Maine joins the bigoted fraternity of states denying gay people the right to get married. And in New Jersey, voters decided that they liked incumbent Democrat and gay marriage supporter Jon Corzine less than GOP challenger Chris Christie.
If prosecutors gin up the frame before the innocent men enter the courtroom, and the jury sentences the innocent men to life in prison for a murder they did not commit, and after twenty-five years of imprisonment the men are exonerated and freed, they can sue the prosecution for framing them, right?
Not according to the prosecutors in question, who say that “there is no freestanding right not to be framed.” The Obama administration agrees. Wouldn’t want fear of lawsuits influencing prosecutorial decisions. Unlike elections and race, as in the case of Iowa prosecutors who coached a witness to perjure before an all-white jury so they could convict two black men from out of town in an election year. The story is at NPR.
PBS will air a documentary about the lynching of Leo Frank tonight. The People v. Leo Frank tells the story of the Jewish man sentenced to death, then commuted, then lynched for the 1913 murder of a thirteen year-old girl, Mary Phagan. The lynching was shocking, largely because the victim was white, but in many ways is is just another example of the way in which white southerners in the Jim Crow South violently enforced their own code of justice, especially against outsiders. (Governor John Slaton, who commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison, was hanged in effigy above a sign reading, “King of the Jews.”)
Leo Frank
The lynching remains controversial to this day, with descendants of Frank and Phagan arguing over his guilt. CNN has that story. The lynching remains a point of contention, too, among crazy white supremacists. “Leo Frank” is the most popular google search of the last hour “(Mary Phagan” is twentieth). Looks like they’ll have a chance to proselytize.
Karen Kruse Thomas of Johns Hopkins University gives her talk, “Deluxe Jim Crow Health Policy: The Bridge between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement,” at The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, a conference hosted by the Southern Oral History Program, April 2-4, 2009. For more video, visit the LCRM Common Room.
A former corrections officer in Florida has been sentenced to life in prison for federal civil rights violations. The officer put a prisoner into a situation where she knew he was likely to be assaulted by another prisoner, and even encouraged the assault. The officer “prosecutors said, knew of Delano’s reputation as a prison snitch and McCullah’s reputation as a notoriously violent inmate nicknamed “Animal,” who belonged to prison gang Aryan Brotherhood, a group that hated snitches.”
The report paints a terrifying picture of life in the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, the country’s largest maximum security prison. It’s nothing unfamiliar to anyone who has watched Oz, or The Wire, but is all the more disturbing because the “chaotic, dangerous environment” in prison is not the invention of a writer. The inmate known as Animal needed a kill to earn his position in the Aryan Brotherhood.
The case, too, illuminates the crucial difference between deprivation of liberty and deprivation of rights.
Paradoxically, confinement may enhance some claims to rights the un-imprisoned do not have. Advocacy groups insist that prisoners have the right to medical care, for example, and the right to food and clothing, rights which a walk through any of our major cities will demonstrate are alien to much of the American public. Those claims, though, by no means guarantee access to care and clothing, and when they do, by no means guarantee access to adequate care and clothing. And many more rights we take for granted are denied by law. The Prison Reform Litigation Act, passed in 1995, makes it very difficult for prisoners suffering physical abuse to file suit, and limits the number of times a prisoner can litigate as a poor person (and thus have filing claims waived).
The Prison Reform Litigation Act harkens back to what is known as the “hands-off” period, when, before the civil rights era brought concerns about rights and discrimination to the fore, prisoners were considered slaves of the state. Prisoners were legally invisible, and deliberately so–judges were worried that prisoners’ claims would clog up the court system. (For the same reason, at least in North Carolina, for a very long time new trials were not granted in criminal cases even if new evidence appeared.) This began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, when inside and outside prisons, people began to force the government to acknowledge their rights. But it was not until the 1970s that Supreme Court Justice Byron White asserted that “There is no Iron Curtain between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.”
The LCRM project team would like you to participate in our new Survey for Librarians. The survey is designed to allow librarians a chance to offer their feedback on our latest activities and ideas for innovative publishing projects. And, to show our appreciation for those who participate, we are pleased to offer a free UNC Press book from a list of four specially selected titles for completing the survey. We look forward to hearing from you!
Paul Ortiz of the University of Florida comments on papers by Zaragosa Vargas and William P. Jones at The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, a conference hosted by the Southern Oral History Program, April 2-4, 2009. For more video, visit the LCRM Common Room.
Today we sent letters to some 30 UNC Press authors to let them know that their books have been chosen to be included in our online publishing pilot and give them a chance to opt out if they wish. This pilot will follow up the prototype that we demonstrated last Spring and incorporate some of what we have learned from our focus groups and survey so far. The following description is adapted from the letter to authors.
One central initiative of the LCRM project is the development of an online publishing platform that will enable connections among secondary works and a variety of primary sources. We are now preparing to develop a pilot implementation of this platform, testing its potential with a small collection of UNC Press books.
Scope of the publishing pilot. The core function of the publishing platform we are developing will allow users to create connections between scholarly books and digital archives of primary sources. Continue reading ‘Online Publishing Pilot’