A phone call from a death row inmate

This morning, while doing random things in my apartment before going to work, I heard the home phone ring and I instantly knew it would be one of the prisoners I write to.  I didn't know which one, but I was happily surprised to hear the name "Teddy" spoken by the man himself when the recorded female voice on the line informed me that I was receiving a collect call from a correctional institution.  


Teddy is housed in Pennsylvania, and while looking for information, I came across this article.  With the exception of the comment about prosecutors being despicable, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed.


The Book of the Dead
Those Sentenced to Death In Pennsylvania
And Those Who Ordered Their Deaths
By: Francis DeSales
Volunteer Editor

It's not just immoral, it's pathetic. What civilized society must shink to the status of it's worst criminals? What civilized culture resorts to slaughtering it's own? It's a kind of madness where the "good guys" make themselves as bad as the "bad guys."All sane persons recognize that, like torture, capital punishment is simply irrational. Were an individual to extract such self-consuming vengeance he would be called deranged. Of the civilized nations of the world only the United States uses capital punishment (or torture, for that matter). We don't execute prisoners because we're strong or tough or masculine or robust. We kill because we're too ethically weak to control our lowest urges. Killing is proof that we've lost. Capital punishment isn't only insane, it's unfair, indeed, it's almost randomly haphazard. Who dies depends on how sadistic the presiding judge happens to be. That's the reason why ghoulish Pennsylvania prosecutors shop to get the very worst judges available, the killer judges. Because the judges reflect the randomness of our killing, we've arranged this "Book of the Dead" by the killer judges who pass out the death sentences in our names. These are the vampires who make us all accomplices in their cruelty. Decent persons simply wouldn't do these calculated things. But it's not just the unfairness of the judges. It's also the bias of race. For the same offense, the Afro-American has twice the likelihood of getting the death penalty. At the same time, he's got only half the chance of getting anything like a "fair" trial. Because of the stark racial disparity in death sentences, our roster of the doomed lists the race of the condemned. It must be remembered that only about 13% of Pennsylvania's population, or about 1.5 million persons, is classified as African-American. That means that there should be 7 and a half times as many non-blacks on Death Row as there are Afro-Americans. So, why are most Death Row prisoners blacks? Frankly, as a society, we don't value black lives as highly as white lives. The great majority of the whites on Death Row are poor men. The real disparity on Death Row is between the haves and the have-nots. Capital punishment is rooted in class warfare. Those who have money and means are seldom if ever sentenced to death. Every American knows that people with money must be "good." Money makes them good. It's part of the madness of American social mythology. We don't sentence "good" people to death. The people with money (the Republicans) have seen to that. The persons on Death Row had little or no adequate legal representation. Most had slipshod public defenders to represent them. They couldn't afford investigators to dig up facts. They couldn't afford medical experts to refute the lies of police laboratories. They couldn't afford to find and obtain witnesses. They couldn't challenge the government's machine and deep pockets. Most of the persons sentenced to death had sub-standard educations. Few had families which instilled the basics of knowledge and responsibility which most of us take for granted. The death sentence is simply not evenhanded or fair. The American way is to kill those on society's bottom rung, persons nobody cares about. Most of Pennsylvania's capital cases came from Philadelphia, the death capital of the United States. A small army of mostly white judges have sentenced half the capital cases in the Commonwealth, but Philadelphia represents only one sixth to the state's population. To explain the geographical disparity in death sentencing, we publish a companion table, The Death Table. It reflects the counties in the state which are most blood thirsty. The universal excuse for the death sentence is that "they deserve it!" It's such an inane rationalization that it hardly warrants comment. In point of fact, people (including juries) make mistakes. (Did YOU ever make one?) Many of the folks we kill are not guilty of the crime for which they've been convicted. In Pennsylvania, the prosecutor isn't interested in "justice." He (or more often, she) is obsessed with winning. Most prosecutors are perfectly content to cheat, lie and distort just to win. The death sentence is just a way to keep score. As a class, prosecutors are pretty despicable persons. Of course, in a larger sense, we ALL "deserve" to die. It's a fact of nature. If we live, we deserve to die. The critical question is do we deserve to kill? Should our legal system make killers of all of us. Many Americans are decent persons. They don't want to be parties to official murder. No system of vengeance should make us accomplices to killing. That's immoral.

Innocence Project: Overhaul death penalty laws - Yahoo! News

By MICHAEL GRACZYK, Associated Press – Fri Nov 12, 5:04 pm ET

HOUSTON – The execution of a Texas man whose plea for DNA testing was ignored shows procedures and laws covering capital punishment need to be changed, a leading anti-death penalty lawyer said Friday.

Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck said the execution of convicted murderer Claude Jones 10 years ago took place only because then-Gov. George W. Bush wasn't told by his legal team that Jones' lawyer was seeking DNA testing on a piece of hair used to convict him.

"I have great hopes that when President Bush reviews this case he will acknowledge what I think is obvious here, and that is that he was blindsided, he was misled, and he would have granted that DNA test to Claude Jones and everything would have been different for Claude Jones."

Bush's office has declined to comment on the case.

Bush's former spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Friday that Bush would typically ask two questions in execution cases.

"Did the defendant have full access to the courts and was there any doubt about his or her innocence," said McClellan, who said he had no involvement in the Jones case.

Jones' execution was the 40th and last of the year 2000 in Texas — a record that still stands in the nation'sbusiest death penalty state. Earlier that year, Bush, who was running for president at the time, used his authority as governor to give another condemned inmate a 30-day reprieve for DNA testing. Those tests confirmed the evidence and the prisoner was executed.

Scheck said that earlier decision from Bush convinced him the governor also would have stopped Jones' punishment if his staff had accurately told him about the DNA request. Documents obtained by attorneys working for the Innocence Project showed Bush was told Jones' guilt "is not in doubt" and that the prisoner had "full and fair access to judicial review of his case."

"We know that's not true," Scheck said.

The piece of hair was the only physical evidence prosecutors used to tie Jones to a fatal shooting during the robbery of an East Texas liquor store in November 1989. Because the DNA test showed the hair did not come from Jones, the evidence used to convict him was insufficient under Texas law, Scheck said.

"If that DNA test had been performed, there would have been plenty of doubt about guilt, and this conviction would have been reversed and this execution wouldn't have taken place," he said.

Scheck said while some may say this case "isn't the holy grail" to show Jones definitely was innocent, "I think that in and of itself is pretty significant, and only a cynical view would say this is not important, this doesn't matter."

He said courts should allow for examination of forensic evidence now blocked by deadlines. Courts now can say "we're not even going to look at this" and reject filings as abuse of the writ process, he said.

"You need to change writ procedures so courts will consider new changes in scientific evidence in reviewing cases," Scheck said.

He also said he thinks Texas crime labs need to improve and that the state's relatively new Forensic Science Commission, which reviews misconduct and negligence by forensic investigators, needs to ignore "death penalty politics."

Scheck was joined at a Houston news conference Friday by former Texas Gov. Mark White, who oversaw the execution of 19 inmates during his four-year tenure ending in January 1987. He also was Texas attorney general when the state did its first lethal injection in December 1982.

White also said it is critical for the courts and executive branch of government to change procedures when reviewing death penalty matters.

"This is exactly the horror story that every governor, I think, has in this country: that something will be left out in the information he's receiving to help make him make a decision concerning this most important matter a governor determines," White said.

In the nearly 35 years since capital punishment was reinstated in the U.S., there has never been a case in which someone definitively was proven innocent after being executed.

Jones was condemned for the slaying of the liquor store's owner, Allen Hilzendager, who was shot three times outside the small town of Point Blank, about 70 miles north of Houston.

During his trial, a forensic expert testified the hair in evidence could have come from Jones but not from an accomplice or the store owner. No DNA test was performed for the trial.

Bill Burnett, the San Jacinto County district attorney who prosecuted Jones, died earlier this year, but always insisted he had the right man on death row.

"I think he's guilty," Burnett told The Associated Press in 2007 when questions about DNA testing in the case resurfaced.

The Innocence Project had "an agenda," he said. "They want a lot of press. From our standpoint, we're simply doing our job trying to follow the law."

Jones' criminal record dated back to 1959. While serving a 21-year prison sentence in Kansas, he poured a flammable liquid on his cellmate and set him on fire, killing him. Three days after the Texas shooting, he was identified as the robber of a suburban Houston bank. He was arrested nearly three weeks later in Fort Myers, Fla., where he was charged with robbery and bank robbery there.

From the death chamber gurney, he did not acknowledge guilt but told relatives of the liquor store owner he was sorry for their loss.

Jones' son, Duane, said Friday that prosecutors had ignored their responsibilities, appellate courts had "dropped the ball in the search for truth," and Bush's staff showed gross incompetence.

"Everybody needs to keep in mind the whole objective of our legal system is that it be administered with justice and logic in mind and not vengeance and emotion or politics," he said.

Inside the Mind...

Lost in the lurid details of the rape and triple murder of a Connecticut family is what brought together Steven Hayes, just sentenced to death, and his partner in crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky. Jacob Bernstein reports.
For weeks, Steven Hayes had sat there at his trial, his stare as blank as that now infamous mug shot of him in his prison jumpsuit. Then, as he found out he was being sentenced to death, Hayes flashed a smile, apparently thrilled that he would get to die rather than spend the next 40 or 50 years locked away in a maximum security prison.
Still, lost amid the clippings—the articles that spoke of his sentence as “trash removal on a global scale”—was a sense of just who the man was and why three years ago he’d broken into the home of a Connecticut family in the first place. There, he and his partner in crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky, beat a man named William Petit with a baseball bat, tied him up in the basement, went upstairs, sexually assaulted his 11-year-old daughter, and raped and strangled his wife. Eventually Hayes and Komisarjevsky lit the house on fire, leaving the two Petit daughters there to die inside as they ran from the burning building, stealing the family car, and crashing into a police vehicle a few hundred feet away. (Of the family members they set their sights on, only William Petit managed to escape alive.)
To many, the case has been an open and shut example of how the legal system failed to protect society against two career criminals who’d spent their entire adult lives in the system, bouncing in and out of jail, violating parole over and over.
The more troubling thing may be that law enforcement had little evidence either of the men they were dealing with had seriously violent proclivities.
In Hayes’ case in particular, prior to that fateful night in July 2007, he’d been a petty criminal, pathetic for sure, but hardly a serious threat to society. Mostly, the guy was a crack addict, a drug he’d been addicted to ever since it became an “epidemic.”
As a child, he grew up in a broken home, with a mother who struggled with alcoholism and a father who abandoned him and his brothers. He earned his first arrest at 16, dropped out of school, was sent to jail for burglarizing a house at 24, and spent the next 20 years in 15 more prisons.
“There was a three-year period where he seemed to be doing well,” said his lawyer, Thomas Ullmann. “He’d been heavily involved in NA and AA, but addiction is a lifelong disease, and even with strenuous efforts, if you’re not totally focused and don’t have total support, you can fall.”
Invariably he did.
Hayes and Komisarjevsky were “a Mutt and Jeff pair; the whole thing happened because they were inside together.”
During the trial, employers from over the years described Hayes as a basically nice guy who would work hard in low-level service jobs—in the kitchens of restaurants, for example—and then would disappear when his crack addiction came roaring back.
Steven Hayes was sentenced to death for his involvement in the murder of Hayley Petit (17), Michaela Petit (11), and Jennifer Hawke-Petit (48), which took place in Connecticut, on July 23, 2007. (AP Photos)
When that happened, he broke into cars, stole people’s purses—the basic, parasitic stuff that kept him permanently in the system but only temporarily in jail.
He’d express remorse, space was tight, his mother would write letters on his behalf, and he’d get sprung from jail, only to fall off the wagon again, sometimes just days later.
While receiving treatment in a halfway house, Hayes met Komisarjevsky, another man who was stuck in the system.
They had lots in common: children they loved but didn’t have the discipline to take care of, women they were angry at for not being there for them, substance abuse problems that took them to the same fellowships, and a horrible predilection for stealing.
“It was a jailhouse romance,” said Brian McDonald, author of In the Middle of the Night, a 2009 book about the killings. “I don’t mean it was sexual, but they were a Mutt and Jeff pair; the whole thing happened because they were inside together.”
Ironically, despite the age difference between them—at the time of the crime, Hayes was 44; Komisarjevsky was 26—nearly everyone close to the case says it was the younger man pulling the strings.
“There’s something really evil about Komisarjevsky,” said McDonald. “His trial won’t get the same coverage as Hayes’, but he was the star of the show. Hayes was second fiddle, no doubt in my mind.”
At 14, Komisarjevsky began burglarizing people’s homes, which he would do at night so that he could hear his victims sleeping. Most of the time, he would just steal a little cash, maybe some jewelry or some china. Nothing to truly warrant suspicion. At 20 or 21, he knocked up his girlfriend Jennifer Norton, who was then 15. Her next boyfriend, Tim Totton, who helped raise the child, later told NBC News, “He thought it was boring when nobody was home. He said it was too easy, and there was no fun involved in it, you know?”
When Komisarjevsky was finally convicted of burglary—to the police he admitted hitting more than a dozen homes, to McDonald he said the number was more than 100—a judge sentenced him to nine years in prison and called him a “cold, calculating predator.” (He was released after four and a half years.)
What led to this streak is a matter of some debate. Residents of Cheshire, Connecticut, say Komisarjevsky’s parents were lovely people, they took in foster children. According to papers filed by their son’s lawyers in 2002, when he was tried for burglary, one of the foster kids raped Joshua.
Still, he had a way with the ladies. In addition to fathering a child with Norton, Komisarjevsky embarked on a romance with a local girl named Claire Mesel, then transferred his affections to Mesel’s younger sister Caroline, after a jailhouse visit from the pair.
“He was a quiet, normal person,” Caroline told me. “He didn’t show any signs of violence. To me he seemed normal. He was very good with his daughter. He loved his daughter a lot.”
Caroline said she knew he had a past but that she didn’t really understand the extent of it when she became involved with him at the age of 15 or 16. (He was already in his 20s.)
What worried her more was the relationship with Hayes. “To be honest, when I first met Hayes, I didn’t really like him. I thought that isn’t really a good idea, to be making friends with people from jail. Granted, I know, you guys have been through the same crap, but it’s not a good idea. It’s just going to lead to bad things. But apparently, he thought [Hayes] was a good friend.”
Still, when asked who masterminded the whole plot, Mesel professed not to know.
Her father, Norman, a minister in the area and perhaps a more objective source of information—“He was my first love,” Caroline said of Komisarjevsky—places the blame squarely at her wayward ex-boyfriend.
A few months before Komisarjevsky turned to rape and murder, Norman Mesel had a man-to-man phone conversation with the young man during which Mesel told him just how dangerous he thought he was. And around that time, Mesel packed the family up and moved them to Arkansas.
According to Mesel, the move wasn’t precipitated by his daughter’s worrisome romance, though he acknowledged that he relished the opportunity to get her away from it.
“I told Josh I viewed him as a career criminal, and I also told him I viewed him as a pedophile,” Mesel said in an interview. “He had no reaction. That’s the thing that concerned me. It spoke volumes. It was a flatline emotionally. The pitch never changed.”
• Richard Cohen: I Want Steven Hayes DeadShortly after the family’s move to Arkansas, Komisarjevsky was permitted to take his electronic ankle bracelet off. Around the same time, Hayes’ mother discovered that $2,000 her son was saving to buy a truck had disappeared, presumably because of drug use. Finally, she decided to throw Hayes out of the house, leading to a potential parole violation.
The two men began plotting a burglary, though by most accounts, it was Komisarjevsky who spotted Mrs. Petit outside a Stop & Shop with her 11-year-old daughter, Michaela. And for sure, Komisarjevsky is the one who sexually assaulted Michaela the morning of the killings. (Afterward, Hayes raped and strangled Mrs. Petit.)
Consequently, people like McDonald don’t even think robbery was at the heart of the crime when the pair broke into the Petit home. “This was more about rape than robbery, at least on Josh’s part,” McDonald said. “It was never about money. It was the thrill of the crime that got him off.”


Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.

BBC News - Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a 'mini-Big Bang'

BBC News - Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a 'mini-Big Bang'
The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.

The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

Up until now, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator - which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) - has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe's formation.

Continue reading the main story
THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

The LHC is smashing together particles in a bid to unlock the secrets of formation of our Universe
It is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva
The collider is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border
The giant tunnel is located an average of 100m underground
The LHC is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator
The circumference of the LHC is 26 659 m, with a total of 9300 magnets inside
The magnets are cooled to an operating temperature of -271.3°C (1.9 K) - colder than deep space

Proton collisions could help spot the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.

But for the next four weeks, scientists at the LHC will concentrate on analysing the data obtained from the lead ion collisions.

This way, they hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

One of the accelerator's experiments, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions, but the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments have also switched to the new mode.

'Strong force'

David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK, is one of the researchers working at ALICE.

He said that the collisions obtained were able to generate the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment.

"We are thrilled with the achievement," said Dr Evans.


The ALICE experiment has been designed specifically for lead ion collisions
"This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."

Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.

He explained that by studying the plasma, physicists hoped to learn more about the so-called strong force - the force that binds the nuclei of atoms together and that is responsible for 98% of their mass.

After the LHC finishes colliding lead ions, it will go back to smashing together protons once again.

People make me sick.

Obama 2012

Sure, things look grim for the Dems this fall. But the base will rally, the economy will turn up, and the GOP will shoot itself in the foot—ensuring the president a second term.

Arnold Schwarzenegger made headlines this week by declaring that “Obama will get a second term in office,” especially if Republicans win the House. You’ve got to hand it to the grand Teuton. Even when he says something blindingly obvious, he makes news.

Of course Barack Obama is likely to be reelected. For starters, American presidents usually get reelected. In the last 75 years, incumbents have lost a grand total of three times: in 1976, 1980, and 1992. And what did Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all have in common? They had serious primary challenges within their own party (from Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, and Pat Buchanan, respectively). The last president who lost reelection without a major primary challenge was Herbert Hoover in 1932.

In the last 75 years, incumbents have lost a grand total of three times: in 1976, 1980 and 1992. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo)

A president who isn’t challenged in his own party can usually count on a decent turnout from his party’s base. (If party activists aren’t alienated enough to throw up a primary challenger in the spring, you can usually drag them to the polls in the fall.) A president without a primary challenger also has the space to move to the center to neutralize political weaknesses: That’s what Reagan did in 1984, when he toned down the Cold War rhetoric that was frightening moderates; it’s what Bill Clinton did when he signed welfare reform in 1996; and it’s what George W. Bush did when he signed a prescription-drug bill in 2004.

There’s only one Democratic pol who could keep Obama up at night, and she’s safely tucked away at the State Department.

I doubt Obama will move as sharply to the center over the next two years as did Clinton, but he can do so to neutralize key weaknesses if he wants, because there is zero prospect that he’ll be seriously challenged in the primaries. No challenger would have any chance of stealing the black vote, of course, and even among white lefties, for all their grumbling, Obama has no national rival. In 1996, Clinton was petrified about a primary challenge from Jesse Jackson. But there’s only one Democratic pol who could keep Obama up at night, and she’s safely tucked away at the State Department.

The second reason Obama will likely win reelection is, oddly, the economy. Historically, when voters evaluate a president for reelection, they judge the economy not against some abstract standard but against the economy he inherited. That’s why Franklin Roosevelt could win 48 states in 1936 with the U.S. still mired in depression, and Ronald Reagan could win 49 in 1984, even though unemployment on Election Day was still 7.5 percent. Obama doesn’t need the economy to be booming in 2012 to win reelection, he just needs voters to feel that it is better than it was when he took office and heading in the right direction. If that’s the case, and most economists seem to think it will be, Republicans won’t get very far by harping on the deficit. In 1984, you may remember, a presidential candidate told voters to ignore the nation’s nascent economic recovery and focus instead of the country’s swelling debt. His name was Walter Mondale.

Finally, Obama’s third big advantage is his opposition: the GOP. The party has had great success in mobilizing older white conservatives, who weren’t particularly fond of Obama in the first place, and in a midterm like this one, in which younger and minority voters don’t turn out, their rage will loom large. But this very short-term success is preventing the GOP from grappling with its deeper problems attracting the Hispanic and “Millennial” generation voters who tilted heavily to the Democrats in 2008 and will comprise an even larger share of the electorate in 2012. As Schwarzenegger suggests, a GOP victory this fall will likely exacerbate the problem. With the Tea Party shaping the congressional GOP, the party’s immigration views will further alienate Hispanics.

The Tea Partiers will also put pressure on the party to attack popular government spending, as the Gingrich Republicans did after 1994. It’s worth remembering how Bill Clinton clobbered Bob Dole in 1996: He tied him to Gingrich’s assault on spending on education and health care. Obama could do something similar in 2012, proving that while Americans hate government in theory, in practice they demand it, especially in bad economic times.

It’s hard to recognize it now, with the economy in the tank and Democrats running for cover, but take a step back and you can see that we’re still probably in the early stages of an era of Democratic dominance. It’s going to be a while before another Republican wins the White House, and when they do, I bet they have less in common with Sarah Palin than with Arnold himself.