Writing Life

In a fantastic editorial today, the Baltimore Sun has called for an end to the death penalty in Maryland. A key quote from the short piece is:

There is widespread agreement among law enforcement officials, prosecutors, defense attorneys and legal scholars that capital punishment does not deter crime, that it is unfair, arbitrary and capricious in its application and that it protects the public no better than a life without parole sentence.

I applaud the Sun for their stance.

My only qualification would be to ensure that if this is enacted, the courts and juries continue to put their most earnest efforts into determining guilt or innocence. I’d hate to see an innocent person sentenced to prison without parole almost as much as executing an innocent person.

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett flip-flopped and now supports slots for Maryland. Last I heard, there weren’t any slots slated for his county, but I’m sure he’ll take the money from those exploited in other areas.

Then, we have cop killers. No, not people who kill cops but police who take the law into their own hands and execute suspects who are already in custody in a jail cell. In Prince Georges County, another autopsy report shows again that a suspect in a cop killing was killed in his solitary jail holding cell. Guards have kept quiet and said various things, that is when they even speak with investigators. The Feds are investigating but we’ll have to wait and see.

I find this new technology, or more accurately, it’s application, very disturbing. It glosses over the fact that what the mind believes is the truth might not necessarily be the truth. Research and evidence has shown for decades that people may truthfully believe something that didn’t happen. This happens all the time in witness testimony. It also doesn’t address what happens if the person is trying to be deceptive about what he/she believes.

If issues of guilt and innocence weren’t so important, I’d almost want to joke and reference the Monty Python witch detector from their Holy Grail movie. There, we see how easy it is to use machines and mental states to show that if a woman weighs as much as a duck, then she’ll float in water, … and thus she’s a witch. This new application of MRI technology is not much more scientific at the moment.

Equally disturbing is article writer Anand Giridharadas and his editors at the New York Times. The article’s second sentence says “Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete.” Yet again they perpetuate the Bush & McCain axiom that one must say “harsh interrogation methods” instead of saying torture. The author and the Times are so bold as to say that waterboarding is just a harsh method by linking it with the words “and other”. By continuing to not call it what it is, they do a disservice to their readers and are coconspirators, albeit not in the room, with the U.S. torturers themselves.

Following up from an earlier post, Howard County’s state’s attorney’s office won’t file charges against an undercover cop who “accidentally” shot two unarmed boys with his one magic bullet. The Baltimore Sun reports that the officer is on administrative duty pending an internal investigation. No word on whether that report will be released or if he’ll be exonerated behind closed doors, judged not by his peers but by his colleagues.

The shooter’s identity is being protected by police and government officials by claiming that his undercover status is of higher civic value than justice for the two teens he shot. I find it telling that these same police leaders have no problem repeatedly publicizing the name of the woman who accidentally struck and killed a Howard County police officer who was making “step-out” traffic stops on a County highway. She too wasn’t indicted by the grand jury, but her identity isn’t being protected.

The Baltimore Sun is reporting that prosecutors won’t file charges against two teens who were mistakenly shot by police. The April incident featured two undercover officers and two teens in a neighborhood off Route 1 in Jessup. The cops claimed the boys were involved in a drug deal, and one of the undercover officers came out of his car, gun drawn, finger on the trigger. The officer shot one of the boys, and there’s confusion as to whether he shot the other one too or if a magic bullet scenario played out with one bullet hitting both teens. The officer claimed that his gun accidentally went off (i.e. people don’t shoot people, guns shoot people).

What is shocking to me is that prosecutors didn’t bring any charges against the officer who shot the two innocent boys. (And yes, they were innocent, having been cleared by officials as not being involved with drugs or drug deals.) I haven’t heard much about how the police department will penalize the shooter and his undercover partner. If a lawful individual with a valid license to possess a gun accidentally shot a police officer, I’m not so sure the scenario would have played out in the same way.

What we saw in this case was the prosecutors bestowing upon the two victims the right of not being prosecuted for a crime, which I can only imagine would be described by prosecutors as “voluntarily stepping in front of a righteous officer’s accidentally fired bullet.” One of the boys’ families will be filing a civil suit and the other is waiting for their son to recover from his wound before moving forward.

And I don’t mean Guatanomo Bay today. This is one of the most shocking pieces I’ve read in a long time about the Bush Administration’s policies. The article details U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) practice of using psychotropic drugs to “sedate” people being deported from the U.S. These drugs aren’t given to patients who require such medication, but are used to make individuals pliable like luggage to be thrown on a plane and flown out of the country.

If these people are being legally deported, then they need to be taken out of the country, but with dignity for them and honor for the U.S. government. Forcibly medicating individuals with no need for such pharmaceuticals is against U.S. policy, illegal under international law and an offense to human dignity. Additionally, documents show ICE officials often inject more than the recommended doses, sometimes as much as four times more. This seems to make the process even more medically unethical. The doctors, nurses and technicians involved should be appropriately punished.

America’s transformation into a Soviet-style police state is nearly complete. We have secret spying on all citizens (national security letters, NSA eavesdropping), gulags (Guantanomo Bay, secret prisons in other countries), and now medicating the innocent entrusted to the custody of the State. One of the drugs used by ICE is Haldol, an extremely strong antipsychotic. The article states that “Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals.”

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky reportedly said “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If we believe this, and I think we must, then America has truly entered a dark time.

There was an intriguing article in the Washington Post yesterday (26 Mar 08). It talked about Sierra Leoneans’ reaction to the Special Court established there in 2002 after the end of that country’s horrible civil war. Set up in conjunction with the United Nations, this court was to prosecute those who “bore the greatest responsibility” for the violence. It was said to be a compromise that would hold the very top responsible but not focus on actual perpetrators, who number in the thousands and often involved child soldiers and forced recruits.

The problem is, some locals feel just the opposite. They think the $150 million spent so far to prosecute 13 top-level war criminals could have been better spent in a country ranked near the bottom in terms of development. Funds for daily needs, employment, training, and medical care are desperately needed. Additionally, many of the perpetrators of actual violence, those who cut off limbs and killed people, are not being punished or prosecuted. This is partly due to a barely functioning judicial system, one of the reasons given for creating the Special Court in the first place.
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Both the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post covered a human interest story that often seems to garner no human interest. What happens to people in put in jail? In this one instance, prisoners at the Patuxent Institution in Jessup, Maryland, watched a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, put on by Ellicott City’s Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.

It was a fascinating story on many levels. First, always cool to see Shakespeare being performed. And Macbeth might be one of my favorite plays of the Bard.

Second, it treats people behind bars as just that, people. Yes, they’re serving time, some for brutal murders and violence. But, they’re still people, not just statistics chucked into a hell-hole to either be killed on the inside, both metaphorically and possibly physically, or churned back outside with nothing to help them break the cycle. Offering those who play by the rules inside (it seems to see the show, you had to be free of infractions for a year) something of culture and decency, with an opportunity to watch it with their loved ones from the outside, means that maybe, just maybe, they’ll think more of themselves, and in turn, more of others. So, when they do make it back to the other side of the wire, they might reintegrate smoothly, or at least, less problematically.

Third, and finally, I read something I hadn’t known, which plays into my last paragraph. The Post’s author interviewed psychologist Randall Nero, who is in charge of the prison’s operations. Quoting from the article, Nero remarked that

The facility is set apart from other Maryland prisons, with its own parole board and structure, which allows Patuxent to emphasize treatment rather than punishment for its 812 convicts. Although almost half of the inmates in Maryland’s other prisons are rearrested within three years on parole, Patuxent has a zero percent recidivism rate in that period.

This gives me hope and I’m proud that my state and county were involved in this effort.