Tag Archive for 'death penalty'

History in Action: Thomas and Meeks Griffin Exonerated Nearly 100 Years after Executions

Published by kotch on October 20, 2009 in In the News (National/International). 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Paul Finkelman, of the Albany School of Law, with Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., have done research that has resulted in the posthumous pardon of two black men, brothers, electrocuted for murder in South Carolina in 1913. The execution took place despite substantial white support for the two men, the kind of support which might have saved their lives (and often did save the lives of capital criminals in the Carolinas), were it not for scandalous details in the life of the victim, a Civil War veteran, local authorities wished to conceal.

The route to exoneration began with Gates’s revelation to talk radio host Tom Joyner that the executed men were Joyner’s great uncles. CNN has the story.

UPDATE. News coverage is exploding here and around the world:

The Independent (Dublin)
NBC Nightly News (video)
The Telegraph (UK)
MSNBC
Yahoo

The Netflix Prize and Collaboration

Published by kotch on September 21, 2009 in Related News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A while back, Netflix announced a $1 million award for improving the DVD-by-mail service’s recommendation service, which suggests  films to its users based on their ratings of films they’ve seen. The service provides enough of a challenge to Netflix users, who have to make hard choices about their ratings. Do I give The Curious Case of Benjamin Button one star? What about Duplicity? Both terrible movies, but generally the kinds of movies I like created by filmmakers and actors I like. I wouldn’t want to miss out on Children of Men because Netflix thinks I don’t like Clive Owen, or The Game, because it thinks I don’t like David Fincher.

I likely just revealed how little I know about Netflix’s rating system, but may also have illustrated the kind of foolishness lots of smart people are dealing with as they seek to make the recommendation system work. And if these smart people could improve the system by 10%, a $1 million prize would be theirs. It seems they have.

What’s the point to the LCRM community? The successful efforts of an international team speak powerfully to the possibilities of crowdsourcing, sharing expertise and data to answer formerly unanswerable questions. The Times article linked above suggests applications in the sciences, but crowdsourcing has a role in the humanities, too. We do it all the time, such as when we send questions to a listserv. One result and possibility for the future is the Espy File, the massive collection of data on the history of the death penalty that was built mainly by one man, M. Watt Espy (who recently passed away), but has since been taken on by other historians. The Espy File reveals both the power and the potential for crowdsourcing history data–what if everyone working in the area contributed what they learned about, say, the races of victims in these crimes. A remarkable history, one with real relevance to today’s civil rights-inflected discussion of the death penalty, could emerge that would go much deeper than names and dates.

But, as the article suggests, crowdsourcing has its pitfalls, too. After all, most of the teams competing for the prize did not win.

The Racial Justice Act

Published by kotch on August 20, 2009 in In the News (National/International) and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Gentle Reader,

We are just back from lots of travel, during which time our home state of North Carolina passed the “North Carolina Racial Justice Act.” The act allows prisoners facing a death penalty or those on death row to request a hearing before a judge, where they and others may produce evidence and sworn testimony that “race was a significant factor” in the decision to seek or impose a death sentence in their case. Here’s the bill. And Politics Daily has some nice coverage which gives a bit of context and links to this study by UNC-CH’s Isaac Unah and Jack Boger which makes a more than persuasive case that race is the single most important factor in the death penalty process in North Carolina.

It’s an interesting development (Kentucky is the only other state with such a provision), and one which could add another handicap to a death penalty system already weighed down by legal provisions and squabbles. North Carolina is already in a de facto death penalty moratorium, and this law adds another obstacle toward carrying out a sentence of death.

This kind of law, which backs away from the death penalty, tinkering with it in an effort to improve it, rather than addressing the fundamental questions behind it, though, is also the kind of law that allows the death penalty to persist. Will the Racial Justice Act dramatize the death penalty’s essential racist core? Or will it, if death sentences are upheld in these hearings, justify a deeply flawed system of lethal punishment?

And it is impossible not to offer a glimpse of some of the comments on the Politics Daily article, comments which well illustrate the nagging problem of race, and the way in which, as we’ve seen at these hijacked town hall meetings on health care, race bleeds into other political concerns in unpleasant ways:

  • “Black Racism at it’s finest. Allowing criminals to get lenient treatment because they black is just a continuation of the Obama racist agenda.”
  • “Its now time to step back and see who the real racist are. Its not the whites, Its the Blacks and the Mexcans. I have a booth at a flea market with the American flag in lights over it and I have seen that the mexicans won’t even come near it which is ok with me if thats the way they want to be.
    All I have seen and heard in my many years here on this earth has shown me and many others that most white people don’t want to be racist but are really not the given the chance by the Blacks and the mexicans, esp the illegal ALIENS.”