the sick, corrupt, and dirty details of absolute power
Posted by Michelle Moquin on April 9th, 2011
Here’s what I promised.
Cruel but Not Unusual
Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever.
Posted Friday, April 1, 2011, at 7:43 PM ET
In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana. Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial. He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson’s private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim’s family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson’s blood type.
In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant’s innocence. Failure to do so is a violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights. Yet the four prosecutors in Thompson’s case managed to keep secret the fact that they had hidden exculpatory evidence for 20 years. Were it not for Thompson’s investigators, he would have been executed for a murder he did not commit.
Both of Thompson’s convictions were overturned. When he was retried on the murder charges, a jury acquitted him after 35 minutes. He sued the former Louisiana district attorney for Orleans Parish, Harry Connick Sr. (yes, his dad) for failing to train his prosecutors about their legal obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this civil rights violation, one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated. The district court judge added another $1 million in attorneys’ fees. A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. An equally divided 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed again.
But this week, writing on behalf of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court and in his first majority opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can’t be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion, in which he takes a few extra whacks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent. (Ginsburg was so bothered by the majority decision that she read her dissent from the bench for the first time this term.) Both Thomas and Scalia have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy. Their disregard for the facts of Thompson’s thrashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia opens his concurrence with a swipe at Ginsburg’s “lengthy excavation of the trial record” and states that “the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors.” But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor.
Both parties to this case have long agreed that an injustice had been done. Connick himself conceded that there had been a Brady violation, yet Scalia finds none. Everyone else concedes that egregious mistakes were made. Scalia struggles to rehabilitate them all.
One of the reasons the truth came to light after 20 years is that Gerry Deegan, a junior assistant D.A. on the Thompson case, confessed as he lay dying of cancer that he had withheld the crime lab test results and removed a blood sample from the evidence room. The prosecutor to whom Deegan confessed said nothing about this for five years. While Scalia pins the wrongdoing on a single “miscreant prosecutor,” Ginsburg correctly notes that “no fewer than five prosecutors” were involved in railroading Thompson. She adds that they “did so despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight.” While Thomas states the question as having to do with a “singleBrady violation,” Ginsburg is quick to point out that there was far more than just a misplaced blood sample at issue: Thompson was turned in by someone seeking a reward, but prosecutors failed to turn over tapes of that conversation. The eyewitness identification of the killer didn’t match Thompson, but was never shared with defense counsel. The blood evidence was enough to prove a Brady violation, but it was the tip of the iceberg.
In the 10 years preceding Thompson’s trial, Thomas acknowledges, “Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick’s office.” Yet somehow this doesn’t add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn’t blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn’t be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.
Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates’ unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady,acknowledged that his prosecutors “were coming fresh out of law school,” acknowledged he didn’t know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had ‘stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions’ when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974.” And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would “make [his] job more difficult.” As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had “considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson.”
It’s not just that a jury, a judge, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Connick knew his staff was undertrained and he failed to fix it. It’s that it’s almost impossible, on reviewing all of the evidence, to conclude anything else. Nobody is suggesting that the legal issue here is simple or that there aren’t meaningful consequences to creating liability for district attorneys who fail to train their subordinates in Brady compliance. But those aren’t the opinions that Thomas and Scalia produced. Their effort instead was to sift and resift the facts until the injury done to Thompson can be pinned on a single bad actor, acting in bad faith. It’s a long, sad, uphill trek.
Beyond that, there is no suggestion in either opinion that this is a hard question or a close call or even a hint of regret at their conclusion. There is only certainty that the jury, the appeals court, and above all Ginsburg got it completely wrong in believing that someone should be held responsible for the outrages suffered by John Thompson. If there is empathy for anyone in evidence here, it’s for the overworked and overzealous district attorneys.
It’s left to Ginsburg to acknowledge that the costs of immunizing Connick from any wrongdoing is as high as the cost of opening him to it: “The prosecutorial concealment Thompson encountered … is bound to be repeated unless municipal agencies bear responsibility—made tangible by §1983 liability—for adequately conveying what Brady requires and for monitoring staff compliance.” As Scott Lemieux points out, by all-but-immunizing Connick for the conduct of his subordinates, the court has created a perfect Catch-22, since the courts already give prosecutors absolute immunity for their actions as prosecutors (though they may still be liable for their conduct as administrators or investigators). By immunizing their bosses as well, the court has guaranteed that nobody can be held responsible for even the most shocking civil rights violations.
I don’t think that the failure at the court is one of empathy. I don’t ask that Thomas or Scalia shed a tear for an innocent man who almost went to his death because of deceptive prosecutors. And, frankly, Ginsburg’s dissent—while powerful—is no less Vulcan in tone than their opinions. But this case is of a piece with prior decisions in which Thomas and Scalia have staked out positions that revel in the hyper-technical and deliberately callous. It was, after all, Scalia who wrote in 2009 that “this court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” It was Thomas who wrote that a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form had no constitutional claim.
The law awards no extra points for being pitiless and scornful. There is rarely a reason to be pitiless and scornful, certainly in a case of an innocent man who was nearly executed. It leads one to wonder whether Thomas and Scalia sometimes are just because they can be.
**********
And this is our Supreme Court “Just us” system. Comments? Thoughts? Rants? Blog me.
AH: Wow. Talk about a conspiracy. And the fact that so many people, not to mention countries, kept it a secret is astounding. I can see not much has changed. Your statement, “The fear was that if Lincoln could put the country back on its feet, he would run and be elected for even a third term,” proves that even back then those that oppose were willing to risk the loss of their country to be successful in their agenda. The racists opposed a black man as president then, just as they do today.
With respect to the rest of your chronicle, I was glued to my computer, hanging on every word. I am not shocked but I am left somewhat speechless. Amazing how our history books etc., reflect nothing like this.
As readers have said here before, history is told and depicted how people in power want us to remember it. It is not necessarily the truth. The truth that we are supposed to believe is all in the power of the hands of those who write the written word, and have the power to spread it widely. Thank for sharing. I HOPE you, Bita and Adam are well.
Paula: Your comments were such an interesting addition to AH’s. Thanks for sharing too. However, it seems there are more than just “two” presidents with black ancestry. There is a little book by J.A. Rogers called “The Five Negro Presidents”, that has come across my plate.
Readers: I expected to hear more from you with respect to AH’s story. Here’s a excerpt from an article written about this little 18-page book mentioned above:
Obama Would Be the Sixth Black President, At Least!
About a year ago, a Rastafarian guy I worked with who had a lot of optimism about Obama and, to me, an unrealistic expectation that an Obama presidency would be “revolutionary,” made a statement that piqued my curiosity. In the middle of speaking on what was shaping up to be the Obama versus Hilary primary farce, he said:
“Of course, people talking about Barack being the first black president have it wrong. He’d be the sixth one, at least!”
I’d never heard such a thing before, and I’ve heard lots of things. I’ve even had, in past iterations of my personality, great pride in having heard and read about quite a few things most people of my age don’t know. But this was the first time I’d heard about other black presidents, so I asked him about it.
My Rasta colleague responded with surprise. “Really? I figured you knew about that? There have been a few presidents with black ancestry. Thomas Jefferson was one, I forget the others. Alexander Hamilton, one of the other Founding Fathers, was part black, too. You ever been to his house up in Harlem? Any way, The Five Black Presidents, I think that’s the book. You should track that down.”
Cut to earlier this week. I’m in Brooklyn to check out a viewing of John Carpenter’s They Live, and I stop into a bookstore in the neighborhood. I’m browsing around the shelves when I come across a thin pamphlet that sets me abuzz.
A tiny pink covered, zine-sized affair with a picture of Warren Harding on the front and, just below him, a well-dressed man with an Afro: The Five Negro Presidents U.S.A. by J.A. Rogers. (Rogers is himself, a fascinating man, a self-taught scholar born in Jamaica who interviewed Marcus Garvey and attended the coronation of Hailie Selassie during the course of his life.)
Also known by the name The Five Negro Presidents According to What White People Said They Were, the tiny book first came out in 1965, a year before Rogers, a fascinating, noble-minded autodidact, passed on. It gives an account of four presidents, plus a fifth that Rogers does not name. The four presidents Rogers mentions are Warren Harding, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. All of these men were, while they were alive, suspected of having black ancestry, something that was publicized and/or used against them by political opponents in their lifetimes even if these events have been whitewashed (pun definitely intended) from the history most of us learned during our youthful schooling.
Interesting huh? To read the rest of the write, click here.
PEACE OUT.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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April 9th, 2011 at 10:44 am
http://smallbusiness.aol.com/2011/03/14/my-first-million-bob-williamson-horizon-software-international/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl9%7Csec1_lnk3%7C209237
This is my life, all but for the turning it around part, and the million dollars won’t ever come. But ,hey. Somebody has to fill the role for the rest of you to look down upon. Scums of the earth are important so that the high and mighty can feel superior to something other than their own self image.
April 9th, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Michelle, “The Five Negro Presidents” by J. A. Rodgers was the book I quoted from. It has been in our family for more than 20 years.
Wait t’ll you see the real portrait of Alexander Hamilton by Charles Peale. He had full lips, wooly hair and he was brown skinned. It says so much about the fear the white race has of other races that they have to steal the accomplishments of those other races to call them their own.
It reminds me of another Alexander. Mr. Dumas who wrote “The Three Musketeers” among other classics was depicted as a white man. I grew up thinking he was. It was my grand father that gave me two of J.A. Rogers books to show me the accomplishments my race has contributed to the world that the white race has made it their business to keep them from us.
Take Mr Hamilton for instance. He was the single most important figure in the making of America. He was their first self taught lawyer. He wrote most of the law studies for early students of the law. But he was self taught in the law.
He singled handed invented and set up our entire banking system that lasted untouched until that crook Reagan set about deregulating it. If it wasn’t for that crooked white boy we would not be experiencing a financial crisis every decade or so.
Reagan was a bought and paid for stand in for the presidency. He did what he was told for money. My grand father said in the 80″s “we creoles will not have our land long here in N.O. after this man gets his second term. And he will get a second term because the white man worships money. It is his god and reason for living.”
He did not live to see it but he was right. Bush’s son used the deregulation to permit anyone to own a bank. The crooks lined up stole the country blind with Palin’s running mate helping them avoid prosecution. Then they switched up and ran the same scam in the mortgage market.
Look for the next one. Obama can’t stop them because the white boy put back in the crooks that deregulated the banking system in the first place. The republican party is chomping at the bit. They are anxious to get the stealing going again.
I just want to add when one talks about conspiracies most never think about the fact that the entire history that white america feeds us is a series of conspiracies to keep us from knowing what really happened.
When you get J.A. Roger’s book and see Mr. Hamilton’s portrait drawn by Charles Peale and then you see the one prominently displayed in the New York Library of Congress, it is a conspiracy that is devised to keep anyone from asking if Alexander Hamilton was an OTW.
The portrait has been altered to give him thin lips, straight hair(prominently displayed with straight wisps stringing from his head.) Very white complexion. All this is complete with quotes from his relatives claiming that AH was a blond with blue eyes.
Read the account from the other books from France, Spain, and J.A.Rodger’s book. You will discover that AH’s brother was arrested for sitting in the front of the train as if he were white. AH’s mother could not come to America because she feared being made a slave and destroying her son’s career. She was a West Indian.
The problem is that whites have hidden their genocides so well that most people don’t know that Caribbean Island like the West Indies, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto, Rico, etc where invaded by the white men who savagely killed all the males and brought in their black male slaves to work and populate the islands.
Interesting that whites never ask how all those islands have black wooly haired people. More interesting however is the conspiracy of silence that allows the white boy to not tell that he murdered all the males on those islands. Does anyone really think that French was Haiti’s native language or that the true indigenous people of Haiti had wooly hair?
Committing genocide is as natural to the white race as breathing. They invent words to make their actions more presentable, does “collateral damage” do anything for anyone but the white race. They eat it up!
Sure, Sharon, we all look alike and sound alike to you. But let me tell you sister, it is not difficult to sound alike when one is describing the same depraved behavior by the same race. It is only a different place, or time but the same damn story. Genocide for money. War for money. With the white race anything justifies the acquisition of money.
You can call me a bigot for putting it so bluntly. But you can not call me a liar. The entire map of the world had been redrawn because of the greed of the white boy for money. Until that behavior is looked at honestly and addressed seriously NOTHING WILL CHANGE.
The white has infested other cultures with their disease. Now all the other races are racing to catch up with the white boy’s greed. Everyone is doing whatever they can to get more money, all the while claiming to be better than the other guy while he is doing it.
I’m sorry to say it Al, And I know it sounds bad. But the truth is the white boy in America has done every sin imaginable to everyone he could beginning with the defenseless i.e the OTWs, women and then proceeding to carry his depravity to his own. Is it any wonder he is the world’s worst savage?
This is a creature who makes movies glorifying serial killers. The white boy makes them heros and super brains. When the real truth is most serial killers are thought of by their neighbors as ideal neighbors. That is because they are cowards and avoid any kind of confrontation with physical equals. They work so hard to get alone to avoid the slightest possibility of an altercation that could lead to physical violence because they are cowards. They need to catch their victims unawares.
They prey on the unsuspecting, the weak and the defenseless. Yet, white america in its rush to glorify murder, torture and mayhem portrays them as macho men, with brains, that defy capture because of their incredible cunning.
When the truth is it is hard to catch someone who has no motive for killing another human being besides his sick sexual deviancy. Not to mention he is being chased by another white boy cop. So you get the brain dead chasing the brain dead.
Your articles back up that claim. A white cop and his justice system is content with sending innocent victims to jail or death row. A conviction is a conviction to him, as far as he is concerned, what’s justice got to do with it? And the rest of the whites are so ignorant that it never occurs to them that by looking the other way while their “justice” system frames innocent OTWs. They are allowing the real criminals to continue to prey on other unaware victims.
Does the manipulation of the blood and the DNA remind you of any other case? I know that O.J. won’t come to mind to white america because they want to railroad an OTW without a conscience by insisting that they KNOW he is guilty.
I really don’ mean to be so down on your race, Michelle. But as my grand father used to say “the white man is so very quick to claim that he has done this and that good thing. But he runs from accepting the evil, criminal, stupid or just plain dumb shit that he does.
Child as long as you have a mouth to speak with keep reminding him and the world. If you don’t he will lie like a rug.” So I gave you my two cents for my grand father.
Paula
April 9th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
WOW! Paula did you get that off your shoulders?
April 9th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Michelle, I tried to order the book. I couldn’t. If you can let me know how and where.
April 9th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Michelle, your story about the Supreme court justices totally ignoring the law or any pretense of judicial due diligence reminds me of a point that Robert made a while back about those “bought and paid for 5.”
He said that when white america spends so much time trying to convince us of the intelligence of one of theirs, they are lying. All we ever heard was how much Scallia knew about the law. Yet just about every decision he has made is one a bone head first year law student could get right, but he doesn’t.
But what’s most telling about his true lack of judicial knowledge, is that when he sides with his handlers for money, he doesn’t have the legal knowledge to bamboozle us non lawyers with to make us think that his decision could have been a possibility.
We lawyers and non lawyers alike are left saying “that was just stupid.”
Yolanda
April 9th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
I was just readi
April 9th, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Michelle, here is the statement from John Thompson about the supreme court(now you can start spelling it with non capital letters.
Those 5 have reduced the court to a joke.) verdict exonerating the New Orleans retired DA from his misconduct that would have sent a innocent man to his death.
The only black man on the court was chosen to write the decision to show the impartiality of the court. But to blacks everywhere it just affirmed and old adage repeated more and more these days. –
“Give a dark nigger a white woman for a wife, no matter how fat or ugly the bitch may be, the nigger will kiss ten yards of white ass.”
First I’ll give you the ass kisser’s statement;
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that only a pattern of misconduct would warrant holding Mr. Connick accountable for what happened on his watch.
=========================
Now here is the Mr. Thonpson’s reply:
The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t
By JOHN THOMPSON
New Orleans
I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors surfaced just weeks before my execution date.
Those prosecutors were never punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.
Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else today.
I was arrested in January 1985 in New Orleans. I remember the police coming to my grandmother’s house — we all knew it was the cops because of how hard they banged on the door before kicking it in.
My grandmother and my mom were there, along with my little brother and sister, my two sons — John Jr., 4, and Dedric, 6 — my girlfriend and me.
The officers had guns drawn and were yelling. I guess they thought they were coming for a murderer. All the children were scared and crying. I was 22.
They took me to the homicide division, and played a cassette tape on which a man I knew named Kevin Freeman accused me of shooting a man. He had also been arrested as a suspect in the murder.
A few weeks earlier he had sold me a ring and a gun; it turned out that the ring belonged to the victim and the gun was the murder weapon.
My picture was on the news, and a man called in to report that I looked like someone who had recently tried to rob his children.
Suddenly I was accused of that crime, too. I was tried for the robbery first. My lawyers never knew there was blood evidence at the scene, and I was convicted based on the victims’ identification.
After that, my lawyers thought it was best if I didn’t testify at the murder trial. So I never defended myself, or got to explain that I got the ring and the gun from Kevin Freeman.
And now that I officially had a history of violent crime because of the robbery conviction, the prosecutors used it to get the death penalty.
I remember the judge telling the courtroom the number of volts of electricity they would put into my body. If the first attempt didn’t kill me, he said, they’d put more volts in.
On Sept. 1, 1987, I arrived on death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary — the infamous Angola prison. I was put in a dead man’s cell. His things were still there; he had been executed only a few days before.
That past summer they had executed eight men at Angola. I received my first execution date right before I arrived. I would end up knowing 12 men who were executed there.
Over the years, I was given six execution dates, but all of them were delayed until finally my appeals were exhausted. The seventh — and last — date was set for May 20, 1999.
My lawyers had been with me for 11 years by then; they flew in from Philadelphia to give me the news. They didn’t want me to hear it from the prison officials. They said it would take a miracle to avoid this execution. I told them it was fine — I was innocent, but it was time to give up.
But then I remembered something about May 20. I had just finished reading a letter from my younger son about how he wanted to go on his senior class trip.
I’d been thinking about how I could find a way to pay for it by selling my typewriter and radio. “Oh, no, hold on,” I said, “that’s the day before John Jr. is graduating from high school.” I begged them to get it delayed; I knew it would hurt him.
To make things worse, the next day, when John Jr. was at school, his teacher read the whole class an article from the newspaper about my execution.
She didn’t know I was John Jr.’s dad; she was just trying to teach them a lesson about making bad choices. So he learned that his father was going to be killed from his teacher, reading the newspaper aloud. I panicked. I needed to talk to him, reassure him.
Amazingly, I got a miracle. The same day that my lawyers visited, an investigator they had hired to look through the evidence one last time found, on some forgotten microfiche, a report sent to the prosecutors on the blood type of the perpetrator of the armed robbery.
It didn’t match mine; the report, hidden for 15 years, had never been turned over to my lawyers. The investigator later found the names of witnesses and police reports from the murder case that hadn’t been turned over either.
As a result, the armed robbery conviction was thrown out in 1999, and I was taken off death row. Then, in 2002, my murder conviction was thrown out. At a retrial the following year, the jury took only 35 minutes to acquit me.
The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.
Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he called it off.
In 2005, I sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for what they did to me.
The jurors heard testimony from the special prosecutor who had been assigned by Mr. Connick’s office to the canceled investigation, who told them, “We should have indicted these guys, but they didn’t and it was wrong.”
The jury awarded me $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row — which would have been paid by the district attorney’s office. That jury verdict is what the Supreme Court has just overturned.
I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves.
There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.
Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Because we were sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths.
But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final.
Someone needs to look at those cases to see how many others might be innocent.
If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.
A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me.
John Thompson is the director of Resurrection After Exoneration, a support group for exonerated inmates.
==================
So let me hear again how being called a derogatory name by a OTW is equivalent to having a white boy doing it with the power to not only lock you up for life, but to take your life with as little regard for it as he would have swatting a fly.
And house nigger or not writing the opinion, the white boy is still calling the shots that keeps us falsely imprisoned or murdered on their death rows.
So Al, when you say you haven’t benefitted from being America’s Affirmative Action Beneficiary, then I take it you have never had even a parking ticket, or ever had any cause to need to receive government services.
But deep in your heart, I know you know that AAAB always goes first.
Robert
P.S. I know Sharon – “Nicely said”, sic(Robert)
April 9th, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Robert:
Thanks, nice read. But I think you should lay off of Al, he was just popping off. Also, cut Sharon some slack. What do you expect from a white woman, who follows the white man’s rhetoric in lockstep? Be nice and let that go too.
As for your quote, you missed that one too. I remember it this way; “Give a dark nigger a white woman, no matter how fat or ugly the bitch may be, the house nigger will still eat ten yards of white shit for the privilege.”
Finally, Scalia wrote the opinion that house nigger, couldn’t spell his name without first getting his master’s permission. Scalia let Thomas read it to give the impression that race had nothing to do with their decision.
I guess we will have to wait awhile before the media inundates us with how brilliant a legal scholar scalier is after that inane decision. And tell me again how republicans hates it when a judge legislates from the bench. Oh yeah it doesn’t matter if it is done to achieve a verdict they want.
Dwight
April 9th, 2011 at 9:45 pm
There are 20 nuclear sites bordering the middle of TN, to include Al, GA, SC, NC and Fl.
If the next nuclear disaster wiped those bigots out would that go a long way towards solving our problems? I wonder how fast those hypocrites would start screaming for green energy?
Then, again, they are ________.
Maybe, not.
April 10th, 2011 at 7:22 am
Anonymous 1
I read your story this morning about 3 hours ago. I just finished reading it again a little after 10 AM here in New Brunswick.
Great read! I needed the inspiration.
Thanks
Nora
April 10th, 2011 at 7:33 am
Kids Are Getting Their Drugs from You
Robert Stutman
America’s drug problem is staggering. Illegal drug use has climbed to 20 million Americans.
Even more shocking: Many addicts began abusing drugs or alcohol as kids under the watchful eye of well-intentioned parents.
Parents fail to take steps that might steer their kids away from addiction because they don’t understand how much drug use has changed since they were young.
Today there are different drugs, different dangers and a different demographic of young people at risk. Here’s what parents need to know now…
Drug abuse begins early. A generation ago, the average age of first drug use among eventual users was 15. Today that average starting age is alarmingly low — 12 or 13.
This is a huge problem because the younger people are when they first try drugs, the greater the odds that they will become addicted.
Important: Start talking with your kids about the dangers of drugs before they set foot in junior high school. By high school, it may be too late.
The drugs teens abuse today are not the ones your generation used. Today young people are much more likely to abuse prescription medications than marijuana or LSD.
In fact, one in five high school students have taken a prescription drug that they didn’t get from a doctor. Teens almost always get their pharmaceutical drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets or the cabinets of friends’ parents.
Dozens of different pharmaceuticals can be abused. As a rule of thumb, if there’s a sticker on a pill bottle warning against driving after use, it’s likely that teens take the drug to get high. Even over-the-counter medications such as cough suppressants are abused.
If anyone in your house is prescribed a medication that has a warning sticker about driving after use, buy a lockbox or a safe and lock up these pills.
Do this even if you trust your kids completely — you don’t want your kids’ friends or your babysitter to be tempted.
Abusing prescription drugs often is riskier than abusing illegal drugs.
Many teens — and even parents — incorrectly assume that anything prescribed by a doctor can’t be all that dangerous. In truth, many prescription medications are extremely dangerous when not used as intended.
Example: OxyContin is a time-release pill designed to suppress pain over six to eight hours. Drug abusers crush these pills into powder so that the full dose is absorbed at once.
Fact: According to a September 2010 government report, fatalities from misuse of prescription medications are the single leading cause of accidental death in the US.
Drug abuse is not just a problem for cities, minorities, the poor and kids who underachieve in school. Rural and suburban kids are just as likely as city kids to abuse drugs or alcohol — perhaps even slightly more likely.
White kids are as likely as African-American kids to do so. Private school kids are as likely as public school kids.
Teens on sports teams are just as likely to use drugs as any other teen.
Kids who do well in school are somewhat less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than those who do poorly, but good grades are not the ironclad evidence of nonuse that many parents imagine them to be.
Even smart kids can be drug users, and some of them are smart enough to maintain their grades after they start using.
Those who start drinking as teens are almost twice as likely to become alcoholics. Alcohol is the most socially acceptable drug in our culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
Consuming one or two alcoholic drinks is not a problem for most adults, but when teens drink, they almost never stop at just one or two — they drink until they are intoxicated.
The teenage brain is especially prone to addiction, including alcohol addiction, because it is still developing.
Those who start drinking as teens or preteens are approximately twice as likely to become alcoholics as those who wait until their 20s.
Do not drink to get drunk in front of your child — even if your child is still too young to fully understand what drinking means.
As early as age two, children begin forming lifelong beliefs and behaviors based on what they see their parents doing.
Certainly never allow your teens to get drunk in your presence. Some parents permit their teens to drink at home because they think this is safer than the teens drinking elsewhere and then driving home.
I am somewhat sympathetic to this thinking, though studies suggest that teens who drink with their parents are slightly more likely to become alcoholics than those who do not.
I am not sympathetic when parents allow kids to drink to the point of drunkenness at home. That only increases the odds of future drinking problems.
WHAT EVERY PARENT MUST DO
Many parents believe that nothing they do or say about drugs gets through to their teens. While it’s true that parents cannot control their teens completely, all kids learn important life lessons from their parents — even when neither parent nor child realizes that learning is taking place.
Have dinner as a family as often as possible. Families that eat together are much less likely to have kids who become addicts.
Children who have dinner with their parents at least three times a week are less likely to develop drug or alcohol problems.
Tell your children regularly and emphatically that you want them to stay away from drugs, including alcohol and prescription medications.
Your teens might roll their eyes, but at some level, your words are likely to have an effect — studies show that kids who know their parents care whether they use drugs are less likely to use them.
Helpful: For information about talking with children about drugs, read How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid by Joseph Califano, Jr. (Fireside)… and explore the links section on my Web site (www.TheStutmanGroup.com, then click “Links”).
Confront your teen if you smell cigarette smoke on his/her clothes or discover other evidence of tobacco use. Teens who use tobacco are at greater risk than nontobacco users of becoming drug addicts. If you smoke, quit.
Inform your teens that if one of their peers ever passes out from drinking or drug abuse in their presence, they should immediately roll this person onto his/her side (to prevent suffocation if the person vomits), then call 911. Thousands of lives would be saved if every teen knew this.
Personal interviewed Robert Stutman, a 25-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
He served as special agent in charge of several DEA field divisions, including the New York field division, the nation’s largest. In 1990, Stutman founded The Stutman Group, a consulting company that designs and implements substance-abuse prevention programs, Boca Raton, Florida.
He is special consultant on substance abuse for CBS News and speaks to more than 100 groups a year. http://www.TheStutmanGroup.com
April 10th, 2011 at 7:55 am
I am American but I have many relatives in Japan. I hope we here in America stop the powerful thieves that stand to make $millions from building more nuclear power plants.
Here is a story about what has happened to Rokkasho, Japan’s other nuclear disaster.
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Japan’s Other Nuclear Disaster
Yas Idei, 04.06.11, 06:00 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated April 25, 2011
At the nuke dump in Rokkasho, a nation’s hunger for power has spawned a financial catastrophe.
The Rokkasho nuclear site: It has consumed $25 billion but left Japan’s power plants scrounging to store waste.
In many ways the 11,000 villagers in Rokkasho, on the northeastern tip of Japan’s main island, are blessed.
While other towns in the remote region are run-down and financially strapped, Rokkasho boasts gleaming public buildings, immaculate recreation facilities and free picture-phones in every home.
Rare in a land of massive public debt, its government has a $100 million surplus. At $170,000 per capita income is triple Tokyo’s.
The reason for Rokkasho’s good fortune is its decision three decades ago to host a nuclear waste dump, as well as uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing plants. When the plans were hatched in the 1980s, Japan was the economic wonder of the world, and Rokkasho was held up as a “dream project.”
Spearheaded by Japan’s political and power industry bosses, it was envisioned as harnessing the nation’s technical and financial prowess to complete the nuclear fuel cycle–a circuit in which conventional nuke plants, fast-breeder reactors and Rokkasho’s recycling facilities would create inexhaustible energy.
These days the dream project looks more like a study in how overwrought ambition and money politics created a financial nightmare.
Rokkasho is operated by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. (JNFL), an industry consortium led by Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant. Up to now it has remained in the testing stage and taken delivery of what is believed to be only a small amount of waste.
The power industry’s plan to send many tons of spent fuel to Rokkasho from its 54 domestic nuclear plants has been scuttled by 18 safety-related delays so far in the start of uranium reprocessing.
The delays, in turn, have left Japan’s nuke plants sitting on 13,000 tons of waste. Unless Rokkasho begins reprocessing, they could run out of storage capacity within a matter of years.
JNFL now hopes to begin reprocessing in October 2012–after spending another $2.5 billion. Plutonium reprocessing and fast-breeder reactors, which other nations have largely abandoned, are more doubtful still.
That was true even before the Mar. 11 earthquake set off a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, halfway between Rokkasho and Tokyo.
Under a nuclear policy review ordered by Prime Minister Naoto Kan, Rokkasho is likely to get a close look; one type of fuel it aims to produce, mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium, or mox, was introduced into Fukushima’s No. 3 reactor last year and is a top contamination concern.
One thing that’s not reviewable is the money already consumed by Rokkasho. Costs have exceeded estimates by threefold and stand at $27.5 billion. Billions more would be needed to fulfill its early ambitions.
How did Rokkasho avoid the fate of both Nevada’s stalled Yucca Mountain dump and a plutonium reprocessing plan President Obama killed in 2009?
Beginning in the 1980s the power industry harnessed local support for development in a place that village vice chairman Takegoro Takada says was known as “Japan’s Manchuria” for its remoteness.
As Rokkasho boomed doubters were marginalized. Retired fisherman Yosaburo Takada, 86, is one of the few remaining. His antinuke lawsuits went nowhere.
His son has been blackballed from jobs. A four-time mayoral candidate, Takada most recently ran in 2002 after the previous mayor committed suicide amid a construction scandal. Takada garnered 170 votes to 5,140 for current pro-nuke Mayor Kenji Furukawa.
“We couldn’t win against the power of the state and money,” Takada says.
Mayor Furukawa and JNFL officials referred queries to pro-nuke village councilman Fumio Takahashi. “Because of Fukushima, antinuclear movements may grow again,” he says, “but we should focus more on safety issues.” That view may be tested even in Rokkasho. Talk is that potentially unstable waste from Fukushima may be sent its way.
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All this says is that greed is what fuels these men. They do not care what they do to the individuals or the world while they are getting it.
Wake up America.
Emi
April 10th, 2011 at 8:05 am
Zen Lill:
A good friend referred me to this site. She said remember that tall beautiful blond that smiled a lot, she is a major feature on a blog I read often. I remember you when you lived in Singapore. So I asked her for the link.
Maybe we will talk some time.
Loo
April 10th, 2011 at 9:03 am
Robert:
You really are a stupid bigot. Any one who reads this blog knows I am disabled and poor. I went to the worst schools and I grew up in the worst part of the city in which I live. I have been arrested more times than I can count, mainly for being white in a black neighborhood. I have spent a good deal of my life incarcerated, and have never committed a crime that had a victim. I try to eat. I receive food stamps, SSI, and Medicaid now. I cannot walk around the block. Maybe I can stand long enough to take a quick shower, or a piss.
It has been at least 20 years since I could afford a car to get a ticket in. I have been mugged by Blacks and Latinos and Caucasians. I have had police pistols shove so far down my throat they broke most of my teeth out. All for being white in a black area (where I happened to live). I know more about racial discrimination than you will ever learn in your stupid cry baby ass life.
I know why you hate the white man, and are so fucking angry, to make 60 million a year you must have had to suck a lot of white cock and kissed a lot of ass. I have more OTW friends than you could ever dream of knowing, cause a pussy like you sure can’t have many friends.
So Fuck You ,you racist bastard. Just because you have not helped out your own people, don’t lay your guilt trip on me. You don’t know me, but even my black friends want to kick your ass, you are truly a piece of shit cry baby if there ever was one.
You think I don’t know about discrimination. Again, FUCK YOU. You are a bigot no matter what you think. You stupid fucking asshole.
Al
April 10th, 2011 at 11:01 am
Too bad all the bad noise affects the blog.