Texas' grim death penalty milestone

Holding cells at Huntsville Prison where death-rowinmates spend their last hours. The executionchamber is located at the far end of the corridor.Owing to its size and inclinations, Texas registers prodigious statistics, but none so bleak as what comes from the state's pre-Civil War red-brick prison in Huntsville that houses the nation's busiest execution chamber.There, on Wednesday, Texas' 500th execution since national reinstatement is set to be carried out. The life scheduled for termination belongs to Kimberly McCarthy, whose grisly murder of elderly neighbor Dorothy Booth of Lancaster brings the state to this grim milestone.It's one that no other state may ever touch. Virginia, 2nd in terms of executions, is barely a 5th of the way there, and the pace of capital punishment has slowed nationwide, even in Texas.Part of that has to do with a collective shudder at the realities of a fallible criminal-justice system. Part of it has to do with a growing list of states - now at 18 - that have abolished the death penalty. Part of it has to do with a willingness to pause and take an unflinching look at the system and why it singles out some killers to die and others to live.In Ohio, the 8th-ranking capital-punishment state, a special commission appointed by the state Supreme Court is now doing that self-examination. It was galvanized by a report that showed the likelihood of being executed depended on where a killer committed his crime and who he killed. Defendants paid a disproportionately higher price in Cincinnati, for example, as opposed to Cleveland and other major cities. Killers of whites were far likelier to face execution than killers of blacks.Unevenness in capital punishment is also a blemish on the Texas record. Again, geography and race count - among the reasons that this newspaper opposes capital punishment.Of Texas' 254 counties, only 22 have sent killers to death row in the previous 5 years, and only 11 have done so in the previous 2, according to an analysis from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. A death case is too time-consuming and expensive for many counties to take on.Studies indicate that the race of the victim and murderer likely produce different outcomes in Texas, from decisions made by jurors to convict and by prosecutors to bring charges. Of the 46 death verdicts in the past 5 years, 21 defendants were black.It's time, in Texas, for our own unflinching self-exam on the system of sending people to the death chamber.That's especially important for Dallas County, which is suddenly notable as Texas' leading county for new death sentences, with 8 in the previous 5 years.The McCarthy case, the potential 500th execution, dredges up this county's sketchy history of racially discriminatory jury selection. New briefs in the case cite findings by this newspaper that, as recently as 2005 - 3 years after the McCarthy trial - Dallas County prosecutors excluded eligible blacks from juries at more than twice the rate they rejected eligible whites.McCarthy is not a sympathetic character, and her culpability in a brutal murder is not at issue. Still, in the grim business of seeking an eye for an eye, Texas must insist on a fair, dispassionate, even-handed, colorblind justice system. It's not the one we have today.LEADING DEATH-PENALTY STATESExecutions since national resumption in 1976:Texas: 499Virginia: 110Oklahoma: 104Florida :77Missouri: 68Alabama :55Georgia: 53Ohio :51North Carolina: 43South Carolina: 43Source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News, June 21, 2013It's time to halt executions in TexasThe figure 500 is sobering, particularly when it is applied to people and their deaths.On Wednesday evening, barring intervention by a court or the governor, Texas will carry out its 500th death sentence since capital punishment was reinstated in 1974.Between 1924 (when the state took charge of executions from its counties) and 1964, the start of a decade-long moratorium, the Lone Star State performed 361 killings by electrocution.Texas has the bragging rights for its frequency of ultimate punishment, leading the nation even though other states have more inmates on death row.These large numbers represent people, individuals with names who, although convicted of horrible crimes and deserving punishment, should not have their deaths determined by flawed human beings acting in the name of the state.Kimberly McCarthy, if her sentence is carried out shortly after 6 p.m. Wednesday, will have the distinction of being that 500th person (and only the 4th woman) to be executed in Texas since the death penalty was reinstated.It is time - in fact, long past - for Texas to get out of the killing business.A character in an 1889 short story, The Bet by Anton Chekhov, makes a compelling argument during a dinner party debate on capital punishment. He boldly states, "The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire."Precisely.On moral grounds alone, Texas should abolish capital punishment as six other states have done in the last 6 years. Maryland become the most recent in May.Just as the Supreme Court declared in 1972, the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, and its application continues to be arbitrary and capricious.Whether a killer receives a death sentence can vary according to many factors, including the county where the crime occurs. The costs of prosecuting such cases and providing court-appointed lawyers are too high for some counties to absorb. Poor rural counties are less likely than large urban ones to seek the death penalty.Death row tends to be occupied by the poor, as rich people seldom are sent there. And minorities are over-represented. Of the 283 people on Texas's death row, 39.2 % are black, 29.7 % are Hispanic and 29.7 % are white, state figures show.Although no one is certain that an innocent person has ever been executed, Texas has an embarrassing record of wrongful conviction, as evidenced by the number of recent prisoner exonerations.Progress has been made on limiting executions in certain cases, and in reducing the overall number of capital cases and death sentences. For example, recent Supreme Court rulings prohibit the execution of the mentally ill and people who were under age 18 when the crime was committed. After 2005, when Texas began allowing prison sentences of life without parole in capital cases, jurors have been more inclined to hand down that sentence instead of death.Although a Gallup poll shows 63 % of Americans still favor capital punishment, the number of executions has dropped by more than 1/2 in the past 15 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.Texas executed 15 people last year, compared to 40 in 2000. McCarthy, convicted of robbing and murdering a 70-year-old Dallas woman, would become the 8th person to die by lethal injection this year. 7 other executions are scheduled through November.Proponents of the death penalty argue that it is the appropriate punishment for people who take a life, often in the most heinous way.The victims, they say, deserve justice, and killing their killers is the best way to mete it out.Abolishing capital punishment would neither demean the memory of victims nor deny any of them justice. Instead, it would make our society as a whole more just, more morally consistent and certainly more humane.Texas retired "Old Sparky," its electric chair, in 1977.It is time to permanently close our infamous death chamber.Source: Editorial, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 21, 2013
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Robert Bork cause of death

Robert Bork cause of death, Robert H. Bork, a former solicitor general, federal judge and conservative legal theorist whose 1987 nomination to the United States Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in a historic political battle whose impact is still being felt, died on Wednesday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His death, of complications of heart disease, was confirmed by his son Robert Jr.Judge Bork, who was senior judicial adviser this year to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, played a small but crucial role in the Watergate crisis as the solicitor general under President Richard M. Nixon. He carried out orders to fire a special prosecutor in what became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.” He also handed down notable decisions from the federal appeals court bench. But it was as a symbol of the nation’s culture wars that Judge Bork made his name.It is rare for the Senate in its constitutional “advice and consent” role to turn down a president’s Supreme Court nominee, and rarer still for that rejection to be based not on qualifications but on judicial philosophy and temperament. That turned Judge Bork’s defeat into a watershed event and his name into a verb: getting “borked” is what happens to a nominee rejected for what supporters consider political motives.The success of the anti-Bork campaign is widely seen to have shifted the tone and emphasis of Supreme Court nominations since then, giving them an often strong political cast and making it hard, many argue, for a nominee with firmly held views ever to be confirmed.Until the end of his life, Judge Bork argued that American judges, acting to please a liberal elite, have hijacked the struggle over national values by overstepping their role, especially in many of the most important decisions on civil rights and liberties, personal autonomy and regulation of business.He advocated a view of judging known as “strict constructionism,” or “originalism,” which seeks to limit constitutional values to those explicitly enunciated by the framers and to reject those that evolved in later generations. He dismissed the view that the courts had rightly come to the aid of those neglected by the majority. By contrast, he felt that majorities, through legislatures, should be empowered to make all decisions not specifically addressed in the Constitution.He most notably took issue with the Supreme Court’s assertion in the 1960s and ’70s that the Constitution implicitly recognizes a right of privacy that bars states from outlawing abortion or the use of contraceptives by married couples.That position, along with his rejection of court-mandated help to minority groups, led a coalition of liberal groups to push successfully for his Senate defeat, motivated in no small part by their sense that he cared more about abstract legal reasoning than the people affected by it. They contended that his confirmation would produce a radical shift on a closely divided Supreme Court and “turn back the clock” on civil and individual rights.Judge Bork, who was 60 at the time, was sitting on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often a steppingstone to the Supreme Court, when President Ronald Reagan announced on July 1, 1987, that he was nominating him to the high court to replace Lewis Powell, a moderate justice who was retiring. Within an hour of the announcement, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, set the tone for the bruising contest to come.“Robert Bork’s America,” Mr. Kennedy said in a speech, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”Judge Bork’s supporters considered every word of that attack a misrepresentation. But the fear that his confirmation would curtail settled rights, especially of blacks and women, created a national reaction.A National OutcryAn array of groups focused on civil and women’s rights, labor, consumer power and the environment began an extraordinary public campaign against him, arguing that his long and extensive record exposed a range of agendas and made him unfit for the job.They made their case in full-page advertisements, mass mailings and demonstrations and ceaseless lobbying of their senators. Since there was no question of his integrity or intelligence, the campaign and subsequent hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee, run by Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic senator from Delaware at the time, focused on whether Judge Bork was “out of the mainstream.”Two Supreme Court decisions were seen as especially vulnerable to being overturned by a bench with Judge Bork on it: the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which barred states from banning abortion, and the 1978 Bakke case upholding affirmative action. During five days of testimony, much of it televised, Judge Bork declined to comment on how he would rule should those issues come up and argued further that what he had said in his life as a scholar and advocate would have little bearing on his judgments from the bench.The White House also sought to portray him as a moderate. That, and his own assertion that he would look at the law with a fresh eye, gave off the whiff of hypocrisy, which made it easier for some senators to oppose him.The American Bar Association’s committee on judicial nominees also split, with four of the 15 members calling him “not qualified,” because of concerns over his “compassion, open-mindedness, his sensitivity to the rights of women and minority persons or groups.”Judge Bork, a bear of a man with a scraggly red beard and untamed frizz on a balding pate who had an outsize love of food and drink, handled himself poorly in front of the committee and failed to give doubters confidence. As Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, wrote of his testimony: “He looked, and talked, like a man who would throw the book at you — maybe like a man who would throw the book at the whole country.”The most contentious part of the hearings occurred under questioning from Arlen Specter, a centrist Republican from Pennsylvania and a former prosecutor. Mr. Specter, who died in October, quoted Judge Bork as having written that under the Constitution, executive power had to evolve. Why then, Mr. Specter wanted to know, shouldn’t other constitutional concepts — like individual liberty — have a chance to evolve as well? The senator accused Judge Bork of selecting evolving rights based on his own preferences rather than neutral principles.It was an accusation that stuck. So did the notion that the nominee was somehow unfeeling as a judge. This latter was amplified when, asked by a sympathetic senator, Alan K. Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, why he wanted to serve on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork replied that it would be “an intellectual feast.”The committee voted, 9 to 5, to reject his nomination and sent it to the full Senate, which also turned him down.After the defeat the White House picked Douglas Ginsburg, of the same federal appeals court in Washington, as its new nominee. But when it was discovered that he had smoked marijuana at Harvard, his nomination was withdrawn and replaced with that of Anthony M. Kennedy, a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California.In his hearings, Judge Kennedy, a mainstream, clean-cut conservative from Sacramento, made a point of distinguishing himself from Judge Bork by focusing on compassion and the need to respect Supreme Court precedents. His nomination sailed through the Senate. On the Supreme Court, he became an important centrist swing vote between liberal and conservative blocs and has consistently declined to overturn Roe v. Wade.Judge Bork inspired a fervent generation of conservative legal thinkers. As America turned more conservative and President George W. Bush chose judges with views similar to his, many of Judge Bork’s acolytes and admirers ended up on the federal bench.After his defeat, Judge Bork retired from the Circuit Court and took up positions at conservative ideological groups and law schools, writing and speaking against what he saw as the moral decline of the country at the hands of an elite, a theme he explored in a best-selling book.In an interview in The American Spectator in 2002, he repeated his view that a liberal elite had hijacked the nation. “Churchgoers aren’t very powerful, given their numbers,” he said. “And the intelligentsia is powerful, far beyond their numbers, because they control the hype of television. They control Hollywood. They control the newspapers. They control the foundations. They control the universities.”A Change in PhilosophyRobert Heron Bork was born on March 1, 1927, in Pittsburgh to Harry Bork, a purchasing agent with a steel company, and the former Elizabeth Kunkle, an English teacher. He attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and recalled that he spent most of his early years “reading books and arguing with people.”After a stint in the Marines guarding supply lines in China at the end of World War II, he went to the University of Chicago. Renowned conservative scholars there like Leo Strauss advocated a return to republican principles of “virtue” and hierarchy. Mr. Bork was a New Deal enthusiast, as was his wife, Claire Davidson, a fellow undergraduate whom he married in 1952. But by the early 1950s, while he attended the University of Chicago law school and became impressed with market-oriented conservatism, both had moved permanently to the right.Mr. Bork discovered economics and became a libertarian opposed to government intervention and regulation. He began to evolve a similar theory of law, seeking what he called “neutral principles.” His major scholarly contribution, a 1978 book called “The Antitrust Paradox,” encouraged mergers and called for less antitrust regulation for efficiency’s sake. Students called a course he taught on the topic at Yale “protrust.”Out of law school, Mr. Bork was hired by the prestigious Chicago firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he spent eight years before taking a job teaching antitrust law at Yale in 1962. The Borks packed up their three children, Robert Jr., Charles and Ellen, and moved to New Haven, where he pursued his conservative ideas in a deeply liberal environment, campaigning for the Republican and archconservative Barry Goldwater’s election to the presidency in 1964.He also wrote a fateful article for The New Republic in 1963 — one that played a key role in his 1987 defeat — condemning the public accommodation sections of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act aimed at integrating restaurants, hotels and other businesses. Mr. Bork said he had no objection to racial integration but feared that government coercion of private behavior threatened freedom.The New Republic took the rare step of writing a reply, rejecting his reasoning and pointing out that restaurateurs were not legally permitted to reject service to well-behaved whites and that the new law intended simply to extend that principle to blacks. The editors also accused Mr. Bork of taking neutral principles out the window — an accusation he would hear more than once in his life.A decade later, during his confirmation hearings for solicitor general, Mr. Bork said that he had changed his mind and that his 1963 article had been a kind of thought experiment. But during the 1987 Supreme Court nomination battle, many cited the article as evidence that he had always been out of step in a way that harmed minorities.The upheavals of the late 1960s drove Mr. Bork from libertarianism to social conservatism. Freedom — the cry of student activists — no longer stood as his supreme value. Tradition, order and hierarchy did. In a 1971 article in The Indiana Law Journal, he argued that the First Amendment’s protection of free speech had been wildly extrapolated beyond the intent of the Constitution’s framers. In a starkly narrow interpretation, he said free speech existed to perpetuate the process of self-government; therefore, he wrote, only explicitly political speech about governing was protected.Mr. Bork worked for Nixon’s re-election in 1972. He was rewarded with the nomination to solicitor general, a post he held for three and a half years and from which he advanced his beliefs on the constitutionality of the death penalty, the illegality of busing to achieve racial balance in schools and the power of the president over Congress.Mr. Bork’s role in Watergate occurred in 1973, when Nixon wanted to keep a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, from gaining access to incriminating White House recordings and ordered him fired. The attorney general, Elliot L. Richardson, and his deputy refused and quit. Mr. Bork, as solicitor general, was next in line to carry out the president’s orders, and he did, firing Mr. Cox and his entire staff.When Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was elected in 1976, Mr. Bork returned to Yale. But it was a hard time for him. He had grown impatient with academic theorizing, and his wife, Claire, had developed cancer, which was spreading. She died in 1980, and he returned to Washington, first in private practice. After the election of President Reagan, he was nominated to the District of Columbia circuit court.His five years on the federal bench showed a record of stark conservatism; he often denied plaintiffs the right to a court hearing, showed strong deference to the executive branch over Congress and gave wide latitude to business over government regulation.A View Made ClearOne of his opinions, in Dronenburg v. Zech in 1984, dealt with the Navy’s power to fire a veteran for consensual homosexual activity. Judge Bork not only granted the Navy that power, but he also took the opportunity to make clear that a right of privacy did not exist in the Constitution. “If the revolution in sexual mores that appellant proclaims is in fact ever to arrive,” he wrote, “we think it must arrive through the moral choices of the people and their elected representatives, not through the ukase of this court.”In 1982, at an event in which he was speaking, Judge Bork met Mary Ellen Pohl, a conservative activist and former nun. They married five months later. She and his three children and two grandchildren survive him.Judge Bork laid out his objections to much of what is handed down in American courtrooms in his best-selling book “The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law” in 1989, describing a number of rulings as “judicial legislation” by inappropriately activist judges. He further said that he had become the symbol that liberals needed to destroy.In 1996, he published “Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline,” also a best seller. This book took aim at egalitarianism, individualism and other liberal ideas, saying they go against natural law.
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China earthquake: Death toll climbs to 181, thousands injured, many missing

China earthquake: Death toll climbs to 181, thousands injured, many missing, A magnitude 7 earthquake hit China's Sichuan province on April 20 claiming over 181 lives and injuring 11,200. At least 24 people have been reported missing.The number of dead and missing continues to climb with each passing hour, according to CNN.Although first responders including emergency workers and soldiers quickly made their way to the affected southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, their progress has been hampered by the hilly terrain and damage to the area.Huge chucks of the mountain in certain areas have sheared off and fallen into the valleys, near the quake's epicenter in Lushan. Big boulders have landed on the roads, making emergency work difficult.The earthquake hit just after 8 a.m. on Saturday, approximately 70 miles from the provincial capital of Chengdu. The quake was followed by numerous aftershocks, some of them as strong as a magnitude 5.1.Flights at the Chengdu airport and high-speed rail operations were suspended temporarily.College student Fan Xiaodong from Chengdu, who ended up on the streets with his dorm mates wearing only the clothes on their backs, said:"I thought it was my roommates shaking the bed," he said. "But the shock became stronger soon, and it came to me that an earthquake happened."The earthquake’s epicenter was located in the in Lushan country,” home to China's famous giant pandas and also home to the country's biggest panda research center.”Tremors from the quake were felt as far as 190 miles away from the epicenter.For more on the frantic search for survivors in the China earthquake, see the video accompanying this article.
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China earthquake: Death toll climbs to 181, thousands injured, many missing Images