UK or US: Who is More Civilized?

The following info-graph/poll can be found at the Justice Gap, a magazine about law and justice. And the difference between the two

See which side of the pond of justice you stand.

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Meet the Should Be Exonerated: Crosley Green

Crosley Green

Update: (August 19, 2017):

Despite a mountain of evidence that proves Crosley Green's innocence, in January 2016, due to a trivial procedural technicality (one day late), Green's petition for a new trial was denied. So, in other words, 59-year old Crosley Green could stay in prison for the rest of his life even though there is very clear evidence of his innocence and very clear evidence that he should never have been convicted in the first place.

"People are alarmed to find out that courts have no problem at all saying you filed one day late… we're gonna use that as a basis to keep you in prison for the rest of your life not withstanding the fact that you can prove a clear miscarriage of justice," -- Seth Miller, runs the Innocence Project of Florida.

And then, in June 2017,the 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals will allow Green's attorneys to argue in person why his case should not have been dismissed. If the three-judge panel agrees, Crosley Green will finally get his case heard in federal court.

Please watch the the most recent 48 Hours episode which also features three similar cases of wrongful convictions from Brevard County Florida in the 1980s that were subsequently overturned.

Please sign this petition for clemency (or new trial) on Change.org.

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Something new and different, a Florida man convicted for murder and sentenced to death simply because he was black. As attorney, Keith Harrison said, "an example of race being a substitute for evidence,race substituted for evidence." 

For more than 16 years, 48 Hours has investigated the case of the 1989 murder of 22-year old Charles "Chip" Flynn because they believed it involved prosecutorial misconduct, which resulted in the conviction of Crosley Green (left) who was later sentenced to death, an absolute travesty of justice not uncommon as I have documented repeatedly.

It all began on April 4, 1989 when Flynn's former girlfriend, Kimberly Hallock called 911 saying she thought her boyfriend had been shot by a a black man with a gun who had hijacked and drove them to a remote Florida citrus grove. Keep in mind, this black guy would've had to steer and shift gears all while he was holding the gun on them. Oh, and after her ex-boyfriend, with his hands tied behind his back, grabbed a gun and shot the assailant, she alone managed to get back into the truck and escape.

Despite a story that kept changing, littered with troubling inconsistencies:

• Crosley didn't match the original description of the assailant;
• ex-girlfriend waiting almost an hour to call for help;
• a truck that was hard to handle because it had a custom gear shift;
• shoe prints that did not match...that tracked in different direction than testimony indicated;
• no gun powder residue on Flynn's hands; no shell casings from Flynn's testified to gunshots;
• no bare footprints or knee prints of either Flynn and Hallock at scene
• witnesses who later said they were coerced into testifying recanted their testimony
• a police dog, despite not having an item of Green's to scent upon, somehow connected him to the crime scene
• no fingerprints or any physical evidence that linked Green to the crime
• ten alibi witnesses who place Green miles away from the murder,

Crosley Green was arrested and charged with kidnapping, robbery and murder. It took the all-white jury just three hours to convict Crosley Green; the judge sentenced him death.

Crosley Green, top row center, target with a bull's eye...the black spot you focus on.

“That's a target with a bull's-eye for Crosley Green. ...His picture is smaller and darker than the other pictures," Harrison said of the photo lineup. "Anybody involved in police investigation and prosecution knows this. ...the position that your eyes are normally drawn to are right in the middle."

"It's a black spot," Green said of the photo. "That's what you focus on, that black spot." [...]
“When I went to homicide school ... they told us that this spot is the most likely that someone will pick a picture from," Mark Rixey said of the photo lineup.

"And where exactly is Crosley Green in that--"

"That's Crosley Green right in that spot," Green said, pointing to the second of three images in the top row.

"Anything that strikes you about this lineup?" Moriarty asked Christopher White.

"You can't see the guy in the top middle very well at all," he replied. "Crosley Green's photo is the darkest."

"If you don't specifically know who you're looking for, then that's the spot you will pick nine times out of 10," said Rixey.

And why was Kim Hallock eliminated as a suspect when it's normal procedure to investigate the last people to see victim alive...everyone closest to the scene? No one knows.

“That's homicide 101, anybody who is present at the scene of a shooting ... gets their hands tested for gunshot residue," Rixey explained. "That should have been the very first thing that was done. ...That was never done."

Moreover, the Brevard County State's Attorney's Office had a history of pressuring, coercing witnesses into lying. In the 1980s, Brevard County put away three men whose convictions have since been overturned.

“They coerced witnesses ... to lie and it's really as though you see -- a deliberate pattern of the state creating evidence to achieve a result that they wanted to achieve and that's what they got," said Jeane Thomas.

In 2009, Green received a reduced sentence (life in prison)  due to an error in sentencing. In total, Crosley Green has spent almost 26 years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.  Three witnesses recanted their testimony. 

“Every witness recanted their story," Moura explained. "And every one of them had reason to be afraid of the police. ...They were squeezed. ...And they were squeezed hard."

As it stands now, undeterred by exculpatory evidence withheld by the prosecution, the recantations of four of the prosecution's star witnesses, not to mention, more inconsistencies than a government's official story, the Florida Attorney General's Office is fighting to uphold Crosley Green's conviction. It says Green failed to meet a filing deadline for his appeal.

Links:

Investigators say condemned man not guilty

Former Florida Death Row Inmate Crosley Green Asks Orlando Federal Court To Overturn His Conviction: Crowell & Moring Files Habeas Corpus

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The Criminalization of Poverty as Hungry Americans Flood Major American Cities

Hunger in the US is now the highest since the era of the Great Depression as real unemployment is much higher than the 5.6% rate reported in the mainstream media (closer to 40-50% if you include the marginally employed); as earnings are stagnant or declining for 90% of the work force; as inflation of food prices spiral out of control, not to mention a significantly compromised social safety net and the subtle, yet continuous effort to criminalize poverty.  

Unlike now, during the Depression tightly knit communities and family farms stretched across the nation to provide a safety net that served to catch some or many of those who suffered the worst consequences of the failed economy.   Unlike now, people knew the entire nation was struggling.  They knew that times were hard and were less likely to fault the individual. 

Today, society is fragmented and the establishment media is taking advantage of that by deceiving people into believing our economy is improving and anyone who is not making ends meet...well, it's their fault! They're not trying hard enough!   In fact, the criminalization of poverty is a growing trend in America.

“But many things have changed in the last 50 years, some of them so recently as to have gone largely unnoticed by pundits and policy makers. The poor, and especially poor people of color, have long been over-represented in the prison population. This used to be attributed to the fact that the poor are more likely to be tempted by criminal activities such as theft and drug dealing. Just in the last ten years, however, it has become apparent that being poor is in itself a crime in many cities and counties, and that it is a crime punished by further impoverishment. As Karen Dolan explains in this hard-hitting report, a simple traffic violation – such as a broken tail-light – can bring down a cascade of fees and fines, which mount quickly if not paid on time and can lead to incarceration.

The mid-00s were a turning point in the criminal justice system’s treatment of misdemeanors. Local governments increased the fees, fines and court costs they levied for minor transgressions, and at the same time, increased the number of possible misdemeanors to include truancy (for which parents can be punished), driving with an expired license (as is the case in Washington, DC), putting one’s feet up on a subway seat (in New York City), and a variety of other minor infractions. The latter two are grounds for immediate arrest, leading to the imposition of fines and court costs. If the defendant cannot pay, he or she may be jailed and, in the ugliest twist of all – later charged for the cost of room and board, then re-jailed for failing to pay that. If the defendant is put on probation, he or she must pay for the probation officer and anything else required for monitoring, like an ankle bracelet.

Ferguson, Missouri helped bring attention to the extent of “offender-funded” criminal justice services. The city was relying on fees, fines, and court costs for 20 percent of its budget, effectively turning it into an occupied territory, with a 95 percent white police force supporting itself by forcibly preying on a nearly 70 percent black population.

Who benefits from this “criminalization of poverty”? In the short-term, municipalities and counties may appear to benefit, as well as the private companies that increasingly provide probation services and operate detention facilities and prisons. In addition, the increasing barriers, such as drug testing and criminal record searches, to social benefits like public housing, SNAP, and TANF may also temporarily help relieve cash-strapped local governments. But the overall effect is to perpetuate poverty and even expand the poverty population, to no possible good effect. Poor and indigent people cannot afford to pay for the means to coerce and incarcerate them, and nothing is gained by repeatedly jailing them. The criminalization of poverty – and increasing impoverishment of people judged to be criminals — amounts to a system of organized sadism.

This is the real “cycle of poverty:” Poverty leads easily to criminal charges from unpaid debts, unrenewed licenses and the like. Criminal charges in turn lead to ever-mounting debt and, despite laws prohibiting debtors’ prisons, to incarceration. There is no mystery about where government needs to intervene — first, by stopping the persecution of people who are already struggling to get by, and second, by mitigating that struggle

So, big cities across the nation are struggling to keep up with the growing number of homeless, hungry Americans. Washington, D.C., our capital wins this contest as it increased its homeless population by more than 60% in 2015. 

“The past year has marked the year of homelessness in the US as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Seattle — America's most populated areas — hosted a huge jump in the number of people on the streets, according to the Hunger and Homelessness study. Washington, D.C. ranks first in the list of cities with homeless as figures say it has 28 percent more homeless and 60 percent more transient families. The demand for food for the hungry rose 27 percent over last year's.

The survey said that across twenty-two cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, homelessness rose by 1.6 percent overall and handouts increased by 3 percent over the past year.

The recently released US Conference of Mayors Hunger and Homelessness Survey presents the results of a survey of 22 of the citie s whose mayors serve on The U.S. Conference of Mayors' Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness.

A number of important findings emerged from the survey:

• Emergency food assistance requests rose by an average of 2.8 percent during the survey period in more than half, 61 percent, of the cities involved in the survey.
• Twenty-three percent of requests for emergency food assistance in the cities surveyed went unmet.
• Food pantries and emergency kitchens had to cut back on the amount of food given out as groceries or meals in 47 percent of cities involved in the survey. Additionally, in far more than half of cities surveyed, 57 percent, families and individuals had to cut down on the number of visits to charitable food outlets they could make each month. The same percentage of cities were unable to meet food requests by homeless and hungry residents demand because they lacked sufficient resources.
• Lack of affordable housing, an issue that continues to worsen in many places around the country, was the primary reason given for homelessness among families with children. Poverty, unemployment and low-paying jobs were the reasons that followed.
• In 50 percent of cities surveyed, mayors indicated they expected homelessness to rise “moderately” next year. Similarly, 65 percent of cities say they expect emergency food requests to “moderately” increase over the coming 12 months.

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Challenging and Revealing Concealed Evidence in the Trial of the Century

Did O.J. do it? The more I learn, the more I think he is innocent of the crime of murder.

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Innocent Woman Scheduled For Execution in Mississippi

On Thursday, Mississippi is scheduled to execute the first woman, Michelle Byrom, 57, in the state since 1944, even though her son, Edward Byrom Jr., repeatedly confessed to the killing that she is slated to die for — evidence the jury did not hear because her defense attorneys--their first capital murder trial-- never admitted the confession letters into evidence. Ms. Byrom was a lifelong victim of  abuse, both as a child and in the marriage that ended in her husband’s death. Not to mention, at the time of her husband's death, Ms. Byrom was in the hospital for double pneumonia while on mind-altering drugs.

“As I sat on my bed, tears of rage flowing, remembering my childhood my anger kept building and building, and I went to my car, got the 9mm, and walked to his room, peeked in, and he was asleep. I walked about 2 steps in the door, and screamed, and shut my eyes, when I heard him move, I started firing.” -- Edward Byrom Jr

Despite corroborating evidence supporting the son's confessions such as the gunpowder found on his hands, Byrom Jr. pinned the murder plot on his mother after prosecutors convinced him to take a plea deal in exchange for a reduced sentence.

“When they got me here, I gave them a bullshit story after another, trying to save my own ass, but when David Smith started questioning me, and told me what happened, I was so scared, confused, and high, I just started spitting the first thought out, which turned into this big conspiracy thing, for money, which was all BS, that's why I had so many different stories,"--Edward Byrom Jr.

So authorities allege that Byrom Jr., his mother and his friend, Joey Gillis, colluded to kill Byrom Sr, in order for Michelle Byrom to collect on her husband’s life insurance policy. However, both Byrom Jr. and friend, Joey Gillis--accused of pulling the trigger despite the gun powder residue on Byrom Jr.'s hand-- walk free today.

The only certainty here is that Michelle Byrom did not have competent attorneys nor did she get a fair trial, the case in so many people who have been executed or who await their execution.

“I have attempted to conjure up in my imagination a more egregious case of ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing phase of a capital case. I cannot."--Judge Jess Dickinson

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The Science of Killing a Human Being.

In the documentary below, former Conservative MP, Michael Portillo pushes his body to the brink of death in an investigation into the science of execution. At the very beginning he states, "If the state's going to kill people, you want to do it as humanely as possible, I think most people agree on that." I'm not so sure. From my very limited perspective, I think the man who invented the lethal injection protocol, Dr. Jay Chapman's response,  "My basic attitude is so they suffer a little pain, who cares?" might just be the attitude shared by most.

Of course, as I've stated repeatedly, I do not believe in the death penalty under any circumstances, but if the state insists upon executing people, the least they could do is spare the doomed individual as much pain as possible. As I have also stated many times before, I think the lethal injection protocol is, as they say in the film "torture disguised as a medical procedure." And that's whether they carry it with two or three drugs. I mean, just imagine not getting enough of the drug that is supposed to cause unconsciousness, before getting the paralyzing drug (most likely used for aesthetic reasons) that renders you unable to signal your distress, followed by a heart-stopping drug, which "feels like a fire traveling through the vein to the heart.” The chance of this occurring is extremely high because it is administered by ill-trained staff.  After all, doctors and nurses are supposedly bound by the "Hippocratic Oath" or take a pledge to do no harm.

It's not just a lack of expertise that contribute to the controversy over lethal injection; it's the second drug in the cocktail: pancuronium bromide, the paralyzing agent  Carol Weihrer, who has testified in 15 court cases against lethal injection, knows all too well the pain this drug can cause. During a routine eye operation, in which she was given anesthesia and then pancuronium bromide, the anesthesia failed to work, leaving her fully aware of the excruciating pain as the pancuronium bromide coursed through her veins, but unable to tell anyone or move. She said if felt like "ignited jet fuel going through your body feeling like you're absolutely on fire." Carol believes that most executed inmates go through the same experience as she did.  She states that the anesthetic used in the lethal injection protocol is  "short-acting, five minute version" and that that lethal injection "takes between 10-12 minutes on a good day."  In other words, the inmate is put out for a couple of minutes, and then conscious, thus feels the pancuronium bromide painfully charge through their veins without being able to alert anyone and dies from suffocation before their heart is stopped.

One example:

Angel Diaz

On December 13, 2006,  Angel Diaz took more than a half-hour to die and required a second dose of the chemicals. After the first injection, he continued to move and was squinting and grimacing as he tried to mouth words.  The medical examiner stated that the needle had gone through Mr. Diaz's vein and out the other side, so the deadly chemicals were injected into soft tissue rather than the vein.

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War on Drugs and The Prison Industrial Complex

“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."--Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President. 18 Dec. 1840

CCA houses over 80,000 inmates in
more than 60 facilities across the US.

In 1971, President Nixon declared an all out "War on Drugs" under the guise of benefiting the population by halting the trafficking in drugs in the United States, when, in fact, the motivations for starting this "war" were rooted in racism, greed, "empire building", and maintaining/gaining power and control. The proof is its success in meeting its true goals.  Because 42 years later, well over one million  non-violent offenders are incarcerated and   3,278 non-violent offenders are serving life without parole, not to mention, there are more drugs circulating than ever before. How is that proof?  Well, follow the money...and the drugs, legal and illegal.

The only people experiencing consequences from this "war" are the poor, not the ones who profit/benefit most from the drug trade: the banksters who launder the money and profit immensely!

Then  President Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986  fueled the prison boom, bringing in a lot more profit because it allowed privately owned corporations to build and operate prisons.  Today, it's a $50 billion industry, with prison quotas that push lawmakers to fill 90% of the beds! Not only that, the criminalization of Americans is profitable to these corporations because they equip them with essentially free labor...slave labor.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group [previously Wackenhut], the two largest private prison companies in this country, push for criminal justice legislation, including mandatory minimum sentences such as California’s three-strikes law “that increase the number of inmates who enter and stay in prison.” ITPI reported that CCA and GEO Group have also contributed to legislation like "Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring law enforcement to arrest anyone who cannot prove they entered the country legally when asked.”

Tulia Texas is a prime example. Undercover narcotics officer, Tom Coleman arrested 46 people - nearly all of them black - on charges of being cocaine dealers, sending many of them to prison for a total of 750 years. as part of a $500 million effort to fight the war on drugs in rural America

As the following documentary points out, one of the main achievments of the "War on Drugs" is "profiting from the felonization of sick people.



Links:

Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

School to Prison Pipeline

Ill-Gotten Gains, The Rockefeller War on Drugs

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Update: Is There a Difference Between Capital Punishment and Human Sacrifice?

Update::  Dennis McGuire surpassed the projected five minutes--experiencing the "agony and terror of air hunger as he struggles to breathe for five minutes after [executioners] intravenously inject him with the execution drugs"--before he loses consciousness and expires--his lawyers said it would take to die,  It took 15 minutes for him to die, as he "gasped, snorted and snored during a prolonged execution" from "air hunger" on January 16, 2014, when the state used the controversial, never-before-tried lethal injection after supplies of the state's previous drug dried up.

“The 53-year-old's attorneys had argued against using intravenous doses of the sedative Midazolam and the painkiller Hydromorphone, claiming the combination would cause 'air hunger' - where someone experiences immense terror and agony as they strain for breath during the execution."

[...]

“He was then still for five minutes before emitting a loud snort as if snoring and continued to make this noise for several minutes. His stomach rose and fell several times as he repeatedly opened and shut his mouth, making what the Columbus Dispatch described as 'deep, rattling sounds.'

His family sobbed as they watched him slowly die. At one point, his daughter exclaimed 'Oh my God' as she observed her father's final moments.

A coughing sound was Dennis McGuire's last apparent movement, at 10:43 a.m. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes later. McGuire as first injected with the drugs at 10:29 a.m."

Why can we put a dog/cat to death in less than 10 seconds but can't seem to do it when it involves putting a human-being to death. The answer is we can but the sequence of the "lethal cocktail" that enters the body is designed to provide the condemned with a feeling of terror, otherwise why not just inject a general anesthetic followed by whatever it is that stops the heart immediately?

Moreover, McGuire's children watched their father die in such an inhumane and terrible way. They weren't to blame for his crimes but they will now suffer with flashbacks of his horrible death until their last days. Even the victim's family may suffer--if not from watching this man's terrible death--from the memories of his children's reactions. I mean, people who takes enjoyment or satisfaction from this man's suffering only makes them as barbaric as the people they claim deserve this type of suffering.

Make no mistake, Dennis McGuire was guilty for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of Joy Stewart and her unborn baby in Preble County in western Ohio. His victims suffered unimaginable terror. However, revenge has no place in a truly civilized system of justice, because not only does the outcome contribute to an unending cycle of violence, its example teaches the public that malice, retaliation, and violence are appropriate means of handling problems. In other words, when government goes beyond the steps necessary to protect society, and sinks to the level of using vengeance and hatred, the wrong message is sent, and the results are demeaning and destructive.

Judge Rules 'Not Entitled to Pain Free Execution'.

Over the past six years, six states — Maryland, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico — have done away with capital punishment, but one state in particular, Ohio, is planning to go through with a never-before-tried combination of two drugs, which defense lawyers say threatens to leave convicted murderer and rapist, Dennis McGuire, 53, writhing in agony from “air hunger”--"McGuire will experience the agony and terror of air hunger as he struggles to breathe for five minutes after [executioners] intravenously inject him with the execution drugs"--before he loses consciousness and expires. This  "death chamber 'experiment' by the state" will occur on Thursday, January 16, 2014.

Why only two drugs? Well, it's becoming harder and harder to get the three drugs needed for the three-drug cocktail used in lethal injection. Many of these drugs are manufactured in Europe, where opposition to the death penalty has led to a ban on exporting drugs for that purpose, according to the Death Penalty Information Center's (DPIC) report. This has led to states — including Ohio — turning to compounding pharmacies, which were not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration until November 2013.

“Ohio and other death penalty states have been struggling to keep executions going because supplies of pentobarbital traditionally used in a three-drug mix have all passed their sell-by dates thanks to its Danish manufacturer prohibiting its sale to US prison services. The European Union has also threatened to restrict sales of Propofol, a leading anaesthetic used in hospitals, were US death chambers to use it instead."

I feel my whole body burning.

So  how are we to determine what is "cruel and unusual punishment?"  What about experiencing "air hunger" for five minutes that probably feels like five hours or more?   And what about the execution in Oklahoma last month, where about 20 seconds into the execution of Michael Lee Wilson, he uttered “I feel my whole body burning?” Potassium chloride, which is used to stop the heart, is known to cause an excruciating burning sensation should the prisoner be partially conscious at that stage, but because execution records are normally shrouded in secrecy, the precise cause of Wilson's apparent agony will never be known.

These are only a couple examples of many, yet, we claim to live in a civilized society.  DNA has proven that our "justice" system too often convicts the innocent,  not to mention the economic cost of capital punishment to society  is astronomical, so how can anyone claim state sanctioned murder is in anyway beneficial, except maybe to those who still believe in human sacrifice...because that's exactly what it is.

Outrageous, you say?

Well, the practice of human sacrifice is as old as humanity.  The oldest recorded human sacrifice dates back to somewhere between 3,700 and 3,400 BC. and, more than likely, even dates further back than that.  Yet, despite the Eighth Amendment that bars "cruel and unusual punishment"which “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,” here we are, more than 5,000 years later, supposedly the most civilized of societies, sacrificing humans--the majority of them, poor people of color--on the altar of so-called "justice" and social order.  So it follows, just as it was believed  thousands of years ago that the ancient gods  demanded human blood to pacify and appease, the same must hold true today.  The modern day secular "gods" of justice are just as bloodthirsty as their ancient counterparts, because  even if you eliminate the morality issue, the highly ritualized practice of state sanctioned execution offers no additional benefit to society that would justify its use.  It is more expensive than life in prison.  It is not a necessity or an additional deterrence for the prevention of crime and needless to say, but I'll add it anyway, it's not rehabilitative!

Then, there is the arbitrary way in which it is applied.  The only rhyme or reason to its application is that it's almost exclusively administered to the most marginalized members of society, while men of means who are convicted of sometimes much greater crimes almost always escape the gallows. 

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Profitable Punishment: Prisoners Making Obscene Profits for Corporate America

Across the nation, thousands of new prisons are being built as the multi-billion dollar Prison Industrial Complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in America, and when you consider that most prisoners are in jail for non-violent offenses, and that their only "crime" is disobeying the government's arbitrary system of  "laws", the fact that corporate America profits so obscenely must raise the question of who the criminals really are.

From Unmasking the Prison Industrial Complex Part 1: The High Profits of Prison Labor:

“The research that went into this post revealed harsh realities about the state of our country and it's deeply rooted capitalist mentality. Story after story, it was clear that real Americans were suffering in ways that simply did not have to be. It was obvious that the prison industrial complex was created and perpetuated in a way that is unprecedented. Stories such as, US Technologies, an Austin, Texas based company, who closed their doors and laid off hundreds of employees only to ship their jobs, not overseas, but to the nearest Austin, Texas Prison, where inmates work for cents a day. Many companies have begun using prison labor, such as Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret and Boeing. You may have had firsthand experience dealing with the hardest of criminals if you have ever called TWA to book a flight. That’s right folks; TWA uses prison inmates to book flights. Even federal prisons have gotten a piece of the action, a company under the trade name Unicor uses prisoners to make everything from lawn furniture to congressional desks. Their web site proudly displays “where the government shops first.” For private corporations, prison labor is pure gold. With prison labor there are no unions, no strikes, no insurance benefits, and no rights! This is even backed up by the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution. State Corrections agencies are even advertising their prisoners to corporations by asking them questions such as: “Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the cost of employee benefits? Getting hit by overseas competition? Then the Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you.”

An American worker, who once upon a time made $8/hour, loses his job when the company relocates overseas where workers are paid only $2/day. Unemployed, and alienated from society indifferent to his plight, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison, and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents/hour. This fictional story, unfortunately is true of many Americans, that have not been given many options. Prison is quickly becoming the new form of slavery, as the laws against crime disproportionately affect the African American Community."

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Children in Long Term Solitary Confinement.

"Why lock somebody up while you're locked up? You're trying to kill their spirit even more," says Michael Kemp, describing his six-month stay in solitary confinement at age 17.

Solitary confinement was once a punishment reserved for the most-hardened, incorrigible criminals. Today, it is standard practice for tens of thousands of juveniles in prisons and jails across America. Far from being limited to the most violent offenders, solitary confinement is now used against perpetrators of minor crimes and children who are forced to await their trials in total isolation. Often, these stays are prolonged, lasting months or even years at a time.

Widely condemned as cruel and unusual punishment, long-term isolation for juveniles continues because it's effectively hidden from the public. Research efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition have struggled to uncover even the most basic facts about how the United States punishes its most vulnerable inmates.

How can a practice be both widespread and hidden? State and federal governments have two effective ways to prevent the public from knowing how deep the problem goes.

The first has to do with the way prisons operate. Sealed off from most public scrutiny, and steeped in an insular culture of unaccountability, prisons are, by their very nature, excellent places to keep secrets. Even more concealed are the solitary-confinement cells, described by inmates as "prisons within prisons." With loose record-keeping and different standards used by different states, it's almost impossible to gather reliable nation-wide statistics.

The second method is to give the old, horrific punishment a new, unobjectionable name. Make the torture sound friendly, with fewer syllables and pleasant language. This way, even when abuse is discovered, it appears well-intentioned and humane.

So American prisons rarely punish children with prolonged solitary confinement. Instead, they administer seclusion and protective custody. Prison authorities don't have to admit that "administrative segregation" is used to discipline children. Just the opposite, actually. It's all being done "for their own protection."

Seclusion? Protecting children? Who could argue with that?

For starters, there is Juan Mendez, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. Americans are accustomed to the U.N. investigating incidents of prisoner abuse in other countries -- which Mendez has done in faraway places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But increasingly, his inquiries are focused on American prisons.

Mendez spoke publicly about Bradley Manning's deplorable treatment in solitary confinement. Now he is calling on the United States to ban isolation for minors, which he considers, "cruel, unusual, and degrading punishment." It's a recommendation he shares with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology.

The ACLU report, Growing Up Locked Down, is one of the few detailed, comprehensive examinations available. This devastating and detailed look at solitary confinement for minors has led to this online petition that will be presented to Attorney General Eric Holder in October 2013.

Because the prison system is so opaque, reform has been slow in coming. A congressional hearing on solitary confinement, chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) last year, heard testimony from mental health experts, questioned the director of federal prisons, and brought a replica of a solitary confinement cell onto the Senate floor. In recent years, seven states -- Maine, Connecticut, West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska -- have enacted laws to restrict the use of punitive isolation on young people. As awareness of the magnitude of the problem grows, more reforms are likely to follow.

If we believe that juveniles are inherently less responsible for their actions than adults - and more susceptible to rehabilitation - then it follows that their punishments should be less severe.

Given the severity of the punishment, prohibiting solitary confinement for young people is a first step. The greatest challenge remains demanding greater transparency from a prison system that wields total control over its most vulnerable inmates.

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It's "Always Nigger Season" Even When the President is Black

Or I might add especially when the President is black. At least when 'W' did something horribly  racist and criminal, as he often did, there were loud voices protesting  in opposition. But when Obama does the same thing, it’s considered good leadership. President Obama received 95% of the black vote. In return, African Americans received a check that came back stamped: insufficient funds. He tells African Americans to stop whining and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps while his actions set these same people up to fail and keep them trapped by his support of legislation--specifically, in this case, by actively trying to maintain racially discriminatory prison sentences--that further empowers and emboldens the New Jim Crow Lulled to sleep by the rhetoric of color-blindness and the appearance of great racial progress, most of us are blind this new form, or should I say, formless invisible institutional racism.

In UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. CORNELIUS DEMORRIS BLEWETT (12-5226) and JARREOUS JAMONE BLEWITT (12-5582),, "a crack cocaine case brought by two currently incarcerated defendants seeking retroactive relief from racially discriminatory mandatory minimum sentences imposed on them in 2005," President Obama quietly tried to enforce racially biased federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed" by the  2010 Fair Sentencing Act. The Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to make sure thousands of people--almost all of them poor and most of them black--remain locked in prison despite a total lack of justification.

Crack cocaine and powder cocaine are "pharmacologically identical," the only difference being who consumes these pharmacologically identical substances: crack cocaine, the drug of mostly poor black folk, and powder cocaine, the drug of wealthier white folk. To be sure, young African American males are the most disposable, yet at the same time, profitable--for the for-profit prison industry--demographic in this prison nation. Not only do the private prisons prosper, corporations can put these people to work for a few cents an hour, not to mention, these human-beings are excluded from poverty statistics and unemployment data thus masking the severity of issues more than they already are.

Although Black people make up only 34% of crack users, they are 85% of those convicted on crack charges. As early as 2011, 30,000 people were serving time for crack charges in federal prison, 85% of them Black.

“…persistent bias occurred with respect to the contemporary enforcement of drug laws where, in the 1990s and early 2000s, blacks constituted a minority of regular users of crack cocaine but more than 80 percent of crack defendants.” -- Harvard Professor William J. Stuntz

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues, "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." One such strategy is through targeting black men and women (often mothers) through the "War on Drugs," decimating communities of color.

“There are more African American adults under correctional  control today, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the 15th amendment was ratified explicitly prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis or race....During the Jim Crow era, poll taxes and literacy tests, circumvented the 15th amendment and operated to deny African Americans the right to vote. A black child born today has less of a chance of being raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. This is due in large part to the mass incarceration of black men....The mass incarceration of black men take them out of the dating pool at the years they would be most likely to commit to a partner, to a family.  But, what's worse is that by branding them criminals and felons at early ages, often before they're even old enough to vote, they're rendered permanently unemployable in the legal job market, virtually guaranteeing that most will cycle in and out of prison, sometimes, for the rest of their lives. 
[...]
Today, in many states, felon disenfranchisement laws accomplish what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not. This does not effect some small segment of the African American community. To the contrary, in many large urban areas, more than half of working age African American men now have criminal records and thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. In some cities--Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago (80%), DC--the statistics are far worse." -- Michelle Anderson, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State

The incarceration rate has quintupled over the last 30 years, from a prison population of 300,000 in the early 1970s to well over 2 million! During this same period of time that the incarceration rates increased exponentially, crime rates have fluctuated, leading most sociologists and criminologists to admit that incarceration rates and crime rates have moved independently of one another.

So for now the grant of en banc review puts Blewett relief for Sixth Circuit prisoners on hold. Why?  Is  the Department of Justice afraid of re-hearing thousands of old cases?  If so, can't President Obama just commute all of the pre-Fair-Sentencing-Act minimums to their equivalent minimums under the new law? Or is the reason for en banc review far more nefarious?

Links:

How the mass incarceration of black men harms black women.


Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer

Stop the Drug War

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It's Always "Nigger Season"

Always “Nigger Season”  by Rev. Reynard N. Blake, Jr.

What is “Nigger Season?”

It’s George Zimmerman walking free

It’s all-white juries

When Skittles and iced tea become weapons

It’s a “justice system”

That’s soooo proficient

Putting black people in jail

And, can’t get justice for one

It’s 44 days for a killer to be arrested

It’s a damn “knock, knock” joke

Glib to black death

It’s white expectations of black violence

It’s Fox News jumping with glee

It’s their analysis being justified

It’s “Stop and Frisk” being justified

It’s colleges and universities fiending for black athletes

But dismantling affirmative action

Killing voting rights

Here’s what kills rednecks

Specifically, Republicans and Conservatives

This is what they think:

“A nigger president”

YET

That president

Wanting a “bromance”

Having a schoolboy crush on Republicans

Acting like one

Wanting to do their bidding

He kills for them

With them

Drones and all

Brown-skinned folks run

Soon to be turned on to Americans

Spy on them, too

We go from COINTELPRO to COINTELBRO

AND they STILL think he’s a nigger

(Like their boy, Clarence Thomas)

Conservatives and the GOP

Making his girls political fodder

Sanctioning one of their fellow “Crackers”

Talking about Michelle’s butt

It’s that same Cracker having fantasies

Of days of yore

Dreaming of being a slave owner

Or, a ship’s captain

Seeking the “good ol’ days”

Having his way with nigger bitches

Enhancing his proficiency with the lash

Bible on his right hip

(Analyzing it wickedly)

Gun on his left hip

Mastering the use of shackles

Aroused at thoughts

Wiping Native Americans and Africans

Whipping Native Americans and Africans

Christianizing Native Americans and Africans

(By dehumanizing them)

Off the face of the earth

Sensenbrenner feeling good about those fantasies

GOP couldn’t even feign to disavow him

But then, why should they?

If the hood fits WEAR IT!

DAMN HIM!

DAMN THEM ALL!

Some 2520s

Thinking, but not saying “nigger”

Prejudging black people

Associating them with the worst

Expecting them to be:

“The Chuckle People”

Joking and singing on TV and movies

And in the office

Or, acting like orifices

Or, expecting them to go to the “Big House”

And, I’m not writing about the U of M football field

Although for some that’s pleasing

“Run that ball, nigger!”

(“Look at that nigger run!”)

“Jump over that hurdle, nigger!”

“Slam that ball, nigger!”

“All the day long, nigger!”

“All the live-long day, nigger!”

Then, when those “niggers” are off the field

Or, the dance floor

Some 2520s think:

“Serve me quick, nigger!”

“I’ll pay you less nigger!”

“I’m Paula Deen, nigger!”

“This is Dixie, nigger!”

“Rather, this is America, nigger!”

“You’re just monkeys, nigger!”

(“What’s a ‘honky,’ nigger?”)

(“Why do you niggers say, ‘My nigger?’”)

“You just steal, nigger!”

“You’re hard to believe, nigger!”

“Even when you academically achieve, nigger!”

“You’re still OJ, nigger!”

“Not always OK, nigger!”

“I’m going to follow you in this store, nigger!”

“Even if you can pay for something, nigger!”

“You’ve got to have bad credit, nigger!”

“Killing Trayvon’s OK, nigger!”

(“Zimmerman’s my hero, nigger!”)

“Keep wearin’ a hoodie, nigger!”

“I’ll drop a cap in you, nigger!”

“I won’t even go to jail, nigger!”

(“Cause I can get better lawyers, nigger!”)

(“That’s why I don’t go to jail on drug charges, nigger!”)

“Be gone, nigger!”

“Get out my way, nigger!”

“Know your place, nigger!”

“They’re called ghettos, nigger!”

“Or, called barrios, nigger!”

“Or, reservations, nigger!”

“All of you look the same, anyway!”

“I’m always right, nigger!”

“Because I’m white, nigger!”

So, brothers and sisters of all hues

Of all races

Considering the events of the day

Any day

In America

Or, globally

How should I feel?

What should I believe?

Based on the evidence

Based on my experience

Based on what I see:

Without rhyme or reason

IT’S ALWAYS NIGGER SEASON!

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Meet the Exonerated From Death Row Updates Alabama through Louisiana

Daniel Wade Moore [Alabama Conviction: 2002, Acquitted: 2009]  spent six years on death row for a crime he did not commit.  He was acquitted of all charges by a jury in Alabama on May 14. .

Moore was originally found guilty of the murder and sexual assault of Karen Tipton in 2002. The judge overruled the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence and instead sentenced him to death in January 2003, calling the murder one of the worst ever in the county.

A new trial was ordered in 2003 because of evidence withheld by the prosecution. (See State V. Moore, No. CR-04--0805, Ala. Ct. of Crim. App. (2206) (providing procedural summary at pp.2-3; the circuit judge's order for a new trial was upheld by the Ala. Supreme Court, State v. Moore, No. Ms. 1030218, Nov. 6, 2003)). A second trial in 2008 ended in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked at 8-4 for acquittal.

Judge Glenn Thompson, who originally sentenced Moore to death, ordered a retrial upon discovery that the prosecution had withheld important evidence. "Orders were entered in any capital case, that whatever the state has, whatever the prosecutor has, whatever the investigation has they should provide that to the defendant," said Judge Thompson. The evidence missing was a 256-page F.B.I. report.

“The prosecution, Mr. Valeska specifically, looked me in the eye and said, quote, 'there ain't no such thing as an F.B.I. report.' Well, there probably wasn't a report, but there were 256 pages of information collected by Decatur police officers that were sent to the F.B.I.," -- Judge Thompson

According to Judge Thompson, Assistant Attorney General Don Valeska later came to him confessing there was withheld information. "Mr. Valeska came forward with the information after the conviction," said Judge Thompson. “Clearly, the only remedy was to grant him a new trial and I did," he said. "It frustrated and angered me that he would be willing to lie to the court," he continued.

Meanwhile, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ordered Judge Thompson to stand down from the trial and continued to let Valeska prosecute Moore. Upon hearing the jury’s not guilty verdict, Judge Thompson responded, "I felt like it was the only conclusion that a jury could reach if they actually followed the law." Thompson also said that the problems with the prosecution withholding evidence continued throughout the 10 years of the case. Just days before the current trial started, the prosecution called the defense saying they had just found new evidence from the victim's home computer.

Seth Penalver, [Florida conviction: 1999, Acquitted: 2012] spent 13 years in prison, seven of which were on death row.

On December 21, Seth Penalver was acquitted of all charges and will be freed from Florida's death row, 13 years after being sentenced to death. He was originally charged with a triple murder and armed robbery that occurred in Broward County in 1994. His first trial ended with a deadlocked jury. At his second trial in 1999, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court (Penalver v. Florida, No. SC00-1602, Feb. 2, 2006) overturned his conviction because the prosecution had introduced improper evidence at his trial. A co-defendant, Pablo Ibar, was also sentenced to death and remains on death row. A video from the crime scene helped convict Ibar, but images showing another suspect were inconclusive. Penalver has always maintained his innocence. At Penalver's most recent trial, which began 5 months ago, the jury was deadlocked 10-2, and both the prosecution and defense agreed to replace two jurors with alternates who had attended the proceedings. The newly constituted jury began deliberations afresh and found Penalver not guilty of all charges. Penalver is the 142nd person to be exonerated and freed from death row since 1973, and the 24th such person in Florida, the most of any state.

Nathson Fields [Illinois Conviction: 1986, Acquitted: 2009] spent nearly two decades behind bars, including more than 11.5 years on Death Row for a crime he did not commit.

 Nathson Fields,  and a co-defendant were sentenced to death for the 1984 murders of two rival gang members. The original trial, however, was marred by corruption, as the the judge in the case, Circuit Judge Thomas Maloney, accepted a $10,000 bribe during the trial.

Thomas Maloney, who died in 2008, was ultimately convicted and spent 13 years in prison for fixing murder trials. As a result, Fields and co-defendant Earl Hawkins were granted new trials in 1998. Hawkins, who had admitted to killing 15 to 20 people, testified against Fields in exchange for a lesser sentence. However, at Fields' retrial, Judge Vincent Gaughan found Hawkins "incredible," saying that "If someone has such disregard for human life, what regard will he have for his oath?"

Fields spent almost twenty years in prison, including 11.5 years on death row. He was released on bond in 2003 while awaiting retrial and has been residing outside of Chicago. This is the 19th exoneration from death row in Illinois since 1973, which is second only to Florida in the number of exonerations.

Following the not guilty verdict handed down by Judge Gaughan, Fields said,

“I feel like my prayers have been answered...It's been 24 years of this ordeal for my family and my friends, and now with it coming to an end, it's like a dream come true." -- Nathson Fields

(M. Walberg, “23 years after judicial misconduct, ex-gang leader freed," Chicago Tribune, April 9, 2009). (R. Hussain, Man formerly on death row acquitted in retrial,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 8, 2009). See also People v. Hawkins, et al., 181 Ill.2d 41 (January 29, 1998) (upholding a circuit court's reversal of Fields' and Hawkins' convictions).

Damon Thibodeaux [Louisiana conviction: 1997, Charges dismissed: 2012] spent 15 years on death row convicted for a crime he did not commit.

On September 28 2012, Damon Thibodeaux was freed from death row in Louisiana after an extensive investigation, including DNA testing and the cooperation of Jefferson Parrish District Attorney Paul Connick. Thibodeaux was sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of his cousin. He at first confessed to the attack after a nine-hour interrogation by detectives. He recanted a few hours later and claimed his confession was coerced. In releasing Thibodeaux, Connick said, "I have concluded that the primary evidence in this case, the confession, is unreliable. Without the confession the conviction can't stand, and therefore in the interest of justice, it must be vacated."

Thibodeaux spent 15 years on death row in Angola. The reinvestigation of the case cost more than $500,000, an expense shared by the defense and prosecution. Regarding his early statement to the police, Thibodeaux noted, "They look for vulnerable points where they can manipulate you, and if you’re sleep-deprived or panicked, or you’re on something or drunk, it makes it that much easier to accomplish what they want to accomplish.... I was willing to tell them anything they wanted me to tell them if it would get me out of that interrogation room.”

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Meet the Exonerated: Massachusetts Death Row

Laurence Adams spent 30 years in prison--one of those years on death row--for a crime he did not commit. Adams escaped execution because Massachusetts had abolished capital punishment soon after he was sentenced.

In March 1974, Laurence Adams was convicted and sentenced to death as one of allegedly three men who had beaten, robbed, and killed a subway porter in Boston in 1972.

In March 1973, Harry Ambers confessed to the crime and implicated Adams along with his own brother, Warren Ambers as his accomplices. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts eliminated the death penalty one year after Adams’ conviction and his sentence was changed to life imprisonment.

Adams was further implicated in the murder by the testimony of Prosecution witnesses, Wyatt Moore and his sister Lynne (Suzie) Moore, who testified that Adams had admitted to committing the crime with the Ambers brothers. Exculpatory evidence in the files of the Boston Police Department was not revealed until decades later. This included the fact that Suzie recanted her trial testimony, admitting that she had testified to help get her brother out of jail. Wyatt was being held on serious felony charges, (and he was released the day after Adams’ trial). In fact, Wyatt Moore was in prison on the same date Adams allegedly confessed his participation in the crime to the Moores. Police further withheld a sworn statement from a witness who said that Harry Ambers had confessed that he and his brother Warren alone had committed the murder.

In May, 2004, the Superior Court Justice allowed a Motion for Postconviction Relief and ordered a new trial because records, witness statements, and police reports that had not been disclosed were considered newly discovered evidence. However, in June the district attorney announced that, “the state was dropping the case because witnesses are dead and physical evidence is lacking,” (Boston Herald, June 8, 2004, at 26). Adams was released after 30 years of incarceration.

Lawyer Johnson Massachusetts Conviction: 1971, Charges Dismissed: 1982
Lawyer Johnson was sentenced to death by an all white jury for the murder of James Christian, a white victim. In 1982, the charges were dropped when a previously silent eyewitness, Dawnielle Montiero, who was 10 years old when the murder was committed, says the real killer, Kenneth Myers, was the man who testified against Johnson in two previous trials, the state's chief witness as the actual killer.

Johnson has said all along that he was not at the scene, but in two trials could not prove it so he spent ten years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

In 1983, a bill was filed to obtain compensation for Johnson's wrongful conviction. (Commonwealth v. Johnson, 429 N.E.2d 726 (1982)).

“In an interview yesterday in his mother's house, where he has lived since he was released in February on bail, Johnson said that "anger destroys," but still he is bitter about the legal system that twice convicted him, once to death, and once to life in prison. He accused prosecutors of manipulating both the jury and the testimony because they cared only about getting a conviction, not about the truth.

"It was a legal lynching," he said. The prosecution, he said, "fabricated and conspired" with Meyers. Both juries were all white; the murder victim was white, too, and Johnson, who is black, said the racial fears of the jurors were played on by the prosecution.

"I totally believed in the system of justice," he said. "My faith in the system is gone."

 

Louis Greco died in prison following a 1965 Chelsea murder conviction and was posthumously exonerated.

Louis Greco joined the Army before World War II, became a professional prizefighter, and was sent off to combat in the South Pacific. He won two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart and came back disabled for life with a shattered ankle and no future in the ring.

With a sixth grade education, he did what a lot of broken-down fighters did in that era, he sold his muscle as an enforcer and worked as a repo man for the mob.

In 1965, Louis Greco and his co-defendants were convicted in the murder of a small-time hoodlum named Teddy Deegan in a Chelsea alley. The prosecution charged Louis Greco with being the shooter and the three others as accessories to conspiracy. Greco was sentenced to death, as were Limone and Tameleo.

Greco submitted himself to eight different lie detector tests administered by outside experts and passed all eight of them. He wasn't even in Massachusetts at the time of the shooting; he was in Florida. Judge Gertner would declare that the FBI had deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence at the 1968 trial: namely, that its star witness, a contract killer for the Mob, was telling considerably less than the whole truth. The Justice Department task force's discovered compelling new evidence that Greco and his co-defendants were actually innocent of the murder of Edward Deegan.

Peter Limone Massachusetts Conviction: 1968, Charges Dismissed: 2001
Thirty -three years after being convicted and sentenced to death for a 1965 murder, Peter Limone's conviction was overturned (Commonwealth v. Limone, 2001 Mass. Super. LEXIS 7 (2001)) and the case against him officially dropped.

The move came as a result of a Justice Department task force's discovery of compelling new evidence that Limone and his co-defendants Joseph Salvati, Henry Tamelo, and Louis Greco were actually innocent of the murder of Edward Deegan.

In 1968, all four were convicted and Limone was sentenced to die in Massachusetts' electric chair, but was spared in 1974 when Massachusetts abolished the death penalty and his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Salvati, who was released from prison in 1997 when the governor commuted his sentence, received word from prosecutors that they were dropping the case against him as well. Tamelo and Greco both died in prison.

At trial, the main witness against the four men was Joseph Barboza, a hit man cooperating with prosecutors, who later admitted that he had fabricated much of his testimony. The recently revealed FBI documents show that informants had told the FBI before the murder that Deegan would soon be killed and by whom, and a memorandum after the crime listed the men involved. Neither list included Limone, Salvati, Tamelo or Greco. (New York Times, 2/2/01 and Boston Herald, 1/21/01)

Henry "The Referee" Temeleo  was one of the founding members of the Boston criminal activities along with Phil Buccola and Joe Lombardo. Henry Tamaelo was also a member of the Bonanno Family and was the underboss of Family boss Raymond Patriarca in the 1950's till the end of the 1960's. In 1967 he and Patriarca were arrested for the murder of bookmaker Willie Marfeo. Before the trial's conclusion, Tameleo, along with Peter Limone, Louis Greco and Jospeh Salvati were indicted for the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan on March 12, 1965. In 1968, all four men were found guily of the Deegan murder in the Superior Court of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and sentenced to death by the state. This penalty was later reduced to life in prison, where Tameleo died in 1985.

By 2000, all charges were dismissed against Tameleo and the other accused men, amid a flurry of accusations of a government frame-up and cover-up extending over thirty years. In 2007, a federal judge in Boston awarded damages of $101.7 million to the four men who were wrongly convicted for Deegan's murder in 1965 after Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents H. Paul Rico, Dennis Condon, John Morris, and John Connolly took affirmative steps to withhold evidence of their innocence in order to protect FBI informants Vincent Flemmi and Joseph Barboza. $13 million went to the estate of Enrico Tameleo, specifically his son, Saverio, as administrator of the Tameleo estate, and Tameleo's wife Jeanette.

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Meet the Exonerated: New Mexico's Death Row

Ron Keine, Assistant Director for 
Witness to Innocence

It's been a long time since I added to the list of Death Row Exonerated By State pages I listed on the right hand side of my blog. So today, I came across a video of Ron Keine being  interviewed by Bill Windsor (video below) from Lawless America about his experience as an innocent man on death row, which reminded me I need to complete the list I started over three years ago.  A little out of order but I'll backtrack to where I left off after I post New Mexico and Ron Keine's story.

Anyway, New Mexico knows firsthand that the innocent can go to death row. In 1974, four men--Thomas V. Gladish, Richard Greer, Ronald Keine and Clarence Smith--were wrongfully sentenced to death in New Mexico.

The four (left) were convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing William Velten. They could have been executed if not for an investigation by the Detroit News, which interviewed a key eyewitness in the case who said she was coached to identify the four.  Seventeen months later, the men were freed when another man confessed to the murder.

Inspired by the 1969 movie, "Easy Rider", Ron Keine a college student in Detroit at the time, decided to tour the country on a motorcycle with his friends. They joined an infamous California motorcycle gang Keine described as "a drinking club with a motorcycle problem."

“In 1974, Keine, Doc and three friends had borrowed a van for a trip home when they were stopped and harassed by police in Oklahoma. They were arrested and charged with armed robbery of a gas station, which had burned down two years prior. But before Keine and his friends were set free, they were told they had to be extradited to New Mexico and were being charged with the Albuquerque murder of college student William Velten.

Once in New Mexico, Keine's court-appointed public defender advised Keine and his cohorts to plead guilty so they would only get life in prison. Keine pleaded not guilty and was taken immediately from the arraignment to death row, where he sat for two months awaiting trial.

At the trial, the prosecutor presented the testimony of a motel maid who claimed to have seen the men carry out the murder. Police, however, had found no evidence in the van the men were riding in or on their pocket knives, according to Keine. Keine asked his public defender several times to object to the evidence, but to no avail. He was convicted and sent to death row.

Keine said at that moment his "whole value system slammed down on you. Everything you believed about the law, the honesty, the ethics of it, out the window."

Keine stayed on death row awaiting his execution for two years, until a former police officer, Kerry Lee, confessed the murder to the pastor of a church. Keine was notified of his retrial nine days before his scheduled execution and was freed in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

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