After an outcry from judges, professors, and other community leaders about the unjust and discriminatory imposition of the death penalty in Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) agreed to indefinitely grant reprieve to death row inmate Nathan Dunlap, citing his uncertainty about the death penalty generally, and not his opposition to this particular execution. His order reads:

It is a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives. Because the question is about the use of the death penalty itself, and not about Offender No. 89148, I have opted to grant a reprieve and not clemency in this case.

Hickenlooper also said Colorado’s system is flawed, citing a study that showed the death penalty was applied inconsistently. Hickenlooper’s announcement comes several months after the failure of a bill to abolish the death penalty. Ironically, the bill died after Hickenlooper suggested he might veto it, but the movement to expose Colorado’s broken death penalty system did not. In letters imploring Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, members of the NAACP exposed statistics that the three individuals on Colorado’s death row are all black, all from the same one county, and all committed their crimes before they turned 21. A group of judges lamented that Dunlap’s trial was rife with error, with Dunlap’s lawyer never even raising his history of bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies.

Hickenlooper’s grant of a reprieve rather than clemency means that John Dunlap’s execution will be on hold until another executive order, according to the Denver Post. But Hickenlooper said it was “highly unlikely” he would revisit the decision, although another governor might. The decision means that Colorado is, in effect, not imposing the death penalty, and Hickenlooper’s public opposition may lead to a revival of legislation to officially abolish it. Eighteen other states have abolished the punishment, which data shows is disproportionately and arbitrarily applied and does not deter violent crime.

 

McMinnville, Oregon Police brutally assaulted a man who was neither being arrested nor accused of any crime, according to dashboard camera footage and an internal police review recently acquired by Portland’s Newschannel 8.

Hipolito Aranda was watching the police conduct a DUI investigation on February 13th, 2010, when he was approached and frisked by Sgt. Tim Heidt. Though Aranda offered no resistance, Heidt handcuffed him, threw him to the ground, and began punching him repeatedly all around his body. The video footage corroborates this narrative of events:

Newschannel 8 Reporter Kyle Iboshi reports that, according to the internal McMinnville Police report, “Heidt did not have probable cause or evidence of a threat that would justify the initial frisk.” Moreover, “There was no visible actions on Hipolito’s part that warranted the aggressive take-down used in this situation,” and the officer’s account of the events “is extremely troubling even if not deceitful.” Heidt had accused Aranda of resisting arrest, but a jury cleared Aranda.

The ordeal was terrifying for Aranda. “I thought I was going to die,” he said. Though Aranda is currently pursuing a civil rights suit over the matter, Sgt. Heidt remains on duty.

This is the second older case of police brutality to come to public attention in recent weeks. In Berkeley, California, two police officers nearly killed a man for asking to read the ticket they were (incorrectly) assigning him before he signed it.

Bishop E.W. Jackson, the Republican nominee to be the next Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, does not believe that victims of the Oklahoma tornado should receive any federal aid to help them rebuild their lives. In video from a previous campaign first posted by Right Wing Watch, Jackson claims that federal relief to disaster victims is unconstitutional:

JACKSON: I don’t think that the federal government has much of a role at all constitutionally, at all [in disaster relief]. Now, you may make an argument that it does. You might argue that it’s a national security issue you might argue that it weakens us in the event of some sort of national military emergency. So you can make an attenuated argument. But I think that as a constitutional matter the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot to do with that. In my view, these are things that are ultimately supposed to be handled by the states. And, so, we’ve got a big Tenth Amendment problem in our country. . . . We’ve turned the federal government into a kind of god.

Watch it:

Disaster relief is not an attempt to steal power from God. To the contrary, it is the just response of a nation sensitive to the lesson of 1 John 3:17, which reads that “if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”

It is also entirely consistent with the Constitution. The Constitution gives the United States broad authority to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Ensuring that all Americans can rebuild their lives in the wake of a major national disaster is a classic example of using federal revenues to provide for the general welfare.

While Jackson’s view of the Constitution is wrong, it is not surprising giving the range of unusual views he’s expressed in the past. Jackson believes that Planned Parenthood is “more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was.” He thinks that the original Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause, which gave slave states additional representation in the U.S. House by allowing them to count 60 percent of their slave population when congressional seats were apportioned among the states, was “an anti-slavery amendment.” He accused Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) of faking his faith. And he believes that being gay “poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of.”

In April, Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) refused to vote for the Senate’s bill to expand background checks on gun purchases, pushing a debunked conspiracy theory that the bill would create a national gun registry to justify his opposition. Now that anti-gun violence groups are targeting him along with other senators who voted against the failed legislation, Heller sent a letter to his constituents insisting on his support for increased gun control.

As 87 percent of Nevadans support background checks, the letter avoided any mention of Heller’s vote against the Manchin-Toomey background checks compromise. Instead, the senator touted his co-sponsorship of an NRA-supported bill that claimed to strengthen background checks but would actually make it easier for mentally ill people to get guns.

I have been adamant from the beginning of the gun control debate that our current background check system needs strengthening and improving, particularly in areas that could keep guns out of the hands of felongs and the mentally ill. We need to increase submission rates of disqualifying records by state as well as close existing loopholes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). You may be interested to know, I am an original cosponsor of bipartisan legislation, the NICS Reporting Improvement Act (S.480), to strengthen our current background check system and close loopholes related to the mentally ill. This legislation provides clarity to existing law and is a common sense approach to preventing unnecessary violence.

The bill Heller refers to was drafted in consultation with the NRA and would allow patients who were involuntarily committed and treated for mental illness to pass a background check. Despite his professed support for gun control, Heller has actually voted to loosen gun laws. He has repeatedly supported a proposal to allow concealed weapons to be carried into states where they are illegal, co-sponsored two bills to make interstate gun purchases easier and to repeal Washington, D.C. gun laws. Indeed, the NRA-backed bill he’s now trying to pass off as a background checks bill would have also weakened gun laws by making it easier to buy guns across state lines. As gun sales in states with lax gun laws are a common method of evading stricter laws in other states, the bill Heller touts in his letter could very well have made gun violence worse.

Heller is not the only senator trying to dissemble on their gun control stance after voting against background checks. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) responded to an ad criticizing his vote by claiming he did vote to strengthen background checks. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) also had some help from the NRA in an ad trying to obscure her anti-background check vote.

During the Tea Party’s uprising of 2009, E.W. Jackson, the controversial Republican candidate for Virginia Lieutenant Governor, founded a socially conservative organization named Staying True To America’s National Destiny (STAND).

Though the website has since been heavily scrubbed, a cached version from October 9, 2009 shows that Jackson’s group initially spelled out its “Top 7 Issues”. The second most important issue, he argued, was “to bring an end to the hyphenated American.” Jackson warned that by referring to oneself as Jewish-American or Hispanic-American, it comes “at the expense of our national unity.”

STAND FOR AN END TO THE HYPHENATED AMERICAN

It is time to bring an end to the hyphenated American. We have balkanized ourselves into islands of ethnocentrism: Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. We understand the desire of people to maintain a connection to their history and ancestry. That desire is legitimate, but not at the expense of our national unity. We are Americans with different ethnic backgrounds, but we are first and foremost Americans. Some of our forefathers came from Europe, some from Asia, India, the African continent and a host of nations around the world. If we restrict ourselves to our ethnic enclaves and ethnic identities, we deprive ourselves of the great benefits of the American experiment. It is about uniting a diverse group of people with a common love for freedom, democracy and the ideals of our nation. We are a family. We unite under one Constitution, one flag, and one common destiny. Without a single language, that ideal will become farther and farther from reality.

See a screenshot below:

Preventing Americans from acknowledging their ethnic heritage was so important to Jackson that it actually edged out abortion (3rd most important) and outlawing marriage equality (4th most important) in his list of top issues.

Jackson did deem one problem even more troubling than the hyphen, however. His number one issue was creating an “American History Month,” because “[w]e have Black History Month and Gay Pride Month, but these only serve to further balkanize us.”

During the just-concluded trial on the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, the city argued that officers’ disproportionate targeting of black and Latino New Yorkers was not due to racial profiling but because each stopped individual was doing something suspicious at the time. The data, however, tells a different story: weapons and drugs were more often found on white New Yorkers during stops than on minorities, according to the Public Advocate’s analysis of the NYPD’s 2012 statistics.

White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon was half the likelihood of finding one on a white person.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.

It’s unlikely that the appropriate lesson to take from these findings is that stops of white people should increase because they are more likely to carry weapons and drugs. Rather, they suggest that police are excessively targeting minorities. Officers may be netting more successful stops of white New Yorkers because they are only likely to stop a white person when they actually suspect that person of committing a crime. Considering one officer’s testimony that superiors explicitly directed him to target young black men, minorities are judged by a much more flexible definition of “reasonable suspicion.”

And this loose approach to the Constitution’s ban on unlawful searches and seizures is part of a larger pattern of African-Americans being targeted by police. In one incident an officer cuffed and detained a 13-year-old African American boy, the son of a former cop, for six hours because he allegedly reached into his pants’ waistband. Other cops punched and pepper-sprayed a 38-year-old veteran who was discussing Memorial Day plans with friends on a street corner. Yet another black man reported being stopped and arrested 4 times in one year on criminal trespass charges later dismissed by a judge.

In general, stop-and-frisk has proven to be remarkably ineffective; nearly 89 percent of all stops result in no charges. The city has also had to settle a surging number of civil rights lawsuits against police to the tune of $22 million in one year.

Last August, a woman in Josephine County called 911 and pleaded with dispatchers to send police — “my ex-boyfriend is trying to break into my house. I’m not letting him in but he’s like, tried to break down the door and he’s tried to break into one of the windows.” The woman had good reason to be afraid of this man, as she told the dispatcher on the other side of the phone, this same abusive ex had put her in the hospital just a few weeks before. But the dispatcher has no one to send. Because the local sheriff’s department recently lost millions in federal funds, it laid off 23 of its 29 deputies and limited their availability to eight hours on Mondays through Fridays. The woman’s call to 911 took place on a Saturday.

With no deputies available, the 911 dispatcher transferred the woman to the state police — but they would not come rescue the woman either. In the words of the state police dispatcher, “I don’t have anybody to send out there. You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”

Eventually, the ex-boyfriend, a man named Michael Bellah, pried open the woman’s front door. Choked her. And raped her. After he was caught, he plead guilty to kidnapping, assault, and sex abuse.

This woman’s situation was not a tragic outlier — while Sheriff Gil Gilberson declined to comment on this specific case, he noted to Oregon Public Radio “[t]here isn’t a day go by that we don’t have another victim” due to a law enforcement deficit caused by a budget cuts that went into effect last May.

The Josephine County’s Sheriff’s Office budget was cut after the the expiration of a multi-million dollar annual federal aid payment to timber-dependent counties, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, originally passed in 2000. The federal government previously shared timber sale revenues from public lands with rural counties to offset the lack of property taxes from those lands, but as logging was reduced by 90 percent in federal lands since 1989, the aid program replaced that revenue source.

Without money from the program, the county was forced to lay off most of its deputies and close its entire major crimes division. Two of the remaining six deputies are limited to patrolling federal forest lands and a local river because of how their positions are funded.

After the cuts, Gilberson released a press statement suggesting victims of domestic violence “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.” The Grant Pass State Police Office usually has just two officers working per shift, but has become the only resource for local law enforcement on weekends. They’ve received about three times as many calls in as in the past.

But despite these dire circumstances, yesterday Josephine County voted 51 to 49 percent against a public safety levy for more law enforcement. The levy would have raised county property taxes from 59 cents per $1,000 of property value, the lowest in Oregon, to $1.48 for the next three years. It rejected a similar property tax levy increasing the rate to $1.99 per $1,000 shortly before the initial cuts 57 to 43 percent.

While clearly, the situation in Josephine County is an extreme example of a community failing to live up to public safety needs of its residents, the community is not alone in struggling to recover from revenue lost with the expiration of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. Nationwide more than 700 counties in 41 states benefited from the program, including 33 of the 36 counties in Oregon.

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.

Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic debates on the same basic concepts.

The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites,” has proved proper tinder for a public firestorm. The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies is now a former Senior Policy Analyst — Heritage could not risk further tainting an immigration report it hoped would be influential by outright defending its scholar’s meditations on the possibly genetic intellectual inferiority of immigrants from Latin America.

It might seem like the book is closed on l’affaire Richwine: he’s left his job, Heritage is left with a black eye, and not a single mind has been changed about the value of research into race and IQ. But there’s still one major unanswered question.

If the dissertation was bad enough to get him fired from the Heritage Foundation, how did it earn him a degree from Harvard?

A popular answer among Richwine’s defenders is that, quite simply, it was exemplary work. Richwine’s dissertation committee was made up, by all accounts, of three eminent scholars, each widely respected in their respective fields. And it is Harvard.

But dozens of interviews with subject matter experts, Harvard graduates in Richwine’s program who overlapped with him, and members of the committee itself paint a somewhat more textured picture. Richwine’s dissertation was sloppy scholarship, relying on statistical sophistication to hide some serious conceptual errors. Yet internal accounts of Richwine’s time at Harvard suggests the august university, for the most part, let serious problems in Richwine’s research  fall through the cracks.

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