digitalprimate

So…you’ve been in an American prison for years, most likely raped and/or tortured. But you’re the baddest of the bad and you’re on death row. At least you’ll have a quick and humane execution.

No, you probably won’t. Deathpenaltyinfo.org has a long list of executions that didn’t go well, to put it mildly. Here’s a few of my favorites (the numbers are endnotes from the original website). Enjoy.

Sept. 2, 1983. Mississippi. Jimmy Lee Gray. Asphyxiation.
Officials had to clear the room eight minutes after the gas was released when Gray’s desperate gasps for air repulsed witnesses. His attorney, Dennis Balske of Montgomery, Alabama, criticized state officials for clearing the room when the inmate was still alive. Said noted death penalty defense attorney David Bruck, “Jimmy Lee Gray died banging his head against a steel pole in the gas chamber while the reporters counted his moans (eleven, according to the Associated Press).”3 Later it was revealed that the executioner, Barry Bruce, was drunk.4

May 4, 1990. Florida. Jesse Joseph Tafero. Electrocution.
During the execution, six-inch flames erupted from Tafero’s head, and three jolts of power were required to stop his breathing. State officials claimed that the botched execution was caused by “inadvertent human error” — the inappropriate substitution of a synthetic sponge for a natural sponge that had been used in previous executions.17 They attempted to support this theory by sticking a part of a synthetic sponge into a “common household toaster” and observing that it smoldered and caught fire.18

May 3, 1995. Missouri. Emmitt Foster. Lethal Injection.
Seven minutes after the lethal chemicals began to flow into Foster’s arm, the execution was halted when the chemicals stopped circulating. With Foster gasping and convulsing, the blinds were drawn so the witnesses could not view the scene. Death was pronounced thirty minutes after the execution began, and three minutes later the blinds were reopened so the witnesses could view the corpse.33 According to William “Mal” Gum, the Washington County Coroner who pronounced death, the problem was caused by the tightness of the leather straps that bound Foster to the execution gurney; it was so tight that the flow of chemicals into the veins was restricted. Foster did not die until several minutes after a prison worker finally loosened the straps. The coroner entered the death chamber twenty minutes after the execution began, diagnosed the problem, and told the officials to loosen the strap so the execution could proceed.34 In an editorial, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the execution “a particularly sordid chapter in Missouri’s capital punishment experience.”35

March 25, 1997. Florida. Pedro Medina. Electrocution.
A crown of foot-high flames shot from the headpiece during the execution, filling the execution chamber with a stench of thick smoke and gagging the two dozen official witnesses. An official then threw a switch to manually cut off the power and prematurely end the two-minute cycle of 2,000 volts. Medina’s chest continued to heave until the flames stopped and death came.39 After the execution, prison officials blamed the fire on a corroded copper screen in the headpiece of the electric chair, but two experts hired by the governor later concluded that the fire was caused by the improper application of a sponge (designed to conduct electricity) to Medina’s head.

And, although the execution to which the following is attached is not the worst of them, I think the comments about it are the most telling of the bunch:

Later, when another Florida death row inmate challenged the constitutionality of the electric chair, Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw commented that “the color photos of Davis depict a man who — for all appearances — was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida.”46 Justice Shaw also described the botched executions of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina (q.v.), calling the three executions “barbaric spectacles” and “acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state.”47 Justice Shaw included pictures of Davis’s dead body in his opinion.48 The execution was witnessed by a Florida State Senator, Ginny Brown-Waite, who at first was “shocked” to see the blood, until she realized that the blood was forming the shape of a cross and that it was a message from God saying he supported the execution.49 (emphasis added)

I don’t know about you, but I’m sure glad we’re exporting our humane ways to those barbaric lands of the Middle East. And, for the record, if I have to be put to death, I want a fucking firing squad full of army ranger sharp shooters.

Channel 4 in the UK ran a piece last year called, Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons which I picked up via metafilter.

The link above (with absolutely, completely not safe for work embedded video) goes to an archived version of the video and an accompanying article about same. A few choice samples include:

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’ If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking. Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

Iraq? Nope, the great state of Texas (admittedly, difficult to tell apart sometimes). The Channel 4 piece is a litany of torture - sometimes resulting in death - that would make the most hardened fan of prison-as-punishment cringe. And it’s not hearsay, testimony from disgruntled prisoners. It is in fact all on video, in photographs and in first hand accounts by the guards themselves.

Read and watch the above if you can stomach it. And then think about the massive self deception we practice here in the US. We know; we’ve always known. Why else would jokes about prison rape be common fare on the nightly comedy shows? It seems nobody wants to admit what’s going on until they have a photograph or video shoved in front of them.

And even then we don’t care. I don’t care what a man did (or, as likely as not nowadays, didn’t) do to land himself in prison. No one deserves to be tortured to death, and even if they did, who the hell are YOU to decide to be the one to do it?

A couple of years ago, I attended a wedding in Cozumel, an island off the coast of Cancun in Mexico. I like to think of myself as a fairly accomplished traveler, and told the groom he didn’t need anyone to pick me up at the ferry dock. Well, that and he didn’t offer.

Anyway, I fly into Cancun, change out of my Don’t Search Me or Screw with Me flying clothes into my White Guy in the Tropics clothes in the airport bathroom, wait an hour for a bus that takes me to the dock, dash through the monsoon-esque squall in my White Guy in the Tropics Raincoat (with anglewings, naturally), catch the ferry, relax belowdecks with a local brew, and arrive at Cozumel in high spirits at high noon.

Shouldering my pack, I walked through the main tourist part of the city to a residential neighborhood, ask directions only once (and somehow manage to understand them) and arrive at the address the groom gave me, a little three story house with a veranda. I knocked, but no one was there, so I went on in. That was a bit odd, as they’d be expecting me, but I figured they probably had gone for a swim or something. A little more odd was the fact that I didn’t see any of their gear lying around – no suitcases, clothes, toiletries, etc. So I had a look around and discovered a stairway around the back of the house that led to three other apartments or rooms, all of which were locked and apparently unoccupied at the moment.

So, I went back to the main house, took a shower in what I took to be the master bedroom figuring that the bride and groom, very close friends, would forgive this small indulgence. I took a short siesta on the couch then moved outside to the veranda to escape the heat and wait for someone to come home.

Toward the end of the day, some little Local Dudeman rode up on his bicycle, opened the gate and walked onto the veranda. We exchanged hellos, me explaining that I was here for the wedding, he explaining that he lived above. I asked when the owner would be back as I’d like to get to my room, but he didn’t seem to know (or perhaps understand?). He disappeared upstairs, and I took a walk, bought some beers and smokes, and returned around dusk.

The bride and groom in question are pretty smart people, but a wedding can scatter anyone’s brain. I was not the only person arriving that day, and I knew that they should have been back by now. But I figured they were off someplace having a good time, and I’d be with them for a whole week soon enough.

Still, I was hungry and not a little bored waiting around. Little Local Dudeman had told me if I was bored to knock on his door and we’d do something. So I did, and we sat on the roof and drank beer while watching possibly the worst high school marching band I’ve ever heard practice in the whitewashed courtyard a half a block away.

Now it was legitimately dark and I was legitimately hungry, so Local Dudeman and I took off for eats in the locals’ area (a very bad torta) then went into to “town.” There we met up with some hipster locals: a dive instructor, and underwater photographer, a recreational fisherboat captain. All very interesting people. The drank some strange Mexican version of a shanty and I drank a Herradura. They also all spoke pretty good English, and it was then that I began to realize that I’d better get back to the hacienda pretty soon, for after talking to them it appeared that my Local Dudeman had not really understood why I was there.

When we got back, the gate was open but the front door was locked. This was less than optimal since everything I owned, aside from about $20 worth of pesos, was in the house. Local Dudeman did not have a key. About half an hour later, a guy showed up in a taxi, got out and walked up to us. He asked me pointedly and in English what I was doing there. I explained that I was here for the wedding, but the wedding party wasn’t back yet and had, apparently, locked me out of the house. He then informed me that, no, they hadn’t locked me out of the house, he had when he fixed the broken lock and could I please explain again what the hell I was doing there.

It turned out that this was a private apartment rented by an American girl who had left for a week’s holiday. I had showered, napped and hung out in her place all day because the lock on the door had been broken. Fortunately, the Taxi-locksmith knew that the owner of this building also owned another building, and he offered to drive me there where I found the rest of the wedding party, awaiting myself and another lost soul to whom they’d given the wrong address from the owner’s website.

What the Bankruptcy Bill Could Do to You from the Black Commentator.

The U.S. Senate has passed a dream bill for credit card and financial service companies that, if passed by the House, will land millions of American families in debt slavery. Rather than being able to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and make a difficult new start, families and individuals will be placed on long-term payment plans to credit card companies, companies that will take their houses, their cars, their child-support payments, and their paychecks.

The above opens a devastating expose and critique of the pending “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.” This Republican sponsored bill passed the Senate on March 10th, 2005 with a considerable amount of support from Democrats. What, exactly, does this bill change that makes it so important?

First, here’s how personal bankruptcy filings are supposed to work today:

After filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you’re required to liquidate some assets and pay off what you can. But you are then able to write off the rest of your debt and start over, albeit with a credit record that will make it harder to borrow and sometimes harder to find work. Under the current system, if a judge finds that you have significant assets or income, you can be denied Chapter 7 and be required to enter into Chapter 13 bankruptcy, in which you pay off your debt over a number of years. This current “means test” is conducted by a judge who is able to look at actual income and expenses, as well as to distinguish between someone whose child has diabetes and someone who’s been going on reckless shopping sprees.

Now, here’s what Congress proposes to change:

The bill that is coming up for a vote in the House would create a new means test that would forbid making any such distinctions. It would even forbid comparing what someone actually earns with what they actually have to pay for rent and basic expenses. A court would be forced to use standard government figures for expenses, regardless of what you’re actually having to pay. It would base your income on your last six months of income, even if you just got laid off. If your income is below the median, it would spare you the means test but require that you purchase credit counseling, even if you have no money to pay for it and it isn’t offered anywhere near your home. It would also require significant new legal expenses and paperwork

OK, so that’s kind of harsh, but if folks are abusing the system, perhaps we should crack down, right? Well, that might be true (doubtful) if folks were actually abusing the system.

As with Social Security, there’s a grain of truth that can be found if you dig for it…. Estimates of cases of abuse of bankruptcy law range from 3 to 10 percent. The non-partisan American Bankruptcy Institute estimates that at most 3 percent of filers – and almost certainly less – are able to discharge debts they could actually pay.

I don’t know if any of you know anyone who’s had to declare bankruptcy, but imagine: you can’t get a credit card (or can only get one at close to 30% interest), so you can’t buy anything off the Internet (e.g., prescription drugs you can’t afford otherwise); you can’t get a job handling money (credit risk=theft risk for many corporate employers), so many of the low paying jobs forming your pool of likely employers is closed to you; it’s very difficult to find a good place to rent (buying is out of the question and most landlords run credit checks and reject bankruptcies), so you’ll often have to settle for sub-standard digs.

This is not the case with everyone, and I’ve known people who have declared bankruptcy and then gone on to rebuild their lives: which is exactly the point of the system. Yet our leaders in Congress seem to think that the rebuilding part should start, basically, from the street. No keeping the car so you can drive to a job anymore. Just as our penal system has moved towards some Old Testament punishment model, our Congress wants to punish rather than help folks in dire straights.

But surely, you say, credit card companies, et al., wouldn’t ask for such draconian measures unless they were losing money hand over fist, unless such “abuses” caused them great financial hardship they must of necessity pass on to their “good” customers?

Credit card companies, like most lenders, charge interest rates based on the risk they see of each borrower failing to pay back the loan. Some people pay 9 percent on their credit card and others pay 29 percent. The higher rate is supposed to cover the losses the lender will suffer when some of the riskier borrowers default. This system has been bringing in massive record profits for the credit card companies: $30 billion last year.

Not only are credit companies profitable, they’ve already collected money against any risk they incur:

Fine, you say, this sucks but it doesn’t really have anything to do with me. I don’t expect to go bankrupt anytime soon. NO ONE expects to go bankrupt, and yet few understand how easy it is, how quickly things can change:

The above is from a recently completed Harvard study. The study relied extensively on data from South Carolina (among other places) and in a Reuters interview on the study, local bankruptcy expert George Cauthen said that, “fewer than 1 percent of all bankruptcy filings were due to credit card debt.” He went on to add that credit card debt leading directly to bankruptcy“truly is a myth.”

Yeah. There’s your republican family values for you. Manufacture a “crisis” (gee, where have we heard that before) and then fuck middle and working class families squarely in the ass, ‘cause can bet that aforementioned ass that the monied classes have it all squirled away in untouchable “asset protection trusts.”

Kind of hard to keep the old family together if their all out on the god damned street, eh? I suppose it’s merely a matter of time before we bring back real debtors prisons. Prison, you say, well, at least it’s better than the street. I’ll take a look at that next.