Starting Points

Jun 2, 2010

Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

Dale Gerstenslager/Winona Times, via Associated Press

Curtis Flowers at his capital trial in 2004. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first conviction after prosecutors used all of their peremptory strikes against blacks in the jury pool.

By SHAILA DEWAN

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case.

The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed “arrogant” and “pretty vocal.” In another woman, he said he “detected hostility.”

Mr. Broussard also questioned the “sophistication” of a former Army sergeant, a forklift operator with three years of college, a cafeteria manager, an assembly-line worker and a retired Department of Defense program analyst.

The analyst, he said, “did not appear to be sophisticated to us in her questionnaire, in that she spelled Wal-Mart, as one of her previous employers, as Wal-marts.”

Arguments like these were used for years to keep blacks off juries in the segregationist South, systematically denying justice to black defendants and victims. But today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

In the Madison County case, the defendant, Jason M. Sharp, a white man, was sentenced to death after a trial by a jury of 11 whites and one black. The April hearing was the result of a challenge by defense lawyers who argued that jury selection was tainted by racial discrimination — a claim that is difficult to prove because prosecutors can claim any race-neutral reason, no matter how implausible, for dismissing a juror.

While jury makeup varies widely by jurisdiction, the organization, which studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — found areas in all of them where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases.

An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites.

In North Carolina, at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.

Studies have shown that racially diverse juries deliberate longer, consider a wider variety of perspectives and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries, and that predominantly black juries are less likely to impose the death penalty.

Excluding jurors based on race has been illegal since 1875, but after Reconstruction, all-white juries remained the norm in the South.

“It really made lynching and the Ku Klux Klan possible,” said Christopher Waldrep, a historian at San Francisco State University and the author of a forthcoming book about a lawyer who was able, in a rare case, to prove jury discrimination in Mississippi in 1906. “If you’d had a lot of black grand jurors investigating crimes, it would have made lynching impossible.”

Back then, judges and prosecutors often argued that blacks lacked the intelligence or education to serve. That such claims persist is evidence, said Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, that jury selection remains largely unscrutinized.

“There’s just this tolerance, there’s indifference to excluding people on the basis of race, and prosecutors are doing it with impunity,” Mr. Stevenson said. “Unless you’re in the courtroom, unless you’re a lawyer working on these issues, you’re not going to know whether your local prosecutor consistently bars people of color.”

In jury selection, potential jurors are first dismissed for cause — reasons like scheduling conflicts or opposition to the death penalty. Then, both sides can ask questions and take turns dismissing jurors using what are called peremptory strikes (the number of strikes varies by state, but it is often enough for one side to eliminate all qualified minorities).

In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that if a pattern of discrimination emerged during peremptory strikes, lawyers must provide nonracial reasons for their strikes. The reason does not have to be “persuasive, or even plausible,” the Supreme Court ruled in a later case in which a prosecutor said he dismissed one black juror because he had long hair, and another because he had a goatee, saying, “I don’t like the way they looked.” It is up to the judge to decide if there was deliberate discrimination.

That is a high bar, defense lawyers say — so high that in Tennessee and North Carolina, there has never been a successful reversal based on Batson.

“Anybody with any sense at all can think up any race-neutral reason and get away with it,” said Stephen B. Bright, a capital defense lawyer in Atlanta.

Prosecutors have claimed to strike jurors because they live in high-crime neighborhoods, are unemployed or are single parents. In one Louisiana case, a judge allowed a black juror to be dismissed because the prosecutor said he “looked like a drug dealer.”

Often, a defense lawyer’s challenge is based on showing that white jurors who answered questions the same way or had the same characteristics were not struck. For example, in the Sharp case, Mr. Broussard said that because one juror was studying to be a minister, she “was not the kind of juror we were looking for.” But a white man who was a minister was allowed to serve.

Mr. Broussard did not respond to requests for comment, but Stephen Wimberly, the first assistant district attorney in Jefferson Parish, said that of more than 2,000 jury trials since 1997, only two had been reversed because of discrimination. “The legal standard is not representation of any race or gender, but the fairness and impartiality of each respective juror,” Mr. Wimberly said.

In one Mississippi case, a black man, Curtis Flowers, was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four furniture store employees. The jury was made up of 11 whites and one black after prosecutors used all 15 of their peremptory strikes on black jurors. Montgomery County, where the crime occurred, is 45 percent black. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the case, noting that “racially motivated jury selection is still prevalent 20 years after Batson.”

At a retrial, in which prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, the jury of seven whites and five blacks was split along racial lines, resulting in a hung jury. At the second retrial, prosecutors sought the death penalty, which eliminated more blacks from the pool of qualified jurors. The jury, nine whites and three blacks, hung again when one black member declined to convict, said Andre De Gruy, the director of the state’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel.

The Equal Justice Initiative study argues that jury diversity “is especially critical because the other decision-making roles in the criminal justice system are held mostly by people who are white.” In the eight Southern states the study examined, more than 93 percent of the district attorneys are white. In Arkansas and Tennessee, all of them are white.

Thai Parliament Reflects Nation’s Anger

Narong Sangnak/European Pressphoto Agency

Sathaporn Maneerat, an opposition legislator, showed his solidarity with the red shirts in Parliament on Tuesday in Bangkok.

By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK — Thailand’s conflict moved from the streets of Bangkok to the chamber of Parliament this week, as angry and irreconcilable as ever, with members from both sides trading accusations late into the night.

Interspersed with video clips that brought the sound and horror of battle into the chamber, the debate revived unanswered questions about snipers, arsonists, killings at a Buddhist temple and mysterious assassins dressed in black.

Framed as a parliamentary no-confidence motion against the government, the session on Monday and Tuesday provided the first public forum to debate the violence during a two-month demonstration by an antigovernment movement known as the red shirts that ended when the military moved in on the protesters’ encampment on May 19. A total of 88 people were killed and more than 1,800 wounded during the protests and crackdown.

The no-confidence motion was defeated on Wednesday in a 246-to-186 vote, The Associated Press reported. But no possible outcome seemed likely to ease the intensifying polarization of the nation, in which the rural heartland seems increasingly disconnected from the more comfortable life of the capital.

During the sessions, opposition members accused the government of shooting unarmed demonstrators as well as medical workers, and of placing snipers on an elevated railway track to fire at protesters taking shelter in a temple.

The government blames the protesters for instigating the violence, going so far as to suggest that black-shirted gunmen among them killed their own people to frame the government.

For nearly two months, mostly poor protesters occupied parts of Bangkok, particularly the commercial core of the city, demanding that the government step down and hold a new election. By the time Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva offered to hold an election in November, it appeared that compromise was no longer possible, and the violent eviction followed.

In Parliament, the opposition accused the government of unprovoked massacre, echoing the position of its figurehead, the fugitive former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who had hired an expert on war crimes to bring international charges against the government.

The government has in turn brought terrorism charges against Mr. Thaksin, accusing him of being behind the violence. He remains abroad, evading jail time for a corruption conviction.

Mr. Abhisit said the government had never ordered the killing of protesters, and the finance minister, Korn Chatikavanij, suggested in an interview that the killings had been staged by the protesters as provocations.

“There have been certain incidents in which the paramilitary arm of the red-shirt movement were quite willing to shoot their own to place the blame on the government,” Mr. Korn said.

In addition to the killings and the burning of more than 30 buildings on the final day of conflict, the police said Tuesday that during the crackdown there were 62 bomb attacks, 39 cases of arson, 18 cases of manslaughter and attempted killing, and 34 cases of robbery and looting.

Suthep Thaugsuban, the deputy prime minister in charge of security, denied that snipers had fired at a Buddhist temple, Wat Pathum Wanaram, a haven that became a trap for thousands of people taking refuge in the core of the protest area. But Mr. Abhisit conceded that many such questions remained to be investigated by an impartial panel he had promised.

Though the parliamentary session was unlikely to sway opinions, it gave opposition politicians a chance to put forward their views at a time of strict censorship. Citing the crisis, the government has shut down thousands of Web sites and pages, as well as opposition radio stations, prompting condemnation from within and outside Parliament.

Jun 1, 2010

'Social Networks' - 1,500+ Links from Alexa Internet

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says

Image via Wikipedia

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.

It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.

“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”

The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.

The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.

Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.

Image via Wikipedia

The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old. On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.

Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”

Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “These results say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some research effort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”

The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”

For people under 50 who may sometimes feel gloomy, there may be consolation here. The view seems a bit bleak right now, but look at the bright side: you are getting old.

Proposal for day-laborer site brings a national debate to Centreville

Image by futureatlas.com via Flickr

By Derek Kravitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; B01

At first, a Northern Virginia developer's plan to build a gathering place for immigrant day laborers seemed like a simple solution for a local problem. But as the national immigration debate continues to ramp up, the idea of erecting a double-wide work center in Centreville -- privately funded and staffed by church volunteers -- is facing increased scrutiny from those on both sides of the debate.

Albert J. Dwoskin, once described as the region's "shopping center king" and a longtime Democratic Party donor, last month proposed setting up a trailer behind his Centreville Square Shopping Center as a de facto work center for about 50 Guatemalan day laborers who for years have sought construction and landscaping jobs near the stores and the adjacent Centreville Public Library. Fairfax County Supervisor Michael R. Frey (R-Sully) has supported the plan, and a group of churches, calling itself the Centreville Immigration Forum, has offered to staff the facility.

But a town-hall-style meeting Tuesday to discuss the proposal is expected to bring out hundreds of shopping center tenants and nearby residents who oppose a day-laborer site because they worry that it could lure more immigrants seeking work. Dwoskin acknowledged the potential for a firestorm.

"The less press this gets, the better," Dwoskin, 67, said last week.

Frey, a moderate Republican with a low-key demeanor, said he, too, feared that the meeting could devolve into a larger discussion of federal immigration policy and threaten the community's carefully hatched plans.

"People have wanted me to grandstand and become some kind of a demagogue on this issue," Frey said. "This is a Centreville problem, not a federal problem. Not to say I wish this hadn't bubbled up, say, three months before Arizona," referring to a new Arizona law that makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally.

Debate about Spanish-speaking day laborers gathering to seek work has been common in the Washington region, from Herndon, Annandale, Culmore and Falls Church in Northern Virginia to Wheaton, Silver Spring and Gaithersburg in Maryland.

In Centreville, a Fairfax County community of about 50,000 that is both prosperous and quickly diversifying, the controversy focuses on the four dozen or so Hispanic men, some of whom are undocumented immigrants, who often stand near Lee Highway and Centreville Road. For five years, Dwoskin has fielded complaints from many of his 120 shopkeepers, who say their customers are being scared away.

"I personally don't like to see them hanging around there. I have families with kids that come in, and it can be a problem," said Rayman Hamid, a Guyana native and former winner of the Centreville Businessman of the Year award who owns a Baskin-Robbins franchise a few blocks from where many of the laborers gather. "But I feel sorry for them, too. They're human beings, man. I don't know what to do."

A year ago, Dwoskin hired a full-time security guard to keep the men off his property, so they took refuge near the library. The Centreville Immigration Forum, the church group that organized three years ago to work with the Hispanic community, has offered its services, holding public forums about immigration and the difficulties of day laboring. Many of the men have told church officials that they have been cheated by employers, said Alice H. Foltz, a parishioner at Wellspring United Church of Christ. She is the unofficial "convener" of about 40 churchgoers who have agreed to staff the trailer as a day-laboring work center.

"It's an issue of exploitation," said Holtz, a history teacher at Northern Virginia Community College's Loudoun County campus. "But we're not trying to solve immigration here. We're trying to help these men."

No taxpayer funds would be used, Frey said, and Dwoskin would pay for the trailer and its utilities. Edgar Aranda-Yanoc, a community educator in the Falls Church office of the Legal Aid Justice Center, called it a "local solution to a local problem," adding that it has the support of the day laborers who live in a stretch of townhouses near the library.

David Garcia, 35, who moved from Guatemala with his wife about four years ago, said a work center could give him and other immigrants a haven and a steady income. "Sometimes they pick us up and don't pay. So a trailer would help," Garcia said.

But many shopping center tenants and customers said they fear that a hiring center would attract more immigrants seeking work, overwhelming already congested roads and spurring a spike in vandalism, loitering and petty crime.

"It's a terrible idea. They're going to come from all over, and we're going to get a reputation for not being a safe place," said Gary Malm, who owns Centreville Tire and Auto near the trailer's proposed site. "I wouldn't want my daughter or son or my wife dropping off a car at night around here if they were hanging around."

Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax), whose district includes Centreville, sent an e-mail to 9,000 supporters urging them to attend Tuesday's meeting -- scheduled for 7 p.m. at Centre Ridge Elementary School -- and oppose the work center plan. "Centreville is turning a blind eye to the concerns of its residents," said Hugo, who co-sponsored a bill this year that will allow Virginia localities to prosecute those who sell "goods or services" on roadways.

Church forum members say they fear that Centreville could experience the turmoil that occurred in Herndon in 2006 over a plan for a town-sponsored day-laborer center. But Dwoskin and Frey hope the work center idea calms tensions. "We'll see what happens Tuesday," Frey said.

Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base

Image via CrunchBase

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A08

Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web.

Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The plan could spark criticism from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users.

After backlash, Facebook last week announced new privacy tools to make it easier for users to block Web sites from tapping into their information, as well as a simpler way to configure who on the site can see personal data. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Facebook on Friday to explain what kind of user data it had shared with third-party sites. Conyers also asked Google to retain, for federal and state regulators, the data the company scooped off WiFi networks as it collected Street View mapping photos around the country.

To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely.

Image via Wikipedia

"We've been watching and trying to be thoughtful about our approach," said Anne Toth, head of privacy for Yahoo.

Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer.

Yahoo has tiptoed into social media, launching a similar tool last year called Connections, which allowed each user to customize a list of contacts with whom to share information. The company also tried two years ago to build a competitive product to Facebook, where users sought "friends," or contacts, to join micro-networks within Yahoo in the same way Facebook users amass friends through requests. Yahoo abandoned that project and instead decided to tap into its captive audience of e-mail users.

The move is part of a revamping of the once-rudderless Internet pioneer. Chief executive Carol Bartz, brought in last year to lead the firm, has stripped the company of unprofitable business units to focus on its greatest strengths -- its popular free e-mail and messaging programs, and its library of sports, news and finance sites -- to keep users in the Yahoo universe longer.

The longer a user stays on the site, the more advertising dollars and e-commerce it generates. But it remains to be seen if users will view their contact lists as the kinds of people they choose to socialize with on the Web. When Google launched Buzz, some users complained that they used Gmail for business and to correspond with strangers and that they didn't want to share birthday videos with their plumbers or bosses.

Yahoo will begin notifying users of the change on June 7, one week before the launch. Users who don't want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information -- a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story -- to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook. Eventually, Twitter and other partners with social-networking platforms will also be included.

"What Yahoo has done is recognized that your e-mail or messenger network is a useful resource and that you may be interested in knowing what your contacts are interested in knowing about, and they stop there," said Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank. "That's opposed to the idea that then, therefore, your relationship with them risks being exposed."