Thursday, October 18, 2018
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
The Legal Killing and Criminalization of Homosexuality
The world has been facing a human rights issue that has been getting progressively worse in the turn of the 21st Century. Homosexuals are persecuted in the majority of Africa, the Middle East, and other states around the world. Western ideals of what a human right are rejected under through religion and nationalism. Barbaric means are used to legally murder homosexuals for “cleansing” of the nation. While homosexuality and expression tolerance is being progressively protected amongst wealthy and secular democratic states, the rest of the world continues to persecute homosexuals by taking their basic human rights. A voice must be given to the suppressed and it starts with us individuals. Action must be taken to represent this hidden minority and bring justice to victims of hate.
Currently, homosexuality can be punishable by death in over 40 states around the world. There are at least 79 countries where homosexuality is illegal. In Africa, 38 out of the 53 nations discriminate against homosexuality is some way. In Africa’s most populous state, Uganda, homosexuality can range between a 14-year sentence for homosexual “acts” upwards to a lifetime sentence or even a death sentence for “aggravated homosexuality.” The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, signed the “Kill the Gays Bill” on February 24th, 2014 making homosexuality illegal. A few weeks after this legislation was signed, several instances of mobs entering homosexuals’ homes to viciously assault them in the name of cleansing occurred. The participants in these beatings were protected under Ugandan law. Thankfully though, the Constitutional Court of Uganda delayed the bill’s policy for death, but homosexuality itself is still illegal and punishable by the state. Also, while the bill was still in law, an undocumented amount of homosexuals were detained and tortured. Those involved in the torturing were given amnesty. These homophobic laws have existed since British colonial rule in hopes of preventing “unnatural sex.” Public opinion of Africa is overwhelming against homosexuality because of their strong desire to keep African culture as well as Christian ideals. The only nation in Africa that supports same-sex rights are South Africa and Namibia; underdeveloped states like Mali and the Congo do not have express laws against homosexuality, but all of these states have turned a blind eye to protecting the rights of homosexuals. “Curative/Corrective Rape” or the rape of lesbians by men and other hate driven crime such as vandalism, blackmail, and physical assault happens every day in these states with minimal action by police. Even though Uganda’s government does not directly murder their homosexual population, plenty of other nations still do. Any instance of a state killing its citizens is a direction violation to the right to life as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Yemen, married men have been sentenced to death by stoning since 1994. Married women face up to seven years in prison. The same stoning law exists in Saudi Arabia. Iran, Qatar, Somalia. Most of these states impose sharia law to sentence homosexual intercourse to death by either stoning or other methods. Flogging or imprisonment is legal for minor acts such as kissing, assembling in homosexual clubs/bars, or even for holding hands.
Changing the world starts with a change in our priorities. Protecting homosexuals from having their basic human rights stolen and their dignity ignored is critical to end the injustices committed in these countries. Rape, murder, disease, and hate continues to be embraced by governments rather than tolerance, peace, and healing. Religion must be taken out of government, especially when that religion advocates for the killing of a group of people. When those ideal trump the humanity of another human being, we as a society remain separated. Education is also important in stopping injustice. Ignorance of the unknown becomes fear, that fear becomes hate, and that hate fosters the growth of injustice. As stated above, one should not sit idly by waiting for their government to demand justice for the defenseless, that change must be demanded by each individual person who can help.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
The Death Penalty and Wrongful Executions
“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are three rights guaranteed
to us by our government in the Declaration of Independence. A government which swears
to uphold those rights; enshrining their importance by deeming them “inalienable.”
The 14th Amendment of the Unites States Constitution likewise
states, “nor shall any state deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Yet there appears to be a double standard, or
rather an incongruence between the words which built our government and the
actions they employ to achieve the perceived intent of those words. If “life”
is a right that we are naturally entitled to, how can our government withhold the
power to remove it?
Personally I believe that “life” is a right which can never
be deprived. Yet, in a purely theoretical viewpoint you can argue that an eye
for an eye could potentially qualify as Justice. While I might not agree with
you, I concede there may be a legitimate foundation for such a claim to stand
on. However, one of the flaws I find in the “eye for an eye” theory is that the
margin for error is far too great. What if you’re wrong, and what if the “due
process” isn’t as infallible as we are led to believe? An eye for an eye may
not be an injustice to some, but losing an eye for doing nothing is. And
because there is no way to ensure that you are always correct in your
evaluation and investigation, such actions should never be taken.
I’m not merely alleging
the government has wrongfully deprived someone of the right to life before;
it is a data-driven fact. A study conducted by Samuel Gross of the University
of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State was analyzed by Time magazine. According to Time, “Authors
of the study say that their ‘conservative estimate of the proportion of
erroneous convictions’ is 4.1 percent’... This could mean that approximately
120 of the roughly 3,000 inmates on death row in America might not be guilty… ”
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences led to startling conclusions. Newsweek,
who wrote an analysis of the study, deduced, “Since
1973, 144 people on death row have been exonerated. As a percentage of all
death sentences, that's just 1.6 percent. But if the innocence rate is 4.1
percent, more than twice the rate of exoneration, the study suggests what most
people assumed but dreaded: An untold number of innocent people have been
executed.”
A quintessential example of an
innocent man being executed occurred in 2004, when Cameron Todd Willingham was
killed by lethal injection for allegedly murdering his three children by means
of arson. He was convicted due to forensic
experts who testified that he intentionally set fire to the house. As
innocenceproject.org explains, “Thirteen years later, in the days
leading up to Willingham’s execution, his attorneys sent the governor and the
Board of Pardon and Parole a report from Gerald Hurst , a nationally recognized arson expert, saying that
Willingham’s conviction was based on erroneous forensic analysis. Documents
obtained by the Innocence Project show that state officials received that
report but apparently did not act on it.” Willingham was then executed. Several months
after his death, the Chicago Tribune
released an investigative report which found the evidence used against
Willingham to be fallacious and unfounded.
The death penalty is the outcome
of Due Process, which is symbolic of the system of achieving Justice in
America. According to UMBC Professor Jeffrey Davis, “Justice
should be conceptualized as a process whose purpose is to reconstitute the
equilibrium of human dignity and not simply as an end result.” He goes on to
assert that you “can’t just look at guilty or not guilty, because you ignore its
contributions to transitional justice.” The death penalty takes a process that
should be continuous and makes it finite, and in doing so forever robs the 4%
of individuals, such as Willingham, who are innocent on death row of the
opportunity to seek their own justice. The justice system is not perfect. That
is a fact. We must acknowledge that reality by banning the death penalty.
Justice can be achieved in other ways, and the death penalty – which many view
as the ultimate form of retribution – is only a temporary means of appeasement.
Justice is a flawed process, but a process everyone is entitled to nonetheless.
Murdering someone who isn’t guilty of the crimes they have been convicted deprives
them of their right to life and their right to benefit from the process of Justice,
but murdering someone who truly is guilty of the crimes they have been
convicted for, still deprives someone of their right to life and only
temporarily satisfies those who are seeking Justice in its most holistic form.
I encourage you to join the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a group which consists of 90 million
Americans who explicitly believe the death penalty is wrong. Take their pledge,
and use the tools on their site to keep yourself, and others, informed on this
injustice.
References:
The Central Park Five
On April
19, 1989, a woman, later to be revealed as Trisha Meili, was running on a
pathway in Central Park. During her jog, she was struck over the head with a
tree branch and subsequently dragged into the woods of Central Park. In the
shrubbery of Central Park, her assailant raped her. Five boys were charged with
the assault, rape, and sodomy of Trisha Meili. These five teenagers, however,
did not commit the crime.
On the
evening of April 19, 1989, a group of over twenty-five teenagers entered
Central Park. The group was violent; throwing rocks at cars, harassing people
on bikes, and beating the homeless. Five boys of African American and Hispanic
descent were part of this group; Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin
Richardson, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam. Their ages ranged from 14 to 16 during the time of the attack. When the
police appeared at the scene, the boys ran. Initially, Richardson and Santana were
the first of the five boys picked up and taken to the Central Park Precinct for
unlawful assembly. Just as they were to be released, passersby found the woman
in the park, and the detectives kept the boys at the station, under the guise
of paperwork issues. McCray, Salaam and Wise were picked up the next
day, though Wise was not initially a suspect in the case. The officers say
the two of them hanging around together, so they brought him down to the
precinct with Salaam. McCray was taken from his home later the next day.
The
issue in this case is clear; these children were arrested for a crime that
they played no part in. However, what is more appalling is the role the
detectives and prosecutors had in the indictment of the boys. The detectives
began the interrogation of the boys with the belief that they had sexually
assaulted and abused Meili. The boys initially began the interrogation insisting on telling
the truth, that they had no knowledge of who this woman was. But the detectives
were persistent and unyielding in their attempts to get the boys to support the
narrative that they believed in. They screamed, yelled, spit on the boys, and
told them things like “oh this is the prick right here. Yea he don’t wanna tell
us what happened. You know you fu*king did it. You stuck your fu*king di*k in
her.” They told the boys blatant lies, like Salaam’s prints were found on the
woman’s pants. The interrogation of these boys lasted between 14 and 30 hours.
The police officers purposefully tried to wear the suspects down with abusive
and unfounded tactics. They knew that putting the boys in a state of despair
would encourage them to say anything that would allow them to be released from
the precinct. McCray’s father even told his son to tell the cops whatever they
wanted to hear so they could go home.
The police
officers further placed pressure on the boys by playing the prisoners’ dilemma
with the teenagers. In separate rooms, they told the individuals that the other
males were placing the place on blame on them. It was only at this point that
the boys let go of the truth, that they were innocent, and began making up
stories that condemned the other boys. The cops coached the boys, asking them
leading questions, such as “where was Kevin?” At that point, the boys simply
played along because they wanted to go home. When an undeveloped juvenile is
stressed and placed in an overwhelming situation, all his or he brains is
calculating is how to go home.
Furthermore,
the prosecutors in this case, Elizabeth Lederer and Linda Fairstein, operated
not only as prosecutors but also as investigators with the Manhattan North
cops. When it was first discovered that
the boys did not commit the crime after the true perpetrator, Matias Reyes,
confessed, 13 years after the conviction, the police department commissioned a
panel to go over what happened during the case. The commission found that the
prosecutors and detectives did nothing wrong, only furthering the problem of
institutional protectionism. It was extremely important for Fairstein to be
sheltered, as her entire career was built on this case. Lederer teaches at
Columbia Law School, and the school removed all mention of the
case from her biography, though it still allows her to teach there.
The
prosecutors in this case eventually discovered that there was no DNA evidence
present to support that the boys were anywhere near Meili during the time of
her rape. Even knowing this, the prosecutors decided to proceed with the case
and based it entirely on the false and forced confessions of the teenagers.
The injustices present in this case stem from the shortcomings in the criminal justice system. The abuse of authority, both by the detectives and prosecutors in this case, was not rectified even after Reyes admitted to committing the crime. There was no person or group that held these officers accountable to their misuse of power. We see this problem rampant in society even today, with cases such as Freddie Gray. Police brutality is an obstinate problem that has seen little to no change. Oversight is the only way to fix this abuse of power, and not just selective oversight. Everyone must be held to the same standards in order to ensure that each person is provided and protected by the rights that they intrinsically have by being a US citizen.
The injustices present in this case stem from the shortcomings in the criminal justice system. The abuse of authority, both by the detectives and prosecutors in this case, was not rectified even after Reyes admitted to committing the crime. There was no person or group that held these officers accountable to their misuse of power. We see this problem rampant in society even today, with cases such as Freddie Gray. Police brutality is an obstinate problem that has seen little to no change. Oversight is the only way to fix this abuse of power, and not just selective oversight. Everyone must be held to the same standards in order to ensure that each person is provided and protected by the rights that they intrinsically have by being a US citizen.
Perhaps the
most important consideration as to why this injustice occurred is the answer to
why these specific boys were prosecuted for the crime. Reality and justice were
not the reason for the conviction, but rather their roles as proxies for other
agendas. In the late 1980s, racism and classism was rampant in New York. The
city was divided into those flourishing from the economic boom, and the
criminal underclass. Crack was introduced to the city in large doses in 1984,
and those blamed for the crimes in the City were actually the victims of these
horrifying crimes, black and brown kids. The racism environment during the time
made it easy for the prosecution to paint a picture for the jury; a group of
black and Hispanic kids raped and maimed a white woman. The public was not
concerned with finding the truth, but rather blaming the scapegoat.
The most
important way to combat these injustices is education. Educating the public,
educating youth of the rights they have when speaking to the authorities. New
York City public school teacher Jeena Lee-Walke was just recently fired for doing
exactly that, for teaching her students about the injustices found in The
Central Park Five case. On an individual level, students can rally behind Lee-
Walke and sign a petition to disagree with her termination(http://action.18mr.org/jlw-doe/).
Additionally, there is a petition circulating to fire Lederer from Columbia Law
School(https://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/columbia-university-law-school-fire-elizabeth-lederer-as-lecturer-in-law).
PBS also sponsors a discussion on the issues present in the case(http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/discussion/).
Works Cited
"The Central Park Five"- directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, produced by Sundance Selects, WETA, Florentine Films, PBS, and The Central Park Five Film Project
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/discussion/
https://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/columbia-university-law-school-fire-elizabeth-lederer-as-lecturer-in-lawhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/nyregion/central-park-five-petition-oversimplifies-blame-in-a-collective-failure.html
https://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/columbia-university-law-school-fire-elizabeth-lederer-as-lecturer-in-lawhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/nyregion/central-park-five-petition-oversimplifies-blame-in-a-collective-failure.html
http://action.18mr.org/jlw-doe/
Justice for Shaken Baby Syndrome Victims
Shaken
Baby Syndrome(SBS) is an injury a baby cause by being shaken violently and repeatedly. The shaken can cause swelling of the brain,
internal bleeding detached retinas leading to blindness, mental problem, and
death. It’s a severe form of physical
child abuse that result in an injury to the brain of an infant child which is
Abusive Head Trauma(AHT). All the
victims suffer serious form long-term health and medical problem range from
vision problems, development delay, physical disabilities, and hearing loss and
one of every four child die. In the United
States, between $1500 to over $10,000 Shaken Baby Syndrome cases are reported
each year. The children who suffer from shaken
baby syndrome range from ages 3 months to 4-year age. The average hospital bills range to over $150,000
and the life time treatment cost over $180,00.
Most of the cost are not over by insurance and family have to pay out of
pocket expenses. The perpetrators are normal the father or mother, other family
members, friends, and caregivers that causes this violent crime against an
innocent child.
The reason why SBS is a justice
issue because not all of the perpetrator are punished that same for the
crime. There is no retribution in most
of these case, when all evident are presented the perpetrator are not punished
or pay its debt to society. The criminal
case can take up to three to six years are long depend on the state justice
system. The perpetrator will only receive
jail or prison time only is the child die and than it become a murder
charge. The injustice, when the child
doesn’t die and the perpetration don’t face jail time and only receive suspended
probation for two years depend on the they criminal records. The time frame of the criminal proceeding
takes such as long time, it makes it hard to file a civil suit because of the
statute of limitations. Most states
statutes of limitation range from one to three years to file a civil suit and
if the criminal case is not completed not civil law suit can be filed.
The story of Baby Kimar, at 14
months became a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome in the hand of her Child Care
Provider. The perpetrator was charge
with a Class C felony in Fayetteville, NC.
The criminal proceeding taken three years to completed and because of
the timing, the statute of limitations had run out. The perpetrator only received two years
suspended probation because of a guilty plea and could only be around her own
children. There was no trial and no explanation
on why the perpetrator injury the child.
Another a mother whom daughter was also a victim of SBS and waited six
years for the trial to complete. Upon
that six years the case was dismiss and perpetrator charges was drop. The was no no justice for either mother and
many other families that have to deal with the disappointment.
The action that should be taken for
justice is to have all child abuse cases should be treated the same. The same sentence should be carry for both
murder and attempted murder towards a child.
The time frame for any child abuse that have a long term health consequence
should be reduce so that justice is served in those cases. Make SBS a Crime that the charges will be
time serve in jail/prison whether or not the child live or die. The Federal and State Law need to be the same
across the board with the charges for SBS.
Congress
has a Bill called the S.3003-Shaken Baby Syndrome Prevention Act of 2010, that
set out the ways to stop SBS. The CDC
also have information for family and child care provider to inform the society about
the danger SBS and what can happen to a child.
We need a awareness to allow people to know about the punishment that
will happen if you commit a crime like this to child.
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