In a September 7 debate among the GOP presidential hopefuls, Texas Governor Rick Perry seemed quite proud of leading the country in death row executions. He indicated that he loses no sleep over the possibility of executing an innocent person. This is despite the fact that we now know that at least one innocent man – Cameron Todd Willingham – had died by lethal injection on Perry’s watch.

In sharp contrast, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber wants to take no such chance. On November 22, Kitzhaber announced that he would allow no more executions through the end of his time in office.

During a previous term as Oregon’s governor in the 1990s, Kitzhaber presided over two executions, despite personal doubts about the morality of the death penalty. Kitzhaber had this to say about those executions: “They were the most agonizing and difficult decisions I have made as Governor and I have revisited and questioned them over and over again during the past 14 years. I do not believe that those executions made us safer; and certainly they did not make us nobler as a society. And I simply cannot participate once again in something I believe to be morally wrong.”

Kitzhaber pointed to flaws in Oregon’s criminal justice system, which he described as “broken”: “Oregonians have a fundamental belief in fairness and justice – in swift and certain justice. The death penalty as practiced in Oregon is neither fair nor just; and it is not swift or certain. It is not applied equally to all.”

Indeed, studies in several states have shown that the death penalty is applied in a discriminatory, arbitrary, and uneven manner, and is used disproportionately against racial minorities and the poor. For example, a 1998 study of death sentences in Philadelphia found that African-American defendants were almost four times more likely to receive the death penalty than were people of other ethnic origins who committed similar crimes. That’s not justice, it’s discrimination.

Human rights group Amnesty International, which describes the death penalty as “the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights”, hailed Kitzhaber’s decision. Furthermore, said Rob Freer, Amnesty International’s USA researcher, “Oregon’s state legislature should seize the opportunity provided by Governor Kitzhaber and turn this temporary moratorium into permanent abolition.”

Doing so would follow a growing trend in death penalty abolition in the U.S. Illinois abolished the death penalty in that state earlier this year, joining 15 other states and the District of Columbia which had previously halted the practice.

The trend extends also through much of the rest of the world. The U.S. is one of very, very few western nations that still engage in state-sponsored killing. In maintaining the death penalty here in the U.S., we align ourselves with the other executing nations of the world such as Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and a handful of other countries known for their systematic violations of human rights.

This is apparently the kind of company that Rick Perry is proud to keep. Kudos to Governor Kitzhaber for instead moving his own state forward towards a more civilized approach to criminal justice.

Texas governor and Republican presidential contender Rick Perry has faced criticism from the left (and applause from the right) for his heavy-handed use of the death penalty. And Perry has said that he loses no sleep over the possibility that he may have executed an innocent man.

This is despite the fact that it appears that Perry has done just that – and could very likely do it again very soon.

In 2004, Texas death row prisoner Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for an alleged arson that claimed the lives of his three daughters in 1991. However, a later forensic review of the case led to the conclusion that “a finding of arson could not be sustained.” In other words, the fire for which Willingham was executed was probably just an accident.

Instead of acknowledging that an innocent man may have been executed, and working to correct the system that allowed such a grievous error, Governor Perry appears to have taken steps to impede the investigation into the Willingham fiasco.

And now we have another Texas death row prisoner, Henry Watkins “Hank” Skinner, facing a November 9 execution date for a triple murder, despite the existence of untested DNA evidence that Skinner says could prove his innocence.

Skinner had been convicted and sentenced to death for the New Year’s Eve murder in 1993 of his girlfriend Twila Busby and her two adult sons. The DNA in question went untested during the original trial because Skinner’s attorney was afraid that it could incriminate his client – a decision that Skinner contends he never agreed with.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Skinner may pursue a civil rights claim to obtain the DNA testing. In the meantime, however, Texas has jumped the gun. Instead of waiting for the civil rights suit to unfold, and for the DNA to be tested to ensure they’ve got the right guy, the state went ahead and scheduled the November execution.

What are they afraid of – the possibility that Skinner’s conviction, like Willingham’s, might be proven wrong?

Governor Perry, as noted above, has bragged that he really does not care. Neither, apparently, does anyone else in charge of the busiest death chamber in the country.

Killing a prisoner, apparently, is more important to them than killing the right prisoner.

Killing a prisoner, apparently, is more important to them than true justice.

The drama continues in the case of America’s most famous living death row prisoner.

On October 11, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from the Philadelphia District Attorney to overturn a federal appeals court decision declaring Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence unconstitutional. Abu-Jamal had been convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Now, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), “Mr. Abu-Jamal will be automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole unless the District Attorney elects to seek another death sentence from a new jury.”

This development is good, but it’s not enough.

For years, rights groups have been speaking out against Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. A 2000 report by Amnesty International noted that “numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.” Amnesty expressed concerns about judicial bias and hostility, police misconduct, and the apparent withholding of evidence from the jury. Amnesty called for a new trial “in a neutral venue, where the case has not polarized the public as it has in Philadelphia.”

Abu-Jamal’s supporters insist that he is innocent, that he was set up, and that racial bias and witness coercion had played a big part in an unfair trial. They also point out that Faulkner was killed with a .44 caliber gun, while the gun found on Abu-Jamal was a .38 caliber.

This most recent court decision, however, concerns only the penalty, not the question of guilt or innocence. At this stage, the death penalty was challenged because of flawed jury instructions in the sentencing phase of Abu-Jamal’s original trial. The issue involves how jurors were to weigh various mitigating factors that may have resulted in a sentence other than the death penalty.

Professor Judith Ritter of Widener Law School, who, along with the LDF, represented Abu-Jamal in this phase of his case, weighed in on the new decision: “Like all Americans, Mr. Abu-Jamal was entitled to a proper proceeding that takes into account the many substantial reasons why death was an inappropriate sentence. Our system should never condone an execution that stems from a trial in which the jury was improperly instructed on the law.”

Indeed.

Again, this latest development is good, but it’s not enough.

Unless Abu-Jamal is granted a new – and fair – trial to address his guilt or innocence, I will not believe that justice has truly been served.

I shall not hold my breath.

With President Obama running for a second term, I cannot help but wonder which Obama we will see as the reelection campaign heats up over the coming year.

In 2008, we saw Obama the Candidate, who promised us change we can believe in. He inspired and energized us.

Now many of us on the progressive end of the political spectrum are dealing with 2+ years of disappointments from Obama the President.

We’re still holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

We’re still wasting money on unnecessary military operations.

The unemployment rate is still much too high.

The bankers are still raking in obscene salaries and bonuses as home foreclosures continue.

The rich still enjoy their Bush-era tax cuts (which are now Obama-era tax cuts).

And our Social Security and Medicare are on the line as possible bargaining chips in the ongoing budget wars.

This is not change I can believe in.

Perhaps Obama feels trapped in a position where he has no choice but to “negotiate” with the right. But negotiation, by definition, is supposed to be at least two-sided, with some give-and-take on all sides.

So has Obama pushed back strongly enough? I haven’t heard enough words in his speeches to convince me that he has. I just keep hearing him use the word “compromise” while what he actually does is capitulate.

Still, next year, we the voting public will have to choose between Obama and his still-unknown Republican challenger.

More progressive Democrats have proven unelectable in the past, so we won’t see a Dennis Kucinich or a Russ Feingold reaping any kind of surprise overthrow victory at next year’s Democratic National Convention. And a progressive running as a third-party candidate (remember Ralph Nader?) would only potentially steal enough votes from Obama to reward us with a President Bachmann, a President Perry, or (at best) a President Romney.

So will Obama step up to the plate and try to win back the progressive base that worked so hard to get him elected in 2008?

If so, will enough of us support him?

That last question is not a rhetorical one. Sometimes we just have to face reality and vote for the proverbial lesser of two evils. We cannot afford any more Republican Supreme Court appointments.

But we can – and we must – make noise in the meantime. For democracy. And for true change that we really can believe in.

On August 19, three men walked out of prison in Arkansas after spending nearly 20 years behind bars for a triple murder that they maintain they did not commit. The crime involved the brutal killing of three eight-year-old boys.

Damien Echols had been on death row for the murders. Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and Jason Baldwin were both serving life sentences. They had been nicknamed the “West Memphis Three”.

Their first big break came in 2007, when new forensic evidence showed that the DNA from the crime scene did not match any of the defendants. After four years of appeals, a plea agreement was reached by which the three would enter Alford pleas in exchange for having their sentences reduced to time served. Under an Alford plea, a defendant can assert his innocence while acknowledging that prosecutors have enough evidence to obtain a conviction.

So what led to the convictions if the DNA says otherwise? Campbell Robertson, writing for The New York Times, describes the web of hearsay, speculation, and coercion that led to the guilty verdicts:

“The grotesque nature of the murders, coming in the midst of a nationwide concern about satanic cult activity, especially among teenagers, led investigators from the West Memphis Police Department to focus on Mr. Echols, a troubled yet gifted 18-year-old who wore all black, listened to heavy metal music and considered himself a Wiccan. Efforts to learn more about him through a woman cooperating with the police led to Mr. Misskelley, a 17-year-old acquaintance of Mr. Echols’s.

“After a nearly 12-hour police interrogation, Mr. Misskelley confessed to the murders and implicated Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin, who was 16 at the time, though his confession diverged in significant details, like the time of the murders, with the facts known by the police. Mr. Misskelley later recanted, but on the strength of that confession he was convicted in February 1994.

“Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin soon after were convicted of three counts of capital murder in a separate trial in Jonesboro, where the proceedings had been moved because of extensive publicity in West Memphis. The convictions were largely based on the testimony of witnesses who said they heard the teenagers talk of the murders, and on the prosecution’s argument that the defendants had been motivated as members of a satanic cult. Mr. Misskelley’s confession was not admitted at their trial, though recently a former lawyer for that jury’s foreman filed an affidavit saying that the foreman, determined to convict, had brought the confession up in deliberations to sway undecided jurors.”

Now the DNA evidence exists that casts reasonable doubt as to their guilt. Why then were they forced to acknowledge otherwise as a condition for their release? It was either that or remain in prison (and, in Echols’ case, remain on death row).

Lawyers for the three defendants say that they will pursue full exoneration. That would be one big step towards true justice in this case.

Another big step would be to reopen the case and find the real killer(s).

We owe it to the victims and their families.

It seems that lawsuits are never simple, and there are always at least two sides.

The latest example to catch my attention is the case of Baker and Linsley v. Wildflower Inn. In this case, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is working with a lesbian couple, Kate Baker and Ming Linsley, to sue a Vermont inn for refusing to host their wedding reception.

According to some case background on the ACLU website, the Wildflower Inn seemed very eager to host the reception until the innkeepers learned that the happy couple are two lesbians. Never mind the fact that same-sex marriage has been legal in Vermont since 2009; it appeared that the innkeepers wanted no part of it on their property.

The ACLU quotes an email from an employee of the inn who had been working with the mother of one of the brides on preliminary arrangements: “After our conversation, I checked in with my Innkeepers and unfortunately due to their personal feelings, they do not host gay receptions at our facility.”

And this wasn’t the first time, allegedly. According to the ACLU’s official complaint, filed July 19, “during the same 12-month period in which the Meeting and Events Director refused to allow Ming and Kate to hold their reception at the resort, the Meeting and Events Director also turned away at least two other same-sex couples pursuant to the Wildflower Inn’s no-gay-reception policy.”

Imagine the public outrage if interracial couples were treated this way in 2011!

According to the ACLU, “The Vermont Human Rights Law has prohibited public accommodations from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation for nearly 20 years.”

And, notes the ACLU, “This case is about discrimination, plain and simple. When a business that is open to the public refuses to serve two people and their guests solely because the two people are a same sex couple, it is no different than restaurants not serving individuals because they were black, or other businesses keeping out women or Jews. It is discrimination and it is illegal.”

But, as I noted above, there are always at least two sides to every lawsuit. So I called the Wildflower Inn. I expected to hear, “No comment.” Instead, I ended up speaking with a woman who wanted to talk, albeit reluctantly.

When she answered the phone at the inn, I introduced myself and explained that I am a writer in Philadelphia hoping to hear their side of the story. The woman (who did not give her name) said it was all a misunderstanding.

She went on to say that the Wildflower Inn employs a number of gay people, and that numerous gay guests have stayed there in the past and have returned for repeat visits.

Whey then, I asked, were Ming and Kate turned away?

I did not get a straight answer to that question (pun unintended). But the woman on the phone seemed to imply it was the decision of the Meeting and Events Director, who had allegedly not consulted the owners at all.

I’ll leave it to the lawyers on both sides to drag out the real facts. And I’ll leave it to the courts to ultimately decide who at the inn broke the law, if indeed a law was broken. But, at the very least, the email quoted above certainly does make it seem like someone at the inn has a homophobia problem.

In the meantime, ABC News reports that Ming and Kate have found a different place to hold the festivities. I wish them all the best.

Today in Florida, Casey Anthony will be sentenced for the handful of misdemeanors for which the jury on Tuesday found her guilty, all related to giving false information to law enforcement. Since Anthony was acquitted of the more sensational charges against her, I am hoping that the whole media circus will now go away.

I am sick of it. And I am sick of the pundits and everyday citizens expressing their outrage over the jury’s decision on Tuesday that Anthony is not guilty of the murder of her 2-year-old daughter. (As if these armchair critics are privy to some secret evidence that would erase the reasonable doubt. But no, they just know it anyway.)

Just after the verdict broke, an acquaintance asked me what I thought of it. I answered honestly: I don’t care. I do not personally know Casey Anthony. She is not a member of my family or my professional or social circle, so it’s none of my immediate business, unless her human rights are at some point violated (which would have been the case had she been convicted with a death sentence).

The Casey Anthony story got so big, and so out of control, because the media saw some glamour (and therefore ratings) in it. A hot white middle-class mom may have killed her cute white daughter because the toddler was interfering with mom’s party-happy social life. Cha-ching! Not even Paris Hilton can compete with that.

But I hear stories every week here in Philly of missing children. In many of those cases, a parent is a suspect. But those other cases don’t become national news sensations. Maybe they’re just not glamorous enough. The parties involved might be minorities, or they just might not be interesting or edgy enough to capture the national spotlight.

This double standard is not solely the fault of the media that hype the select few cases. It’s also the fault of the sheep who turn them into a ratings success.

Get a life, people.

Sadly, though, I predict some major magazine exposure for Anthony after this, along with maybe a book and a made-for-TV movie.

Again: Get a life, people.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian passed away on June 3. He died the old-fashioned way – in a Michigan hospital bed while suffering from pulmonary thrombosis. Kevorkian, also known as “Dr. Death”, was famous as a proponent and provider of physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

At the beginning, Michigan had no law against assisted suicide. Kevorkian eventually went to prison when he crossed the line and gave a lethal injection to a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. He videotaped the event and provided the video to the CBS program “60 Minutes”. Unlike Kevorkian’s other patients, the Lou Gehrig’s sufferer was unable to administer the lethal drug to himself. Kevorkian was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder. And the Michigan legislature proceeded to outlaw assisted suicide.

Some people call Kevorkian a murderer and a monster. I call him compassionate. He admirably wanted to relieve the suffering of the terminally ill. He just did so with a bit too much drama. Fortunately, his legacy lives on with a number of right-to-die organizations around the world that are fighting for what I see as the final human right: the right to choose a quick and dignified death over a painful, lingering one.

As a result of the work of these organizations, physician-assisted suicide is now available for terminally ill patients in Oregon, Washington, and Montana, as well as a small handful of European nations. Everywhere else, the terminally ill are forced to endure sometimes horrific pain at the end of life, or end their misery with a plastic bag, a noose, or other undignified means. And those sad, desperate acts will continue as long as so-called “pro-life” factions keep fighting attempts to widen the acceptance of physician-assisted suicide and provide more people with the power to choose a good death over a horrible, slow, painful one.

This is not euthanasia, where some people worry that the disabled will be killed to get them out of the way. Where physician-assisted suicide is legal, the patient must demonstrate a rational and clear-headed desire to die, and must pass medical screenings to prove that they are terminally ill.

Sometimes those on the “pro-life” side point to hospice care as an alternative that would provide palliative care to relieve suffering at the end of life. But the fact remains that modern medical science cannot yet provide adequate pain control for all dying patients, even by the best hospice organizations.

While physicians are sworn to do no harm, is it not harmful to force a dying patient to suffer a slow, lingering death against his or her will, perhaps kept alive artificially with respirators and feeding tubes?

When a pet becomes ill to the point where it is near death and suffering uncontrollably, a veterinarian will not think twice before recommending that the pet be euthanized, to put the animal out of its misery.

So why do we treat our dying pets with more mercy than we treat our dying people?

Dr. Kevorkian saw this double standard and chose to fight it. For that I admire him. May he now rest in peace.

On May 12, Amnesty International (AI) released its annual report on the state of human rights in the world. The report examines the human rights records of 159 countries around in the world during 2010.

The United States of America got some bad marks again this year, primarily related to human rights violations in the “war on terror” and our continued use of the death penalty.

“US President Obama’s promise that the Guantanamo detention centre would be closed by January 2010 was not fulfilled,” AI notes in the report. “By the end of the year, 174 people remained held in the prison. The only Guantanamo detainee so far transferred to the US mainland for prosecution in a federal court was tried and convicted. Two Guantanamo detainees were convicted by military commission during the year after pleading guilty. Revised rules, issued in April, governing military commission proceedings for so-called ‘war on terror’ suspects showed that there was little hope that the US administration would make substantial reforms and uphold human rights.”

Also in the “war on terror”, AI’s report criticizes the Obama administration for its failure to prosecute the instigators of torture and other human rights violations by the Bush administration: “[I]n the USA, those responsible for crimes under international law committed as part of the ‘war on terror’, such as torture and enforced disappearance, were not held to account. In November, former President George W. Bush admitted that he had authorized the use of ‘water-boarding’ (a form of torture in which the process of drowning a detainee is begun) during his administration. Nevertheless, accountability and remedy for human rights violations committed as part of the USA’s programme of secret detention and rendition remained non-existent. In November, the US Department of Justice announced, without further explanation, that no one would face criminal charges in relation to the destruction in 2005 of 92 tapes depicting evidence of ‘water-boarding’ and other torture techniques used against two detainees held in 2002.”

Regarding the death penalty, AI’s report notes that “[46] prisoners – 45 men and one woman – were put to death in the USA during the year. This brought to 1,234 the total number of executions carried out since the US Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on the death penalty in 1976.” AI describes the death penalty as “the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights, and calls for worldwide abolition of the death penalty “to end the cycle of violence created by a system riddled with economic and racial bias and tainted by human error.”

In this year’s report, AI has again exposed the US not as a nation of laws and justice, but as a nation of impunity and injustice.

I am ashamed for my country, as every citizen of conscience should be.

You can obtain a copy of the report, or browse the report by region or by country, at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2011

As of April 11, the average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $3.79. And I hear people complaining about it all the time.

Still, they don’t think twice about spending much more per gallon for bottled water.

During a recent visit to a local sandwich shop, I noticed that 20-ounce bottles of Dasani water were selling for $1.75 each. That’s $11.20 per gallon. Those bottles of water were practically flying off the shelf during the busy lunch hour. And I didn’t hear a single customer complain about the price of the water.

Why the double standard?

Perhaps some people think that bottled water comes from purer sources than tap water, and is actually worth the price. But such an assumption is naive. In fact, the Coca-Cola Company has admitted that Dasani is nothing more than filtered tap water. And, with the wide availability these days of home water filtration systems, filtered water pitchers, and filtered water bottles, purified water is available to virtually everyone for pennies – not dollars – per gallon.

Perhaps some people believe that bottled water is healthier and safer than tap water. This, too, is naive. In fact, bottled water is less regulated – and therefore possibly lower quality – than tap water.

Perhaps some people see bottled water as a status symbol. But is your own personal (perceived) social status, as reflected in a bottle of needlessly expensive water, really worth the cost to the planet and its inhabitants?

The website BottledWaterBlues.com sums up the environmental impact of bottled water in these four points:

– 60 Million plastic bottles a day are disposed of in America alone!

– Massive amounts of greenhouse gases are produced from manufacturing the plastic bottles.-

– Millions of gallons of fuel are wasted daily transporting filtered tap water across America and around the world.

– It requires 3 times as much water to make the bottle as it does to fill it… it is an exceptionally wasteful industry.

So, even if you recycle your own Dasani or Poland Spring bottles, there are all those other factors to negate that well-intentioned gesture.

Finally, and most importantly, if you buy and drink bottled water, you are supporting the privatization of something that is supposed to be a natural resource. And, in willfully paying corporations for something that you could otherwise get for free, you are compounding the problem. If water is something we have to pay for, then the poor will not be able to afford it. And, without clean water, it is impossible to survive.

Do you want that on your conscience?