Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of Delma Banks, a man who killed his 16 year old co-worker and stole his car in 1980. Prosecutors had withheld evidence that refuted the case that the man, who had no prior criminal record, would be a continuing danger to society, a factor juries take very seriously when considering whether to impose the death penalty. In 1999, the man's new legal team tracked down one of the witnesses, who admitted that he'd set the guy up. He also admitted lying on the stand when he said that he was not being paid by the government for his testimony. The government never corrected that lie. The second witness gave damaging testimony and said that he had not been coached by the police. But after the new defense lawyers got a judge to force the prosecution to turn over the district attorney's files, they found a transcript from 1980 that showed the witness was exhaustively rehearsed before testifying.
People complain about the long period of time between conviction and execution. But it took 19 years for the new lawyers to get access to the proof that the prosecution not only withheld important evidence at the trial, but continued to lie about the information well into 1999. Prosecutors lie, about the most important things. And sometimes it takes years to discover that. What would have happened if these prosecutors had simply removed the transcript proving the witness was coached from the file?
What's scary is not how long the appeal process takes, but how close Banks came to being killed.
And its worth keeping these lies in mind when we hear about how people held in Guantanamo Bay will be held indefinitely.
Jennifer | 5:13 PM
| I learned that my commenting function was not working so I've gone to another service. Apologies for all those who commented and deserved replies, and all who made good comments that are now lost in the switchover. I was thinking that no one writes back!
Jennifer | 5:07 PM
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Wednesday, February 25, 2004
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Jennifer | 1:38 PM
| I'm really disappointed in my Senator, Barbara Boxer. After four days of San Francisco issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, on February 20th, Boxer declared that our mayor should have asked the courts for permission first and that she thinks the current state law is fair. Her spokesman says she's for civil unions, but not marriages. Why is Boxer speaking out about this four days later? Turns out the public opinion polls came out the same day. Fifty percent of Californians oppose gay marriage, and only 43% or so support it. I guess Boxer knows what side of history she wants to be on, the popular side.
In any case, that polling statistic is pretty strange, since 62% of Californians voted for the Knight Proposition that made gay marriage a violation of state statutes.
Jennifer | 5:20 PM
| My friend Richard Thieme has been visiting my old haunt, Sarasota, Florida. He's sent me nostalgic pictures of one of my favorite places, Capt'n Curts restaurant on Siesta Key
, and he's ordered my favorite dish, the shark sandwich!
. Tell me, Richard, is it still $4.99? I think I hear Auld Lang Syne in the background....
Jennifer | 12:37 AM
| My blog is now Atom-enabled. Let me know if this form of syndication is a reasonable alternative to RSS. And thanks to Graham at Blogger for helping me work it out.
Jennifer | 1:57 PM
|
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
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Jennifer | 8:30 AM
| BoingBoing blogs our car story.
Jennifer | 5:02 PM
| When our Honda Civic hybrid went missing last Christmas, Brad and I wondered if we'd ever see it again. What we didn't realize was that while cars get stolen every day in San Francisco, our car's disappearance was a technological impossibility. The finest cryptography went into making our car's micro-chipped ignition key, so in principle it should be impossible to hack and hotwire. Nevertheless, we found the car, emptied of gas, filled with cigarette butts and Pantera CDs, parked about 5 miles away, clearly in a post-joyride daze.
How did it happen? Following Brad's story on the Newsweek website, readers have contributed many theories, which Brad will follow up on with Honda and write more. My favorite so far is below (Read Brad's story first):
I think that Honky, tired of being so socially and environmentally respectable and upstanding, decided to cut loose and raise hell around town. Knowing that converting to a standard gasoline internal combustion engine would have been far too time consuming, expensive, and not to mention, horribly painful, Honky started herself up, drove to the nearest convenience store and bought a pack of cigarettes, which she immediately began chain-smoking as the quickest way to generate more air pollution. Feeling herself loosening up, I would assume that she switched the radio settings to dance, went to the nearest gravel parking lot, and spent the night doing figure eights, possibly intoxicated on a fifth of Bacardi 151, which once consumed in the gas tank, would have been ejected out the window. Obviously Honky and the Acura have a little action on the side happening, what with going in and out of each others glove boxes.
As for leaving your wife's red leather jacket untouched, obviously it's a bad fit, unless she is a extraordinarily big and tall woman, if it had been a car bra, you would have found it sloppily secured on the front (Or burned).
Sated and tired, Honky drove to the ocean, breathed the salt air, and passed out, probably hung over and annoyed to be woken up by you.
Meanwhile, I'm interested in collecting other stories of technological mysteries. Email me, or comment below.
Jennifer | 11:37 AM
| Hooray for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom! Newsom is pressing the civil rights issue of gay marriage by authorizing the City to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This will ensure a court battle, since the practice conflicts with California law, but we've had great legal success in Vermont, and now Massachusetts. In twenty years, people will look back on people opposing gay marriage the way we look back at the segregationists of the 1960's. Newsom is brave and right to take this stand.
Jennifer | 4:06 PM
| There's a cool profile of Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, in the NY Times Circuits section today. Among other things, it shows that if you pursue what interests you, you can make something amazing and maybe make a living, too.
Jennifer | 10:43 AM
| California's March primary is coming up. Don't forget to subscribe to the Granick Slate Card, for all your voting needs. If you don't subscribe, you won't get the slate card, though I will post it here on The Shout.
To subscribe, send email to majordomo_at_www.granick.com with the words "subscribe slatecard" in the body. To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo_at_www.granick.com with the words"unsubscribe slatecard " in the body.
Jennifer | 4:47 PM
| On Sunday, Pam, her 3 year old daughter Gabby, and I went to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. Another reason to love San Francisco. The building was recently renovated for a gazillion dollars and practically glistens.
There are flowers, butterflies, orchids, bromeliads, but I liked the aquatic plants room the best.
How I love San Francisco!
Jennifer | 9:46 AM
| On Saturday, Brad, Ethan, Rebecca, Alex, and I did the Chinese New Year's Treasure Hunt. The hunt has a SF noir cinema theme combined with Chinese New Year. Our team name was Sam Ian, Primate Eye. You run around downtown, solving riddles which bring you to different locations in the city where you have to be very observant to find the answers. One riddle brought us down a dark alley with bronze monkey prints in the asphalt to find an honored man named Alfred Ho. Another required us to measure some lines in centimeters, then call the number to find a heart sculpture near a fountain in a small local park. Meanwhile, the New Year's parade, complete with floats, firecrackers and food vendors, rages around you. We were the second team to return our answer sheet, but made a foolish mistake of thinking any old honorable person in Pioneer Park was the honorable person the clue was searching for, and did not place. We'll be back next year.
Jennifer | 5:02 PM
| A very cultural weekend. On Friday, Brad and I saw Lion King at the Orpheum Theater. Though I've lived in San Francisco for over 13 years, I'd never been. The theater is done in a moorish/Morroccan style, with an ornate ceiling in the theater itself, made of interlocking triangles that form multi-colored stars and vaulted ceilings with fancy pulpit like windows looking over the lobby.
Lion King itself is great. For me, the story rings false. [Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens!] Its about the son of the king of Lions, Simba, who is driven away, and has to decide to care enough to come back and resume his rightful place on the throne. As an American, deeply stewed in the philosophy of democracy, its hard to care about the "rightful king" when there's nothing about that king that would recommend him to government, except that he's cuter than the bad guy who's currently in charge (Scar) and has botched the whole thing. We kind of see that Simba's got to learn to come to terms with the mistakes he's made in the past, but those mistakes weren't really his fault anyway. And then he's just a grub-eating goof off for the next couple of years, so he hasn't really won my vote. The part about the beneficient father-figure watching down from above, though, is all Judeo-Christian.
Nevertheless, the music is good, African-sounding stuff with great female vocals and a couple of Sir Elton John blockbusters, but its the costumes that make it spectacular. The designer was clearly not beholden to literal conceptions of what animals should look like, and has created these wonderful masks and puppet bodies that are visibly animated by human actors. It gives the animals a sense of humanity, while very artistically identifying those visual characteristics that are the essence of the particular creature. There's a cheetah, who stalks along, exuding feline power. The hind legs are a person's with constructed haunches. The person stands up straight, but the cat's body extends forward from a belt, kind of like a strap-on, the front legs and head manipulated by the actor. The whole thing is so ingeniously done, and there are elephants, and giraffes (my favorite), hyenas (which I saw recently at the Night Zoo in Singapore and these are amazing likenesses, in the physical shape, if not the cartoony faces). Great.
Jennifer | 4:39 PM
| I learned today that Jerome Heckenkamp pled guilty on Friday in a case in which I used to represent him. I wish him the best in his upcoming sentencing. The case involved a defaced eBay website, pretty minor stuff that's easy to fix. Hopefully, the court will understand that what's relevant in these cases is that harm that's done to the computer servers and to the company's business as a result of that server being unavailable, not the harm that's done to a company's reputation. See Intel v. Hamidi, U.S. v. McDanel.
Jennifer | 12:39 PM
| Soon, cell phones will be used by your service provider, friends, family, employer, enemies, government to track your movements. I'm already uncomfortable with the phone's persistant ability to "find" me whenever someone has the whim to call. This development could counteract the cell phone's usefulness so much so that I'd stop carrying one. Of course, I'd have a choice, but many workers would not. We need to start questioning the unquestioned control that employers exercise over employees in this country, as new technologies are expanding this power exponentially without any kind of check or balance. I was particularly impressed with the respect we pay employers in the dominion of work when reading a recent cover story in the New York Times magazine about a woman who simply can not earn more than poverty-level wages. Though social workers were willing to give her clothes, education, housing to help her, no one ever considered calling her employer and asked him to pay her more money, or give her more shifts, or give her shifts that were easier for her to get to on the bus. The magazine article can, unfortunately, be purchased from the NYT archives here.
Jennifer | 11:22 AM
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