NC Racial Justice Trial: Victory for Justice

[QueEx]

• The State: North Carolina, the only state in the union which has such a law.

• The Law: The Racial Justice Act of 2009 - allows judges to reduce death sentences to life in prison without parole in cases where defendants prove racial bias in jury selection.

• The Defendant: Marcus Robinson, a black man, convicted of killing 17-year-old Erik Tornblom with a shotgun blast to the face during a robbery that netted $27.

• The Prosecutors: Typically white.

• The Judge: Gregory A. Weeks, a black man.

• The Ruling: That prosecutors, "intentionally used the race of [jury pool] members as a significant factor in decisions to exercise preemptory strikes in capital cases.’’ He ruled that discrimination was a factor not only in the case Weeks heard involving convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson, but also in capital cases involving black defendants across North Carolina.

• The Result in Week's Case: Weeks sentence commuted from death to life.

• The Implications Nationally: The landmark decision could help set a precedent nationwide in death penalty cases, which for years have included arguments by black defendants and civil rights lawyers that prosecutors keep blacks off juries for overtly racial reasons.
  

• The Article:
  Racial Justice trial: No execution for black inmate, judge rules
  
  
  

  

  
  Marcus Robinson listens Friday as Cumberland County Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks found that racial bias played a role in Robinson's trial and sentencing.
  
  ​

 

[Upgrade Dave]

There was some buzz about this locally but not much.

 

[QueEx]

I've heard that the decision is raising some eyebrows among the prosecution bar and unrest among the death penalty enthusiasts.


Perhaps, one reason its a bit difficult to hail the case is the bad facts: there doesn't appear to be much question that he brutally killed a young man, for 27 damn dollars - - and so its not hard for many to reach the conclusion that the defendant in this case deserved worse. On the other hand, many prosecutors are a shameful lot. Even when they have all of the facts their way, some cannot resist adding insult by striking blacks from the jury. This ruling, as I'm certain you understand, is a blow against that practice, despite the bad facts of the case.

 

[Upgrade Dave]

I've heard that the decision is raising some eyebrows among the prosecution bar and unrest among the death penalty enthusiasts.


Perhaps, one reason its a bit difficult to hail the case is the bad facts: there doesn't appear to be much question that he brutally killed a young man, for 27 damn dollars - - and so its not hard for many to reach the conclusion that the defendant in this case deserved worse. On the other hand, many prosecutors are a shameful lot. Even when they have all of the facts their way, some cannot resist adding insult by striking blacks from the jury. This ruling, as I'm certain you understand, is a blow against that practice, despite the bad facts of the case.

I've been aware of the practices of NC prosecutors in the last few years and it's an embarassment, to say the very least.
If I see one more A&E or MSNBC or Current documentary/report about some NC prosecutor's misconduct (and it's always a different one), I might start claiming Charlotte isn't in North Carolina.

 

[muckraker10021]

When Innocence Isn’t Enough


<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/03/18/books/review/18BOYLE/18BOYLE-popup.jpg" width="250"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/03/04/sunday-review/04BONNER/04BONNER-popup.jpg" width="250">
Edward Lee Elmore was in prison for 30 years, convicted of a crime that the evidence strongly suggests he did not commit

by Raymond Bonner

March 2, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/when-innocence-isnt-enough.html?ref=raymondbonner

EDWARD LEE ELMORE turned 53 in January. For more than half his life, the soft-spoken African-American who doesn’t understand the concept of north, south, east and west, or of summer, fall, winter and spring, was in a South Carolina prison, most of it on death row.

On Friday, Mr. Elmore walked out of the courthouse in Greenwood, S.C., a free man, as part of an agreement with the state whereby he denied any involvement in the crime but pleaded guilty in exchange for his freedom. This was his 11,000th day in jail.

Mr. Elmore was convicted in 1982 for the sexual assault and murder of an elderly white widow in Greenwood. His trial lasted only eight days, including two spent picking the jury. The state concealed evidence that strongly pointed to Mr. Elmore’s innocence and introduced damning evidence that appears to have been planted by the police. For three decades lawyers for Mr. Elmore, who were convinced of his innocence, sought to get him a fair trial.

Headlines and news stories about men being released from death row based on DNA testing suggest that this happens often. But it doesn’t. Once a person has been convicted, even on unimaginably shaky grounds, an almost inexorable process — one that can end in execution — is set in motion. On appeal, gone is the presumption of innocence; the presumption is that the defendant had a fair trial. Not even overwhelming evidence that the defendant is innocent is necessarily enough to get a new trial. “Due process does not require that every conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility of convicting an innocent person,” Justice Byron R. White wrote for the majority in a 1977 case, Patterson v. New York.

In other words, innocence is not enough.

I came to the Elmore case indirectly during the 2000 presidential campaign. On “Meet the Press,” George W. Bush, who as governor of Texas had presided over more executions than anyone in history at the time (Rick Perry has surpassed him), told Tim Russert that he was confident that every person who had been executed or placed on death row in Texas under his watch was guilty and had had a fair trial. This led to a reporting assignment in which a New York Times colleague, Sara Rimer, and I wrote about capital punishment, starting in Texas and then ranging from coast to coast.

It was an eye-opening experience. But no case grabbed me like Mr. Elmore’s. It stands out because it raises nearly all the issues that shape debate about capital punishment: race, mental retardation, a jailhouse informant, DNA testing, bad defense lawyers, prosecutorial misconduct and a strong claim of innocence.

Few men on death row are without any connection to the crime for which they are condemned to die. Their conviction might be reversed after an appellate court finds they were denied due process or didn’t receive a fair trial. Other death row inmates may not be guilty of murder, because they didn’t pull the trigger though they were present during the crime. But in the case of Mr. Elmore, I am convinced beyond a scintilla of a doubt that he had nothing to do with the Greenwood woman’s death. His conviction resulted primarily from a rush to judgment — and flagrant prosecutorial misconduct.

Mr. Elmore, who grew up in abject poverty as the 8th of 11 children born to a tenant farmer’s daughter, was arrested 36 hours after the body of 76-year-old Dorothy Ely Edwards was found in her bedroom closet. Mr. Elmore had occasionally washed windows and cleaned gutters at the woman’s house, the last time two weeks before the murder. Less than 90 days after the body was found, his trial began.

During his opening statement, the prosecutor, William Townes Jones III, a courtroom legend, said that 53 hairs had been gathered from the victim’s bed, where the sexual assault supposedly took place, and that most were the defendant’s pubic hairs. It was the only physical evidence that put Mr. Elmore inside the house at the time of the crime. “That’s what convicted him,” said a juror.

But contradictions appeared at the outset. When Mr. Jones called an agent from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, as a witness, he handed him a plastic bag marked State Exhibit 58 and asked him if it contained “53 hairs gathered from the bed of the deceased.”

“The total count on the hairs is 49,” answered the agent, Earl Wells, and he added that there were only 42 in the bag, because he had taken seven out for examination.

Mr. Elmore’s lawyers made nothing of this discrepancy during their cross-examination of Mr. Wells, or in their closing argument.

The state’s own inability to agree on how many hairs were found wasn’t the only suggestion of foul play. State Exhibit 58, the baggie with the hairs, wasn’t sealed. Which means that the hairs could have been put in by anyone at any time, and could have included those yanked from Mr. Elmore’s groin at the police station after he was arrested.

Further, the bed barely featured in the police investigation. Investigators from SLED took nearly a hundred pictures at the house. They took pictures in the guest bedroom, where nothing had happened — even the small figurines on the bureau had not been knocked over — and of the bed in the guest bedroom, which looked as if it was ready for the next guest. But the investigators took no photos of the bed where they claimed to have found hairs.

Nor did the investigators take the sheets from the bed. Why not? “There were no obvious blood or other stains present,” one of the agents, Ira Parnell, explained during Mr. Elmore’s post-conviction relief hearing in the case. The hearing, which is much like a civil trial before a judge, is an opportunity for the defendant’s lawyers to present new evidence and to examine and cross-examine witnesses. He was categorical: “We did not see any stains of any kind.”

The state argued that while the police might have made some mistakes, none served to deny Mr. Elmore any of his constitutional rights. The hearing judge adopted the state’s arguments verbatim and declined to grant Mr. Elmore a new trial.

Perhaps Mr. Elmore’s only good fortune was that on appeal he had on his side two determined appellate lawyers, Diana Holt, who had first begun working on the case as a law school intern, and J. Christopher Jensen, an accomplished New York litigator who was representing Mr. Elmore pro bono. Two years later, they turned up new evidence that the state had sought to hide and that pointed to Mr. Elmore’s innocence.

At Mr. Elmore’s trial, the prosecutor, Mr. Jones, said he had authorized the arrest after being told that during the autopsy, the doctor had found a “Negroid” hair on the victim’s abdomen. The doctor sent the hairs and fibers found on the body to SLED, where the agent, Mr. Wells, examined them under a microscope, then put the slides in a padded envelope and labeled it “Item T.”

In the 1963 landmark case Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that the state must turn over all potentially exonerating evidence to the defendant. But Mr. Jones did not give Item T to Mr. Elmore’s trial lawyers. More shocking still, Item T disappeared.

When Mr. Elmore’s lawyers began searching for it, state officials repeatedly said they couldn’t find it. The lawyers persisted and, 16 years after the trial, found Item T — in Earl Wells’s filing cabinet, where the state attorney general’s office conceded it had been all along. (Mr. Wells said he found it while moving offices.)

The retired F.B.I. agent retained by the state to examine the hair said it was not “Negroid,” but Caucasian. Mr. Elmore’s lawyers had the hair DNA-tested. It wasn’t Mrs. Edwards’s, which suggested it was from an unknown man, likely the killer. Armed with this development, Mr. Elmore’s lawyers went back to court. There was a hearing, a few days before Christmas 2000, in the same courtroom where Mr. Elmore had been convicted 18 years earlier. It was widely expected that he would get a new trial.

The judge ruled against him. “One hair is not enough,” he said. Spectators gasped. But the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed.

Mr. Elmore’s lawyers did not give up. Remarkably, in November, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals — historically one of the most conservative — ordered a new trial. In a 163-page opinion, the majority was searing in its criticism of the SLED agents and the police.

There was “persuasive evidence that the agents were outright dishonest,” and there was “further evidence of police ineptitude and deceit,” Judge Robert Bruce King wrote.

Even though he walked out of court on Friday, none can call it justice.

A man has served 30 years for a crime he did not commit, many of those under the threat of imminent execution. Surely, there are grounds for a Justice Department investigation into whether his civil rights were violated.

Raymond Bonner is a lawyer and former New York Times reporter and the author of “Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong.”


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When this article was first published on March 2012, I emailed the author asking him how he could write this sobering article but never mention the word 'racism'? He didn't reply.

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[muckraker10021]

The cases posted above are emblematic of our American Apartheid system’s endurance. ‘White Supremacy’ persist in the United States today, despite the US Civil War where more than 620,000 men died, in a war initiated by the South, wanting to break from the Union to preserve the chattel slavery of Blacks.

In 1987 the Supreme Court tacitly acknowledged institutional racism and the systemic apartheid evident in the criminal justice system; but then ruled 5-4 that if you as a Black American got convicted by a demonstrably biased and racist justice system — too bad!

In 1987 in McCleskey v. Kemp the United States Supreme Court ruled in a majority 5-4 opinion, authored by Justice Powell, acknowledged that racial bias was "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system," but cynically concluded that if sentences stemming from such bias were tossed out it would call the entire system into question.



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25 Years After McCleskey, Racial Bias Remains "An Inevitable Part Of Our Criminal Justice System"

April 18, 2012

http://fairandunbalancedblog.blogsp...-bias.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=feed

Twenty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued McCleskey v. Kemp, one of its more shameful decisions. Despite overwhelming statistical evidence of systemic racial bias in Georgia's imposition of capital punishment, the Court upheld Warren McCleskey's death sentence. It held that statistics proving a discriminatory effect were insufficient and that a showing of deliberate, purposeful discrimination -- a nearly impossible burden -- was required to establish a constitutional violation on equal protection grounds. The majority 5-4 opinion, authored by Justice Powell, acknowledged that racial bias was "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system," but cynically concluded that if sentences stemming from such bias were tossed out it would call the entire system into question.

I am not a fan of analogies to Nazi Germany, which in many ways was an incomparable horror. But in the piece written below by my dear friend, the remarkable Denny LeBoeuf, the thought experiment she proposes is quite apt. -- Lovechilde

If Germany Had The Death Penalty: A Thought Experiment
<blockquote>
Imagine it's 1976. A high crime rate afflicts German cities, and the government reinstates the death penalty. "We'll have the strongest possible protections for people accused of capital crimes, providing them with free lawyers, right to experts, investigators, appeals to higher courts, and trial by a jury of their peers. This is not the Germany of the Nazi Party. We will never repeat those terrible errors."

Now imagine that 30 years later, statistical evidence shows that Jewish citizens disproportionately get the death penalty; crimes by Jews against Christians are more likely to be selected for a capital prosecution; Jews are routinely excluded from jury service. Further imagine that prosecutors defend all this by saying that Jews shouldn't sit on capital juries because they are mistrustful of German authorities, and that the German high court has ruled that statistical evidence of discrimination against Jews is inadmissible in a death penalty case.
</blockquote>

You see where we're headed. My guess is that most people can't get past the second sentence of this thought experiment, let alone past the discrimination against Jews.

Bryan Stevenson, whose idea this is, asks this of America: "Do we deserve to have a death penalty?" If Germany does not — and they emphatically believe they do not — then why do we? Think the parallels are forced? Not accurate? Really?

Consider this: before the Civil War, crimes against Black people in the South were considered only as property crimes against their owners. The Supreme Court issued its Dred Scott decision in 1857, finding that Blacks have "no rights which the white man is bound to respect." Within a few years after the Civil War, the criminal justice system became an engine to produce bodies — Black bodies — to work in the same agricultural fields they had tended as slaves, and in the burgeoning industries of the post-Reconstruction South.

Doug Blackmon's Pulitzer-winning book, Slavery by Another Name, carefully documents the re-enslavement of Black Americans after the Civil War — by a re-tooled criminal justice system that charged, convicted and sentenced freed slaves and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren based on the need for free convict labor — not on guilt, innocence, culpability or fair procedures.

Meanwhile, as Black people were being targeted by the criminal justice system for undeserved punishment, the very same system was protecting the vigilante members of white supremacist domestic terrorist groups like the KKK and the Knights of the White Camellia, who were allowed to commit murder, arson and property theft in the open, without fear of arrest or prosecution.

So if a criminal justice system functions to protect white criminals (the Klan) and convict Black workers (for convict labor) with little or no regard for innocence or guilt, what is the one thing that system cannot accommodate? The equal participation in the system of Black people. That means no Black people on juries — by law for many years and by unlawful and unconstitutional discrimination after that. It also means shutting out statistical evidence of discrimination, no matter how explosive, careful and well-documented, that would prove the system — up to and including the sentencing of a person to death — is tainted by race discrimination. That's according to McCleskey, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court 25 years ago.

As a part of a coalition of capital defense attorneys, earlier this year ACLU Capital Punishment Project attorney Cassandra Stubbs participated in the first-ever hearing under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, which aims to reverse the harm of McCleskey by allowing capital defendants to introduce statistical evidence showing race is a factor in the administration of the death penalty.
The lawyers are challenging the death sentence of Marcus Robinson, a Black defendant convicted for the death of a white person, who was sentenced to death by a jury tainted by a racially biased jury selection process.

Faced with overwhelming proof that Black people are continually excluded from death penalty juries in North Carolina, the prosecutors in Robinson's case argued, essentially, that Black people tend not to trust the criminal justice system, and don't believe in the death penalty as much.

Now back to the thought experiment. Prosecutors in North Carolina argue that Black people, who have been deliberately excluded from and discriminated against by America's criminal justice system since the Civil War, are less likely to trust that system, and therefore it's okay to continue to exclude them from participating in it. Now let's answer Bryan Stevenson's question: Does the United States deserve to have the death penalty?

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Bowing To Racism

by Anthony Lewis

April 28, 1987

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/28/opinion/abroad-at-home-bowing-to-racism.html

The great achievement of American society since World War II has been to turn away from the racism that marked our history. Unfairness of all kinds remains. But we have made extraordinary progress in ending official racism: the expression in law of racial hatred and fear.

That record is what makes the Supreme Court's recent decision on race and capital punishment so distressing. Confronted with powerful evidence that racial feelings play a large part in determining who will live and who will die, the Court chose to close its eyes. It effectively condoned the expression of racism in a profound aspect of our law.

The evidence was a study of 2,484 murder cases in Georgia: an unusually large and sophisticated study. Prof. David Baldus and others weighed hundreds of factors that might influence sentencing decisions, but one factor made the great difference. Killers of white people were four times as likely as killers of blacks to be sentenced to death.

''The correlation that the Baldus study shows between race and death sentencing in Georgia is two-and-a-half times greater than the proven correlation between cigarette smoking and heart disease.'' A South Carolina lawyer who works on capital cases, David Bruck, wrote that last fall, when the Supreme Court started to consider the case that raised the issue - the case of Warren McCleskey.

''If this case involved race discrimination in the way Georgia hires prison guards or assigns first graders to public schools,'' Mr. Bruck said, ''Georgia would almost certainly lose. Ordinary civil rights lawsuits rarely involve evidence of race discrimination as detailed and as powerful as the data on which McCleskey's case is based.''

But Warren McCleskey lost. A 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court, assuming the validity of the Baldus study and its findings, nevertheless held that there was no violation of Mr. McCleskey's constitutional rights.

Justice Powell, writing for the majority, said Mr. McCleskey had not proved that racial prejudice played a part in his particular case. And only that, not statistical proof of general and massive sentencing disparities based on race, could show a violation of the Constitution.

''At most,'' Justice Powell said, ''the Baldus study indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race. Apparent discrepancies in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.''

The reasoning was so unrelated to the facts, so unconvincing, that the opinion sometimes seemed cynical. For an individual defendant to prove that racial feelings figured in his sentence would be almost impossible.

But Justice Powell is the opposite of cynical. He searches achingly for constitutional justice. So one must find another explanation, and he really provided it.

''McCleskey challenges decisions at the heart of the state's criminal justice system,'' he wrote. In other words, to confront the reality of racial influence on death sentences would risk disturbing the system too much.

When the Supreme Court decides for the state in such a case, it passes on only the constitutionality of the challenged practice, not its rightness or wrongness. But the Court inescapably gives it an aura of legitimacy. That is why the implications of the McCleskey decision are so disturbing.

But perhaps here, as in so many other instances, the last word will prove to be the dissenters'. There was a kind of serenity in their opinions, an appeal to history without shrillness. Justice Brennan's opinion especially: I found it the most impressive literary document to come from this Court in a long time.

Over the last three decades, Justice Brennan said, this country has taken ''honorable steps'' against racism. ''But we cannot pretend that we have completely escaped the grip of an historical legacy spanning centuries.

''Warren McCleskey's evidence confronts us with the subtle and persistent influence of the past. His message is a disturbing one to a society that has formally repudiated racism, and a frustrating one to a nation accustomed to regarding its destiny as the product of its own will. Nonetheless, we ignore him at our peril, for we remain imprisoned by the past as long as we deny its influence in the present.

''It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined. . . . The way in which we choose those who will die reveals the depth of moral commitment among the living.''

 

[muckraker10021]

Exonerated Ex-Convicts Band Together In Texas
The Dallas District Attorney's office says it's reviewing 200
cases of inmates who could be innocent


<img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/01/article-2137892-12DCDEEE000005DC-83_634x496.jpg" width="400"><img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/01/article-2137892-12DCDEEA000005DC-187_634x413.jpg" width="400">
Innocent: Judge Susan Hawk apologised to James Curtis Williams and Raymond Jackson and declared them formally innocent of aggravated sexual assault. Dallas County has now cleared 32 convicts in the past decade

<embed src="http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf" scale="noscale" salign="lt" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" background="#333333" width="425" height="279" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" FlashVars="si=254&&contentValue=50124000&shareUrl=http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7407084n&tag=contentMain;contentBody" />




by Mark Strassmann

April 30, 2012

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57424510/exonerated-ex-convicts-band-together-in-texas/

(CBS News) It is an all-too-familiar story in this country: in Dallas, two men who spent more than a quarter of a century in prison for a rape they didn't commit were formally exonerated Monday after DNA testing implicated two other men.

With James Curtis Williams and Raymond Jackson, Dallas County has now cleared 32 convicts in the past decade.

CBS News correspondent Mark Strassman reports this is such a common occurrence, the wrongly convicted in Texas have joined forces to help one another.

At one parade in Lancaster, Texas, six convicted felons were hailed as heroes. All had spent years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.

"We're just blessed to have this opportunity here riding around and enjoying our freedom again," said Christopher Scott.

Scott was arrested in 1997 for murdering a man in his neighborhood. A witness identified him as the gunman, but Scott insisted he was innocent. He said he knew he was in trouble "when they found me guilty."

He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

"I thought everyone who went to prison was guilty, and when you see the tables turned on you and you be put in a position like that and you're in prison for something you didn't do, it changes your whole way of thinking," Scott said.

Thirteen years passed before the real killer confessed. Scott was cleared and released in 2009.

Once out, he got help from other men wrongfully imprisoned in Dallas County. They call themselves the Texas Exoneree Project.

"We have a lot of people say: 'Man we know how you feel.' Man, you don't know how I feel. The only person that know how I feel is the guy that has been in position like me. He know how that feel,'" Scott said.

It's a growing fraternity. In the last ten years, more than 30 men in Dallas County have been freed or cleared of wrongful convictions for murder and rape - more than any other place in the country.

The Exonerees help newly released men rebuild their lives by finding them a place to live or helping them get a drivers license.

They have also become a voice for other Texans they say are still wrongfully imprisoned.

"You wish you can help get everybody get out of prison that don't supposed to be there, but you know you are not going to be able to do it," Scott said.

The Dallas District Attorney's office says it's reviewing 200 cases of inmates who could be innocent.

"You obligated to try, to at least help somebody that's in your position, that they say they are crying out for help. Because many days I cried out for help and wasn't nobody out there for me," Scott said.

Texas paid Scott more than $1 million to compensate him for false imprisonment. He used some of that money to open a men's clothing store.

"Sometime when I get up I still pinch myself to see if it's really true or not," Scott said. "No kidding."

Scott once dreamed of freedom, but now he wants justice.

 

[muckraker10021]

Registry Tallies Over 2,000 Wrongful
Convictions Since 1989
The national database, the largest of its kind, covers
the period since DNA testing came into common use

<img src="http://i.minus.com/jmW5hnvrZ63xL.jpg" width="400">
Bennie Starks of Chicago spent 20 years in prison after being convicted of rape.
DNA evidence pointed to another man, and charges against Starks were finally dropped May 2012

May 20, 2012 | by David G. Savage

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/20/nation/la-na-dna-revolution-20120521

WASHINGTON — More than 2,000 people have been freed from prison since 1989 after they were found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes, according to a new National Registry of Exonerations compiled by University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University.

Its sponsors say it is by far the largest database of such cases, and they hope it will help reveal why the criminal justice system sometimes misfires, prosecuting and convicting the innocent.

"The more we learn about false convictions, the better we'll be at preventing them," said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor.

The registry covers the period since DNA came into common use and revealed, to the surprise of many prosecutors and judges, that a significant number of convicted rapists and murderers were innocent. The Innocence Project in New York says DNA alone has freed 289 prisoners since 1989.

Criminal law experts have been studying the growing number of exonerations. Some cases have involved police corruption or witnesses who recanted. Experts have also pointed to faulty eyewitness testimony and lying witnesses as common problems.

Beyond that, a surprising number of cases involved suspects who confessed to crimes they didn't commit.

"Nobody had an inkling of the serious problem of false confessions until we had this data," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. Under persistent and prolonged questioning by investigators, some suspects confessed to crimes such as rape, even though DNA later revealed they were not the perpetrators.

Among the states, Illinois has the most exonerations listed in the new registry, and among counties, Cook County and Chicago led the way, followed by Dallas and Los Angeles. However, the sponsors of the new registry do not contend that their data permits strong comparisons across counties or states because only about 900 of the cases were examined in detail by jurisdiction.

"It's clear that the exonerations we found are the tip of the iceberg," Gross said.

For example, several counties in California with more than 1 million residents, including San Bernardino and Alameda, listed no exonerations. By contrast, Cook County had 78 and Dallas County 36.

"Obviously there are false convictions in those [other] counties. We just don't know about them," he said.

The figures are also constantly changing. Last week, shortly after a report on the registry was completed, prosecutors in Lake County, Ill., dropped sexual assault charges against Bennie Starks. He had been convicted of the 1986 rape of an elderly woman and had served 20 years in prison. DNA evidence taken from the victim pointed to a different man.

Updating the registry, Warden said Illinois now had 103 exonerations.


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[QueEx]

2,000; when even one is too many.

 

[muckraker10021]

Anthony Graves Becomes 12th Death Row Inmate Exonerated in Texas
©2012 Death Penalty Information Center<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" -->
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Anthony Graves (pictured) was released from a Texas prison on October 27 after Washington-Burleson County District Attorney Bill Parham filed a motion to dismiss all charges that had resulted in Graves being sent to death row 16 years ago.

Graves was convicted in 1994 of assisting Robert Carter in multiple murders in 1992. There was no physical evidence linking Graves to the crime, and his conviction relied primarily on Carter’s testimony that Graves was his accomplice.

Two weeks before Carter was scheduled to be executed in 2000, he provided a statement saying he lied about Graves’s involvement in the crime. He repeated that statement minutes before his execution.
<span style="background-color:yellow;"><b>
In 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned Graves’s conviction and ordered a new trial after finding that prosecutors elicited false statements and withheld testimony that could have influenced the jurors. </b></span>

After D.A. Parham began to reassemble the case and review the evidence, he hired former Harris County assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler as a special prosecutor. Siegler soon realized that making a case against Graves would be impossible: "After months of investigation and talking to every witness who's ever been involved in this case, and people who've never been talked to before, after looking under every rock we could find, we found not one piece of credible evidence that links Anthony Graves to the commission of this capital murder. This is not a case where the evidence went south with time or witnesses passed away or we just couldn't make the case anymore. He is an innocent man," Siegler said.


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GRAVE INJUSTICE
Students Help Free Innocent Man Who Spent 16 Years On Death Row



http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363660n

Watch the full 41 minute story of the innocent Mr. Graves 18 year imprisonment; — 16 years on death row, and finally his exoneration before receiving the lethal injection

https://www.rapidshare.com/files/4014224687/GraveInj.rar

Anthony Graves Finally Receives $1,400,000 From Texas For Wrongful Conviction


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[muckraker10021]

John Edward Smith Released After
&nbsp;&nbsp;19 Years In Prison For Murder
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Lone Eyewitness Lied At Trial, LAPD Detectives
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Pressured Him To Identify Smith As Gunman

September 25, 2012 | LOS ANGELES (AP)

A Los Angeles man serving a life sentence for murder was released Monday after prosecutors conceded that their star witness had perjured himself.

During 19 years behind bars, John Edward Smith, a 37-year-old former gang member, adamantly maintained his innocence in the drive-by shooting, insisting that he was miles away at his grandmother's house at the time of the crime.

His claims went unheard until three years ago, when a fledgling wrongful convictions group, Innocence Matters, took his case and identified problems with the testimony of the lone witness to identify him as the killer. The man subsequently recanted and at a brief and raucous hearing Monday afternoon, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge vacated his conviction.

Smith's relatives and friends erupted in cheers as Judge Patricia Schnegg, the supervising criminal judge, said she was setting aside the 1995 verdict because Smith's conviction rested almost entirely on perjured testimony.

"Thank you for your enthusiasm," Schnegg told the audience as Smith, dressed in a blue jumpsuit, gave a slight smile.

Smith was released around 8:30 Monday evening from a jail in downtown L.A., and was greeted by a phalanx of camera crews and microphones.

"I had days when I was really frustrated, but I knew I couldn't stop," Smith said of his bid for release in a phone interview minutes after he walked out a free man. He said he was most dazed by the lights of downtown Los Angeles and Staples Center, and was looking forward to going home and hugging his grandmother.

Smith said he was putting the details of his case out of his mind and focusing on the small steps to rebuild a life on the outside, like getting a driver's license.

"I'm not looking in the rear-view mirror," he said. "I'm here now."

The judge's ruling came after the district attorney's office completed its own yearlong investigation and determined that the witness, a high school student injured in the shooting, had lied on the stand.

That teenager, Landu Mvuemba, told Smith's lawyers that LAPD detectives had pressured him into the identification and that he had tried on a number of occasions over the years to alert authorities about his false statements.

The killing was a skirmish in a bloody war between gangs associated with the Crips and Bloods in the Mid-City neighborhood. On the morning of Sept. 9, 1993, two neighborhood teenagers went to look at the scene where a gang shooting had occurred the previous night. As they neared, a car approached and opened fire on them, killing one and injuring Mvuemba, then 16 years old.

Mvuemba became the key to the police case against Smith, a Bloods associate who lived nearby. He said he had seen the gunman's face for a split second from a distance of 18 feet and was questioned repeatedly by police. At the trial, Mvuemba identified Smith as the gunman.

Smith offered the jury an alibi: He was with a girlfriend and two others at his grandmother's house nearly three miles away. But the jury believed Mvuemba, convicting Smith of murder and attempted murder after three hours of deliberations. He was given two life sentences.

Smith's family, including his grandmother Laura Neal, firmly believed in his innocence. At one point, his grandparents mortgaged their house to pay an appellate law firm $65,000. They tried to persuade the Innocence Project to take his case and later took to cold-calling lawyers and investigators. Every effort failed until Smith heard about Innocence Matters from a relative.

When he phoned a few days after Christmas in 2009, the founder, veteran criminal defense attorney Deirdre O'Connor, told him that he was too early. The organization hadn't even filed its incorporation papers yet. But something about Smith's manner grabbed O'Connor. Guilty clients were often vague and hesitant, perhaps trying to sort out lies, but Smith was straightforward and precise.

"It was effortless for him to answer all of my questions," she recalled. She took his case.

O'Connor, a former Los Angeles deputy public defender, and a team of legal interns spent thousands of hours investigating his case. The most important thing they did was track down Mvuemba, according to court filings detailing their work. He was in prison for sexual assault and wanted to talk. Minutes into the first meeting, he blurted out, "I didn't see anything."

He said the police had come to his school two months after the shooting, handcuffed him and brought him to a police station, where they told him Smith had already been identified as the gunman. They wanted him to do the same.

"I felt a lot of pressure to go along with it," he said.

Mvuemba said he soon regretted it and reported his concerns to LAPD internal affairs twice. He even told the courtroom bailiff as he prepared to take the witness stand, he said. No one did anything, he said.

He and Smith later took polygraph tests. Both passed.

In court papers, Smith's lawyers have suggested that another neighborhood man, Roy Clarke, was the gunman. Clarke, an immigrant from Belize, has been a fugitive for two decades in connection with another gang shooting.

Outside the courthouse, Smith's grandmother, a frail women who uses a walker, said she had willed herself to stay alive until he was free.

"There was a part of me that was in there too," she said of his prison stay. "I am free now."

In an only-in-L.A. twist, Smith's exoneration occurred moments before a long-scheduled probation hearing for R&B singer Chris Brown. Brown, who was 4 years old when Smith was arrested, sat about five feet away as the judge recounted the wrongful conviction. When the judge announced that she was freeing Smith, Brown applauded along with Smith's relatives.

Smith's sister, Tiana Goodman, 25, said he would be meeting nieces and nephews who were born while he was in prison.

"This is a big day for our family," she said, tears running down her cheeks. "He kept his faith and never gave up."



http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-conviction-overturned-20120921,0,7713838.story

 

[Greed]

• The State: North Carolina, the only state in the union which has such a law.

• The Law: The Racial Justice Act of 2009 - allows judges to reduce death sentences to life in prison without parole in cases where defendants prove racial bias in jury selection.

• The Defendant: Marcus Robinson, a black man, convicted of killing 17-year-old Erik Tornblom with a shotgun blast to the face during a robbery that netted $27.

• The Prosecutors: Typically white.

• The Judge: Gregory A. Weeks, a black man.

• The Ruling: That prosecutors, "intentionally used the race of [jury pool] members as a significant factor in decisions to exercise preemptory strikes in capital cases.’’ He ruled that discrimination was a factor not only in the case Weeks heard involving convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson, but also in capital cases involving black defendants across North Carolina.

• The Result in Week's Case: Weeks sentence commuted from death to life.

• The Implications Nationally: The landmark decision could help set a precedent nationwide in death penalty cases, which for years have included arguments by black defendants and civil rights lawyers that prosecutors keep blacks off juries for overtly racial reasons.
  

• The Article:
  Racial Justice trial: No execution for black inmate, judge rules
  
  Marcus Robinson listens Friday as Cumberland County Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks found that racial bias played a role in Robinson's trial and sentencing.
  
  ​

So why isn't the conviction itself void?

 

[QueEx]

So why isn't the conviction itself void?

In this particular matter (the Marcus Robinson case) I think the following may have a lot to do with that:

I've heard that the decision is raising some eyebrows among the prosecution bar and unrest among the death penalty enthusiasts.


Perhaps, one reason its a bit difficult to hail the case is the bad facts: there doesn't appear to be much question that he brutally killed a young man, for 27 damn dollars - - and so its not hard for many to reach the conclusion that the defendant in this case deserved worse.

On the other hand, many prosecutors are a shameful lot. Even when they have all of the facts their way, some cannot resist adding insult by striking blacks from the jury. This ruling, as I'm certain you understand, is a blow against that practice, despite the bad facts of the case.

​

 

[Greed]

North Carolina lawmakers want to repeal bias law, restart executions

North Carolina lawmakers want to repeal bias law, restart executions
By Colleen Jenkins | Reuters
17 hrs ago

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) - North Carolina lawmakers took additional steps on Tuesday to repeal a divisive racial bias law in a move designed to restart executions in the state.

The 2009 Racial Justice Act, which permitted death-row inmates to cite statistics to help prove that racial discrimination affected their punishment, was already gutted last year by the Republican-led General Assembly.

Lawmakers said a full repeal of the legislation was needed to end the effective moratorium it had imposed on executions in the state. North Carolina has 152 inmates on death row but has not executed anyone since 2006.

"No one wants actual racial discrimination," Representative Paul Stam, a Republican, said during the debate of the proposed repeal. "What we don't want also is for race to be used for a pretext in order to stop the death penalty."

The House of Representatives passed the measure 77-40 and was expected to hold a final vote on Wednesday. The legislation will then go back to the Senate, where it passed along party lines in April.

In 2009, then Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue signed the Racial Justice Act into law when Democrats controlled the legislature. The law allowed an inmate's sentence to be changed to life in prison without parole if a judge determined that racial bias played a significant role in sentencing.

Supporters of the act hailed it as a historic measure that addressed a long history of racial injustice in the state's death penalty system. Critics say it has created unnecessary costs and delays.

In the act's first test, a state judge last year commuted the death sentence of a black man convicted of murder to life in prison, citing abundant evidence of "the persistent, distorting role of race in jury selection in North Carolina."

Statistics show that of the 152 people on death row in North Carolina, 80 are black, 62 are white and the remainder fall into other racial categories in a state where African Americans overall make up around a fifth of the population.

Democratic legislators urged their colleagues on Tuesday not to abandon a law they said had helped expose intentional discrimination in cases where inmates had otherwise exhausted their appeals. They said the law was designed to root out prejudice from trials, not to stop the death penalty.

"We remain imprisoned by the past as long as we continue to deny its existence," said Representative Rick Glazier, a Democrat.

http://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-lawmakers-want-repeal-bias-law-restart-002158761.html

 

[thoughtone]

There was some buzz about this locally but not much.

Which is why republicans keep winning.

 

[muckraker10021]

Which is why republicans keep winning.

RepubliKlans win State legislatures because all voters but especially Democratic voters and even more especially Black Democratic voters do not participate in the non- presidential year elections.

The Black voter turnout in North Carolina in 2008 was 71.9% in 2012 it was 70.2%.

During the 2010 North Carolina mid term elections Black voter & turnout was less than 40% and the RepubliKlans coasted to majorities in the NC State legislature. Even during the 2012 elections many Democratic voters only voted for the top of the ticket; the President; so RepubliKlans control the state.

Voters interested in preserving civilization over barbarism need to get more politically sophisticated and stop just voting only during presidential elections; furthermore they have the majority of votes when they go to the polls

http://democracy-nc.org/downloads/NCVoterTurnout2012PR.pdf
http://www.ncsbe.gov/content.aspx?ID=70
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171146/gops-failed-voter-suppression-strategy

 

[muckraker10021]

The Third Koch ‘Brother’ Hits North Carolina
<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" -->
Art Pope<img src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/10/10/p233/111010_r21377_p233.jpg" align="right"></div>

by Katrina Vanden Heuvel | June 11, 2013

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/...thers-north-carolina-citizens-united/1[/size]

<br>There&rsquo;s something rotten in the state of North Carolina — and it smells like money. Specifically, Art Pope&rsquo;s money.
<br>In fact, Pope and his cash are responsible for North Carolina&rsquo;s recent meteoric rise as the poster child for regressive, conservative politics.
<br>As the head of Variety Wholesalers (a family-run discount store holding company) and the $150 million Pope Family Foundation, he has invested in an array of think tanks and advocacy groups dedicated to aggressively aligning the state&rsquo;s political terrain with his business interests. Gov. Pat McCrory, whose campaign he bankrolled, recently named Pope to the powerful post of state budget director.
<br>Pope is, for all intents and purposes, North Carolina&rsquo;s third, lesser known, Koch brother. In fact, he&rsquo;s attended the Koch Brothers&rsquo; planning summits and considers himself their close ally.
<br>In 2010, Pope&rsquo;s organizations spent $2.2 million on 22 state legislature races, and won 18 of them. In fact, outside groups backed by Pope accounted for 75 percent of independent spending in those races. In 2012, Pope and his affiliated groups again spent more than $2 million on the election, leading to a Republican supermajority in the General Assembly, and putting McCrory in the governor&rsquo;s mansion.
<br>In the dystopian world of Citizens United, Art Pope&rsquo;s $2.2 million feels like chump change — and on a national scale, it is. Sheldon Adelson alone spent $150 million in 2012. But in one state, that $2.2 million can buy a whole ticket&rsquo;s worth of legislators. That&rsquo;s the only way to push back against the undeniable demographic shifts that have made North Carolina a battleground state in the last two presidential elections.
<br>So, having bought and paid for key seats, Pope and his conservative cronies are fighting every progressive policy North Carolina has enacted. Their efforts could lead to a rollback of crucial gains.
<br>Conservative legislators want to dilute the influence of minority voters by curtailing early voting, ending Sunday registration and enacting unnecessary voter ID laws. It&rsquo;s a sequel to 2010&rsquo;s gerrymandering. The American Prospect recently reported that though a majority of North Carolina voters picked a Democrat for the House in 2012, &ldquo;thanks to where those voters had been placed, Republicans won 9 of the state&rsquo;s 13 House seats.&rdquo;
<br>Public education is being gutted. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, despite overwhelming support, the legislature repealed the pennysalestax that went toward public education funding. Even the state&rsquo;s prized University of North Carolina system is facing some $50 million in budget cuts.
<br>Unsurprisingly, and unconscionably, Gov. McCroy has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though it would insure half a million North Carolinians. Instead, the state Health and Human Services Department is looking to privatize Medicaid, which will ultimately raise costs and reduce care.
<br>Despite a 9.2 percent jobless rate — well above the national average of 7.9 percent — North Carolina is cutting back on unemployment benefits. Last week, the state legislature repealed a first-in-the-nation law that allowed inmates on death row to challenge their sentencing based on racial factors. Without a hint of irony, state Republicans claimed that the law was unfair — turning a blind eye to the systemic racial injustice and inequality that plagues capital punishment trials.
<br>But Pope&rsquo;s money cannot silence the sound of outraged North Carolinians who have had enough. The NAACP has organized a diverse coalition of religious leaders, farmers, teachers, doctors, veterans – people from all walks of life – to rally at the steps of the General Assembly in Raleigh. These &ldquo;Moral Mondays&rdquo; protests are against attempts to eliminate the fundamental building blocks of a fair society: voting rights, public school funding, access to health care, unemployment insurance and racial equality. The state legislature is facing an abysmal 25 percent approval rating – which means that their extremism won&rsquo;t go unchecked.
<br>Unfortunately, one-man political machines — right-wing billionaires using their outsize influence to control states and roll back hard-earned rights — are not new. The Koch brothers effectively bankrolled Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker&rsquo;s public union-busting policies and his subsequent recall victory. But North Carolina is showing us that this is just the beginning.
<br>Republican donors know that this strategy produces a high return on investment. For just a few million dollars, not only can they affect state policies, but they also can control electoral laws and redraw districts — rigging the deck before it even gets to Washington.
<br>With money to burn, Pope and his cronies are on their way to turning state after state into regressive backwaters while using their bucks to drown out the voices of anyone who disagrees with them. It all happens right under our noses because state legislature races almost never make the cover of The Post or the headlines on CNN. If states are, as Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “the laboratories of democracy,” then Art Pope is a mad scientist — turning North Carolina into his own personal monster. It’s time for everybody who cares about preserving America’s democratic ideals to pay attention.

 

[muckraker10021]

Protests Swell as Republican Party Remakes North Carolina

by Margaret Newkirk and Romy Varghese | June 30, 2013

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print...-republican-party-remakes-north-carolina.html

It started in April with 17 arrests at the North Carolina statehouse. By last week, more than 600 people had passed through Raleigh’s jail and the crowd on the grassy mall outside the capital numbered in the thousands.

Armed with signs, bongo drums and puppets, the protesters blasted tax breaks for the rich and the end of a credit for the poor. They chanted against education budget cuts, the refusal to expand Medicaid, the end of a program that kept special-interest money out of judicial races, proposed voting restrictions and a new law that cuts jobless benefits. More than 70,000 North Carolinians lose those checks today, when the protests resume.

The weekly outpourings of anger, called Moral Mondays, were prompted by the first Republican-led North Carolina government since Reconstruction. Its leaders are pushing dramatic change in a state whose economy has been dominated by technology, higher education and banking, and one that is narrowly divided between parties, choosing President Barack Obama in 2008 and Republican Mitt Romney last year.

“We’ve always had this balance,” said Ericka Eisdorfer, 57, a Durham bookseller at last week’s demonstration. “The progressive were balanced by the business conservatives. North Carolina is balanced and these people are running roughshod over it.”

Entering their 10th week, the protests recall demonstrations over public-employee rights in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan in 2011, and during a Texas Senate filibuster last week, spurring a commotion that blocked a vote on an anti-abortion bill pushed by Republicans.

Final Takeover

North Carolina Republicans, who won the governor’s office and cemented a veto-proof legislative majority in Raleigh last year, are doing everything they can to hurt the poor, help the rich and destroy the coalition of black, white and Hispanics that made the state competitive for Democrats, protesters say.

Raleigh was the last state capital in the U.S. South to switch to all-Republican control, after incumbent Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue didn’t run for re-election. It joined 36 states where one party holds power in both the legislature and the executive branch after former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory won the governor’s race. He’s the first Republican in a century to take office with a legislature led by his party.

McCrory ran on a platform of change, specifically to the tax code and education system.

Eager Supporters

The business community was eager to see it, said Lew Ebert, president of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce.

“We had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country,” he said. “We owed the federal government $2.5 billion for unemployment benefits we’d borrowed. We were paying benefits that were much higher than what’s common in the South. Our business taxes were much higher than what’s common in the South.”

The state also had a reputation of being a cut above the rest of the region because of its tradition of public investment, particularly in education. Home to Duke University in Durham and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state topped Site Selection magazine’s list of best business climates in nine of the past 11 years, in part because of the quality of its workforce.

Once a low-wage, mill-and-agriculture state, North Carolina’s economy now rests on higher education, technology and banking, including Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp., the second-biggest U.S. bank. The Research Triangle region, including Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, has the sixth-highest number of doctoral-degree holders in the U.S.

Dashed Hopes

The Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said his members and their allies had hopes that they could work with McCrory. The former mayor had been known as a moderate during his tenure in Charlotte.

The optimism continued even after McCrory tapped Variety Wholesalers Inc. Chairman Art Pope, a top campaign donor and limited-government advocate, as budget director. Pope spent years building a network of policy institutes advocating free markets and less government.

Barber said his hopes were dashed within weeks, when the new administration killed efforts to expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health-care program for the poor, and worked with lawmakers to cut unemployment benefits.

The changes also raised business contributions to the jobless-insurance system to repay federal aid, supplied when North Carolina’s funds ran out during the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009. The cuts made the state ineligible for extended U.S. support, which is why checks end today for 70,000.

Financial Superstructure

The legislature is also weighing dueling tax proposals that both would cut corporate and income levies and reduce revenue, at least in the short term.

North Carolina’s fiscal management has made it one of eight states that have AAA grades from the three major credit-rating companies. Its pension system was more than fully funded in 2012, according a report this month by the Center for State & Local Government Excellence in Washington. The median nationwide was 72 percent in 2011, according to Bloomberg Rankings.

The state’s leadership is tinkering with the some of the underpinnings of North Carolina’s success. However proponents, including the chamber’s Ebert, say the proposed tax cuts ultimately will boost revenue by encouraging business growth.

Lit Fuse

A slew of election bills introduced in April, all still pending, spurred the weekly protests. One measure would remove a tax credit for parents whose college-student children vote where they go to school instead of where their parents live. The provision would reduce the vote in college towns such as Chapel Hill, a Democratic stronghold.

The bills also add voter-identification requirements; end Sunday voting, which has increased turnout among black churchgoers; shorten the window for early voting and end same-day registration. The registration provision had been won only five years ago, by the same organizations -- the NAACP, labor, women’s and Hispanic groups and clergy -- that are behind the demonstrations.

College students protested first, showing up at the legislature with duct tape over their mouths. Then, on April 29, the NAACP brought 17 protesters to the statehouse, all of whom were arrested after they refused to disperse. That kicked off what organizers call Moral Mondays, with demonstrations every week since except on Memorial Day.

Enraged Housepet

Police estimated last week’s crowd at 3,000, of whom more than 120 were arrested.

“Stop making my state look stupid,” said one handwritten sign. “Even my dog is pissed,” said another.

The arrests have taken place on the first floor of the Statehouse after rallies on the grassy mall next door. Typically, volunteers file in surrounded by cheering supporters, then sing until they’re told to stop.

“To get arrested, you stay when they say go, sing a few songs and they put the handcuffs on you and walk you away,” said Roy Schonberg, 60, a Durham technology consultant arrested last month.

Those arrested have included preachers, a woman in a wheelchair, another more than 90 years old and the Charlotte Observer newspaper’s religion reporter, who was interviewing a protesting clergy member.

The charges are typically second-degree trespassing and disobeying building rules. Most of the defendants are released on personal recognizance.

Cell Seminar

Chris Kromm, editor of the pro-labor publication Southern Exposure, was among 150 arrested last month, and said he was back home by about 1:30 a.m.

“I was sitting in a cell next to a doctor, a farmer, a guy who works in a genetics lab and an Army guy from Fort Bragg,” he said.

The governor has had little to say about the protests.

“Unlawful demonstrations should be unacceptable,” McCrory said in response to an e-mailed query last week. “But lawful demonstrations we welcome. That is the great part of our democracy.”

Critics call the protesters outliers who don’t represent voter sentiment in North Carolina.

“It looks like my fellow baby boomers want to revisit the ’60s,” said James Tynen, a spokesman for the free-market Civitas Institute, one of the research organizations created by Pope, now McCrory’s budget director. “They represent a fairly narrow cross-section of the state.”

Civitas created a mocking game using mug shots of the arrested, publishing it on its website. It listed many of their occupations, the salaries of public employees, and a chart showing that most were from the immediate area.

Barber, the NAACP president, said the Civitas gallery only brought out more protesters: “People are realizing. This is where the fight is happening now, in statehouses. It’s the statehouses that are taking away our rights.”

 

[muckraker10021]

The Decline of North Carolina

July 9, 2013 | Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/o...html?src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=print&_r=0

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the &ldquo;Moral Monday&rdquo; demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage. <br>
In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot. <br>
The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks. <br>
The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program. <br>
At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped. <br>
&ldquo;We are losing ground,&rdquo; Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master&rsquo;s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes. <br>
Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state&rsquo;s abortion clinics. <br>
And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham. <br>
North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build. <br>

 

[muckraker10021]

What’s The Matter With North Carolina?
The state went from beacon of tolerance to bastion of voter suppression in a month

by Dahlia Lithwick | July 24, 2013 |http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...voter_id_law_is_the_worst_in_the_country.html

<br>North Carolina is proving itself to be the poster child for all that is wrong with modern American democracy and—with thanks to Moral Mondays—also highlighting all that may someday save it.
<br>Once a temperate and tolerant beacon of the South, the state is poised to enact a rash of inexpressibly awful legislation, rushed through a Republican legislature. Because the GOP has veto-proof super-majorities in the state House and Senate and a Republican governor—for the first time since Reconstruction—the party has been on a spree. Republican-controlled redistricting was fantastically effective. So much so that in the 2012 elections, nearly 51 percent of North Carolina voters picked a Democrat for the U.S. House, yet Republicans won nine of the state&rsquo;s 13 House seats, as Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis recently pointed out.
<br>Some of the gems advanced recently in the legislature include an abortion bill tacked first onto an anti-Sharia law and then snuck in through a motorcycle safety law (new TRAP regulations may shutter all but one clinic in the state). Another bill forces all educators to teach seventh graders that abortion causes preterm birth (it doesn't). Lawmakers also enacted legislation (described here and elsewhere as "the harshest unemployment insurance program cuts in our nation's history") that resulted in 70,000 North Carolina citizens losing their unemployment benefits. The state is one of the 15 to have refused Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. A proposed education bill would slash teacher compensation, (already ranked among the lowest in the nation), eliminate tenure, and use vouchers to reallocate $90 million of public-school funding to private schools (The school superintendent issued a statement this week saying that in light of the proposed deep cuts to the education budget "For the first time in my career of more than 30 years in public education, I am truly worried about students in our care.") Don't forget the embarrassing proposed resolution allowing counties and cities to enshrine a state religion. Or the proposed ban on nipples.
<br>But none of this is a joke. For reasons that Kromm and Sturgis lay out at length, it&rsquo;s a well-funded, Koch-endorsed Christmas rush to get everything done right now.
<br>How does the state legislature control an electorate that by all accounts really hates the state&rsquo;s new legislative initiatives? Simple. Drown them out—by diluting minority/Democratic votes through redistricting, or suppressing the vote.
<br>Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 40 counties in North Carolina had to go to the federal government for pre-approval of any change to local election law. When the Supreme Court locked up Section 5 last month, by a vote of 5–4, it gave a great gift to the disenfranchisement community. States no longer need to check their crazy with federal courts or the Justice Department. The obligation to prove that you aren&rsquo;t harming minority voters (or expressly targeting them) has gone. Texas and Mississippi charged ahead with their own controversial voter ID laws within hours of the Supreme Court ruling. Alabama and Mississippi have either passed or are working on similar ones. And Tuesday, North Carolina took the first step to expanding its Voter ID bill to better disenfranchise a few more voters who might have leaned left, including students, African-Americans, and women.
<br>Indeed, North Carolina has just put in place a vote suppression regime that can only really be described as political performance art. Here is the proposed new elections omnibus bill. It drastically reduces early voting, does away with same-day voter registration, weakens the disclosure of so-called independent expenditures, disenfranchises felons and the "mentally incompetent," authorizes vigilante poll observers, and penalizes families of college students who vote out of state.
<br>The voter ID component of the bill is probably the most draconian in the nation. It cuts to seven the forms of permissible identification. If it passes, no county or municipal government or public employee IDs will be valid proof of voter identification. Nor will any photo ID issued by a public assistance agency, or any student ID from any college. The new voter ID rules will hit African-American voters, women, and Democrats hardest. The indispensable Ari Berman sums up the aggregate effect as follows: "According to the state&rsquo;s own numbers, 316,000 registered voters don&rsquo;t have state-issued ID; 34 percent are African-American and 55 percent are registered Democrats. Of the 138,000 voters without ID who cast a ballot in the 2012 election, 36 percent were African-American and 59 registered percent Democrats." And the scourge of voter fraud in North Carolina, at which the proposed law is directed? Between 2000 and 2010 there have been <em>two</em> cases of alleged voter impersonation. In that period three people also ate pop rocks and died.
<br>While the General Assembly allocated $1 million in the budget to implement the new voting regime, estimates of the actual cost range from $3 million to $20 million. It is the voters themselves who will soon be paying for the privilege of being denied the vote.
<br>This brings us to the rather amazing book review in <em>the New York Review of Books</em><em> </em>this weekend, by retired Justice John Paul Stevens, of Professor Gary May&rsquo;s superb new book, <em>Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy</em><em>.</em> May scrutinizes the forces that led to the original passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, with an emphasis on the brute violence and racial ugliness that accompanied efforts to vote, organize, and protest.
<br>Stevens aligns himself with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg&rsquo;s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court&rsquo;s June decision that hamstrung Section 5, and expressly takes on Chief Justice John Roberts&rsquo; constitutional claim that the "fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the states" controlled the case. Stevens also lambastes the majority for usurping the role of Congress, writing that while some neutral decision-maker could surely find that the preclearance formula is now dated: "The opinion fails, however, to explain why such a decision should be made by the members of the Supreme Court."
<br>May&rsquo;s book offer a grim reminder of how truly awful things were for Southern Blacks before the VRA was enacted, and how hard Southern whites worked to suppress their votes, long after they were legally granted the franchise. He details the beatings, deaths, police-led violence and brutality that culminated in the events of "Bloody Sunday" in March of 1965. As May concludes, "History reveals that improved conditions come less from a revolution in white attitudes toward African-Americans than from the act&rsquo;s effectiveness in altering electoral conditions that had prevented blacks from winning elections." Stevens&rsquo; object in his review is not just to call out the majority for its institutional overreach—although he does that with gusto—but to try to shake his colleagues out of their willful ignorance of how egregious state efforts at vote suppression have been and continue to be, and how extensive the record of brazen misconduct remains.
<br>The underlying paradox of the Supreme Court&rsquo;s June ruling is that it was deployment of the Voting Rights Act that stopped efforts to suppress votes and limit voting in Texas, North Carolina, and Florida in the 2012 elections. The law was a victim of its own success, not just in the distant past, but only months earlier. In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that "the sad irony of today&rsquo;s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." She famously added that throwing out the law&rsquo;s key protection for minority voters "is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
<br>Less than a month later, it&rsquo;s raining vote suppression in North Carolina. And the forecast calls for a whole lot more of the same.

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[muckraker10021]

Freed by DNA, Angola Prisoner Henry James
30 Years Behind Bars for Crime He Didn’t Commit


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Monday, September 30, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/30/freed_by_dna_angola_prisoner_henry

We broadcast from New Orleans, Louisiana, the heart of the world’s prison capital, where more people are behind bars any other state per capita — an incarceration rate 13 times that of China.

Louisiana also ranks among the highest in the country in terms of the number of people per capita who are exonerated after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit. We are joined by Henry James, the longest-serving prisoner to be exonerated in Louisiana. James spent 30 years in the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola prison, on a life sentence without parole for rape.

At trial, the prosecution never told the jury that serology testing from the rape kit excluded James as the perpetrator.

In 2011, DNA evidence found by accident proved James’ innocence, winning him his release. We also speak with Emily Maw, director of Innocence Project New Orleans, which helped win his exoneration. "Henry James’ case is unfortunately atypical. Everybody in Louisiana who is convicted of murder or rape gets sentenced to life without parole. There is no other sentence for those two crimes. What is atypical about Henry’s case is that they found the evidence," Maw says. "In Louisiana, as in many places, evidence storage and preservation practices are atrocious. People lose evidence all the time in cases where DNA testing could prove their innocence."




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Cancer-Stricken Angola 3 Prisoner Herman Wallace Given Just Days to Live After 42 Years in Solitary

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Monday, September 30, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/30/cancer_stricken_angola_3_prisoner_herman

Angola prisoner Herman Wallace is dying of liver cancer after 42 years in solitary confinement. A member of the so-called Angola Three, Wallace and two others were in jail for armed robbery, then accused in 1972 of murdering a prison guard at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola prison. The men say they were framed because of their political activism as members one of the first prison chapters of the Black Panther Party. Wallace’s supporters say he has just days to live, but his requests for compassionate release has so far gone unanswered.

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Black Panther dies 3 days after release from 42-year solitary stint

Black Panther dies 3 days after release from 42-year solitary stint

Herman Wallace as he entered prison, during his stay in solitary confinement and in an ambulance after his release from prison.


NEW ORLEANS — A 71-year-old man who spent more than four decades in solitary confinement in Louisiana died Friday, less than a week after a judge freed him and granted him a new trial.

Herman Wallace’s attorneys said he died at a supporter’s home in New Orleans. Wallace had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and stopped receiving treatment. Wallace was held for years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In 2009, Wallace was moved from Angola to “closed-cell restriction” at Hunt Correctional in St. Gabriel, where he recently was taken to the prison’s hospital unit.

Jackie Sumell, a longtime supporter of Wallace, said he was surrounded by friends and family when he died. Wallace at one point told them, “I love you all,” according to Sumell.

“He was in and out of consciousness,” she said.

U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson in Baton Rouge had ordered Wallace released from prison on Tuesday after granting him a new trial. Jackson ruled women were unconstitutionally excluded from the grand jury that indicted Wallace in the stabbing death of the 23-year-old guard, Brent Miller.

A West Feliciana Parish grand jury re-indicted Wallace on charges connected to Miller’s death on Thursday. District Attorney Sam D’Aquilla told The Advocate newspaper that Jackson ordered a new trial because he “perceived a flaw in the indictment — not his murder conviction.”

Wallace and two other inmates held in solitary confinement for years came to be known as the “Angola 3.”

Wallace’s attorneys said in a statement Friday that it was an honor to represent him.

“Herman endured what very few of us can imagine, and he did it with grace, dignity, and empathy to the end,” they said. “Although his freedom was much too brief, it meant the world to Herman to spend these last three days surrounded by the love of his family and friends. One of the final things that Herman said to us was, ‘I am free. I am free.’”

Wallace, of New Orleans, was serving a 50-year armed robbery sentence when Miller was stabbed to death.

Wallace and fellow “Angola 3″ member Albert Woodfox denied involvement in Miller’s killing, claiming they were targeted because they helped establish a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party at the Angola prison in 1971, set up demonstrations and organized strikes for better conditions.

In 2010, Woodfox was moved to the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where he remains in custody.

The third “Angola 3″ member, Robert King, who was convicted of killing a fellow inmate in 1973, was released in 2001 after his conviction was reversed.

 

[QueEx]

Re: Black Panther dies 3 days after release from 42-year solitary stint

Man who spent decades on La. death row is freed




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Glenn Ford of Louisiana has gone free, after spending nearly
26 years on death row. His murder conviction was vacated.
​

ANGOLA, La. — A man who spent nearly 26 years on death row in Louisiana walked free of prison Tuesday, hours after a judge approved the state’s motion to vacate the man’s murder conviction in the 1983 killing of a jeweler.

Glenn Ford, 64, had been on death row since August 1988 in connection with the death of 56-year-old Isadore Rozeman, a Shreveport jeweler and watchmaker for whom Ford had done occasional yard work. Ford had always denied killing Rozeman.

Ford walked out the maximum security prison at Angola on Tuesday afternoon, said Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Asked as he walked away from the prison gates about his release, Ford told WAFB-TV, “It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It feels good.”

Ford told the broadcast outlet he does harbor some resentment at being wrongly jailed: “Yeah, cause, I’ve been locked up almot 30 years for something I didn’t do.”

“I can’t go back and do anything I should have been doing when I was 35, 38, 40 stuff like that,” he added.

State District Judge Ramona Emanuel on Monday took the step of voiding Ford’s conviction and sentence based on new information that corroborated his claim that he was not present or involved in Rozeman’s death, Ford’s attorneys said. Ford was tried and convicted of first-degree murder in 1984 and sentenced to death.

“We are very pleased to see Glenn Ford finally exonerated, and we are particularly grateful that the prosecution and the court moved ahead so decisively to set Mr. Ford free,” said a statement from Gary Clements and Aaron Novod, the attorneys for Ford from the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana.

They said Ford’s trial had been “profoundly compromised by inexperienced counsel and by the unconstitutional suppression of evidence, including information from an informant.” They also cited what they said was a suppressed police report related to the time of the crime and evidence involving the murder weapon.

Currently, there are 83 men and two women serving death sentences in Louisiana, according to Laborde.

A Louisiana law entitles those who have served time but are later exonerated to receive compensation. It calls for payments of $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration up to a maximum of $250,000, plus up to $80,000 for loss of “life opportunities.”

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
​

http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ccb2e4-a97f-11e3-8a7b-c1c684e2671f_story.html

 

[QueEx]

Re: Black Panther dies 3 days after release from 42-year solitary stint

Four Inmates Might Return to Death Row
Because North Carolina Republicans
Repealed a Racial Justice Law​

Last month, the North Carolina Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it should reinstate death sentences for four inmates whose punishments were previously commuted. Under the state’s Racial Justice Act of 2009, the inmates awaiting execution had successfully challenged their sentences by illustrating that their trials had been affected by racial bias.

Last year, however, the Racial Justice Act was repealed by North Carolina's Republican-controlled state legislature, allowing the state to argue in favor of sentencing the four inmates to die for a second time. The state’s Supreme Court has not said when it will deliver an opinion on the case, and it is not clear whether its ruling will focus on the four defendants or whether it will be broad enough to apply more widely. Either way, the state’s repeal of the Racial Justice Act provides a powerful example of why we should fear the takeover of state legislatures by Republican politicians.

Back in 2010, North Carolina was one of eleven states in which Republicans gained control of both houses of the state legislature. In North Carolina, this marked the first time the GOP controlled both assembly chambers since 1870. The takeover resulted in an onslaught of legislation: sweeping voter identification laws, drastic reduction of unemployment benefits, the subsidization of homeschooling, and cuts in funding for public schools.

The repeal of the Racial Justice Act was part of that legislative push. Local Republicans justified the repeal by arguing that it was unnecessary and excessive. Governor Pat McCrory implied that it offered too many avenues of redress for guilty inmates: “Nearly every person on death row, regardless of race, has appealed their death sentence under the Racial Justice Act,” said McCrory after he signed the repeal. The repeal bill’s sponsor, State Senator Thomas Goolsby, told local news outlet WRAL the act was “bad”—i.e., unnecessary—“law” since those convicted of capital crimes already have “multiple avenues of appeal” available to them.

But a closer look at the reason that these four inmates were able to appeal their death sentences and have their sentences commuted underlines the fundamental necessity of this act. In these four cases, according to the arguments presented in a brief filed by the NAACP on behalf of three of the inmates, racial bias affected the jury-selection process.

Take the case of State v. Augustine. In 2002, Quintel Augustine pled innocent to killing a Fayetteville police officer but was convicted and sentenced to death. As the NAACP brief shows, however, jury selection for the trial was fraught with racial bias. According to the brief, the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Cal Colyer, identified prospective African American jurors as “blk” in his notes and described a potential black juror with a substantial criminal record as a “thug.” A prospective white juror who had been involved in “trafficking marijuana” was described as a “fine guy.” Another African American was described as a “bl[ac]k wino.” Prosecutor notes in two of the other cases—those of inmates Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters—utilized similarly racially coded language. “Categorical assumptions were made about black prospective jurors, while white prospective jurors were assessed individually,” states the NAACP brief. There is not significant recorded evidence of racial bias during jury selection in the fourth case, but the lawyer for the inmate argued for the reduction of the inmate’s sentence through the Racial Justice Act by pointing out that over half of the qualified black jurors for his case were dismissed.

Jury selection based on race is illegal. A 1986 Supreme Court decision (Batson v. Kentucky) ruled that prosecutors cannot rely on race to dismiss jurors. In reality, though, this can be difficult to enforce, as prosecutors can eliminate jurors without expressing a reason—a prerogative known as peremptory challenge. In some states, according to the NAACP brief, “cheat sheets” have been distributed during prosecutorial conferences. These sheets instruct prosecutors on how “to hide the fact that you’re really eliminating this person because he or she happens to be black,” says Neil Vidmar, a law professor at Duke and a member of the team who prepared the brief. “The cheat sheet gives [prosecutors] a list of reasons that courts have approved as neutral explanations,” says James Coleman, also a law professor at Duke, “It gives them the answer that will give them a passing grade.”

The fate of the four inmates may hinge on more than just the repeal of this act, however. “I don’t believe these individuals can be resentenced to death,” says Jay Ferguson, the lawyer for three of the defendants. “They were sentenced to life without parole, and under North Carolina law, as well as the federal Constitution, once someone receives a life sentence, they can’t be sentenced to something greater, such as the death penalty.” The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution prevents individuals from double jeopardy; according to Ferguson, this is a straightforward instance in which the double jeopardy protection applies.

Whatever happens to these four individuals, the Republican takeover of the state legislature has resulted in a narrowing definition of justice in North Carolina that will likely affect many more people.

​

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117699/repeal-racial-justice-act-north-carolina-gop-takeover

 

[kenbgco68]

Re: Black Panther dies 3 days after release from 42-year solitary stint

And some of you still think the south isn't pure bullshit.

 

[QueEx]

Re: Black Panther dies 3 days after release from 42-year solitary stint

Henry McCollum and Leon Brown,
Wrongfully Convicted Brothers,
Each Get $750,000 Payout​

RALEIGH, N.C. — Two North Carolina brothers were each awarded $750,000 on Wednesday, three decades after they were wrongfully convicted in the killing an 11-year-old girl.

Henry McCollum, 51, appeared calm when the North Carolina Industrial Commission formally awarded him and his half-brother Leon Brown, 47, the money during a compensation hearing. Brown is in the hospital and did not attend.

McCollum and Brown were released in September 2014 after a judge vacated their convictions, citing new DNA evidence that points to another man in the killing and raping of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in 1983.

McCollum had been the longest-serving inmate on North Carolina's death row. Brown had been sentenced to life in prison.

Pardons in June from the governor qualified each of the brothers to receive $50,000 from the state for every year they were imprisoned, with a limit of $750,000.

The funds will be available after a period of 15 days, deputy commissioner J. Brad Donovan said.

In the months since their release, both men have had trouble adjusting to the outside world after spending most of their adult lives in prison. Money has been a problem, but McCollum told The Associated Press in June that the most important part of the pardon was having his name cleared.​

The case began in September 1983, when Buie's body was found in a soybean field in rural Robeson County. Items found nearby included cigarette butts, a beer can and two bloody sticks.

Defense attorneys have said the brothers were scared teenagers who had low IQs when they were questioned by police and coerced into confessing. McCollum was then 19, and Brown was 15.

The DNA from the cigarette butts doesn't match Brown or McCollum, and fingerprints taken from the beer can weren't theirs either. No physical evidence connects them to the crime, a judge and prosecutor acknowledged in late 2014.

Based largely on their confessions, both were initially given death sentences, which were overturned. Upon retrial, McCollum was again sent to death row, while Brown was convicted of rape and sentenced to life.​

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...ully-convicted-brothers-each-get-750k-n420281