April 23 FLORIDA: Death penalty on court docket----Appeals process is in question Convicted cop killer Clarence Hill was a syringe away from execution when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy issued a stay in January. On Wednesday, the nation's highest court will hear arguments in the appeal that spared Hill's life. The ruling, expected around the end of June at the conclusion of the court's session, will settle a technical question about court procedure in death-row appeals and the future of Hill's appeals. More than 23 years after he gunned down Pensacola police officer Stephen Taylor, Hill escaped his second death warrant signed by a Florida governor. "What a fantastic day!" Hill's attorney Todd Doss said of the stay of execution. Death penalty proponents steamed and sent Doss dozens of hateful e-mails, one suggesting he should be executed along with his client. Taylor's family continued to suffer almost a quarter-century after his murder. "All these people who are against the death penalty tell me it doesn't work," said Linda Knouse, Taylor's sister. "Well, the reason it doesn't work is because they aren't carried out properly. "It shouldn't be 24 years later. They found him guilty over and over, and it just shouldn't take this long." More than one inmate's life is on the line. A.D. Rutherford, a week after Hill, saw his life similarly spared until the issues raised by Hill's case are resolved. The 57-year-old Milton man is sentenced to death for the 1985 murder of Stella Salamon, a 63-year-old widow beaten and strangled to death. Though the Supreme Court seeks to resolve a procedural issue, ultimately the result is important in 37 states that use lethal injection because it could make them change their methods and lead to more legal challenges if Hill wins. For inmates on death row all around the country, the court's decision will open or close avenues for appeals. "If I was a lawyer in one of those states that have a similar procedure, you can bet I'd be formulating an attack based on Mr. Hill's case," Doss said. It's already so. "For all intents and purposes, every state actively seeking to carry out capital sentences has been impacted," wrote the state's attorney, Carolyn Snurkowski, Florida assistant deputy attorney general, in her brief to the Supreme Court. Knouse said she will not allow herself to consider the possibility that execution of her brother's killer could be delayed even longer . Even Gov. Jeb Bush has concerns. "Given our twisted system, it takes forever to get to the point where people exhaust their appeals," he said in February. Hill's attorney agrees the process doesn't work, but from a different perspective. "I think our system's broken. I don't focus so much on the time issue," Doss said. "Whenever the process is not allowed to run its course . . . it really causes some chaos really where it's not as reasoned and orderly as it should be and could be." Florida's death row has 372 inmates who have been there an average of about 13 years. The state's attorney says appeals take as long as they need to. "It never takes too long. The bottom line is that if you're still litigating, that means courts are interested in your claim," Snurkowski said. "The fact we're engaged in a discussion . . . it's just the evolution of the law." Hill's attorneys don't dispute his death sentence or even that it can be done by lethal injection. Snurkowski argues that's disingenuous: If allowed to challenge the constitutionality of Florida's particular lethal drug cocktail, there will be no end to the appeals filed. Taylor's brother, Jack Taylor Jr. of Pensacola, expressed frustration with that possibility. "The execution (will happen). It's just taken a ridiculous amount of time," he said. Hill "deserved it, so, by God, let him get it," he said. (source: Florida Today) ***************** High court to hear lethal injection case Convicted cop killer Clarence Hill was already strapped to a gurney with IV tubes running into his arms to deliver the lethal injection. The executioner was ready for the order to start the flow of drugs, and witnesses including both his family and relatives of the slain police officer were waiting. But at the last minute, Hill was granted a stay of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the high court will hear Hill's appeal, using his case to clarify how inmates may bring deadline challenges to the use of lethal injection and whether his challenge can be filed as a civil rights action. How the court rules could decide whether Hill will be executed this summer or whether he will be allowed to challenge Florida's use of lethal injection as cruel and unusual punishment - a ruling that could halt executions in Florida and perhaps elsewhere, at least temporarily. Hill's stay of execution also halted the death of another Florida inmate on the same grounds, and Gov. Jeb Bush said he would not sign any other death warrants until Hill's case is settled. Hill's stay also is directly responsible for execution delays in three more cases in other states, said Rion Dennis, a spokesman for the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. Carolyn Snurkowski, a death appeals lawyer in the state attorney general's office, will argue that Hill cannot challenge Florida's method of execution through a civil rights action. She also argues he filed his claim against lethal injection too late, since he waited until just before his scheduled execution on Jan. 24. "The fact that it was delayed doesn't make it right now," Snurkowski said. Hill's lawyer, D. Todd Doss, argues that the doses of drugs used in Florida executions can cause pain, in violation of the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Hill was convicted of killing Pensacola police Officer Stephen Taylor in 1982. Taylor, 26, and Officer Larry Bailly had gone to investigate a silent alarm at a bank in downtown Pensacola, and caught Hill's partner, Cliff Jackson, outside the bank. As the officers attempted to handcuff Jackson, Hill came up from behind, killing Taylor and wounding Bailly. Hill was shot 5 times. Jackson was sentenced to life in prison. Bailly, who is retired, did not respond to a request for comment made through the Pensacola Police Department. Hill also has claimed he should not be executed since he is mentally retarded. That argument was rejected by the state Supreme Court, which noted that a mental evaluation showed his IQ was 16 points higher than the standard of 70 or below. Taylor's family is growing weary after 24 years of delays, said his older brother, Jack Taylor. They want Hill dead and they were angry when his execution was halted. "If they want me to, I'd put a bullet in his brain," said Taylor, 61, who lives in Pensacola. "It needs to be done and it needs to be over with," said Linda Knouse, the slain officer's sister. However, a cousin of Taylor, Gary Mace of Key Largo, was not upset the high court took the case. "We are willing to see what the courts have to say. I want the Supreme Court to look at this case and make a judicial decision so others won't have to go through what we went through," Mace said. "It's not going to change anything. Steve will still be dead and is not coming back to us," Mace said. Hill, 48, did not respond to a request for an interview. His relatives, most of whom live in Mobile, Ala., did not return messages left on their answering machines. "He's concerned," Doss said. "His life is at stake. He is not somebody who is an overly emotional person, at least not with me." (source: Associated Press) USA: ON ETHICS----Shirk jury duty and you're guilty of poor citizenship Q: When I asked to be excused from jury duty, the judge berated me for leaving my civic duty to the "poor." I did not oppose her diatribe, but I make good money and feel it's more efficient for society if I work, pay taxes, support charities and leave jury duty to others. Isn't this like leaving other essential functions - trash pickup, policing, dentistry - to others? Alternatively, couldn't I defer service to a less onerous period, like retirement? ANONYMOUS San Francisco A: No. Some obligations fall to all citizens - or should, like military service in times of crisis, for example, or driving the speed limit. We do not exempt those with greater incomes from either. Apparently you would prefer to return to the Civil War-era practice of allowing the wealthy to buy their way out of inconvenient duties by hiring replacements. As for your willingness to serve decades from now, the obvious problem is that the court can't count on your still being in San Francisco. Or still being. Disconcertingly, your proposal places a greater value on the lives of those who earn more than those who earn less. An ill-paid nurse or librarian would serve on a jury, but a tobacco lobbyist or PGA star would not. Income is hardly a reliable guide to one's societal value, let alone the value of a life in a broader sense. What's more, if you are as smart as you imply, shouldn't the accused have the benefit of your (and Tiger Woods') insights? Jurors are meant to be a cross-section of the population, not just those below a particular income level or above retirement age. Jury service is not only a civic duty; it is also an opportunity - not merely onerous but edifying - to glimpse a part of life you do not regularly see. Instead, your plan erases a shared experience of American life, one of those things that help create a community, like attending public school or going to the local library or swimming in a neighborhood pool. Granted, jury duty always arrives at a maddeningly inconvenient moment and is sometimes dogged with inefficiencies, but efficiency is not the summum bonum. Much that is worthwhile is notably inefficient: It takes hours and hours to listen to all the Mozart concertos. Incidentally, it was wise not to tell the judge that her recounting the law was a "diatribe." Judges can be so pesky about the whole contempt-of-court thing. Q: We are trying to hire a physician at our community health center. To meet patient needs, this doctor must be well-versed in family-planning options. (We do not provide abortions but do refer patients when appropriate.) One candidate's resume included religious training that suggested he might be reluctant to perform such tasks. Would it be ethical to ask him about his attitude toward contraception and abortion? ANONYMOUS Atlanta A: You may not ask this physician about his religious opinions, but you may - you must - ask if he can meet the health needs of the patients, i.e., if he can do the job, and that means talking to him about contraception and abortion. It would make no difference if his inability to do so derived from spiritual beliefs, personal quirks or weird hallucinations. Not one of these entitles a physician to neglect a patient or obliges you to hire him. UPDATE: After a conversation about work, not theology, this candidate withdrew his application and took a job at a religious-affiliated institution. (source: Viewpoints, Houston Chronicle) ************************* U.S. has lost moral ground One of the nation's leading advocates for human rights, the Rev. William F. Schulz, 56, of Halesite, retired earlier this month after 12 years as executive director of Amnesty International USA. Besides leading missions to Romania, India, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, Schulz increasingly turned his organization inward over the years, to look at the United States. He talked with Newsday editor Jim Smith about this shift in focus. In 1994, when you joined Amnesty, it wasn't going after the U.S. government much. But many of your recent campaigns have been directed against Americans and U.S.-based corporations. How did that change come about? In 1999, following a yearlong global Amnesty campaign on U.S. human rights violations, the movement changed its "work on own country" rule to allow all its sections, including Amnesty International USA, to work on issues in their own countries. Before that, we had worked on selected U.S. issues, such as [opposing] the death penalty or U.S. treatment of asylum seekers. After 1999, we were permitted to work on prison conditions, use of electro-shock weapons by police, life without parole sentences for juvenile offenders, etc. During your tenure, Amnesty began buying stock in U.S. corporations, such as ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, and used shareholder resolutions to try to focus attention on corporate human rights violations abroad, such as poor working conditions, use of child labor, pollution, quashing unions. Why do you think people in power abuse it? The principal reason is because they think they can get away with it. When powerful people know they may pay a penalty ... human rights violations diminish markedly ... Leaders have rarely paid a price for abusing human rights. But that may be changing. Corporations, for example, are more and more sensitive to their public images, and Abu Ghraib has made even conservative politicians aware that unbridled torture is bad for America's interests. Do we have a violent culture that tolerates this stuff? I don't know that U.S. culture is more inherently violent than other cultures. Is trying to stop violations by the Bush administration harder than trying to stop violations committed by, say, ExxonMobil? They're both tough. But I think grassroots pressure on corporations is beginning to have significant impacts. Witness the changes Wal-Mart has been introducing, albeit reluctantly, to repair its image as a heartless corporate exploiter of its workforce. And though we haven't stopped all the Bush administration's war-on-terror-related abuses, we've had a number of victories - from the report of the Justice Department's inspector general confirming Amnesty's claims of mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to the Supreme Court's rejection of the administration's arguments that Guantanamo prisoners ought to have no access to U.S. courts ... to passage of the McCain anti-torture amendment. One of your recent mailings to members basically calls the president a liar for saying "we do not torture" and urges them to demand that Congress set up an independent commission to uncover the facts about U.S. torture policy. Is that a risky stance, in terms of fundraising? I don't think it is. Amnesty International USA, in terms of its membership [360,000], staff [165 in 6 offices] and finances [$23 million stock portfolio], is stronger than it's been in years. We have another 400,000 online activists. The U.S. is holding many people around the world in secret detention centers. Is this a great disappointment? Of course ... because it reflects badly on America and Americans. ... Human rights are based on what we used to call "a gentlemen's agreement among nations," and the Bush administration has undermined it. The result is that we are seeing an expansion of violations by other countries, citing America's violations as authority. The 2 best examples are Zimbabwe and China. So we've lost the moral high ground? Absolutely. If we had set out to undermine our moral authority, we couldn't have done a better job. You can't engage in torture and then defend that. We've violated the Geneva Conventions ... you can't hold prisoners in secret detention centers, thumb your nose at the United Nations and expect to maintain moral authority. Amnesty's traditional role, since its founding in London in 1961, has been calling attention to so-called prisoners of conscience incarcerated around the world for their political, religious and social views. Does it surprise you that you've had to focus so much on violations by Amercans? My most formative experience was as a student minister at Kent State in 1970 during the shootings there [while attending Oberlin College]. I had a firsthand encounter with a government capable of turning on its citizens, so the idea that the U.S. government was capable of human rights violations was not surprising to me. What has been most damaging about the Bush administration is that it set out intentionally to undermine the very principles on which human rights are based. (source: Newsday) ********************* Theocons and Theocrats Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some liberals argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular population and moral laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP constituencies and pressure groups; or (4) all of the above? The last, I would argue. The characteristics are not inconsistent. No large nation--no leading world power--could ever resemble theocracies like John Calvin's Geneva, Puritan Massachusetts or early Mormon Utah. These were all small polities produced by unusual migrations of true believers. As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets the unfortunate criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an elected leader who believes himself in some way to be speaking for God; a ruling party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the nation's churches; the conviction of many rank-and-file Republicans that government should be guided by religion and religious leaders; and White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews. As several chapters in American Theocracy make clear, this kind of religious excess has been a problem--indeed, a repeating Achilles' heel--of leading powers from late-stage Rome (historian Gibbon thus explained Roman decline and fall) to the militant Catholicism of Habsburg Spain and most recently the evangelical and moral imperialist Britain that saw 1914 as something of an Armageddon against the German Kaiser's Antichrist and wound up in 1917-18 crusading in the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem. But although this facet of historical decline constitutes a major caution regarding the future of the United States, this essay will concentrate on the domestic political aspects--the theocratic tendencies in the GOP and the notable "religification" of American politics across a spectrum from life and death to science and medicine to climate change and biblical creationism. The Growth of Theocratic Sentiment The essential US conditions for a theocratic trend fell into place in the late 1980s and '90s with the growing mass of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christianity, expressed politically by the religious right; and the rise of the Republican Party as a powerful vehicle for religious policy-making and eventual erosion of the accepted degree of separation between church and state. This transformation was most vivid at the state level, where 15 to 20 state Republican parties came under the control of the religious right, and party conventions in the South and West endorsed so-called "Christian nation" platforms. As yet nationally uncatalogued--a shortfall that cries out for a serious research project--these platforms set out in varying degrees the radical political theology of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, ranging from the Bible as the basis for domestic law to an emphasis on religious schools and women's subordination to men. The 2004 platform of the Texas Republican Party is a case in point. So are the political careers of Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft, two presidential aspirants whose careers were milestones in the theocratization of the Republican Party. Robertson's 1988 presidential bid brought huge numbers of Pentecostals into the Republican Party. Missouri Senator Ashcroft, who explored a presidential race in 1997-98, got much of his funding from Robertson and other evangelicals. Picked as Attorney General by Bush after the 2000 election, Ashcroft was the choice of the religious right. Earlier in his career Ashcroft had decried the wall between church and state as "a wall of religious oppression," and his memoir describes each of his many electoral defeats as a crucifixion and every important political victory as a resurrection, and recounts scenes in which he had friends and family anoint him with oil in the manner "of the ancient kings of Israel." But the national political emergence of Bush was equally relevant. "Born again" during the mid-1980s, he came up during the same period and in the same intense mode. As Newsweek noted in 2003, "As a subaltern in his father's 1988 campaign, George Bush the Younger assembled his career through contacts with ministers of the then emerging evangelical movement in political life. Now they form the core of the Republican Party, which controls all of the capital for the first time in a half century. Bible-believing Christians are Bush's strongest backers." More telling still, in the years since 1988 dozens of reports have quoted Bush the Younger telling ministers, supporters and foreign officials that God wanted him to run for President and that God speaks through him. In mid-2004 one Pennsylvania newspaper reported his telling a local Amish audience, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." Reports that he told Middle Eastern leaders that God told him to invade Iraq have been denied by the White House, but this is clearly the sort of language he uses from time to time. Since Robertson's run for the White House in 1988 and the victory that same year by Bush the Elder, the Republican Party has clearly moved closer to this constituency--and the process was speeded by Bill Clinton, whose politics and personal conduct offended the churchgoing South, in particular, enabling George W. Bush to pose as the standard-bearer of moral restoration in 2000. This metamorphosis gained further momentum after September 11, 2001, when the younger Bush responded to the terrorist attacks by declaring the start of a war between good and evil, speaking in a relentlessly religious idiom that several biblical scholars have described as double-coding--only mildly religious on the surface, but beneath that full of allusions to biblical passages and Christian hymns. They, too, suggested that Bush cast himself as a prophet of sorts--one who spoke for God. The upshot of this escalating religiosity on the part of the Republican national leadership has been an escalating and parallel religiosity on the part of the Republican rank and file. Those voting Republican for President since 1988 have become increasingly religious in motivation. After 9/11 pro-Bush preachers described Bush as God's chosen man while hinting that Saddam Hussein, whose Iraq was the biblical "New Babylon" of fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye's eerie Left Behind series, was the Antichrist or at least the forerunner of the Evil One. In 2004 a further wave of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal turnout helped to cement the Republican transformation, even as moderate mainline Protestants shuddered and turned in a small Democratic trend between 2000 and 2004. As early as 1988, Ohio academician John Green, a specialist in religious political behavior, had commented on how the growing correlation between frequent church attendance and Republican presidential voting was starting to raise a US parallel to the religious parties of Europe, most notably the Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy. By 2000-04, this correlation was much stronger, and political journalists began to speak of the "religious gap" that was replacing the "gender gap." The less discussed but even more significant aspect of this upheaval lay in a second set of polls that showed the increasingly theocratic inclinations of the Republican electorate (see chart). These sentiments did not spring from nowhere. A majority of Americans take the Bible literally in many dimensions, including subjects ranging from the creation and Noah's Ark to the Book of Revelation. Within the ranks of Republican voters, the ratios are lopsided. For example, in 1999 a national poll by Newsweek revealed that 40 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and virtually as many thought the Antichrist was already alive. Because such believers were most numerous in the Republican electorate, I would calculate that roughly 55 % of Bush 2004 voters believed in Armageddon--and it could be higher. Such voters are especially prone to theocratic views, and foreign policy is by no means immune. In 2004 a survey by the Pew Center found that 55 % of white evangelical Protestants consider "following religious principles" to be a top priority for foreign policy. Only a quarter of Catholics and mainline Protestants agreed, but given the makeup of the Bush coalition, I would guess that about half its voters would favor that position. This explains both why so many of Bush's core supporters cheered the first-stage US involvement in Iraq--and why Bush bungled things in the Holy Land so badly. The Bible, Theology and American Politics This is a bit of a chicken-versus-egg situation. Have the issues that matter most to Americans become more theological because religion has become more of a political force--or has the growth of issues with a religious dimension spurred the increasing religious divisions? Probably some of each, but the list is frighteningly long. First and foremost are the issues involving birth, life, death, sex, health, medicine, marriage and the role of the family--high-octane subject matter since the 1970s. These are areas where perceived immorality most excites stick-to-Scripture advocates and the religious right. Closely related is the commitment by the Bush White House and the religious right to reduce the current separation between church and state. Topics such as natural resources, climate, global warming, resource depletion, environmental regulation and petroleum geology mark out a third important arena. Organizations such as the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty have enlisted a fair amount of conservative religious and corporate support for preparing what amounts to a pro-business, pro-development explanation of Christian stewardship. The institute's director, Roman Catholic Father Robert Sirico, contends that left-tilting environmentalism is idolatrous in its substitution of nature for God, giving the Christian environmental movement a "perhaps-unconscious pagan nature." Then there is the subject matter of business, economics and wealth, in which the tendency of the Christian right is to oppose regulation and justify wealth and relative laissez-faire, tipping its hat to the upper-income and corporate portions of the Republican coalition. Christian Reconstructionists go even further, abandoning most economic regulation in order to prepare the moral framework for God's return. The last arena of theological influence, almost as important as sex, birth and mortality, involves American foreign policy, bringing us to the connections among the "war on terror," the rapture, the end times, Armageddon and the thinly disguised US crusade against radical Islam. Since Islam and Christianity began fighting in the 7th century, the Holy Land has often brought disillusionment: after the Crusades (all nine of them); after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and 5 centuries later for the British, in particular, after World War I. Unmindful Western nations may still be playing out the Crusader hand. In the months before George W. Bush sent US troops into Iraq, his inspirational reading each morning was a book of sermons by a Scottish preacher accompanying troops about to march on Jerusalem in 1917. Controversies over life and death--often pivoting on precise definitions of each--can only continue to burgeon. The arguable rights of women (or parents) are being displaced by the rights of embryos or by the prerogative of sperm and egg to join, decisions rooted largely in theology, not science. Perhaps the preoccupation involves maximizing the potential soul count for the hereafter, in the manner of sixteenth- and 17th-century inquisitors who ordered that heretics must die even if they repented, yet pursued repentance to save their souls first. The theology of death is cloudier and also riskier politically. Although Bush took a bold and ultimately unpopular stand in the Terri Schiavo case, bending over backward to insist on continuing her life support, blocking death is not the theological equivalent of enabling birth. The Bible abounds with the killing of those already born, both by God and by lawful authorities. Bush himself, as governor of Texas, sent hundreds of prisoners to the electric chair. The next throbbing cluster of issues involves church-state relations. The nonradical theocon wing of the GOP demands a more conservative judiciary and an expanded role for religion in education, social services and the constraining of what they consider to be immoral behavior--abortion, homosexuality, pornography and contraception--but avoids spelling out any grand revolutionary mandate. The Christian Reconstructionist movement, by contrast, proclaims ambitions that range from replacing public schools with religious education to imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to male Christians. The federal judiciary is the arena in which the battles most critical to incipient theocrats will be fought out judge by judge, court by court. Signs of their anxiety to control the federal judiciary burst into view in an early 2005 meeting at which conservative evangelical leaders were addressed by Tom DeLay and Senate majority leader Bill Frist. The focus of the strategy session was how to strip funding or jurisdiction from federal courts, or even eliminate them. James Dobson of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family named one target: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. "Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson commented. "All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone." A spokesman for Frist said he did not agree with the idea of defunding courts or shutting them down, but DeLay, who had once said, "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts," declined to comment. Beyond the judiciary, pressure for theological correctness became overt in federal government relationships with the varieties of science--from climatology to geology, and even entomology--that can conflict with the Book of Genesis. For the growing number of elected officials who uphold Genesis, the Almighty, not carbon dioxide, brings about climate change. The consequences here go far beyond the evolution-doubting books being sold by the National Park Service or inconvenient information about climate change or caribou habitats in oil lands being deleted from government websites. In Texas, where the cotton industry is plagued by a moth in which an immunity to pesticides has evolved, a frustrated entomologist commented, "It's amazing that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is evolution they are struggling against in their fields every season." Meanwhile, the bigger message--depressingly reminiscent of our imperial predecessors--is that science in the United States is already in trouble. Irving Weissman, a stem-cell researcher, told the Boston Globe, "You are going to start picking up Nature and Science and all the great [research] journals, and you are going to read about how South Koreans and Chinese and Singaporeans are making advances that the rest of us can't even study." Part of the explanation involves the religious right's larger view of economic matters and dismantling of government. In the radical Texas Republican platform adopted in 2004, the Lone Star GOP was not content to call for abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department; it also demanded abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and elimination of the income tax, the inheritance tax, the gift tax, the capital-gains levy, the corporate income tax, the payroll tax and state and local property taxes. Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Convention adherents and others oppose government social and economic programs because they interfere with a person's individual responsibility for his or her salvation. Others were diverted by rapture and end-times possibilities. "Overall, this kind of teaching has certainly stifled social consciousness among evangelicals," said Tim Weber, professor of church history at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. "If Jesus may come at any minute, then long-term social reform or renewal are beside the point. It has a bad effect there." These are divisive issues, and they divide both parties, but survey data suggest that they divide the Republicans somewhat more than the Democrats. True, liberals were front and center in trying to shrink the role of religion in the public square, and they have paid the price. However, the more important confrontation is now within the GOP, as the essential tensions shift from the unpopular derogation of religion so prevalent decades ago to the theologization and theocratic excesses of the conservative countertide. 3 prominent Republicans have staked out the boundaries. Former Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri complained in 2005 that "the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in a womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law." Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee suggested that George W. Bush's "I carry the word of God" posture ought to be a 2004 election issue. And Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut regretted that "the Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy." Unhappily, that's the direction in which it's been trending. (source: The Nation) OHIO: Judge gives death row inmate hope A Ross County man convicted 20 years ago of murder and sentenced to death has been given a glimmer of hope he will given another chance to prove his innocence in a court of law. Lawrence Landrum, 44, was granted a conditional writ of habeus corpus this week in U.S. District Court. Judge Thomas M. Rose ruled Landrum, who has been sitting on death row since April 3, 1986, received ineffective counsel at trial. As such, Rose granted Landrum a conditional writ commanding his release from custody unless within 180 days from the entry of final judgment in the case, he is again convicted and sentenced to death at trial at which the testimony of Randy Coffenberger is admitted in the guilt phase. However, the Attorney General's Office has 30 days to appeal the ruling, which it will, said spokesman Bob Beasley. Ross County Assistant Prosecutor Mike Ater said the matter would be vigorously appealed in federal court and the U.S. Supreme Court, if needed. "He is not getting out tomorrow and the case is not coming back to Ross County tomorrow," he said. "This is one judge's opinion, even though many other judges have ruled Landrum is right where he belongs." Landrum will not be released while court proceedings progress. Even the idea Landrum could get a new trial does not sit well with victim Harold White's niece, who remembers leaving her studies at The Ohio State University to attend the trial. "I remember how lackluster Landrum was. He was so nonchalant and it was a mess," said Johnida Barnes. "My uncle always said he was going to live to be 100, but his life was snuffed out before he had a chance. I'm only sad my mom didn't see his demise. That man killed her brother." According to information found on the Ohio Public Defender's Web site, Landrum and a juvenile named Grant Swackhammer entered White's apartment on Sept. 19, 1985, to rob the elderly man. However, White returned home during the burglary and was killed by a series of blows to the back of his head and cuts to his throat. The Web site went on to summarize that medical testimony at trial indicated the cuts to the throat were fatal, even though the blows to the head could also cause death. It never has been in dispute that Swackhammer and Landrum were the 2 intruders. Swackhammer, in his initial statement to the police, confessed to hitting White in the back of the head with a railroad bolt. He claimed, however, Landrum cut Mr. White's throat, the Web site said. Landrum testified otherwise at trial. Gazette files indicate Landrum was found guilty in February 1986 of aggravated murder and aggravated burglary. In the penalty phase of Landrum's trial, defense lawyers attempted to call Randy Coffenberger, who they say would have testified that Swackhammer had confessed to him to cutting White's throat. The trial court barred the testimony, claiming it was hearsay. (source: Chillicothe Gazette) CONNECTICUT: Report From A Cuckoo's Nest -- What Happens When A Prison Becomes An Asylum Sheren Dickau wants to do something simple for her son Daniel. She wants to buy him Zyprexa, the medication she thinks best controls the schizophrenia that makes him hear voices. On good days, the voice Daniel hears is God's. But Daniel is no longer just her son, the one who, before he got sick, was a star of the Glastonbury High School tennis team. He is inmate number 321758 in Garner Correctional Institution, a high security prison in Newtown that doubles as one of the state's largest mental hospitals. Most of Garner's approximately 600 prisoners are sentenced or awaiting sentence for crimes ranging from the minor to murder and also are guilty, as mental health advocates might say, of having a severe psychiatric illness. Daniel Dickau's offenses include back-to-back purse snatchings from restaurant parking lots on the Silas Deane Highway in Wethersfield in August 2003 and swinging a baseball bat at a neighbor whose phone he asked to borrow in July 2005. His mother says that at the time of both incidents, he was in the throes of his illness, aggravated by drug abuse. The neighbor victim, who managed to deflect the blow and wrench the bat from Dickau's hands, told police that as Dickau fled he called out: "You don't know how screwed up I am." Dickau ran home, where he was soon captured by rifle-carrying police. Locked up since, he is now serving an effective 5-year sentence. He turns 22 Monday. His mother worries he'll come out of Garner just as sick as when he went in. Sheren Dickau says her son has had his prescription changed 4 times since he arrived at Garner, that he gets almost no therapy, that he's had money extorted from him by other inmates and that he's in constant fear. Once while she was talking to him on the phone, she said, another inmate made what sounded to her like a crude, threatening sexual advance. Garner, nonetheless, is as good as it gets for prisoners with acute mental illness. It is touted as a model of care at a time when the state and the nation are putting more and more people like Dickau - people who might not have broken the law except for their illness - behind bars. Experiment In Progress In Connecticut in recent years, the number of incarcerated prisoners has dipped slightly to about 19,000, but the proportion needing psychiatric care has jumped from about 12 % to 20 %. The Department of Correction began shifting its sickest inmates to Garner in the spring of 2003, shortly before the independent Office of Protection and Advocacy (OPA) filed a lawsuit directed mainly at the state's "super-max" death-row prison, Northern Correctional in Somers. At Northern, the lawsuit claimed, mentally ill inmates might spend 23 hours a day in windowless cells, and a therapy session might amount to a social worker shouting to them from the other side of a cell door. The lawsuit ended with a negotiated settlement that sets care standards at both Northern and Garner. Signed in September, the agreement does not apply to the rest of the state's jails and prisons where there are another 2,000 or so psychiatric inmates. In fact, their numbers have grown to the point where the correction department confines and cares for more mentally ill people than do state hospitals. Advocates wonder whether care in the rest of the prison system has declined since Garner became a de facto asylum. But Garner's capacity alone rivals that of the 550-bed Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, the state's last mental hospital of any size. The 1st 6-month monitors' report required by the settlement agreement was due late last month. Under its terms, any violations found by the monitors cannot immediately be made public. No matter what the monitors report, however, the success of the Garner experiment remains in doubt. As even its new warden, James Dzurenda, who took over a year ago, said, "It's not a perfect program right now. Everybody is learning from this. My biggest goal was to reduce violent incidents." Sitting with Dzurenda, Brian Garnett, the department's external affairs director, pleaded, "This is an extremely demanding facility ... and there are times when it can be extremely dangerous. This has been a huge undertaking. This is not a population you can direct and control. There's a lot of patience needed here." A Riskier Toxic Brew >From the start of the Garner experiment, mental health advocates warned against "warehousing" at the prison. Surprisingly, correction officers - "Don't call them guards," a union leader advised, "they think it makes them sound like thugs" - found a common cause with the advocates. The officers said they lacked the training and personnel needed to cope with such an unmanageable population. By last August, the Courant was reporting that union leaders, then especially concerned about gang members transferred from Northern, considered conditions at Garner "toxic." Since then the OPA settlement agreement has been put into force. It may benefit inmates, but it also has generated new rumblings from the correction officers and the other front-line staff at Garner - the clinical social workers, nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists who provide treatment. They are not employees of the Correction Department. They work for Correctional Managed Health Care, a unit of the University of Connecticut Health Center that since the late 1990s has had the contract to provide medical care in all the state's prisons and jails. People from both staffs say the OPA agreement, by requiring more out-of-cell time for prisoners and more documentation for the monitors, adds to their work load and at the same time can have the ironic effect of compromising prisoners' care and everyone's safety. A pair of social workers with a combined 5 years' experience at Garner said they are doing less of the kind of individual therapy they think most effective and sometimes can't keep up with their group sessions. Staff may have been added, they said, but not enough for the increase in inmates. "You're putting out fires," said one. "You're short of staff four days a week. You're probably covering 2 units [instead of one]. You hope you're doing groups [therapy]." Interviews with the 2 were arranged by their union, and they originally agreed to let their names be used. But they asked not to be identified the next day, after prison authorities had learned of their conversation and told them to file an incident report. A nurse, who also changed her mind about being named, spoke angrily about the way UConn managed the medical staff and about safety. Insisting that assaults on staff still happened too often, she said, "Our morale is down. I don't thank the administration at all for going home safe at night to my family. I thank our officers." She said there sometimes is no follow through on inmates who are "paneled for medication," that is collectively judged so bad they need to be forcibly drugged. A doctor gave a mixed review. Some conditions have improved in the last year, he said, but he still believes that UConn Health Center, in an effort to control costs, is cutting corners on care. He said medical tests such as CAT scans that he orders for inmates are routinely denied. He also said there is a dire lack of substance-abuse treatment for a population whose crimes commonly are drug related, and a lack of continuity of care because inmates may see different part-time psychiatrists from one month to the next. Correction officers who do not fear to complain publicly agreed with the medical staff that the OPA agreement is now driving operations at Garner - but with a twist. The addition of clinical workers and the mandate to give inmates more out-of-cell time has made the prison riskier. Two Garner veterans, Steve Curran, the chief union steward, and Mike Giannetto, a disciplinary officer, said front-line officers have lost informal disciplinary options they once had and their decisions are 2nd-guessed. "The way the prison is being run, it has created an unsafe environment. We are being touched at a much greater rate," said Giannetto. They handed over administration figures showing the number of so-called "Class 2" incidents remains elevated, with 290 occurring between July and January. The annualized rate is similar to the 522 total for fiscal year 2004-2005 and is triple the 146 the year before that, when the consolidation began. Class 2 incidents include minor assaults, but a minor assault might involve an inmate spitting, throwing food, or containers filled with urine or toilet water. "I'm not sure they've come up with a diagnosis for a mental health inmate that would include saving urine in a milk carton and throwing it at staff," Curran said. Suicide With A Cell Sink On a tour, Garner does not appear to be a madhouse. It is clean and well-lit. Inmates in khaki uniforms file to group sessions down corridors like those in a high school. In a gymnasium, six inmates play a game of half-court basketball, the squeak of their sneakers swallowed by the vast space. But the calm can be deceptive. In one of the prison's 2 hospital units, a correction officer stands by an inmate getting a haircut, just in case the inmate makes a grab for the barber's clippers. Another officer does "one-on-one" duty, watching through a thick window a sleeping inmate who tried to commit suicide the night before. Warden Dzurenda said the inmate, whose prison number indicates he's been in the system a long time, apparently tried to strangle himself with the tubes of a medical device he had in his cell. "We had one guy who killed himself with his sink. He put his head under the faucet and laid down and cracked his neck," Dzurenda said, bending his head sideways to demonstrate the fatal leverage. He says some inmates are self-mutilators, using their own fingernail clippings to cut themselves. On April 12, the kind of fatality that leads to lawsuits occurred at Garner. An inmate who became unruly died after being forcibly restrained, state police reported. He was 35-year-old Edward Henderson of Clinton, serving a short sentence for 2nd-degree assault. Suicides and injuries can be a crude measure of conditions inside a mental hospital or prison. Better signs of the daily tension at Garner may be the closet-sized cages used for individual counseling or the food trolley used to deliver meals to inmates inside their cells. Its shelves match the height of cell-front trap doors through which the food trays can be slid. But the trolley is enclosed on the top and 3 sides to prevent an inmate from throwing his food, or something filthier, back. Nowhere Else To Go Given the raw reality of Garner, Sheren Dickau's crusade on behalf of her son may seem quixotic. But as a suburban mother, she may find it impossible to believe that her child would end up in prison, one among thousands fallen just like him. "There is no place for these people to go. There is no help other than jail. I never realized it myself until I became involved in it," Dickau said in December, when she decided to make her case public and begin a letter-writing campaign, first to Dzurenda, then to Correction Commissioner Theresa Lantz, and finally to the governor. Getting no satisfaction, she upped the ante in March, contacting Antonio Ponvert, a civil rights lawyer who is a prominent critic of the prison system and has won several lawsuits against the Correction Department. Ponvert was sympathetic, but didn't see a winnable case. "This is a very troubling situation," he wrote back to Dickau. "Unfortunately the law concerning medical care and treatment of inmates makes it extremely difficult to require the [Department of Correction] to provide a particular kind of medication for your son." Dickau already had heard that message. The gist of the responses from Garner, she said, has been, "This is not a country club. This is a jail. I said I still expect him to get the best care they offer there." She's made a nuisance of herself, constantly calling the prison in an attempt to manage her son's care from the outside. Dzurenda said Dickau is one of the few parents he's ever spoken to. He said her specific demand, to have her insurance pay for her son's Zyprexa and a private psychiatrist's consultation, is administratively unworkable. It would be especially so, Garnett said, if the same right had to be extended to all inmates. Then there is the problem of medical second opinions. "I'm not going against a psychiatrist who believes he's doing the right thing," Dzurenda said. Dickau did succeed in getting her son's case reviewed by the prison program's part-time chief of psychiatry, who is based at the UConn medical center in Farmington. He ordered Daniel's medication changed, but not to Zyprexa. Dickau says her son reacted badly to the new drug and was then given a 2nd drug to counter its side-effects. She believes Zyprexa is being denied because it is expensive. A prescription costs $700 a month. The director of mental health services for the prison program, Steven Helfand, a psychologist, said no drug would be denied simply because of cost. He said some inmates have received Zyprexa even though it is not in the program's "formulary" of approved drugs. Requests for drugs not in the formulary are made by a committee that considers how the drugs are used in outside practice, inmates' histories and cost. Helfand, who has been director eight months, said a new unit health manager position was being created at Garner and that funding is being sought for regional psychiatry chiefs for the statewide system. A psycho-pharmacologist already is working as a "trouble-shooter" on a case-by-case basis, seeing if an inmate needs an off-formulary drug. "We have a lot of practitioners, but we want more timely supervision," Helfand said. "We're concerned with someone who is not doing well, or not getting better. It comes down to a review of how a patient's doing." Gaps In System Of Care It also comes down to how the state is willing to spend its money. Correctional Managed Health Care currently is paid about $86 million a year for its prison services. A legislative report in December 2004 found the "ongoing consolidation" of medical and mental-health care had shown "significant cost effectiveness." The annual expense of psychiatric medications had dropped by half a million dollars to slightly over $4 million. A UConn spokesperson described the prison budget as "break even." "We're not in the business of making money on this," she said. But even absent an audit, the prison spending has to be considered in context. Earlier this year, Connecticut was 1 of only 2 states to earn a "B" grade from the National Alliance for Mental Illness advocacy group. None got an "A." In it's Connecticut report card, the group said "criminalization of people with mental illness" remains a problem, but first it said it had "grave concerns" about conditions at Connecticut Valley Hospital and the placement of mentally ill in locked nursing homes. The OPA has filed a lawsuit challenging the nursing home "warehousing," too, citing exposes in The Day, the New London newspaper. In general, the NAMI report said wealthy Connecticut wasn't providing enough outpatient care and affordable housing for the mentally ill. The need for such care can be traced back to laws entitling the mentally ill to the "least restrictive treatment" available and the shutdown of what had been the state's other two large mental hospitals, Norwich and Fairfield Hills state hospitals. The latter campus is in Newtown, about a mile from Garner. The state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services runs a program at local courthouses that tries to divert mentally ill people arrested for minor crimes to community care. But its reach is limited, sometimes by the arrested person's unwillingness to accept treatment, or lack of a place to live. Meanwhile alternative-to-incarceration programs for minor offenses run by the Department of Corrections exclude the mentally ill. The upshot, said Gail Sturges, director of forensic services for the mental health department, is, "If you're arrested on criminal charges and you're mentally ill, you're more likely to be incarcerated pre-trial, and you're more likely to do your time incarcerated." During the current General Assembly session, several pieces of legislation have been introduced to fill these gaps. One would extend certain provisions of the Patients Bill of Rights to prisoners. At a public hearing in March, corrections commissioner Lantz opposed the bill. Among those speaking in favor were Gene Tewksbury, vice president of the local representing Garner guards, and Catherine Osten, the president of the lieutenants' union. She recommended turning Garner over to the mental health department. "Why did we close psychiatric facilities if the need still exists?" she asked. Another omnibus bill contains funding for new or expanded alternative incarceration programs. Testifying in favor was Karen Zimmer, who sits on the board of directors of the NAMI Connecticut chapter and who has a son very much like Sheren Dickau's. Zimmer said her son, a once shy, gentle child, has since his early 20s struggled with a schizo-affective disorder and substance abuse. He's been in and out of homeless shelters, hospitals and prisons, including Garner. She said her son, now 29, had just been arrested again, for breaking a window, then kicking a hospital orderly who tried to restrain him in the emergency room where he was taken for evaluation. She'd refused his pleas to bail him out. "In his mind, the [orderly] was torturing him," Zimmer said later, wearily reciting the history of her son's illness. "If you don't have a family member with it, you say, 'Who cares, anyway?' But a lot of people do." She said she no longer remembered the first time her son was arrested. Numerous two-week commitments to hospitals were too short for him to stabilize. "The only place that keeps him long enough is jail. It's really kind of stupid," Zimmer said. "In jail you don't get treatment, you get a roof over your head, and save beds." A Life Unravels The Dickaus' ordeal began in 2003, about the time Daniel finished his first year at Mitchell College in New London. He started to hear a girl's voice talking to him. With his parents away at the time, he was frightened enough to drive himself to Hartford Hospital. Court records show he was admitted to the hospital's Institute of Living on June 25 and was discharged July 7. 2 more 14-day stays followed, the last ending Aug. 8, 2003, shortly before Dickau went on his purse-snatching spree. Avoiding jail, he was ordered into a succession of short-term drug rehab programs that he only sometimes completed. "The reason he never did well in those places is they are mainly for drug people," his mother said. "I'm not saying he doesn't have a drug problem. But he talks to himself, so the other kids would make fun of him." Schizophrenia is one of the mental illnesses that goes hand-in-hand with addiction. Dickau began using cocaine when he was 17, according to a court report. It also describes odd behavior like digging in his parents' yard at night and trying to take a car apart. Sheren says he once wrecked her car trying to drive it to Albany, N.Y., and stole her jewelry. In April 2005, shortly after another stay in the Institute of Living, he stole a .22 caliber rifle from an acquaintance of his father. Siegfried Dickau found the rifle in his garage and told the owner to report the theft to police. At one point, Sheren applied to probate court to be made her son's conservator so she might she said, "put him somewhere to get the treatment he needed," but her petition was denied after two psychiatrists disagreed about the severity of his illness. Sheren said her son was relativity free of symptoms only during the periods he was taking Zyprexa. Feeling well, he'd stop taking it and his symptoms and drug abuse would return. The Dickaus' frustration with their son and the mental-health-care system was evident on Jan. 10, the day he appeared in Hartford Superior Court to be sentenced on charges related to the purse snatchings in Wethersfield. Daniel shuffled into the crowded courtroom, shackled and manacled, bearded and looking gaunt. After glancing in the direction of his parents, he kept his head bowed. The judge, Bradford Ward, kept his head down too, reading from the files in front him. After the lawyers briefly made their cases, the judge noted aloud that Dickau heard voices and had been in the Institute of Living but otherwise focused on Dickau's drug abuse and background. "He had an upbringing this court does not see very often," the judge said of Dickau. "He was reared in a bedroom town. His father owns a manufacturing company... He has had every advantage many youngsters in this area are not exposed to... His behavior has gone from self-indulgence to drug abuse to not doing very well in school to inflicting harm - on women, too. He's the one who's going to have to address these problems." The judge then sentenced Dickau to seven years in prison, suspended after four, to be followed by five years' probation. Outside the courtroom, Siegfried Dickau tried to console his wife, who had been weeping. "The court is interested in `you do the crime, you gotta do the time.' If you're a citizen, you don't care if he's sick or not," Siegfried said. "If somebody did the same thing to you, what would you do?" Sheren answered, "I think I'd have more compassion." But Siegfried went on. "The law is not really created for people who need mental help. There's so many people. They don't have the time. They don't have the staff. It's overwhelming for the state. The thing is you never know what a mind can do to you. Look at it this way. We went to court today ... It's not perfect, but it's at least some help." Sheren didn't seem to hear. She noticed a mistake about her son's illness in the court pre-sentence report. Siegfried started to fret about how Daniel had looked. "When you look in his eyes it was like a tunnel. They were blank like there was no feeling. But that could be the drugs he's getting," his father said. It was what passed for hope. Bullies And Bibles Change is coming to Garner. Dzurenda said the prison is being reorganized to make it safer. Previously, inmates on the prison's seven psychiatric cellblocks were housed by diagnosis, regardless of the severity of their illness or how dangerous they are. The system mixed aggressive inmates with defenseless ones, and those needing less care with those barely responding. Beginning this month, inmates will be housed by their function level, which takes into account how well they behave. "It will stop extortion and stop predators, or at least slow it down," Dzurenda said. "That's half our problem," officer Mike Giannetto had said earlier. "We have the sharks in with the chum." How Daniel Dickau will fare is impossible to predict. His mother, who remains vigilant, says his condition varies from week to week. In an interview in early March, Dickau himself said he thought he was doing better. Looking just as thin and meek as he did in court in January, he said he sees a doctor, whose name he didn't know, once a week, that he wasn't getting much therapy and that he spent about 2? hours a day out of his cell. If that were true, it would fall short of goals in the settlement agreement. But inmates cannot be forced to attend therapy sessions, and Dickau seemed to prefer being solitary. "The C/Os [correction officers], they're good," he said. "They pretty much leave me alone." He "screwed up" once, he said, by letting another inmate pressure him into renting a radio for $50. He said he understood he couldn't have Zyprexa because of its side effects. But he preferred it because it helps him sleep. "I get just a few hours of sleep a night," he said. "I just toss and turn and write and read stuff." Mostly what he reads is the Bible, and on the occasions he does hear a voice, it's God's. "I don't know why it would not be God. He's saying stuff like read the Bible," he said. "After I read it, He explains it and I read it over again and it makes perfect sense, what He's telling me. But I don't hear [voices] as much any more." Dickau said God sometimes helped with what he writes, which is rap music. He guessed he had 100 notes in his cell with lyrics on them. "This is what I've been doing the whole time," he said. He offered to recite one song he'd managed to memorize. Jabbing with his hands the way rap singers do, he chanted the long song, interrupting it to apologize for the obscenities required by the genre. One passage went as follows: Thank you God for the gifts you gave me I'm on my knees for a favor Will you please be his savior Gangsta Understand that if you want light You'll wind up in the hospital for a night. Dickau said the song was about his life and that if he had to make up a title it would be "If You Had What I Had." (source: Hartford Courant)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----FLA., USA, OHIO, CONN.
Rick Halperin Sun, 23 Apr 2006 18:54:56 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
