Sept. 26
TEXAS:
Questions raised after shock belt used at Texas murder trial
A potential death penalty trial in East Texas is set to resume on Monday after
it was put on hold when a judge was said by a TV station to have had a shock
belt used on the defendant for misbehaving.
James Calvert, 45, of Tyler, Texas, is on trial in Smith County, where
prosecutors allege he beat and fatally shot his former wife at her home and
abducted their 4-year-old son in October 2012.
Judge Jack Skeen allowed Calvert to defend himself, over objections from
attorneys specializing in the death penalty, at the outset of the trial in
August. Skeen also ordered a shock device be placed on Calvert for security
reasons because of his unpredictable behavior, legal officials said.
On Sept. 15, when Calvert did not stand up at the judge's request, Skeen had an
electric shock administered on the defendant that caused him to twist in pain
before the jury, local TV broadcaster KLTV reported.
"Calvert refuses to stand up when talking to judge. Shock belt is administered,
Calvert scream 'ahh' for about 5 seconds," Cody Lillich, a KLTV reporter,
tweeted from the courtroom.
After Calvert was shocked, Skeen allowed public defenders who had been
monitoring the hearings to defend him, court officials said. The trial is set
to resume on Monday after it was put on recess on Sept. 16.
The judge has issued a gag order in the case, a court official said.
Skeen did not respond to requests for comment.
Legal experts said the judge's conduct could open the door to appeals if
Calvert is convicted and possible sanction for abuse of the shock belt, which
is to be used only if the defendant poses an immediate security risk.
"This is just a travesty of justice as far as I'm concerned. This man is facing
an execution if he's convicted," said George Parnham, a Houston lawyer who
represented Andrea Yates, who drowned her 5 children and was found innocent by
reason of insanity on appeal.
Skeen, who was Smith County district attorney before he was elected a district
judge, has had no disciplinary sanctions, according to the Texas Bar
Association.
Calvert has been disruptive because of mental illness, making it all the more
reasonable to have had a lawyer represent him from the start, said Kathryn
Kase, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, which has been
monitoring the case.
"I know of no death penalty trial in the state of Texas where the defendant has
been able to represent himself who got life in prison," Kase said.
It is common to have a shock belt on defendants at jury trials for safety, and
the device is less obvious than handcuffs or leg irons, Smith County Sheriff's
Lieutenant Gary Middleton said.
"It's really pretty effective when we use it. It's kind of like a Taser," he
said.
(source: Reuters)
USA:
International Community Condemns U.S., Recommends End to Police Deadly Force,
Racial Profiling and Death Penalty
America's racist practices - including police violence and the implementation
of its criminal justice system - have human rights implications and face
international scrutiny. The United Nations has reviewed the country's human
rights record and the international body slammed the U.S. for its racial
profiling and use of deadly force, and its implementation of the death penalty.
Of the 343 recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva,
Switzerland, the U.S. accepted 44 recommendations for eliminating racial
discrimination and addressing excessive use of police force and racial bias in
the death penalty, as Al Jazeera America reported. In addition, the U.S.
supported another 20 recommendations "in part" and rejected 1 - calling for an
independent commission to prosecute racially motivated crimes.
During the peer review process - in which 117 UN member states participated,
and each state must undergo every four years - the international community was
able to weigh in and offer comments and recommend changes. The panel called on
the U.S. - which often characterizes itself as a beacon of human rights and
criticizes other nations on their human rights record - to abolish the death
penalty, end extrajudicial killings, and protect the human rights of indigenous
people and immigrants. The council also urged the U.S. to punish torturers, and
close its Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.
The French delegation recommended the U.S. "take necessary measures to fight
against discriminatory practices of the police based on ethnic origin."
Meanwhile, Malaysia suggested the U.S. "double its efforts in combating
violence and the excessive use of force by law enforcement officers based on
racial profiling through training, sensitization and community outreach, as
well as ensuring proper investigation and prosecution when cases occur." The
U.S. accepted these peer recommendations, while also explaining its criteria
for supporting recommendations.
Some recommendations ask us to achieve an ideal, e.g., end discrimination or
police brutality, and others request action not entirely within the power of
our Federal Executive Branch, e.g., adopt legislation, ratify treaties, or act
at the state level," the U.S. wrote in an official response to the review
process. "We support or support in part these recommendations when we share
their ideals, are making serious efforts to achieve their goals, and intend to
continue doing so. Nonetheless, we recognize, realistically, that the United
States may never completely accomplish what is described in these
recommendations' literal terms."
The U.S. added that, "We support recommendations to take actions we are already
taking or have taken, and intend to continue taking, without in any way
implying that our ongoing or prior efforts have been unsuccessful or that these
actions are necessarily legally required. With respect to judicial remedies, we
note that we cannot make commitments regarding, and do not control, the outcome
of court proceedings."
However the U.S. did say it would take a closer look at other recommendations.
"Where recommendations include inaccurate assumptions, assertions, or factual
predicates, we have decided whether we support them or support them in part by
looking past their rhetoric to the proposed action or objective," the U.S.
said.
The UN report came as Pope Francis gave a speech to a joint session of Congress
on September 24, in which he called for an abolition of the death penalty and
urged the U.S. to adopt policies that embrace immigrants. According to Amnesty
International, the U.S. is 1 of 5 countries accounting for the overwhelming
majority of executions in the world.
Further, the U.S. has very permissive policies on the use of deadly force by
police, raising serious human rights questions. "Deadly Force: Police Use of
Lethal Force In The United States" - a report released by Amnesty in June 2015
- found that all 50 states and Washington, D.C. fail to comply with
international law and standards on the use of deadly force by police.
Further, 9 states and Washington, D.C. have no laws on the books regarding the
use of lethal force by law enforcement, while 13 states have laws that do not
even comply with the lower standards for deadly force set by the U.S.
constitutional law. Some states allow for deadly force to "suppress opposition
to an arrest"; to arrest someone for a "suspected felony"; to "suppress a riot
or mutiny"; to prevent a prison or jail escape, or for crimes such as burglary.
Some states allow private citizens to use lethal force if they are carrying out
law enforcement activities.
In recent years, the killing of unarmed Black people by police has received
national and international attention, and has spurred the growth of a Black
movement against police violence. According to The Counted, a database
maintained by The Guardian, 861 people have been killed by police in the U.S.
in 2015. Blacks are killed by law enforcement at a rate of 5.1 per million, as
opposed to 2.08 for whites and 2.27 for Latinos.
(source: Atlanta Black Star)
******************
Blind Justice Leads to Black Death
Though many of us whites have been able to rationalize away the experience that
people of color have always reported, the recent proliferation of smartphone
video recordings of encounters between people of color and the police makes it
much more difficult for us to deny that the same police whom we trust so
implicitly are, in many cases, subjecting people of color to unwarranted
violence. The issue goes far deeper than the police/citizen encounter. A system
that ensnares and traps people of color in a permanent underclass has been
exposed.
Much research and critique has been done on the subject. Ta-Nehisi Coates'
October 2015 Atlantic article offers a remarkably comprehensive view of the
system with the brevity of a magazine article. Michelle Alexander's book The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is for many our
first introduction to the issue of mass incarceration and the criminal justice
system's disparate treatment of and destructive impact on people and
communities of color, especially Black/African American people. Numerous other
thinkers, researchers, and writers, many of them people of color, have
contributed to this body of knowledge, none of whose work this blog post could
hope to emulate.
In The New Jim Crow, Ms. Alexander devotes a chapter to Supreme Court decisions
that act to perpetuate the disparate treatment of people of color and are yet
considered race neutral. They are particularly clear examples of the legal
system acting to perpetuate racial inequity and creating a societal maze from
which there is no escape. Often it is because the Supreme Court demands that
evidence of conscious, deliberate bias must be present for a person to seek
relief or redress from a criminal justice system that creates blatantly
different outcomes for different racial groups.
One of those decisions is McClesky v. Kemp. A study found that in the state of
Georgia convictions of murder in which the victim was white resulted in the
death penalty up to 4.9 times more frequently than when the victim was black.
The court found that this was not enough evidence to prove that the death
penalty was being applied unfairly. Even if there was a "racially
disproportionate impact," no redress could be sought unless there was proof of
a "racially discriminatory purpose." In other words, unless there is obvious,
overt racism, the application of the death penalty, even though it was proven
statistically to be applied differently based on the race of the victim, is
deemed to be fair. Colorblind justice means it's a worse crime to kill a white
person than a black person.
Another case that Alexander cites is United States v. Armstrong. In this case a
defendant's lawyers noticed that a certain prosecutor's office assigned only
black crack offenders to the harsher federal system. They sought the
prosecutor's records to investigate this more fully. The Supreme Court ruled
that the discretion of prosecutors to pursue cases as they see fit is so
important that only evidence of conscious, intentional bias would be grounds
enough to open prosecutors' records to that degree. With no sense of irony, the
court ruled that in order to get the evidence needed to prove bias, one must
first prove bias. Colorblind justice means a person can legally be prosecuted
more harshly because of her of his race.
In Purkett v. Elem the court ruled that any reason for the use of the
peremptory strike of a person from a jury by a lawyer doesn't need to be
persuasive or even plausible to be accepted as reasoning for doing so, even if
a clear pattern of racial discrimination in jury selection can be discerned.
This ruling includes incidents when judges discern the pattern, not just
competing lawyers. The judge in such a case has no power to address a
prosecutor who uses her or his peremptory strikes to create all white juries.
Colorblind justice means a black defendant can expect an all-white jury.
Blacks make up about 13 % of the US population and almost 35 % of the people
executed. Whites are about 78 % of the population but only 55 % of executions.
Because of decisions like the ones described by Ms. Alexander, criminal justice
professionals pursuing the death penalty who act on unconscious biases are
beyond censure (even though by some counts, 70 % of whites have unconscious
bias against blacks . It also means that those who are actually acting on bias,
as long as they are smart enough not to publically admit it, can continue to do
so with impunity.
Personally, I have been known to get snippy if someone unwittingly joins the
express line at the supermarket with more than ten items. We live in a nation
where the need to fight against perceived unfair treatment of us has become so
pervasive and powerful that we've coined the term "road rage" for the now
commonplace violence that occurs as the result of selfish or thoughtless
driving. I wonder if some of my white brothers and sisters, looking at these
statistics, can put themselves in black people's shoes. I do know there are
plenty of us who feel that we are the ones who are discriminated against, but
in almost every measure of quality of life and justice, whites fair better
statistically than other groups*. We mistake the loss of complete dominance for
the loss of liberty. We mistake attempts to create parity with minority
dominance. There is a system in place that's killing all of us, some at a
higher rate than others.
* Except Asians, who fair slightly better in some areas. This fact is used by
many whites as proof that white society is in no way the cause of disparities
in other groups without any critical reflection on how the different kinds of
common stereotypes of Asians make more room for them to be successful in
certain ways within white society while continuing to circumscribe their
choices in many ways -- the "model minority" phenomenon.
(source: Peter DiCaprio, Huffington Post)
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