As you
probably already know, they executed Dale Leo Bishop in Mississippi
last night. I had urged readers to write to Governor Haley Barbour and
respectfully request that he commute Bishop's death sentence to life
imprisonment, since he did not actually murder anyone, although he did
take part in a terrible crime. Barbour refused -- even though he had
just released a man who had murdered his wife in the street: blew her
head off with a shotgun. But that actual murderer had been a servant in
Barbour's mansion; wiping the dribble off Barbour's jowls is obviously
a qualification for clemency. So the wife-murderer is free, while the
non-murderer Bishop is dead.
The execution took place at the dinner hour, 6 p.m. Perhaps Barbour was
just sitting down to a nice juicy steak as his minions were putting a
syringe full of poison into Bishop's bloodstream. We can only hope the
dead flesh Barbour devoured during the course of the execution will
clot the bowels of the bloodthirsty, graft-bloated son of a bitch. (And
we mean that in the most respectful sense, of course.)
Well, the deed is done. The world moves on. It's just too bad for Dale
Leo Bishop that he was only involved in a single murder; if he had
slaughtered a million people, like Barbour's good buddy, George W.
Bush, no doubt he'd be a free man today.
Dale Leo Bishop is scheduled to be killed tomorrow by the state of Mississippi -- despite the fact that he did not kill anyone, although he assisted an attack that turned into a murder. The actual murderer, oddly enough, was sentenced to life in prison; but Bishop, who is mentally ill, was sentenced to die. [For more, see previous post on this subject.]
All of his judicial appeals have been exhausted now. Outside a highly unlikely intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, the only hope Bishop has is a commutation of his death sentence to life in prison by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.
As the Jackson Clarion-Ledger points out in an excellent editorial on the case, just last week Barbour pardoned a man convicted of a heinous murder. Michael Graham walked up to his ex-wife's car at a streetlight in Pascagoula and shot her in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun, blowing her head off in front of her own father, who was standing across the street at the time. Graham had served 19 years of a life sentence for the killing when Barbour pardoned him. The reason? Graham had been a trusty, a prisoner working as a servant, in the governor's mansion.
From the Clarion-Ledger:
Trial testimony - undisputed trial testimony - indicates that Bishop was not the man swinging the hammer that delivered the fatal blows to victim's head....
If Bishop, who suffers from mental illness, receives a lethal injection on Wednesday, he would be only the eighth person put to death - and the first since 1996 - who did not directly kill the victim (not including contract killings) in the more than 1,100 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
There is ample evidence that Bishop's mental illness led to his waiving rights that might have spared his life at trial. There are also allegations that his post-conviction counsel representation suppressed evidence of Bishop's mental illness....
If there is mercy in Barbour's heart for a killer like Graham who was definitely guilty of a cold-blooded, gruesome murder, then the governor shouldn't blink an eye in granting clemency to Bishop - who took part in a killing but didn't deliver the fatal blows.
Bishop didn't get a chance to serve as a domestic servant at the Governor's Mansion. Graham did. That's the apparent difference.
Bishop should at most share a jail cell for life with Jessie Johnson, the man who is serving life without parole for Gentry's murder. But he should not pay the ultimate price if he did not commit the ultimate crime.
As we noted here earlier, Barbour is a rank political hack, a lobbyist, bagman and fixer from way back. His good buddy George W. Bush has steered millions of dollars in federal money earmarked for Hurricane Katrina relief to Barbour and his corporate cronies. His pardon of Graham is all of a piece with the plutocrat's code: "Everything for me and mine, diddly-squat for everybody else."
It is not very likely than an appeal to a conscience that Barbour has shown little sign of possessing will move him to spare Dale Leo Bishop from the poison needle. However, our high and mighty officials do like to appear to be figures of great moral depth, and so occasionally they can be moved to some gesture of clemency, some show of humanity, as long as there is no significant downside to their bottom line.
Therefore, we urge you once again to send a very respectful message to Haley Barbour, asking him politely to give his profound and prayerful consideration to Dale Bishop's plea for commutation. The address is below:
I think it is time for all those who have opposed the American invasion of Iraq to stand up for Barack Obama and acquit him of the ludicrous charge hurled at him by so many on the so-called "left": namely, that he has somehow "sold out" the anti-war movement with his recent statements about "refining" his long-held plans for a carefully calibrated end to the war.
Of course, the candidate himself has spoken most eloquently on this issue, pointing out that the idea of refining the details of the pullout according to the facts of the ground in Iraq has always been a key element of his plan all along. Sen. Obama is entirely correct: his views regarding American involvement in Iraq have been clear and consistent throughout his campaign for the presidency.
Although in a perfect world, Obama would need no defense on this matter, its truth being so self-evident, the distortions of the corporate media -- always looking for a trivial "gotcha" issue to goose the day's horse-race coverage -- compels the "reality-based community" to step forward and set the record straight.
And Sami Ramadani -- an Iraqi writer and academic who was persecuted by Saddam Hussein and driven from his native land -- has done just that in a column in Monday's Guardian. He brings a perspective almost entirely absent from the Washington's navel-gazing debate over Iraq: the Iraqi perspective. He makes a brilliant case for Obama's rock-solid consistency on the Iraq war, and explores some of the far-reaching implications of the candidate's plan.
From the Guardian: As November's American presidential elections approach, Barack Obama's message on Iraq is being widely interpreted as "flip-flopping" and a "retreat" from a previously unequivocal stance of fully withdrawing the US occupation forces. This is to misunderstand Obama, who is not someone who shoots from the hip. There is much more to his words than cursory reading could unravel...
Obama himself has reacted angrily to claims of a policy U-turn: "For me to say I'm going to refine my policies is I don't think in any way inconsistent with prior statements and doesn't change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I'm going to end it as president." Earlier this month he resorted to an op-ed article in the New York Times to emphatically state: "On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war."
As always in examining the words of politicians, let alone Obama (who now has 300 foreign policy advisers), the devil is in the details. Here, Obama's "ending the war" declarations begin to look far from reassuring, even before he "refines" his line after meeting the US commander, General Petraeus, in Iraq.
Obama sees Iraq as part of a wider theatre of war and potential wars engulfing the entire Middle East, where US strategic goals and interests are at stake. So his obvious shift on the "surge" operations in Iraq (underlined by deleting criticisms of it from his website last week) is strengthening his call for "redeployment" from Iraq to Afghanistan. His current strategy could be summed up as: de-escalate the war in Iraq, escalate it in Afghanistan, and talk to Iran. On Iran, his offer of talks was coupled with an alarming, Bush-style threat. "I'll do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything," Obama told a gathering of the pro-Israel lobby group, Aipac, in April. He is echoing the sentiments of his famous anti-Iraq war speech in 2002, in which he repeatedly stressed that he was not opposed to all US wars.
It is worth noting that the term withdrawal, let alone a full unconditional withdrawal that will satisfy most of the Iraqi people, has never been part of Obama's vocabulary. His first carefully considered statement on Iraq was made in January last year, when he introduced the Iraq war de-escalation act to Congress. It was then that he envisaged stationing troops in Iraq on a longer-term basis: "A residual US presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces and pursuit of international terrorists." Using similar phrases, this is what he outlined in the New York Times last week.
....But it doesn't require rocket science to know that keeping "residual" forces requires heavily fortified areas, installations and a state of readiness to go to war. Unless Obama has discovered something new, such areas are known as military bases.....
Obama has even pre-empted a possible line of attack from hawks by chillingly suggesting he would possibly invade Iraq again if necessary. His website states: "He would reserve the right to intervene militarily, with our international partners, to suppress potential genocidal violence within Iraq." The word potential is worth pausing over; it is salutary to remember Bush and Blair occupied Iraq and caused the death of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people for "humanitarian" reasons.
Neither is Obama opposed to signing a military treaty with Iraq. He has two conditions to make Bush's current attempts to impose a pact acceptable: the pact should get Congressional approval, and renounce "permanent" military bases. However, leaked drafts of this colonialist-style pact do not mention the word "permanent" at all. And his "benchmarks" for continued support for the corrupt Iraqi politicians protected by US forces in Baghdad's Green Zone are strikingly similar to those of the Bush administration.
Tactical differences and issues of style aside, Obama's message on occupied Iraq is deeply troubling - not because it has U-turned but because it has been consistent. His 300 foreign policy advisers are making sure that he will not stray from protecting US imperialist interests, even if it does mean launching new wars and bolstering puppet regimes and corrupt dictatorships throughout the "greater Middle East".
A bit under the weather, so apologies for the light posting. Hope to be back in gear soon, so keep checking in.
Meanwhile, here is some abiding wisdom on the inevitable ramifications of macro-economic cycles in an unrestricted "free" market system (also known as "One law for the rich, another law for the poor"). This learned disquisition originally appeared in 1854, and was updated in 1993 by one of our most eminent men of letters (doctorates from Princeton and St Andrews University). Perpend:
Next week, the State of Mississippi is going to strap Dale Leo Bishop to a prison guerney and shoot him full of deadly chemicals. He's going to die for murder although he killed no one. He's going to die even though his case was grossly mishandled by a lawyer who refused to present mitigating evidence of the horrible abuse Bishop suffered as a child and his life-long struggle with mental illness. He's going to die even though the man whom prosecutors admit is the one who committed the murder has been spared, while Bishop has been condemned to execution by lethal injection.
The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear his appeal last month. The Mississippi Supreme Court then scheduled his killing for July 23.
It's a complicated case. It's an ugly case. Bishop took part in the brutal murder of Marcus Gentry ten years ago. Gentry was set upon by Bishop and Jessie Johnson, who believed that Gentry had ratted out Johnson's younger brother, Cory, to the police on grand larceny and burglary charges. In the course of a beating in which Bishop landed a couple of blows with his hands and held Bishop at one point, Jessie Johnson repeatedly struck Gentry with a claw hammer belonging to Bishop and finally killed him. Bishop was 24 at the time of the attack; Gentry was 19 years old.
At the trial in 2000, Bishop admitted taking part in the beating but said he didn't know Johnson was going to kill Gentry. After his conviction, Bishop, crushed, refused to make any mitigating statement, but instead declared that he was bound for Hell and asked the court to do what Gentry's family wanted to do: kill him. The judge said, "Mr. Bishop, I'm going to grant your wish."
After the trial, Bishop changed his mind and appealed the verdict. His case was handled by the state's Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, set up in 2000 to help indigent death row prisoners. Here the case took a curious turn. As the Jackson Free Press reports:
Bishop’s lawyers accuse Robert Ryan, former director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel...with “extreme dereliction of duty” in Ryan’s failure to present mitigating evidence in Bishop’s appeal. The brief includes affidavits supporting the defense’s allegations that Ryan deliberately suppressed his own staff’s investigation, which revealed Bishop’s life-long mental illness, and summarily dismissed the volunteers working on the case.
“The director simply discarded this proof and substituted his own unsubstantiated and frivolous allegations (with the appeal). All the while, Bishop himself had no idea his lead lawyer was sabotaging his main chance to escape execution,“ the lawyers wrote.
“I don’t really know if Ryan was overworked or in over his head,” [James] Craig said... "but whatever the reason is for his lack of performance, it’s just another situation where the quality of justice you get is dependent on whether you have any money. That’s been such a theme for Dale Bishop, because his mother tried to have him taken for (psychiatric evaluation and treatment). They quoted her a price and she couldn’t possibly afford it. This was a situation that probably could have been avoided if somebody would have intervened in (Bishop’s) life.”
The attorneys contend that Bishop's illness prevented him from making a rational decision during the original sentencing. Back to the Free Press:
The brief goes on to say that Ryan failed to have Bishop evaluated although he knew Bishop was taking Lithium after doctors at Parchman diagnosed his illness. Lithium is prescribed almost exclusively to people suffering from bipolar disorder, the brief states. Instead, Ryan made the claim in his appeal that Bishop was mentally retarded, while attaching evidence indicating clearly that he was not.
“I think it’s close to criminal fraud to take the state’s money and handle a case like this,” Craig said.
Ryan's successor in the post, Glenn Swartzfager, is working with Bishop's lawyers in their appeal. In court papers, Swartzfeger called Ryan's work on the case "a sham," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports. Ryan also buried evidence of abuse suffered by Bishop as a child and youth, as the human rights organization Reprieve notes:
Reprieve volunteers assisting on the case gathered documents and witness statements which proved that Bishop suffered from a chronic mental illness (bipolar depressive disorder, formerly known as “manic depression”) and had undergone horrific trauma when he was young, which clearly affected his capacity to make rational decisions at trial. Bishop’s family noticed problems with his behavior and thinking when he was four years old. His elementary school records from Texas have many references to these problems and to evaluations that showed that Dale Bishop needed serious help. When he was in middle school, his school counselor recommended a psychiatric consultation. The psychiatric hospital Dale’s mother took him to advised immediate inpatient hospitalization, but Mrs. Bishop could not afford the high price of this care. He was only diagnosed and treated for his mental illness when he got to death row.
Also, Dale Bishop’s father was an abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children – including Dale Bishop – on a weekly basis. The family was incredibly poor. When Dale was an infant, the family had no running water, no indoor bathroom, and no money.
This is evidence that almost surely would have required a new trial, where Dale Bishop could present his case for a life sentence, giving a jury the background about his youth and illness, and letting them weigh up these facts alongside the fact that Dale Bishop was not the killer of Marcus Gentry.
The last-minute appeal also stresses the lack of evidence that the killing was premeditated, which is "one of the components required to impose the death penalty in Mississippi when a defendant is not the actual killer. Bishop’s co-defendant, Johnson, stated in an affidavit that the murder took place after a two-week drug binge and that they had been smoking marijuana, and injecting crystal meth and cocaine prior to the crime," as the Free Press reports. Johnson, who admitted killing Gentry, was given a life sentence at his trial, which was held after Bishop's conviction.
And so this is how "justice" is going to work in Mississippi next week. Dale Leo Bishop, a man riddled with genuine, even suicidal remorse over his part in a drug-addled murder, will be killed by the state next week. Meanwhile, the man who actually committed the murder will live out the rest of his natural life as a ward of that same state.
Reprieve notes:
Dale Bishop never had a real chance in life. If the death penalty is going to be anything more than just a lottery, it’s not fair for some prisoners to lose appeals just because their State-paid lawyer discarded valuable, relevant evidence. We are shocked and sickened by what has happened in this case, and we hope others who look at the facts will feel the same. Dale Bishop’s lawyers are preparing a Petition for Executive Clemency, to present to Governor Haley Barbour if the courts deny the new appeal. We ask all those who are concerned about the justice system to write to the Governor...to ask that he seriously consider, in this case, commuting Dale Bishop’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Or, at least, we ask the Governor to grant a temporary reprieve and ask the Parole Board to study the case and make a recommendation for or against a commutation to life imprisonment without parole.
The chance that Barbour, a long-time right-wing political hack and backroom fixer, will actually commute Bishop's sentence or even delay his killing are slim. For one thing, Bishop is white -- or "white trash" as he'd be called amongst Barbour's neo-plantation set -- and his death could help redress the statistical imbalance between the executions of black and white prisoners: an imbalance that always threatens to bring in some busybody judge to interfere with the politically popular operation of the death chamber. But a slim chance is better than none.
“The death penalty feeds a mentality of revenge and vindication and further reduces the dignity and worth of human life,” said Fr. Jeremy Tobin of St. Moses the Black Priory in Raymond. “Executions teach us that killing people is OK, and in fact, should be celebrated,” he added. “Killing is immoral, it is not justified, it is anti-Christian. … Only non-violence can end the self-destruction of a blood-soaked world.”
Below are contact details for Haley Barbour:
Haley Barbour Governor of Mississippi P.O. Box 139 Jackson, MS 39205 Fax: + 1 601-359-3741 E-mail: governor@governor.state.ms.us
Reprieve also provides text for the letter that you can send or adapt here.
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop Chris - very good post, and a travesty of justice.
[i]What is, is that there is no "state of Mississippi" that will strap this man down and shoot poison into his veins. There are the the men who do it, the men who order it, and then men who support...
Death for Dinner: Haley Barbour Kills Dale Leo Bishop Everybody (Dennis Prager, the Supreme Court and the people who appropriate funds for public defender budgets aside) is opposed to the death penalty for provably innocent people. Being against capital punishment for them takes no courage. Being oppose...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge [quote]No candidate for President would get any media attention if they did not kiss the various rings of the oligarchs. Obama has been consistent because he is the proverbial slick lawyer who understands the angles and the lay of the land. Having sa...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge obama is just a smoother rapist,
one who will convince more people
to enjoy it
kahoneez above has it right -
a more elegant occupation of iraq
is a lead-in to the next war
we're 'merkins and we need more
victories - we can never have enough
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop clemency for one who becomes known to the prince
cold steel for the other who is not
many think we live under a state of fascism
we don't
royalism
News That Stays News Despite being a Dylan fan from 1964 on, personally, I rather prefer this....
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm
"Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? "...mediocre translation, but still....
hope you're feeling better, please kee...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge 1 . Obama On 60 mins. " we must keep troops in Iraq , to protect out interest " , aka permanent military bases , to project U.S. power .
2 . Wants to " bring combat troops home " , we'll I figured it out right away and that's COMBAT troops are about...
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop THe US lost it's national conscience, IMHO, at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, not that there was much of a conscience to lose. Barbour, on the other hand, never had one, but an appeal to his vanity and political self-interest might reach something in that sh...
