Public vigilance reaps rewards for imprisoned children

Despite recent changes, we're still keeping children in prison. There is a converted prison, the T. Don Hutto

Family Residential Center in Tyler Texas, that houses families of illegal immigrants. Whole families, children, infants, all.

This facility had come under harsh criticism in the past year for failing to meet basic requirements mandated by congress, to the DHS and by extension the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

From the ACLU (3/6/2007)

In 2005 and 2006, Congress directed DHS to keep immigrant families together, either by releasing them or using alternatives to detention. If detention is necessary, Congress said immigrant families should be housed in non-penal, homelike environments.

...

Approximately 400 people are currently detained in Hutto, half of them children, and many of them are refugees seeking political asylum. What ICE calls a “Family Residential Facility” is in fact a converted medium-security prison that is still functionally and structurally a prison. Children are required to wear prison garb, receive only one hour of recreation a day, Monday through Friday, and some children did not go outdoors in the fresh air the whole month of December, 2006, according to legal papers filed today. They are detained in small cells for 11-12 hours each day where they cannot keep food and toys and they have no privacy, even when using the toilet.

This is the same facility that would on occasion separate parents from children, which is exactly what this facility's existence is supposed to prevent.
USA Today

An 8-year-old girl was separated from her pregnant mother and left behind for four days at a detention center established to keep immigrant families together while their cases are processed.

And why was that family here in the U.S.?

Banegas said the pair fled Honduras earlier this year to escape an abusive relationship and growing gang violence in that country, including attacks that broke her sister's ribs and left her with scars. She asked that her sister and niece not be named because of concerns for their safety.

Finally, 2 years later, changes are being made.

Statesman.com

The concertina wire is gone. So are the imposing steel doors in the booking area and the green and purple hospital-type scrubs issued to immigrants and their children. Also gone are the routine head counts by uniformed guards that awakened children in the middle of the night at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention center.

The only reason these changes are being made is because of the public outcry, because of the coverage by the ACLU, NPR, the New York Times.
ICE plans to open more of these facilities (instead of say, electronic monitoring) which is troubling merely in the idea of more "family" prisons springing up. But beyond that, we must watch these new prisons, to make sure the "improvements" of the Hutto center continue. We must also be sure that conditions do not deteriorate once again to a travesty, once the spotlight has moved on.

Capital Punishment as Practiced in the Real World

I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.
-Harry Blackmun Justice of the Supreme Court


Bobby has laid out several arguments in favor of the death penalty, specifically in Texas.

The death penalty, once carried out, is obviously irreversible. If new forensics technology or new evidence arises that may prove a prisoner’s innocence after his execution, there’s no “taking it back”.
The very idea of executing innocent people is the strongest argument against the death penalty, in my opinion. Bobby’s statement that “There is no conclusive evidence that any of these people were innocent.” is at best, misleading and I believe, highly inaccurate.

There is indeed ample evidence that innocent men and women have been sent to death row, some executed before they were exonerated. Take the case of Ruben Cantu
Cantu, executed despite no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and no witnesses who could have provided an alibi were interviewed. The lone eyewitness has recanted, claiming police pressure to identify Cantu.

Or the case of “>Cameron T. Willingham. Of two extremely similar cases of murder by arson,

The report says that prosecution witnesses in both cases interpreted fire indicators like cracked glass and burn marks as evidence that the fires had been set, when more up-to-date technology shows that the indicators could just as well have signified an accidental fire. In one case, the signs were accepted as proof of guilt, the report said; in the other, they were discarded as misleading. "These two outcomes are mutually exclusive," Mr. Scheck said. "Willis cannot be found 'actually innocent' and Willingham executed based on the same scientific evidence."

Beyond those, we have the long term study by James S. Liebman, a Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School. This is as summarized by Death Penalty Information Center

High error rates put people at risk of wrongful execution. 82% of the people whose capital judgments were overturned by state post-conviction courts due to serious error were found to deserve a sentence less than death when the errors were cured on retrial. 7% were found to be innocent of the capital crime.

Beyond that, what about questions of due process, or of race being a factor in death penalty cases? Again, as quoted by the Death Penalty research center: “"In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."
- United States General Accounting Office, Death Penalty Sentencing, February 1990”

Or as the NACDL says:
“The [Texas Court of Criminal Appeals] also upheld at least three death sentences in a Houston case in which the lawyer for the defendant slept during the trial.”

Like the case of Calvin Burdine who at one point “[came] within hours of execution”.

The Texas Governor can be the court of "last resort" in these cases, claimed as another check on the innocent or the undeserving being executed. But take the tenure of Governor Bush, who “[spent] between 15 and 30 minutes on each case” (San Jose Mercury News via Common Dreams
“Judge Al Gonzales, who was Bush's legal counsel for the governor's first 59 executions, says Bush would typically spend about a half hour on each of the cases.”
via Salon


I could rail against the death penalty as barbaric, as a avenue for revenge, but I’d rather let the facts speak for themselves.
When the mistakes are irreversible, we cannot afford there to be a single flaw in this system. A flawless process is clearly not in place, and innocent people die because of it.