Category Archives: criminal justice

Passing Judgment

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Tookie Williams was executed last night, and in the cold dawn light of the next day right-wingers are still dancing around the embers of their victory bonfires. “Shake hands with the devil,” says one. Michelle Malkin, in her role as tribal high priestess, makes righteous note of the names of those Tookie Williams was convicted of murdering. Those who protested the execution are dismissed as “the freak show.”

So Tookie Williams is dead, and the four people he was convicted of murdering remain dead, also. And the world turns, and the seasons change. In the vastness of eternity, big bleeping deal. Whatever path Williams took last night is one we’ll all take eventually. Whether we “deserve” death or not is beside the point.

And this is a point missed by both advocates and protesters of last night’s execution. Opponents of the death penalty make a huge mistake, IMO, by making the issue about what a prisoner might deserve. Will Bunch wrote yesterday about an anti-death penalty “cult of celebrity” that makes poster boys out of “deserving” prisoners like Williams or Mumia Abu-Jamal. These men are considered “deserving” because of their intelligence and accomplishments. Those who argue for sparing them either dismiss their convictions or insist they are better men now and don’t deserve to die for what they did then.

But if we make the argument about who deserves to die, we’re thinking like righties, who arrogantly believe they know who deserves to live or die. Bunch continues,

To truly oppose the death penalty, one must oppose it not just for the innocent or the remorseful, but for the most vile scum among us. The idea of a government taking someone’s life is offensive to our core religious beliefs — and most likely to yours as well. A so-called Christian fundamentalist who supports capital punishment is going through more twists than a South Philly pretzel. Even the Pope — and maybe even Rick Santorum — can get this one right.

From an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times,

GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER should have granted clemency — to Donald Beardslee, the convicted murderer executed in January. Beardslee didn’t have celebrity advocates making his case, like Stanley Tookie Williams did. But if Schwarzenegger had commuted Beardslee’s sentence to life in prison without parole, he would have made clear that no one would be put to death on his watch. And he could have explained that a civilized society doesn’t kill for retribution and should certainly not continue doing so when it’s become clear that the judicial system’s margin of error is unacceptably high.

Alas, Schwarzenegger failed to stake out that principled position. So Williams, who was scheduled to be executed shortly after midnight, always faced an uphill battle in seeking clemency. The governor turned him down because he does not consider capital punishment to be about our values as a society, but about the merits of the convicted supplicant.

Put another way, executions are not just about what is done to the condemned, but about what is done to us, the executioners.

The death penalty does not deter crime. Nor, I believe, has it been proved reliably to ease the sorrow of those who loved the victim. It only serves to gratify some base instinct that makes us want to cast all aberrations out of the tribe — including the malformed, the odd, the diseased, and anyone else who varies from social and biological norms.

But throughout human history, the great moral and spiritual teachers have urged us to renounce this instinct. If Jesus really said what he is quoted as saying in Matthew chapters 5-7, for example, the rightie tribal dancers need to look to their own souls. “Ye have heard that it was said to men of old, Thou shalt not murder; and whosoever shall murder shall be liable to judgement. But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with His brother without good cause shall be liable to judgement. … Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, that ye resist not the evil one: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. … Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

About five centuries earlier, the Tao Teh Ching warned (verse 74)

People fear death because death is an instrument of fate.
When people are killed by execution rather than by fate,
This is like carving wood in the place of a carpenter.
Those who carve wood in place of a carpenter
Often injure their hands.

Capital punishment is a failure of civilization. It legitimizes violence. It gratifies our worse instincts. It diminishes us as a people.

It’s not something to celebrate.

See also: Lawyers, Guns, and Money; Eschaton; The Talking Dog, R.J. Eskow at Huffington Post.

Update: See the Rude One, too.

Capital Punishment

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Breaking news: Gov. Schwarzenegger denied clemency to Tookie Williams, which means it’s nearly certain Williams will be executed after midnight.

The ACLU has a useful death penalty FAQ.

According to Amnesty International, “In 2004, 97 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Viet Nam and the USA.”

Also according to Amnesty International, homicide rates in death penalty states tend to be higher than in non-death penalty states.

I have read arguments that the death penalty encourages violence, because it legitimizes a violent “solution” to problems. I suspect there’s something to that.

See also: Attywood.

Bedfellows

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Viveca Novak’s account of what she told Bob Luskin about the Plamegate investigation is up at Time. And it reveals much about why what passes for “jounalism” is clueless.

Washington “journalists” and Washington “government officials” and their “attorneys” are all one big happy family. They have drinks together. They meet for dinner. They go to the same parties. They bump into each other at posh vacation spots. And loyalty to one’s source-buddies comes first — before employer, nation, or truth itself.

This has been apparent of the television “punditocracy” — Cokie et al. — for years. But after the Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, and now Viveca Novak episode, it is apparent more humble print reporters have crawled into the same compromised bed.

As Jeralyn, Kevin, and Jane point out, the impact of Novak’s testimony on Karl Rove’s future depends a lot on what other information Patrick Fitzgerald might have. But the corruption of journalism is crystal clear. I sincerely hope that every working reporter covering Washington politics — and politics elsewhere — is doing some heavy-duty soul searching right now.

Greg Mitchell writes at Editor & Publisher:

Where will it end, and when will reporters pay with their jobs? First we learn that Bob Woodward failed to tell his editor for years about his role in the Plame/CIA leak case. Today, we find out that Time reporter Viveca Novak not only kept her editors in the dark about her own involvement, but even had a two-hour chat with the special prosecutor about it well before telling her superiors.

At the end of her first-person account at Time online today, we are told in a brief editor’s note that she is by ”mutual agreement” now on a “leave of absence.” Has she been taken to the woodshed and, if not, why not?

Swopa writes,

… as it turns out, just for the sake of stalling Rove’s indictment for a month or two, Luskin has torched Novak’s career with Time (which notes as the end of her article that she is on a mutually agreed “leave of absence”). It seems that Viveca didn’t tell her bosses about her chats with Luskin to begin with, nor even when she first was interviewed by Fitzgerald — and when she did admit her involvement after being asked to testify under oath, they weren’t happy.

There should be an object lesson there for Washington, D.C. reporters playing the “access journalism” game … the sources who you’re covering up for even as they give you lies and personal smears will burn you in the blink of an eye if it helps them in the slightest.

Then again, that seems to be a larger message that the Bushites are all too happy to send to the media. What the latter thought was merely an occasionally distasteful exchange of information was really a blackmail ring. In the Corleone administration, reporters aren’t expected to keep quiet out of duty to the First Amendment — they’re expected to do so because they’ll be destroyed by any means possible if they don’t.

Reporters, please note: “Sources” are not “buddies.” And sources who try to use you to manipulate news, by feeding you lies and smears, are not worthy of protection. Got that?

Digest This

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I guess we’ll have to cross item #3 off the official White House list of ten serious al-Qaida terrorist plots disrupted since September 11.

Item #3, in case you forgot, is —

The Jose Padilla Plot: In May 2002 the U.S. disrupted a plot that involved blowing up apartment buildings in the United States. One of the plotters, Jose Padilla, also discussed the possibility of using a “dirty bomb” in the U.S.

Well, forget that. The charges against Padilla do not include plots to bomb apartment buildings or anything else in the United States. In fact, Padilla is such a minor figure he is barely mentioned in his own indictment. Neil Lewis reports in today’s New York Times:

Jose Padilla, whose newly unsealed indictment on conspiracy charges signals a marked change in the Bush administration’s legal approach to dealing with terrorism suspects, is mentioned only sparingly in the government’s account.

The indictment, announced Tuesday by the Justice Department, portrays Mr. Padilla as a distinctly minor though thoroughly willing player in a scheme run by others to support radical Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere.

Padilla is alleged to have acted as a courier for four conspirators who ran bogus charities and businesses to raise money to send to the radical Islamic fighters. The four conspirators were indicted on the same charges last year.

Padilla has been incarcerated since May 2002. The Gubmint finally obtained an indictment against him two days ago.

The Bush Administration claims that it could not bring other charges against Padilla without violating national security. Apparently the “intelligence” that led to Padilla’s arrest came from two senior al Qaeda members held in secret prisons and, most likely, tortured. Douglas Jehl and Eric Lichtblau write in today’s New York Times:

The Bush administration decided to charge Jose Padilla with less serious crimes because it was unwilling to allow testimony from two senior members of Al Qaeda who had been subjected to harsh questioning, current and former government officials said Wednesday.

The two senior members were the main sources linking Mr. Padilla to a plot to bomb targets in the United States, the officials said.

The Qaeda members were Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a top recruiter, who gave their accounts to American questioners in 2002 and 2003. The two continue to be held in secret prisons by the Central Intelligence Agency, whose internal reviews have raised questions about their treatment and credibility, the officials said.

One review, completed in spring 2004 by the C.I.A. inspector general, found that Mr. Mohammed had been subjected to excessive use of a technique involving near drowning in the first months after his capture, American intelligence officials said.

Reason #17 torture is a bad idea: You can’t use the “results” in court.

In June 2002 Attorney General John Ashcroft made a big show — via satellite feed while visiting officials in Moscow — of announcing the arrest of Padilla. You can read the transcript of Ashcroft’s statement here.

But just three months after the arrest, word leaked out that there wasn’t much of a case. CBS News reported in August 2002:

The government media blitz after the arrest an American accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive bomb was almost unprecedented for a terrorist suspect post-Sept. 11.

United States Attorney General John Ashcroft held a news conference via satellite while visiting officials in Moscow. Justice Department officials in Washington called him a significant terrorism figure and President Bush weighed in to agree.

But two months later, U.S. law enforcement officials close to the case, say Jose Padilla is probably a “small fish” with no ties to al Qaeda cell members in the United States.

The FBI’s investigation has produced no evidence that Padilla had begun preparations for an attack and little reason to believe he had any support from al Qaeda to direct such a plot, said one of the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

When John Ashcroft triumphantly announced the capture of Padilla, he said the U.S. had already captured an accomplice in the nefarious dirty bomb plot. What happened to that guy? Jehl and Lichtblau explain:

In an interview on Wednesday, a British lawyer for another man accused by the United States of working as Mr. Padilla’s accomplice in the bomb plot also accused American officials of working to extract a confession. The lawyer said the United States had transferred the man to Morocco from Pakistan, where he was captured in 2002, in an effort to have him to sign a confession implicating himself and Mr. Padilla.

“They took him to Morocco to be tortured,” said Clive A. Stafford Smith, the lawyer for the suspect, Binyan Mohammed. “He signed a confession saying whatever they wanted to hear, which is that he worked with Jose Padilla to do the dirty bomb plot. He says that’s absolute nonsense, and he doesn’t know Jose Padilla.”

Reason #2 torture is a bad idea: Tortured people will make stuff up to stop the torture.

One suspects the Bush Administration kept Padilla locked up all this time because they didn’t want the world to know Ashcroft had been wrong. But after nearly three years of maneuvering the Bushies were staring at a possible Supreme Court showdown over whether the president can hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely without criminal charges by declaring him an enemy combatant.

And the White House does not want that showdown. Even Harriet Miers may have realized the Bushies could lose. They got a big hint in 2004 when SCOTUS told them even “enemy combatants” must have access to courts. And when Padilla’s lawyers were about to challenge his detention in front of the SCOTUS, the Bushies suddenly changed their minds about not allowing Padilla to meet with counsel.

The Justice Department had to file a motion asking the SCOTUS not to take the case by next Monday. Instead, they announced Padilla’s indictment, taking advantage of Thanksgiving to minimize media attention.

Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate that the mishandling of Jose Padilla is proof that we’d all be better off and safer from terrorists if alleged terrorists were handled by the criminal justice system.

More than three years after the government began holding citizens in jails without charges, there is no proof that anyone in this country is safer for it. Nor is there any proof that ordinary criminal trials for Padilla, Hamdi, and the other terrorists we’ve tagged would have exposed vital intelligence information or resulted in acquittals. Yet with Hamdi sent home, and Padilla shuffled to the criminal courts, there may be no testing the addled theory that President Bush has boundless wartime powers, even after the Supreme Court has told him he doesn’t.

Had Padilla been charged and tried back in the summer of 2002, rather than touted as some Bond villain—the Prince of Radiological Dispersion—his case would have stood for a simple legal proposition: that if you are a terrorist, a supporter of terrorism, or a would-be terrorist, the government will hunt you down and punish you. Had the government waited, tested its facts, kept expectations low, then delivered a series of convictions of even small-time al-Qaida foot soldiers, we in this country would feel safer and we would doubtless be safer. Instead Padilla, like Hamdi, was used as fodder for big speeches. They became the justification for Bush’s position that some people are so evil that the law does not deter them, that new legal systems must be invented—new systems that bear a striking resemblance to those discredited around the time of Torquemada.

Just two months ago, Bush claimed in a speech that the U.S. had foiled ten terrorist plots since September 11. On the spot to back up the claim, White House staffers hustled to patch a list together and handed it to press. The Jose Padilla plot was item #3. Are the other nine items also fakes? Has the Bush White House actually accomplished anything to make us safer from terrorism?

Padilla Indicted

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Mark Sherman of the Associated Press reports that somebody finally brought charges against Jose Padilla. But they aren’t same the charges John Ashcroft talked about three years ago.

Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held for three years as an enemy combatant suspected of plotting a “dirty bomb” attack in this country, has been indicted on charges that he conspired to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas.

A federal grand jury in Miami returned the indictment against Padilla and four others. While the charges allege Padilla was part of a U.S.-based terrorism conspiracy, they do not include the government’s earlier allegations that he planned to carry out attacks in America.

You mean Crisco John was wrong? Wow.

The indictment avoids a Supreme Court showdown over how long the government could hold a U.S. citizen without charges. Padilla’s lawyers had asked justices to review his case last month, and the Bush administration was facing a deadline next Monday for filing its legal arguments. The high court had been asked to decide when and for how long the government can jail Americans in military prisons.

If it took ’em three years to patch a case together, one suspects they didn’t have much on Padilla when they arrested him.

Is Woody Helping Scooter?

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On MSNBC, Chris Matthews is referring to Bob Woodward’s unnamed administration official as “Deep Throat II.” Please…

[Update: John Dean thinks DTII could be Ari Fleischer. He just said this to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Update update: Raw Story says it’s Stephen Hadley.]

(If you’ve not been following the new Woodward/Plame angle, the details are here.)

Matthews speculates that DTII and/or Woodward came forward now in an attempt to take some of the shine off the Libby indictment. I don’t see how Woodward’s revelation makes any difference to the Libby indictment. Whether Libby was the first leaker or not doesn’t seem to me to matter to the charges. And as Maha reader Donna pointed out, Fitzgerald didn’t claim that Libby was the first leaker, just that he was the first official KNOWN to have leaked. The whole reason Libby was indicted is that he obstructed the investigation and prevented Fitzgerald from knowing stuff. So if they’re trying to manufacture a talking point, this seems a pretty lame effort.

On the other hand, righties have certainly based talking points on much less.

Howie Kurtz reports that Woodward apologized today for waiting two years to tell WaPo‘s executive about his connection to the Plame case. The editor, Leonard Downie Jr., has been all CNN and MSNBC today claiming that he was not angry with Woodward and that all was forgiven and he hopes Woodward keeps writing for the Washington Post.

Downie also said that three administration officials talked about Valerie Plame Wilson to Bob Woodward. Two have given releases for Bob to write about their conversation, and those two are Scooter Libby and Andy Card. But the third remains a mystery.

Update: See also first-rate rant by ReddHedd at firedoglake.

Bernie’s a Bad Boy

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Remember Bernie Kerik, the ethics-challenged former New York City police commissioner who was chosen by President Bush to be Director of Homeland Security? He’s in the news again. William Rashbaum writes in today’s New York Times that Bernie is accused of taking tens of thousands of dollars in apparent bribes from a construction company when Bernie was NYC correction commissioner in the late 1990s. Even better, the construction company is associated with organized crime.

Wow, that Dubya sure knows how to pick ’em.

These accusations emerged during the uproar following Kerik’s withdrawal from nomination, although most of that uproar focused on Kerik’s extramarital adventures. But some New Jersey officials were paying attention. Yesterday the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement filed papers with the state Casino Control Commission to stop the construction company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, from doing work on Atlantic City casinos. The New Jersey officials have no authority to bring charges against Kerik, but he is featured prominently in the accusations nonetheless. For example:

The agency officials said yesterday that Interstate paid another contractor for renovations worth more than $200,000 made to Mr. Kerik’s apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx in 1999 and 2000.

Mr. Kerik, who is now a consultant to the government of Jordan, could not be reached yesterday.

A lawyer for him, Joseph Tacopina, said that Mr. Kerik was not aware that Interstate had paid for the work done on the Bronx apartment, and that he doubted that the work was as expensive as the officials said.

The officials also said that Interstate gave Mr. Kerik’s brother, Donald, an $85,000-a-year job at the same time Mr. Kerik was using his influence within New York City government to help the company win a license to operate on Staten Island.

Some of the details of Mr. Kerik’s dealings with Interstate and its owners, Frank and Peter DiTommaso, became public late in 2004 after President Bush nominated him as homeland security secretary. Mr. Kerik withdrew his name, citing possible tax problems involving his family’s nanny.

So Bernie’s not facing charges, yet. But the Bronx district attorney is looking at him real hard…

Texas–It’s Like a Whole ‘Nother Planet

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CNN just reported that Texas’s highest criminal court let stand a lower court ruling that threw out Andrea Yates’s murder conviction for drowning her children in June 2001.

With no qualms about wasting taxpayer money, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry said the case would be retried if Yates’s attorney won’t settle for a plea bargain.

Andrea Yates has remained in prison since the lower court overturned her conviction in January. Essentially, Yates’s attorney figured that since the massively psychotic Yates is receiving psychiatric medical treatment in prison, she might as well be there as anywhere else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the husband and attorney agree to a plea bargain, in fact, because it is unlikely Yates will ever be well enough to be set free, and a trial would just be unnecessary stress as well as cost. Also, they have good reason to want her to stay in prison, explained at the end of this post. But a humane justice system would not have tried her in the first place.

I’ve written about Yates before; this is a repeat from May 2003:

I followed the Andrea Yates trial closely, and came to the conclusion that Texas is not only like a whole ‘nother country. It’s also stuck in a whole ‘nother century, sometime in the Dark Ages. The Texas justice system does not recognize brain disease; to them, insanity is a character flaw, or maybe devil possession.

The early news stories about Andrea Yates called her illness “postpartum depression,” but the truth is that she was a five-alarm schizophrenic. She had been sinking deeper and deeper into psychosis for several years, had attempted suicide, and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. In the months before the killings, one of her friends was so alarmed at her behavior she was keeping notes.

Two weeks before she killed her children, a bleeping incompetent psychiatrist took her off the antipsychotic meds — cold turkey — that had propped her up and kept her functional. A couple of days before she killed her children, her husband Randy took her back to this psychiatrist and begged him to put her back on her meds; the doc refused.

Once in county jail, the psychiatric staff proclaimed she was the most psychotic inmate they had ever seen. Several of the prison psychologists and psychiatrists — people who worked with her for many weeks — testified at trial that Yates was massively delusional. A prominent neuropsychiatrist tested her and diagnosed severe schizophrenia, noting major frontal lobe impairment. During her trial, Yates had to be drugged into catatonia so she could sit in her seat and not try to catch flies with her tongue.

The jury was told, over and over, that Yates had a disease of the brain. They were not told that, if found not guilty by reason of insanity, Yates would not have gone free. The court would have ordered her to be hospitalized, not to be released without another court order.

The prosecutors trotted out two primary witnesses. One was the psychiatrist who had taken her off her meds and who would have been charged with murder if I’d had anything to say about it. He said he saw no sign of psychosis in Yates. One suspects this guy couldn’t find shit in an outhouse.

The other witness was a paid expert psychiatrist who is also a consultant for “Law and Order.” He said that Yates had gotten the idea for killing her children from a “Law and Order” episode. Later it was determined that there was no such episode; it had been scripted but never produced.

After several weeks of testimony, the jury took all of four hours to find Yates guilty of murder. They decided she couldn’t have been crazy because she had called 911 to report the childrens’ deaths. Yes, this makes sense. A crazy person would have made up some story about intruders to avoid punishment.

Since the Yates trial, another Texas killer mother, Deanna Laney, was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the stoning deaths of two of her children. Laney lacked Yates’s long and well documented history of psychiatric illness, but the “witness for hire” hack psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, who testified for the prosecution at the Yates trial testified for the defense at the Laney trial, which should prove what an absolute whore the man is. Anyway, Laney was committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital, and the state of Texas expected her husband to pay the bills. I undersand Mr. Laney didn’t waste much time filing for divorce.