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Don’cha Know?
A Texas Civil Rights Review
Column of Dissent

By Faddy MacMough

In your article I found at CounterPunch.org, “Beauty from the Heart of Texas: Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debators” you started out with the following paragraph:

Over at the Internet Movie Database, redneck trolls are saddling up their cyber posse to go night riding on the message boards against Denzel Washington and “The Great Debaters.” All of which is a good thing if you like to see relevance in contemporary art. Because deep down, “The Great Debaters” is a film about how to grow yourself into a real person despite the needlers, taunters, and brutes who dominate the space around you — and who dominate it, still.

By now you ought to know I’ll come back at you on any generalizations you make that excoriate Rednecks — it is my solemn duty after all as a leftie redneck. I’ll be the first to admit there are, as you suggest, trolls of a redneck variety. But there are trolls of all sorts of varieties that include folks who are not rednecks. And amongst the trolls who are busy attacking Denzel Washington and the great debaters are some who just don’t have the credentials to be good decent rednecks.

I’d suggest, based on his betrayal of his own roots, that Justice Thomas is a troll who, if his past maunderings are any indication, is perfectly capable to giving Denzel Washington and the movie a needling, a taunting, and a brutalizing. Given his lofty position, that would also carry some weight.

Now don’t get me wrong, trolls are trolls (especially if they are the Tolkienian persuasion) and are to be avoided, and brought to light at every opportunity. And if they happen to be rednecks as well, they certainly do need to be brought into the light of day. (Light, it seems, of a sunlight variety, causes trolls to turn to stone as any student of the Hobbit can attest.) That is just fine and dandy by me. In fact, I applaud anyone who helps to sanitize the redneck blood lines by ridding us of their influence.

However, and this is important, there are rednecks who should be your allies . . . and the allies of all sorts of people (dare I suggest types?) who are struggling against oppression and bigotry in this class society of ours. They are all on the same side of the civil rights equation and shouldn’t be alienated by a slip of the hyperbolic tongue. It doesn’t help your cause, and it only makes theirs all that more difficult.

Had I not recognized you as a fellow traveler in the art and practice of civil rights, someone who has, at least for me, sterling credentials, I wouldn’t have gone much further than the racist epithet: redneck trolls. Nor would you have done much reading if you’d run up against ‘n-word trolls’ — or ‘m-word trolls’ — or any of a number of other racist terms.

Now that brings us around to the closing paragraph:

So please don’t bother believing what the bigots tell you about this film, not even the trolls who claim to have Harvard degrees. You don’t have to be Black to feel beautifully about Denzel Washington’s fine new film, “The Great Debaters.” The “message” of this film is for anyone who still desires the capacity to dream higher than what you already are.

Here, I suppose you come close to redeeming yourself in spite of some rather grandiloquent attempts at grand eloquence. Not believing trolls, or bigots, or even folks with some fancy degree (Harvard being one), is very good advice. We should all heed your advice . . . whether our necks are black or red or brown . . . and we should, all of us, all celebrate the desire to dream higher than what we already are. Those of us wallowing in the under classes of our society have a hell of a lot more in common that we have that the power elites want us to understand and recognize.

Alas, your introductory paragraph does a great deal to continue the tradition of division and intolerance for those who are sometimes frighteningly mirrors of our own existence. It’s high time, in my not so very humble opinion, that all of us with our necks under the yoke of economic oppression were willing to celebrate our mutual successes and quit the divisive language. And it is high time that you, as one of our leaders, should watch out for those killer phrases that have our mutual antagonists smiling with delight at our antagonizing each other.

Fredegar N. MacMough (his friends call him Faddy) is a self-styled leftie, of redneck parentage, holding forth from one of those nasty little oil towns where the glories of Friday Night Lights sustain a population so used to being abused that they think things are just fine and dandy . . . where a peppermint patty world is an illusion foisted upon them because the boys did take state again.

You read it here first. See Jay J. Johnson-Castro’s Christmas letter to the President–gm

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Press Release
February 22, 2008

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD ANNOUNCES OPPOSITION TO FEDERAL JUDICIAL NOMINATION OF CCA GENERAL COUNSEL GUS PURYEAR

On June 13, 2007, President Bush nominated Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV for a position on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Mr. Puryear currently serves as vice president and general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit private prison company. If appointed he would serve as a federal judge in the same jurisdiction where CCA is headquartered.

Since 2000, at least 260 federal lawsuits naming CCA, company subsidiaries or CCA employees have been filed in the Middle District of Tennessee. Such cases would constitute a conflict of interest for Mr. Puryear, and assigning them to other judges would not be an effective use of judicial resources.

Of greater concern is that Mr. Puryear lacks familiarity with the federal courts and has little trial or litigation experience. By his own admission he has tried only two cases to verdict; he has been personally involved in only five federal cases, most recently a decade ago. He is not admitted to practice before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is over the Middle District of Tennessee, and received only a “qualified” rating from the American Bar Association rather than a “highly qualified” rating.

Both Tennessee Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker strongly support Mr. Puryear’s nomination. Neither Senator has acknowledged the substantial financial contributions received from Mr. Puryear and his employer, CCA – which include over $80,000 to Senator Alexander and $27,000 to Senator Corker since 2004.

Further, Mr. Puryear mentioned in disclosure statements that he is a member of the Nashville-based Belle Meade Country Club. The fact that Mr. Puryear maintains membership in an exclusive, predominately white club that did not admit its first minority member until 1994, and reportedly does not afford voting privileges to female members but only to male members, is a matter of significant concern for a federal judicial nominee.

In an Associated Press national wire article concerning Mr. Puryear’s nomination, Vanderbilt Professor Stefanie Lindquist was quoted as saying his judicial appointment “might slide through as a compromise.” The National Lawyers Guild does not believe the people of Tennessee should have to compromise or settle for a less-than-qualified federal judge to represent their interests in U.S. District Court.

The National Lawyers Guild calls on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to vote down this unqualified, conflicted and controversial judicial candidate.

By Nick Braune
Special to the Texas Civil Rights Review

Back in mid-July, I wrote a column on a poor Oklahoman, Curtis McCarty, who was released from 20 years of incarceration (mostly on death row) because a crime lab supervisor, forensic expert Joyce Gilchrist, was too eager to help prosecutors. She slam- dunked evidence against McCarty. She originally wrote in her notes that his hair samples did not match evidence found at the crime scene; after McCarty was charged with murder, she changed those original notes and insisted it was a “match.” Although she eagerly wanted to nail bad guys and be on the good guys’ team, she finally was fired in disgrace in 2001.

Prosecutors, I pointed out, were said to love having Gilchrist testify: she had some showmanship and style that swayed jurors. The prosecutors called her “Magic.” In my column I mentioned that the prosecutors who kept calling on her to work her magic had to be blamed too, but I did not have any specifics to base it on.

I recently found an excellent quote on this, however, when I was recently combing the Innocence Project (I.P.) web site. (I.P. is a group of legal experts, with supporting chapters in 30 law schools, who have shown over 12 years that over 200 convictions were false, using the newest DNA technology. Curtis McCarty was in touch with them from prison.) On I.P.’s site, I found the following paragraph linking Gilchrist and the prosecutor, confirming my view that she alone was not the problem.

“By itself, Gilchrist’s misconduct would have derailed justice, but it practically guaranteed a wrongful conviction when paired with the outrageous conduct of District Attorney Robert Macy, who exaggerated the evidence against McCarty and misled the jury. Over two decades, Gilchrist and Macy together sent hundreds of people to prison and two dozen, including McCarty, to death row. Macy has said publicly that executing an innocent person is a risk worth taking. It’s a risk that he and Gilchrist took when their misconduct sent McCarty to death row, but DNA testing in 2002 and 2007 proved McCarty did not commit the crime.” (Website: The Innocence Project in Print; Summer/Fall, 2007)

(In my mid-July column I reported a study by the Chicago Tribune a few years ago that analyzed 381 cases of prosecutor misconduct ranging back to 1964, where the misconduct was serious enough to overturn a conviction, but not one prosecutor was convicted of a crime. And some moved up the ladder to be top district attorneys or judges. And to my knowledge, neither Prosecutor Macy nor forensic expert Gilchrist have been given jail time for what they did to McCarty.)

Keeping in mind how lab problems and prosecutor problems were connected in the unethical Oklahoma City situation, let’s shift to Texas. Now, this summer the results came in from a two-year study of Houston’s crime lab. (This is very important because Houston’s Harris County is the only county in America to have sent more people to death row than Oklahoma County, where Gilchrist and Macy operated.)

In Houston, the Chronicle (June, 17, 2007) ran an article speaking of “troubling” cases: “Investigations in the four and a half years since the HPD’s crime lab woes first arose have highlighted…years of incompetence and uncovered hundreds of unidentified cases with potential problems.” HPD’s DNA lab was closed after 2003 because of allegations of flaws in the data collected, misinterpretations of data, evidence being improperly stored, etc. Later a [two-year] study was commissioned and its results are in: about 600 cases handled by the HPD “deserve further scrutiny.” Houston’s forensic lab has a muddied name now.

Here is an interesting case mentioned in the Chronicle…note that the muddied lab isn’t too far from a mud-splattered prosecutor. Listen to what the prosecutor will tell Ronald Cantrell who was in custody. Cantrell was accused of a shocking sexual assault on an eight-year-old girl. With an “indecency” incident on his previous record, he was terrified when the prosecutor told him that the HPD crime lab had matched his DNA to the crime scene and that he had better confess to avoid a massive sentence.

Cantrell confessed, plea bargaining down to six years in prison. But during the recent investigations of the lab, a private lab redoing the tests did not get the same results; there were no conclusive lab results about Cantrell one way or the other. The prosecutor was mistaken, or was lying. Some foolish people might say it doesn’t matter if Cantrell was confused about how much evidence the government had against him…he did confess to the crime and we nailed the perpetrator. But it matters if we think rights matter. And what if this Cantrell story is part of a pattern? Then it is either a pattern of lab and prosecutor mistakes or a criminal modus operandi on the part of prosecutors.

The Chronicle had another story in the same article, but notice the same pattern in this case: A man is arrested and told there is conclusive forensic evidence against him; the man confesses and is given a lighter sentence; later, the evidence was found not to be so conclusive. But by that time the man had confessed. Leroy Lewis, an 18-year-old high school student in 1991, accused of slaying a bank teller, was told by the prosecutor that a HPD analyst reported that forensic evidence linked Lewis to the crime scene. “Facing a capital murder charge and a possible death sentence, the young man pleaded guilty,” said the Chronicle. A decade later retests show no forensic evidence connection. (Well, he confessed, so he probably did it; so what does it matter?)

I.P., which has overturned 29 convictions in Texas in 12 years through DNA, knows this reveals only the tip of the iceberg, because physical evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing only exists in 5 or 10% of all cases. Nationally, there have been “decades of overzealous prosecution and forensic science negligence and misconduct,” according to I.P.’s newsletter, so more work needs to be done.

A beginning: Thanks to I.P., Texas now has a Forensic Science Commission to investigate state labs, and the legislature this last session gave it some funds to work with. This is good; but we will also need now some legislative action checking the power of “red meat” prosecutors. They do not check themselves and the judiciary doesn’t seem to do it.

If readers are eager to find out more about overzealous prosecutors, there is an excellent story in the current (September, 2007) Texas Monthly about Dallas, which had the same prosecutor (of the “red meat” variety) from the 1950’s, where blacks did not have a chance at all in Dallas, all the way to 1986, where things had improved somewhat. The name of the article is “Craig’s List,” and it tells the story of a new prosecutor, Craig Watkins, who is black and is trying to undo some of the decades-long prosecutorial misconduct, like keeping blacks of juries and treating defense lawyers as enemies.

Craig Watkins is not perfect — he still supports the death penalty, for instance — but he is moving in a good direction on some matters. He is now allowing the I.P to review hundreds of Dallas county cases dating back to 1970. Dallas has had 13 exonerations from DNA, and I suspect there will be many more people found to be wrongfully incarcerated in Dallas because of “overzealous” prosecutors and the various technicians propitiating them.

Note: This is an expanded version of an article first appearing tin the Mid-Valley Town Crier.