Month: July 2018

Jerome Johnson, innocent American man jailed in 1988, is free at last

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

A piece in today’s Times:

After spending his adult life in prison for a killing he did not commit and mounting more than a dozen attempts to overturn his conviction, a 50-year-old man from Baltimore has been freed.

Jerome Johnson cheered as he left a city courthouse, emerging in a pink striped shirt to breathe in the air as a free man for the first time in 30 years. The first thing he would do, Mr Johnson said, would be to “get me a home-cooked meal”.

He was the 2,245th man to have his conviction overturned in the US since 1989, the first year that DNA evidence was used in murder cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Mr Johnson was found guilty of shooting dead Aaron Taylor in a bar in Baltimore in 1988 after an altercation. He had tried to challenged the verdict 15 times.

His conviction hinged on the testimony of a 15-year-old girl who said that she had seen Mr Johnson enter the Nite Owl with a gun. [J4MB emphasis] Mr Johnson maintained that he was innocent and his case was taken up by the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, a charity that works to exonerate those whom it deems to have been wrongly accused of murder.

Lawyers spent nine months reinvestigating the case and discovered evidence proving that Mr Johnson had not been at the scene of the murder.

Standing with Mr Johnson outside the courthouse Shawn Armbrust, the charity’s executive director, said: “Today represents the first time in 30 years the criminal justice system has worked for Jerome Johnson. The wrong was finally righted and it was righted in a way that we can all be proud of.”

Mr Johnson was given a biography of Nelson Mandela and a diary to record his life as a free man by his lawyers.

The number of wrongful convictions overturned each year has been rising, setting new records. In 2016 there was an average of three exonerations per week — more than double the rate in 2011 — for violent and other crimes.

About a third of the convictions overturned were for homicide. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, misconduct and false accusations were factors that had led to wrongful convictions in more than 60 per cent of the cases.

The overturned convictions have contributed to a shift in attitudes on the death penalty, with more Americans saying that they do not support capital punishment because of the risk of error, according to Gallup.

Last year support for the death penalty fell to a 45-year low, although a poll suggested that 55 per cent of people continued to back capital punishment.

Mr Johnson was the third man in three years to be cleared of murder in Baltimore. Malcolm Bryant, 44, was cleared of the 1998 killing of a teenager when DNA evidence presented in 2016 proved that he was not the murderer, 17 years into his life sentence. He died last year. Lamar Johnson, 34, was freed in September having served 13 years for a murder he did not commit.

The wronged prisoner who served longest behind bars before being released was Richard Phillips, from Detroit, who served 45 years in prison for a murder in 1971 that he did not commit.

“I wish you nothing but the best in the future,” the judge told him on his release in March. “I hope that other people can benefit from your . . . story.”

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Pru Goward, Australian minister, says sex can’t be consensual without audible ‘yes’

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

A piece in today’s Times:

Sex will be deemed rape unless a woman gives vocal consent to a man first, a minister for Australia’s most populous state has proposed.

Pru Goward, the New South Wales minister for the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault, said: “If you want sex you have to ask for it, and if you want that sex, you have to say yes.”

Ms Goward said today that the state is seeking to enshrine the requirement for a woman’s “audible” consent in law, and that its main law advisory body has been tasked with reporting on how the legislation should be drafted. “Often you don’t say no. You say nothing, and that’s why you need to say yes,” she said.

In the meantime, ahead of the potential change to the law, the state is introducing a new sexual assault strategy in which couples intending to have sex will be urged to seek and receive audible consent.

“It should be, ‘Do you want to have sex with me?’ And the answer’s got to come back, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. [J4MB emphasis] Not, ‘She was too drunk, but she did say earlier that she would’,” said Ms Goward, a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation political correspondent and television host. “It is a responsibility, both in the ask and in the reply.”

She said that a woman’s consent before sex must be clear, and that a “no means no” approach was not good enough. “We have young men and women, teenagers, talking about sex and committing sexual acts in a way that previous generations can’t imagine. If it’s that explicit, then let’s change the manners that go with modern sexual behaviour,” she added.

The minister had been motivated to introduce a change in the law after the case of Saxon Mullins, a teenager who said she had been raped in Sydney in 2013. She accused Luke Lazarus of raping her in an alleyway behind his father’s nightclub. He was acquitted after a five-year legal case.

Ms Mullins, who was on her first outing to Sydney’s nightclub district, said she had not consented to sex, but told a court that she had frozen in fear and did not immediately say no.

Ms Mullins, who is now 23, earlier this year waived her right to anonymity to tell her story in a widely viewed television documentary that sparked a national debate about sexual consent. After the broadcast, the New South Wales government referred the issue of sexual consent to the state’s law reform commission.

Under the new sexual assault strategy the government will tell young adults socialising in pubs, clubs and on university campuses that “no means no” via social media, posters, and beer coasters with messages such as “silence is not a yes”.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Ally McBeal

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

A little over eight months ago I posted a piece about the American series Ally McBeal, aired on Fox over 1997-2002. I’d just bought the box set in a charity shop in my adopted hometown, the throbbing metropolis of Bedford, Bedfordshire, for £10.00, and I’ve just watched the last of 120+ episodes. The series was a delight from start to finish, and far more truthful about the real natures of men and women than could or would be portrayed in a TV fictional drama today, where women are reliably strong and amazing, and men are contemptible scum.

Individual series (there were five) and complete box sets are available on Amazon for a song.

Jessica Parker, 58, mother of ‘homeless hero’ jailed for four years for stealing phones from Manchester bombing victims, is spared prison herself despite stealing almost £4,000 from lifeboat charity

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

Our thanks to Mike P for this. The end of the piece:

Danielle O’Donovan, mitigating, said Parker was ‘deeply ashamed’ of what had happened.

She said Parker had suffered a ‘near breakdown because of stress anxiety’ [J4MB: A “near” breakdown. So, NOT a breakdown.] and had been in a ‘difficult, mentally abusive relationship with a man’. [J4MB: There we go. A man must be to blame, because women never are. These allegations of abuse are always accepted, without question. And why would it be a mitigating circumstance, if true? Homelessness wasn’t a mitigating circumstance for her son, jailed for four years and three months, for stealing far less than his mother.]

She said the money was used for ordinary purchases and Parker would repay it with money borrowed from her sister. [J4MB: So she received absolutely no punishment.]

The court heard that Parker had previously been convicted of deception with intent to defraud in 1983, and false accounting and failing to notify of a change of circumstances in 2007. [J4MB: So was she not punished for those crimes either?]

Call for parties to publish gender breakdown of candidates

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

Our thanks to Jeff for this. An extract:

The Electoral Reform Society, which is backing the campaign, said the “legislation is ready and there is widespread support for this change to be made”.

“The sooner it is enacted, the sooner the UK’s shameful political gender gap can be bridged,” said Jess Garland, its director of policy and research. [J4MB: The Electoral Reform Society is clearly just another institution under the control of feminists.]

Dr Rosie Campbell, Professor of Politics at the University of Birkbeck who has extensively researched the make-up of parliamentary candidates, said it would help all concerned if the data was readily available.

“It would be a much more efficient way of getting this information into the public domain,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

“I certainly think they ought to do it and a little bit of a stick to persuade them would be a good idea.” [J4MB emphasis]

Caroline Spelman MP was the Conservative Party chair over 2007/8. In a BBC Radio 4 interview a few years ago, she admitted that men outnumbered women as prospective parliamentary candidates 10:1. I doubt the ratio is much different today. Women are woefully OVER-represented as MPs, given how relatively few women seek to become candidates. Women selected from all-women shortlists (e.g. Jess Phillips) have a particularly poor track record, and are invariably focused on extending women’s privileges over men.