Southern Exposure

Sweet Home Alabama

2006-08-15T16:22:00.000-04:00

Ok...well, not quite. After spending 10 weeks in the Deep South, I’m not quite ready to call Alabama home. Home to me is where I am now, back in New York City. It’s also my family home in Maryland, where I grew up. Though my summer internship at the Equal Justice Initiative and my experience living in Montgomery have made a lasting impression on me, I leave Alabama knowing that I came as an outsider and I left as an outsider, albeit one who has at least gained an appreciation for the way of life down south.

As I have hopefully conveyed on these pages, Alabama’s criminal justice system is characterized by systematic flaws that result in racial and socio-economic prejudice, in trials that are ripe with ineffective defense attorneys, and in excessive punishments, including but not limited to the death penalty and to life without parole, being pursued by overzealous prosecutors. Though I can only rely upon my limited experience to answer this question, I have repeatedly wondered this summer whether alternatives to Alabama exist that offer better criminal justice systems. Clearly, states that have public defender offices are in a better position than Alabama because they have the means to provide indigent defendants with more effective counsel. States that have abolished the death penalty are also a step ahead because they have recognized that the death penalty does not achieve deterrence, nor can it ever be imposed in a fair and equitable manner.

An ideal criminal justice system would involve prosecutors who present their cases before juries and then ask them to impose a punishment that is fair; i.e., a punishment that deters crime and provides retribution for the victims and for society, while recognizing that individual defendants cannot be defined solely by their criminal acts, but by the circumstances that led the defendants to commit them. As I mentioned earlier, an ideal system in my mind would also greatly resemble a child welfare program that assigns individual caseworkers to inmates to determine when and if they are ready to be released. For many reasons, no state has ever supported such a criminal justice system. The cost of hiring and training caseworkers and then administering non-uniform prison sentences would be astronomical. Furthermore, litigation in our country is adversarial in nature, so prosecutors and defense attorneys alike have little incentive to strive for a happy middle ground, but instead advocate for their position to the extreme and then let the judge and jury settle the matter at hand. As employees of the state, prosecutors (and often judges) are also subject to the whims of politics, and go to excesses to portray themselves as tough on crime instead of advocates for justice.

Along these lines, another question I ask myself is whether I could ever see myself being a prosecutor. A common refrain in the public defense world is that once you have worked as a prosecutor, you can never go back to representing indigent defendants because you have crossed a line from which you cannot return. I found such a hard-line stance difficult to swallow at the beginning of the summer; now, I understand this perspective. Even the best-intentioned prosecutors are restricted by sentencing requirements, by their superiors’ political ambitions, and by their own career aspirations. I would also imagine that many prosecutors lose sight of attaining justice and become cynical after being exposed to an endless series of criminals and criminal acts. From my vantage point as a young law student, I would like to believe that I can defy these odds and prosecute criminals in the name of justice and equality, but I don’t yet know whether such a conviction is realistic in today’s world.

Aside from the intellectual challenges that I pondered over the summer, I truly enjoyed living in the south. Looking over my tongue-in-cheek list of goals that I created for myself at the outset, I’m happy to say that I can check off pretty much all of them. I went to a Southern Baptist Church and loved it; I traveled throughout the southern states to get a flavor for the south’s civil rights history; I entertained myself with Rick & Bubba in the morning to appreciate the values and cultural norms of red-state America; I enjoyed being on the receiving end of southern hospitality; and, yes, I even learned to appreciate some country music and took slide guitar lessons (which were only moderately successful I might add).

As for my blog – I’ve really enjoyed being able to reflect on my experiences and to share them with all the readers who have chosen to click on my website or receive my emails. And of course, I appreciate all the feedback I’ve received both online and offline. Thank you. With classes starting all too soon and with my life returning back to the normal and somewhat less-interesting life of just another second-year law student in New York, I can’t promise that I’ll be able to continue to post regularly but I do hope to be able to add the occasional posting or thought online, and always welcome your comments.

Until then, it’s been a pleasure y’all.

Final grits count: 8 regular grits, 4 cheese grits

The Real World

2006-08-09T01:30:00.000-04:00

I’ve never really watched the show and don’t have any aspirations to be on it, but I’m pretty sure that my living situation down here in Prattville is a close replicate of what life is like on the Real World. Prattville is a sleepy town located right outside of Montgomery that smells constantly like ice cream waffle cones thanks to the nearby International Paper mill. I found my roommate, Maud, after posting on Craig’s List, and have been delighted with the find. The house is spacious (especially compared to New York standards!), the price is great and Maud is an easy-going, friendly and laid back person to live with. (I still haven’t figured out how old she is, but I’m guessing 30-something to early 40s). Maud is so easy going in fact, that she hasn’t been working the last few months, and spends a lot of time a the house watching television, surfing the web and drinking beer. She drinks a lot of beer.

Maud is also gay, and that fact, along with her generous and laid back personality, accounts for a lot of the excitement we’ve had in the place for the last 2+ months. Unlike cities in the northeast, the gay community in places like Montgomery is not supported by city politicians or a bevy of nonprofit organizations, nor does it coalesce in certain neighborhoods that provide social outlets and group support. Instead, Maud is like a fish out of water in a neighborhood that’s comprised of mostly military and retired military families. And she’s not the only one. Throughout the summer we’ve had a parade of wandering characters (straight and gay) staying in the house or passing through, who know that Maud is liberal with her beer stash and is always happy to offer a place to crash on the living room futon or in one of the spare bedrooms.

First there was Maud’s friend, Mae Belle, who had been living in the house for a few months before I arrived but went back to her on-again, off-again girlfriend right before I moved in. When Mae Belle left, she forgot to take the three rusted shotguns she had been keeping with her and had to come back for them. Three weeks later she pulled into the driveway one night and didn’t leave the futon again for about a month except to go to work during the day, content to drink beer and watch TV at night until she and her girlfriend decided to get back together.

No sooner had we said goodbye to Mae Belle, then Maud’s ex-girlfriend, Sue, and her high-school-age son showed up. Of all the people we’ve had staying with us this past summer, Maud’s ex is the only one that should not have been there, but she claimed she needed to come to take a break from her boyfriend. Maud’s ex and her siblings all live in trailer parks on the road between Montgomery and Tuscaloosa. Many of them are alcoholics and petty criminals, eager to take advantage of a woman like Maud, who’s both generous and lonely. Over Christmas, for example, Sue invited her whole family to come to Maud’s for Christmas dinner since none of the trailers could accommodate all of them. One of the guests repaid Maud’s hospitality by stealing blank checks from her checkbook.

During the few days that Sue parked herself in our house this summer, her son unlocked the windows in Maud’s bedroom so he could make an easy, and illicit, return. (That never happened.) One week later, Sue’s sister showed up drunk, probably at Sue’s prompting, with her mentally disabled infant daughter and dog in tow looking for some beer. (Maud refused and got her out as quickly as possible). Despite all of this, Maud made sure to buy a birthday gift for Sue’s son, and replaced Sue’s bed with a new one when she said she couldn’t afford one of her own.

One day I showed up and a guy was sitting on the couch, smoking cigarettes and watching television. I didn’t see him move an inch from his spot until two days later when he decided to go back to work. Another day, yet another guy showed up - an old friend of Maud’s who used to live in the house. He drove Maud home from a bar one night after she was in no condition to drive back, and didn’t leave the house for two days.

Earlier this week, I returned home in the evening to find a woman sprawled out on the couch. As I learned the next morning, Terry is a Navajo woman and divorcee from New Mexico who’s lived all over the States, and is crashing in our house for an indeterminate amount of time, while she and Maud spend the days drinking, watching television and cooking.

In case we didn't have enough people coming through, we also had 3 dogs and 2 cats roaming around at different points during the summer. (1 of the cats belongs to Maud).

All this might make my living situation sound out of control or unpleasant. The truth is I haven’t felt that way at all. Besides offering me a window into the different lives that people lead here, everyone with the exception of Sue has been friendly and easy to get along with, especially Maud. I’m not sure this would work in New York, but then again, whoever said living in the Big Apple was like living in the real world??

State of the Union

2006-08-07T18:23:00.000-04:00

Here’s a list of all the states I’ve visited and associated stats:

States I’ve visited: 38 (Almost 39...after I visit Minnesota in September)
States I still need to visit: 12
(See below for a complete listing)

States I’ve traveled to this summer:
Alabama
Mississippi
Louisiana
Tennessee
Georgia

Favorite State:
Maryland, of course!
Runners up:
New York City (ok, that's not a state)
Colorado

Least-Favorite State:
I’m not going to answer this one because every state I’ve been to has something good about it, but I think most people from the Northeast would pick New Jersey.

State with the friendliest people:
It’s a toss up between Colorado, California (San Francisco), Alabama and Mississippi

Most scenic state:
Wyoming

Least scenic state:
Oklahoma

States I Still Need to Go to (Ranked in order of preference):
Washington & Oregon
Alaska
North Dakota & Montana
Hawaii
Arkansas
Kentucky
Idaho
Missouri
Kansas

State with the most far-out but worthwhile tourist site:
Iowa’s Field of Dreams

States I could see myself raising a family in:
Maryland / D.C. Area
Pennsylvania
Massachusetts
Connecticut
Georgia
California
Colorado
Texas

States I could see myself retiring to:
Maine
Vermont
New York
Maryland (DC Area)
Arizona
California
(Florida is conspicuously absent from this list...though I can't promise it won't happen)

State I think will be the first to secede from the Union:
Texas

State that should host the Olympics:
Colorado
Pennsylvania
Florida
----------------
States I've Been To:
Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware
Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine
Maryland, Massachussets, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska
Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York
North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island
South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas
Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin
Wyoming

States I still have to get to:
Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky
Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota
Oregon, Washington

Mississippi Burning

2006-08-04T19:16:00.000-04:00

In the 1960s, Mississippi proved to be one of the most deeply entrenched, if not the most, deeply entrenched state in the Union to resist the African American civil rights movement. As the director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Mississippi Project, Bob Moses, often compared to the Biblical Moses in the context of the Civil Rights movement, led voter registration and education drives in rural towns across the Mississippi Delta such as Greenwood and Rureville. During his campaign, Moses suffered constant physical beatings and threats at the hands of law enforcement, as well as regular jailings.

When James Meredith sought to become the first registered black student at Ole Miss in 1962 in Oxford, Mississippi (also the birthplace of William Faulkner), Governor Ross Barnett’s steadfast refusal to allow it to take place sparked riots that resulted in two people dead and nearly 80 wounded, many of whom were U.S. Marshals sent in by the Kennedy Administration. Eighteen months later, three civil rights workers - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner - were killed in Philadelphia, MS after being released from the Neshoba County jail, where they had been booked for a few hours on charges of speeding. (Chaney was from Mississippi and Goodman and Schwerner were from NYC). Edgar Ray Killen, a member of the Neshoba County Klu Klux Klan was only convicted of conspiracy to murder them 13 months ago. That’s right....only 13 months ago. The deaths of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner inspired the movie Mississippi Burning.

Last weekend, I took a road trip to neighboring Mississippi along with my friends Bobby and Rhonda. Though we went to enjoy the sites and scenery in the central and southwestern parts of the state, Mississippi’s notorious clash with race relations was never far from our mind or from our itinerary. Our first stop was in Vicksburg, site of the famous Siege of Vicksburg. Vicksburg played a crucial role in the Civil War because it was situated on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and thus was necessary to control traffic on the waterway. In June of 1863, Union forces laid siege to the city and 47 days later, on July 4th, Confederate soldiers surrendered, marking a major turning point in the war. (As a result of this defeat, the town of Vicksburg didn’t celebrate July 4th until recently). The National Military Park in Vicksburg is the south’s equivalent to the National Military Park in Gettysburg, Pa., and we spent the day touring the park and walking downtown along the Mississippi River.

From Vicksburg, we followed the Mississippi River southwest and made our way to Natchez, a town known for its antebellum (i.e., pre-civil war) homes, and for its history as the center of the Natchez Indian Tribe. Today, Natchez is a quaint collection of beautiful antebellum mansions, a bunch of small-town bars and restaurants on Main Street, and a gigantic casino boat on the Mississippi River. The town turned out to be one of the most tourist-friendly places I’ve been to all summer. Though we were quickly identified as the “Yankees in town,” we had a whole group of friends to hang out with after a night of checking out the local watering holes. By the same token, Natchez also seemed to me to be one of the most conspicuously separated towns that I’ve been in all summer. The bars that we went to were almost 100% white, and we wound up being engaged in an hour-long conversation with a musician from Louisiana who didn’t beat around the bush when he told us that he didn’t want to sound prejudiced, but he thought too many African Americans were on welfare and simply sat around on their laurels taking advantage of tax payers’ money. Especially the ones affected by Hurricane Katrina.

On Sunday, we made our way back north to Jackson, along the Natchez Trace Parkway, which goes from Natchez all the way up into Tennessee, and commemorates the migration route of the Natchez Trace Indians. Jackson was the site of some of the most famous civil rights events in the 1960s. The first Freedom Ride ended in Jackson, MS in June 1961 when the riders, who consisted of both black and white activists seeking to integrate Greyhound’s southern bus system, were arrested upon arriving in the city. Two years later, Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was killed by a white supremacist in front of his home.

Today, downtown Jackson is a pretty bland place with the exception of a few cafes and bars. Using a guidebook for direction however, we drove through the streets to pass by sites where sit-ins and integration protests took place 40 years ago, and then wound up at Millsaps College. In 1965, Millsaps College became the first private college in the south to integrate. On Sunday, it was hosting the New Orleans Saints training camp, which was really why we went there in the first place. (Though the Saints’ highly touted draft pick, Reggie Bush, had ended his contract holdout the day we went to training camp, he didn’t report to camp until Tuesday because he couldn’t get a flight out of LA). Seeing players who had biceps twice the size of my thighs put together was a pretty remarkable sight.

Just as the sun was setting Sunday evening, we arrived at our last stop of the trip - Philadelphia, Mississippi. Our time there was relatively brief, but driving through the streets and seeing the poverty that still permeates the black section of town brought echoes of what James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner must have seen when they came on a mission to effect positive social change. Seeing the memorial to them in front of the small Neshoba County Baptist Church, also reminded me that my work in Alabama this summer is the offspring of the cause that they died for.

With that, we made our way back to Montgomery, Alabama. There are still places I want to see in Mississippi. I want to hear the blues music of the Mississippi Delta (that’s the northeastern part of the state) where, legend has it, the blues player Robert Leroy Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a railroad crossing, and died at the age of 27 after recording only 29 songs. (Those 29 songs are now among the most famous blues songs to ever have been played.) I’d also like to travel to Oxford, birthplace of William Faulkner and home to the University of Mississippi. Last, but not least, I wouldn’t mind swinging through Tupelo, Mississippi, birthplace of none other than Elvis Presley.

I’ll just have to save that for the next time I make my way down south.

The Public Defender

2006-08-02T10:22:00.000-04:00

Going back to some common refrains that I’ve heard about the death penalty and our criminal justice system in general….Before I came here, I assumed that every state had a public defender's office to represent accused criminals who couldn't afford their own attorney. I think most people make the same assumption. Everyone has a right to an attorney, so it seems only natural that a public defender would represent a defendant if they couldn’t hire their own lawyer.

Well, it turns out I was wrong. Alabama does not have a public defender’s office. Instead, private attorneys are appointed by the court to represent indigent defendants. Until 1999, attorneys that were appointed to represent capital punishment defendants at trial received a maximum of $2000 to defend their client. Today, the cap has been removed for trial attorneys (though the billing rate per hour is still pretty meager), but not for attorneys who represent death row clients on appeal. In contrast to Alabama’s system of court-appointed attorneys, states that have public defender offices provide funding for the office that is then matched by the federal government. Public defenders work on representing poor defendants 100% of the time, unlike the private attorneys who represent indigent defendants in Alabama.

Alabama’s system has several consequences that necessitate organizations like Equal Justice Initiative, the organization I’m interning at this summer, to actively seek reform of the state criminal justice system while extending their own resources to capacity in order to represent clients on death row. First of all, the attorneys that are appointed to represent indigent defendants have an incentive to spend as little time as possible representing each defendant so that they can earn more money. This means that the quality of their counsel is extremely poor. Criminal indigent defense attorneys are also usually not the “cream of the crop” so-to-speak because if they had regular, paying clients than they wouldn’t have to accept the discounted fees offered by the state to represent indigent defendants.

Not surprisingly, 70 percent of the people presently on death row were convicted when the fees for indigent defense lawyers were capped at $2,000. Partly as a result of this astonishing statistic, ineffective counsel is one of the most common arguments that’s made on appeal to try and secure a new trial. In one case that I’m working on now for instance, our client’s attorney was only given about $100 to hire a forensic expert to testify on his client's behalf. The forensic expert had to analyze bullets found at the crime scene, which turned out to be the main evidence against the defendant. Because of the meager allowance that he got from the state, the defendant’s attorney wound up hiring an “expert” who did not know how to use the machine to analyze bullet markings, and who was blind in one eye. Today, this client sits on death row, despite extraordinarily strong evidence - including evidence that the bullets don’t match his gun - that he is actually innocent of the crime committed.

There’s a saying that it’s better to be rich and guilty than innocent and poor. That’s especially true in Alabama.

Reverend Robert Graetz

2006-07-28T12:50:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, this week has been tough, and I sit here tonight with swirling emotions struggling to write this blog. Though my summer has been an amazing one, as I hopefully have conveyed on these pages, not every day is easy. Besides the complicated nature of the work in which I’ve been engaged, I realize the difficulty of living in a place and culture that is virtually foreign to me: relationships with the people I love and care about can change while I’m gone; phone and email conversations are not substitutes for the comfort of friends and family back home; and even the up-to-the minute nature of online news doesn’t replace the experience of living through the headlines, whether they be good or bad.

I wanted to briefly share an inspirational experience that I had tonight. In 1955, Reverend Robert Graetz, who is white, was called to become the minister of Montgomery’s all-black Trinity Church, fresh out of seminary in Ohio. Several months after his appointment, an African American woman, who used Rev. Graetz’s church for youth meetings, was arrested for refusing to leave her seat in the front of the bus. Rev. Graetz called Rosa Parks that night to confirm what had taken place, and the next day stood up in his pulpit and became one of the first ministers, white or black, to publicly support the Montgomery bus boycott. Following his declaration of support, Rev. Graetz became one of the leaders of the boycott, an active participant in the civil rights movement, and a close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Earlier tonight I had the opportunity to hear Rev. Graetz speak in his adopted hometown of Montgomery (he’s now semi-retired and living in Ohio). In the audience sat a virtual “who’s who” of civil rights activists: Judge Thomas Gray, whose brother, Fred Gray, is the renowned civil rights attorney made famous when he represented the bus boycotters in court; Reva Harris, a close friend of Dr. King’s, whose husband organized an African American taxi service during the boycott and who provided shelter to 31 Freedom Riders when they came to Montgomery; the niece of E.D. Nixon, considered the “Father of the Civil Rights Movement”; and finally, several members of Trinity Church who actively participated in the boycott.

Though I have experienced something of this sort in my own family, for one of the first times in my life, I observed people treat others of a different race than their own as if they were all part of the same family. The God that Rev. Graetz invoked was not the God of war or of divisiveness, but of compassion, of unity and of respect. Rev. Graetz spoke of the need for the Church and for society to be more accepting of homosexuality, and related to the audience that his oldest son, who was gay, died of AIDS in the 1980s. His son came out, however, with the full support of his family, which I can only imagine as being extremely difficult given the fact that the Lutheran Church only welcomed gays and lesbians in the 1990s.

Rev. Graetz also imparted his advice to the next generation, emphasizing not only the importance of knowing our collective history, but also the need for people to exercise the right to vote. This advice was particularly relevant given President Bush’s signing of the Voting Rights Act today, but also had special meaning for me since I recently visited the Voting Rights Museum in Selma. On a related topic, Rev. Graetz discussed what it means to put one’s life on the line for a cause in which he believed. As he put it, he and the other civil rights leaders knew that some of them would die fighting for their rights, but decided that they were willing to do so in order to be able to change the lives of the generation that succeeded them. (Rev. Graetz’s house was bombed several times in 1956 and 1957).

Though his name may not carry the instant recognition associated with Dr. King’s, meeting Rev. Graetz tonight reinforced the fact that my work here is a continuation of the reform that he first advocated along with Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders of the 1950s and ‘60s in Montgomery. We have come a long way since the days of Martin Luther King’s and Rev. Graetz’s heroic deeds, but we still have farther to go.

P.S. Grit Count = 6 regular grits, 2 cheese grits.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

2006-07-25T12:47:00.000-04:00

What does it feel like to walk through a tunnel that has no light at the end of it?

On Thursday, I was back in prison for another visit, this time to meet with a client, “CC”, who is serving a sentence of life without parole for a murder he committed when he was sixteen. Today, CC is 29 and has spent most of his 13 years in prison locked in solitary confinement. More than anything else during our visit, I felt a sense of the overwhelming despair that inevitably consumes someone who has grown up inside the walls of a prison and has virtually no chance of ever getting out.

I myself walked out of our meeting frustrated, not only at the fact that there was little I could do to ease CC’s palpable anxiety. Our 3 hours of conversation certainly put him in a better mood than when he first walked in, if only because he had a chance to enjoy human interaction and a thought-provoking discussion. From a legal point of view however, CC knows that there is little recourse available to secure a reduction in his sentence or to get him before a parole board. (This was not a part of our conversation as I was only there to check in with CC, not to provide him legal counsel).

CC’s best shot at freedom right now is to hope for a Supreme Court decision concluding that a sentence of life without parole for crimes committed as a juvenile is unconstitutional. Several organizations have begun to advocate for this to happen, though it’s unlikely to come about anytime soon. In the meantime, I was left to ponder how an individual who has grown up in prison from a dangerous kid into an articulate, remorseful and educated adult can be left to stare ahead at the four walls around him without much hope of ever seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

The answer to me lies in the fact that our criminal justice system emphasizes uniformity and efficiency over individualized justice. Our justice system is not set up like a child welfare department, whereby case-workers monitor prisoners’ progress during incarceration to determine when they have assumed responsibility for their crimes, demonstrated remorse and matured to the point of being able to successfully re-enter society. Instead, our justice system attempts, though not always successfully, to ensure that similar crimes merit similar punishments, that criminal prosecution is executed pursuant to a protocol that protects the constitutional rights of the defendants, and that appellate courts are not bogged down by an endless series of appeals questioning the accuracy of the jury’s verdict.

This all sounds well and good, except when we consider that such a criminal justice system treats a 19-year old offender the same as a 40-year old offender, that taxpayers assume the cost of incarcerating individuals who no longer need to be locked up, and that prosecutors face incentives to maximize sentences instead of adopting a pragmatic approach that emphasizes ultimate re-entry into society. Moreover, especially when it comes to considering the death penalty, the criminal justice system tends to lose sight of the fact that human life is involved on both sides of the equation – on the victim’s side and on the perpetrator’s side. This point is made with startling clarity in the movie I saw last night, Dead Man Walking.

No doubt there are arguments in favor of our justice system as it exists today. Efficiency and uniformity keep the costs of prosecution and administration down and provide notice to potential criminals of the punishments they might face if they choose to act on their tendencies. Furthermore, our justice system mandates that when a crime is committed, all of society suffers harm and not just the immediate victim or the victim’s family. Meting out similar punishments for similar crimes is consistent with this philosophy.

Though I don’t expect our country’s justice system to be overhauled in the near future, I believe advocates of reform must figure out a way to focus their eyes on the light at the end of the tunnel – to lobby legislators and prosecutors and convince them that prisoners, especially young ones, who enjoy a ray of hope at being released might have incentives to clean up their act; to create better programs inside and outside of prison that encourage continuing education, regular communication with the outside world and positive reinforcement; and, above all, to emphasize that our criminal justice system must be more accountable to individual human beings, victims and criminal offenders alike.

Speaking Words of Wisdom

2006-07-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

Passionate oratory voiced by church ministers and lay leaders catalyzed the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. Instead of counting on physical comforts or material wealth to support its awe-inspiring endurance and drive to tear down racial barriers, the black community fed itself with the "soul food" of its leaders' daily rhetoric at mass Church meetings.

These are three of my favorite quotes from the Montgomery bus boycott, which was initiated when Rosa Parks boarded a bus, only a block from my current office, and refused to take a back seat as segregations laws required.*

And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.
There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair.
There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
Martin Luther King, December 5th 1955 at a mass meeting signalling the start of the boycott.

We are not wrong in what we are doing.
If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this mighty nation is wrong.
If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.
If we are wrong, God almighty is wrong.
Martin Luther King, December 5th 1955.

When MLK's own speech failed to resonate with the crowd at a later mass meeting in support of the boycott, Mother Pollard, one of the older members of the congregation walked up to the pulpit, comforted MLK and threw the crowd into a frenzy when she declared:
My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.
This simple sentence became one of the mantras of the Montgomery bus boycott.

*The boycott lasted for a full year, from December 5, 1955 until December 21, 1956. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the age of only 26 (!!), the Montgomery Improvement Association worked on a shoestring and succeeded in keeping the boycott together. In addition to fleets of carpools and drivers organized by the MIA to help overcome the black community's near total dependence on public transportation, many people wound up trekking long distances by foot just to avoid taking the buses. The yearlong boycott represented an incredible feat of organization, unity and sheer willpower and propelled the southern Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. to the national consciousness. Though an area on the corner of the street where Rosa Parks boarded the bus is today called the Rosa Parks Plaza, no memorial or plaque exists at that location describing her momentous act.

The Cost of Death v. Life

2006-07-17T10:58:00.000-04:00

A common refrain in the anti-death penalty world is that imposing capital punishment doesn’t make sense because it’s more costly to the State than imposing life without parole (LWOP). Several people have asked me where this statement comes from and I decided to do a bit of research to figure out what the scoop is.

The argument that a death sentence is more expensive than LWOP centers on the differences in cost between a capital trial versus one where the maximum sentence is LWOP. Though the cost of employing the prosecutors may be a fixed cost to the taxpayer no matter what kind of case is being tried (i.e. the prosecutors’ salary has to be paid either way), a death penalty trial is more expensive than other trials because it requires two phases, the first to determine the defendant’s guilt and the second to determine the defendant’s punishment, and because it involves significantly more pretrial preparation. Some state attorney generals also have prosecutor divisons devoted exclusively to capital trials.

According to the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Richard Dieter, in his January 2005 testimony before the New York State Assembly, a death penalty trial and the appeals that immediately follow it make a death sentence more costly than LWOP, even if a lifetime incarceration is more expensive than incarcerating an inmate until they’re executed. (note: many death sentences are not carried out because 68% of them are overturned on appeal, and 82% of those reversals result in a sentence of LWOP). Ultimately, Mr. Dieter’s point is that “a million dollars spent today is a lot more costly to the state than a million dollars that can be paid gradually over 40 years.” Mr. Dieter backed up his testimony by pointing to numerous studies calculating the costs of the death penalty versus LWOP in particular states, including a 1992 analysis presented in the Dallas Morning News that found that a death penalty trial costs an average of $2.3 million, or three times the average cost of imprisoning someone in a maximum security cell for 40 years.

Of course, there’s always another side to the story. According to a 1997 report by Dudley Sharp, the Death Penalty Resources Director for Justice for All (www.jfa.net) (Mr. Sharp’s paper is on www.prodeathpenalthy.com), LWOP is $1.2M - $3.6M more expensive than execution because the State must bear the cost of keeping the prisoner in state custody for the rest of their life. This figure is reached based on the dubious assumption that an LWOP prisoner is incarcerated 50 years verses only six years for a person on death row. Nevertheless, the overall point is that a life sentence is more expensive than a death sentence because it involves a longer period of incarceration.

Though my sympathies lie with the anti-death penalty stance, I don’t think that advocates on either side of the fence should put too much weight on a financial cost comparison as the primary motivation for abolishing or for continuing to impose the death penalty. That’s partly because the numbers can clearly be manipulated either way, but also because there are many other issues underlying the death penalty that I think are more important. For example, we must answer how and whether the death penalty furthers the pursuit of justice; whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent against crime and/or achieves moral retribution for the commission of particularly heinous acts (a la an “eye for an eye”); whether the state or a jury of peers has the power to decide that an individual has not only forfeited their right to live among society but also their right to live at all; whether we have made sufficient technological and forensic advancements to avoid putting an innocent person to death; and, finally, whether the widespread international criticism that this country has faced in imposing the death penalty should influence our system of punishment.

Letter from Birmingham

2006-07-12T17:01:00.000-04:00

My Dear Barber Q,

In the spirit of Martin Luther King’s open Letter from Birmingham Jail, published in April 1963, I write to you having just returned from a weekend in the city made famous for its role in the 1960s civil rights movement. Unlike Dr. King’s letter, mine is drafted in the relative comfort of personal freedom and in a time when individuals, both black and white, are no longer risking their lives to end such egregious practices as segregation. Also unlike Dr. King's letter, mine is only intended to capture my reaction to a trip to your city that I took this past weekend in the company of Missy T and D-Man, whereas Dr. King’s powerful words dictated the philosophy behind non-violent direct action. Like Dr. King however, I write because I find myself in the south refusing to sit idly by while observing that injustice is still here.

Saturday afternoon, the three of us went to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, located right across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church. (The church jumped into the national consciousness and became one of the most graphic images on display during the 1960s, when it was bombed by the Klu Klux Klan in September 1963 and killed 4 teenage girls inside). The CRI contains some of the most important symbols of the civil rights movement, including the door to Dr. King’s Birmingham jail cell and the front of a Trailways bus that was firebombed soon after it entered Alabama in 1961 while transporting Freedom Riders through the south.

While the museum was impressive, it served mainly to inform us of the imagery and historical context surrounding events that took place four decades ago. After leaving, we experienced first-hand how deep the roots of racial separation run in this city.

[Birmingham was founded 120 years ago in the wake of the civil war as an industrial mining town. Despite the fact that slavery had already ended, racial separation continued to permeate through the south, first by custom and then by law. The Birmingham mines were no different, with African Americans relegated to the dangerous and back-breaking menial work and whites appointed to supervisory positions. Socially, African Americans and whites also didn’t mix, especially in the wake of the white landowners’ resentment after the civil war. Because many white establishments refused to serve them, African Americans caught onto Birmingham’s fast paced development that earned the city its nickname the “magic city” by opening a slew of black businesses that served the African American community. Many of these businesses were located on Fourth Avenue, which is where we found ourselves soon after leaving the CRI. ]

Today, Fourth Avenue is still all black, featuring a row of African American barber shops, a theater famous for providing black entertainment, a well-known chicken wing joint and a funeral parlor. After walking out of a Montgomery barbershop last week with my first-ever mullet, I was in desperate need of another haircut, and I decided to take my hair and put it into your hands, Barber Q, when we entered the oldest black barbershop in Birmingham, Magic City Barbershop.

The music and conversation didn’t come screeching to a halt when we first walked in to your shop though we received some quizzical looks and side glances from the folks inside. No sooner had the three of us sat down before we started fielding questions asking what our names were, what we do, how old we are, etc…all trying to tactfully figure out how we managed to be the only three white customers on the entire block. By the time we left two hours later, however, we had broken through the color barrier and enjoyed friendly conversations, talking politics and bantering with everyone there. Though we couldn’t make it, we also appreciated your invitation to the shindig you were throwing in honor of your wife’s birthday. (The haircut was a drastic improvement also).

The next morning, the three of us found ourselves again to be the only persons not of color in attendance when we arrived for services at Birmingham’s historic Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. Having never attended a black Southern Baptist Church before, I’ve been looking forward to this experience since I arrived here. Now that I’ve had the chance to clap my hands and sing along with the spirited gospel music, say a few amens and shout out some hallelujahs, there’s no doubt in my mind that if I weren’t Jewish I’d be a southern Baptist. Surely Dr. King was aware of the similarities between Jews and African American Baptists, not only in their histories as a persecuted people, but also in their love of spirited singing and music in the prayer service.

Barber Q: I write today to say how much all three of us appreciated your openness and the openness of Birmingham’s African Americans to see beyond our skin color and to engage us in dialogue and welcome us into your community. Nevertheless, I leave Birmingham with a taste of extraordinary southern hospitality mixed with disappointment that though segregation is no longer practiced, separation still is. As I learned from spending time in your barbershop, attending church and even from dropping in at a black jazz joint on Saturday night, Birmingham still has miles to walk before reaching the plateau of race neutrality; before arriving at the day when the black leadership better represents its own constituency by demanding that the 73% of Birmingham residents who are African American practice their hard fought right to vote instead of letting it fall by the wayside; before the white leadership recognizes that equality can only be achieved with a judicial system that is not inherently biased against African Americans and that education only reinforces separation when both public and private schools are demographically lopsided.

Martin Luther King closed his Letter from Birmingham Jail by asking for “hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.” Those stars are certainly closer today than they were in Dr. King’s time, but we have yet to fully bask in their glow.

Yours,
Ariel Glasner

PS Grit Count = 3 Regular Grits, 2 Cheese Grits

Meat & 3

2006-07-06T02:31:00.000-04:00

I just returned from a weekend at Virginia Beach with my family to celebrate July 4th, and more importantly my grandmother’s 80th birthday! I know that sometimes I take it for granted, but it’s truly a blessing to be able to vacation at the beach where we’ve been going for 25 years with both of my grandparents and, though they were not with me this past weekend, to still have all of my grandparents alive and in relatively good health.

Having just returned home from the weekend, I now have a few minutes to finish up the posting I started writing last week.

Alabama is known as one of the homes of authentic southern cooking – deep fried chicken, meat slathered with gravy, corn bread positively soaked with butter, collard greens, fried okra and candied yams - all to be washed down with sweet tea (that’s ice tea with about two cups of sugar per pitcher. I never knew what drinking liquid sugar tasted like until I had sweet tea).

Besides Sunday after church, one of the best times to get a taste of southern food is during the week, at one of the local lunch counters. (Note: lunch counters are located all over the deep south and aren’t indigenous to Alabama, however, each state’s lunch counters have a different character, and oftentimes different menu options). Though there are a few places to pick up tuna sandwiches or even to get take-out Chinese food for lunch in Montgomery (don’t come to Montgomery for its take-out Chinese food!), the most common place to pick up a bite to eat during the work week is lunch counters or low key restaurants known as Meat & 3 or Meat & 2s, meaning a meat dish and 2 or 3 side dishes.

Last week, when I had the pleasure of having Mommy Dearest pay me a visit, I decided I’d treat her to authentic southern cuisine – or at least authentic vegetarian southern cuisine – and take her to a local Meat & 3. I’ve never seen a restaurant like a Meat & 3. They’re usually only open from 12 – 3 on weekdays and each day they have a different menu that’s written out manually on a blank sheet of paper and then Xeroxed. The general choices are variations on fried chicken, beef with gravy or chicken with gravy. The side dishes include everything from steamed cabbage, to creamed corn, to mashed potatoes with gravy, to mac & cheese, to fried okra. Being a vegetarian for the summer it obviously sounds a bit ridiculous to go to lunch at a place where I can’t eat anything, but I love just soaking up the atmosphere, trying out the corn bread and ordering the “vegetarian platter”, which consists of 3-4 side dishes of my choosing.

The first place we went to – and the place I heard was one of the best in town – was the first floor of a person’s house, where the eponymous Martha converted her living room and dining room into a quaint lunch spot. After sitting down and starting to snack on the corn bread, Mom and I realized that everything, and I mean everything, on the menu was cooked with meat or a meat base, including all the vegetables. The waitress apologized, but she had nothing she could serve us. (“Made to order” dishes isn’t a familiar concept at a meat & 3). We were obviously disappointed, but I had a few fallbacks in mind so we made our way to another well known lunch spot.

Davis Café looks like its straight out of the 1960s – outside and inside. Despite its dim lighting and lack of décor, it always draws a crowd for lunch and is known for being a gathering spot for local politicos. In we went, and what do you know but 5 minutes later we were leaving again with the waitress’s apologies that she had nothing vegetarian to serve us following us out the door. After a few more stops we realized we had exhausted all the lunch counters we could find in downtown Montgomery and we weren’t going to have any luck finding a veggie option on the menu that day since everyone was pretty much serving the same thing. In the end, Mom and I had to settle for tuna sandwiches, a disappointing finale to our quest for authentic southern cooking.

Though he might not find a whole lot of cheeseburgers here, Jimmy Buffet would probably be in paradise down south thanks to his “carnivorous habits” (See: Cheeseburger in Paradise). For Mom and me, however, we learned the obvious lesson that it’s not easy being a vegetarian in Montgomery. I always marvel at the luxuries we have in the Northeast, where it’s virtually a given that every restaurant has at least one solid veggie option in order to succeed. It’s easy for me to imagine that if more southerners came up north for a spell then America would be less of a meat eating culture, which could have a positive impact on transforming our “Fast Food Nation” into a country of more health conscious eaters. On the other hand, I think northerners have a lot to learn from the southern concept of food – which is more similar to the European take on things – that we were put here on this good earth to satisfy our appetites, and we might as well have a passion for what winds up getting digested in our stomachs, even if it could potentially raise our cholesterol levels a few notches.

Last but not least, since this posting is all about food, I’m sorry to say that my grit count has been completely static the last week (I'm not counting the grits I tasted at Virginia Beach, which don’t hold a candle next to the real thing down here.)

Next time I’m going out to lunch on Wednesday, when I’m guaranteed of getting some (vegetarian) macaroni and cheese!!

Listenin' to R & B

2006-06-27T00:25:00.000-04:00

Since moving down here, I’ve gotten hooked on Rick & Bubba’s morning talk radio show on Y102 (the equivalent of Z100 in NYC – it mostly plays Top 40 hits). The following is a list of topics from Rick & Bubba’s morning radio show:

1) Rick (or was it Bubba?) got too competitive at a Church carnival and broke his son’s Sunday school teacher’s nose while boxing on a moonwalk.

2) A call-in segment on being aware of and preventing internet predators

3) Why moms and dads have different parenting responsibilities: Dads are the playmates and Moms are the caretakers. (This message was affirmed by a university student who called in and informed listeners this is exactly what she learned in her family life and parenting class)

4) Effusive praise for Geraldo, who stated on the air that we’re going to be in Iraq a long time, so anyone that has a problem with the war should “get over it” (Note: I haven’t independently confirmed Geraldo’s statement);

5) Extensive critical analysis of Connie Chung’s farewell parody song (which was indeed atrocious) on her weekend cable news show with Maury Povich.

6) Interspersed throughout has been ongoing discussion of the World Cup results (Rick or Bubba, I forget which, isn’t a big fan of soccer, but loves tennis)

Admittedly, I’ve been impressed with how substantive R&B’s content is – they’re both pretty well versed on world events and are certainly entertaining. I was holding out some hope that R&B would offer at least a taste of liberalism, especially since the entertainment industry and most of all, morning shock jocks, generally trends toward liberal and boundary-busting ideas. But my hope went out the window on the same day that R&B started singing Geraldo’s praises, which was the same day that they hailed Ronald Regan for prophesying the Star Wars missile defense system and then proceeded to call Democrats multiple variations of “whiners”, “whiny liberals” and “folks that complain a whole lot but don’t do anything”. Listening to R&B is when I have my “duh moments” that not everyone in this country thinks of progressivism as a positive trait. By the same token it also gives me a window into what politicians mean when they stress “family values” – a lifestyle that is family-safe and centric, that is humorous (with clean jokes, of course), where men and women stick to traditional gender roles and where faith plays a significant part of one’s outlook.

Upward "Mobile"-ity

2006-06-20T18:38:00.000-04:00

Sparky and I decided to take an adventure this past weekend and to meet up in between New Orleans and Montgomery. After looking at a map we figured that Mobile, Al was the best destination, located right on the border of Alabama and Mississippi and sitting on Mobile Bay, which opens into the Gulf of Mexico. Our choice turned out to be a great one and, somewhat to my surprise, Mobile is a tourist friendly city with quite a bit of activity going on.

Saturday morning (which also happened to be the fifteenth anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah!) we checked out the local synagogue, where we were greeted with warm hospitality and a standing invitation to come back anytime. Though a lot of similarities exist between synagogues in the northeast and synagogues down south in terms of the liturgical components of the service, the two congregations I’ve visited down here differ from what I’m used to back home. Part of the reason for this difference stems from the fact that the congregations here are relatively small and don’t have a lot of young people, so when an unfamiliar young couple walks into the room, the congregation pounces on them with open arms. Our warm reception was also a product of traditional southern hospitality. At the synagogue in New Orleans, for example, Sparky received a bunch of business and calling cards from women who were only too happy to offer her a drive over to the synagogue or a place for dinner when she was in town.

Another reason for the difference between synagogues here and those up north, is that down south, Jewish communities find themselves in the extreme minority; so much so that a common question to ask here when meeting someone is “what church do you belong to?” (I haven’t yet figured out my answer to this question). With such a dominant Christian culture, synagogues represent the only way to celebrate one’s Jewish heritage, or even to acknowledge it.

One similarity between synagogues in the south and north may has a touch of irony associated with it. Regular church attendance is expected here, and as a result, churches provide a large part of communities’ social fabric. People that go to synagogue are seeking the social outlet they don’t have by not belonging to a church. While synagogues up north are also centers of social activity, most have become that way because the communities are so substantial, not necessarily because they find a need to compete with church culture.

The last difference I noticed about synagogue this past weekend compared to the one I go to at home, was that grits were served for lunch! It wasn’t quite like having challah and herring, but the grits were still pretty tasty.

On a related note, I’ve been keeping track of the number of grit dishes I’ve eaten since coming down to Alabama, and the total count thus far is two orders of regular grits and one order of cheese grits. Definitely a little disappointed with my grit consumption. I also have a sizeable bag of raw grits waiting to be cooked sitting on my desk, courtesy of my fellow intern. Next up on my menu is fried grits….

Getting back to my weekend – after services, Sparky and I enjoyed the rest of what Mobile and its environs had to offer. The city’s history is extraordinarily colorful and the architecture is also amazing, except for the fact that there are way too many fast food places located downtown. Mobile was French Louisiana’s first capital and featured this country's first Mardi Gras, but eventually lost its prestige when the capital moved to New Orleans. France ultimately ceded Mobile to Great Britain, who turned it back into a major port and economic center, thereby making it a prime strategic target of other colonial countries, most notably Spain who overtook the city during the Revolutionary War. Finally, in 1813 the United States defeated the Spanish and gained control of the city. Today, remnants of the original French fort protecting the gateway to the city from Mobile Bay still exist, and all different styles of houses and buildings line the downtown area (many of them are unoccupied). Saturday night Sparky and I went out for a night on the town and found out that the bars and restaurants are crowded with a healthy contingent of yuppies and university/high school students.

On Sunday, Sparky and I hit Gulf Shores, which is the small stretch of coastline that Alabama claims along the Gulf of Mexico (right next to the Florida panhandle beaches). White sands, warm water, a hot sun and great company – perfect for a relaxing day on the beach!

That pretty much sums up my weekend. Work this week is of course interesting as always, made all the more so by the fact that we’re running a World Cup office pool. As of yesterday I was tied for second place along with all the other interns, but that might change if the US doesn’t win a game already!

Holman Prison; June 15, 2006

2006-06-15T20:51:00.000-04:00

I just got back from a visit to death row.

Holman Prison is located about 115 miles outside of Montgomery near the town of Atmore, Alabama. The maximum security prison was constructed in 1968 under the administration of Governor Lurleen Wallace, wife and successor to the infamous Governor George Wallace (known for his stance against desegregation), and the only female governor to ever be elected in this state. Today, the facility houses about 830 general inmates (many of whom are serving life without parole) and 168 death row prisoners.

I emptied my pockets and left the contents in the car, taking only a photo ID and a note pad. The tower guards sitting at the entrance pressed the buzzer to let us in. We walked inside to the reception area and a guard materialized and patted me down. Then the door slid open, kind of like I would have imagined from the movies I’ve seen, and we walked into a room containing about 20 tables, a couple of snack machines and surrounded by glass walls.

In 2000, at the age of 19, BB was convicted of capital murder because he shot and killed the man he was trying to rob. This morning, he walked into the room with the glass windows; I shook his hand and, with the EJI staff attorney leading the way, helped to explain the next steps of his appeals process. This explanation was important because since his conviction 6 years ago, BB has not been visited by an attorney. It’s a bit unsettling talking so banally with someone about trying to save his life, especially when the odds aren’t good. I imagine it’s what a doctor feels like talking to a patient whose cancer has already metastasized.

When I walked into the prison, out of the corner of my eye I saw a plaque with the quote “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” To me, the shadow of death took the form of a pit in my stomach as I sat there, having a conversation with a guy who looked not a day older than 20, who was quick to smile and who was genuinely considerate and happy to see us. The main question he asked as we went along was “how much time are the appeals going to take?”, which is a loaded question that doesn’t have a good answer no matter which way you cut it, though in his case the process is still in its early stages.

For more than a half hour after we got the legal material out of the way, we chatted about everything from the NBA finals to his favorite college teams to the family members he keeps in touch with and why he likes the heat of Alabama and Louisiana compared to the cold of the northeast, where he used to live. He became most animated when telling us about the annual death row-wide competition that’s coming up, where teams of prisoners compete against each other in chess, basketball, volleyball and dominoes in order to win a prize of ice cream, soda and, most important of all, bragging rights. We only left when he had to go back to his prison cell for the twice-daily prison-wide count that takes place.

Though I know BB unlawfully took someone’s life, sitting there it was hard to envision the 60 seconds when the gun went off as anything more than a reckless and tragic mistake brought on with the help of a childhood marred by physical abuse and the deaths of BB’s immediate family. Sitting there, it was also hard to think that no matter what happens with his appeals, BB is virtually guaranteed of spending the rest of his life behind bars in a jail cell in Alabama without air conditioning, competing for ice cream and a soda.

As I wrote earlier, I can’t imagine the loss and grieving that the victim’s family has suffered since the day he was killed. But today - after I realized first-hand that the person convicted of committing the crime is not defined by his life’s worst moment (that’s one of EJI’s mottos) - I understood that execution is not the solution to honor the victim’s life or to attaining justice. Perhaps I would have reacted differently had I met a death row prisoner who was a habitual violent offender, or who visibly displayed his evil designs.

What does evil look like after all? If the person sitting in front of me today is considered the face of evil, and is deemed to be so dangerous to society that his life must be terminated, then I can only look in the mirror and conclude that evil resides within me and my friends too, because in different circumstances BB and I would have no problem hanging out and becoming friends outside of the barbed wire fences that surrounded us.

That makes me think of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant”, where Guthrie is arrested for littering and is placed on the same bench as violent offenders - “Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!” And a few minutes later, Guthrie sings how they all “shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talking about all kinds of groovy things.” The point is that maybe we’re all the same inside – we’re all sitting on the same bench – except that different people act out their bad parts while others keep it contained.

Or I could drop the whole evil stuff and conclude that I’m not an evil person nor did I meet the face of evil today - only a friendly kid who would cream me in basketball and/or chess if I ever played him and who is paying too high a price for his mistakes, which originated through no fault of his own way before he pulled the gun on an innocent victim in a mall parking lot. To the extent that it's possible to generalize about evil people, I believe that the real ones might be serial criminals, sociopaths or even perhaps the few individuals who enforce laws and punishments in the false name of justice.

The answer is probably a little bit of both. I guess I’ll just have to go listen to Alice’s Restaurant and think about it.

Kosher Cajun

2006-06-13T23:57:00.000-04:00

(Editor’s note: Names have been changed to protect individual privacy.)

This past weekend I went to visit Sparky in the Big Easy, New Orleans. Much to my surprise the drive was pretty quick - a straight 4.5 hour shot southwest on the Interstate through Alabama, Mississippi right to the edge of Louisiana, where NOLA is located. After spending spring break in N’awlins it was good to be back and of course to get the chance to visit Sparky, who’s lucky enough to be spending the summer there.

The city itself is truly unique, managing to combine a rare blend of funky music, spicy food, European old city houses with southern plantation style mansions, and of course a hefty serving of “soul”. Though I’d already gotten to see how New Orleans has been recovering from Katrina when I was there a few months ago, this past weekend I had the chance to revisit the Lower 9th Ward, which is the area most devastated by the storm. I saw several people working on reconstructing their houses in the lower 9th, and even some “For Sale” signs, though my portfolio manager tells me it’s probably not a good move to buy there right now.

For the most part, however, the Lower 9th Ward remains a ghost town, and I’ve never seen such an enormous magnitude of destruction concentrated in one place. Driving down the empty streets there, it’s easy to imagine that a huge bomb simply exploded overturning houses, cars and anything else in its way. In some ways a bomb is better than the reality of what really happened – ultimately, the people who were most disenfranchised in the city, the poor and predominately black residents of the lower 9th, lived in poorly constructed houses that were just waiting to be blown down, either by the big bad wolf or by the inevitable Hurricane. Moreover, enfranchisement doesn’t come at the snap of one’s fingers, even if that “snap” involved the complete destruction of a whole population’s entire livelihood. Most of the 9th ward residents haven’t returned to New Orleans because they have nowhere to come back to, and in the meantime, the city has been twiddling its thumbs about what to do.

On a lighter note, I don’t think I’ve quite reached “foodie” status, but Sparky and I spent a good part of the weekend enjoying New Orleans’ cuisine. On Saturday night we checked out a place called Jacques-Imos, a small hot spot in the western part of the city. The wait is typically up to 2 hours and people just hang out by the bar until they’re seated. On the way to our table we walked through the kitchen where a whole lotta’ frying was going on – all different kinds of fish, chicken, shrimp – and it smelled amazing. The highlight of the meal besides the waiter who was literally walking around in his cycling outfit – spandex shorts, helmet, glasses and blinking reflectors all over himself – was the fried green tomatoes, which were awesome!

The next morning after having only partially recovered from our dining experience the night before, we checked out a local diner for my first taste of grits since coming down south! I can’t believe I waited a whole week to have them!! Breakfast consisted of a healthy portion of grits, French toast and eggs – and we went the “light” route. Most people added sausage, ham or bacon on top of all that. In case you’re wondering what grits taste like, they’re pretty much a bland version of cream of wheat, except that they’re made with corn (and if you’ve seen My Cousin Vinny you know that they take 20 minutes to make). You can add anything to them to give them some flavor, such as butter, salt, salsa, syrup, etc and they washed down the eggs pretty well.

That wasn’t the end of the eating fest that Sparky and I went on. Right after breakfast we got into the car and headed about 20 minutes out of the city to check out Kosher Cajun, the only kosher New Orleans style restaurant in the city (we heard about it when we went to Synagogue on Saturday). I was dreaming about going there literally all weekend. So much of New Orleans’ food is off limits to me (because I keep kosher) that I couldn’t wait to try the types of food whose aroma literally wafts through the air as I walked through the streets. Though most of Kosher Cajun’s fare consists of New York deli sandwiches and knishes, they had kosher Po Boy sandwiches (The name Po Boy originated in 1929, when a New Orleans restaurateur started serving striking railroad workers, who he called “Poor Boys”, free sandwiches which eventually became known as Po’ Boys. They were originally made with baguettes and French Fried potatoes in the middle to keep costs down but gradually they evolved to be made with meat and fish.). KJ’s also had kosher gumbo, which is the equivalent of kosher chullent. I took both options for the road and, 10 pounds heavier than when I first arrived, I got in the car and drove back to ‘Bama.

The first thing I did when I returned was go for a run in 95 degree heat. Felt like running through a sauna, but it felt great to get out and expend some energy. Since then, the work week has been interesting and exciting and has included an office outing to the final home season game of the local arena football team, the Montgomery Maulers. I realized I was in Alabama when I walked into the arena just in time for the prayer starting off the game, thanking God for good attendance and healthy athletes and hailing Jesus. Then the lights came up, the color guard retreated, and 3 Harley Davidsons roared out of the building. Final score: Montgomery Maulers 42, Charleston Sand Sharks, 30. Way to go home team!!!

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

2006-06-09T16:48:00.000-04:00

Why am I here? It’s a fair question considering that fighting the death penalty was never a cause I championed, nor does it have anything to with my previous career. Besides the obvious answer of wanting to be in a new and exciting place, some experiences I’ve had over the last few days capture the reasons why I felt like working in Montgomery was the right choice for me.

My first project involves helping to prepare a petition of certiorari to the Supreme Court (to get the Court to review the defendant’s conviction/sentence) in a case that features a murder committed by an African American who suffered significant and continuous abuse from the time he was a young kid to the time he committed murder at the age of 19. He also witnessed or experienced the deaths of all 4 of his caregivers - his mother, both his grandparents and his uncle - within a relatively short period of time.

Is justice being served by sentencing a 19 year old with such a history to death? Take away one of those factors - his race - and his chances of getting a lighter sentence rise considerably in this state. Take away the years of abuse he endured and he would have been less disposed to even thinking of such a crime. Take away the fact that he was charged as an adult and you have a young 19 year old who has maliciously taken away another individual’s life, but who also has a lifetime to repent for his actions and to evolve into a contributing - or at least non-threatening - member of society. To me, justice is clearly not being served in this case by killing the defendant. Yet, his chances of living right now are slim to none. My work - and the uphill battle associated with it - is one of the reasons I came here for the summer - to shatter the idea that America’s democracy needs no repair and to find out ways that I can truly help fix it.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to travel to Atlanta to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to hear attorneys argue on behalf of their death row clients. Going to the court was really interesting and was an experience in it of itself - from hearing the court clerk open the session by asking God to show His Grace upon the court, to seeing the judges grill the attorneys on the finer points of their cases. But what really captured the court field trip for me was the realization that these cases don’t just involve a description of the actual crime surrounded in a legal brief by a whole bunch of legalese. On the contrary, these cases involve real people getting killed on both sides of the table.

I apologize for being graphic, but this is part of my point - in Case #1, the defendant killed the woman he was dating, who was deaf, and strangled her two sons, ages 5 and 4 respectively. In Case #2, the defendant was convicted of getting drunk and then taking a knife, stabbing his victim repeatedly, slitting her throat and disemboweling her. Even sitting in a court room hearing lawyers argue dispassionately about the facts of such horrific crimes was difficult for me to stomach. I could talk myself blue in the face about how the death penalty does nothing to deter future crimes, but when it all comes down to it - if I was a witness to the crime or a relative of the victims, could I honestly say that I would not want to see the defendants’ lives taken in exchange for the lives they had no right to take?? Would I care that an African American defendant would have a higher chance of getting capital punishment than a white defendant? Or would I care that the defendant was subjected to a history of abuse or mental illness??

In an ideal world, I hope I would, but realistically I think I’d be too caught up in the grieving process to say that I had such priorities. This question brings to mind Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s infamous flub when he was asked whether he would support the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife. He said no, and then segued into talking about how effective his state’s crime policies had been. Is that all he could think of when asked how he would react to someone killing his wife?? What would I do??

Though I’ve already had one nightmare on this topic, and I’m sure that more are in store for me, one of the reasons I’m here this summer is to challenge myself to think about what my answer to the question is; to answer what I would be willing to personally sacrifice for a system of justice that I support; and to wrestle with uncomfortable, but truly important, dilemmas.

I'm Comin' to Alabama with a Banjo on my Knee

2006-06-04T23:24:00.000-04:00

So, after a short weekend at home in MD with the family and a night of watching My Cousin Vinny and To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm off to a summer of adventures in Alabama this summer. Who knew that the excitement would start as early as my plane ride down south?? From Atlanta, I got rerouted through Columbus (in Georgia...I didn't know Georgia had a Columbus either) and then got driven down to Montgomery by a friendly, but clueless, Delta employee. Still waiting for my luggage to arrive, but all in all I'm happy to be here and am already starting to get settled in.

Though I don't plan on returning to the Big Apple with a southern twang in my voice, I have some aspirations to meet while I spend the summer shvitzing down here (listed in no particular order):

-come home with scientific evidence that, in fact, all country music really does sound the same

-sing Hallelujah and shout Amens at a Southern Baptist karaoke night

-put myself in the shoes of a red-state, card-carrying NRA member, god-fearing, socially conservative Christian American

-see how far our country has come and how much farther we have to go since the day Martin Luther King walked from Selma to Montgomery

-comprehend how and why the death penalty experiment in our country has failed

-learn how to play slide guitar

-eat enough grits to advertise myself as the first human alternative to fuel because I'll be...um, farting so much ethanol

-Be able to strum Sweet Home Alabama and mean it

I'm looking forward to a summer in the Deep South!