Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted became one of the villains of the 2012 presidential election for his multi-pronged efforts to restrict voting. After the election, Husted ordered all boards of elections to hold public hearings on voter fraud suspicions. Conservatives, long bereft of compelling evidence that in-person voter fraud actually exists, rushed to point out Hamilton County, Ohio, where 93 cases of anomaly votes are being investigated by the board.

The only problem is, 59 of the voters facing possible felony prosecution appear to have cast two ballots by mistake — and ultimately only had one ballot counted. The Cincinnati Enquirer conducted an extensive review of these cases, finding that most involve errors by Board of Elections employees or voter confusion:

• Five are the result of acknowledged errors by a board of elections office. In another nine cases, voters said they did what they did because a Board of Elections employee told them – or didn’t tell them – what to do.

• Eight are the result of postage problems.

• 12 came from people who were confused, according to the board’s own investigation.

On Wednesday, the board of elections split along party lines over whether 39 of these voters should be reviewed for prosecution. Husted will now have to decide whether to pursue cases like 64-year-old Bella Lipavsky, a Russian immigrant who feared she made a mistake on her absentee ballot and was told to cast a provisional ballot by poll workers. Many other Ohioans shared similar worries with the Enquirer that they had made an error on their absentee ballot or that it would not reach the board of elections. These voters then showed up at the polls and cast provisional ballots, which are used if the voter’s legitimacy is in question. In all 39 cases reviewed Wednesday, only one vote was counted.

Tim Burke, Hamilton County Board of Elections chairman, expressed misgivings to the Enquirer about “an effort by some to make it appear there is more voter fraud than there actually is” by inflating the number of allegations with people who were simply confused by the system. The Hamilton County prosecutor, Joe Deters (R), has charged 6 people for voter fraud thus far.

It’s no surprise these voters were concerned their ballots would not count; Ohio has the highest number of provisional ballots in the country, and routinely tosses thousands of legitimate votes every election. The confusion among voters and poll workers was exacerbated by Husted’s war with the courts over his voting hour restrictions and last-minute changes to vote protocols. Critics predicted that even Husted’s well-intentioned initiative to mail absentee ballot request forms to every registered voter would flood the system with provisional ballots from people who chose to return an absentee ballot application but later decided to vote in person. Sure enough, the number of provisional ballots increased in several Democratic strongholds.

While the hearings have netted a couple of cases of legitimate voter fraud — a nun who voted for a friend who passed away shortly before the election and a poll worker who filled out ballots for her granddaughter and other relatives — they make up less than .0034 percent of all Ohio voters. By contrast, laws meant to combat voter fraud raised obstacles for hundreds of thousands of people — primarily minority, low-income, and elderly Americans — trying to cast their votes all over the country. As many as 49,000 people in Florida, Ohio’s partner in election woes, were discouraged from voting by Republican voter suppression laws.

(Credit: Columbus Dispatch)

Teenage inmates in adult prisons endure higher rates of sexual abuse by staff members than adult inmates do, according to a new study from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Because of the vast under-reporting of such abuses, the true number is likely to be much higher.

While 1.8 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds in adult prisons reported being assaulted by another inmate, 3.2 percent were abused by staff. Gay and bisexual inmates were abused at even higher rates. Inmates diagnosed with serious psychological distress were also prime targets for victimization by staff members and inmates alike.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed in 2003, created the first national standards to curb sexual violence in prison. Because teenagers are considered prey in adult prisons, PREA stipulated that minors should be removed from all adult jails and prisons. Ten years later, the October 2013 deadline for state and local prison facilities to certify compliance with PREA is just a few months away. Yet inmates, primarily those who are 16 and 17 years old, continue to live under constant threat of rape in adult prisons. Three-quarters of sexually victimized youth in the DOJ study reported they were abused more than once, and nearly half said staff used force to get what they wanted.

One former juvenile inmate who was raped and abused in prison explains that the horrors they experience spill over into society at large:

Placing juveniles in adult facilities has devastating consequences not only for the youth but also for the communities from which they came. Eighty percent are released before their 21st birthday, and 95 percent are released before they turn 25. They’re coming back into society indelibly marked by what they’ve experienced — either traumatized by sexual assault, or hyper-violent from having learned to fend off the threat.

Critics of PREA note that the bill has no way to enforce its standards to curb sexual assaults and is completely dependent on self-reporting by the agencies holding the prisoners. Anecdotal evidence suggests the true number of assaults is suppressed by youths who are afraid to report. It’s no wonder many choose not to report, as a 2005 DOJ study found that few prosecutors are willing to prosecute cases that cannot prove staff members threatened overt physical force to rape inmates because the penalty is so low. Staffers who are charged will often be released on low bonds or receive short sentences because their victims were inmates. Even when staffers were clearly caught sexually abusing prisoners, only about 56 percent were referred to prosecutions.

Several exonerated men whose innocence of murder was proven years after they were sentenced to death are imploring Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) not to sign a Florida bill that would set automatic timelines for imposing the death penalty, and likely would have resulted in the execution of these and other innocent people.

The bill, known as the “Timely Justice Act,” was passed last month amid legislator sentiments that “timely justice” is more important than “guilt or innocence,” with one legislator saying, “Only God can judge. But we can sure set up the meeting.”

Now, as the deadline approaches for Gov. Scott to sign the bill, former inmates who escaped the death penalty are coming forward to demonstrate the extraordinary costs of the law’s passage, in a state with the highest number of exonerations, and more people on death row than any state but California.

“If Governor Scott would just sit with me and others like me, I know he will veto this bill that, if it had been law, would have ended my life – I am innocent,” said Seth Penalver, who sat on death row for 18 years before exonerating evidence emerged. “If he signs this bill into law, I fear other people who are innocent like me, will be unjustly executed by the State of Florida.”

Exoneree Juan Melendez wrote in the Huffington Post:

The “Timely Justice Act” would speed up a system we know has already sent innocent men, like myself, to death row. Some of these prisoners may be men like me, who have exhausted their legal appeals, yet keep trying to find a way to prove their innocence.

In multiple cases of current death row prisoners, we don’t know exactly what the legal claims are. Some of the men on Florida’s death row ran out of legal options simply because their attorneys missed filing deadlines.

In those instances, no court had the opportunity to evaluate the claims and determine whether they have merit. How can we possibly justify speeding up the execution of prisoners in those cases?

According to logic of the “Timely Justice Act,” any prisoner who has exhausted his appeals and been through a clemency process has had every opportunity and is ready for an execution date, regardless of the specific questions and issues that surround his case.

I am living proof that each case is unique and that the system must allow ample time for the truth to emerge.
Given Florida’s troubling track record on wrongful convictions, this legislation ensures the unthinkable — the execution of an innocent person.

Although the final version of the bill eliminated timelines for filing appeals and post-conviction motions, it would require the governor to issue an execution warrant to those who have exhausted their legal remedies within 30 days, and require execution within 180 days of the warrant. The problem is that when it comes to the death penalty, cases are reopened years later when new evidence finally emerges or defendants obtain the resources to uncover new evidence. In several recent instances, crucial errors in FBI analysis were not revealed until years after hundreds of individuals’ cases had been completed and decided.

Just this week in Florida, a man who was sentenced to death in 2006 is just now requesting a retrial, after he obtained lawyers in 2011 that secured testing of crucial DNA evidence.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is overturning Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that’s what freshman Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) seemed to suggest in a speech earlier this month:

Just in the last several days, a Bismarck news anchor mistakenly uttered vulgarity on live television. He’s been heralded by celebrities from New York to California as some sort of pop icon. His bosses have been called goons because they fired him. We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape, and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court-marshalled.

Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.

Cramer’s link between recent school shootings and a 40 year-old Supreme Court decision is certainly an unusual take on what causes events to transpire, but his attempt to present abortion as more dangerous to society than weakly regulated access to firearms is far from unique. Indeed, in five states, it is significantly harder to obtain an abortion than it is to purchase a gun.

The congressman’s statement appears to be part of a broader theory about how bad things are happening in the United States because people have turned away from Cramer’s version of Christianity. At another point in the speech, he claims that “[i]nnocent people in New York have airplanes flown into their places of work, and marathoners in Boston are victims of bombs, yet Christianity is singled out as bigotry in our public institutions because politicians and academics lack the courage to speak truth. We’ve normalized perversion and perverted God’s natural law to the point where the only thing not tolerated anymore is a stand for truth.”

Kansas Board of Education member Steve Roberts (R)

Kansas Board of Education member Steve Roberts (R), an elected official representing one-tenth of the state, defended on Tuesday his use of a racial epithet at a previous board meeting to “push the frontiers of political correctness.” After a former Topeka NAACP president advocated for more African American history in state curriculum standards, Roberts had brought up an unrelated non-binding 2007 New York City resolution discouraging the use of the “N-word” and other offensive language.

Roberts, a former math tutor who was first elected to the board last November, had delivered a monologue to the Rev. Ben Scott at the April board meeting during a discussion on history, government, and social studies standards. Roberts complained that New York City had banned the same racial slur that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had used (in quoting racist police forces and other segregationists) in his famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” saying:

We have to push the frontiers of political correctness and do what’s right. And so, if I were to use it clinically, I would almost use a test to see what the effect on Twitter would be. You know, ‘That Roberts guy said nigger at the state school board meeting, and he said it as, it’s probably the ugliest word in our vocabulary.’ It’s an ugly repugnant absolutely horrific word that we should rise above. But I did get it out there and I appreciate the opportunity to do it in a politically correct setting.

Watch the video:

According to Topeka Capital-Journal reports, when Scott and other civil rights leaders expressed their concern about those comments at Tuesday’s board meeting, Roberts stood by his remarks.

“I did my best to say the ‘N-word’ clinically,” he noted, adding “I’m willing to be considered politically incorrect … I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” Roberts then accused those criticizing his comments as only wanting media attention.

Two events this morning strike at the heart of whether workers have the right to organize. The first is a brand new decision by two Republican judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit striking down President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The second is a confirmation hearing, coincidentally being held this morning, on five nominees to that same Board. If the Third Circuit’s opinion stands, and the five nominees are not confirmed, the practical result will be a blank check for union-busting employers.

The background here stretches back to a 2010 decision by the Supreme Court holding that the NLRB is powerless to act unless it has a quorum of at least three members. The NLRB has exclusive jurisdiction over what are known as “unfair labor practices,” meaning that it is the only body of government permitted to enforce much of federal labor law. If the NLRB is powerless to act, there will be no one to enforce workers’ rights to join a union without intimidation from their employer. No one to enforce workers’ rights to join together to oppose abusive work conditions. And no one to make an employer actually bargain with a union. Without an NLRB to enforce the law, it may be possible for an employer to round up all of their pro-union workers, fire them, and then replace them with anti-union scabs who will immediately call a vote to decertify the union.

This reality gave Senate Republican filibusters of President Obama’s NLRB nominees a special aura of danger. When the Senate minority filibusters nominees to a powerful court, the other judges on that court can continue to issue decisions (even if those decisions are likely to reflect the ideological preferences of past presidents). If senators filibuster most agency heads, the agency’s remaining staff can maintain its day to day operations. But if a filibuster blocks confirmations to the NLRB, a sweeping array of workers’ rights simply cease to exist.

To ward this off, President Obama recess appointed three people to the NLRB nearly a year and a half ago. A panel of Republican-appointed judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down those recess appointments earlier this year. And, today, two more Republican judges voted to strike down the same appointments (an Obama appointee on the same court voted to uphold them).

While the rationale behind the these two court decisions is somewhat different, it’s not clear how much legal arguments actually matter in a case like this. The bottom line is that every Republican judge to consider the matter has now struck down President Obama’s appointments. There are five Republicans, and only four Democrats on the Supreme Court. That’s probably all you need to know if you’re placing bets on how the justices will resolve the case.
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In the nation’s highest court, corporations are winning immunity from lawsuits at a higher rate than ever, in part because they can invest tremendous sums in litigation. But in many state high courts, corporations have yet another tool in their arsenal to rig the game in their favor: spending on state judicial elections. And as spending on judicial elections continues to break new records nationwide, those six state supreme courts that have seen the most money pour into their judicial elections since 2002 — Texas, Alabama, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois – saw individuals losing to corporate defendants in the overwhelming majority of the cases, according to a new Center for American Progress report. These states are seeing average win rates of 70 percent for corporate defendants, and this rate does not even account for the countless individuals who never sue to begin with, because both the laws of the state and the orientation of the judges pummel their chances at success. Report author Billy Corriher explains:

One Texas plaintiff, Connie Spears of San Antonio, ran up against the state’s stringent medical-malpractice laws when she sought to hold a hospital accountable for failing to diagnose a blood clot, a problem she had previously experienced. The delay in discovering the clot led to the amputation of both of her legs. It took years for her to find a lawyer willing to take the case, due to Texas’ defendant-friendly laws, and once she did, she could not find an expert witness who met the state’s standards. Spears says that negligent medical care has impacted her family and “ruined all of our lives,” but she could not hold anyone accountable in Texas.

Even in in those cases in which the evidence is so overwhelming that lawyers believe they may be able to overcome the onerous legal standards set by courts and legislatures, individuals have lost over and over. In Ohio, a plant worker whose leg was crushed and pelvis fractured after he was pinned against an electric powered fork lift could not overcome the state legal requirement that corporations have “deliberate intent” to injure the employee, in spite of rampant evidence of willful negligence. In fact, Bruce Houdek’s manager had explicitly told the forklift drivers not to avoid aisles where employees were driving fork lifts and labeling inventory. He lost his case for damages 6-1.

When individuals do win, stringent damage caps preclude awards that compensate to the full extent of the loss. In Texas, a family who said their son’s skull was crushed during birth and suffered severe brain damage recovered the maximum award of $500,000 – an amount eaten up by medical bills in just the first three weeks of his life. The boy’s father was a small business owner, and had been a public supporter of damage caps until he experienced what that meant for him. He is now an outspoken opponent of damage caps. Texas, which has recently seen one of the highest corporate win rates of 85 percent, saw a deluge of corporate money in the mid-1990s after a court ruling invalidated a state damages cap. Thanks both to elections spending and political lobbying for so-called “tort reform,” the state now has some of the strictest limits on liability for negligent health care providers. And in a sign that this insulation from liability really does affect corporate accountability, Texas now also holds the title of number one in workplace fatalities, and has more than three times the number of accidents, and four times the number of injuries and deaths as the second-ranking state, Illinois.