On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

In the early hours of May 2, the quiet of night was shattered aboard the Conscience, a civilian vessel anchored in international waters, 17 kilometers off the coast of Malta. Aboard were 18 crew members and passengers, jolted from sleep by the sound of two explosions. Flames and smoke filled the air. The ship had just been struck—by what the crew members say were drone attacks.

The very day of the attack, more passengers from 21 countries were waiting in Malta to be ferried out to join the Conscience. Among those slated to join the ship were world-renowned environmentalist Greta Thunberg, retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright, and longtime CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry.

The Conscience is part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a network of international activists that has been challenging Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza since 2008.

The group alleges that the attack came from Israel—an allegation bolstered by a CNN investigation. According to CNN, flight-tracking data from ADS-B Exchange showed that an Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft departed from Israel early Thursday afternoon and flew at low altitude over eastern Malta for an extended period. While the Hercules did not land, its path brought it in proximity to the area where the Conscience was later attacked. The plane returned to Israel approximately seven hours later. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on the flight data.

The ship suffered significant damage, but fortunately, no one was hurt. That was not the case when the Freedom Flotilla was attacked in 2010. This May 2 attack comes just weeks before the 15th anniversary of the infamous raid on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship that led a previous flotilla to Gaza in 2010. On May 31 of that year, Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship in international waters, killing ten people and injuring dozens. The Mavi Marmara had been carrying over 500 activists and humanitarian supplies. That attack drew condemnation from around the world and calls for an international investigation—calls that Israel dismissed.

One of this year’s flotilla organizers, Ismail Behesti, is the son of a man killed in the 2010 raid. In videos circulating after the recent strike, Behesti is seen walking through the damaged interior of the Conscience, his voice resolute as he condemns what he believes was another Israeli act of aggression against civilians on a humanitarian mission.

“People are asking how Israel can get away with attacking a civilian ship in international waters,” said Tighe Barry, speaking from the port in Malta. “But since October 8, 2024, Israel has shown complete disregard for international law—from bombing civilian neighborhoods to using starvation as a weapon by blocking food from entering Gaza. This is just one more example of its impunity.”

“Where is the outrage?” Barry continued. “The U.S. condemns the Houthis for stopping ships carrying weapons to Israel—and bombs Yemen mercilessly for it. But will they condemn Israel for attacking a peaceful ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza?”

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition and activist groups such as CODEPINK are calling on governments and international bodies to speak out and take action.

The Conscience was carrying no weapons. It posed no threat. Its only crime was daring to challenge a brutal siege and slaughter that the UN itself has condemned as illegal and inhumane. That’s the real threat Israel fears—not the ship itself, but the global solidarity it represents.

So, will the world speak up about Israel’s latest outrage? Or will this, too, be quietly buried beneath the waves?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

When faced with two adverse unethical options, a person may try to avoid the more harmful immoral choice. This is ancient strategy people have talked and written about, and applied in various situations. In the US political parlance, the term “lesser of two evils,” is choosing the evil that will be less damaging.

There is talk about voting for the “lesser of two evils.” The rationale behind this thinking is to prevent the greater “evil” from gaining power and thus causing more havoc. This is an intelligent thing to do especially in countries where million of peoples’ future is at stake — but when the United States is involved, the well being of the entire planet is at stake.

In the US, it is understood by many that the greater evil is the Republican Party or the proverbial Charybdis. Noam Chomsky once said, “Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history.” The lesser evil’s title goes to the Democratic Party or the proverbial Scylla.

In dire situations, one could accept voting for the lesser evil – Democrats. But when the Democrats don’t want to address the root causes then voting for them election after election turns into a futile exercise, while the sick state keeps on deteriorating. This is a serious problem. It’s like a person who has a tumor that in initial stages is ignored due to carelessness. However, a timely realization as to the consequences rushes in emergency for treatment as if he/she had not headed for the doctor, the malignancy would have proved fatal.

The above example is equally applicable to the United States — a Sick Empire — physically, that is, in economic decline and mentally, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” to use Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s words spoken on April 4, 1967. The US has steadfastly held on to the title of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” as if it doesn’t want to prove Dr King wrong in his assessment.

The Republican Party openly supports the capitalist class by lowering taxes for the rich, opposing unions, resisting pay raises, waging foreign wars or domestic ones, such as “war against drugs,” etc. In return, they get favors and election campaign contributions.

But there is something to be said about the lesser evil of the two choices.

Democratic Party is not that naked — it uses a fig leaf to cover up its hypocrisy, it pretends to be what it is not; it claims it is working for the common folks, complains about rich not paying taxes (but does not do anything), and so on. In reality, they do very little for the general public because they too get lots of money from the big donors to contest elections. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (worth $2.5 billion), in 2024 gave $10 million to Biden-Harris campaign donated another $7 million to Kamala Harris (after Biden quit the presidential bid and nominated Harris as the Democratic candidate, without any intra-party election). Hoffman wants Harris to fire Lina Khan, the FTC chair who is fighting big corporate mergers and monopolistic corporate practices. This is what Hoffman said:

“I do think that Lina Khan is a person who is not helping America in her job in what she’s doing. And so, I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”

Expedia Chairman Barry Diller (worth $4.5 billion) called Khan a “dope,” but then he said he misspoke; he wants her fired. Who knows, may be Harris would listen to her paymasters, as has been the custom.

It is sad that people like Lina Khan, who are honest, incorruptible, and are working for the welfare of the majority, and are rare to find in government, have to face so much opposition from the billionaire class. Lina Khan and people like her are hated by the rich, like Hoffman because they try to enforce laws which assist most people rather than fattening the already obese (financially) like Hoffman and his ilk.

The Young Turks put it rightly: “… we don’t have a democracy. We have an open auction 100%.“

Biden, when he was running for president, had told the wealthy donors:

“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.” “The truth of the matter is … nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”

One cannot not sympathize with the Democratic presidential candidates who are (or aiming to be) multimillionaires, who hobnob with billionaires, are mostly interviewed by anchors making millions of dollars, who have to feign they are for ordinary people, in order to get their vote.

But the problem with this line of strategy is that it is simply prolonging the onset of the overdue implosion rather than trying to eliminate the rot in the system. If you watch or read the news and various commentaries or watch late night shows in the liberal news media, many a times they are making fun of Donald Trump, his wife and children and portray him as an evil person and thus imply Biden/Harris are virtuous people. (In the mid 1980s, then President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” hinting that the US is a sanctimonious entity.) These same people never accuse Biden or his cabinet, as bloodthirsty murderers.

So why go for the lesser evil?

The Democrats and the Republicans are almost twins,¹ as far as warring against foreign countries or overthrowing their governments is concerned. It’s within the US, where the slight difference comes into play. Democrats would not want to go total fascist at home — they permit some freedom to maintain the facade of the US being “the greatest democracy.” On the other hand, the Republicans want to treat, actually mistreat, most people indiscriminately, within and without the US, in the same fascist manner. Many people in the US don’t mind foreign countries becoming victim of US imperialistic fascist policies, either due to their ignorance or indifference or are misled by Republicans’ and Democrats’ warmongering or news media’s and think tanks’ fear inducing presentation etc. On the other hand, many people are frightened now that, it seems if Trump wins, fascism is going to hit most people in the US. That’s why most people prefer the lesser evil.

Mind you, fascism has never been absent in many people’s life in the US, such as incarcerating a huge segment of population, people who are victims of police violence (injured or killed), PTSD-(Post traumatic stress disorder) traumatized soldiers returning from fabricated bloody wars, homeless people, and so on. Most Democrats haven’t created meaningful improvement in the lives of these people.

The Democrat and Republican led governments have overthrown many governments and are still trying to overthrow many more but Democrats don’t want Trump to do that in the US, such as the purported January 6, 2021 attempt.² It was an unorganized, clumsily executed foolish attempt. Trump should have consulted the experienced hands from both parties and also the CIA before the January 6 attempt. He would have succeeded, for sure.

Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington?

A: Because there’s no American embassy there.

Is there a difference between Trump and Harris etc.?

Without a second thought, one has to admit that Trump’s virile oral member is long and ejects idiocies and hate on a non-stop basis. Trump is a very cruel person, indeed. But the question is: are Biden, Harris, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Harris’ supporter greater evil Dick Cheney any less cruel?

No.

In fact, they are more cruel and have excessively more blood of innocents on their hands than Trump has, that is, until now. His next term will be full of vengeance and who knows, greater bloodshed. Isn’t Biden too full of hate for Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians or anyone fighting for their rights and want to go their separate ways? Biden, a grandfather, who still grieves for his son Beau Biden’s death in 2015 due to glioblastoma has neither shed a tear nor has grieved for the 42,511 Palestinians (including 16,660 children) plus 1974 [A Lancet article from 10 July 2024 reported a much higher estimate: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death⁹ to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” — DV ed.] (which includes 127 children) Lebanese killed by Israel with US encouragement, arms and ammunition, money, personnel, and intelligence –without which Israel could not have caused such incredible loss of lives. The opposition to war within the US is squashed by the Israel Lobby.

At this juncture in human history, who deserves more loathing, Trump or Biden and Harris? Of course, today the answer is the Biden/Harris team.

• See also a related article: “A Moral Imperative for the 2024 US Elections.”

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

On October 16, Guinean police and gendarmerie officers insulted, beat with batons, kicked, and shot tear gas at reporters Mariam Sall, with privately owned broadcaster Espace TV; Mariama Bhoye Barry, with privately owned broadcaster Cavi TV; and Amadou Lama Diallo, with Guinée Matin, as they covered a demonstration in the capital, Conakry, according to the three journalists who spoke with CPJ and a video filmed by Barry and published by Guinée Matin.

The demonstration was organized by the Syndicate of Press Professionals of Guinea (SPPG) to voice concern over the blocking of access to the Guinée Matin website in Guinea since August 15. The website has remained available outside the country.

Police arrested Sall, Barry, Diallo, and 10 journalists participating in the protest and detained them at Conakry’s Kaloum central police station before transferring them to a local court where they were charged with “criminal participation in a prohibited gathering on the public highway” and were released, according to Barry and news reports. Their next court date has not been set.

“Guinean authorities should allow journalists to stand up for their rights and against censorship, and ensure reporting on public demonstrations does not carry the risk of attack and arrest,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should drop the legal proceedings against journalists covering the October 16 demonstration by their colleagues calling for the unblocking of the Guinée Matin news website.”

Ibrahima Foulamory Bah, a reporter for the online media outlet Le Courrier de Conakry, who was participating in the demonstration, told CPJ that he stepped in to protect Barry from the officers and was also hit in the neck by their batons, cracking a bone in his neck.

Diallo accompanied Bah, Sall, and Barry to a private clinic in Conakry, where Barry was treated for wounds to his hand and Sall for injuries to the neck. Bah was ordered to refrain from work for a month due to his neck injury.

The 10 journalists who participated in the protest and were briefly detained and charged were:

• Bah
• Sékou Jamal Pendessa, secretary general of the SPPG. 
• Thierno Baïlo Diallo, a reporter with privately owned website Le Mondemédias
• Nyima Aïssata Kébé, a reporter with privately owned website Infochrono
• Aminata Sylla, a reporter with privately owned online broadcaster Unique 360 TV
• Mamady Bérété, a Unique 360 TV reporter
• Abdoulaye Cissé, a reporter with privately owned website Le Renifleur 
• Lamine Kaba, an Espace TV reporter
• Fodé Camara, a reporter with privately owned online broadcaster Ouestvision TV
• Djibril Camara, a reporter with privately owned radio station Nostalgie Guinée

Guinée Matin remained inaccessible within the country as of October 26, Nouhou Baldé, the outlet’s director, told CPJ.

Azoka Bah, a spokesperson for the Guinean Ministry of Communication, told CPJ that the government was not responsible for the blocking of Guinée Matin’s website. CPJ’s calls to a number for Guinea’s Ministry of Post, Telecommunications, and Digital Economy and to Bachir Diallo, Minister of Public Security and Civil Protection, rang unanswered.

Separately, Inquisiteur, another local news website that had been inaccessible since September 1, was brought back online on October 11 after the resolution of an ownership dispute, according to its administrator Mamadou Babila Keita and media reports.

A transitional military government took control of Guinea in a coup that overthrew elected President Alpha Condé on September 5, 2021.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“British authorities should ensure a thorough and transparent investigation into the alleged surveillance of journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, and make sure that any who violated journalists’ rights are held accountable,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Journalists must be able to speak with sources and do their jobs without fear that authorities will spy on their communications.”

The investigation stems from complaints filed by Birney and McCaffrey to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body charged with looking into surveillance allegations. The IPT is expected to hold a hearing later this year on the lawfulness of that alleged surveillance.

Birney and McCaffrey were arrested and their homes raided in 2018 on suspicion of stealing confidential documents while working on the documentary “No Stone Unturned,” about a Northern Ireland police investigation into the 1994 murders of six men. In 2020, the journalists won a case in the High Court of Belfast, which ruled that the search warrants were inappropriate and ordered the police to pay damages to both journalists.

Birney told The Guardian that he and McCaffrey had no insight into the IPT’s investigation. He said they were “completely blinkered in this process. We only get to see a glimpse behind the curtain of what the court is doing.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Barry Jones rarely dared to imagine his release from death row. Sometimes, when he was feeling low, his paralegal, whom he called Ms. Jennifer, tried to buoy his spirits by promising that one day his legal team would drive up in the “habeas van” to the desert prison in Florence, Arizona, honking and celebrating, ready to take him home. It was never going to be like that, of course. But neither could they have predicted where Jones would find himself on June 15, in his first moments of freedom after 29 years: alone at a Del Taco near the bus station, being told he could not use the phone.

The previous 24 hours had gone mostly according to plan. He’d spent Wednesday giving away most of his things to friends and neighbors on death row. The next morning, around 4:30 a.m., Jones ate some instant oatmeal for breakfast and prepared to leave his cell for the last time. He boarded a van for the ride down to Tucson, the sprawling prison complex fading from view behind him. By 9:30 he’d arrived at Pima County Superior Court, where a judge would sanction his release at a hearing later that morning. Jones had hoped to walk out there and then. Instead, he was driven around by officers with the Arizona Department of Corrections who didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They eventually arrived at a probation office, where he was finally uncuffed and given a change of clothes. Then they dumped him at the Greyhound station downtown.

With no money, no cellphone, and no experience navigating the city in decades, Jones looked for a pay phone to make a collect call but found none. “Even at the bus station — this is a bus station,” he later said with disbelief. “Wow.” So he started walking toward the one downtown address he knew: the office of the Arizona Federal Public Defender.

In a blue T-shirt, dark jeans, and white sneakers, Jones made his way west. He carried a trash bag with a few belongings and an envelope with his release documents inside. It was a typically bright, hot Arizona day. But he was struck by how green Tucson looked compared to Florence, where there was nothing but brown desert as far as the eye could see. “You know, this ain’t so bad,” he thought. If he didn’t find anyone at the office, he could try to find his son’s house. He could even sleep under a bridge if he had to. What mattered was that he was no longer in prison. “I can do whatever I want.”

What Jones didn’t know was that people were frantically looking for him. His daughter, Brandie, had gone with her family to the Pima County Jail, where she’d originally been told Jones would be held until his paperwork cleared. At the federal defender’s office, Jones’s longtime attorney, Cary Sandman, grew increasingly agitated as he made calls and sent emails looking for his client. When Sandman finally got word that Jones had been left at the bus station, retired investigator Andrew Sowards rushed out to pick him up. But when he got there, Jones was gone.

A search party ensued. Members of the legal team and staff from the Arizona Justice Project split up to look for Jones. Finally, around 2 p.m., a voice came through on speakerphone at the office: “We found him.” Jones was just a block away. He had walked more than a mile. A few minutes later, Jones came through the door, sweaty, smiling, and wearing a can you believe this? expression. Jennifer Schneider, the paralegal, gave him a T-shirt she had been saving for that day. It read “Free Bird.”

The first wave of family filed into the office a little while later. In a large conference room with panoramic windows, Jones reunited with his kids, Brandie, Andrew, and James, along with their children and extended relatives, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. His niece recounted the rush to drive to Tucson earlier that day: “I did 80 and 90 all the way down,” she said. Jones didn’t miss a beat, “I don’t wanna hear nothing about breaking the law.”

Before long, the stress from earlier had melted away. Sowards, one of Jones’s biggest supporters, was amazed as he watched Jones joke and laugh surrounded by people. Jones had never liked crowds in prison; Sowards was nervous he might feel overwhelmed. “But it was the exact opposite,” he said. He saw a side of Jones that was lost in the decades he spent on death row. Jones had been a social guy before his wrongful conviction. “He loves people and loves these people in particular. I think he’s always wanted to be the friendly guy that he was way back then.”

People repeatedly asked Jones what he wanted to eat, but he didn’t have an answer — somehow, he wasn’t hungry. But he did say he’d like to grill burgers that weekend. There was a park he liked to go to back in the day. They could have a cookout for Father’s Day. Brandie said it would be hot; maybe they could plan something indoors. But Jones said he’d rather be outside. “I’ve spent enough time inside.”

Barry Jones poses for a photo with members of his legal team at the office of the Arizona Federal Public Defender in Tucson, Ariz., on June 15, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Innocence Isn’t Enough”

Jones’s release was the culmination of a harrowing saga that started almost 30 years earlier. After being sentenced to death in 1995 for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Jones thought his nightmare might be ending in 2018, when a federal judge overturned his conviction. Instead, his case became an emblem of Arizona’s dysfunctional death penalty, the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical rightward shift, and the cruelty of a legal system that prioritizes finality over fairness — even if it means executing an innocent person.

Jones was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. The child had died from a sharp blow to her abdomen, which led to a fatal case of peritonitis. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department singled out Jones as the sole suspect before an autopsy had even identified Rachel’s cause of death. Prosecutors based their case on a narrow window of time during which Jones had been seen with Rachel before she died.

But no one investigated the medical evidence: not the lead detective, Sonia Pesqueira, and not Jones’s own court-appointed attorneys, who left the state’s theory unchallenged at trial. It was only when Jones’s federal defenders took his case years later that they discovered the state’s timeline was medically impossible.

Assistant Federal Public Defender Cary Sandman, representing Barry Jones, appears before Judge Kyle Bryson at the Pima County Superior Courthouse in Tucson, Ariz., on June 15, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

The odds of Barry Jones getting this evidence into a courtroom were slim. Ideally, Jones’s state post-conviction lawyer would have challenged the trial lawyers’ failure to investigate the medical evidence, arguing that Jones received ineffective assistance of counsel — a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. Instead, his state post-conviction attorney compounded the trial lawyers’ mistakes.

Under the burdensome rules dictating federal habeas appeals, if a defendant failed to challenge their trial lawyers’ performance in state court, they would be barred from doing so in federal court. But in 2012, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Martinez v. Ryan carved out a rare path to relief for people like Jones: If the failure to bring such a claim was due to the post-conviction attorney’s own ineffectiveness, the petitioner should have another shot at relief.

The ruling got Jones back into federal court. In 2017, U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess presided over a seven-day evidentiary hearing in Tucson, where Sandman and his colleagues presented evidence that had never made it to trial. The testimony dismantled the state’s case against Jones, revealing not only the failings of his attorneys, but also law enforcement officials’ rush to judgment.

Burgess seemed disturbed by Pesqueira, who conceded that she never considered other suspects apart from Jones. And he seemed especially fed up with former Pima County medical examiner John Howard, whose testimony was critical to sending Jones to death row. Howard had previously estimated that Rachel’s abdominal injury was “most consistent” with occurring 24 hours or more before she died. But at Jones’s trial, he shortened the time frame to just 12 hours, which neatly fit the state’s theory of the crime.

In 2018, Burgess vacated Jones’s conviction. If not for the failures of his trial attorneys, the judge wrote, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.” Burgess ordered the state to retry Jones or release him.

Instead, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich appealed, first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the core of Burgess’s findings, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state’s lawyers insisted that under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Jones should never have been allowed to present the evidence that persuaded Burgess to vacate his conviction. The argument seemed far-fetched: It would mean gutting the Supreme Court’s own ruling in Martinez v. Ryan. But to the dismay of Jones’s legal team, the court took the case.

During oral argument, the attorney general’s office said that it didn’t matter if the evidence showed Jones was not responsible for the crime that sent him to death row. “Innocence isn’t enough,” the state’s lawyer, Brunn Wall Roysden III, said. In May 2022, the justices agreed, reinstating Jones’s death sentence and destroying a lifeline for incarcerated people whose lawyers failed them at trial.

Barry Jones greets his family after his release following 29 years on Arizona’s death row.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Some Measure of Justice”

I first wrote about Barry Jones in 2017, in advance of the federal evidentiary hearing in Tucson. One of the first people I met was a juror from his trial, who was haunted by her role in the case. As she recalled it, the evidence against Jones was weak — so weak, she thought surely his conviction had already been overturned. She was distressed to learn that he still faced execution. Before she died in 2020, she expressed hope that Jones would be exonerated.

Over time, I came to learn just how many people believed in Jones’s innocence, including current and former members of his legal team. They worried about Jones’s mental health, which had been ravaged by his time on death row. Before his conviction was overturned, Jones saw 34 neighbors taken to the death chamber. After executions were placed on hold in Arizona following a series of botched lethal injections, Brnovich pushed to resume them last year. In the months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones’s case, known as Shinn v. Ramirez, three more men were executed.

In the meantime, however, some critical shifts began to take place. At a hearing in September, Burgess urged lawyers on both sides to consider settling Jones’s case through mediation. “I do think it would be in everybody’s best interest, including society’s best interest, if we can resolve this case,” he said. A judge was assigned to oversee the process.

Two months later, Arizona voters elected a new attorney general, with Democratic candidate Kris Mayes defeating her Republican opponent by just a few hundred votes — one of the closest margins in state history. For Arizona’s death row, the result was literally the difference between life and death. In January, Mayes announced that she was putting executions on hold.

Throughout it all, Jones tried not to get his hopes up. He was encouraged by the judge overseeing the mediation; at their first meeting in December, she had spoken to him for an hour and seemed genuinely committed to a just result. But after almost three decades of wrongful incarceration, he knew better than to pin his hopes on any legal process.

As the months passed, Sandman tried to visit Jones in Florence once a week. In April, he told Jones that there was a tentative agreement that could allow him to walk free, but it would require him to plead guilty to failing to take Rachel to the hospital the night before she died.

The Supreme Court decision left Barry Jones with “a series of bad choices.”

Jones never wished to plead guilty to any part of his case. But as Sandman told Burgess at the hearing last fall, the Shinn decision left them with “a series of bad choices.” At 64, Jones did not have time to litigate for another decade — and even if he did, there was little reason to trust the courts. “The only way to get some measure of justice for him was to compromise,” Sandman said. Jones’s close family friend, Debbie Wheeler, urged him to agree to the deal. “I said, ‘Barry, just sign whatever you have to do to get out.’”

On April 19, Burgess approved the settlement agreement between Jones’s attorneys and the state. Two weeks later, Sandman filed a petition with the Pima County Superior Court requesting that Jones’s conviction be overturned. The state would agree to the request on the condition that Jones plead guilty to the agreed-upon charge. He would then be sentenced to 25 years with credit for time served.

On May 22, the one-year anniversary of the Shinn decision, Pima Superior Court Judge Kyle Bryson agreed to the terms. He set a hearing for June 15. Over the next few weeks, the reality that Jones might actually be released started to sink in. “You could tell he was believing it,” Wheeler said. “But it was just so hard for him to process it.”

Just before 11 a.m. on June 15, dozens of people packed a small courtroom on the eighth floor of the courthouse in downtown Tucson. In his orange prison uniform, Jones turned and smiled at his family and friends. Brandie, his daughter, blew him a kiss and cracked a joke about his thinning hair. Her dad looked happy, she said. Everyone seemed to know it was real this time.

Still, it was impossible not to be anxious. Sandman had felt like he was walking a tightrope for months. It wasn’t until the week of the hearing that he finally felt “99.9 percent sure” the judge would sign the order. Sitting in a row behind him was Sowards, the retired investigator, whose anxiety shot up as soon as the judge started talking. When Bryson said he was taking up Jones’s “potential change in plea and sentencing,” all Sowards could hear was the word “potential” ringing in his ears.

“I can’t give him back the 30 years that was taken from him. But I hope he can make the best of his freedom.”

Before the judge signed the order, a victim’s advocate approached the podium to share a statement from Rachel’s sister Becky. She was 10 years old when Jones was accused of killing her sister and testified against him at trial. I never managed to reach Becky, but in 2022 she was contacted by producers with the true-crime podcast “Conviction,” who made a two-part series about Jones’s case based on my reporting. It was then that Becky learned of the evidence that had emerged after Jones was sent to death row. By the end of her statement, several people in the courtroom were wiping away tears, including Jones.

“Your honor, I have spent the better part of almost 30 years hating the defendant for what happened to my sister Rachel,” the statement began. Although Becky had forgiven Jones for what she thought he’d done, she was shocked to learn about the Supreme Court’s decision in his case, which came down on her birthday. She no longer believed he was a murderer. In fact, she wished he could be released with no strings attached. “I can’t give him back the 30 years that was taken from him. But I hope he can make the best of his freedom.”

Barry Jones, left, and his lead attorney, Cary Sandman, pose for a portrait in Tucson, Ariz., on June 15, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Free Bird

By the end of the day, Jones was settled into a rental unit overlooking a pool near the University of Arizona. Sowards had arranged for Jones to stay there for the next two weeks, and the fridge was stocked with food: burger patties, bottles of Pepsi, and ice cream. A jar of candy sat on the counter next to a Keurig coffee pot. Jones had never seen anything like it.

Schneider, the paralegal, had gotten Jones a flip phone, filling it with contacts. They discussed email and Wi-Fi — technology that he would learn to use. But there were so many other things to take in, the kinds of things that others take for granted. At the lawyers’ office, he’d walked by a bathroom and stared for a moment. He hadn’t seen a porcelain toilet in almost 30 years.

When we first spoke in 2017, Jones told me how nervous he felt contemplating life on the outside. Now, he said, “I just wanna be your average Joe.” He was immensely grateful for his legal team, who treated him like family. Sowards had posted a GoFundMe to help with housing and other basic needs. There were plans to take him shopping, out to eat, and to get him a state ID. One of his former attorneys was even planning to stay at the apartment with him that night, just to make sure he was OK. Still, Jones admitted, “I’m worried about most everything.”

Standing by the pool as the evening wore down, Jones joked that he would have to learn the names of all his grandchildren. It was hard not to think about the horror of what he’d been accused of and how unfathomable it seemed. Since 1994, family and friends had always said Jones would never hurt a child. Now the rest of the world could see what they knew to be true. Jones smiled as his granddaughter splashed around. “It does my heart good to see that,” he said.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

• News

Innocence Project Responds to Release of Barry Jones After 29 Years on Death Row 

"While we celebrate Mr. Jones's freedom, it does not change the fact that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shinn vs. Ramirez and Jones will have a devastating impact on thousands of innocent people."

06.16.23 By Christina Swarns

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The post Innocence Project Responds to Release of Barry Jones After 29 Years on Death Row  appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Julia Lucivero.

The post Barry Humphries: Misunderstood Anarchist of Culture appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The genius of the late Barry Humphries first took root in Britain, along with a flowing of other Australian expatriates who had made Blighty their home. It became evident in Britain’s most famous, remorseless panner of reputation and issue, the satirical magazine Private Eye, that weedkiller of inflated reputations. There, another genius of comedy, Peter Cook, understood a kindred spirit. At Cook’s suggestion, Humphries ran a comic strip that made him famous and eventually found celluloid expression: The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

The reception of the comic strip in Australia, with its slang-fluent, rough protagonist stomping through the Mother Country, was a foretaste of things to come. Compiled in three book collections, the first two were banned by the Customs Department under the Customs Prohibited Import Regulations. The silly justification was section 4A, which prohibited the importation of works and articles deemed blasphemous, indecent, or obscene, or unduly emphasising matters of sex, horror, violence or crime, or are likely to encourage depravity.

The harebrained nature of this measure, one that could only have been appreciated by Humphries, was that selections from Private Eye, including “Barry McKenzie’s Naughty Night”, were already available in the country in the 1965 publication Penguin Private Eye.

Her Dame Edna Everage (Mrs Norm Everage to some) act, hewn from the dull, insular terrain of Moonee Ponds in Victoria, was always going to be an uneven sell for home audiences. In the sex-suppressed Anglosphere, with its hypocrisies of gender, control and concealment, it was brilliant, a poking, full frontal display of the bigoted housewife giving bigotry a lengthy outing.

The bricks of the mythmakers are now being assembled, an effort to build a mausoleum of deception. Always be suspicious of the “he was much loved by all” tag; they usually have a fair share of aggrieved, envious enemies.

There are, however, clues in the coverage. Humphries was a “comedy export” – read, not palatable in straitlaced, monochrome Australia, a bit too salty, or gamey, for local consumption. He tested his various alter-egos – the barely tolerable Edna, the monstrous, dribbling Sir Les Patterson and so forth – on foreign soil. (Rarely mentioned in tributes is his more complex, rounded character, Sandy Stone.) Contrary to the hagiographically saccharine accounts now clogging news outlets and tributes, Australians did not like what they saw of themselves. The BH treatment was harsh, unsparing, and relentlessly Juvenalian.

With ever increasing notoriety, he would become the target of stock standard accusations. He was unfair to women. He toyed with race. He was insensitive and lacked empathy. None of these viewpoints appreciated Kurt Tucholsky’s observation made in 1919 that satire, in its essence, is unfair: “the just,” goes the Biblical expression, “suffer with the unjust.”

In November 1978, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal criticised Humphries for his “put down of middle-aged women” (Canberra Times, Nov 3, 1978). One irony-free Tina Namow of the Women’s Studies Collective at Flinders University was a case in point, spending time combing through commercials with alleged sexist import. She was delighted to stumble across Dame Edna’s portrayal of women in the Whirlpool advertisements, duly charging the effort as “incompetent”. “To add to the insult, he then makes racist statements such as ‘grubby little foreigner’ during the commercial.”

In 1994, he was criticised by Canberra academic Bill Mandle for being at it again. Dame Edna had become an international figure, no longer a suburban dweller of Moonee Ponds. No distinction is drawn between the artist performer from the individual off the stage and out of the persona. The representation is the artist. “Humphries is relentlessly consistent in his hatreds: women free is a caricature, is a threat. Women must be domesticated and sexually submissive.” This careless misreading is done from the wrong end of the comic impression; it is precisely that received image of woman Dame Edna is mocking, that they, in that macho Australian world, could not be truly free.

In the United States, a country known for small pockets of irony rather than lashings of it, Humphries also found himself in hot water, though it hardly seemed to scald him. The February 2003 issue of Vanity Fair caused much rage. It featured Dame Edna’s views in a satirical column about a reader’s concern about the pressures of learning Spanish. “Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk? The help? Your leaf blower?” Again, we see rigid hypocrisy exposed in the outrage. To satirise society’s divides, the exploitation, and the manipulation, is to invite trouble.

The whole episode certainly puzzled, and depressed, the Pulitzer Prize winner Liz Balmaseda, writing in Hispanic (Mar 2003). “Let’s get this straight (trying to be funny Liz?): It takes one loopy character in ill-fitting garb to rally us into militancy?” Well, yes. She goes on to write in blessed tones about the constructive role played by the Australian performer. “In a way, I’d say God bless Dame Edna. In one swoop, she exposed the worst of the ‘mainstream’ media AND the misguided militancy of its targets.”

For all his exploits, Humphries was also considered too much for the organisers of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2019. (As a measure of cravenness, the organisers have refused to officially mark the passing of a figure that singularly did so much to establish and sustain the event.) The festival’s most prestigious offering, since 2000 named the Barry Award, was scrubbed of the illustrious name. It became, instead, the far more anodyne Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award.

The reason? Remarks made about the transgender movement. “How many different kinds of lavatory can you have?” Humphries rhetorically asked The Spectator in a 2018 interview. “And it’s pretty evil when it’s preached to children by crazy teachers.”

Having stated that transgenderism was “a fashion”, his detractors proceeded to accuse him of not going along with it. That Australian comedian of sorts, Hannah Gadsby, who won the Barry Award in 2017, suggested he loved “those who hold power, hates vulnerable minorities and has completely lost the ability to read the room. That’s not a comedian, that’s an irrelevant, inhumane dick biscuit of the highest order.”

Thankfully, the persistently courageous Miriam Margolyes took issue with the Festival organisers’ decision to cancel the protean dick biscuit, accurately pointing out that he was not “properly appreciated by Australia”, let alone the crony-cringing set at the MICF. “He’d had more talent in his little finger than they did in their whole bodies, all of them.”

The weak response from festival director, Susan Provan, was a model answer from managerial followers of the cancel-culture credo. “Some years ago, the award for most outstanding show was re-named to reinforce the equality and diversity that our Festival community has always championed.” The prerogative of the inclusive is always to exclude.

Ironically enough, the various characters of Humphries are meant to read the room in precisely the way that Gadsby misunderstands. It was a reading that came with an acid bath, the just having to suffer with the unjust. It should never be forgotten that Humphries, in departing, left the landscape a glorious, often misunderstood anarchist of culture.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

In the Globe and Mail Andrew Coyne has written two columns in recent days arguing that the discussion over Chinese interference should focus on “domestic accomplices.” “What we need a public inquiry to look into is domestic complicity in foreign interference,” noted the regular CBC commentator.

In a similar vein Justin Trudeau responded to criticism regarding purported Chinese interference by noting, “We know that Chinese Canadian parliamentarians, and Chinese Canadians in general, are greater targets for interference by China than others.” The prime minister added, “We know the same goes for Iranian Canadians, who are more subject to interference from the Iranian government. Russian speakers in Canada are more vulnerable to Russian misinformation and disinformation.”

Why ignore how Israel and its Canadian lobby use Jewish MPs and Jewish organizations as their agents?

The leading Israel advocate in parliament, Anthony Housefather chairs the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group. That group was previously led by another Jewish Liberal MP, Michael Leavitt, who resigned to head Israel lobby group Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. Housefather and Leavitt have repeatedly met Israeli officials in Canada.

As part of the media frenzy about Chinese interference, there has been significant discussion about Trudeau attending a 2016 Liberal Party fundraiser at the Toronto home of Chinese Business Chamber of Canada chair Benson Wong. Among the attendees was Chinese Canadian billionaire Zhang Bin who is alleged to have donated to the Trudeau Foundation/University of Montréal at the request of a Chinese government official.

But Trudeau has far more extensive ties to pro-Israel funders. Since 2013 the chief fundraiser for the Trudeau Liberals has been Stephen Bronfman, scion of an arch Israeli nationalist family. Bronfman has millions invested in Israeli technology companies and over the years the Bronfman clan has secured arms for Israeli forces and supported its military in other ways. Bronfman openly linked his fundraising for Trudeau to Israel. In 2013 the Globe and Mail reported:

Justin Trudeau is banking on multimillionaire Stephen Bronfman to turn around the Liberal Party’s financial fortunes in order to take on the formidable Conservative fundraising machine…. Mr. Bronfman helped raise $2-million for Mr. Trudeau’s leadership campaign. Mr. Bronfman is hoping to win back the Jewish community, whose fundraising dollars have been going more and more to the Tories because of the party’s pro-Israel stand. ‘We’ll work hard on that,’ said Mr. Bronfman, adding that ‘Stephen Harper has never been to Israel and I took Justin there five years ago and he was referring at the end of the trip to Israel as ‘we.’ So I thought that was pretty good.’

In 2016 Trudeau attended a fundraiser at the Toronto home of now deceased billionaire apartheid supporters Honey and Barry Sherman. The event raised funds for the party and York Centre Liberal party candidate Michael Levitt. In 2018 CBC reported on multimillionaire Mitch Garber attending one of Bronfman’s fundraisers with Trudeau. On Federation CJA Montréal’s website Garber’s profile boasts that his “eldest son Dylan just completed his service as a lone soldier serving in an elite Cyber Defense Intelligence Unit of the IDF in Israel.”

A thorough investigation of pro-Israel Liberal fundraising would uncover a litany of other examples. And they’ve had far greater success. While the Trudeau government has banned Chinese firms, arrested a prominent Chinese capitalist and targeted that country militarily, they’ve been strikingly deferential to Israel. The Trudeau government has expanded the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, organized a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, voted against over 60 UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights, sued to block proper labels on wines from illegal settlements and created a special envoy to deflect criticism of Israeli abuses. During a 2018 visit to Israel former foreign affairs minister Freeland announced that should Canada win a seat on the United Nations Security Council it would act as an “asset for Israel” on the Council.

Part of the Chinese interference story is about funding University of Montréal and University of Toronto initiatives tied to China. But Jewish Zionist donors have set up far more initiatives, including numerous Israel and Israel-infused Jewish studies programs.

Having fought to establish Israel and with major investments in Israel, David Azrieli spent $5 million to establish Israel studies and $1 million on Jewish studies at Concordia University. At the University of Toronto more than $10 million was donated to establish the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israeli Studies. Millions of dollars more have been donated to launch similar initiatives at other universities.

On many occasions pro-Israel donors have leveraged donations to block academic appointments or suppress discussion of Palestinian rights. The hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Israel supporters (Schwartz/Reissman, Peter Munk, Seymour Schulich, etc.) partly explains why over a dozen Canadian university presidents recently traveled with apartheid lobby group, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, to Israel despite opposition from significant segments of their institutions.

Much more influential than the ‘China lobby’, the Israel lobby has largely been ignored in recent discussion about the need for an inquiry into foreign interference. But any serious foreign agent registry ought to include the apartheid state’s domestic accomplices.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Traoré, who also is a correspondent for U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Voice of America, told CPJ that the threats against him related to a December 1 radio report he produced about a meeting between Burkina Faso’s transitional president, Ibrahim Traoré, and civil society organizations.

The journalist said the media was not invited to the meeting and he did not attend, but participants informed him that the transitional president gave a speech that mentioned an attempted coup against the government. When the journalist broadcast this on Radio Oméga, government supporters began posting threats against him in WhatsApp groups, copies of which CPJ reviewed, calling for people to protest against the journalist’s work. One person claiming to be a supporter of the president made this anonymous threat: “Everyone must go out and oppose what Lamine Traoré is saying. I don’t know this man, but I think he has strange and harmful intentions … If the journalists do not play their role, we will have to hit the table. The enemies of the people, those who are able to put the people on the wrong road, like Lamine Traoré, must be corrected.”

Separately, Barry told CPJ that the threats against him followed his December 3 Facebook post explaining legal flaws in the government’s December 2022 decision to suspend French broadcaster Radio France Internationale.

In one video posted in WhatsApp groups and translated by Barry for CPJ, an anonymous person who identified as a government supporter and spoke in the widely spoken language Mooré, called on the transitional president to kill people like Barry: “I ask Captain Ibrahim Traoré to kill people like (Ahmed Newton Barry) who are not human beings but animals.”

In a December 5 statement, the Burkina Faso government expressed concern about the threats.

In June 2022, Barry also received threats, after he criticized work between the Malian government and a Russian mercenary company.

Reached by CPJ over the phone, Jean Victoire Ouédraogo, the communications director of the Burkina Faso prime minister, declined to comment and said local media groups would be better placed to comment on the threats.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

From the energy of passionate advocates across the country to the support of NFL players to celebratory exoneration lunches, these are some of the Innocence Project’s best moments in 2022.

1. Melissa Lucio’s execution stayed

Melissa Lucio poses for a portrait behind glass at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas. (Image: Ilana Panich-Linsman for the Innocence Project

In January, the Innocence Project joined the legal team of Melissa Lucio, a woman in Texas who faced execution on April 27 for a crime that never occurred — Ms. Lucio would have been one of the first Latina women executed in U.S. history. 

Ms. Lucio was wrongly convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter, who died from complications after an accidental fall down stairs. Thousands of Texas residents, lawmakers, and organizations spoke out on Ms. Lucio’s behalf and on April 25, theTexas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a stay two days before her scheduled execution and ordered the court to consider new evidence of her innocence.

2. Pervis Payne becomes eligible for parole 

Over the past two years, hundreds of thousands joined our campaign in support of Pervis Payne, who maintained his innocence on death row in Tennessee for 33 years. In November 2021, the Shelby County district attorney agreed to remove Mr. Payne from death row based on intellectual disability. Then, this January, a Tennessee judge made him eligible for parole within six years following a hearing where 19 witnesses testified that Mr. Payne was not a threat to society.

3. Michael Monroe celebrates Christmas in January

Michael Monroe, a navy veteran, spent 28 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Mr. Monroe was released and reunited with his family early this year as he is battling cancer. To celebrate his return home and make up for nearly three decades of missed holidays, his family recreated Christmas for him in January.

@innocence

Help us welcome Michael home!

♬ Will to Live – Jacob Yoffee

4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers surprise exoneree Robert DuBoise 

Robert DuBoise enjoyed football growing up, but since being freed and exonerated in 2020, he has developed a new relationship with the sport and his hometown team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

In January, the team gifted Mr. DuBoise a pair of unique cleats inspired by his 37 years of wrongful imprisonment during an ”Inspire Change” game against the Carolina Panthers. The cleats, designed as part of the NFL’s “My Cause, My Cleats” campaign, bear Mr. DuBoise’s name and the number of years he spent wrongfully incarcerated. They were presented to Mr. DuBoise by Buccaneers offensive tackle Donovan Smith, who wore them at a practice ahead of the game.

5. Barry Jacobson exonerated 

Barry Jacobson was convicted of arson in 1983 after a deck on his family’s vacation home was set on fire in Richmond, Massachusetts. Mr. Jacobson was sentenced to six months in prison and a $10,000 fine. He spent more than a month in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, based on unreliable arson evidence and a baseless claim that he was looking to collect insurance money on his home despite the fact that he never filed a claim. 

Following the jury verdict, evidence of antisemitic bias on the jury began to surface. In April, a Massachusetts district attorney agreed that Mr. Jacobson had been wrongly convicted in a trial during which jurors made antisemitic remarks about Mr. Jacobson, who is Jewish.

6. Mallory Nicholson is exonerated after 40 years  

In June, a Texas judge dismissed Mallory Nicholson’s 1982 burglary and sexual assault charges based on newly discovered evidence of his innocence that the State had withheld at his original trial. Mr. Nicholson had been tried before an all-white jury, who rejected his five alibi witnesses, all of whom were Black.

He spent 21 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. After being released on parole in 2003 he was forced to register as a sex offender. The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit, who jointly re-invetsigated the case, dismissed the charges on innocence grounds. Mr. Nicholson celebrated his freedom and the clearing of his name with his legal team and his wife, a childhood friend he reunited with after his release. 

7. John Galvan, Arthur Almendarez, and Francisco Nanez are exonerated in Chicago 

John Galvan, Arthur Almendarez, and Francisco Nanez, who spent a combined 105 years incarcerated in Illinois for a crime they were coerced into falsely confessing were exonerated in July. 

All three were young men when they were intimidated with threats and violence and ultimately coerced into falsely confessing. Their case is part of the long and documented history of such tactics by the Chicago Police Department particularly against young men of color. These false confessions and now invalidated arson science served as the primary evidence used to convict Mr. Galvan and his co-defendants.

Watch Mr. Galvan and Mr. Almendarez walk free after decades in prison.

@innocenceWelcome home John and Arthur!♬ Maple Leaf – Official Sound Studio

8. Former Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison became a U.S. district judge 

Nina Morrison, one of the Innocence Project’s longest-serving attorneys, who helped exonerate 30 innocent people from prison, became a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York in September. Judge Morrison brings a much-needed perspective to the bench and her experiences, humility, and relentless commitment to ensuring equal justice for all will make her an exceptionally fair jurist.

9. Herman Williams reunites with his family after 29 years behind bars

An Illinois judge vacated the conviction of Herman Williams and ordered his immediate release after nearly 29 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. A decorated member of the U.S. Navy, Mr. Williams, who is now 58 years old, was wrongfully convicted for the 1993 murder of his ex-wife in Waukegan, Illinois, where he was stationed at the time. The Lake County District Attorney’s office acknowledged the trial prosecutors withheld favorable evidence and presented the jury with scientifically unfounded pathology evidence. New evidence of Mr. Williams’ innocence also included advanced DNA testing.

See his first steps of freedom.

@innocenceWelcome home, Herman!!♬ VICTORY – Steven Cooper

10. Innocence Project Wins Clarence B. Jones Impact Award for digital advocacy campaign to stop Pervis Payne’s execution 

The Innocence Project was named the fifth winner of the Clarence B. Jones Impact Award, an honor from The Communications Network that recognizes and celebrates the impact of transformative communications campaigns in the social sector. The award is named for Dr. Jones, an attorney and Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech writer. The Innocence Project team was recognized for the grassroots campaign that led to a stay of execution for Pervis Payne and his removal from death row.

11. The Innocence Project turns 30

The Innocence Project celebrated its 30th birthday this year.

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld with their team.

In 1992, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who started their careers as Bronx Public defenders, began a clinic at Cardozo Law School to use DNA testing to prove defendants were innocent of crime. Today, the organization has helped free over 200 innocent people from prison, passed hundreds of laws to prevent wrongful conviction, and developed a network of over 68 Innocence Network partners across the U.S. and around the world. None of which would have been possible without the support of this community. 

The post Innocence Project’s Best Moments of 2022 appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Alicia Maule.

More than six months have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Barry Jones’s conviction and death sentence despite evidence of his innocence. In that time, Arizona has executed two more of Jones’s neighbors — three total in 2022. It has been “a very difficult time,” Jones’s longtime attorney Cary Sandman told a federal judge in September. At 64, having spent nearly half his life behind bars for a crime he insists he did not commit, Jones has struggled to find reasons to be hopeful.

Now there may be light at the end of the tunnel. On December 6, a settlement conference will take place at the federal courthouse in downtown Tucson. Jones will be transported from death row to attend. Unlike past hearings in his case, the proceedings will be closed to the public, comprising a series of negotiations between Jones’s legal team and attorneys representing the state. The Pima County Attorney’s Office, which first prosecuted Jones in 1995, will also attend.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

Barry Jones sat quietly in an orange prison jumpsuit, his surroundings familiar yet disorienting. He was once again at the federal courthouse in downtown Tucson, Arizona. Five years earlier, in the same building, his lawyers had presented new evidence that convinced U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess to vacate Jones’s conviction. More than two decades after Jones was sent to death row for a crime he swore he did not commit, Burgess concluded that his trial had been fatally flawed — and that Jones should be retried or released.

But that never happened. Jones’s moment of victory instead gave way to a whole different nightmare. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office fought to undo Burgess’s order, appealing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May, the justices ruled in the case, known as Shinn v. Ramirez. They found that Burgess should never have used the new evidence to overturn Jones’s conviction, reinstating his death sentence. Burgess, who announced his retirement last year, returned to Arizona from his home in Alaska in early September for a hearing to decide what should happen next.

“Innocence is not enough.”

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Rachel Gray’s gravesite at the East Lawn Palms Cemetery in Tucson, Ariz., in June 2022.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

“Somebody’s going to have to look at it at some point.”

The federal courthouse in downtown Tucson, Ariz., on Sept. 7, 2022.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

The van driven by Barry Lee Jones in 1994.

Photo: Pima County Sheriff’s Department

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

On Friday, September 23, the High Authority for Communication (HAC), Guinea’s media regulator, ordered the one-month suspension of the radio program by the privately owned Nostalgie Guinée radio station and three of the program’s hosts—Mamadou Mathé Bah, Minkailou Barry, and Kalil Camara, according to local media reports that include a copy of the suspension order and a local journalist who spoke to CPJ by phone and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.

The regulator alleged that a September 22 broadcast of the program—which featured a telephone call from Sékou Koundouno, an officer for a coalition of opposition political parties and civil society groups known as the National Front for the Defense of the Constitution (FNDC)—included “incitement of public revolt” and “public insults,” according to a copy of the suspension order. The order also claimed that Bah, Barry, and Camara were “not being professional.”

Koundouno told CPJ over the phone that during the program, he called on Guineans to “mobilize for a return to constitutional order.” Koundouno said he made this call to action in response to Guinea’s military government criticizing the president of the intergovernmental Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for opposing military rule in the country. CPJ was unable to review a copy of the broadcast because it was not available online and a request to obtain it from the radio station was not answered.

“Guinean authorities should reverse their suspension of Nostalgie Guinée’s ‘Africa 2015’ radio program and three of its hosts—Mamadou Mathé Bah, Minkailou Barry, and Kalil Camara,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Sharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “The suspensions showcase Guinean authorities’ ambitions to censor voices critical of the military government and send a chilling message to journalists in the country.”

Chaikou Baldé, president of the local press freedom group Media Alliance for Human Rights (AMDH), and the local journalist who requested anonymity told CPJ by phone that on Friday, September 23, 10 minutes before starting that day’s program, the hosts learned of their suspension from public media reports. Baldé said that the suspended hosts were not informed directly or asked to respond to the regulator’s concerns before the decision. The regulator usually gives a journalist a chance to respond before ordering a suspension, Baldé said.

In addition, the regulator banned the suspended hosts from speaking to local media on any topic for one month until October 22, Baldé and the anonymous journalist said. The program has five hosts, but two were away during the broadcast and were not suspended, they said.

CPJ emailed Boubacar Yacine Diallo, the regulator’s president, and received a response that Diallo was available for an interview, but his phone was off. CPJ followed up with questions in another email but received no response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Barry told CPJ in a phone interview that on June 10 his lawyer sent him an audio clip, then circulating widely in WhatsApp groups, that featured an anonymous voice calling for people to attack Barry’s home.

A joint statement by local press associations called on Burkina Faso authorities to immediately investigate the threatening message and hold those responsible to account.

Barry, the former editor-in-chief of the privately owned L’Evènement newspaper who now appears as a current affairs commentator for a variety of Burkina Faso media outlets, told CPJ that the clip did not cite any specific reason for the threats, but added that he had recently voiced skepticism of a deal between the Malian government and a Russian mercenary company, which would have been seen as provocative to “pro-Russian enthusiasts” in the region.

“Burkina Faso authorities should thoroughly investigate the threatening message against Newton Ahmed Barry that recently circulated on social media, and ensure his safety,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator in Johannesburg, South Africa. “The security of journalists in Burkina Faso is tenuous enough without their having to worry about a mob being provoked to attack their homes.”       

In the audio clip, in the local Mooré language which Barry translated for CPJ, the speaker identified Barry by name and then said they would “organize a hundred people and invade his house. We are going to set fire to it and then destroy everything and collect the rubble that is piled up.”

Barry said the threat may be related to comments he made during a May 19 broadcast of “Surface de vérité,” a prime-time program aired by privately owned TV station BF1, in which he criticized the Malian government’s work with the Russian mercenary company.

Barry told CPJ that he had shared a copy of the audio with Harouna Yoda, Burkina Faso’s attorney general.

‘’As soon as we were informed, we contacted the Central Brigade for the fight against cybercrime, which mobilized other subunits to find the person [who made the threats],” Yoda told CPJ in a phone interview, saying that he could not speak further about an ongoing investigation.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Almost four years after a federal judge overturned Barry Jones’s 1995 conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the order directing Arizona to release or retry Jones and reinstated his death sentence. The ruling puts Jones on a path to execution in a state that just restarted its death machinery — despite significant evidence that he is innocent.

The 6-3 decision in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez was authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote that Jones and David Martinez Ramirez, another man on Arizona’s death row, should not have been allowed to present new evidence in federal court showing that they had received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial. In Jones’s case, the evidence dismantled the state’s original theory of the crime, prompting U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess to vacate his conviction. If not for the failures of Jones’s trial attorneys, Burgess wrote in 2018, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.”

Barry Jones in October 2018.

Photo: Arizona Federal Public Defender

Jones’s case seemed like the perfect example of what the Martinez ruling was designed to address.

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Dr. John Howard, chief medical examiner for Pierce County, Wash., testifies at Virginia Beach Circuit Court on Nov. 18, 2003.

Photo: Dave Ellis/Getty Images

His lawyers’ investigative failures “pervaded the entire evidentiary picture presented at trial.”

Pima County Sheriff’s Detective Sonia Pesqueira interrogates Barry Jones in Tucson, Ariz., in 1994.

Screenshot: Pima County Sheriff’s Department

“Putting on a brave face, but underneath I am as scared as I have ever been.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

District Attorney Harrington said: “Prosecutors have a legal, ethical and moral obligation to ensure that jury verdicts are rendered free from bias. The credible evidence of antisemitic juror statements undermine the fairness of this verdict and denied Mr. Jacobson his Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury trial. Prosecutors have the responsibility to implement policies to ensure fair convictions and to rectify past injustice. I am proud to stand with the Anti-Defamation League and the Innocence Project because a conviction that is tainted by bias erodes the integrity of our system of justice.”

“Nearly 40 years ago, I was wrongfully convicted for a crime I didn’t commit. Antisemitism infected the prosecution and the jury deliberations. I am grateful that District Attorney Andrea Harrington recognized this injustice and helped my lawyer Bob Cordy, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Innocence Project finally clear my name,” said Barry Jacobson. “This wrongful conviction has cast a painful shadow over my life. I am thankful to God, family, and friends. The evils of antisemitism and racism in our legal system must be fought relentlessly.”

Mr. Jacobson was convicted of arson in 1983 and sentenced to six months in prison and a $10,000 fine, after a deck on his family’s vacation home in Richmond, Mass. was set on fire. He spent more than a month in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, based on unreliable arson evidence and a baseless claim that he was looking to make insurance money on the home — although no claim was ever filed. 

Following the jury verdict, evidence of antisemitic bias on the jury began to surface. Sworn statements from a sitting juror and an alternate juror were filed with the court. In her sworn statement, the sitting juror advised the court that, “From the beginning of our deliberations, the forelady of the jury …. repeatedly made references to Mr. Jacobson as being ‘one of those New York Jews who think they can come up here and get away with anything.’”

The alternate juror also observed: “[W]hen the jury first went out to deliberate they had only been in there, I would say less than five minutes, when I overheard one of the ladies say to the other, ‘Well, this is not going to take very long. We should finish this real quick because you know he’s guilty.’ And says, ‘All those rich, New York Jews come up here and think they can do anything and get away with it.’”

Additionally, renowned fire science expert John Lentini, a leading expert in the field of arson investigation, provided an affidavit that the chain of custody procedures used by the state police officers in the case rendered the key evidence of arson unreliable. The investigating state police officers testified at trial that they squeezed liquid into a vial from one of the carpet samples they had cut out and believed to be the point of origin of the fire. However, the carpet samples that were obtained by the troopers at the scene on Jan. 29, 1982, from the alleged point of origin, were promptly brought to the state laboratory and tested. No flammable residue, gasoline or otherwise, was detected on any of the samples. It wasn’t until a year after the fire, days before the grand jury heard the case on Feb. 10, 1983, that this “unsealed” vial was “found” in one of the trooper’s lockers and brought to the state laboratory for testing, where it tested positive for gasoline residue. In his affidavit, Dr. Lentini said, “In my 47 years of practicing in the forensic sciences, I have seen many errors, but none so egregious as this with respect to the mishandling of the evidence and the failure to properly document the chain of custody.”

“As reports of antisemitism increase around the country, Mr. Jacobson’s case reminds us that the criminal legal system has never been immune from its pernicious and insidious effects,” said Barry Scheck, Mr. Jacobson’s counsel and Innocence Project co-founder. “We applaud D.A. Harrington for recognizing that the antisemitism Mr. Jacobson faced 40 years ago was a factor that led to his wrongful conviction.”

Rising Cases of Antisemitism

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitic incidents are at historic highs across the country. ADL’s most recent Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in the United States recorded more than 2,000 antisemitic acts of assault, vandalism, and harassment in 2020. This was the third-highest year on record since ADL began tracking in 1979.

“The antisemitic bias that was brazenly displayed in this case defies a basic principle of our legal system that the ‘law punishes people for what they do, not who they are.’ While this injustice occurred in the 1980s, antisemitism continues to this day, both hidden and in plain view. Every day we witness antisemitism impacting daily life, in the public square, workplace, college campuses, youth sports, and our criminal justice system is no exception,” said Robert Trestan, regional director of ADL New England, which filed an amicus brief regarding antisemitic juror bias. “In the 40 years since his wrongful conviction, Barry Jacobson worked tirelessly to clear his name and expose the antisemitism that contributed to this miscarriage of justice. This case is a vivid reminder of the danger posed by antisemitism and the need for greater education efforts at all levels.” 

Fighting for Justice

From 1987 to 2002, Mr. Jacobson filed four petitions for pardon relief. At the hearings on each one of these petitions, Mr. Jacobson maintained his innocence even though he was repeatedly advised by members of the Board of Pardons that although he qualified for pardon relief, his failure to admit guilt disqualified him for relief.

In January 2022, District Attorney Harrington determined that the overwhelming evidence of antisemitism in jury deliberations so severely undermined the trial that justice required that the Commonwealth assent to Jacobson’s motion for a new trial and subsequently dismiss the indictment, ending any further prosecution of the case.

“This ends a decades-long fight for Mr. Jacobson, who has always maintained his innocence,” said Robert Cordy, of McDermott Will & Emery LLP, co-counsel for Mr. Jacobson, whom he began representing in the 1990s. “It is unacceptable for racial and ethnic bias to taint jury selection, and juries should be educated about both explicit and implicit bias.”

The Innocence Project (Susan Friedman and Barry Scheck) with co-counsel McDermott Will & Emery LLP (Robert Cordy) represent Mr. Jacobson. 

The post The Conviction of Barry Jacobson Is Vacated Due to Antisemitism in Trial appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by jlucivero.

The post Barry Rosenberg: a Fearless Force for Wild Nature appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.