Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

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Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Florida Passes Law To Speed Up Executions

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Apr. 30, 2013 9:29 AM PDT

States across the country have spent the last few years reconsidering the wisdom of capital punishment. Over the past six years, five states have abolished the death penalty entirely, including Maryland just last month. But Florida, where the execution rate is second only to Texas, isn't having that conversation. Instead, Gov. Rick Scott (R) is currently considering a bill passed by the legislature this week that would speed up executions in the state by limiting "frivolous" appeals by inmates and shortening the time they spend on Death Row. (Florida has about 400 people on Death Row, 10 of whom have been there more than 35 years.)

Called the "Timely Justice Act," the bill would create new deadlines for certain filings and force the state to move faster towards an execution after a ruling by the state supreme court. Florida legislators behind the bill believe it will save money (executions currently cost state taxpayers about $24 million each) and bring closure to victims, but legal advocates say that it's likely to do nothing but raise the possibility that Florida will execute an innocent person. They're on pretty solid ground with that argument, given that 24 people on Florida's Death Row have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.

It's not very hard to convict someone of a capital crime in Florida, which is the only state in the country that allows a jury to recommend a death sentence with only a simple majority vote of 7 to 5. Also, the state has one of the nation's worst indigent defense systems, ensuring that anyone facing a capital charge is likely to get a bad lawyer in the deal. Because of other state budget crises, Florida has slashed the money available for indigent defense, and it caps the fees in a capital case at $15,000, an amount that barely covers a lawyer's time in court through the trial. The fees are so bad that few lawyers will take capital cases. (Florida's indigent defense system is generally a mess. After the state legislature in 2009 set very low flat fees for private lawyers who are appointed to handle criminal defense cases, lawyers fled the system in droves. Things got so dire that at one point judges attempted to force lawyers to take the cases through "involuntary" appointments.)

The lawyers who do take the capital cases are often largely incompetent. Florida made the news a few years ago after one of its mentally ill death row inmates, Albert Holland Jr., won a US Supreme Court case in which Justice Stephen Breyer found that Holland did a better job of representing himself than his court-appointed lawyers did. The New York Times explains what sorts of representation Holland had gotten in Florida:

Consider Kenneth Delegal, who was assigned to defend Mr. Holland at a 1996 retrial on charges that he killed a Pompano Beach police officer in 1990. Mr. Delegal was removed from the case after being sent to a mental health facility. Later, the two men would see each other at the Broward County jail, where Mr. Delegal was held on drug and domestic violence charges.

The next lawyer, James Lewis, was a friend of Mr. Delegal’s and had shared office space with him. When Mr. Delegal went to court after his removal from Mr. Holland’s case, seeking to be paid about $40,000 for his work on it, the new lawyer testified on behalf of the old one, saying the fees had been “reasonable and necessary.”

Mr. Delegal died of a drug overdose about a month after the fee hearing, and a local paper asked his former colleague Mr. Lewis about his troubles. “I heard some rumors,” Mr. Lewis said, “but I chose not to know.”

The new Florida bill attempts to address the issue of terrible lawyers and the appeals they generate by setting competence standards for lawyers taking capital cases, and it would bar anyone found guilty twice of giving "constitutionally deficient representation" from handling another capital case for five years. But the bill doesn't provide any more money to pay for more competent counsel.

The bill's opponents haven't convinced Florida lawmakers of any of this. During a legislative debate last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) said, "Only God can judge. But we sure can set up the meeting." The bill awaits Scott's signature.

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Florida Tea Party's Unemployment Tests Get Flunked by the Feds

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Apr. 25, 2013 12:50 PM PDT

Tea partiers revere the Constitution, which they often study like the Bible, in small groups. But somehow all that devotion to the Founders' original thinking doesn't seem to have much of an impact on their ability to follow its requirements once tea partiers take power in elected office. Take the case of Florida's GOP governor Rick Scott, who has turned Florida into the nation's premiere laboratory for tea party governance. He's been trying for years now to force poor single mothers to take drug tests before getting welfare benefits, a requirement that's since been shot down in federal court twice as likely unconstitutional. And the US Department of Justice is threatening to sue the state for unconstitutionally warehousing disabled children in geriatric nursing homes.

Then there's the state's unemployment benefits system, which was "modernized" by the legislature under Scott's leadership in 2011 to become one of the nation's stingiest. A new law required unemployed people to file all claims for benefits online, even though previously at least 40 percent of UI claims were done over the phone. The new online filing system required people to take a "skills review" test that included 45 math and reading questions. Failing to take the test would result in losing eligibility for benefits.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Study: Siri Doesn't Make Texting While Driving Any Safer

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Apr. 23, 2013 11:11 AM PDT

April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, a time when safety and transportation experts beg, plead and cajole Americans to put down their phones while driving, lest they become a murderer behind the wheel. It's a thankless job, as American drivers suffer from some serious delusions about their abilities to pilot a car safely while texting their girlfriends, shopping on eBay, or dialing in to Rush Limbaugh. Despite the fact that a quarter of all motor vehicle crashes today involve cellphone use, Americans still think it's only other drivers who are the problem. More than 90 percent of drivers think other drivers texting or using cellphones behind the wheel are a threat to their personal safety, yet two in three of them do it anyway, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Elected officials have been reluctant to address the problem, passing legislation that reinforces drivers' delusions—like the law here in DC that allows people to drive and talk on the phone so long as they use a hands-free device, even though there's no evidence that talking on a Bluetooth is any safer than just holding up the old phone. (Spend some time in DC cabs to get a sense of how well this law is working out.)

Phone companies have been trying to come up with technical solutions that might head off further attempts by lawmakers to curb cellphone use while driving. The latest of these has been the suggestion that Siri can help. The idea is that simply talking to your phone to send a text rather than punching in the message would somehow allow people to keep their eyes on the road and drive safely while texting. As it turns out, the notion that an app will save lives is as faulty as the promise that the Bluetooth would.

A new study out from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute this month found that:

Driver response time was terrible regardless of whether the driver was manually texting or using Siri.
Texting drivers of any sort took twice as long to react to roadway hazards than when they were off the phone.
Texting drivers spent a lot of time not looking at the road, regardless of whether they were using a voice-to-text app.
Manual texting was actually quicker than using a voice app, but driving performance was equally bad in both cases.

The new study also found a new form of distracted driving delusions: Drivers felt less safe when they were texting, but they felt safer using a voice app than texting manually, even though their performance on the road was equally dangerous.

Moral of the story: When you get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, just put down the damn phone! And just as a chilling reminder of why this is important, watch this video:

Here's Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Not only is it almost always useless—it puts everyone else in jeopardy.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Apr. 23, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Sinus infections are nasty beasts. They leave you exhausted, drowning in green snot, seeing double from face pain, and ready to beg your doctor for antibiotics. Roughly 20 percent of all adult antibiotic prescriptions in the United States, it turns out, are written to treat sinusitis. In fact, I got one of those prescriptions just a few weeks ago, even though antibiotics are almost entirely useless for the condition, and may be causing more harm than good.

Antibiotics only kill bacteria, but a whopping 90 percent of sinus infections are caused by viruses, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. What's more, new research over the past year has proven definitively that antibiotics won't change the course of most sinus infections.

More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:

Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?

This Is Your Body on Microbes

Should You Take a Probiotic?

Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants

Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?

Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation

Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

The rampant misuse of antibiotics to treat conditions they can't possibly cure is one major reason for the alarming rise in the number of "superbug" outbreaks—infections by deadly bacteria that have evolved the ability to survive most antibiotics. (The other reason has to do with overuse of antibiotics by factory farms.) The more antibiotics you take, the more likely that you'll develop a drug-resistant infection. That's because, while the drugs kill most of the bacteria, the most naturally resistant ones are most likely to survive—and multiply.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent a decade trying to convince doctors to stop dispensing antibiotics for viral conditions in order to preserve the effectiveness of these crucial lifesaving drugs. Meanwhile, a host of medical specialty groups have launched a new "Choosing Wisely" campaign designed to educate patients about unnecessary treatments. The program specifically emphasizes avoiding antibiotics for sinusitis.

[Read the full article]

Big Corporations Won't Be Sweating the IRS This Year

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Apr. 17, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Jason Stitt/Shutterstock

Lots of average Americans who filed their tax returns this week will soon face the unpleasant prospect of having those returns audited. But corporations with at least $10 million in assets (or far more) have much less to fear from the tax man. Behemoths such as Microsoft and General Electric have taken a beating in the press lately because of how little in US taxes they pay, thanks to extremely complicated and aggressive use of offshore tax havens. The criticism doesn't seem to have affected how corporations are treated by the IRS, though. According to a new report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in the current fiscal year, the IRS plans to devote 18 percent less effort to auditing companies with more than $10 million in assets than it did just two years ago. The agency has seen a $1 billion budget cut in the past year, and all of this comes before the effect of the sequester, which will slash $600 million from its budget this year. The IRS also projects that the amount of time available for specialized agents to conduct these audits will drop 14 percent as well, thanks to staffing cuts.

The IRS measures employee budgeted time in staff years, whose decline is shown in this chart:

Large Business and International Division Direct Examination Staff Years Transactional Records Access Clearing House

While the amount of staff time devoted to auditing the average Joe has gone up 62 percent since 2011, it's fallen nearly 30 percent for corporations. The IRS's workforce today is 23 percent smaller than it was in 1992, even though the number of returns filed has gone up 27 percent over the same period, according to TRAC. The acting IRS commissioner testified before Congress on April 9 that the agency is down 10,000 employees compared to what it had during the 2010 tax season. And the agency is being asked to do even more work. It's responsible for implementing key sections of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) and it is grappling with a significant number of cases of identity theft that are projected to cost the country billions in fraudulent refunds if not addressed promptly.

Yet thanks to the forced, across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress, the IRS is going to have to close up shop for seven days in 2013, when work will essentially grind to a halt. All of these cuts seem shortsighted, given that the IRS collects 93 percent of all government revenue. Failing to collect what all taxpayers owe leaves the federal budget short about $400 billion per year. More robust funding of the IRS that would allow it to go after more of corporate America's bigger players might help reduce the need for some of the sequester cuts.