Troy Davis—the man about whose case former FBI director William S. Sessions has written “What quickly will become apparent is that serious questions about Davis’ guilt, highlighted by witness recantations, allegations of police coercion and a lack of relevant physical evidence, continue to plague his conviction”—was executed by the state of Georgia last night at 11:08pm.

Davis was convicted in 1991 of killing a police officer. There’s not much I can add to the discussion around this case. If you’re looking for insightful writing on it, there’s Mother Jones’coverage, this from The Nation editors, an impassioned plea at In These Times, and of course Amnesty International, which has used Davis’ visage in their campaign to abolish the death penalty. There, too, is the video below of Democracy Now’sAmy Goodman reporting from Georgia last night.

As many others have stated, this execution is not only about Troy Davis. It is, and especially now should be, a time to reflect on this country’s use of the death penalty. To add to that conversation, here are some articles from our November-December 2010 issue about capital punishment in the U.S.

The Sun interviews legendary capital punishment opponent Sister Helen Prejean:

According to Amnesty International, 93 percent of the world’s executions take place in five countries: China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and the United States. Why is our government on such a list? 

The death penalty is a natural outgrowth of our long history of using violence to achieve our ends. We’re a very young country, and violence has worked for us in the past. It began with the settling of this continent and the genocide against Native Americans, then continued when we brought slaves over.

Continue reading >> 

The Texas Observer’s Robert Leleux takes a very hard look at executions in the Lone Star State:

One of the things about the death penalty is that, because convicted killers (for a whole variety of reasons) aren’t typically white, middle-class honor students, with reputations for being kindly, wholesome people, it’s very easy for middle-class people like me to presume that folks on death row are people from “over there.” Folks from another, meaner America—that hard, irredeemable underbelly of the nation’s poverty and crime. You know, the kind of place you see on Cops.

Of course, there are so many things wrong with this presumption that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Continue reading >> 

And finally, as an online extra to those two articles, here is a blog post with a number of resources from around the web about executions in the U.S.

Source: Democracy Now!, Mother Jones, In These Times, Amnesty International, The Sun, The Nation, The Texas Observer 

Image by World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Map of usage of lethal injection chair for the death penalty in the United States.  

In our latest issue (Nov/Dec) you’ll find a couple fine features on the subject of the death penalty in America; The Texas Observer’s Robert Leleux takes a long and very hard look at the assembly line approach to executions in the Lone Star State, and The Sun interviews legendary capital punishment opponent Sister Helen Prejean, 17 years after the publication of her Pulitzer Prize-nominated Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States.  

Whether your interest in executions (you can’t really sugarcoat that word) is fueled by moral outrage or purely voyeuristic curiosity, the internet offers all sorts of resources, history, and creepy diversions.  

The Death Penalty Information Center provides everything from the latest news and data to a comprehensive execution database that will tell you, for instance, that of the 45 executions in the U.S. so far in 2010, 17 have been carried out by the state of Texas. The site also allows you to break down data in all sorts of revelatory ways. Want to know what percentage of those executed in any given year have been juveniles, white, or female? The information’s there.  

At the Texas Department of Criminal Justice site you can read the rap sheets and final words (where a statement was offered) of the 464 inmates the state has put to death since 1982.  

The Dead Man Eating Weblog hasn’t been updated in awhile, but it still offers a sad and oddly fascinating inventory of the last meals of a host of executed offenders. And the artist Kate MacDonald has done a series of stark paintings that capture the aftermath and essential melancholy of those lonely meals.  

Finally, the diligent folks over at Executed Today offer a scholarly and obsessively-annotated timeline (updated pretty much every day) of executions throughout history.   

Source: Utne Reader , The Texas Observer , The Sun , Executed Today, Dead Man Eating Weblog 

Image by Lokal_Profil, licensed under Creative Commons. 

In January 2004, the infamous “Hi, How Are You” frog mural in Austin, Texas, was set to be destroyed and replaced with windows for a new Baja Fresh chain restaurant. And Dan Soloman needed to stop it.

The mural, which at first glance appears to be just lazy graffiti, was painted by the musician and artist Daniel Johnston in 1993. Johnston, a schizophrenic, became somewhat of a cult hero, having his songs covered by the likes of Beck and Tom Waits and amassing a large underground following.

Writing for The Texas Observer, Soloman insists “the frog mural represents a lot of things to people in Austin. To me, it’s a monument to a time when there was no point to cynicism, and street protest was the most viable form of activism I could imagine.” And guess what? He ended up saving the frog (also known as Jeremiah the Innocent), because, he claims, exerting change upon your immediate environment is infinitely more productive than attempting to affect change across the world.

“Street protest gets a bad rap these days, and for good reason,” Soloman writes:

Despite hundreds of thousands of marchers during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, despite more than 1 million demonstrators nationwide rallying for immigration reform, despite even more people in London, Pittsburgh and Toronto protesting the G20 summits, the result was: a war with Iraq, a failed immigration bill, and agreements among G20 nations that took no account of the masses in the street.

Ultimately, Soloman and some of his friends saved the mural by approaching the owner of the Baja Fresh and explaining how important the mural was to all of Austin and to the thousands of Johnston fans across the country. After initially refusing, the owner finally agreed to redesign the restaurant around the mural—costing him $50,000 in architect fees and lost revenue.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything that needs reform in our world. But, as Soloman points out, admitting that mass protest usually doesn’t do anything to help isn’t cynicism; it’s just reality:

The late House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said that “All politics is local.” Most of the demonstrations held up as proof that protest doesn’t work have been about big national and international issues. A group in Toronto isn’t going to change what leaders in South Korea and Turkey and Australia decide about the G20; amassed immigrants in Chicago and Dallas aren’t liable to effect change on an issue that’s so divisive throughout the country; a bunch of people with signs down in Texas aren’t able turn heads in the Pentagon.

If I were still in my early 20s, that might sound like cynicism to me. When it feels hopeless, though, I just have to go back to my old neighborhood to see that big, googly-eyed frog to remember that when you keep your focus on your immediate world, you can be a lot more powerful than you’d have thought.

Source: The Texas Observer 

Image by tibbygirl, licensed under Creative Commons . 

The Texas Observer has gone Forensic Files on us. The cover story of a recent issue tackles the case of Warren Horinek, a man sent to prison against all reasonable doubt because of faulty bloodstain pattern analysis. Dave Mann seamlessly weaves Horinek’s story into the larger issue of wrongful convictions due to flawed forensics:

Bloodstain analysis is similar to other kinds of forensic science. With the exception of DNA testing, much of the forensic evidence used in U.S. courts—including fingerprint matches, ballistics, and arson evidence—is based on junk science. CSI it ain’t. Contrary to what’s portrayed on television, bullets are regularly matched to the wrong gun, fingerprints are misidentified, crime labs botch their analysis, and accidental fires are misread as arson. 

Most criminal-justice experts believe that flawed forensic evidence—and overreaching expert witnesses—have sent thousands of Americans to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. The solution is to ensure that forensic testimony is based on sound science. Reconstructing how blood flies through the air is obviously dicey business. 

And it is that dicey business—and the testimony of one undereducated private blood spatter analyst—that sent Horinek to prison against the warnings of the crime scene investigator, the police sergeant who oversaw the homicide investigation, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, and the assistant district attorney initially assigned to prosecute the case, who all believed Horinek was telling the truth about what happened to his wife that Tuesday night in 1995. 

At least Horinek can be considered relatively lucky: Handfuls of professionals are working to free him, unlike the thousands of others who have been wrongfully convicted. But after 15 presumably guiltless years in prison, I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way. 

Source: The Texas Observer 

Image courtesy of Matt Wright-Steel. 

Perhaps the argument for tougher government drilling regulations and more renewable energy production can be made on the basis of our distaste for “tarballs” washing ashore while we’re laying siege to each others’ sandcastles. The Texas Observer has posted a scary little tarball history of sorts, in which they point out:

Anyone who visited Texas’ beaches in the 1970s is familiar with the tarball. Ranging in size from a penny to a basketball, these dough-like masses of raw petroleum stained our skin and swimsuits with an unfortunate brown smear. They also made handy projectiles to throw at crabs, seagulls and friends. Tarballs seemed like just another hazard of playing in the waves, like jellyfish—the price paid for living in an oil-producing state.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the tarballs are likely rolling back up Texas beaches this summer.

Source: The Texas Observer

Image by elleinad, licensed under Creative Commons.

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt-weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year, we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Sunday, April 25, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in Washington, D.C., and post them online the following Monday. We’re crazy about these publications, and we’d love it for all of our readers to get to know them better, too. So, every weekday until the conference, we’ll be posting mini-introductions to our complete list of 2010 nominees.

The following eight magazines are our 2010 nominees in the category of political coverage.

The American Prospect reports on the day’s most essential issues, from immigration to workers’ rights, privacy to prison reform. By combining thorough reportage with deep analysis, it provides progressives with the intellectual and inspirational tools to engage in transformative politics and policy. www.prospect.org

Since 1976, the folks behind the investigative nonprofit Mother Jones have relentlessly and reliably delivered “smart, fearless journalism,” transcending the day’s political spin to unearth stories on everything from global climate change to torturous foreign policy decisions on both sides of the aisle. www.motherjones.com

Ms. has been at the forefront of feminist politics since 1972. In 2009 the editors shone light on a host of pressing issues, including the Obama administration’s abortion policies and the need for domestic workers’ rights. Featuring journalism that provokes action, this quarterly loves a righteous fight. www.msmagazine.com

The Nation has been a vital progressive voice for nearly 150 years, weighing in weekly on politics, arts, and culture via vivid features, incisive reviews, and convention-busting commentary. By bucking the trend against the slick and the glossy, The Nation helps to keep politics real. www.thenation.com

The influential, debate-fueling biweekly The New Republic chooses tough critical thinking over easy dogma, encouraging its writers (and readers) to be critical not just of their right-wing foes but also their fellow liberals. In a political landscape full of bluster, TNR’s cool rigor holds sway. www.tnr.com

The Progressive turned 100 last year, but this bastion of the liberal press is full of fresh energy and up-to-the-minute currency. Publishing analysis and reporting from leading thinkers, it never loses sight of the people behind the issues it covers. www.progressive.org

With hard-hitting reports on immigration, life on the border, education, prisons, and social justice issues, The Texas Observer has carved out a niche worth celebrating. Its unmatched reportage and analysis kneecaps those who traffic in malfeasance, corruption, and injustice. www.texasobserver.org

Washington Monthly forged ahead of the mainstream on many issues this year, from textbook revisionism in Texas to the subprime student loan racket, making it a must-read beyond the Beltway. Its reporting is unimpeachable, its analysis sound, and its reputation for sagacity well earned. www.washingtonmonthly.com

Want more? Meet our international, health and wellness, spirituality, and science and technology nominees.

Robert Leleux stokes some book-club envy in a recent issue of The Texas Observer with a short piece about the Pulpwood Queens, whose motto is “where tiaras are mandatory and reading good books is the rule.” The Queens have chapters all over the country—more than 260, by Leleux’s count—and a few hundred of its members get together once a year to “converge upon the deep woods of East Texas, dressed in hot pink satin, leopard-print capes and enough rhinestone tiaras to choke the entire Royal Court of the Cotton Bowl parade,” Leleux writes. “Then we rat each other’s wigs, throw a couple of high-steppin’ theme parties, and award much-coveted statuettes to the person, for instance, who wore the best Barbie costume. Also to the person who wrote the year’s best American novel.”

Here’s how it works: Each month, individual chapters—who’ve named themselves things like “The Sirens” and “Queens in the Hood” and “Queens on the Rocks”—gather to discuss Kathy’s selected titles, wear outré get-ups, and eat pot-luck suppers. Then they blog about their talks with their fellow queens worldwide. At the end of the year, they vote for their favorite novels and children’s books. (This year’s winners were Pat Conroy’s South of Broad, Jamie Ford’s p, and Melissa Conroy’s delightful picture book Poppy’s Pants.) And finally, at their Girlfriend Weekend convention, held annually at Jefferson’s Convention and Tourism Building, the Queens dub their chosen writers (in a ceremony similar to a knighthood) “Jewels of the Pulpwood Crown,” in addition to attending readings and discussions led by prominent authors.

This jolly atmosphere is, Leleux notes, rarely cultivated around literature—but it’s what’s made the Queens so successful.

[W]hat all this fake fur and hairspray really amounts to is having fun with serious literature, in the midst of a drab cultural landscape in which fun isn’t a word often associated with la vie littéraire. I mean, has anybody tried to watch Book TV lately? It’s like visually ingesting a lithium capsule. Why is that? There used to be an air of public revelry surrounding books. The bitchy remarks of Mary McCarthy or Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show were actually the stuff of water-cooler chit-chat, even scandal. But today, public revelry is too often killed off by the very people attempting to “promote literature”—wellmeaning sorts like Laura Bush, who talk about “the importance of reading” in the same Somber Sally tones one might use to encourage flu vaccination.

Source: The Texas Observer 

Congratulations to The Texas Observer, which is nominated for a 2010 Utne Independent Press Award for political coverage.

The Texas Observer’s Melissa del Bosque has been doing some excellent reporting on the many broken pieces of our immigration system, and she has another must-read report in the current issue of the Austin-based biweekly. In “Point of No Return,” del Bosque investigates the astounding lack of legal representation among immigrants in detention: More than 80 percent of immigrant detainees do not have a lawyer.

This is due, in many cases, to poverty, but also to the transfer-happy officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who frequently shuffle detainees to rural facilities far from their homes and families. “On average, 52 percent of ICE detainees—whether legal residents or illegal immigrants—are transferred at least once before they are released or deported,” del Bosque writes. She interviews one man, Rama Carty, who spent time in seven detention facilities over the course of 21 months.

Like Carty, many detainees in Texas have been relocated from urban areas in the Northeast, where detention beds are scarcer. This brings them under the sway of the 5th U.S. circuit court of Appeals, which has earned a reputation as the most conservative in the nation regarding immigration rulings—a conveyor-belt to deportation. (See “Pleading With the Fifth.”) Since most detention facilities are in Southern states like Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, ICE is sending an increasing number of detainees to the 5th circuit. When they arrive at these largely rural facilities, far from home, they find few immigration lawyers available or willing to help.

For more on the subject, read “Jailing the American Dream,” Tom Barry’s in-depth investigation into the private-prison companies profiting from immigrant detention centers. Originally published in Boston Review, the piece ran in our March-April issue.

Congratulations to The Texas Observer, which is nominated for a 2010 Utne Independent Press Award for political coverage.

Source: The Texas Observer

Not everyone would champion the arrival of a Walmart Supercenter in their town, but Joe R. Lansdale boldly argues in The Texas Observer that the mega-retailer isn’t all that bad. He tells the story of how his Texas town of Nacogdoches was revitalized when the regular Walmart was transformed into a Walmart Supercenter. Lansdale’s not advocating for child labor, unethical work practices, unfair wages, or outsourcing—he’s just in favor of convenience and practicality when it comes to small-town life. Here’s his take:

Let me tell you, the late downtowns in East Texas burgs were usually small stores run by locals. They generally priced things three times more than they were worth. Maybe they had to, but I don’t care. I don’t want to pay $30 for a hammer and a fistful of nails. If I wanted a banana, I had to go to another store. If I wanted to pick up a pair of shoes, another store.

If you worked, by the time you got off work, many of the stores were closed. Saturday, they might be open, but Sunday they were closed again. So for the working individual, the mother or father who had a kid wake up in the night with aching gums from teething, and you wanted something to make it all better, you had to wait until the next day.

With Walmart in town, lots of people can be put to work, far more than downtown ever employed. Someone has to run a 24-hour store, check people out, sack groceries, push carts, place stock, work at the McDonald’s sequestered in the back. The workers have all skin colors, not something I saw a lot of downtown, except for immigrants unloading trucks.

If you’re poor and barely making it, or even if your income is middle-of-the-road, it’s good to get what you need at slashed prices, anytime of the day, seven days a week, in a big, ugly, over-lit store that closes only on Christmas and half a day on Christmas Eve….now in our downtown are specialty stores that provide things we can’t get at Walmart, like maybe a stuffed deer head for that special place over the mantle.

Source: The Texas Observer

Image by jason.mundy, licensed under Creative Commons.

For the past few years, the Texas Observer has been tracking the under-funded and inadequate Texas state institutions for the mentally disabled.  Workers at one such institution made international headlines when footage of resident "fight-clubs," organized by guards, found its way to CNN. The September-October 2008 issue of Utne Reader highlighted one of the Observer’s findings: “The culprit behind some 1,266 incidents of abuse in the past three fiscal years...is a systemic failure to fund enough qualified workers to provide decent care.”

The U.S. Department of Justice, after conducting its own investigation, threatened to sue the state of Texas if it didn't clean up its act, and quickly. The state did not act quickly, but it did act.

In June, the Observer delivered some good news.  The Texas legislature finally voted to add $279 million in state and federal funds to the state school budget throughout the next five years. 1,160 more doctors, dentists, nurses, and direct care workers will be hired. 

But one problem lingers: You get what you pay for and workers will still be paid "fast-food wages." Direct care workers are, on average, the lowest-paid state employees in Texas. If the state doesn’t move to fix this lingering issue, it faces the threat of another Justice Department lawsuit. "The hard work of bettering these sprawling institutions," writes the Observer, "has only just begun.”

Source:  The Texas Observer

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what’s landing in our library each week in 'Shelf Life.'

Utne’s library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, zines, and other lively dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found at big-box bookstores, or newsstands.

Featured in this week's episode:

- The "Jobless in America" feature in the February 23 issue of The Nation

- Dollars &Sense on "The New Political Economy of Immigration"

- The Texas Observer on Janet Napolitano and the border fence

- "Entertaining in the Recession" from Houston's My Table (not available online)

-Alpacas. That's right, Alpacas. From Radish

Sources: The Nation, Dollars & Sense, The Texas Observer, My Table, Radish

Classic black gospel records are an endangered species. Original recordings are trapped on vinyl, hoarded by the rare gospel collector, or relegated to dust-magnet status in basements around the country. Robert Darden, a former gospel editor at Billboard and current professor at Baylor University, is trying to change that, by resurrecting and preserving this vital part of our musical history.

“Anyone who cares about black history or who has been redeemed by black gospel—by an individual’s repentant outpouring, a family act’s fevered calls-and-responses, or a quartet’s amens between choreographed dance moves—can recognize the tragedy of losing these recordings forever,” reports Michael Hoinski in The Texas Observer.

To raise awareness about black gospel’s dire situation, Darden wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times back in 2005. In it, he linked the work of popular stars such as Kanye West and Mavis Staples to the music of lesser-known classic gospel artists like Sallie Martin and the Roberta Martin singers. Darden was able to drum up some support for his cause, most crucially from investment banker Charles Royce, who told Darden that if he could figure out how to preserve the music, Royce would bankroll the project.

Darden settled on digitization as black gospel’s savior, and Royce granted him $347,175 for equipment, an audio engineer, a cataloger, and acquisitions. So far, the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project has digitally preserved some 750 songs with photos, liner notes, and record jackets. But there’s still a long way to go. “I will die before we finish this project,” Darden says.

Take a listen to a few scratchy samples of the songs, available on Baylor’s library database. (QuickTime required.)

http://ars.baylor.edu/03gospel/620.mov (I’ll Fly Away, Lady Byrd)
http://ars.baylor.edu/03gospel/853.mov (Come Ye Disconsolate, Rev. Franklin Fondel)
http://ars.baylor.edu/03gospel/715.mov (He Never Has Left Me Alone, The Angelic Gospel Singers)
http://ars.baylor.edu/03gospel/604.mov (I’m On My Way, Sammie Graham)
http://ars.baylor.edu/03gospel/739.mov (Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt, Otis Jackson)

To hear more of the songs digitized so far, go to Baylor’s library database.

–Cara Binder

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.)