As Donna stated above, we can't know--based on the evidence--whether Michelle Byrom masterminded a plot to kill her husband, and thus, I've never said she is innocent. But a major portion of the prosecutor's theory of the crime--that Joey Gillis shot Edward Sr.--was not correct, by his own admission (which he now denies, by the way). Certainly, the judge and the prosecution withheld evidence from the jury, and her lawyers were--to put it mildly--incompetent boobs. The case contains a wealth of evidence to produce reasonable doubt.
Imposing the death penalty and executing human beings demands a higher standard for our courts, as the Mississippi Supreme Court realized at Michelle Byrom's 11th hour. She now has an opportunity to receive a fair trial, something Mississippi has denied her for the past 14 years. It is the best outcome anyone could have asked for.
It should also push lawmakers across the country to reconsider the inherent unfairness of the death penalty and its high potential for putting innocents to death. We have no business executing people in our current criminal "justice" environment.
Smokediver, if, as you say "Ms. Apel has been on several national news channels contributing to stories from around the state that have made national news," her piece is actually more egregious because she knows better.
I have no reason to doubt that Apel has done good work. But my piece, contrary to your claim that it is a personal attack, points to a much bigger media issue on a national level. As I wrote, "To be fair, Apel isn't the first journalist who failed to provide the relevant context, and she won't be the last." Apel wrote this piece on assignment and on deadline, I'm sure, and her editor has as much--if not more--responsibility for the outcome. It's one small example of what journalists are often forced by circumstance to produce. As an editor, I would see it as a decent first draft, not a finished piece. It could have been so much more.
The story is written by a woman looking at a valid question raised by one woman's legal battle. Yet Apel included only men's voices, and those from her journalistic colleagues. She presents no media scholarship to explore the question, and no statistical evidence beyond what I quoted.
Journalism is hard work. It should be, as it often shapes public opinion, and thus, public policy. That's a big responsibility, and is protected by the U.S. Constitution because of its importance to the democratic process. We need to do a better job than the numerous examples of sloppy, lazy, context-less reporting and mindless "infotainment" drivel that we are too often prone to write and publish. When we fail to abide by our own high standards, we deserve to come under serious, sometimes scathing scrutiny from our colleagues--and by the people who rely on us to give them real information.
The FDA has only recently begun scrutinizing compounding pharmacies, some of which have been accused of using ingredients from questionable sources, resulting in contaminated drugs that have harmed and killed consumers. The purpose of FDA regulation is to prevent expired, altered or counterfeit drugs from harming the public. The use of unregulated drugs in an execution raises the possibility that a prisoner will be paralyzed and killed without anesthesia. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs highlight recent botched executions elsewhere in the country as evidence that experimental or compounded drugs are dangerous and may result in the torture of a paralyzed prisoner prior to his or her death.
“MDOC’s decision to purchase raw pharmaceutical ingredients and then secretly compound them at an unknown time and location by people with unknown training and credentials, increases the risk that the drugs will be ineffective or contaminated,” said Vanessa Carroll, attorney with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center. “If the state’s pentobarbital is contaminated or sub-potent, prisoners will be conscious when the second and third drugs are administered, and they will experience a torturous death by suffocation and cardiac arrest. The constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and MDOC’s decision to use untried drugs that may be counterfeit or contaminated creates an unnecessary risk of extreme pain and torture during an execution.”
Defendants in the suit, which was filed in Hinds County Chancery Court and assigned to Chancellor Dwayne Thomas, are Christopher Epps, the Commissioner of MDOC; Earnest Lee, the Superintendent of the Mississippi State Penitentiary where all executions take place; the State Executioner, whose identity is concealed from the public; and other unknown members of the State’s Execution Team. The plaintiffs are represented by Jim Craig and Vanessa Carroll of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans.
Roderick & Solange have filed a new suit against MDOC. Here's the release, verbatim:
**Constitutional Rights Violations Alleged in Lawsuit Against Mississippi’s Lethal Injection Drugs Use of Compounded Drugs Could Cause Excruciating Pain and Death by Torture**
jackson, Miss. -- Two prisoners on Mississippi’s Death Row filed a lawsuit Friday against the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) alleging that the State’s plan to use “compounded” drugs to execute them violates the Constitution.
Mississippi uses three drugs for lethal injection: pentobarbital, vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. The first drug, pentobarbital, acts as an anesthetic to ensure that the condemned prisoner is unconscious and does not feel the effects of the second and third drugs, which stop the prisoner’s lungs and heart. Without an effective dosage of pentobarbital, the second two drugs cause excruciating pain similar to death by suffocation and then cardiac arrest. The prisoner would be paralyzed and unable to speak.
States that use the death penalty have had an increasingly difficult time obtaining pentobarbital since the manufacturer put controls in place that prohibit it from being used in executions. As an alternative, some states have turned to “compounding pharmacies” to make non-FDA-approved copies of pentobarbital.
Earlier this month, the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center sued MDOC for refusing to reveal the identity of the state’s supplier of lethal injection drugs. While the lawsuit was pending, it was discovered that H&W Compounding/Brister Brothers Pharmacy has supplied MDOC with the raw components necessary to make pentobarbital. Further investigation revealed that Brister Brothers Pharmacy most likely does not have the facilities and equipment necessary to compound a narcotic like pentobarbital from the raw materials.
"Just as a cockroach scurrying across a kitchen floor at night invariably proves the presence of thousands unseen, these cases leave little room for doubt that innocent men, at unknown and terrible moments in our history, have gone unexonerated and been sent baselessly to their deaths.”
RobbieR, SNAP rolls have increased because gainful employment has decreased, as have wages for the bottom 40 percent of Americans. Many of the jobs now held by people laid off in the past several years don't pay living wages, or are part-time and/or temporary. Witness the fact that many (thousands?) Walmart employees are eligible for SNAP--and get food stamps to supplement their meager wages.
Second, the problem for many poor people is not as simple as a directive to "eat healthy." Many neighborhoods don't have grocery stores, a phenomena called "food deserts." That leaves people with bad options, such as convenience stores. And even most cereals are loaded with salt, sugar and fat, so who will make the distinction between what's "healthy" and what's not. Americans, in general, suffer from a lack of nutrition education (well, we have a lack of education about a lot of things, but that's another subject) in the areas most affected by lack of healthy food options.
The average SNAP benefit in Mississippi is just a bit more than $4 a day. To say that amount is anything but "supplemental" is simply absurd. Two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly and the disabled. Most of the rest are adults with children.
Justjess, the title is not "Brown: Aligning with THE Right" as in right-wing ideology. Read it again. It is "Brown: Aligning With Right," as in his final quote: "I'm going to align myself with right and what's best for the people of Hinds County."
tsmith, you're right that companies haven't provided pay raises--or they have been minimal for years now. It's also true that public company CEOs pull down huge incomes.
Here's one egregious example of the type of money CEOs are getting relative to their worker's salaries, from [Bloomberg][1] last April: "Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries got $48.1 million, according to the New Albany, Ohio-based company’s 2012 proxy. That’s 1,640 times the average clothing-store worker’s $29,310 in pay and benefits. "
Companies are also sitting on huge piles of cash, [more than $1 trillion][2], and the stock market is in [record-high territory][3].
[Meanwhile][4], the country's unemployment rates have barely moved (most experts agree that employment numbers are far weaker than the "official" numbers when you add those who have given up looking for work and those chronically underemployed) and [workers salaries haven't kept up with inflation][5].
In other words, corporate America is winning big--at least those at the top--but little to none of that windfall ever makes it into the average American's paychecks, that is, if he or she is lucky enough to have a job. Simply put, something's very wrong with that economic picture. Such lopsidedness is not sustainable, and it hurts all of us.
Also, to say that government "incentives is money you wouldn't have had anyway so you haven't given up a thing," is simply not true. Taxpayer dollars go to support those companies, from building new infrastructure to maintaining existing roads, sewer and water systems and other utilities, to paying police and firefighters, garbage collectors, school teachers ... the list goes on and on. Usually, the [government incentives][6] exempts those companies from paying property and sales taxes and, often, it outright hands them money to help pay to build new facilities. Someone has to pay for all that when the corporations don't.
There's nothing inherently wrong with companies making a profit--they have to. There's also nothing wrong with paying people good salaries. But Americans subsidizing already hugely profitable companies at the cost of their own prosperity is completely upside down. It's a situation that we need to change.
Bill Jackson, I agree that JPS has disadvantaged kids, but leaving the (often disadvantaged) parents to deal with the kids' problems is no more of an answer than leaving the schools to do it. As the editorial points out, it takes the community--schools and parents, along with businesses, non-profits and every concerned citizen committed to making a difference.
So 19-year-olds can't read, learn or understand history, js1976?
Certainly there's a difference of opinion on whether there's a climate of fear at Nissan. For those pushing for unionization of the plant, the fear is real. And given that Mississippi is a "right to work" state, any employer can fire people with little to no cause. That's real enough to keep lots of people silent.
As to Nissan putting people to work, it would not have happened without the state offering millions in incentives. No big corporation is going to come to Mississippi without a sh*t-ton of incentives. That's just how the game is played. So the whole "we put people to work" narrative is, for me, overshadowed by "we're making a fortune on Mississippians."
Essentially, every Mississippian has paid or is paying out-of-pocket for every job Nissan provides. That's an awfully sweet deal for Nissan, which pays its CEO some $12 million annually and posted nearly $6.4 billion in profits last year.
Of course, Nissan is only following it's mandate: Increasing shareholder value. In that, the company is brilliant.
RonniMott says...
Thanks, Justjess.
As Donna stated above, we can't know--based on the evidence--whether Michelle Byrom masterminded a plot to kill her husband, and thus, I've never said she is innocent. But a major portion of the prosecutor's theory of the crime--that Joey Gillis shot Edward Sr.--was not correct, by his own admission (which he now denies, by the way). Certainly, the judge and the prosecution withheld evidence from the jury, and her lawyers were--to put it mildly--incompetent boobs. The case contains a wealth of evidence to produce reasonable doubt.
Imposing the death penalty and executing human beings demands a higher standard for our courts, as the Mississippi Supreme Court realized at Michelle Byrom's 11th hour. She now has an opportunity to receive a fair trial, something Mississippi has denied her for the past 14 years. It is the best outcome anyone could have asked for.
It should also push lawmakers across the country to reconsider the inherent unfairness of the death penalty and its high potential for putting innocents to death. We have no business executing people in our current criminal "justice" environment.
On Stop the Execution of Michelle Byrom
Posted 3 April 2014, 1:21 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
Smokediver, if, as you say "Ms. Apel has been on several national news channels contributing to stories from around the state that have made national news," her piece is actually more egregious because she knows better.
I have no reason to doubt that Apel has done good work. But my piece, contrary to your claim that it is a personal attack, points to a much bigger media issue on a national level. As I wrote, "To be fair, Apel isn't the first journalist who failed to provide the relevant context, and she won't be the last." Apel wrote this piece on assignment and on deadline, I'm sure, and her editor has as much--if not more--responsibility for the outcome. It's one small example of what journalists are often forced by circumstance to produce. As an editor, I would see it as a decent first draft, not a finished piece. It could have been so much more.
The story is written by a woman looking at a valid question raised by one woman's legal battle. Yet Apel included only men's voices, and those from her journalistic colleagues. She presents no media scholarship to explore the question, and no statistical evidence beyond what I quoted.
Journalism is hard work. It should be, as it often shapes public opinion, and thus, public policy. That's a big responsibility, and is protected by the U.S. Constitution because of its importance to the democratic process. We need to do a better job than the numerous examples of sloppy, lazy, context-less reporting and mindless "infotainment" drivel that we are too often prone to write and publish. When we fail to abide by our own high standards, we deserve to come under serious, sometimes scathing scrutiny from our colleagues--and by the people who rely on us to give them real information.
In that spirit, thank you for your comment.
On How The Clarion-Ledger Got It Wrong: The Importance of Context
Posted 3 April 2014, 12:25 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
(continued from previous post)
The FDA has only recently begun scrutinizing compounding pharmacies, some of which
have been accused of using ingredients from questionable sources, resulting in
contaminated drugs that have harmed and killed consumers. The purpose of FDA
regulation is to prevent expired, altered or counterfeit drugs from harming the public.
The use of unregulated drugs in an execution raises the possibility that a prisoner will
be paralyzed and killed without anesthesia. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs highlight recent
botched executions elsewhere in the country as evidence that experimental or
compounded drugs are dangerous and may result in the torture of a paralyzed prisoner
prior to his or her death.
“MDOC’s decision to purchase raw pharmaceutical ingredients and then secretly
compound them at an unknown time and location by people with unknown training and
credentials, increases the risk that the drugs will be ineffective or contaminated,” said Vanessa Carroll, attorney with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center. “If the
state’s pentobarbital is contaminated or sub-potent, prisoners will be conscious when
the second and third drugs are administered, and they will experience a torturous death
by suffocation and cardiac arrest. The constitution forbids cruel and unusual
punishment, and MDOC’s decision to use untried drugs that may be counterfeit or
contaminated creates an unnecessary risk of extreme pain and torture during an
execution.”
Defendants in the suit, which was filed in Hinds County Chancery Court and assigned to
Chancellor Dwayne Thomas, are Christopher Epps, the Commissioner of MDOC;
Earnest Lee, the Superintendent of the Mississippi State Penitentiary where all
executions take place; the State Executioner, whose identity is concealed from the
public; and other unknown members of the State’s Execution Team. The plaintiffs are
represented by Jim Craig and Vanessa Carroll of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur
Justice Center in New Orleans.
On Will Byrom Be Tortured to Death?
Posted 28 March 2014, 12:41 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
Roderick & Solange have filed a new suit against MDOC. Here's the release, verbatim:
**Constitutional Rights Violations Alleged in Lawsuit Against Mississippi’s Lethal Injection Drugs Use of Compounded Drugs Could Cause Excruciating Pain and Death by Torture**
jackson, Miss. -- Two prisoners on Mississippi’s Death Row filed a lawsuit Friday
against the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) alleging that the State’s plan
to use “compounded” drugs to execute them violates the Constitution.
Mississippi uses three drugs for lethal injection: pentobarbital, vecuronium bromide, and
potassium chloride. The first drug, pentobarbital, acts as an anesthetic to ensure that
the condemned prisoner is unconscious and does not feel the effects of the second and
third drugs, which stop the prisoner’s lungs and heart. Without an effective dosage of
pentobarbital, the second two drugs cause excruciating pain similar to death by
suffocation and then cardiac arrest. The prisoner would be paralyzed and unable to
speak.
States that use the death penalty have had an increasingly difficult time obtaining
pentobarbital since the manufacturer put controls in place that prohibit it from being
used in executions. As an alternative, some states have turned to “compounding
pharmacies” to make non-FDA-approved copies of pentobarbital.
Earlier this month, the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center sued MDOC for
refusing to reveal the identity of the state’s supplier of lethal injection drugs. While the
lawsuit was pending, it was discovered that H&W Compounding/Brister Brothers
Pharmacy has supplied MDOC with the raw components necessary to make
pentobarbital. Further investigation revealed that Brister Brothers Pharmacy most likely
does not have the facilities and equipment necessary to compound a narcotic like
pentobarbital from the raw materials.
(continued)
On Will Byrom Be Tortured to Death?
Posted 28 March 2014, 12:40 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
"Just as a cockroach scurrying across a kitchen floor at night invariably proves the presence of thousands unseen, these cases leave little room for doubt that innocent men, at unknown and terrible moments in our history, have gone unexonerated and been sent baselessly to their deaths.”
Hear, hear.
On Diaz: Michelle Byrom Did Not Get a Fair Trial
Posted 25 March 2014, 8:10 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
RobbieR, SNAP rolls have increased because gainful employment has decreased, as have wages for the bottom 40 percent of Americans. Many of the jobs now held by people laid off in the past several years don't pay living wages, or are part-time and/or temporary. Witness the fact that many (thousands?) Walmart employees are eligible for SNAP--and get food stamps to supplement their meager wages.
Second, the problem for many poor people is not as simple as a directive to "eat healthy." Many neighborhoods don't have grocery stores, a phenomena called "food deserts." That leaves people with bad options, such as convenience stores. And even most cereals are loaded with salt, sugar and fat, so who will make the distinction between what's "healthy" and what's not. Americans, in general, suffer from a lack of nutrition education (well, we have a lack of education about a lot of things, but that's another subject) in the areas most affected by lack of healthy food options.
The average SNAP benefit in Mississippi is just a bit more than $4 a day. To say that amount is anything but "supplemental" is simply absurd. Two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly and the disabled. Most of the rest are adults with children.
On Mississippi Poverty Comes Into Focus
Posted 25 September 2013, 1:01 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
Justjess, the title is not "Brown: Aligning with THE Right" as in right-wing ideology. Read it again. It is "Brown: Aligning With Right," as in his final quote: "I'm going to align myself with right and what's best for the people of Hinds County."
On Brown: Aligning With Right
Posted 29 August 2013, 2:36 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
tsmith, you're right that companies haven't provided pay raises--or they have been minimal for years now. It's also true that public company CEOs pull down huge incomes.
Here's one egregious example of the type of money CEOs are getting relative to their worker's salaries, from [Bloomberg][1] last April: "Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries got $48.1 million, according to the New Albany, Ohio-based company’s 2012 proxy. That’s 1,640 times the average clothing-store worker’s $29,310 in pay and benefits. "
Companies are also sitting on huge piles of cash, [more than $1 trillion][2], and the stock market is in [record-high territory][3].
[Meanwhile][4], the country's unemployment rates have barely moved (most experts agree that employment numbers are far weaker than the "official" numbers when you add those who have given up looking for work and those chronically underemployed) and [workers salaries haven't kept up with inflation][5].
In other words, corporate America is winning big--at least those at the top--but little to none of that windfall ever makes it into the average American's paychecks, that is, if he or she is lucky enough to have a job. Simply put, something's very wrong with that economic picture. Such lopsidedness is not sustainable, and it hurts all of us.
Also, to say that government "incentives is money you wouldn't have had anyway so you haven't given up a thing," is simply not true. Taxpayer dollars go to support those companies, from building new infrastructure to maintaining existing roads, sewer and water systems and other utilities, to paying police and firefighters, garbage collectors, school teachers ... the list goes on and on. Usually, the [government incentives][6] exempts those companies from paying property and sales taxes and, often, it outright hands them money to help pay to build new facilities. Someone has to pay for all that when the corporations don't.
There's nothing inherently wrong with companies making a profit--they have to. There's also nothing wrong with paying people good salaries. But Americans subsidizing already hugely profitable companies at the cost of their own prosperity is completely upside down. It's a situation that we need to change.
[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-3…
[2]: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100911328
[3]: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/23/investi…
[4]: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc…
[5]: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/…
[6]: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012…
On Nudging Nissan
Posted 18 August 2013, 5:53 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
Bill Jackson, I agree that JPS has disadvantaged kids, but leaving the (often disadvantaged) parents to deal with the kids' problems is no more of an answer than leaving the schools to do it. As the editorial points out, it takes the community--schools and parents, along with businesses, non-profits and every concerned citizen committed to making a difference.
On Common Core Isn’t a Silver Bullet
Posted 16 August 2013, 2:46 p.m. Suggest removal
RonniMott says...
So 19-year-olds can't read, learn or understand history, js1976?
Certainly there's a difference of opinion on whether there's a climate of fear at Nissan. For those pushing for unionization of the plant, the fear is real. And given that Mississippi is a "right to work" state, any employer can fire people with little to no cause. That's real enough to keep lots of people silent.
As to Nissan putting people to work, it would not have happened without the state offering millions in incentives. No big corporation is going to come to Mississippi without a sh*t-ton of incentives. That's just how the game is played. So the whole "we put people to work" narrative is, for me, overshadowed by "we're making a fortune on Mississippians."
Essentially, every Mississippian has paid or is paying out-of-pocket for every job Nissan provides. That's an awfully sweet deal for Nissan, which pays its CEO some $12 million annually and posted nearly $6.4 billion in profits last year.
Of course, Nissan is only following it's mandate: Increasing shareholder value. In that, the company is brilliant.
On Nudging Nissan
Posted 12 August 2013, 6:16 p.m. Suggest removal