re-enter society — something that often happens with no transition period — their symptoms might abate, but they’re unable to adjust. “I’ve called this the decimation of life skills,” said Kupers. “It destroys one’s capacity to relate socially, to work, to play, to hold a job or enjoy life.”
Some disagreement does exist over the extent to which solitary confinement drives people mad who are not already predisposed to mental illness, said psychiatrist Jeffrey Metzner, who helped design what became a controversial study of solitary confinement in Colorado prisons.
In that study, led by the Colorado Department of Corrections, researchers reported that the mental conditions of many prisoners in solitary didn’t deteriorate. The methodology has been criticized as unreliable, confounded by prisoners hiding their feelings or happy just to be talking with anyone, even a researcher.
Metzner denies that charge, but says that even if healthy prisoners in solitary confinement make it through an unarguably grueling psychological ordeal, many — perhaps half of all prisoners — begin with mental disorders. “That’s bad in itself, because with adequate treatment, they could have gotten better,” Metzner said.
Explaining why isolation is so damaging is complicated, but can be distilled to basic human needs for social interaction and sensory stimulation, along with a lack of the social reinforcement that prevents everyday concerns from snowballing into pychoses, said Kupers.
Former Pelican Bay inmate Lonnie Rose, who was held in solitary confinement for 9.5 years, holds photos taken of himself in 1999 and March of this year. Image: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Center for Investigative Reporting
He likened the symptoms seen in solitary prisoners to those seen in soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The conditions are similar, and it’s known from studies of soldiers that chronic, severe stress alters pathways in the brain.
Brain imaging studies of prisoners are lacking, though, given the logistical difficulties of conducting them in high-security conditions.
Such studies are arguably not needed, as the symptoms of solitary confinement are so well-described, but could add a degree of neurobiological specificity to the discussion.
“What you get from a brain scan is the ability to point to something” concrete, said law professor Amanda Pustilnik of the University of Maryland, who specializes in the intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. “The credibility of psychology in the public mind is very low, whereas the credibility of our newest set of brain tools is very high.”
Brain imaging might also convey the damages of solitary confinement in a more compelling way. “There are few people who say that mental distress is impermissible in punishment. But we do think harming people physically is impermissible,” Pustilnik said.
“You can’t starve people. You can’t put them into a hotbox or maim them,” she continued. “If you could do brain scans to show that people suffer permanent damage, that could make solitary look less like some form of distress, and more like the infliction of a permanent disfigurement.”
Such arguments might still not be shared by people who believe criminals deserve their punishments, but there’s also a utilitarian argument. Solitary confinement is supposed to reduce prison violence, but some studies suggest that reducing its use — as in one Mississippi prison, where mentally ill prisoners were removed from solitary and given treatment — actually reduces prison-wide violence.
The demands of hunger-striking California prisoners include a five-year limit on solitary sentences, an end to indefinite sentences, and a formal chance to earn their way back to general-population housing through good behavior.
“Most of these people will return to our communities,” said Rice. “When we punish them in such a manner that they’re coming out more damaged than they went in, and are ill-equipped to re-enter communities and be productive citizens, we’re doing a disservice to society as a whole.”
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George Zimmerman Not Guilty: Jury Lets Trayvon Martin Killer Go
After deliberating for more than 16 hours, a jury of six women on Saturday evening found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old in Sanford, Fla.
Zimmerman had pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder with an affirmative defense, claiming he had shot Martin to save his own life after being attacked by the teen on Feb. 26, 2012. The trial, televised nationally on cable networks and streamed live across the Internet on various sites, kept the country captivated awaiting a verdict on the tragic events that took place that rainy night.
Following four weeks of testimony, more than a dozen witnesses and a host of controversy, Zimmerman walked out of court a free man.
The case first drew national attention during the 44 days the Sanford Police Department took to decide that Zimmerman should be arrested and charged with murder. During that tense period, protests were held across the country calling for Zimmerman’s arrest. Those protests were buttressed by the controversy’s strong presence across the Internet, with hashtags like #JusticeForTrayvon becoming mainstays on Twitter. Celebrities including LeBron James and his Miami Heat teammates and Jamie Foxx were photographed wearing hooded sweatshirts like Martin had been wearing the night he died.
That night, Martin was walking back to the home of his father’s fiancee from a local 7-Eleven convenience store after purchasing a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. He was spotted by Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, who thought Martin looked suspicious because of what he described as an unnaturally slow and meandering gait. Zimmerman called the police and proceeded to follow the teen through the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the gated community where Zimmerman lived and where Martin had been staying. A confrontation ensued, Zimmerman shot Martin, Martin died, and six weeks later, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
On March 16, 2012, police released audio of the 911 calls made by Twin Lakes residents who were witness to the altercation between Martin and Zimmerman occurring near their homes. In one chilling call, a voice can be heard screaming for help in the background. The wailing ends as the loud crack of a gun shot rings out. Those screams and the question of who was making them would become pivotal for both the prosecution and the defense, with the implication being that the person screaming was the one being attacked.
As attention around the case mounted before the trial, details emerged about the teenager and the man involved in the fatal confrontation.
It turned out this wasn’t Zimmerman’s first run-in with the law. He had previouslybeen accused of domestic violence by a former girlfriend, and he had also previouslybeen arrested for assaulting a police officer. More controversially, in July 2012, an evidence dump related to the investigation of Martin’s death revealed that a younger female cousin of Zimmerman’s had accused him of nearly two decades of sexual molestation and assault. In addition, she had accused members of Zimmerman’s family, including his Peruvian-born mother, of being proudly racist against African Americans, and recalled a number of examples of perceived bigotry.
The national focus on the case also brought into question, for some, the character and life history of Trayvon Martin. As time passed, websites like The Daily Caller found Martin’s posthumously scrubbed Twitter page, which featured the teen at times tweeting profanities and showing off fake gold teeth. To some, these behaviors, along with the hoodie Martin wore the night he was killed, were an indication that he was something other than an innocent teenage boy who was shot while walking home from the store. To others, the attention paid to Martin’s tattoos, gold teeth and hoodie were symptomatic of the same kind of stereotyping and profiling that led to Zimmerman’s assumption that the teen was “up to no good.”
While much of this background information proved inadmissible at trial, the characterizations of the two men helped drive an often racially charged polarization on the issue at the heart of the case — whether the killing of Trayvon Martin was self-defense or murder.
The prosecution argued that Zimmerman had profiled Martin, deeming him “suspicious,” as indicated by Zimmerman’s description of the teen to the non-emergency hotline he called for police assistance. The prosecution said that he then stalked Martin, initiating an unnecessary confrontation that led to his shooting the 17-year-old in the chest at point-blank range.
The defense maintained that Zimmerman was just walking back to his car when Martin confronted him, punching him in his face and knocking him to the ground. According to the defense, Martin then mounted Zimmerman and smashed his head into the concrete pavement multiple times, forcing the older man to shoot the teen in order to save his own life.
Testimony at the trial was, at times, contentious. Defense attorney Don Westaggressively questioned Rachel Jeantel, the friend to whom Martin was talking on the phone just before he was killed. Jeantel, who speaks English as a second language, kept her answers tersely short and stuck to her understanding of what had transpired that night, despite the defense’s attempts to undermine her account. Her perceived lack of polish on the stand, though, thrust the teenager into a national conversation about whether she had hurt or helped the state’s case.
The testimony of Dr. Shipping Bao, the medical examiner who performed the autopsyon Martin, was also highly contested. Bao often clashed with the defense as he repeatedly made sure that everyone in the courtroom understood the difference between what he saw as facts and what he considered opinions related to the case.
Both the prosecution and the defense went to great lengths to show who was screaming for help in the background of that 911 call. The prosecution called Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and his brother, Jahvaris Fulton, who testified that it was Martin. The defense called George Zimmerman’s mother, father and a host of friends to testify that it was Zimmerman screaming.
Ultimately, there are only two people who ever knew for sure who was screaming for his life that fatal night. One of them is dead, and the other has been acquitted in his killing. And with that acquittal, this chapter of the Trayvon Martin case, one that has captivated and divided a country for almost 17 months, has been brought to a close.
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