Yearly Archives: 2011

Prosecutorial Misconduct Inquiry Requested by Exoneree Michael Morton

December 21, 2011
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On November 18th we posted a story about the wrongfully convicted Michael Morton receiving an apology from the prosecutor who convinced a jury to sentence him to prison for life.  Morton languished in jail for 25 years for the 1986 fatal beating of his wife before he was finally freed after DNA testing cleared him completely.  Now lawyers for the former Austin grocery store manager who had no prior criminal record before his arrest will request that prosecutor Ken Anderson be investigated for prosecutorial misconduct. A Dec. 19 story in the The New York Times, co-authored by the Times’ John Schwarz and Brandi Grissom of the Texas Tribune, was so intriguing to me that I could find no way to properly summarize it without leaving out critical information.  Rather than posting the lengthy article in its entirety here, we offer the opening paragraphs verbatim and encourage you to read the entire story via this link. Exonerated...

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A Travesty of Justice Squared

December 20, 2011
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A Travesty of Justice Squared

We shouldn’t be surprised if Steven Phillips is ready to just throw in the towel. It’s awful enough that the man was registered as a sex offender and spent 25 years of a life sentence in a Texas prison for a crime that DNA proved with certainty he didn’t commit.  But after being awarded $4.1 million by the state for involuntarily donating half of his life to the penal system, his ex-wife is now seeking to make history by being the first ex-spouse to claim she’s entitled to a share of his compensation for wrongful conviction. And according to the 51-year-old Phillips, ex-wife Traci Tucker rarely visited him in prison and stopped coming altogether just three years into his life sentence.  He said she has been with another man during the 20 years since their 1991 divorce, and Phillips has had nothing to do with her following their break-up. The audacity of her action renders the term “golddigger” an extreme understatement....

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Jim Crow, Jr. — Like Father, Like Son

December 19, 2011
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 We buried Jim Crow several years ago after gradually beating him into submission over half a century, but he apparently had a son we didn’t know about. Lyndon Johnson did a hell of a lot of arm-twisting in his signature style to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed despite the vociferous objections of Southern segregationists then serving in Congress.  That act enabled the Justice Department to go to court to block states from passing discriminatory election laws designed to keep minority voters — primarily black voters — in a permanent minority.  The attempts to codify discrimination via poll taxes and onerous voter registration requirements – Jim Crow laws – were a favorite tactic of primarily Southern states from Reconstruction in 1877 until 1965.  They were designed to circumvent the result of the Civil War and keep the South’s racial caste system in place, only without overt slavery.  The Voting Rights Act did wonders for minority electoral...

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Recent Social Justice Posts from the ACLU’s Blog of Rights

December 12, 2011
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This morning I found three excellent ACLU posts that might be of interest to Canadoons: The Truth About the Racial Justice Act; Help Us Stop Congress From Passing Indefinite Detention Bill!; The Proof is in the Practice: FBI Documents Show Misuse of Community Outreach for Intelligence Gathering and Privacy Act Violations. These are definitely discussion-worthy.  I invite all to read these and come back to The DCDBlog and post your comments.

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SCOTUS to Review Nation’s Immigration Laws

December 12, 2011
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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed this morning to review Arizona’s law targeting illegal immigrants. The Obama administration has been fighting the actions of several states that have passed, or are considering passing, their own get-tough immigration laws, arguing that immigration is solely in the federal government’s domain.  The administration is trying to discourage a patchwork of state laws that could interfere with national immigration legislation, but a few states have decided that the feds aren’t doing enough to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and have thus taken matters into their own hands. The Supremes agreed to review a federal appeals court ruling that blocked several provisions in Arizona’s immigration statute. One of those provisions “requires that police, while enforcing other laws, question a person’s immigration status if officers suspect he is in the country illegally”, per an Associated Press story posted on Yahoo’s news website. In April, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a federal...

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Washington Post Editorial: “Righting a Wrongful Conviction in Virginia”

December 9, 2011
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Occasionally we come across an editorial or op-ed piece in one of the national media that we think will be of interest to our readers, and since it is entirely an expression of opinion we prefer to print it in full rather than paraphrase it and perhaps lose context. The Washington Post published the following editorial on December 5th, and it’s about a non-capital case in Virginia of justice gone awry yet again. Four years ago, 15-year-old Edgar Coker Jr. pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit after his lawyer warned that he could be prosecuted as an adult and subjected to a lengthy prison term if he fought the charges. Two months later, after Edgar had been sent to a juvenile facility, the 14-year-old girl who accused him of raping her recanted and said she made up the story after her mother walked in on the young couple....

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CNN Interviews the Documentary Filmmakers of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”

December 9, 2011
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CNN Interviews the Documentary Filmmakers of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”

In perhaps the most notorious of the many executions of Rick Perry’s gubernatorial term, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 for the murder of his three children in a house fire.  As Joe Bailey, Jr., and Steve Mims, the directors of the documentary “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” told CNN in an interview this week, Willingham was executed even though the evidence cast serious doubt that a crime ever occurred. “In most of these stories, you have a crime and maybe they found the wrong guy. In this case, there isn’t any evidence of a crime in the first place. That’s kind of a unique thing and an interesting thing to dissect, even before you get into everything that happened after the conviction,” Bailey said in the interview. The documentary was first shown to the public in March during Austin’s annual South by Southwest music and film festival, where it played to packed...

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Some People Get It, Some People Don’t

December 6, 2011
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Here’s more empirical support for the Occupy movement: the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in a report released yesterday that the gap between rich and poor is widening on a global scale, not just here in our country.  A Bloomberg news story that reported the OECD information added that the average income of the richest tenth of the population is now about nine times that of the poorest tenth, and that gap has grown almost 10% since the 1980s. Not surprisingly, the U.S. is among the nations with the largest divide between rich and poor, with an earnings multiple of 14-1. In other large developed economies the figure is about 10-1 in the U.K., Italy, and Japan, and 6-1 in Germany.  Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Czech Republic are among those with the smallest gap. “The social contract is starting to unravel in many countries,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said in a statement....

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FYI from the TCADP

December 5, 2011
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FYI from the TCADP

The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) will release its annual report, Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2011, on December 15.  The report presents information on new death sentences, executions, stays, legislative developments, and other issues affecting the criminal justice system in Texas. Updated maps depicting death sentences by county will be included.  See http://tcadp.org/ for more details.

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Feds to Probe Pennsylvania Prisoner Abuse

December 5, 2011
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If you’ve seen Robert Redford’s 1980 film “Brubaker”, which was based on the real life story of Arkansas prison superintendent Tom Murton, then this will sound familiar.  The Huffington Post reported late last week that the Justice Department will conduct a federal civil investigation into “alleged systematic civil rights abuses” at Pennsylvania’s medium-security State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh.  So far seven of the facility’s guards have been arrested since September and now face state criminal charges including rape, assault, witness intimidation and official oppression.  One of the guards, 59-year-old Harry Nicoletti, has been indicted on 92 felony and misdemeanor counts including institutional rape. Nicoletti is suspected of engaging in “pervasive and unchecked abuse of prisoners”.  He allegedly targeted gay and transsexual inmates as well as inmates convicted of child-sex crimes, per an investigator’s report from the Allegheny County D.A.’s office. The other guards arrested are charged with assaulting inmates and using intimidation to keep the abuse secret. The Huff...

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