Latest interview on WNCW

On April 29 I was a guest on Our Southern Community, a public affairs program on WNCW 88.7 FM.
Click here!

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Invocation: Asheville City Council 11/9/10

Members of Asheville’s City Council take turns offering opening words. This was my contribution on Nov. 9, 2010.

Renowned cosmologist Martin Rees, of Cambridge University, once observed, “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. … It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

What Rees is saying is that the DNA record is clear. Dinosaurs have evolved into hummingbirds. Fish crawled out of the ocean, grew fur, gave birth, suckled their young and returned to the sea to become whales. Monkeys dropped from trees, captured fire, lit torches, fractioned petroleum, split atoms and untangled the chain of human DNA, the chain of our being. The lesson is that we are not the crown of creation, we are just one trolley stop on the long track from earth’s beginning to earth’s end, from life’s beginning to wherever it may go.

From Fu Xi to Heraclitus to Mozart to Robert Moog to Lady Gaga the song has been the same. The song is a song of change.

But this is our moment, and our only moment, to love as we are able, to listen as well as we can, to wield the tools we have fashioned or inherited, to feed those who hunger, to teach those who wonder, to build bridges where there are divisions, to break down barriers to justice, to make our moment in time a testament to all life that has gone before us and a beacon to all who come after. We can do no more, and surely we should attempt no less.

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The sources of fear and hatred

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International action to save Troy Davis

Advocates for justice staged an international day of action, May 19, to raise awareness of the plight of Troy Davis, a 40-year-old man who has spent the past 18 years on death row in Georgia for a crime he evidently did not commit. Davis was on the scene when a law enforcement officer was murdered and was convicted on the basis of witness testimony which has since been recanted. Jurors have come forward to insist they were misinformed about evidence in the case. No weapon was ever found. Furthermore, one of the witnesses who testified against Davis is a principal suspect in the case.

In Asheville, more than three dozen people gathered at the Brooks-Howell Home, for a candlelight service and vigil Tuesday evening. Dr. Kiran Sigmon, a local physician and friend of Davis, led the service, describing her family’s contact with Davis over several years, and reading a profoundly moving letter the inmate had sent to his supporters around the world last November. Sigmon’s daughters participated: Joy played a quiet piano accompaniment and read a list of states which still embrace capital punishment, together with the number of inmates on each state’s death row; Lee lit a candle of hope for each state as the names were read. The ceremony was interspersed with song, “How can I keep from singing?” and poetry.

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State Senate twists RJA

Yesterday the NC Senate approved the Racial Justice Act on the second reading but added a provision that will make it easier to execute people in this state. The amendment was added in apparent reaction to the NC Medical Association rule prohibiting doctors from participating in executions. (Anyone recall, “First, do no harm” ?)

The Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court ruled last week that the medical group could not impose penalties on its members if they helped kill people. Their convoluted ruling said, in effect: Lethal injection is not a medical procedure, therefore it is appropriate for the state to require a doctor to oversee the execution.

Huh?

Well, the pro-execution majority in the Senate has now moved to enshrine that rule in the Racial Justice Act. If the bill passes as now written, we can only hope that the doctors themselves will simply refuse to participate.

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Any questions?

This says it all. We need to pass the NC Racial Justice Act.

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NC “Defense of Marriage” act back on stage

The Rovian dividers who seek to ride bigotry into office are at it again. This week the so-called “Defense of Marriage” act will resurface in the NC General Assembly.

Those who believe that healthy marriages are threatened by other people’s livestyles are either paranoid or duplicitous. It’s almost funny that self-identified conservatives, who generally pretend to want the government to butt out of people’s private lives, get their shorts in a bunch when they think about what others might be doing in the privacy of their bedrooms. Are they so tempted to join in the imagined romps of others that their own marriages may collapse? Are they tapping their toes in airport men’s rooms? Are they e-mailing smut to their interns?

You can take action to tell our legislators to mind their own business, and mind ours—by addressing the real issues facing our state instead of raising straw issues that fan the flames of hate and bigotry.

Click here.

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Buncombe County lawsuit could have major implications for North Carolina inmates

Asheville attorney P.J. Roth filed a complaint this week in the matter of the death of Marvis Davidson in the Buncombe County Detention Center. Davidson died of complications due to diabetes in the summer of 2004 and witnesses say she was denied treatment for her medical condition. The complaint charges the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department with wrongful death due to criminal negligence. If Roth wins his case, the outcome would almost certainly mean a major change in liability protection for North Carolina municipalities.

I first reported on this matter for Mountain Xpress back in 2005. As I wrote at that time: “A former guard (who re quested anonymity, fearing reprisals) described having seen serious problems while working there.

Two complaints, the guard said, were filed ‘about [Marvis Davidson's] medical treatment, including failure to correctly administer insulin. And I was told by another guard that Davidson said she had severe stomach pains for four days before she died.’ the former guard said. Davidson was a diabetic, and her autopsy report says she died due to an ischemia (decrease in blood supply) and resulting hemorrhage of her small intestine. Diabetes is a contributory cause of ischemia.”

Following that story I was contacted by a former inmate who had been in an adjacent cell during Davidson’s death. She told me Davidson had been literally screaming in pain, begging for help, and that guards had not only ignored her but had told her to shut up and quit causing a disruption.

Astonishingly, Davidson had previously been incarcerated in the Buncombe County jail, had received treatment for her diabetes, and had been hospitalized from the jail during a diabetic crisis. So there is no reason whatever that the database would have lacked information in this case.

Also following my story, I was contacted by April Nicole Welch, Marvis Davidson’s daughter, who asked me if she might have some basis for legal action concerning her mother’s untimely death. I put her in touch with P.J. Roth who took up her case just days before the statute of limitations ran out. Roth opened the case a couple of years ago, and it has moved through the system in the slow way that civil cases do. Finally, this week, four years after Davidson’s death.

This was the second death at the jail in less than three years. In September 2001, Joey Max Rogers was arrested for operating his lawn mower in a drunken state. The medical examiner noted: “Arrested by B.C. Sheriff’s Dept. for drunk & disorderly — apparently was combative — placed in locked room at approximately 2100 hrs. … Checked at 2130 & found dead on floor.” Neither the medical authorities nor the Sheriff’s Department has explained how a highly intoxicated man who was also found to have a high level of phenobarbital in his blood (a legally prescribed medication, according to medical reports) had managed to break his own neck while alone in a locked room.

According to former guards who have talked to me, Rogers was thrown against a wall by a jailer. But nothing was ever done about the death.

What I’ve learned in the years since then is that North Carolina law protects municipal governments from liability in a major way and that permits jailers to do what they will pretty much without consequence.

The state law prohibits damage claims against municipalities UNLESS the municipality carries liability insurance. But IF the municipality carries liability insurance, it is given a pass on the first $500,000. That is to say if someone wins a claim for $1 million, the winner only gets $500,000. That means that attorneys are very unlikely to take cases in which damages might be less than that amount.

If you are an occasional criminal, working for minimum wage, it is entirely possible that a jury will decide that your life was worth less than $500.000, so your family could win a case and get nothing—including payment to your attorney. It’s no wonder that lawyers in this state are reluctant to take on liability cases involving municipalities, given that they may put years into litigation and come up empty handed. Roth has now been working on the Davidson case for two years and is only now moving toward a hearing.

Roth told me that he took the case for two reasons. The first is that he wants to attempt to secure justice for Davidson’s family, but the second is that he thinks the case might make “good law.” Under this state’s rules, if a public official’s failure to perform required duties is judged to be criminal, penalties are tripled which could bump any reasonable jury award above the $500,000 threshold. Roth predicts that if he wins this case Buncombe County will appeal the decision up to the state Supreme Court if necessary, and that his hope is that an ultimate favorable decision will help protect inmates statewide from jailer abuse.

As he told me, “Since I believe there are actually a bunch of well-meaning lawyers out there, a success in Marvis’ case might encourage more of them to take inmate suits across the state and thereby increase pressure on the municipalities to clean up their act.”

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Robo calls traced to Clinton supporter

Deceptive robo-calls which have reportedly targeted black voters in North Carolina have been traced to Women’s Voices Women Vote, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit. Women’s Voices founder and President Page Gardner has made substantial contributions to the Clinton campaign.

The calls suggest that one cannot vote unless one returns a signed statement to be found in a registration packet that the listener received in the mail. Women’s Voices has been implicated in similar illegal voter suppression efforts in multiple states across the country. The NC NAACP has filed a formal complaint with Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Numerous voters in WNC have reported getting the deceptive calls.

For more, click here.

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Moyers right about Wright

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