Did you know:
Hundreds of people have been found to be falsely incarcerated
and eventually released?

Did you know:
Many more may be denied an opportunity to present their
claims of innocence in the courts because of current laws?

Learn How to Fight for the Rights of Innocent people!

Grassroots organizers, prison rights advocates and the loved ones of incarcerated persons
are encouraged to attend our Grassroots organizers workshop Saturday, June 4th, from
10:00 AM to 4:00 pm (lunch will be served so let us know that you’re coming)

THE COALITION FOR HEALING PA JUSTICE:
PCRA INITIATIVE

Join us Saturday, June 4th at 10:00 a.m.
Calvary United Church of Christ
29th &Lehigh Avenue, Philadelphia

Learn How To:
Organize the community
Raise public awareness
Lobby elected officials
Work with the press
And much more

For more info. Please call Nathaniel Lee @ 215-391-5836

Free will donations will be collected to help support Calvary United Church of Christ

By Nathan Gorenstein

Inquirer Staff Writer

No matter who wins the latest round in the 30-year-old Mumia Abu-Jamal case, unresolved challenges to his death sentence lurk in the files waiting for a day – or a decade – in court.

The longevity of Abu-Jamal’s appeals – he was 27 when he shot 25-year-old Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981 – has been no surprise to attorneys working the case. That reality was reiterated last week by the latest ruling, which awarded him a new sentencing hearing.

Could appeal proceedings still drag on for years? “I think that’s true,” said Hugh J. Burns Jr., chief of the District Attorney’s Office appeals unit.

Abu-Jamal’s first-degree murder conviction is settled. The jury’s verdict was upheld by a 2001 U.S. District Court opinion. But that 272-page decision also provided the basis for the current fight over Abu-Jamal’s death sentence and for potential litigation.

For now, Philadelphia prosecutors are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court the decision Tuesday that confusing jury instructions in 1982 mean a new jury must resentence Abu-Jamal, now 57, either to death or to life in prison.

The jury issue was one of 29 claims in a 1999 appeal filed for the former radio reporter who became a political radical. In 2001, U.S. District Judge William Yohn tossed out most of the arguments but allowed the jury-instruction claim to proceed.

Since then, federal courts have batted that issue, among others, back and forth. In 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit agreed on a new sentencing hearing, and in 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court told the panel to reconsider. Last week, the Third Circuit court said it had not changed its mind.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams immediately announced he would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn that decision.

If the Supreme Court accepts the appeal – no sure thing – and if the 1982 death sentence is upheld, only the litigation on that issue will end. Three more of the 29 claims, all involving the death sentence, are still unresolved and under law must be decided by Yohn.

“It would automatically go back to the District Court to decide the rest of the issues,” said Robert B. Dunham, a lawyer who teaches death-penalty law at Villanova University School of Law and handles appellate cases in federal court.

Those issues include a claim that the death penalty is racially biased in Pennsylvania.

The original Abu-Jamal prosecutor, Joseph J. McGill, now in private practice, attended a Third Circuit session in November during which arguments on the jury’s instructions were heard. The 10 white and two black jurors convicted Abu-Jamal of killing Faulkner early Dec. 9, 1981, near 13th and Locust Streets.

Last week, McGill said that if the Supreme Court refused to hear the latest appeal or upheld the defense, a new penalty hearing would likely be held. And if Abu-Jamal were to be sentenced to life, “I think it’s pretty much ended there.”

To read the rest of this article go to:

Abu-Jamal’s case is far from over – Philly.com

TONY AUTH / The Philadelphia Inquirer (tauth@phillynews.com)

Darwinism is more often associated with the liberal left than the conservative right, but it’s moved a long way across the political spectrum from Darwin’s day, when it was embraced by advocates of free-market economics, colonialism, and similar ideas today associated with the right.

Apparently, Darwinism is still sometimes invoked in arguments for economic conservatism. It’s reflected in a recent e-mail I received from a reader: “Maybe you should write about the current reversing of evolution by humans, using technology. . . . Fitness, in humans, means the intelligence and ability to deliver a healthy child. . . . Today, especially in the USA, the least fit make the most offspring while the more fit have the least children. The most fit pay to insure the survival and future breeding of the least fit.”

Let’s leave aside the part connecting fitness and intelligence for another column, since the term fitness has a very specific meaning in evolution apart from what people try to achieve in the gym. Instead, I’ll focus on the idea that helping people interferes with evolution.

I find this letter so intriguing because it reflects the reaction some people had to Darwin’s publication of On The Origin of Species in 1859.

According to University of Massachusetts historian Diane Paul, people of Darwin’s time realized that evolution was an ongoing process and that our policies and medical advances would influence its direction.

Some preached that charity and social services impeded evolution – a position that came to be called social Darwinism.

Many Christians of the time opposed that attitude, believing mankind should help the poor and the sick.

Paul said Darwin’s writing reflected mixed reactions to the ideas that would later be called social Darwinism. He did, however, hit on an important argument against it in his second book, The Descent of Man: Sympathetic instincts that lead us to aid the helpless are themselves products of natural selection.

That idea has stood the test of time.

“Evolution made us all the things we are by nature – it made us cooperative and selfish,” said David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University. Evolution, he said, left us with the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.

To read the rest go to:

Survival of the kindest: The evolution of sympathy | Philly | 05/02/2011

Judith Trustone, Cats’ Secret Guide to Living with Humans | The Real Dr. Doolittle Show | Animal Talk |

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How “enemy creep” is Guantanamo-izing America.

By Karen J. Greenberg

You only had to listen to the recent hearings convened by New York Republican Congressman Peter King on radicalization and the Muslim religion to know that, if the ascending right in Washington (and elsewhere) has its way, the age of tolerance in America is over.  In the name of putting political correctness in its grave, a surprisingly sizeable contingent of politicians, judges, and other influential figures are now calling for transforming draconian behavior — that once would have made Americans blanche — into the order of the day.

Blaming Political Correctness for Terrorism

King’s hearings underscored the urgency with which a growing cast of influential characters seeks to open yet wider the door to the sort of anti-democratic (and anti-constitutional) actions that have been woven into counterterrorism policy since September 11, 2001. As chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, King made it his job to acknowledge the obstacle that — as he might put it — excessive tolerance for minorities, foreigners, or other religions and cultures can pose. “To back down [from these hearings],” he insisted when criticized, “would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee — to protect America from a terrorist attack.”

It was hardly the first time in the Obama era that political correctness has been identified as a major cause of terrorism, or at least as a major roadblock to confronting terrorism.  One need only think back to the November 2009 killing spree in which Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim Army psychiatrist, fatally gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. In an op-ed penned several days after the attack, Republican Congressman John Carter, who represents the district where Fort Hood is located, pointedly connected political correctness to the dangers posed to the country by terrorism, warning, “Political correctness is killing Americans and undermining the national security of the United States.”

To read the rest of this article go to:

Torture the New Black? How We’ve Come Accept Cruel Treatment for Anyone Perceived as an ‘Enemy’ | Ne

If you missed Part I of the Global Kindness Revolution Teleseminar, not to worry. You can access the complete audio file for the Global Kindness Revolution Part I using the link below:

Global Kindness Revolution

The Global Kindness Revolution Part 2

Mini Seminar

Free & Open to the Public

In remembrance of the upcoming anniversary of the Three Miles Island nuclear disaster and its relevance today, I’m posting “Three Miles Island Woman” which was published in a variety of places, none of which I’ve recorded. When friends who were sailing around the world stopped for a while in New Zealand, they saw the poem in a New Zealand Magazine and then took it around the world with them, for the whole world was shocked and talking about Three Mile Island, just like today.

Three Mile Island Woman
By Judith Trustone
March 28, 1979

Home again
sparkling kitchen
shag carpet hiding
paranoia … breathed
dreamed just around the edge
of every moment.
She stares at the glass
In her hand eyes searching for atomic
particles swallowing
fear she drinks
water.
Dust dancing in sunbeams
looks menacing.
Afraid to breathe eat sleep
she covers her swollen
belly with sweaty hands.

Even prisoner advocacy groups focus mainly on the conditions of confinement, without necessarily questioning sentences that drive prisoners to despair.

By Liliana Segura

Shawangunk Correctional Facility sits on a long swath of land in Wallkill, NY, just west of the Hudson River, and about an hour and 45 minutes north of New York City. Opened in 1985, last year marked the prison’s 25th anniversary, which was celebrated at Shawangunk’s “clubhouse” by some 200 officials. The local Wallkill High School Choir sang the national anthem and the prison was bestowed with the “Pride of Ulster County Award,” a recognition of its benefit to the community.

For prisoners’ families living downstate, Shawangunk is nothing to celebrate. Getting there can be prohibitively costly, especially if you don’t drive. Buses to nearby New Paltz cost more than $40 round-trip from Manhattan and leave you ten miles away. A train to Beacon, across the river, is cheaper, but cabs have been known to charge $40 to take you to the prison. The “free bus” that brings New Yorkers to upstate prisons only visits Shawangunk once a month, and getting a spot can be tricky. Inmates must put in a request for a limited number of tickets well in advance.

Most people visit on weekends. On this particular Sunday, a piece of paper taped to the wall in the visitor’s office announces that the free bus is being suspended for the next two months.

“Where’s the ID for her?” a young, white officer asks a very pregnant African American woman as she prepares to take off her shoes to go through the metal detector. “Her” is a young toddler in pigtails, shuffling around in her snow boots. Her mother runs outside, exasperated. She’s forgotten the birth certificate in the car. It’s lucky she has it. People have been refused visits for far less.

We fill out the usual forms—name of the prisoner we’re visiting, car model and plate number, relationship to prisoner and “reason for visit.” We get a key for a small locker, where we put items we’re not allowed to bring in. Today, these include a pen, my sweater (no zippers allowed) and my knit hat. “An inmate could use it to escape,” says a guard with a sardonic smile.

Yet Shawangunk seems more relaxed than other maximum security facilities. No one is making me take off my underwire bra here (although that has been known to happen) and, today at least, no one is being searched for drugs. With the exception of the man at the desk who seems to relish his little perch of authority, the guards are respectful of visitors.

The visiting room is full. As in every other prison I’ve gone to, visitors are mostly women, most of them non-white. There’s an outside area with picnic tables available for warmer days. Like the rest of New York, it is currently covered in snow.

It’s the second time I’m visiting Nick and I’m feeling bad. He has written me many time since the summer and I have not been good at keeping up. He is serving life without parole for a grisly rape and murder on Long Island that he says he did not commit. I’ve met too many men exonerated for similar crimes in New York not to take his claim seriously. But that’s not the point of my visit; he does not expect me to help him get out. As a leader within the prison’s Lifer’s Association, he wants to talk about sentencing reform, and so do I, along with two other visitors, a woman who works for an organization that provides re-entry services, and a social worker I’ve known for years.

To read more go to:

Life Without Parole: When You Know You’ll Spend Your Whole Life in Prison | Civil Liberties

By Chris Foreman
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 13, 2011

Rosemary Gido calls state prisons asylums for the invisible, particularly women.

A criminology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Gido said an estimated 42 percent of women in U.S. jails and prisons are mentally ill, compared with 24 percent of men.

In Pennsylvania, the Department of Corrections reports that 44 percent of female inmates and 18.6 percent of male inmates have mental health issues.

Women are more likely to have a co-occurring disorder — meaning mental health problems combined with drug or alcohol abuse — and a history of trauma, according to Gido, the former director of program and policy analysis for the New York State Commission of Corrections.

“We have primarily put people in prison who are addicts,” said Gido, who collaborated with IUP alumna Lanette Dalley on a book, “Women’s Mental Health Issues Across the Criminal Justice System.”

“I very much sympathize with correctional systems and jails and wardens because (their facilities) are the repository for these people, and they pretty much have to make do with what they have.”

Gido and Dalley, a professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, attribute the increase in mentally ill inmates to the failures of deinstitutionalization and the “War on Drugs” over the past half-century, as well as mandatory sentencing laws. Their book includes 14 years of research on jailed women’s mental health needs.

William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, said women “really get short shrift” because the state system is generally geared toward the men. His Philadelphia-based organization advocates for inmates, their families and former prisoners.

He cites clothing for female inmates that often seems better suited for men because the waists on the pants are too big and the legs frequently need to be rolled up at the bottom. “It’s almost as if there’s been an attempt to take away femininity that they might otherwise have,” DiMascio said.

To read more go to:

Professors: Prison fails mentally ill women