justice

Wilkerson is a former member of the Black Panther Party and one of the Angola Three. He spent more than 30 years in prison for the killing of a prison guard, along with two other former Black Panthers -- Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- before being exonerated by the state of Louisiana in February 2001. Woodfox and Wallace still languish in prison. They are the longest-held prisoners in solitary isolation to date in the United States. 

On a Friday early this summer, Wilkerson addressed a crowd composed of both supporters and curious passers-by outside Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened its doors in 1829 as the first institutionalized experiment in long-term solitary confinement. Over the past 40 years, with modern advances enabling an unprecedented level of isolation and control, the practice has been systematized, standardized and forced upon thousands of people across the country, from murderers to drug addicts and petty thieves. 

Wilkerson was one of many modern-day solitary survivors who brought focus and momentum to the StopMax Conference, organized by the American Friends Service Committee. Bonnie Kerness, Prison Watch coordinator for the AFSC, said that over the past two decades, the organization has received an "astounding" number of letters from people in solitary confinement describing the abuse that occurs in their desolate cells. She told AlterNet that "they describe in excruciating detail," among other things, "the uses of devices of torture -- forced medication, restraint beds, restraint chairs …" 

"And now we're also starting to hear from juveniles," she says, "so it's almost at a point where, how could we not respond?"

That should not be the end of the conversation. 

Reasonable men and women of all political affiliations, faiths, and professional backgrounds have disagreed for decades about the morality of executing those who commit heinous crimes. As a former prosecutor, defense attorney, trial judge and chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, I have been involved in 1,200 capital cases and can personally attest to the complexity and uncertainty of that debate. Remarkably, the same individuals who agree on little else are beginning to find one piece of common ground: the belief that Florida's system of capital punishment is broken.

Under the plan, marijuana would be taxed as liquor and tobacco are now, with proceeds going toward drug-treatment programs, said former Health Secretary Enrique Vazquez Quintana. 

The proposal, also supported by other former public officials and a medical doctor, calls for stricter penalties against drug traffickers, and comes as the U.S. Caribbean territory prepares to launch drug-treatment programs to wean addicts from crack, heroin and other substances. 

About 24 percent of the island's 13,500 inmates have been convicted on drug charges, and an estimated 80 percent of crimes are drug-related, according to the Department of Corrections. 

"The fight against drugs, using punishment, has not worked," said Jose Manuel Saldana, former president of the University of Puerto Rico. "This is a social reality.

A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to invite comparison). Got caught by police in a, shall we say, "a vehicular sexual incident" with a married woman. They were both drunk, big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by the time they got to court, the lady's testimony was that it was all against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender, while his public defender all but slept through the trial. 

To make matters worse, Stokes had an unregistered handgun stashed in his car. Stupid, I know, but rednecks are often like that, and I'd be willing to bet there are more unregistered handguns than registered ones around here. This may horrify urban liberals, but legal or not, it is the common practice of tens of thousands of people down here in the southern climes of our great nation. It's also common practice nationwide to many thousands of cab drivers, night clerks, hotel parking valets, bill collectors, repo men, single women and god only knows how many others. At any rate, thanks to the gun that he never touched, Stokes was prosecuted for armed abduction for sexual purposes and did ten years. 

He's been out for years now. But he was released into an entirely different world than he left -- one that seems scripted by Adam Smith and Hanging Judge Roy Bean. As a convicted felon, he has been released from prison to serve a new sentence to serve time as a profit center for our economy. In truth, he has been one from the day he was charged.

Punk rock was a rebellion against the clean, predictable sound of popular music and it also encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude. Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

Many Americans assume that executing mentally disabled prisoners is a thing of the past. In a landmark ruling involving another Virginia prisoner, Daryl Renard Atkins, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that executing the mentally retarded was tantamount to "cruel and unusual punishment." "It is fair to say that a national consensus has developed against it," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in Atkins v. Virginia, citing the growing number of states that had outlawed it. 

The ruling followed years of executions -- some high-profile -- of mentally challenged defendants, including the controversial death of Ricky Ray Rector, the lobotomized Arkansas death row prisoner who then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton stopped to see killed while on the campaign trail in 1992. There was also the case of Mario Marquez, a mentally disabled Texas death row prisoner who had been abused as a child before being abandoned by his parents at age 12. No discussion of his mental retardation or years of abuse entered the courtroom before he was sentenced to die. But his post-conviction attorney would later describe how Marquez "was never able to discuss the specifics of his legal case, but instead we talked a lot about his favorite animals, things he liked to draw, and how he missed being able to see his brothers and sisters." Marquez was executed on the day of Gov. George W. Bush's inauguration, in 1995. 

And then there was the case of Earl Washington, a mentally disabled Virginia man who was exonerated in 2000 after having falsely confessed to a rape and murder committed in 1982. "The confession proved to be the prosecution's only evidence linking Washington to the crime," reported the Innocence Project, and "psychological analysis of Washington reported that, to compensate for his disability, Washington would politely defer to any authority figure with whom he came into contact. Thus, when police officers asked Washington leading questions in order to obtain a confession, he complied and offered affirmative responses in order to gain their approval." 

Nobody disputed the guilt of Kevin Green. But Washington's confession put him in the company of many disabled prisoners whose mental pliability makes them especially vulnerable to false confessions -- one of the leading contributions to wrongful conviction. 

The Atkins decision was a critical development in death penalty jurisprudence, in keeping with a trend the court likes to call our country's "evolving standards of decency." But when it came to enforcement, the court's 6-to-3 ruling contained what has proved to be a fatal flaw: It left it up to the states to define mental retardation, providing no standard measure for determining a defendant's mental capacity, thus rendering the law hopelessly elastic. The result: Prisoners with severe mental disabilities continue to face execution across the country.

But before his felony case got to trial, a judge suggested the prosecution and defense try something different -- an informal mediation process that, in less than an hour, resulted in a plea agreement where Gilliam avoided prison but agreed to pay restitution, get drug treatment and be on probation for five years. 

The March 18 mediation also gave Gilliam and his victims a chance to speak, to each other and a neutral judge, with Gilliam eventually apologizing for his crimes. "Both sides felt like they got something out of it and got to have their say," said Kristen Bailey, Gilliam's attorney. She would not allow him to discuss the process because he's not yet been formally sentenced. But she noted, "The victims felt like they were being listened to, and my client felt like he was being listened to." 

Gilliam's was one of 18 felony cases mediated and settled for Clay, Jackson and Leslie counties that day -- as part of a state pilot program that aims to reduce congestion in courts, and in prisons. While mediation is common in civil cases, felony mediation is rare in Kentucky and across the country, in part because of prosecutor opposition and judges' concerns about political fallout from the public.

Research has shown before that lead has harmful effects on judgment, cognitive function and the ability to regulate behavior. But until now the best research focused on juveniles, not adults. 

Now, researchers have collected data from as early as 1979 when pregnant women and their healthy babies had their blood drawn regularly at four Cincinnati medical clinics. By the time the children were 7, researchers had a complete portrait of lead levels. 

Nearly two decades later, the researchers tracked down 250 of the subjects, ages 19-24. Controlling for a host of factors, including parental IQ, education, income and drug use, the team found that the more lead in a child's blood from birth through age 7, the more likely he or she was to be arrested as an adult. The tie between high lead levels and violent crime was particularly strong.

The marketing ploy, if successful, would not only create distance between the candidate and the rest of the Republican Party, which currently suffers from widespread voter disapproval, it would also effectively elevate McCain and make him a larger-than-life figure, the spokesman for his own maverick brand that's built on political independence.

"The campaign's general-election strategy is to sell the McCain brand to show voters that he is distinct from President Bush and other Republicans," the Post reported. 

So guess what members of the press, including those at MSNBC, CNN, NBC, The Washington Post, Newsweek, the Politico, and The Boston Globe, have been doing incessantly in recent weeks. They've been making glowing references to the durability and appeal of the "McCain brand." I mean, how lucky can the Republicans get? The press is echoing precisely the message that the candidate's advisers want repeated again and again. What are the odds?

I assume the sarcasm is coming through loud and clear here.