The Plight of Bradley Manning

What do you call placing someone who has only been charged with a crime (not even convicted) in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, without a pillow or a blanket, for six straight months?  Torture.

Incidentally, where was this form of torture invented?  Philadelphia.

In other cruelty-related news, former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens has an interesting review of a book on the death penalty in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

A Harrowing Tragedy

CNN has a video story that features surveillance shots of a Connecticut woman withdrawing $15,000 from a bank while her family was being held hostage in their home. A short while later, she and her two daughters would be dead. Fortunately, however, her husband would survive, and would live to testify against his alleged tormentors. I remember hearing about this story back in 2007, when it happened. The mind reels before such evil.

"Overall, we can confidently say that well over 100,000 people are sexually abused in American detention facilities every year."

Well, that sentence woke me up. The New York Review of Books has a distressing piece on the rampant disregard in political circles for this human rights issue. Here's an example of what happens with such a failure of leadership and commitment:

Scott was a gay, non-violent, first-time inmate in a Colorado prison when he was targeted by members of the “2-11 crew,” a white supremacist gang with over 1,000 members in prisons throughout the state. For two years he was forced into prostitution by the gang’s leaders, repeatedly raped and made to perform oral sex. Even after he told prison staff that he was being raped and needed protection from the gang, Scott was told that nothing could be done unless he named his abusers—even though they had threatened to kill him if he did. Because Scott is openly gay, some officials blamed him for the attacks, saying that as a homosexual he should expect to be targeted by one gang or another. And by his account, even those officers who were not hostile didn’t know how to respond to his reports, because appropriate procedures were not in place. They failed to take even the most basic measures to protect him.

Ultimately, despite his fear, Scott did identify some of the gang members who had raped him. Not only did the prison authorities again fail to respond, they later put Scott in a holding cell with one of his previous assailants on the day he was to be released from state custody. Again, he was beaten and forced to perform oral sex. Scott had a civil lawsuit settled in his favor recently, winning financial damages and seventeen policy changes that will now become mandatory in the Colorado prison system. Otherwise, however, nothing about his story is unusual.

Even though Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in 2003, it has not been fully implemented. Why? Here's Attorney General Eric Holder's explanation, in a June 22 letter to two congressmen, a copy of which is found on Huffington Post and a link to which is provided in the NYRB article:

[The new rules should not] impose substantial additional costs compared to the costs presently expended by Federal, State, and local prison authorities.

The NYRB article seems to lay blame for this at Holder's feet. As the article points out, Holder is guilty of a certain amount of foot-dragging. In fairness to him, however, he points out in that June 22 letter that this "no new costs" requirement is found in the PREA itself. In other words, while Congress has required AG Holder to promulgate new standards aimed at eradicating prison rape, it has also required that the costs associated with implementing those new standards must be insubstantial; his hands have been tied by a cheapskate Congress whose members are mollycoddling the treasuries of their home states.

This is absurd. An act of Congress that purports to protect human rights while stating that the efforts cannot result in "substantial additional costs" does not protect human rights. Core human rights cannot be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. And anyway, morality and legality aside, does anyone doubt that the costs of permitting prison rape - in health care for diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C that are spread by prison rape, in psychological and psychiatric care necessitated by rape, in litigation expenses - far outweigh the costs of preventing it?

A state prison cannot allow prison rape to happen merely because they don't want to spend a "substantial" amount of money in the effort to prevent it. They should stop prison rape or they should stop having prisons.

Vatican Reforms Canon Laws Concerning Abusive Priests

Here's an interesting article from The Irish Times on the matter. The main revisions:

• In "clear" cases, bishops may now defrock priests by decree alone, without having to resort to canon trial.
• Acquisition, possession, or distribution of child pornography will be treated in the same manner as direct abuse.
• The statute of limitations is extended from ten to twenty years after the victim's 18th birthday.
• All cases of abuse of a mentally handicapped person will be treated as cases of abuse of a minor, regardless of the victim's age.

The pattern of the Church is this: when your back is against the wall, take a good first step, then take no more. These reforms are good and welcome, but they are simply not enough. For instance, why is there a statute of limitations at all on abuse cases? And why doesn't canon law require bishops to report suspected cases of abuse to the civil authorities, who alone can dole out real punishment?

Blago to Jurors: Be as Crooked as Me

Here's a story from Esquire. It's about the merciless beating that Rod Blagojevich (pictured at right) is taking in court, and hypothesizes that Blago's best strategy, at this point, is to pursue jury nullification. That's the name for the residual discretion that jurors have to decline conviction despite a finding of guilt. While it is not often sought, jury nullification does have an ancient pedigree in the Anglo-American legal tradition.

I take a dim view of jury nullification. The argument for it is, essentially, a plea to the subjective sympathies and views of the jurors. It involves asking the jurors to decline to convict because of some fundamental concern that - the argument goes - is not accounted for in the legal system. Jury nullification was put to ignominious use in the pre-1960s South, when white jurors would often refuse to convict white men guilty of lynching blacks. In theory, it can be a tool for securing justice despite the law; in practice, however, it has more often been a tool for securing injustice despite the law.

Furthermore, it's poor form. An attorney who argues for jury nullification - whether for fair goals or foul - is essentially asking the jurors to abdicate their role in the judicial process. Pressing for nullification is probably never unethical, but I do think that a lawyer actively undermining the judicial system is a tad, well, unseemly.

In Blagojevich's case, to pursue nullification, he would have to argue that, because corruption is widespread among politicians, no politician could withstand such scrutiny. Accordingly, the only just course is to acquit. This is the argument in Esquire.

I have some problems with this.

First, no. A logical chasm exists between the concepts "no politician could withstand such scrutiny" and "the only just course is to acquit." Why? What sense does that make? Since when do we acquit guilty politicians because there are other guilty politicians we haven't caught yet? What would make a juror want to do that? The argument makes no sense at all and is silly.

Second, also no. The factual premise "no politician could withstand such scrutiny" is not true. It just isn't. A juror hearing this argument would think: They're not all as bad as you are, Mr. Blagojevich. You have to face the fact that you are indeed bottom-of-the-class material.

Third, no again. As argued above, I think it's wrong to pursue jury nullification in almost every case - certainly in the case of a corrupt and arrogant pol like Blagojevich. Save it for very rare cases of gross injustice.

Fourth, nowhere in this article is any basis in fact given for the suggestion that Blago's legal team is actually considering such a move. This is a hypothetical scenario. I think it's important to point out things like that.