All posts by anna

The Stepchild of Lynching

Alabama’s Lynching Memorial and the Legacy of Racial Terror in the South
by Liliana Segura

A week before the crowds arrived in Montgomery for the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a monument to victims of lynching in the United States, Alabama prepared to kill 83-year-old Walter Moody.
Continue reading: The Intercept

The A.C.L.U. Needs to Rethink Free Speech

The American Civil Liberties Union has a long history of defending the First Amendment rights of groups on both the far left and the far right. This commitment led the organization to successfully sue the city of Charlottesville, Va., last week on behalf of a white supremacist rally organizer. The rally ended with a Nazi sympathizer plowing his car into a crowd, killing a counterprotester and injuring many.      Continue reading: New York Times

Killings of Black Men by Whites are Far More Likely to be Ruled “Justifiable”

The disparity remains no matter the circumstances and has persisted for decades.

When a white person kills a black man in America, the killer often faces no legal consequences.

In one in six of these killings, there is no criminal sanction, according to a new Marshall Project examination of 400,000 homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014.

Continue reading: The Marshall Project

Crime in Context

Violent crime is up in some places, but is it really a trend?

. . . To present a fuller picture of crime in America, The Marshall Project collected and analyzed 40 years of FBI data on the most serious violent crimes in 68 police jurisdictions. . . . In the process, we were struck by the wide variation from community to community. To paraphrase an aphorism about politics, all crime is local. Each city has its own trends that depend on the characteristics of the city itself, the time frame, and the type of crime.

Read the entire article: the Marshall Project

College of Charleston Events Jan. 19 & 20

On Tuesday, January 19th Professor Sarah Haley from UCLA will give a lecture at 6pm in RSS 235 [the old library] on “The Carceral Life of Gender.”

Event Description:
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and economic exploitation on chain gangs. Professor Sarah Haley will deliver a lecture on January 19 based on her groundbreaking new book about imprisoned black women’s brutalization in convict labor systems. Continue reading College of Charleston Events Jan. 19 & 20

Why Are So Many Veterans on Death Row?

By Jeffrey Toobin

The death penalty has always provided a window into the darkest corners of American life. Every pathology that infects the nation as a whole—racism, most notably—also affects our decisions about whom to execute. A new report from the Death Penalty Information Center adds a new twist to this venerable pattern.
Continue reading: The New Yorker
Related: Death Penalty Information Center: Retired Generals Call for Review of Status of Military Veterans Facing Death Penalty