This 1974 picture shows a storage room at the state prison in Walpole holding the electric chair that Massachusetts used in its last execution, carried out in Charlestown in 1947. Globe File Photo
Death Wish (click here)
It’s been almost 60 years since our (Massachusetts) last execution.We went to Texas to see what we could learn from a land that embraces capital punishment.
KAREN OLSSON
Boston Globe 1jan2006
...That’s not a problem only in Texas. Massachusetts lately has had trouble assigning lawyers to poor defendants in criminal cases because of the low fees paid by the state. Last year, Romney denounced lawyers’ refusal to take such cases and, initially at least, resisted calls for raising the pay scale. But Romney brushed away questions about the cost of his proposal. “This is not a measure based on cost. This a measure based on life, the preservation of life through the deterrent of the death penalty,” he told me. “In my view, those people who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds have an understandable and fair posture, but those who try to manufacture other reasons are ducking.”
The last time Massachusetts came close to passing a death penalty law was in 1997, after Jeffrey Curley, a 10-year-old Cambridge boy, was abducted, sodomized, and murdered by two men. The crime received heavy media coverage, and in the Legislature, the 10-vote margin opposing passage of a death penalty bill dissolved overnight. The Senate adopted one version, and the House voted 81-79 to pass another, and only in a second House vote did the bill fail, because one legislator changed his mind. Since then, the state’s Republican governors have continued to support the death penalty while the margins against it have widened in the House and Senate (the House vote on Romney’s bill was not even close, 99-53, and the Senate has no plans to even consider it). Most anti-death-penalty activists feel fairly secure that Massachusetts will not reinstate capital punishment. “We’ve had leadership in the Legislature who are opposed to the death penalty, which means that no one’s pushing it from within,” says Norma Shapiro of the Massachusetts ACLU. Still, the activists admit, another crime as gruesome as the Curley murder could tip the balance back the other way....
09.18.06
McCain-Graham-Warner Torture Bill Suspends Habeas Corpus
I don’t have time for an extended post, but please read this: Judges Tell Congress: Don’t Suspend Habeas Corpus (via Susie).
Here’s an excerpt (and here’s a brief history of the term):
It looks like the McCain Graham Warner version of the military commissions bill is going to pass. While much attention has been paid to the difference between the Bush and these “rebel” Republicans versions, very little notice has been taken of the fact that the McCain version too takes the draconian step of suspending habeas corpus, the linchpin of a free society.
Last Thursday nine former federal judges sent a letter to Congress [pdf text] detailing their opposition to the proposed McCain, Graham, Warner Military Commissions Act of 2006 which would strip US prisoners held outside the United States from their right to habeas corpus....
Bush's lethal legacy: more executions
The US already kills more of its prisoners than almost any other country. Now the White House plans to cut the right of appeal of death row inmates...
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 15 August 2007
The Bush administration is preparing to speed up the executions of criminals who are on death row across the United States, in effect, cutting out several layers of appeals in the federal courts so that prisoners can be "fast-tracked" to their deaths.
With less than 18 months to go to secure a presidential legacy, President Bush has turned to an issue he has specialised in since approving a record number of executions while Governor of Texas.
The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales - Mr Bush's top legal adviser during the spree of executions in Texas in the 1990s - is putting finishing touches to regulations, inspired by recent anti-terrorism legislation, that would allow states to turn to the Justice Department, instead of the federal courts, as a key arbiter in deciding whether prisoners live or die.
The US is already among the top six countries worldwide in terms of the numbers of its own citizens that it puts to death. Fifty-two Americans were executed last year and thousands await their fate on death row.
In some instances, prisoners would have significantly less time to file federal appeals, and the appeals courts significantly less time to respond. On the question of whether defendants received adequate representation at trial - a key issue in many cases, especially in southern states with no formal public defender system - the Attorney General would be the sole decision-maker.
Since Mr Gonzales is a prosecutor, not a judge, and since he has a track record of favouring death in almost every capital case brought before him, the regulations would, in effect, remove a crucial safety net for prisoners who feel they have been wrongly convicted....
AND OF COURSE the justification for all that killing is that it stops violent crime. George Walker Bush is the former governor of Texas. He executed 150 people during 5 years of governorship. So how is Texas doing? Better than the average American city?
Dallas Morning News
Dallas crime ranking played down (click here)
Dallas No. 1 again; officials, experts wary of comparing statistics
11:43 AM CDT on Saturday, April 22, 2006
By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News
For the eighth year in a row, Dallas had the highest crime rate among U.S. cities with more than a million people. But in the numbers game, comparing apples with oranges – or the Big Apple with Big D – may be a fruitless endeavor.
"Awww, it's my favorite story in your paper every year," said Mayor Laura Miller. Like other city officials, criminologists and crime statistics experts, she greeted the news with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Burglaries, more than any other category, helped keep Dallas at the top after an analysis of 2005 crime statistics based on crimes relative to population.
But last year, crimes reported in Dallas fell sharply, with murders down about 19 percent and overall crime lower by 5 percent.
So which is it? Is Dallas among the most dangerous cities in America, or is it a crime-fighting success story in the making?
Both, say police and crime experts.
"We are trained to believe the notion that crime statistics have a relative value," said Alex del Carmen, a University of Texas at Arlington criminology professor. "That's not to say they are regarded as the ultimate truth in terms of crime."
"Dallas has a crime problem, no question," said Police Chief David Kunkle. "Is Dallas the most unsafe big city in the United States? The answer is no."
The analysis is based on preliminary numbers that will become part of the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports, a national survey of about 17,000 police agencies published in the fall.
But the FBI doesn't rank the data, and doesn't condone doing it.
"The natural tendency is to want to know who is first and who is last in anything," said Maryvictoria Pyne, chief spokeswoman for the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports unit. "But what we're saying is, there are many variables that affect crime."
Experts say residents report crimes differently in different communities, police departments have different reporting methods, and some have been caught cheating. A city's density, geography, climate, economy, demographics, crime-fighting resources and other factors also affect crime rates.
"What happens in New York really has no effect on Dallas," Dr. Pyne said. "What happens in Dallas has an effect on Dallas. If the chief can say robberies are down this year, that's saying something."
Ms. Miller said she's been satisfied with the downward direction of reported crimes in Dallas. "The most important thing in my opinion is that we've seen the first reduction in crime in all categories in 13 years," she said.
That's not enough for some, including Bonnie Mathias, a Pleasant Grove community activist.
"People are fed up," said Ms. Mathias, a local chairwoman with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
"We're talking about building a freaking bridge across the Trinity, and we're not addressing the issues that will bring true economic development to this city," she said. "Until we get crime under control, and until we get enough cops on the street and pay them enough to stay here, nothing will change."
Numbers game
Statisticians and criminologists argue that comparing cities' crime rates is a bad idea because crimes are reported differently by different agencies.
Consider auto theft: A simple phone call leads to a police report for a stolen car in Dallas. But in New York, not only are there fewer cars to steal, but victims must sign an affidavit swearing they didn't ditch the car for insurance purposes, said New York police Lt. Eugene Whyte, a nationally recognized crime statistics expert.
What counts as a theft, burglary or robbery in Dallas might not be classified as such elsewhere, Dallas officials said.
"If my 10-year-old's Game Boy is stolen, that'd be in the statistics," Ms. Miller said. But she added, "We can't throw stones at cities that don't report as much crime."
Although Chief Kunkle is also careful not to minimize the reality of Dallas' high crime rate, he said officers have been trained for years to count things as crimes even without hard proof.
For example, he said, if a homeless man wakes up, finds his wallet missing and says he was robbed, the department typically counts it – even if he may have just lost the wallet. "That report stays forever," Chief Kunkle said.
Chief Kunkle said he'd rather see over-reporting of crime than a population too indifferent or too frightened to call the police.
And retraining officers to not count some minor incidents – such as the theft of a tool from a garage or a flowerpot from a porch – as crimes, could lead to complaints.
"It will be attributed to the fact that we're intentionally not reporting crimes so our statistics look better," he said. "And there will be enough of those incidents to make that argument."
The fudge factor
Other departments have faced accusations of crime statistic fudging.
Los Angeles police were criticized after they touted huge crime decreases last year based largely on a 40 percent drop in aggravated assaults. But crime fell in part because the department narrowed its definition of aggravated assault to exclude simple assaults such as spousal assaults, according to the Los Angeles Times. Police later acknowledged that the city's 16 percent overall drop in crime was actually closer to 10 percent.
In the late 1990s, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Philadelphia police routinely downgraded rapes to lesser crimes and touted the results as a crime reduction.
Atlanta police were criticized for underreporting crimes in advance of the 1996 Olympic Games to make the city appear safer.
But Dr. del Carmen said he believes that the practice of fudging statistics is not widespread.
"Cities in the U.S. that would try to get away with manipulating their data would have a hard time, given the oversight of city councils, mayors and people who can request data and analyze it," he said.
Often, discrepancies are caused by faulty software, ill-trained officers or clerks misclassifying crimes, said Dr. Pyne. The FBI audits numbers reported to the Uniform Crime Reports, but there are no sanctions if problems are found, she said.
Dr. del Carmen said some departments benefit from crime increases. "That way they can ask for more resources and equipment," he said.
The murder rate
Most experts say the one truly reliable crime statistic – the one most difficult to get wrong – is murder.
That's the argument offered by the NYPD when experts and even some of its own police union leaders questioned the Big Apple's dramatic crime decreases as suspicious.
Last year, there were about seven slayings per 100,000 residents in New York. That's far closer in terms of population comparisons to Richardson's two slayings per 100,000 in 2004, than to Dallas' 16 per 100,000 residents last year.
"That throws cold water on that argument" that New York isn't as safe as overall statistics suggest, Lt. Whyte said.
Chief Kunkle said he is most comfortable comparing cities by their murder rates because it's difficult to undercount or misclassify them.
"I have no confidence at all making comparisons across cities in anything other than homicides," he said.
Among the largest cities, Dallas is No. 3 in murders. And several cities with populations of fewer than 1 million such as Baltimore, Detroit and Washington, D.C., have historically logged more murders per capita.
Looking ahead
Chief Kunkle's goal for 2006 is another 10 percent reduction in murders, and a 10 percent decrease in overall crime.
He said many strategies used last year will continue, including Operation Disruption, a roving band of officers who target outbreaks in high-crime neighborhoods.
"I think that we'll see reductions in crime this year," Ms. Miller said. But she acknowledged, "We know that if we saw reductions in crime every year it would still be difficult to get out of that top spot."
Ms. Mathias, the community activist, said she is pleased with the gains Chief Kunkle has achieved. But, she added, leaders can't brush off comparing Dallas with peer cities just because of slight variations in crime reporting.
"How many different ways can you report a burglary, whether it happens in New York City or Dallas or Garland or Austin or Houston?" she said. "They've got to explain to me what is the difference. I'm not seeing it. If we're No. 1 again, shame on us and shame on the people at City Hall who aren't taking this seriously."
Ultimately, whether someone is a crime victim depends largely on personal choices, Chief Kunkle said.
"We've always said that if you just mind your business, you don't get into road rage incidents, you don't get into fights in bars, you don't get involved in the drug trade, your chances of being a victim of violent crime are very, very low," he said.
Tell that to Ivan Pugh, 36, owner of the Alligator Cafe.
His restaurant has been broken into five times since it opened two years ago on Live Oak Street in Old East Dallas. The most recent burglary was Thursday.
"I've got cameras, an alarm system, I got the locks re-keyed, and I'm going to order [burglar] bars," he said. "I've got to sell a lot of gumbo to pay for all this."
E-mail jtrahan@dallasnews.com
THE BIG PICTURE IN BIG D
Why is our crime so high?
• Mild winters and warm weather tend to increase crime.
• Dallas has pockets of blight across the city rather than huge hot zones where police can concentrate their resources.
• A vast highway system means many vehicles which can be broken into or stolen.
• Interstates 35 and 45 are major U.S.-Mexico drug trafficking corridors.
• The Park Cities are surrounded by Dallas, but not included in Dallas, sapping the city of middle- and upper-class families less likely to be crime victims. The suburbs may also be a factor.
• A high number of retail stores creates more burglary targets.
The State of Dallas and the Police Department
The news isn’t all bad. Despite remaining the leading major high-crime city in America, in 2005, for the first time in more than a decade, crime was down in all major categories in Dallas:
• Homicides fell 18.9 percent.
• Overall crime fell 5.3 percent.
• Business robberies fell 14.7 percent.
• Auto theft fell 10.1 percent.
PD boons:
• $15 million in private donations spread out over three years for equipment
• 50 new officers in the latest city budget
• A proposal to pay new recruits a $10,000 bonus to break a hiring slump
• A planned new South Central substation and training academy
Challenges:
• The 3,000-member police department is about 600 officers short of goals
• Dallas cops are among the lowest paid in the area
Big D vs. The Big Apple
Even accounting for an overly enthusiastic crime reporting populace and willingness to log the most minor of offenses, comparing Dallas to the nation’s largest city reveals how far behind Dallas is in controlling its crime. Based on preliminary 2005 figures:
• The average New Yorker was six times less likely to be burglarized compared to someone in Dallas.
• New York would have to have about 1,300 murders in a year, or about three times its current number, to equal Dallas' current per capita rate.
• Despite having nearly seven times the population of Dallas, New York only reported having 1,537 more burglaries than Dallas.
SOURCES: Interviews with criminologists, statisticians and research by The Dallas Morning News
