Archive

Continuing its odious tradition of ducking and dodging transparency and accountability in how the state puts its prisoners to death – (purportedly) in the name of the people – the beleaguered Alabama Office of the Attorney General has asserted in a new convoluted, churlish, and...
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Barring intervention by courts or its governor, Alabama will kill an 83-year-old man on April 19 — long-incarcerated for the 1989 mail-bomb killings of United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance and civil rights attorney Robert E. Robinson, Walter...
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If you’re thirsting to understand our increasingly cold, jaundiced, at times carcinogenic society, James Baldwin’s singular insight about America and his dizzying, divine command of the English language are as refreshing as an icy elixir on the hottest day in hell.Moreover, for death penalty abolitionists,...
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If you have a high-profile lawyer with powerful friends and you’re tortured while on death row in Alabama, everyone in the nation not only knows about it — overwhelmingly, especially in liberal, progressive, civilized circles of thought and news — they’re righteously appalled. But poor death...
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  To counterbalance the competitive pace of the digital age, and the cacophony of self-help gurus—always more voluble at the start of a new year—urging us to lead “better,” fuller, more productive lives, Alexandra Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker, recently recommended Danish psychologist...
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Those who survived the holocaust never said “heat” when describing what happened in 2049. Instead, they called the aftermath of the apocalypse The New Era. When temperatures on the planet broke 140 F, millions died and civilization descended into chaos. “Hot” and“heat” became terms of...
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Donald Trump bragged, via tweet, that he’s the Ernest Hemingway of Twitter. Unfortunately for us, the new president possesses neither the courage nor the self-control of Hemingway, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing unforgettably about bravery under fire. As the problems...
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When a zealous public defender acting as the effective lawyer guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment was handcuffed in a Las Vegas courtroom last month for doing her job — pleading for “some leniency” for her indigent client — I wrote in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:...
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In Arizona this past weekend — where temperatures muscled their way to 120 degrees — folks were frying eggs on the sidewalk and baking chocolate chip cookies in cars giving new meaning to the term “outdoor kitchen.” On Monday, where I live in Woodland Hills,...
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