January 2008 Archives
AlterNet: Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream"
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -- Dr. Martin Luther King jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", April 1963
The "I Have a Dream" speech has become a cliche'. It's played every Martin Luther King Day and perhaps again during our so-called "Black History Month." With each passing year it feels more distant to me, more quaint. Its power has always been its simplicity and clarity, but its unassailable message has turned the man who delivered it into more of a myth than a human being made of flesh and blood.
Leaving Prison Doors Behind, Some Find New Doors Open - New York Times
Paroled after 11 years in prison for manslaughter, Sharon White was determined to earn the bachelor's degree she had begun working toward while serving her term. Her goal was to become a social worker; she wanted to counsel former prisoners as well as young people "at risk of going astray," just as she had, she said, when she became a drug-selling high school dropout who ended up stabbing a man to death.
When Marcelino Guillen was released on parole after serving five years for selling cocaine, he was bent on restarting his pursuit of a college education. The first time around, he had dropped out after failing all the courses in his first semester. "I realized that if I had gotten a degree, I probably wouldn’t have sold drugs," he said recently.
Mr. Guillen, 39, and Ms. White, 38, are students at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York, pursuing bachelor’s degrees in social work with the aid of a program devoted to giving people with criminal histories "the know-how and support" they usually need to apply for and succeed in college, said the initiative's founder and director, Benay Rubenstein.
Ms. Rubenstein started the program, the College Initiative, in 2002 at Episcopal Social Services, an arm of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. This past May, she moved it to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, another branch of the City University. Jeremy Travis, the college's president, is a specialist in the problems released prisoners face in returning to society.
At the college, Mr. Travis formed the Prisoner Re-entry Institute, which fosters research and programs on this issue. The College Initiative program is part of the institute.
The initiative not only helps former prisoners with academic, financial-aid and admissions counseling, but also assists with job and housing problems. In addition, it offers a course in computer skills and in preparing for the math and English sections of the City University entrance exams, said Debbie A. Mukamal, the institute’s director.
Post-prison programs like the College Initiative - and like College and Community Fellowship, a similar effort that is part of CUNY’s Graduate Center - were developed in response to a drastic reduction a decade ago in college programs in the nation's federal and state prisons, specialists in prisoner rehabilitation say. At that time, with crime rates having climbed, many elected officials worked to make sentences and prison conditions tougher.
In 1994, Congress removed prison inmates from eligibility for Pell Grants, a major federal program of aid to low-income students that was the financial backbone of most in-prison college programs. Many states, including New York, followed the federal lead and removed prison inmates from their own college aid programs.
As a result, about 25,000 inmates taking part in such programs with Pell Grants had their "education abruptly ended," according to a study by Kenneth Mentor, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. By 1997, only 8 college prison programs remained active nationwide, compared with as many as 350 in previous years, Mr. Mentor said.
What happens when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is "delivered," and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created? The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read - and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.
Justices to Hear Case Testing Rule on Witness - New York Times
WASHINGTON - A defendant's right to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses is among the most valuable of constitutional rights in the courtroom, one to which the Supreme Court has paid increasing attention in the last few years. A landmark decision in 2004 held that unless the witness is available for cross-examination, the state cannot ordinarily introduce any incriminating statements the witness made before disappearing.
But what if the defendant stands accused of the witness's murder?
The justices agreed on Friday to hear a case presenting that wrinkle in the Sixth Amendment's "confrontation clause." It is an appeal brought by a California man convicted of shooting his former girlfriend to death several weeks after she complained to the police that he had threatened and beaten her. The trial court allowed the police officer who had responded to the girlfriend's complaint to testify about her description of the matter.
The defendant, Dwayne Giles, argued unsuccessfully to the California Supreme Court that those statements should have been kept out of court, because there was no proof that he had killed the victim, Brenda Avie, for the purpose of preventing her testimony.
In allowing the statements, the California court applied an old doctrine called "forfeiture by wrongdoing," which means that a person should not be permitted to profit from wrongful acts. To invoke the doctrine, it was not necessary to prove that the defendant's motive was to make the witness unavailable, the state court said.
The question of whether proof of motive is necessary has come up with surprising frequency in courts around the country in the years since the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington. That decision greatly strengthened the Sixth Amendment right of defendants to confront the state's witnesses by excluding statements from absent witnesses that previously had been commonly accepted, under the looser rules governing hearsay evidence.
Some legal scholars regard the Crawford decision as one of the Supreme Court's most important criminal law rulings in recent years. The author of the 9-to-0 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, based it on a literal reading of the language of the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant's right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him."
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles - New York Times
Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”
Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.
The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
Looking at America - CommonDreams.org
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked - how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions - and both American and international law - to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat - and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners - some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports - to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more - so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
