Exoneration Case Detail. In August 1995, Celia Varela reported to police that her four-year-old step-granddaughter had tearfully told her that she had been sexually molested by her father, 29-year-old Sheldon Mosley, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The girl had lived with Varela since she was two weeks old after the girl’s mother was sent to prison. Mosley, who had remarried, was allowed visitation.
In 1995, Varela and Mosley were battling in court over custody rights. In November 1995, the Nueces County District Attorney’s Office charged Mosley with three counts of aggravated sexual assault and, because he had previous convictions for burglary and drug offenses, being a habitual offender. Mosley went on trial in Nueces County Criminal District Court in February 1996. The girl, who was still four years old, testified under leading and suggestive questioning that she was hurt where she would “pee-pee.”
The assisting nurse testified that she asked the girl if anyone else had ever done anything similar to her. Exonerated. Tumblr. “Why do we have so many prisoners?” | JUST WRIT. William Happ, midazolam: Florida’s barbaric, disgusting decision to execute a prisoner using an untested drug. Photo by Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images On Tuesday, a convicted murderer named William Happ was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber of the Florida State Prison and executed via lethal injection. Happ was given a three-drug cocktail that included midazolam hydrochloride, a fast-acting sedative that had never before been used in capital punishment.
Many observers worried that the untested midazolam might wear off before the other drugs took effect, thus subjecting Happ to excruciating pain. Sure enough, the Associated Press reported that Happ apparently “remained conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than other people executed recently by lethal injection under the old formula.” Like many death-penalty states, Florida has nearly exhausted its supply of the popular execution drug pentobarbital, and has been frantically searching for an effective substitute.
And then there’s Florida. Yes, “the process.” Why are so Many Americans in Prison? Author Michael Stoll on America's Ridiculous Incarceration Rates. "Every ten or eleven people that you meet, someone is going to either know someone in prison, has been in prison with a record, or you met them and they are going off to prison," says Michael Stoll, co-author of Why are so Many Americans in Prison? ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer sat down with Stoll to discuss why incarceration rates and associated prison costs in America have exploded in the last few decades, and possible ways to reform the system. "That increase [in incarceration rates] that we saw, 80 percent of that through our analysis, was driven by policy changes, not by the increased criminality of citizens in the United States," says Stoll. "One of the things that I think needs to be done—and we know that this is politically difficult—is there has to be reform in sentencing.
" About 7 minutes. Edited by Tracy Oppenheimer. Camera by Zach Weissmueller and Sharif Matar. Prison Policy Initiative. Breaking the Addiction to Incarceration: Weekly Highlights. Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history. And yet, our criminal justice system has failed on every count: public safety, fairness and cost-effectiveness. Across the country, the criminal justice reform conversation is heating up. Each week, we feature our some of the most exciting and relevant news in overincarceration discourse that we’ve spotted from the previous week. Check back weekly for our top picks. Reducing Prison Populations in the States In August, Gov.
Massachusetts: In July, Gov. Voting for Criminal Justice Reform at the Ballot Box This November, voters in several states will be asked to decide on criminal justice initiatives. Marijuana Decriminalization—that is, licensing and regulation of marijuana for personal use for adults aged 21 and up—will be put to voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. The U.S. Enlace | Organizing the Working Poor | Portland Oregon | Los Angeles California. The Myth of Deterrence. But a distinguished committee of scholars working for the National Research Council has now reached the striking and convincing conclusion that all of the research about deterrence and the death penalty done in the past generation, including by some first-rank scholars at the most prestigious universities, should be ignored. The committee found that the research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.” No study looks at what really matters, by comparing the deterrent effects of capital punishment with other penalties, like life without parole.
A lot of the research assumes that “potential murderers respond to the objective risk of execution,” but only one in six of the people sentenced to death in the last 35 years have been executed and no study properly took that diminished risk into account. The 33 states that retain the death penalty should follow that lead.
Mass Appeal to Governors: Don't Privatize Prisons. The private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America has made states an offer they can—and should—refuse. That's the message that went out to state governors on Thursday in letters signed by 60 policy and religious groups. The letters urged the governors of all 50 states not to take up a blanket deal CCA has put forth to buy and privatize their state prisons in return for a promise to keep those prisons filled. Two weeks ago, the Huffington Post revealed that CCA was reaching out to states, offering to buy their prisons as a way to deal with their "challenging corrections budgets.
" The company is proposing that it receive, in exchange for the cash, a 20-year management contract that would require the states to keep their prisons at least 90 percent full for the duration. This power play by the private prison firm may indicate some anxiety in what has historically been a growth industry.
(See charts below.) More private prisoners (top) beget a kickass stock (above). America Has Become Incarceration Nation. December 21, 2006 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Two remarkable developments in Washington in the past week highlight the extent to which the United States has become the land of mass incarceration. First, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Weldon Angelos for a first-time drug offense. Angelos was a 24-year-old Utah music producer with no prior convictions when he was convicted of three sales of marijuana in 2004.
The Angelos decision came on the heels of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report finding that there are now a record 2.2 million Americans incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails. The composition of the prison population reflects the socioeconomic inequalities in society. While the United States has a higher rate of violent crime than comparable nations, the substantial prison buildup since 1980 has resulted from changes in policy, not changes in crime. More Black Men Now in Prison System Than Were Enslaved. March 31, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
This article first appeared on LA Progressive. “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation. Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “What do we expect them to do?” So it’s like America’s current war addiction. Prison Growth. Students for Sensible Drug Policy.