us: racial profiling

Uncle Tom’s cabin!

Obama’s concerns over racism in US are well researched and well read

It was a debate of yesterday. It is still a debate of today and would remain so, even for tomorrow, cans of beer guzzled down the throat or not! Now, it’s not at all about the “stupid” act of Cambridge police in arresting Professor Henry Gates, but about Obama’s lateral comment (extremely intelligently put, we should say), “...there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” Many Americans ostensibly were shocked by the statement; but they have very less justification.

For Obama was voted to power backed by his commitment to righting this disparity (We quote from his speech in the Congressional Caucus Democratic debate, “In our criminal justice system, African-Americans... [as compared to whites], for the same crime... are arrested/convicted at very different rates. That is something that we have to talk about.”). America has a long deep-rooted history of discrimination. It is a land where women witnessed discrimination and were not allowed to vote till 1920 (they were allowed only after the passage of the 19th Amendment to the constitution). The struggle of blacks for their rights is no more a jaw-dropping story. Going by Department of Justice data, by the mid of 2008, 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males were held in prisons, compared to 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males – this despite the fact that blacks make up only 13.4% of the US population.

Blacks experience disproportionate burden of health diseases, injury and death. Researches show that in 2002, HIV deaths amongst blacks were approximately 11 times more amongst whites. National Urban League’s 2006 annual report revealed that out of 580,000 blacks who are serving sentence in prison, a mere 6.89% males had a bachelor’s degree. Nearly 70% blacks in prison never completed their schooling. Likewise, in a 1994 Department of Justice survey of felony, it was found that blacks were in general more likely to receive prison sentences than whites. Between 1995-2000, out of 682 defendants facing death penalty, 48% were blacks, 29% were Hispanics, and 20% were whites. Following this, a study by Wake County found African Americans had bail set 18% higher than whites charged with similar crimes.

Even in terms of earnings, researches show that in 1964, African Americans’ income was 58% of white people’s income. In 1991, African Americans’ income was just 57% of income of whites. And in the US army, as per the recent data, while 62.7% are whites, 20% are blacks. At the commissioned officer level, the ratio is 12.4% blacks vs 73% whites.

The recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 27% of Americans think Professor Gates is more at fault for getting arrested than Sergeant Crowley! If you think that that percentage is fortunate for a change, don’t be hasty in passing the baton of goodness. Wrong judgements and hasty ‘Rodney King’ decisions by police force are not new phenomena. Some cutting cases – Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant, was shot dead in 1999 by police officers who mistook his taking out a wallet for a gun; he was shot 41 times. For a similar reason, Sean Bell was shot to death by NYPD in 2006 – shot 50 times. Omar Edwards, May 2009 – same result! The list is long...

The customary approach of whites on blacks clearly makes the case against James Crowley and in favour of Dr. Louis Henry Gates. President Obama is unquestionably right with his comments against Crowley. They’re damn well timed, and he must be gloating at the amount of media coverage his statements got. It was not always like this.

Take for instance, the 100th anniversary of the NAACP’s founding. In his concluding words, Obama frustratingly comments, “…I’ve noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted… But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government’s responsibility [towards it] ...that somehow doesn’t make news.” And working towards government’s responsibility is what Obama has done fanatically. While in power in Illinois, he introduced a bill that not only made it compulsory for officers to record the racial background of each person they stopped on the roads, but brilliantly, also forced police to video tape all criminal interrogations (to reduce forced confessions, torture and deaths in police custody).

Everybody in the police department opposed it tooth and nail. The governor came on record to oppose it. Obama faced a scenario of being defeated massively in the 58 seat state assembly. But with conviction, and with the audacity of hope, Obama worked on getting people to his side. When the bill was finally introduced, it was passed 58-0!

We quote from Obama’s iconic Audacity of Hope, from an excerpt where he describes a particular incident sometime after he was trounced badly in the 2000 Congressional elections – “A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed, I had lunch with a media consultant who had been encouraging me for some time to run for statewide office... “You realize, don’t you, that the political dynamics have changed,” he [the media consultant] said as he picked at his salad.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing fully well what he meant. We both looked down at the newspaper beside him. There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head. “Really bad luck. You can’t change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing. Maybe if you were at the start of your career, you know, you could use a nickname or something. But now...” His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologetically before signalling the waiter to bring us the check.

I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me...”

Obama always knew that in white America, white Americans will never vote in majority for a black President... On November 4, 2008, Barack Hussein Obama won the US Presidential elections – 95% blacks voted for him; only 43% whites did...     

terrorism: world

Calling all the countries

Only a united world can fight global terrorism and usher in peace

The year 2008 has not been peaceful, especially for countries like India, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and a few others. There was no month in 2008 that newspapers went without citing any terror activities; the latest being the Pakistan terror attack and 26/11 Mumbai attack.

During her recent visit to India and Pakistan, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged both the countries to cooperate on terrorism issues. Terrorism affects not only the victim country; its effects are felt by many other countries that are not even on the terrorists' radar. Attacks on hotels (for instance, the Taj and Oberoi in Mumbai, Marriott in Islamabad and Jakarta, Serena in Kabul, Grand Hyatt and Radisson in Amman, Hilton in Taba) has recently increased. Such attacks not only kill the citizens of the target country but many foreign tourists as well. This in turn increases the inter-country tension and friction.

Modern day terrorist uses technology (among his armoury are Global Positioning System, satellite phones, international mobile SIM cards, fake passports and ID cards) that is tough for a single country to track. Take for instance, GPS and satellite phone that can be used from any part of the world, making it unfeasible for the victim country to track the devices. In such cases, almost all countries need to come together and share information about any susceptible movements. 

A report released on December 3, 2008, titled 'World at Risk' talks about possible WMDs attack on US soil in the next few years to come. The same report states that "were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan" and bluntly singles out Pakistan as a prime suspect.

Rice's recent visit was primarily aimed at decreasing the chances of next attack on the US soil. However, it also acts an opportunity for Pakistan to undo its age-old image of being a pro-terrorist country. But will Pakistan, with the help of Ms Rice and thus US, eliminate its domestic terror camps and further help the world fight against terrorism? Time can never tell, but the sooner it is, the better!

oil : turkey

The turkish trick!!

In near future, Russia and Turkey are all set to spar

The Turks and the Russians certainly have some thing in common. If not any thing then at least their ambition of becoming more powerful - especially in their region. If Russia is trying to revamp its influence over erstwhile Soviet region, then Turkey is leaving no stone unturned to capture the centre-stage of geopolitical arena.
Energy is no doubt the major issue in Turkish strategic thinking. As Turkey continues to industrialise, its thirst for energy is all set to increase. With Turkey being the largest supplier of low-cost goods to the Russian market, the influence of Turkey’s soft power can be easily felt over the Russian land. Since most of Russian corporations (heavy industry) can’t afford expensive western imports, Turkey found its foot into Russian economy by providing them economically affordable alternatives. Moreover, Turkey has a significant intervention and trade-ties in former communist states like Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. For the uninitiated, most of the Balkan states are already members of the European Union. Furthering this trade related ties, Russia is Turkey’s chief trading partner, with energy accounting for a huge pie. Talking in numbers, presently Turkey depends on Russia for 65-70 per cent of its natural gas and 40 per cent of its oil imports.
Even the Europeans have being eying Turkey as an energy transit hub for routes that would bypass Russia altogether. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is one such route that is still stuck in the initial stages. Thus, Russians seem to have all the more reason to pressurise the Turks not to get into this pipeline deal, as it would cost Russia its energy trade with Europe and eventually a big client.
The second potential source of energy for the Turks is the Central Asia region. If there is something that may increase the friction between the Russians and Turks, its going to be this region. The hurdle that Turkey faces over this region is that it does not directly adjoin the region. The only help it would get to attach itself with a central Asian nation, who would be more than happy to deal with Turkey, is from Azerbaijan. However, the core of Azerbaijan does not share its borders with Turkey. Instead, it is on the other side of Armenia. Armenia has sold itself to the Russians to keep its Turkish foes at bay, thanks to their bitter past. Russia has been building up a substantial military presence in this small Caucasian state. But then things seems to be changing as Turkey and Armenia will sign landmark deals in the near future to normalise ties, in a major step towards ending nearly a century of hostility over their bloody history. This would eventually open many gates for turkey, which are currently inaccessible. It’s beyond any apprehension that these two nations who are all set to rewrite their power equations, will soon collide into each other. With their ambition overlapping, their relation may turn sour quite soon. In the short term they may continue their trade ties which may mutually benefit each other, but in the long term their interest are for sure to clash. It’s all a matter of time. In future this piece of region will be interesting to watch out for...

Genocide: double standards

Thank you, Dick!

Does Obama have it in him to accuse Bush and Cheney of genocide?

While the June 4, 2009, Cairo speech of Barack Obama came in for much praise within global audiences, what escaped attention was a supposedly inconsequential meeting of the former Vice President of United States, Richard Cheney, on June 1, 2009, with the press in Washington. While most of the meeting had Cheney spawning of forgettable anecdotes, what grabbed our attention was a series of statements, which started with the scandalous comment, “I do not believe and have never seen evidence to confirm that [Saddam] Hussein was involved in 9/11.”

As is fabled, Bush and Cheney had decided to go to war with Iraq post 9/11 accusing Iraq of being connected in some way with the 9/11 attacks and also of owning Weapons of Mass Destruction, which ergo gave Bush an excuse to preemptively strike Iraq – and specifically “Islamic terrorists” – under the US National Security Strategy. Not that any reason could be justification for causing such invasion, but the fact remains that while Bush’s Iraqi WMD spin had been proven horribly wrong some years back, the latest comments by Cheney seal the argumentative debate on the fact that all in all, the Bush-Cheney combine really had no justification to invade Iraq. And so we come to our Hugo Chavez spin, which is a question on why isn’t Obama’s administration now stepping up the policy ladder and accusing Bush and Cheney of deliberate genocide in Iraq? For records, the United Nations defines genocide as “Any of the [many] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

Many across the world have been accused, convicted and executed by international courts for such genocidal acts. For appropriate example, as BBC reported on December 30, 2006, “Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein is hanged for crimes against humanity... after a year-long trial over the killings of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail in the 1980s.” If Saddam could be hanged for 148 deaths, allow us to examine the civilian deaths caused due to the Iraq war. Though the figures have been disputed, but even the disputed figures range from between 150,000 (Iraq Family Health Survey) to 650,000 (Lancet Survey) to more than 10,00,000 (Opinion Research Business Survey).

The resemblance between the Iraq war and Darfur civil wars (which the US government accepts is a strong case of genocide) are astonishingly strong. In both the cases, the number of casualties (especially of innocent civilians) runs into hundreds of thousands. In both the case, the perpetrators are the same – paramilitaries. In both the cases, the target victims are groups of people from the same “ethnical, racial or religious group.” In Iraq, Bush and Cheney went one step further. They formalised a quasi-genocidal force while setting up the Iraqi forces, where strangely – or perhaps not so strangely – the forces were clearly dominated by Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds, indiscriminately writing a swashbuckling tale of terror against Sunni communities. But while Darfur is termed a genocide, the Iraq war is called a ‘counter-insurgency initiative’.

The present US government (and to a large extent, the previous one too) advocated pulling out of troops and decreasing the size of military from Iraq. But when it comes to Darfur what US does is rather declares trial of Omar Bashir for war crimes. Does this sound like genocide? For them it was just ‘War on Terror’

Cut to Darfur case. Sudanese troops and a pro-government militia known as the Janjaweed killed hundreds of thousands of people to suppress an uprising among the region’s ethnic African against the Arab-dominated regime of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. On September 9, 2004, President Bush, EU Parliament, labelled the atrocities in Darfur as genocide. Even John Kerry and senators Joseph Lieberman, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton labelled the Darfur mayhem a genocide. But none of the names in this esteemed list have ever given even passing references of any genocide when it came to discussing the Iraq war.

Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Russia, none have raised any ‘genocidal’ debate on the Iraq issue and have remained silent. Although it would sound too clichéd to repeat that the Iraq war was fought by Bush purely for control over its oil reserves, what assumes important context is the fact that the same reason comes to prominence when the US accuses Sudan’s sitting President Omar Bashir of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant against Omar in March 2009.

Why is US so invigorated about giving “justice” to Sudanese people? Like Iraq, Sudan is also a supremely oil-rich and gas-rich nation, despite being largely unexplored (for example, while in 2006, its total oil reserves equalled around 560 million barrels, one year later the same had jumped to 6,600 million barrels, 0.53% of world reserves; similar is the case with gas). However, in its case, all the major oil deals are undertaken with China, which is trying to build its political and economic influence in Africa. This whole power build-up operation is seen as a threat by both US and Europe. And what about Omar? League of Arab States, Russia and China, all opposed ICC’s decision; it’s no surprise all of them are the largest players in the oil industry. Then why is the US silent in the clear case of genocide in Sri Lanka? Isn’t China a growing influence there too (Sri Lanka signed a $37.6 million deal to buy Chinese ammunition and is building a $1 billion port that can protect China’s supplies of Saudi oil)? Heck, the answer is simple; they have no oil Johny boy! And we won’t even touch the subject of US ally, Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinian civilians for the past many years (UN complained in June 2009 how an arrogantly confident Israel flatly refused access to UN’s investigative teams into Gaza).

So on one hand while we thank Dick for being so forthcoming in Washington, on the other, we ask whether Obama will have the wherewithal to go against historic rote to charge Bush and Cheney with genocide? In his Cairo speech, to wide applause, Obama eloquently beseeched, “As the Holy Koran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth...” Tell us Obama, will you?

Alternative: natural resources

An alternative wife!

The search for ‘alternatives’ has pervaded the social family fabric

On the day George left office, our  side splitting favourite late night show host Conan O’Brien commented, “Officials at the White House say that President Bush completed his last piece of official business in the Oval Office at 6:00 am this morning. Yep. Bush says it should take Obama weeks to find where he hid the dead fish.” No. This op-ed scrutiny piece is neither about Obama nor about Bush [No, George, it’s not even about the dead fish you hid!]. But about the dramatic concept of ‘alternatives’, and about how over time, the human psyche has become so maniacal towards the development of ‘alternatives’ that irrespective of how good or bad anything is working – be it your car, your computer, even the President – there has to be an alternative.

A sensible person once said, “Every good thing must come to an end.” [Thank god the philosophy did not exclude bad ones]. What has to be also noted then is that along with ‘every good thing coming to an end,’ what also come to their ends are on one hand trust and satisfaction – a fact that has even been exploited by the extremely clever Barack ‘Change’ Obama. The excruciatingly humorous Jay Leno shared his intellectual inputs recently on his show, “I tell you, the economy is so bad that President Barack Obama’s new slogan is ‘Spare Change You Can Believe In’...”

Jokes apart, the genesis of humanity’s focus on alternatives is obviously historic, and many of such alternatives surely have advanced mankind. Going back in time, during the 18th century, humans relied on oil (extracted from whale’s fat or from vegetables) for lighting. Consequently, whale oil prices soared fantastically in the middle of that century. To counter this Moby Dick’ish over-dependence, an exemplary Abraham Gesner developed kerosene, a cleaner-burning alternative. A few hundred years later, in the late 19^th century, Thomas Edison revolutionised the way people generated light by inventing the electric bulb, an invention that demolished future usage of oil in lighting.

Another similar example is of petroleum. For ages, countries have been fighting over this most expensive natural resource. The popular understanding is that petroleum/oil reserves are limited and would run out in this century. Going against this, many scientists are now trying to prove that oil is neither a fossil fuel nor will ever get exhausted in the near future. For example in the book, Black Gold, Strange Hold, the authors prove that oil can be easily found between granite rocks; ergo, it is not a fossil fuel and thus cannot get exhausted in the near future. Furthermore, in 2004, a few scientists of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry synthesised methane inorganically in a diamond-anvil experiment to prove that the hydrocarbon resources of the bulk Earth may be much larger than traditionally thought. OPEC shows that because of improved technology, by 2020, oil production will cross a tremendous figure of 1,600 billion barrels annually with reserves of 3,400 billion barrels – as compared to, say, 24 billion barrels that were being produced globally in 2003. NASA’s scientists are developing methods for turning carbon dioxide into fuel. Even conversion of natural gas to diesel fuel and petrochemical feedstock has been made possible in recent time – Exxon in Qatar, Shell in Malaysia are a few doing this.

On another front, if you thought gold was valuable, scientists are trying to even develop alternative ‘artificial’ metals and jewellery too [one reason perhaps why Warren Buffett thinks gold is a useless investment]. Pearls, diamonds, you name it and De Beers accepts now how even so-called experts can’t make out which is real and which artificial. If Volkswagen is trying to use auto-engines made out of silicon carbide [and thus eliminating the use of metals], many other companies are using the much cheaper and abundant palladium instead of platinum. If agro-researchers have found out ways to genetically mutate seeds, stem cell researchers are even scampering on the ethically explosive issue of bone marrow stem cell embryo development.

But sadly, this ‘alternative’ concept development – though seemingly and evidently quite profitable a commercial concept, especially for the companies involved – has not worked at all ethically in the area that is related to the second most important element for human survival, water. Yes, technology has to some extent addressed this problem of diminishing water resources – Dubai has desalination plants; Singapore’s Newater plant even cleans sewage water to get potable water. But look around the underdeveloped and developing nations and the scarcity of potable water they suffer and one can realise how myopic have been the focus of various governments.

But the most critical issue is something beyond this and most unnerving. And that is how, over the past few decades, the ‘alternative’ concept has now pervaded the architecture of ‘family’. Somewhere along the line, an American reached a point where he needed to necessarily have an additional car, an additional TV, an additional home and more despite having a fully satisfactorily running car, TV and a wonderful home. Somewhere along the line, the American started imagining that happiness in a family too can come only by applying the diminishing marginal utility curve [“the more you have of something, the less you want to have more of it”]. Somewhere along the line, the wife became a commodity, satisfaction became a diminishing concept, and girlfriends an alternative. To a point today that forget your wife, if you are over twenty and still living in with your parents, you are nothing but a certified sissy. Clearly, this social flux is beyond doubt unsustainable in the future. How can this be solved?

The solution is simple. There used to be a subject called moral science in schools globally. Somewhere along the line, Americans forgot the importance of the subject. On a hot Monday in November 2008, approximately 8,020 miles to the east of the US, somewhere in New Delhi, inside a bureaucratic block called Education Department, Government of India, a landmark bill is approved making it compulsory for all schools in India to start teaching a long forgotten subject. They call it moral science...

Religio - Politics

In the name of the holy spirit...

World politics and religion are as intertwined as Barack Obama to his advertent (?) omissions; a brief phenomonological debate

Religious-political lobbying is not a new phenomenon, be it from the time of the crusaders, holy wars, World Wars or the latest war on terrorism; every time the world took momentous political decisions, lobbyists were actively present to influence governments in the name of their fathers, the sons and all the holy spirits available. Closer in time, if the current US President, Barack Obama, in his most historical inaugural address talked about secularism and specifically orated, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers,” it will take an extremely blind (or forgiving) phenomenologist to ignore the deliberate skipping by Obama of Buddhists (listed by CIA as being more in the US – 0.7% of US population – than Muslims, 0.6%), Unitarian Universalists (listed by US Census as being almost equal to the number of Hindus; 0.3% versus 0.4% respectively) and of many other registered religions. On the side of Martin Heidegger’s caution, if Obama’s considerate renunciation of all ‘other’ religions to the ‘non-believer’ category is only to be considered an expansive mistake, one believes it was quite a deliberately appropriate time to make it, given the global audience that was lapping it all up.

Freedom of religion in the US is considered to go hand in hand with Thomas Jefferson’s concept of separation of church and the State, which he enshrined in The First Amendment, which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and that neither can it prohibit the practise of any religion. But the honeymoon of religion and politics seems to never get over as many of America’s leaders have almost conspiratorially nurtured the same completely against The First Amendment.

The question is, if Jefferson’s clear ‘Wall’ between the State and the church was supposed to have been maintained very clearly and publicly, then where does one draw the line when US leaders naughtily flirt around with paradoxical religio-political issues? The previous President George W Bush, in his State of the Union address, not only renewed a call for Congress to materialise his “faith-based proposals” that would allow religious organisations to compete for more government contracts without strict conditions, but also attended a papal funeral. What’s so strange in that? In US history, he was the first sitting US president to do so (for example, even Pope John Paul I’s funeral was attended by Carter’s mother, not James Carter). Bush even met John Paul II to insist the Pope persuade US bishops to criticise Kerry’s policies on various Catholic-sensitive social issues.

Critically, even US electoral behaviour is influenced by a candidate’s stance on religion. Because of his neutral stand on Catholicism, Democratic presidential candidate and non-Catholic Al Smith suffered electorally; while at the same time, John F. Kennedy was elected president because of huge Catholic votes. Anything out of the ordinary? JFK was the first Catholic US President.

But why blame Obama  or other US presidents when the world smells of the same ‘fragrance’. The North Korean government has disseminated Juche quite strongly as the nationalist doctrine is against the spread of Christianity. China dramatically has officially even banned the Roman Catholic religion. In Iran, Ahmadinejad devices Iran’s foreign policy focussing on relations with the Muslim world. Iran doesn’t recognise the nation’s largest non-Muslim religion, the Bahá’í Faith, and persecutes them (Iran also punishes apostasy by a Muslim by death). Germany, Italy and Sweden have seen strong influence of Christian political parties for decades. Even African politics observes a very high religious influence. Take for instance, Sudan where the Umma party’s election manifesto was titled Nahj al-Sahwa, or manifesto of Islamic reawakening. In EU, there are 60 religious missions ‘influencing’ their ‘behind-door’ policies (the ‘non-Christian’ Turkey’s non-inclusion into the EU a crying example). In 2006, due to pressure from Catholic churches, Tony Blair’s government withdrew its proposal to introduce a mandatory requirement of reservation of 25% seats for pupils from non-religious backgrounds in faith-schools.

Jefferson be damned, the reality is that religious congregations have influenced US policy making on various issues too strongly, be it the Catholic church’s view on abortion or the black churches on US assistance for Africa or Southern Baptists’ on gay rights or Lutheran’s on physician-assisted suicide. Iran’s Ahmadinejad, in an open letter to ex-President George Bush, had written, “Whether we like it or not... the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty... the will of God will prevail over all things.” Poor man’s barking up the wrong tree. Gallup shows in its amazing 2008 US survey that since 2000 till 2008, the overall belief in God has dropped from 86% to 78% (in fact, close to 40% living in the western part of the US now do not believe in God). Chauvinistically, wine, women, wealth were the traditional destroyers of mankind. Religion is the newest addition. And Obama, well, he’s worried only about four of them, and yes, about non-believers too...

US : Pr o s e c u t i o n

Hang him again, he ain’t dead

It’s amazing how US continues to execute ‘criminals’, blind to the fact that many convictions could be wrong

It was the recent US Supreme Court judgement that kicked our peeve more than Saddam could have ever of Bush. The Court ruled that Kentucky’s threedrug method of execution by lethal injection does not violate any kind of constitutional amendments. Not that it would matter anymore, but we just thought of putting history in the right perspective. Going back in time, in 1879 (Wilkerson vs. Utah), in a judgement cited by the same Supreme Court (execution by firing), the criminal in question was documented to have suffered for 27 minutes, even in the presence of a doctor, before dying. Again, in 1890, in an electric chair execution, the criminal was breathing after the exercise. People like Ray Krone, Jonathon Hoffman, Madison Hobley, Aaron Patterson, Stanley Howard, LeRoy Orange and many other unreported names spent numerous years in jail for crimes they didn’t commit (including being on death bench). What’s more, since 1973, more than 125 people (10 in 2003 alone) in the US have been freed from death penalty due to evidence of their convictions being faulty. If one goes even by some tasteless financial logic, legislative audits show now that the estimated cost of a death penalty case is 70% (and in some cases 300%) more than the cost of a comparable non-death penalty case. Various studies show that the chance of a case being put on trial for death penalty is 84% higher in cases where the victim is white. It further reveals that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at thrice the rate of white defendants (especially in cases where the victims are white). Moreover, killers of whites are treated more strictly than killers of the nonwhites. In a survey of 1,788 male inmates by Human Rights Watch, about 21% claimed they had been forced into sexual activity and raped during confinement. Clearly, Illinois’ Governor George Ryan’s statement in January 2000 was less hyperbole and more of pertinent argument, when he said, “I cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare – the state’s taking of innocent life... Until I can be sure everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, ...no one will meet that fate.”

Even now the Nebraska top Court’s ruling uses an electric chair that violates the state Constitution’s ban on cruel and inhumane punishment. Strangely, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly declared lethal injection to be ‘uncruel’ and humane, in spite of documented evidence that the cocktail of drugs used to execute criminals could cause severe anguish. Well, what more can you expect of a nation, whose people argue more about Paris Hilton’s dressing sense, and debate more about Britney Spears’ marital problems, than of severe human indiscretions.