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Newswire: Child Poverty Rises 8/11/11
A new report from the Children's Defense Fund shows that child poverty jumped 10 percent between 2008 and 2009 -- the largest yearly increase in the data's history. A new poll shows that the majority of Americans believe that this country has a problem with drugs. The majority also believe that the war on drugs has been a failure. Texas Governor Rick Perry oversaw his 235th execution as governor on Wednesday. The Congressional Black Caucus has created the "For the People"" jobs initiative program that includes a multi-city job fair.
Email this pageGRITtv: Renee Feltz: Executing the Mentally Challenged
The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing people judged "mentally retarded" qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, and thus unconstitutional. Yet for this ruling to apply, prisoners must be evaluated properly and fairly by professionals, whose medical opinion is unbiased. Multimedia investigative journalist Renee Feltz found several cases in Texas where inmates were kept on death row--and in some cases executed--despite clear evidence that they suffered the kind of mental disability that the Court described. She joins Laura in studio to share some of her video from her investigation, and explain why states are still managing to execute the mentally challenged.
GRITtv: Mar. 1 2010
In Trevor Paglen's new book, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, he investigates the "off the map" locations of covert government activity, including the "salt pit" in Kabul where Khaled El-Masri was held.
Ben Wizner, from the ACLU's National Security Project, is El-Masri's lawyer and he joins Paglen in studio with Laura to talk about black sites, government secrecy, and why anything goes when prisoners are taken off the map.
In today's video from Street Films' new series, "Fixing the Great Mistake," Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White explains how New York's Park Avenue was changed to plan the city around cars, not people.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing people judged "mentally retarded" qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, and thus unconstitutional. Yet for this ruling to apply, prisoners must be evaluated properly and fairly by professionals, whose medical opinion is unbiased.
Multimedia investigative journalist Renee Feltz found several cases in Texas where inmates were kept on death row--and in some cases executed--despite clear evidence that they suffered the kind of mental disability that the Court described. She joins Laura in studio to share some of her video from her investigation and explain why states are still managing to execute the mentally challenged.
The Real News Network reports on protests in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new Israeli "heritage" plan, which classifies national and holy sites in Israel and the occupied territories as Israeli "heritage."
From our friends at Tactical Technology Collective, this third clip in the series explains how visual representations of information and data can broaden the reach of information activism across language barriers.
GRITtv: The F Word: Death Penalty Supporters Concede Defeat
The American Law Institute, which has been credited with creating the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, apparently pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it last year. This could represent a significant shift away from putting prisoners to death in the U.S. A Berkeley law professor quoted in a New York Times story about A.L.I. called the group the death penalty's "only intellectually respectable support." The Institute did not decide formally to oppose the death penalty as some of its members apparently wanted, but in a statement last October conceded there are "intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment." Seems to me, that's tantamount to saying there's no way for state killing to be done fairly or right. -- Laura Flanders
