Scott Watch: Free at Last, Free at Last.

Spread the word! Both Justice and Grace prevailed in Mississippi this week - Jamie and Gladys Scott are to be set free at last...

Thank Governor Barbour at 601.359.3150

------------------------------------------------

Mississippi Governor's Office
Dec. 29, 2010

GOV. BARBOUR’S STATEMENT REGARDING RELEASE OF SCOTT SISTERS

"Today, I have issued two orders indefinitely suspending the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott. In 1994, a Scott County jury convicted the sisters of armed robbery and imposed two life sentences for the crime. Their convictions and their sentences were affirmed by the Mississippi Court of Appeals in 1996.

"To date, the sisters have served 16 years of their sentences and are eligible for parole in 2014. Jamie Scott requires regular dialysis, and her sister has offered to donate one of her kidneys to her. The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society. Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott's medical condition creates a substantial cost to the State of Mississippi.

"The Mississippi Parole Board reviewed the sisters' request for a pardon and recommended that I neither pardon them, nor commute their sentence. At my request, the Parole Board subsequently reviewed whether the sisters should be granted an indefinite suspension of sentence, which is tantamount to parole, and have concurred with my decision to suspend their sentences indefinitely.

"Gladys Scott's release is conditioned on her donating one of her kidneys to her sister, a procedure which should be scheduled with urgency. The release date for Jamie and Gladys Scott is a matter for the Department of Corrections.

"I would like to thank Representative George Flaggs, Senator John Horne, Senator Willie Simmons, and Representative Credell Calhoun for their leadership on this issue. These legislators, along with former Mayor Charles Evers, have been in regular contact with me and my staff while the sisters' petition has been under review."

Free the Scott Sisters: Grace calling Mississippi.

Hey Friends of Justice out there: 
Don't let Governor Barbour leave Jamie and Gladys to die in prison.

 
This week is a pretty critical time for folks to be contacting the Governor of Mississippi to implore him to pardon Jamie and Gladys Scott. I'm posting one of the more recent news editorials detailing their struggle below. You can also hit their mom's blogspot for more info (Evelyn Rasco - such a beautiful soul - is their mom; Nancy Lockhart and Sis Marpessa are their champions). Be prepared for some awesome gospel, blues, and soul to stream through when you open it (that means crank up your speakers, not turn them down)!

The conditions of the prison they're in - particularly the trailer where Jamie receives dialysis treatments (when the machine is working, that is) are horrendous - but you needn't make reference to that in your communication with Governor Barbour's office about the pardon - there's an appropriate contact for that below. 

If you're a registered Republican - even from outside of Mississippi - please share that with Governor Barbour in your letter, as the man will likely be running for national office in 2012. It would help for him to know that real Republicans are interested in seeing that Americans are capable of delivering both justice and mercy when we've been wrong...

Here's the info to reach Governor Haley Barbour (visit that link, first, to get to know a little about him):

Honorable Haley Barbour
P.O. Box 139
Jackson, Mississippi 39205

1-877-405-0733
governor@governor.state.ms.us 

You may also want to put something on letterhead and e-mail it as an attachment to the governor's personal assistant - Dorothy Kuykendal:DKuykendall@governor.state.ms.us

   Jamie Scott (center) with Mom and brother.

Also, check out this recent post and please contact the Mississippi health department regarding the black mold, toilets in Quick Bed and inadequate infrastructure in this dialysis trailer which are all located at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl, Mississippi. There are a lot of lives at stake - the survival rates for sick Mississippi prisoners have plummeted in recent years under the current health care provider, Wexford - Mother Jones did an excellent piece on this in March.

 Jeffrey K. Brown, Ph.D., R.P.E., B.C.E.
Bureau Director
State Public Health Entomologist
Mississippi State Department of Health
570 East Woodrow Wilson Avenue
Jackson, Mississippi 39216

601.576.7972 Office
601.576.7632 Fax
769.257.2242 Cell

jeffrey.brown@msdh.state.ms.us
www.healthyms.com

 

Here's the latest article giving some background on Jamie and Gladys. Please take action on their behalf THIS WEEK. 

 

----------From the Seattle Times via Free The Scott Sisters----------

 

 Sisters may or may not be guilty, but Mississippi assuredly is

Leonard Pitts Jr.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Let's assume they did it.

Let's assume that two days before Christmas in 1993, a 22-year-old black woman named Jamie Scott and her pregnant 19-year-old sister Gladys set up an armed robbery. Let's assume these single mothers lured two men to a spot outside the tiny town of Forest, Miss., where three teenage boys, using a shotgun the sisters supplied, relieved the men of $11 and sent them on their way, unharmed.

Assume all of the above is true, and still you must be shocked at the crude brutality of the Scott sisters' fate. You see, the sisters, neither of whom had a criminal record before this, are still locked away in state prison, having served 16 years of their double-life sentences.

It bears repeating. Each sister is doing double life for a robbery in which $11 was taken and nobody was hurt. Somewhere, the late Nina Simone is moaning her signature song:

"Mississippi Goddam."

For the record, two of the young men who committed the robbery testified against the sisters as a condition of their plea bargain. All three reportedly received two-year sentences and were long ago released. No shotgun or forensic evidence was produced at trial. The sisters have always maintained their innocence.

Observers are at a loss to explain their grotesquely disproportionate sentence. Early this year, the Jackson Advocate, a weekly newspaper serving the black community in the state capital, interviewed the sisters' mother, Evelyn Rasco. She described the sentences as payback for her family's testimony against a corrupt sheriff. According to her, that sheriff's successor vowed revenge.

You don't have to believe that to believe this: Mississippi stands guilty of a grievous offense against simple decency.

But there is hope. Recently, the sisters' cause has been championed by high-powered allies. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and the NAACP have called on Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to pardon the two women. I add my voice to theirs.

I have no way of knowing if the Scott sisters' fate is tied in to some sheriff's revenge and at some level, the question is moot. Whatever the proximate cause of this ridiculous sentence, the larger cause is neon clear: the Scott sisters are black women in the poorest state in the union. And as report after report has testified, if you are poor or black (and God help you if you are both), the American justice system has long had this terrible tendency to throw you away like garbage. Historically, this has been especially true in the South.

If you doubt it, play with the scenario in your head. Try to imagine some rich white girl doing double life for an $11 robbery. You can't.

But then, that girl has access to a brand of justice unavailable to women like Jamie and Gladys Scott. She will receive every break the law allows her and maybe a few it does not. No one will throw her away.

And while it would be nice to think this problem of discarding people's lives would be solved by the release of the Scott sisters, the truth is, that wouldn't even address it.

How many other Scott sisters and brothers are languishing behind bars for no good reason, doing undeserved hard time on nonexistent evidence, perjured testimony, prosecutorial misconduct or sheer racial or class bias?

So fixing the problem the Scott sisters represent involves nothing less than the reformation of the justice system, a commitment to make it, as the name implies, a system that reliably produces "justice” as opposed to these too frequent miscarriages thereof.

Meantime, Jamie Scott, who is in her late 30s now, is in poor health. She is said to be losing her vision and both her kidneys have failed. And we wait for common sense to take hold in Mississippi.

It is a situation that shocks the senses, even if we assume they did it.

Now, assume they did not.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@miamiherald.com

From: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2013477385_pitts21.html 

 

Arizona: Mercy, Mercy Me...

Davon's clemency board hearing was yesterday - the decision to turn him down was clearly made before we walked into the room, however. The chair made only passing reference to the thick stack of mail that had arrived in support of Davon's application, and cut me off when I was speaking on his behalf. He made a special point of reading things into the record to justify their determination against him. The county attorney's office can be expected to oppose such applications, but they went out of their way, it seems, to damn him - which was precisely what the board needed and asked for. Not that I'm accusing them of any impropriety - I'm sure they did what they felt was right - just as I'm doing. We just come from different places, and they don't know Davon like I do. As evidenced by their decision yesterday, They don't know him at all.


Pardons in Arizona have nothing to do with mercy or grace, by the way - or even justice for that matter, even when sincere people try to deliver it. Look at what our good governor did to Bill Macumber, the innocent man who has already spent 35 years in prison for murder and may well die there. Convinced beyond any doubt that his conviction was based on perjured testimony and manufactured evidence, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency unanimously recommended him for a full pardon, which would have gone into effect if Brewer had simply left it alone for 90 days. Instead she quashed it, in the interest of her kind of "justice". Affirming Bill's innocence would have implied his ex-wife's guilt. As she worked for the Maricopa County Sheriff's office at the time she framed him, I suspect Brewer was doing someone with history there a favor. But what do I know?



Sadly, despite his story saturating the media across the country before November 2, the voters in Arizona elected that woman anyway.



As for Davon: the outcome of his hearing was no surprise, really - probably least of all to him - but it was still a disappointment; his little sister left the room abruptly in tears. We did, however, raise awareness about the prosecution of the seriously, mentally ill for their symptoms rather than their criminality, and built a network for prisoners with Hep C and their families. We also entered our objections to the prison industrial complex into the public record (that was the part I think they didn't want to hear). One of our legislators even turned out to corroborate Davon's mom's assertion that Arizona's prisoners aren't getting the medical care they need in there - and that came from a self-described "conservative Republican". I suspect he will pay a price for having done that, which is why I won't name him here. I doubt he would endorse my own take on the system, but he's still one of the few politicians I've ever met with real integrity. I can't think of a single Democrat in this state who would put themselves on the line like that for a convicted violent, crazed felon seeking mercy - much less another Republican.



I'm convinced that clemency boards exist largely to reinforce the illusion that the system we have of doling out punishment in our country is a "just" one that serves the best interests of society at large. By allowing room for pardons and commutations, we suggest that the legal system we live under, as a rule, delivers justice to criminals and victims alike, and that any abuse of power or injustice perpetrated by the state in the process is an exception that needs to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. If that was the reality, however, our prisons would not be packed almost exclusively with the poor - most of whom have the least ability to do great harm. In a truly just and morally evolved society it is the money-lenders, warmongers and rogue sheriffs of this land who would be doing time for exploitation, mass murder, and kidnapping - not making the rules the rest of us have to live by. They certainly wouldn't be retiring with honors and drawing down our collective dime.



But ours is neither a just nor a moral society - it isn't even a democracy. It is a capitalist republic in which the wealth and power of the few still depends on their ability to co-opt, terrorize, and restrain the many. We literally replaced our plantations with prisons when overt slavery went out of style. America's governments exploit and injure far more innocent and vulnerable people than all our lone criminals combined do. We've even made the perpetuation of victimization and crime an attractive, acceptable industry from which savvy investors can profit.



Thanks, everyone, for all your support through this. Stay with us, please - this fight is much bigger than one young man, and has only just begun. Keep an eye on what's happening with Davon for awhile longer - he went further out on a limb in the interest of prisoner rights and health care than any of the rest of us had to - and risks paying a much higher price now than the one extracted from him at sentencing. We'll see if he's allowed to keep his good time - and make it successfully through the 4 years of probation he has yet to serve -in light of his and his mother's public defiance. I guess we'll also see if the Arizona State Legislature shows any mercy for the honesty and courage of one of their own.

Going Up!

And a Hospital Visit



I'm sorry to see that the Springfield Newspapers have raised their prices. It's not that I don't want to pay the small increases, it's just that the whole notion of price increases in the newspaper business seems self-destructive. At a time when the main competition to print media is online content available for free, newspapers should be moving toward making themselves also available for no cost. The Springfield Newspapers, to both preserve and grow their brand name, should decide on an affordable amount of copies they can publish and give away at carefully chosen location like coffeeshops or other spots where people want free reading material. Then they need to put everything they've got into their online presence on Masslive.com.

The most important thing they need to do is to educate their advertisers about the total superiority of online ads over print ones. Print ads are very much hit or miss. In order to reach the minority of readers who are interested in what you're selling you have to pay for ads in every single copy of the paper. So to reach five thousand potential customers you have to pay for 100,000 ads, or whatever the publication's circulation is. In other words, 95% of your print ads are not seen, or the customers are not interested in them, yet you must pay full price for this extremely inefficient and ineffective way of communicating with your customers.

Online ads however, are only seen by those who are interested in topics relating to your product. What Adsense, for example, does is use its search technology to match ads with article related to the product. So if you are selling fishing poles, your ads appear only next to fishing related articles. No more wasting your advertising dollars on print ads that go to people that don't even fish! Instead of the ineffective scattershot method of print advertising, online ads zero in like a laser beam on exactly the customers you want to reach.

As if this was not fantastic enough, online advertising is superior to print in many other ways. For one thing its cheaper, and in color at no extra charge. You also get stats with it that let you know where people are coming from when they see your ads, and how long they spend reading them. This priceless information is just the gravy that comes along when you stop wasting your money advertising in print and move online where the real value per buck is found.

However the newspaper industry, in its typical suicidal fashion, has always downplayed the superiority of online advertising because they have printing presses to protect. They treated online ads as a minor sideline, often throwing in online ads for free with print ad purchases like it was just a novel frill to the real purchase. Now they complain that online ads won't pay the bills, but that's their own fault if they won't educate their customers on why online ads are better than print in every way.

Of course it's tough to do that when you've just made a major investment, as the Springfield Newspapers did in their clueless past, to buy a super expensive state of the art press. What a drag it must be to have made that kind of outlay just as the bottom was falling out of the printing industry! But at least the Springfield Newspapers have a credible online presence in their above average online offshoot Masslive.com. There they at least have the sense to give the content of their paper away for free, unlike the dinosaurs at The Daily Hampshire Gazette who charge $99 dollars a year for online access. The Gazette too bought a fancy new press just as print circulation began to nosedive, but they also make the terrible mistake of charging for their online content, which is something the Springfield Newspapers were never foolish enough to try. As the always insightful Jeff Jarvis explains:



First, as soon as knowledge is known, it’s a commodity—and not a scarce one that can be controlled. Second, there is no end of competition online. As countless publishers have observed about their nemesis, Craigslist, it’s impossible to compete with free.

Charging for content reduces audience, which in turn reduces advertising revenue. And putting a wall around content keeps it out of the conversation and devalues brands (this is why New York Times columnists were said to hate their paper’s aborted effort to charge pennies for their thoughts).

But here’s the killer: When content is hidden, it cannot be found via search (not to mention bloggers’ and aggregators’ links). In a link and search economy, content gains value only through these recommendations; an article without links has no readers and thus no value. The real cost of charging for content—and it’s a cost born by the content owner—is a loss of Googlejuice.

In the complete P&L of news online, keep in mind as well that costs decline when a newspaper need no longer be all things to all people (it can, in the words of my favorite PowerPoint line, specialize: “Do what it does best and link to the rest”). Costs also fall when the paper can jettison the expense of printing and distributing its words.

It is this complete business model that we should be focusing on as we try to bring news into its next generation, not desperate efforts to shoehorn old models into a new world.

In other words, it's time for both The Republican and The Gazette to write off the new presses as a business loss, redefine themselves as totally free online products that also print a small number of free print copies primarily for promotional purposes, and educate their print ad buyers that they need to start transferring their spending online.

Of course the local mainstream media never listens to what I say, even though I was always ahead of the curve and never gave them any advice that was proven wrong. Yet they accuse me of being egotistical for daring to offer them suggestions. Well, there's ego involved, but it ain't mine, and the only place their false pride will get them is in bankruptcy court and on the unemployment line.

Oh Mercy!

Another industry that is facing extinction if it doesn't lower its cost is the post office. Soon we'll be paying all our bills online and email has already killed the personal letter market. Let's face it, hiring someone to walk around on foot hand delivering you pieces of paper is a badly outdated information distribution system that is soon to be extinct. Yesterday I was in Springfield at the downtown post office where this banner hangs showing a 2002 stamp honoring Massachusetts. It also shows how quickly stamp prices are rising to help kill this antique institution, since the more expensive non-electronic mail becomes, the less of it will end up being sent creating an economically fatal downward spiral.



I also visited Mercy Hospital, where my sister was getting an x-ray. Here is the old hospital building, which is now used for offices.



This is the modern hospital complex.



While waiting for my sister I visited this snackbar.



What did people do in waiting rooms before there were laptops?



Mercy is owned by the Catholic church, and is filled with religious icons like the one below, which looks old enough to have been in the original building. Notice how one hand is broken off. Dropped by a careless nun?
(click to enlarge)



Afterwards we went to Main Street's Red Rose for some of their award winning pizza.



Who says there are no good restaurants left in downtown Springfield?

Today's Video

Deep in the woods of Leverett, weird musical shit goes on.