James Ridgeway

In 1965, James Ridgeway helped launch the modern muckraking era by revealing that General Motors had hired private eyes to spy on an obscure consumer advocate named Ralph Nader. He worked for many years at the Village Voice, has written 16 books, and has codirected Blood in the Face, a film about the far right. In 2012, he was named a Soros Justice Media Fellow.

Get my RSS | Follow @jimridgeway

Another Dubious Execution Under Rick Perry?

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Mon Nov. 7, 2011 3:00 AM PST

2012 GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry

Update: On Monday afternoon, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Skinner's execution to review how changes in the state law on DNA testing requests affect cases like his.

"Any time DNA evidence can be used in its context and be relevant as to the guilt or innocence of a person on death row, we need to use it."

This was the statement of none other than George W. Bush, Texas governor. He said it in June 2000, about granting a last-minute reprieve to death row inmate Ricky McGinn, who was seeking DNA testing of forensic evidence he claimed might exonerate him. (It didn't, as it turned out, and McGinn was executed several months later.) Bush was running for president when he made his decision to delay the execution to allow for DNA testing.

Today, Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry faces an almost identical decision with the case of Hank Skinner—the main difference being a greater likelihood that Skinner might actually be innocent of the crime for which he has been sentenced to death. Skinner, who is scheduled for execution on November 9, was convicted in 1995 of killing his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two adult sons. He insists he was passed out from intoxication at the time, and that the real perpetrator was probably Busby's uncle (who has since died). At the time of his trial, Skinner's lawyers chose not to have certain items tested, they said, because his DNA would likely be everywhere in the home he shared with the victim. But since 2000, Skinner has been arguing that there's a chance DNA evidence could exonerate him.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Abu Ghraib on the Allegheny?

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Wed Sep. 28, 2011 2:42 PM PDT

A story out of Pennsylvania reveals the extreme abuse to which some U.S. prisoners are subjected. Yesterday, a suspended prison guard from the State Correctional Institution (SCI)-Pittsburgh was arrested on charges that he sexually or physically assaulted more than 20 inmates–and the district attorney has signaled that there are more arrests to come. As the AP reports:

The 92 criminal charges filed Tuesday include several counts each of institutional sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and official oppression — which amounts to covering up the crimes or allegedly threatening others to do so. The criminal charges mirror allegations contained against [corrections officer Harry] Nicoletti and officials at the state prison in Pittsburgh in two civil rights lawsuits filed by inmates in recent months…

The lawsuits, one filed in 2010 and another on behalf of an anonymous inmate last week, allege the systematic abuse of inmates — especially those convicted of child sex-crimes, or believed to be homosexual —by Nicoletti and other inmates at his direction. The lawsuits say the abuse occurred over the past two years in the prison’s F Block, a reception area where new prisoners are housed for a few days for medical testing and to receive other supplies before they’re moved to permanent cells.

Among other things, Nicoletti is charged with raping inmates, threatening them with other sexual acts, and with having inmates contaminate the food and bedding of his alleged targets with urine and other bodily fluids.

According to the criminal complaint, one of Nicoletti’s victims was a transsexual male who developed female breasts due to hormone treatments. Nicoletti fondled that inmate before raping him, while shouting racial and sexual epithets, including calling him a “weird freaky monkey,” the complaint said.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

9/11 Didn't Upturn the Constitution, the War on Crime Did

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Tue Sep. 13, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Long before the war on terror, there was the war on crime. And as much as 9/11 was a watershed event, our response to the attacks, and the resulting erosion of civil liberties, finds longstanding precedent in America's criminal justice system.

In an article titled "Exporting Harshness: How the War on Crime Helped Make the War on Terror Possible," Georgetown University law professor and former public defender James Forman Jr. argued against the widely accepted notion that "the war on terror represents a sharp break from the past, with American values and ideals 'betrayed,' American law 'remade.'" Forman continued, "I suspect it is both too simple and ultimately too comforting to assert that the Bush administration alone remade our justice system and betrayed our values." Instead, he wrote, "our approach to the war on terror is an extension—sometimes a grotesque one—of what we do in the name of the war on crime.…

As the world's largest jailer, we are increasingly desensitized to the harsh treatment of criminals. We have come to accept such excesses as casualties of war—whether on crime, drugs, or terror. Indeed, more than that, we no longer see what we do as special, different, or harsh. Certain practices have become what David Garland calls "the taken-for-granted features of contemporary crime policy." In part for this reason, despite the mounting evidence regarding secret memos, inhumane prison conditions, coercive interrogations, and interference with defense lawyers, the Bush administration's approach to the war on terror went largely unchecked and unchanged. (H/T Prison Law Blog)

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Rikers Island Prisoners Left Behind to Face Irene

—By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 9:09 AM PDT

Rikers at night (center).

"We are not evacuating Rikers Island," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference Friday. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter's question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city's evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Brother, Can You Spare a Job?

—By James Ridgeway

| Tue Aug. 9, 2011 10:39 AM PDT

WPA photo from Depression-era soup kitchen.

Among the latest attacks on President Obama's policies are claims that his economic stimulus created few jobs, and at exorbitant cost to taxpayers: $278,000 per job, to be exact. Fuzzy math aside, what his foes fail to mention is that the stimulus, like all else these days, operated under the conservative creed that everything must be done through the private sector. This ethos, which Obama has firmly embraced, prevents the federal government from taking the far more efficient route of simply employing people, which might have created many more good jobs at the same cost.

Had Obama had heeded FDR's experience during the Great Depression, we could have put unemployed people to work rebuilding American infrastructure—bridges, tunnels, railroads, roads—not to mention restoring and shoring up wetlands and carrying out other environmental projects. That's what Roosevelt famously did with his Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

Such an initiative might have been possible, on some scale, prior to the midterm elections. But with the gridlock in Congress and diminishing confidence in the president and government, that course now is hard to imagine. Instead, the austerity imposed by the debt deal will further impede any chance of real job growth—as Roosevelt discovered in 1937 when he briefly adopted austerity measures, only to see a falling unemployment rate spike once again.

But even at this dismal stage, there remain a handful of realistic projects that ought to appeal to some fiscally minded conservatives, and Democrats as well.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]