Death Penalty FAIL?

At the urging of several different friends, I read The New Yorker piece last month about Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for a crime that may never have happened. This is the most prominent case right now of potential death penalty applied to an innocent man.

I won't go into all the details, and you can read the piece here, but essentially he was convicted of murdering his two young children by arson, on evidence which has arguably been disproven by breakthroughs in arson detection science, evidence provided by what appear to be woefully underqualified arson "experts" in northeast Texas.

I thought the story would be an uninteresting low-life tale; in fact it's a page-turner. But a new story is emerging, one of potential cover-up by Texas Governor Rick Perry (R), who is looking at a difficult primary battle against popular Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who's going after his job.

Perry has removed officials on the science panel investigating the Willingham case, just 48-hours prior to a key hearing with the scientist disproving the Willingham arson evidence, and replaced them with his own people. Sure looks like he's covering for a failed death penalty system -- and Perry's own failure to commute Willingham's sentence to give time for the evidence to be fully examined.

Hutch

Perry's going the demonization route, calling Willingham a "monster." Hutchison's campaign are using the apparent conflict of interest against Perry with a press release including:

The issue is Rick Perry’s heavy-handed politicization of a process and Commission established by the legislature to provide critical oversight. First, Rick Perry delayed the formation of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, then he tried to ensure it didn’t have funding and when all else failed, he fired everyone he could. The only thing Rick Perry’s actions have accomplished is giving liberals an argument to discredit the death penalty.

Nothing like watching GOPers fight it out, but the bigger issue here is the finality of the death penalty. Look, when I hear about a villain who kidnaps, rapes and murders a fourteen year-old girl, I say fry 'em. But justice is imperfect, especially in certain parts of the country, and arson is perhaps the hardest crime to pin down as murder. Even decades in prison capped by exoneration is better than exoneration post-lethal injection.

So what wonder is, with exonerations based on DNA evidence happening routinely these days, is there still a perfect argument for the state putting convicted individuals to death, rather than life imprisonment?

Another Smug Loser

I used to get especially pissed off by El Presidente George W. Bush's smug expressions at the rare press conference or any place where asked a question by someone other than a handpicked stooge, and often even then.

But Bush is off the scene and seems a lot less assholish than Shadow President Cheney. And the guy who's still got a title and a speaking spot today in front of the world is the smug little Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Today, he was rewarded for his Anti-Semitic blatherings by a walkout:



My hope is that those religious clerics reported to actually be the real power in Iran will see this little man as a detriment to their interests on the world stage. After all, if so much of the Western world walks out on your representative, you're not really going to be heard.

However, hope does not run very deep for Iran right now. Whether intended as a bargaining chip or to send a chilling message, the U.S. journalists, Roxana Sabieri. arrested in Iran for supposed spying was just sentenced to eight years in a nightmarish prison, one where torture routinely is inflicted upon the prisoners. Of course, it would be nice if the U.S.A. wasn't guilty of some variety of torture ourselves, so we'd have the clearest of moral highgrounds, but there's still no excuse for this flagrant miscarriage of "justice."

I don't believe that going in and bombing this week will do anything to help change Iran for the better or give us any true victory over this repressive regime. I do believe that President Obama is correct to embark upon a strategic course of attempted engagement. And I fully expect that should all of our good attempts fail to change some key elements of the Iranian situation today, that he will take forceful action, this time with the world on our side.

To be for such an approach is not to be pro-Iranian government. And it certainly isn't to be pro-Ahmadinejad.

His destiny will come.

Bastards

More outrageous horrors of the Cheney/Bush-style Iraq War, from a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton as visited upon a very courageous Jamie Leigh Jones:

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

The part of me that is not surprised is the part that believes a private "war services" firm like KBR is going to attract brutal men because those are the only ones who will go into a war zone and risk their lives (whereas the actual U.S. Armed Forces attracts young people looking to better themselves or selflessly serve their country).

The part of me that is shocked wants to see legal and political vengeance against KBR, Halliburton, former Halliburton CEO Richard Bruce Cheney, the perpetrators, enablers and cover-up management.

But what's likely to happen?

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

"It's very troubling," said Dean John Hutson of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. "The way the law presently stands, I would say that they don't have, at least in the criminal system, the opportunity for justice."

Congressman Poe says neither the departments of State nor Justice will give him answers on the status of the Jones investigation.

That leaves the civil courts, where the victim has sued. But:

Jones' former employer doesn't want this case to see the inside of a civil courtroom.

KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom. It says her employment contract requires it.

In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury.

Her employment contract. Did it cover rape by fellow employees and imprisonment by management?

Lawless bastards, bottom to top. As MissLaura says on DailyKos in her appropriately incensed diary:

It takes a special something, it seems to me, to say "we don't want to be held accountable for the gang-rape of this woman we employ. Hey, let's lock her up under armed guard without food and water." What was the end game there? Was the intent to let her out once they'd broken her and she wasn't going to report it? Did they even have a plan? And this, mind you, wasn't a matter of the rapists themselves trying to cover up their actions. This was a decision made by someone high up enough in the company to assign guards to a damn storage container.

This is what the government of our country has bought and paid for.

God help this all lead to the end of the GOP practice of contracting out those duties our official armed forces have traditionally handled in order to make shareholders happy and damned be any morality that gets in the way.

As for Ms. Jones, she's acting like a true brave American, having started a foundation to help women like her abused in military or private military situations, and speaking out:

"There needs to be a voice out there that really pushed for change," she said. "I'd like to be that voice."

May she take all the bad guys down.