Tag: U.S.

Black Americans — some of them anyway — might soon receive reparations for the country’s legacy of slavery and racism. In California, a task force is debating “recommendations for how the state can atone for and address its legacy of discriminatory policies against Black Californians,” The Associated Press reports. But it’s not just California: Officials in Boston and Kansas City are also discussing what reparations might look like in their cities. Many other towns, cities, and colleges are doing the same. What are the arguments for and against reparations? Here’s everything you need to know:When did the discussion of reparations start?Even before the Civil War ended. In 1865, Maj. General William Tecumseh Sherman famously ordered that “40 acres and a mule” be given to Black Americans freed from slavery. “That account is half-right: Sherman prescribed the 40 acres in that order, but not the mule,” Henry Louis Gates explains in his PBS show The African Americans. “The mule would come later.” The order was designed to answer a simple but urgent question as slavery ended, DeNeen L. Brown writes for The Washington Post: “How would thousands of newly freed Black people survive economically after more than 200 years of bondage and unpaid labor?” But the order was quickly reversed after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and his successor, President Andrew Johnson, issued an “amnesty” order that evicted most of the former enslaved people from their new land. “Thousands of Black people left without land were eventually forced into sharecropping and peonage.”Why talk about reparations now? The discussion has been going on for a long time. For example: Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) spent decades backing a bill that would force the U.S. government to study the issue, but it went nowhere.  Two events seem to have given fresh energy to the modern reparations movement, though. The first was a 2014 article in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he argued that racism in America — not just slavery, but also Jim Crow and “redlining” housing policies, among other factors — engineered a wealth gap between Blacks and whites “which remains with us to this day.” (He suggested that real reparations would involve more than cutting checks, but would involve “a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”) And the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a national outcry that led directly to the current California task force. What might reparations look like?Evanston, Illinois, in 2021 became the first American city to authorize reparations: The first phase involved giving 16 residents $25,000 each to make home repairs. One critic called the effort “a housing plan dressed up as reparations,” while another suggested that “giving $400,000 to 16 Black people in a town of 12,000 Black residents is not reparation.” That’s just one example. Another is the 1988 federal law that paid $20,000 each to more than 80,000 Japanese Americans who were interned by the U.S. during World War II. So is Germany’s decades-long efforts to compensate Holocaust survivors after the war. Coming up with a workable proposal is hard and often controversial work, however. In California, the task force decided this year “to limit reparations to descendants of Black people in the United States as of the 19th century, either as freed or enslaved people,” AP reports. And there is still much work to be done figuring out “how financial compensation might be calculated and what might be required to prove eligibility.”Are there any objections to reparations? Yes. While polling shows that support for the idea has grown over the years, it’s still the case that “a national majority opposes reparations,” USA Today reports. Those polls show that Black Americans are for reparations, while whites are mostly against them. “For African Americans, [there’s] the belief that the current socioeconomic inequalities and inequities are a reflection in some sense of the continued legacy of the institution of slavery,” Tatishe Nteta of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst tells the paper. “Whites don’t view the issue in this particular fashion. They’re looking at it not in a historical lens primarily. The majority of whites are looking at it in terms of African Americans today have done little to deserve” reparations.What’s next?The California task force faces a July 1 deadline to complete its work. (Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed efforts to extend that time frame.) In other places, talk of reparations is just getting underway. Boston just passed its ordinance to study the issue, while officials in Kansas City and New York State are considering their own bills. The discussion about reparations has been going on for decades — but in some ways, it’s just beginning.

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‘campaign of lies and intimidation’10:43 AMOctober 27, 2022Law enforcement in Arizona is investigating a break-in at the campaign offices of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Arizona, CNN reports. Hobbs is in the final weeks of her midterm campaign in a tight race against Republican Kari Lake. Phoenix police said they “learned that items were taken from the property sometime during the night” after responding to a call Tuesday afternoon about a burglar. A suspect has not been identified, and investigators are combing CCTV footage for evidence, per The New York Times. Hobbs’ campaign manager Nicole DeMont responded to the news in a statement, saying that Hobbs and her staff “have faced hundreds of death threats and threats of violence over the course of this campaign.” She then directly addressed Hobb’s opponent: “Let’s be clear: for nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit,” DeMont continued. “The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation.”Lake responded to the allegations, calling them “absolutely absurd,” then seemingly implied that Hobbs was making the story up. She was “saddened that Hobbs and her camp would try to pin this on us,” and dismissed the remarks as defamatory, per CNN.”She’s trying to deflect from her own abysmal campaign and the fact that, you know, nobody even knows where her campaign office is,” Lake said.

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Before the end of the month, South Carolina is scheduled to execute Richard Bernard Moore for the crime of murdering a convenience store clerk in 2001. The plan is that he will either be electrocuted or shot to death by a firing squad — the state leaves the option up to him. Understandably, Moore would prefer neither.So Moore’s attorneys have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, citing the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” “The electric chair and the firing squad are antiquated, barbaric methods of execution that virtually all American jurisdictions have left behind,” Moore’s attorney wrote in a court filing last week.It would be a surprise if the high court rules in Moore’s favor: Even before Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 supermajority on the bench, the Supreme Court routinely turned away death penalty appeals. And while executions in the United States are much more rare than they once were — the Death Penalty Information Center says there were 11 last year, down from 98 in 1999 — they’re not exactly “unusual.” Governments have been executing criminals and dissidents for as long as there have been governments, after all.But putting an otherwise healthy, living human being to death — no matter the method — is definitely cruel. In South Carolina, Moore is being given the option of firing squad or electric chair because the state hasn’t been able to secure the drugs for lethal injection for more than a decade. Strapping a prisoner to a gurney and pumping them full of chemicals once carried the sheen of being a humane method of executing prisoners — to observers, it often looked as though the inmate went to sleep and passed peacefully. But researchers have found that prisoners who undergo a lethal injection probably experience great suffering — we can’t exactly ask them afterward — and there’s evidence to suggest they’re right: John Marion Grant vomited and convulsed during his 2021 execution in Oklahoma. Pharmaceutical companies have stopped selling the drugs to states, rather than take a public hit to their corporate reputation. It’s self-evident why any normal person should find the electric chair cruel: Indeed, some states that have the death penalty have already banned it as cruel and unusual. “Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes,” the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in 2008. Being shot to death in an execution chamber might reduce the amount and time of suffering, but the obvious violence of the act is why states have usually shied away from the method. “People think of lethal injection, and they think of a flu shot,” Fordham law professor Deborah Denno told The Marshall Project. “It seems so violent to have a bullet go in you.”The question isn’t whether these methods are cruel or not, then, but the degree of cruelty.And that question doesn’t just apply to the prisoners, but to the executioners. Despite measures used to keep any one person from bearing too much guilt for killing a prisoner — South Carolina will have three people on the firing squad, for example — “guards can feel mentally tortured by their participation in executions, both before and after,” Robert T. Muller wrote at Psychology Today in 2018.”The people who pass these bills, they don’t have to do it,” Jerry Givens, a former executioner for the state of Virginia, said in 2015. (The state banned the death penalty last year.) The people who do the executions, they’re the ones who suffer through it.” A system that inflicts such suffering on its own people is inherently cruel. Shouldn’t that count, too?None of this has anything to do with whether Richard Moore or any other convicted murderer deserves to die. The Constitution’s “cruel and unusual” clause means prisoners retain a few rights, even if they have committed horrific acts.And it’s difficult to think that the death penalty, in this or any other case, serves much purpose beyond its cruelty.Deterrence? There’s little evidence the death penalty deters violent crime — and certainly not in the case of Moore, who didn’t even carry a gun to his robbery. (He wrestled the weapon away from James Mahoney, the clerk, before shooting him.) Compensation for the crime? Moore’s death won’t bring Mahoney back to his family. There is nothing about Moore’s death that will improve life in South Carolina. The natural conclusion, then, is that the state’s purpose is to make Moore feel the same terror and pain he inflicted on his victim. That’s an understandable impulse, perhaps. It is also undeniably cruel. 

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Before the end of the month, South Carolina is scheduled to execute Richard Bernard Moore for the crime of murdering a convenience store clerk in 2001. The plan is that he will either be electrocuted or shot to death by a firing squad — the state leaves the option up to him. Understandably, Moore would prefer neither.So Moore’s attorneys have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, citing the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” “The electric chair and the firing squad are antiquated, barbaric methods of execution that virtually all American jurisdictions have left behind,” Moore’s attorney wrote in a court filing last week.It would be a surprise if the high court rules in Moore’s favor: Even before Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 supermajority on the bench, the Supreme Court routinely turned away death penalty appeals. And while executions in the United States are much more rare than they once were — the Death Penalty Information Center says there were 11 last year, down from 98 in 1999 — they’re not exactly “unusual.” Governments have been executing criminals and dissidents for as long as there have been governments, after all.But putting an otherwise healthy, living human being to death — no matter the method — is definitely cruel. In South Carolina, Moore is being given the option of firing squad or electric chair because the state hasn’t been able to secure the drugs for lethal injection for more than a decade. Strapping a prisoner to a gurney and pumping them full of chemicals once carried the sheen of being a humane method of executing prisoners — to observers, it often looked as though the inmate went to sleep and passed peacefully. But researchers have found that prisoners who undergo a lethal injection probably experience great suffering — we can’t exactly ask them afterward — and there’s evidence to suggest they’re right: John Marion Grant vomited and convulsed during his 2021 execution in Oklahoma. Pharmaceutical companies have stopped selling the drugs to states, rather than take a public hit to their corporate reputation. It’s self-evident why any normal person should find the electric chair cruel: Indeed, some states that have the death penalty have already banned it as cruel and unusual. “Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes,” the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in 2008. Being shot to death in an execution chamber might reduce the amount and time of suffering, but the obvious violence of the act is why states have usually shied away from the method. “People think of lethal injection, and they think of a flu shot,” Fordham law professor Deborah Denno told The Marshall Project. “It seems so violent to have a bullet go in you.”The question isn’t whether these methods are cruel or not, then, but the degree of cruelty.And that question doesn’t just apply to the prisoners, but to the executioners. Despite measures used to keep any one person from bearing too much guilt for killing a prisoner — South Carolina will have three people on the firing squad, for example — “guards can feel mentally tortured by their participation in executions, both before and after,” Robert T. Muller wrote at Psychology Today in 2018.”The people who pass these bills, they don’t have to do it,” Jerry Givens, a former executioner for the state of Virginia, said in 2015. (The state banned the death penalty last year.) The people who do the executions, they’re the ones who suffer through it.” A system that inflicts such suffering on its own people is inherently cruel. Shouldn’t that count, too?None of this has anything to do with whether Richard Moore or any other convicted murderer deserves to die. The Constitution’s “cruel and unusual” clause means prisoners retain a few rights, even if they have committed horrific acts.And it’s difficult to think that the death penalty, in this or any other case, serves much purpose beyond its cruelty.Deterrence? There’s little evidence the death penalty deters violent crime — and certainly not in the case of Moore, who didn’t even carry a gun to his robbery. (He wrestled the weapon away from James Mahoney, the clerk, before shooting him.) Compensation for the crime? Moore’s death won’t bring Mahoney back to his family. There is nothing about Moore’s death that will improve life in South Carolina. The natural conclusion, then, is that the state’s purpose is to make Moore feel the same terror and pain he inflicted on his victim. That’s an understandable impulse, perhaps. It is also undeniably cruel. 

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