The study found that participants who had in mind a black offender more strongly endorsed a policy of sentencing juveniles convicted of violent crimes to life in prison without parole compared to respondents who had in mind a white offender.
“The fact that imagining a particular target could influence your perceptions of a policy that would affect an entire class of people, we think, is pretty important to know,” Eberhardt said.
The black-offender group also rated juvenile offenders as more similar to adults in their culpability than did respondents in the white-offender group.
“Race is shifting how they are thinking about juveniles,” Eberhardt said. “So the protected status the offenders have as juveniles is threatened.”
The study took into account racial bias and political ideology, yet neither accounted for these effects.
“The findings showed that people without racial animus or bias are affected by race as much as those with bias,” said Carol Dweck, another of the study’s authors.
“That suggests they believe black offenders will likely be the same when they’re adults but white offenders are in a developmental period and could be very different adults. This starts breaking down the protections against the most severe sentences,” said Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor in the Department of Psychology.
Women’s clinics under physical attack across US
June 2, 2012
Women’s health clinics have been under a siege of anti-choice attacks recently throughout the United States. Cases of arson and burglary of essential sex education and medical materials have victimized not only pro-women organizations, but the recipients of their services.
Attacks have become increasingly common throughout the years as anti-choice legislation has threatened women’s access to healthcare. Fear-mongering tactics among conservative groups has disseminated anti-abortion propaganda, set clinics ablaze, assassinated practitioners and detonated bombs in clinics. However, abortion providers aren’t the only places being threatened; women’s advocacy and sex education groups have also become prey of right-wing anti-choice terrorism.
The pattern of violence comes in wake of the assassination of Dr. George Tiller earlier this week. The late-term abortion provider was gunned down at his church and had previously survived several murder attempts.
The most recent cases of attacks on women’s health clinics include:
Atlanta Gynecology and Obstetrics in Atlanta: The healthcare facility was lit on fire in the early morning of May 20. Suspects also broke into the building stealing classified medical information of its patients.
Alpha OB/GYN in Marietta, Georga: On May 23, a suspect burned down the third floor and areas of the second floor of the local clinic. Nobody was hurt, but the clinic is unable to continue its health services at this time.
Women with a Vision in New Orleans: Women with a Vision, a non-profit clinic that provides health and life services for women of color, transgender women, women with addiction and poor women, was a victim to an arson and burglary attack on May 28. The offenders targeted rooms with sex education literature, self-examination breast models, condoms and HIV and STD materials.
Planned Parenthood in Austin: Anti-choice group Live Action set up a failed sting operation to falsely accuse Planned Parenthood of conducting sex-selective abortions with undercover actors and cameras.- G. Razo
She is the 13th person granted immunity in the ongoing John Doe investigation.
It’s like Scott Walker is the big red center on a corrupt dartboard of fuckery.
You know what to do this Tuesday, Wisconsin.
Great story where the good gal actually wins - and it is a win for all of us. Gotta love her background…
Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank. She was a country girl, raised in rural Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason.
She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college. After she had her first child at 17, she needed a job. A friend helped her find one in 1975, processing home loans at a small bank in Alaska. Over the next 30 years, Hunt moved up the ladder to mortgage-banking positions in Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July issue.
Bartee, who is a retired U.S. Secret Service agent, is one of four candidates for Oconee County sheriff. He is accused of trying to arrange to have retired circuit Judge James C. Williams Jr. kidnapped.
Bartee is accused of trying to arrange the kidnapping after Williams filed an action asking for a judgment on whether Bartee was qualified to run for sheriff. The action also asked for an injunction against creating ballots with Bartee listed as a candidate.
Bartee was to compete in the June 12 Republican primary, along with current Oconee County Chief Deputy Terry Wilson and former sheriff’s captains Donnie Fricks and Mike Crenshaw.
Arson attack suspected in New Orleans women’s clinic fire
The executive director of the nonprofit Women With a Vision in New Orleans says that her clinic was “intentionally” burned because of the work that it does to help poor women and sex workers.
[…]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) are conducting a joint investigation into a series of similar suspected arson attacks on women’s clinics in Georgia.
Maybe sex workers need to start asking clients for their voter registration and just say NO to the GOP jerks that have instigated all of these attacks.
The National Labor Relations Board announced on Sunday that one of its five members, Terence F. Flynn, had resigned after the board’s inspector general found that Mr. Flynn, a Republican, leaked documents to G.O.P. allies.
[…]
The N.L.R.B.’s inspector general, David P. Berry, issued a report in early May that found that Mr. Flynn had committed serious ethical violations by leaking drafts of board decisions and details of internal deliberations to Peter Schaumber, a former labor board chairman who had been co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s labor advisory committee.
[…]
Mr. Berry found that Mr. Flynn had leaked information to Mr. Schaumber and to Peter Kirsanow, a former Republican N.L.R.B. member who was serving as outside counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers. The Romney campaign said Mr. Schaumber had stepped down from his advisory position in December, which was after Mr. Berry’s investigation began. The inspector general’s reports did not accuse Mr. Schaumber of using the material he had received from Mr. Flynn to help the Romney campaign.
In one instance, Mr. Berry found that Mr. Flynn had secretly helped Mr. Schaumber write an opinion column that denounced an N.L.R.B. decision that favored labor unions. Mr. Berry called that action by Mr. Flynn “an abuse of his discretion.”
The Flynn case has been referred to the Justice Department for investigation and to the Federal Office of Special Counsel, which is looking into possible violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from participating in partisan political activity.
Stand-your-ground laws make it easier to ‘get away with murder.’
By now, the scene is familiar: Two men get into an altercation — one black, one Hispanic. One is armed with a handgun and shoots the other dead.
The victim is unarmed; the shooter claims self-defense and walks free.
For more than a month, the victim’s family waits to see whether authorities will file charges against the shooter.
Except this tragedy did not play out in Sanford, Fla., where an unarmed black teen was shot and killed by a Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer. It occurred in a Taco Bell parking lot in Phoenix on April 3, when a black driver and an Hispanic pedestrian got into a shouting match and the driver shot the pedestrian dead.
As in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, where police did not arrest George Zimmerman for 45 days, a stand-your-ground law is influencing law enforcement action in the Phoenix shooting. Since Trayvon’s death, these laws — and how they are applied by police and prosecutors — are under renewed scrutiny.
Here’s the terrifying part:
If there are no witnesses and the victim is dead, or if the evidence is conflicting, the chances are greater that someone can “get away with murder,” Savannah Law School professor Elizabeth Megale.
“The statute can be used and distorted by hard-core criminals or someone who has committed a crime,” she says. “Most times, someone will get arrested if the other person does not die. … It’s ironic. If someone dies, the other person is less likely to get arrested.”
John Roman, a fellow with the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, analyzed homicides in the U.S. from 2005 to 2009. He found that homicides are twice as likely to be ruled justifiable in stand-your-ground states than in those without such laws.
Stand-your-ground is not only a license to kill, but there’s a legal incentive to kill. Supporters of these laws say they keep citizens safe, but if you get into an argument with some jackass and he shoots you, the smartest thing to do from a legal perspective is make sure you’re dead.
Feel safer now? If so, you’re a complete idiot.
A gunman opened fire from a rooftop in a Finnish town centre in the early hours of Saturday, killing two people and wounding several others, police said.
An 18-year-old man wearing camouflage clothing was arrested after the shooting in Hyvinkaa, a small town 56 km (34 miles) north of the capital Helsinki.
The motive for the shooting was unclear, but police said it seemed the suspect is not extremist and does not support a specific ideology.
From a 2008 post at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield takes a commenter to task for defending Paul Cassell’s absurd claim that Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because Blacks simply commit more crimes than Whites. The commenter references FBI UCR statistics:
…Access the FBI uniform crime reporting program on their website. You can wade thru the stats or cut to the chase and just go to table 43, arrests by race, 2005 (last year of stats ). These corrolate with the DOJ victim stats. For instance, blacks make up approx. 13% of the U.S. population. In 2005 they made up 56% of the robbery suspects.
..We don’t get to make up the facts, just our opinions, and it’s not racist if it’s fact. Based on what the facts are, as contained in DOJ and FBI stats, and my own personal experience, black folk, mainly menfolk, commit a higher frequency of crime than other ethnic groups or races. Much higher. If you have any evidence that I’m wrong in my belief, bring it out or referrence it, I’d like to see it. I’m willing to change my opinion if the facts have changed, or I read them wrongly. But I’m not willing to substitute my emotion for my intellect.What’s the problem with using these statistics as proof that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites? As Greenfield notes, conviction rates have almost zero relevance to who is actually committing crimes:
The stats do not show who commits crimes. They show who are arrested, prosecuted and convicted for crimes. The breakdowns don’t account for variables. If blacks and whites live in the same upper middle class neighborhood, do they still commit 56% of the crimes? If not, then you eliminate the variable of black from propensity and are left with poverty. If the lives and circumstances of whites and blacks were reversed today, then the stats would be the opposite because race plays no role in propensity to commit crime.
Blacks are disproportionately in prison because they are disproportionately investigated, arrested, and sentenced to prison for behavior that all races manifest in equal measure. As I explained in November:
Imagine you have two groups of individuals: call them A and B. Let us assume that both Group A and B participate in behavior that is punishable as a crime at equal rates.
Now let us imagine that the police are allowed wide discretion in whom they investigate for crime. Obviously, if the police decide to pay closer attention to one group rather than the other, they will discover more crimes within that group, and thus, make more arrests. But remember that both Group A and B participate in behavior punishable as crime at roughly equivalent rates. Yet because the police pay extra-close attention to Group B, more of Group B’s members end up in jail. This gives people the impression that members of Group B are more likely to be criminals, even thought Group A participates in illegal behavior at the same rate as Group B.
If all races were investigated, convicted, and sentenced to prison at the same rate that Blacks in America are today, the criminal justice system would grind to a halt underneath the weight of its own “efficiency.” Critical race scholars in legal academia have been screaming about this for years, but the inequities in our system continue unabated; in part because hacks like Paul Cassell, a former U.S. District Court judge, Supreme Court law clerk, and current professor of Law at Utah, continue to lend legitimacy to these theories by offering up statistics with zero critical analysis.
A series of break-ins and arson incidents have workers and patients at women’s health clinics in Atlanta on “heightened alert,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The FBI and ATF are conducting a joint investigation of what appears to be a sharp escalation in a campaign to intimidate and threaten providers of women’s health care, including abortion services.
In recent weeks, clinics specializing in women’s health services have been the scene of three burglaries and now two fires. The first fire took place at a private OB/GYN office in the north Atlanta suburb of Gwinnett on Sunday, the second just Wednesday at the Alpha Group GYN offices, a large and bustling facility in Marietta.
Jaime Chandra, Communications Manager for Atlanta’s Feminist Women’s Health Center, was asked if she believes that the attacks are related to Georgia’s recent passage of stringent new anti-abortion measures. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she said, “I would love to believe that it’s not related and that we live in a civil society, but, no, I don’t think it’s coincidental.”
The FBI says it is investigating “intentional” fires that erupted this week at two Atlanta-area women’s clinics, one of which performs abortions.
Rachel Maddow did an excellent segment on this - and the larger implications - tonight. Video is not up yet.
50: Percent who are black
10.7: Average time, in years, from conviction to exoneration
10,000: Combined time, in years, the 891 exonerated prisoners spent behind bars
1,170: Convicted defendants cleared in 13 “group exonerations” since 1995, following large police-corruption scandals, usually involving planted drugs or guns
Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin illegally used her state-funded staff in her campaigns for a seat on the state’s highest court in a scheme that also involved the judge’s sister, a senator awaiting sentencing on similar charges, prosecutors said Friday.
Orie Melvin “actively condoned and even promoted” campaign-related activity by state-paid workers while she was a Superior Court judge, according to a grand jury presentment, which described a “tale of corruption” involving her two sisters — state Sen. Jane Orie and Janine Orie. Jane Orie was convicted in March of 14 similar criminal counts.
Orie Melvin pleaded not guilty Friday afternoon to nine criminal counts. Melvin said she intends to vigorously defend herself against what she says are politically motivated charges.
The high court relieved Orie Melvin of all judicial and administrative duties Friday as a result of the charges. The court also ordered Orie Melvin’s Pittsburgh office sealed to secure records, files and equipment that are property of the court.
