A good write-up by Ed Pilkington in the Guardian about a Texas execution. A very comprehensive investigation conducted by a Columbia law school professor and his students, to be published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, suggests that Texas executed the wrong man.
It’s worth a read. Of course the likelihood that people have been executed in the US for crimes they did not commit is very high. Scores of people have been plucked from death row by new evidence unearthed by investigators trying to show that convictions and death sentences happen with alarming frequency in cases where the evidence is improperly investigated by the authorities.
There have been a number of cases around the world, in the UK certainly, where that has subsequently been admitted, and posthumous pardons have been issued, but in those countries there is no longer the need to maintain an argument in favor of capital punishment.
Here in the US that’s not the case. This new case from Columbia researchers may be the best evidence yet of the ultimate miscarriage of justice. I think it will have legs, though the opposition will be furious.
Let’s hope it’s a turning point. It’s way past time.
(h/t N. Fatale for the image)
We sort of did a bit on the ‘militarisation’ of the US, but something just led me to the Chicago Tribune.
Talk about the ‘Siege of Chicago’!
And of course, the obligatory ‘terrorist/anarchist’ plot has been uncovered . . .just in time!
Oh dear, oh dear. I do hope we don’t get infected here in July. (Squirrel may be in France when the Olympics start, but will be coming back before the first week is over, probably.)
Squirrel -
Roughly -
Chemist = drugstore
Yep, it would be like Boots selling cigarettes and papers. The monster chains sell everything.
Newsagent / off-license = convenience store.
They also sell cigs, tobacco, and papers. Liquor or not depends on the state law, also whether or not supermarkets can sell alcohol as well.
As to who’s behind the voter fraud here, i admit i’m stumped. My first (uneducated and not terribly intelligent) thought was organized crime. It’s still here, but i do think it has diminished in influence somewhat since a lot of the heads have either died or jailed. They’ve been tied up with the Dems and unions here forever, so i don’t know what they might get out of a wide scale fraud.
This is one rare state where we could actually use more republicans. We’ve had quite a few republican governors, but they were all pretty much lone sheep without much of a flock. The dire state of the economy and toxic political culture is a result i think of one party with a stranglehold on the state. Opposition is good, keeps both parties on their toes. Even the batshit Doreen Costa (mentioned in that article, roughly our Nadine Dorries) serves a useful purpose here.
Squirrel -
btw, now that Ms. Brooks and hubby have been charged, does that mean that the papers aren’t allowed to talk about it anymore?
I still get funny looks if I’m at a function and get my baccy tin out.
Di -
I imagine you wouldn’t get funny looks down south here. My brother in law and nephew both chew tobacco. Some folks still smoke pipes. Rollups never really caught on here though – i guess as we do grow the stuff here regular cigarettes ought to be cheap enough (and i think they still are down south). Here in the blue states though, they tax the crap out of them. There have been busts up in the northern states here of folks who buy cigarettes in bulk down south then sell them off the books up here.
As a child I was fascinated by my old soldier uncle’s tobacco can/roller. He’d lift the lid to reveal the tobacco and what looked like a little fabric hammock into which he would tease and fit a cigarette’s worth of leaves. He’d then carefully lick the edge of a rizla and tuck it, licked edge up, behind the tobacco in the hammock. Then he’d let me close the lid and out through a slot on the top would pop a perfectly rolled cigarette – which he would then proceed to smoke gripped between the tips of his thumb and index finger with the lit end shielded in the palm of his hand. Something to do with Burma and Japanese snipers I was later told. That or to avoid catching the attention of more senior personnel.
Expat -
You know where the “third on a match” superstition came from then.
PS – Expat -
Do you say packy in Vt.? I did a quick google check, and here anyway, the package store definition of packy in the urban dictionary was the first to come up. Did that come from some post-prohibition thing of booze being wrapped up in a package? I have no idea. I also relearned a forgotton slang term – Masshole. Just a suspicion that our sorely missed friend Gwill might be one of those.
Pornstar says:
May 20, 2012 at 10:29 am
Squirrel -
btw, now that Ms. Brooks and hubby have been charged, does that mean that the papers aren’t allowed to talk about it anymore?
Hmmm. I think the answer’s “Yes and No” but mostly “Yes”. . . At least as far as those two are concerned. (Doesn’t affect writing about the NoW/Murdochs/hacking/etc. otherwise, though.) To be honest, I got rather bored by it all, so I’ve not actually looked at what the charges are. “Perverting the course of justice”, I think?
(Which one usually — but, of course, not necessarily in this case* — imagines means “Caught out lying to — or getting others to lie to — the police.”)
Bit tricky: journos — and the media lawyers — will be treading carefully: it means you can’t now report on what led to those charges, or whatever it may be they did that led to them, but that’s for the moment a bit obscure anyway. On the other hand, anything she said in front of Leveson, you can. (I think.) If I was subbing these sorts of reports, I imagine I’d cut anything that wasn’t absolutely penny-plain factual/historical. cf Grauniad here.
* Squirrel wipes brow . . .It was “Perverting the Course of Justice”; I checked it. It’s a rather scary charge. Five people (I think it is now) have been arrested, charged, and convicted for hands-on hacking of various kinds for the NoW. Four of them were sentenced only at the end of last February.
I’m not familiar with the term packy store in VT Amy.
Mind you I was amazed when I came to VT that you could only buy distilled spirits in a monopoly State Liquor Store, that the prices were obscenely cheap when compared to the UK and that the local papers were full of stories about the state losing money on the enterprise. Go figure that one.
Also that you were only allowed one drink on the table at any time so you had to swill or relinquish the remains of your first beer before the waitress would give you a second. No double rounds in VT back then. That changed when trendy brew pubs lobbied to offer sampler trays of multiple 4 oz glasses to discerning patrons – at least that was their story.
Squirrel -
I got the impression that the serious charges there, apart from police collusion, was the destruction of evidence. Where the serious perverting of justice came in.
The interest here is the police bribery charges though, as that, along with bribery in Russia, could bring News corp under the FCPA here. There are calls here to the FCC to deem Murdoch “not a fit and proper person” to hold the Fox broadcast license, bolstered by the Ofcam statement.
From the NYT -
A former News Corporation subsidiary, a Moscow-based billboard company called News Outdoor Russia, is the subject of an F.B.I. inquiry into whether the company bribed local officials to advance its business. The findings of that investigation could prove a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to a person briefed on the inquiry. News Corporation sold the company in July to a bank controlled by the Kremlin.
The potential for a billion dollars in fines related to a violation of the corrupt practices act could dwarf the economic downside of anything related to the lawsuits in Britain, said Behnam Dayanim, a regulatory lawyer based in Washington. “It may be the single most feared corporate criminal statute out there today,” Mr. Dayanim said.
Expat -
Those laws do sound odd, but Utah must surely have the weirdest state liquor laws. I didn’t know that Vt. had state liquor stores, i did know that NH did, they’re pretty obvious on the turnpike there.
Back when i was a college kid, there were multiple Beat the Clock deals at the local bars, 2 for 1′s, and happy hours. I think those have all mostly gone by the wayside now, and honestly, it’s no bad thing either.
Aren’t package liquor stores a hangover from prohibition? Or rather from the end of it, when suddenly there was a a new (or revived) game in town. Down south if you lived in a dry county you had to drive out to the package store, generally a cement-block bunker of a building in a low-rent district. Sometimes you even had to go to a window inside and ask for what you wanted and they would fetch it off the shelves behind them.
If you were going to a restaurant you brought your own spirits. No one drank wine. People used to have little leather cases, a bit like a brief case, that had buckles inside to keep two or three bottles from rattling around.
Re two peoples divided by a common language, and down south, I heard a story once, which could be true, about an English guy who was somewhere in the Carolinas when he heard on his car radio that there was a club in Myrtle Beach putting on a shagging contest that evening, with big prizes for the winning couple. Astonished, he drove a couple of hours just to see how on earth that would look play out.
I got the impression that the serious charges there, apart from police collusion, was the destruction of evidence.
Possibly interference in some way with other police investigations or criminal cases. It looks as though the NoW may well have hacked into lawyers’ phones and if any of those lawyers were involved in civil or criminal cases . . . It’s all looking rather convoluted.
I was amazed at how many people who should have known better never changed their access PIN no from the default: so all anybody had to do was get the phone number, dial it and enter “1234″ or “0000″ or whatever the provider’s default PIN was . . .Not exactly like hacking the Pentagon . . .
(I came across something about that some time ago; I presume it’s changed, but US troops serving with NATO were allowed to take their own laptops with them. Trouble was, they used the same laptops for watching porn and downloading films from dodgy sources that they also used to copy briefings and military stuff from the Pentagon . . .According to my somewhat amused source, the whole Pentagon system was not just riddled with viruses, but wide open as a result. So I for one wasn’t too surprised that a private could, apparently, just copy a load of secrets onto a DVD and simply walk away with it . . .I’ve often thought the sheer vindictiveness of Manning’s treatment is not because of the supposed secrets he pinched, but the embarrassing ease with which he could do it.)
Squirrel -
It was deletion of all of those NI emails, and carting away boxes of stuff from NI, presumable documents of some sort. Brooks’ hubby is in there because of the laptop he dumped in that garbage can, i believe.
Amy –– Do you do only photography or do you do other types of graphic design? I need something designed.
Madame -
I do a bit of everything, but i don’t really do graphic design to order. Haven’t got the temperament to deal with clients! What sort of thing do you need designed?
Amy –– It’s an odd sort of map that needs creating. I’m not the client; it’s for a client of mine. He’s picky but I believe you know him to be fairly reasonable, and reasonably sane. If you’re willing to consider it, I could ask Gunny to send you my email address. Whenever he gets back from Santa Fe.
Madame -
That doesn’t sound like it’s the sort of thing that’s up my alley. Maps are way out of my range, sounds like they’d be best with a pro in that sort of field. Many thanks for thinking of me though! (Guessing the id of your client now!)
I’m a nature photographer, i used to have tons of actor friends in NYC asking me to do their headshots. I always told them that it’s so important to have good headshots as it’s their calling card, spring the cash it takes to get a pro who specializes in that area.
Amy –– I understand. The design needed is more art than map so a pro at designing maps is not the answer. It exists in exquisite detail in my client’s head; what’s needed is for someone to pluck it out and create it on “paper.” Can you advise what kind of design person we need to look for?
Madame -
That’s actually rather a tough one. It sounds like it’s more of an illustrator than a graphic designer that you need, but even that is kind of a rough one. I did a quick search around the web for Vermont based artists and designers – most graphic designers seem to be branding or web designers, or childrens’ book illustrators. Something like this is getting a bit warmer though…
http://www.North100.com/
Madame
I’m thinking this might be the kind of thing you are looking for.
The artist who drew it is probably a bit too busy (and expensive), but I’m sure that an enterprising art student could do something in the style of.
Bluth -
That looks great. Definitely out of my league!
Amy –– Thanks, I will investigate that site.
Bluthner –– That is very similar to what my client has in mind. I don’t know why I didn’t think in terms of local resources. I know an art teacher at the Academy and I’m sure if I describe to him what we need he can point me to the right artist, someone with the right kind of imagination and skills. Thanks!
Madame -
There are loads of books that have maps in that style wither as on inside binding, flyleaf, or in the front or back of the book (if you happen to be into historical stuff and period and international crime as i am). In a pinch you could look in that direction for artists / illustrators as well.
Amy,
If you need lessons in Client Domination, you should consider hiring Madame. Gifts like hers should be shared.
Bluth,
That is a masterpiece.
Here’s an annotated example that dates from the Franco-Prussian war.
Nat,
Grayson Perry is proper genius.He dresses himself as a little girl doll and venerates a teddy bear, which puts some people off, but his recent show ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’ at the British Museum made me want to shout out loud with unadulterated joy. Not many living artists have that effect on me. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.
Bluth -
I love Grayson Perry. Especially the ceramics. Didn’t realize that was one of his.
Madame has no hesitation in Dominating others on behalf of Client, for which Client should be grovelingly grateful. The aforementioned art teacher has been Cornered and Collared and is on the hunt for suitably skilled art student.
Oh dear, Madame, so you edited Shades of Grey?
Oh dear, Amy, is that about S/M? I hear it’s flying off the shelves in the bookstore here but haven’t been tempted to peek into it myself. Madame has Standards.
Oh, me too, not my basket of cookies. Especially if badly written. My friend emailed me a pretty funny blog the other day that broke it down and ripped up the chapters and the writing. But i’m busy and have a lot of work to do (like filing my nails) i only read a couple of posts.
That reminds me of a brief date my first week of college. Someone on my floor warned me my date was notorious for “forgetting” his wallet so I didn’t take mine either. Once we discovered with astonishment that neither of us had any money, our date consisted of wandering around the campus for half an hour or so. Couple days later he had me paged from the dorm lobby and asked me to go out right then. I said I couldn’t because I was busy helping a friend scrape wax off her stereo. Oddly, I never heard from him again.
Here’s a thread on the Graun today that explains why some threads on the phone hacking case are closed for comments -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/24/why-we-sometimes-turn-comments-off