The Nine have decided, without explanation, to let the State of Georgia go ahead with its proposal to murder Troy Davis at a time and place of their choosing. They are apparently acting in the belief that making sure all the paperwork stays settled, preserving the institutions of monopolistic legal finality, and practicing due deference to other judges’ turf, matters more than something as paltry as whether or not an innocent man is about to be killed for a crime he did not commit.

Here is what I got last evening from Amnesty International USA:

Dear Charles,

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Troy Anthony Davis’ appeal. His fate is back in the hands of Georgia authorities who may seek a new execution date at any time.

The Supreme Court’s decision to deny Troy Davis’ petition means that no court of law will ever hold a hearing on the witnesses who have recanted their trial testimony in sworn affidavits.

Doubts about his guilt raised by these multiple witness recantations will never be resolved. An execution under such a cloud of doubt would undermine public confidence in the state’s criminal justice system and would be a grave miscarriage of justice.

The state of Georgia can still do the responsible thing and prevent the execution of Troy Davis:

• Write a letter to the editor calling on Georgia to stop the execution of Troy Davis!
• Call on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider its previous decision and grant clemency to Troy Davis.
• Urge your friends and family to go to http://amnestyusa.org/troydavis or text TROY to 90999 to add their voices to the over 200,000 that have already taken action on this case.

Sincerely, Larry Cox
Executive Director
Amnesty International USA

As I said in my earlier post:

First, I should say that, as a matter of fact, it does not matter to me — and it should not matter to you — one bit whether or not Troy Davis really is responsible for the killing he’s alleged to have committed, or, if he is responsible, whether or not the prosecution legitimate proved their case in the midst of what appears to have been a very dirty bit of business by the Gangsters in Blue. There seems to be good evidence for massive police misconduct, and for the likelihood of Davis’s innocence. This evidence is important, and let’s go ahead and scream about it as much as possible to the men and women sitting in the court and corrections system, if it will save Troy Davis from the gallows.

But, just between us, we need to remember that even if he were obviously guilty as hell, the State has no right to commit premeditated murder in order to make him pay for it. The penalty of death is the ultimate, definitive expression of the State’s cold and sadistic violence, exercised with no defensive purpose and against women and men who no longer pose any threat to any living soul, on the theory that in the end your body and your life belong to the State, and can be mutilated and destroyed by it, at its pleasure, for its own special purposes — whether to exact blood vengeance, or to send a message to unrelated third parties, cut into your body by the Harrow of the criminal justice system. It is nothing more and nothing less than State-sanctioned murder, and it ought to be abolished immediately, completely, and forever.

Second, you should also note, from this story, that in the view of the Georgia Supreme Court, final arbiter that it is, getting all the paperwork settled once and for all is apparently more important than whether or not an innocent man will be slaughtered on the basis of lying testimony extracted by intimidation and coercion at the hands of an overzealous police department, desperately seeking a black cop-killer to lynch. You may find this appalling; but it should not be surprising. This approach to The Law is essential to the very nature of the State and its legal system. Authority is held to take precedence over fact and evidence; imposed finality is held to take precedence over justice, even when it comes to punishments that are utterly irreversible, destroying forever any hope of appeal. Otherwise, anyone might just go around any old time and prove somebody’s innocence and spring them from the prisons or the gallows, a judge’s say-so notwithstanding; a journalist’s expose or an ad hoc committee’s discoveries and reasoned decisions might be just as good as that the Nine. Without sovereign authority to stand between the people and justice, doing justice would be nothing a mere human institution, open to anybody who can do some research and submit facts to a candid world. Why, it’d be Anarchy! So instead, paying due deference and having the right stamp on the right papers and uttering the right ritual incantations is held to be more important than somehing so paltry as a man’s life. That is the Majesty of the Law; that is its morality; that is its justice.

The Final Arbiter

See also:

• GT 2008-09-23: U.S. Supreme Court grants reprieve to Troy Davis
• GT 2008-09-08: Stop the state-mandated murder of Troy Davis
• GT 2005-12-13: Murder in the first
• GT 2004-12-15: God damn it.

Here’s a story from NPR’s Weekend Edition (2008-10-05) that I was listening to while cooking for last week’s Food Not Bombs picnic. The occasion for the story has to do with the seasonal noise and with the really insipid theme of finding out where the dictatorial candidates like to eat, but while I’m not at all interested in where Barack and Michelle Obama like to spend their money, I am interested in the real topic of the story, which is the chef Rick Bayless and his Chicago restaurant, Topolobampo. Topolobampo specializes in central Mexican cuisine — in particular, the metropolitan cuisine that you can get from gourmet restaurants or the street vendors in the megalopolis of Mexico City. Bayless is a white boy from Oklahoma City who loves to cook central Mexican food, and who created his restaurant in part because he wanted to make a kind of Mexican food that most Estadounidenses have never tasted, in spite of the tremendous number of Mexican restaurants in just about every city and town in the U.S.

Most of us have never had the kind of Mexican food that Bayless makes because most Mexican restaurants in the U.S. serve northern Mexican food — the usual menu of enchiladas, fajitas, beef tacos, tamales in corn husks, burritos, carne asada, refried beans, salsa picante, huevos rancheros, and so on. That’s the cuisine that developed in the ranching and farming borderlands, in northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. I’m glad that there are folks trying to introduce Estadounidenses to other kinds of Mexican food; what I’m less glad to hear is how fellow white boy Daniel Zwerdling insists on describing this distinction between Frontera cuisine and Distrito Federal cuisine in is interview with Bayless. (You have to listen to the audio report; most of this is not in the printed summary.)

But the cooking here is totally different than what you find in most Mexican restaurants in the United States . . . . At Topolobampo, don’t even think about burritos and refried beans. The truth is, the food most Americans [sic] think of as Mexican is actually Tex-Mex food. It’s the rustic cooking that farmers and cowboys ate along the border.

When Topolobampo opened almost 20 years ago, it was the first restaurant in the United States that served the kind of gourmet dishes you might find in Mexico City. . . .

How did a boy from Kansas City [sic], like you, end up being one of the main people who showed Americans [sic] what real Mexican cooking is really about?

. . . Over the next few minutes, he’s going to teach you to make steak tortillas with grilled onions and guacamole–the way Mexicans really eat them.

. . . You know what’s really puzzling? It’s like, Americans totally fell in love with French cooking, and French cooking became a huge deal in the United States. Italian cooking–huge deal in the United States. Right across the border, they have this incredible cuisine; you know, why didn’t Americans [sic] fall in love with that sooner?

–Daniel Zwerdling, interviewing Rick Bayless A Meal Fit For A Candidate: Barack Obama
NPR’s Weekend Edition (2008-10-05)

See, the kind of Mexican food you’re used to doesn’t count as incredible cuisine because rustic cooking from border provinces doesn’t even count as a cuisine. Cuisine is what rich people in big cities who use gratuitous French loan-words eat. And the kind of food they make in northern Mexican states like Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California, and in former northern Mexican states like Alta California, New Mexico, and (especially) Tejas,^[1] doesn’t count as real Mexican cooking either, because a bunch of farmers and cowboys and immigrants don’t count as real Mexicans. Only rich Mexicans who eat in gourmet restaurants in metropolitan Mexico City do.

In reality, part of the solution to Zwerdling’s puzzle may be that Estadounidenses had trouble with finding this incredible cuisine they supposedly have right across the border, seeing as how those Mexico City restaurants where people eat this kind of food aren’t right across the border; Mexico City is hundreds of miles away from the Rio Grande. If you go right across the border you’ll be somewhere like Juarez or Nuevo Laredo or a little border village, and they’ll be serving those swamps of refried beans … and melted cheese. But NPR-listening white folks in the U.S. of A. are expected to take the very local and peculiar cuisine of Mexico City to represent the real cuisine of the entire United States of Mexico, because NPR-listening white folks in the U.S. of A. have mostly come to believe that world food is arranged not by the messy clustering of ecological, economic, and cultural factors that actually influences how people eat, but rather by the basically military reality of discrete nations separated by fortified political borders. And, having come to believe that, we have mostly come to identify the authentic national cuisine of any given country with the preferences of the rich and powerful people sitting on the political, media, and mercantile centers inside those national borders — that is, the preferences of those who spend a lot of time eating cuisine, and little or no time growing or raising the food that goes into it.

What white people in the U.S.A. generally want, when they have the money to get it, is to eat like rich city people eat all over the world; different countries provide new brands, new spices, and, perhaps most importantly for the sort of white people who listen to NPR, new ways to distinguish yourself from the déclassé white people who don’t know or don’t like or can’t handle the real stuff. Perceived authenticity is the important thing here, and what’s perceived as authentic for any given country — and, therefore, fit for white people in the U.S. to eat — is determined not by culture, but by political economy and the orders of power and wealth.

See also:

• GT 2008-07-05: Whiteness studies 103: Ethnic food and authenticity
• GT 2007-12-10: Over My Shoulder #38: Yael Tamir, Siding with the Underdogs in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Forwarded by Mark Pilgrim (2008-06-19), who adapted this version from <a rel=”via” href=”http://www.slate.com/id/2193798/>Christopher Beam @ Slate (2008-06-17).

From: Mark Pilgrim
Subject: Teach the Controversy about Barack Obama
Date: 19 June 2008

There are many things people do not know about BARACK OBAMA. It is every American's PATRIOTIC DUTY to read this message and pass it along to all of their friends and loved ones.

Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his HEART at all times. He occasionally switches when one arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is STRONG.

Barack Obama wears a FLAG PIN at all times, even in the shower. One time he DROPPED THE PIN down the drain, and he PATRIOTICALLY disassembled his entire plumbing to retrieve it.

Barack Obama says the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE every time he sees an American flag, and he has an American flag in EVERY ROOM in his house. Some days it takes him OVER 45 MINUTES to get out of his house. He also ends every sentence by saying, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. On the INTERNET there is video of Obama quietly mouthing the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE in his sleep.

Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his stomach. It's upside-down, so he can read it while doing sit-ups. He does FIFTY SITUPS every morning, which is the same number as OUR FOUNDING FATHERS did to commemorate our FIFTY STATES.

Barack Obama take his daughters HUNTING every weekend — HUNTING LIBERALS, that is. Liberals are ALWAYS IN SEASON.

Barack Obama is a DEVOUT CHRISTIAN. His favorite book is the BIBLE, which he has memorized. His name means HE WHO LOVES JESUS in the ancient language of Aramaic, which is the language JESUS SPOKE before he learned English. He is PROUD that Jesus was an American.

Barack Obama goes to church every morning. He goes to church every afternoon. He goes to church every evening. He is IN CHURCH RIGHT NOW. If elected, he has pledged to build a MEGACHURCH inside AIR FORCE ONE.

Barack Obama's skin is the color of AMERICAN SOIL. His blood is the color of the AMERICAN FLAG. His fingernails are the color of APPLE PIE. He rubs AMERICAN SOIL on his chest every 20 minutes, then cleanses himself with HOLY WATER.

Barack Obama buys only AMERICAN GOODS. His sole possessions are a FORD PICK-UP TRUCK, a GEORGE FOREMAN GRILL, and HALF THE STATE OF MONTANA. He drinks only APPALACHIAN MOONSHINE, eats only FREEDOM FRIES, and travels exclusively by JOHN DEERE TRACTOR.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW! SPREAD THE TRUTH ABOUT BARACK OBAMA!!!!!

Here’s some remarks from an apparent California leftist (progressive, whatever) that I noticed at Davis Wiki while looking up some unrelated information on Chipotle’s corporate history.

The quest for authentic ethnic food is a noble one in this day and age of capitalistic homogenation. Once the corporations get ahold of a a food category, they subvert it to be as palletable (bland) as possible so people in the midwest will eat it.

Because, you see, once people in the Midwest eat something, it’s not authentic ethnic food anymore. You’ve got to remember that white people in the Midwest (Poles, Germans, Swedes, Irish, Scots, English, etc.) don’t have an authentic ethnicity; they are far too bland for all that. Only spicy, colorful people have ethnicities, let alone authentic ethnic food.

See also:

• GT 2006-02-04: Whiteness studies 102: Intended audience
• GT 2006-01-26: Whiteness studies 101: Ethnicity

(Via Thus Spoke Belinsky 2008-06-20.)

Trigger warning. The following videos of local news stories include graphic footage of extreme physical violence by a male police officer against a woman in his custody.

Cops are here to protect us by arresting a black trans woman on charges of possibly being willing to engage in consensual sex acts that violated nobody’s rights, then throwing her in a booking area as a lead-up to locking her in a cage, then using transphobic and homophobic slurs when ordering her to get up in order to be fingerprinted for having allegedly committed this non-crime, and then, should she refuse to get up in response to that kind of language, and instead go on sitting in her chair, threatening nobody, cops are here to protect the hell of of her by getting up in her face, wrapping a pair of handcuffs around their knuckles and bashing her head in with them over and over again, while sheriff’s deputies stand around and do nothing, and while a fellow cop runs up to hold her down in her chair — stopping eventually to pepper spray her, handcuff her behind her back, and then leave her lying helpless on the floor.

Please note that, according to Memphis Police Officer Bridges McRae, refusing to immediately follow a police officer’s bellowed command over a minor matter of paperwork is a crime which can rightfully be punished by a vicious gang beat-down. And according to the rest of the Gangsters in Blue on the scene, it’s a situation which calls for standing aside, or actively rushing to the aid of, their gang brother — and to hell with the suspect woman being assaulted.

MEMPHIS, TN (WMC-TV) — Video obtained by Action News 5 shows a Memphis police officer beating a suspect at 201 Poplar in an apparent case of police brutality.

The video, recorded February 12th, shows Duanna Johnson in the booking area at the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center after an arrest for prostitution. The tape clearly shows a Memphis police officer walk over to Johnson — a transsexual — and hit her in the face several times.

Actually he was trying to get me to come over to where he was, and I responded by telling him that wasn’t my name — that my mother didn’t name me a faggot or a he-she, so he got upset and approached me. And that’s when it started, Johnson said.

Johnson said the officer was attempting to call her over to be fingerprinted. She said she chose not respond to the derogatory name the officer called her.

He said, I’m telling you, I’m giving you one more chance to get up. So I’m looking at him, and he started putting his gloves on, and seen him take out a pair of handcuffs, Johnson said.

The officer hit Johnson several times with the handcuffs wrapped around his knuckles. In the video, you can see the flash of the metal. The tape shows another officer holding Johnson’s shoulders as she tries to protect herself.

After taking several blows, Johnson stands up and swings back.

I was afraid. I had had enough. Like I said, I thought the other officers that were witnessing this would at least try to stop him, Johnson said. I mean, he hit me so hard. Like the third time he hit me, it split my skull and I had blood coming out. So I jumped up, Johnson said.

But then she sat back down, and the officer her in the face again. Then he maced her. On the tape, other people in the room are seen turning away and fanning their hands because of the smell.

. . . On the tape, Duanna is eventually handcuffed and left on the floor. A nurse comes in, and goes directly to the officer.

I couldn’t breathe, and they just made me lay there, Johnson said. Nobody checked to see if I was okay. My eyes were burning. My skin was burning. I was scared to death. Even the nurse came in and she just ignored me, and I begged her to help me.

— WMC-TV (2008-06-18): Video shows police beating at 201 Poplar

After this brutal gang assault committed in full view of a security camera and several witnesses, McRae had the audacity to file a charge of assault against Duanna Johnson. And then to file an internal affairs complaint against the detective in the booking area for standing by and doing nothing, instead of joining in on the beating.

This happened back on February 12th. At the time that it happened, the D.A. dropped all charges against Johnson. The rookie cop who held Johnson back in her chair during the beating, James Swain, lost his job. On the other hand, Bridges McRae, the thug who was actually bashing the poor woman’s head in, was given a paid vacation from street duty (at a $49,000 / year salary) for four months, pending an administrative disciplinary hearing, which he repeatedly delayed using sick leave and other excuses, after which he finally lost his own job. Neither of these brutal and dangerous thugs has yet faced any criminal charges for this videotaped assault.

Meanwhile, the Fraternal Order of Pigs has provided McRae with a lawyer, who is helping him appeal the decision to fire him from the police force. The lawyer wants you to realize that the mere evidence of your senses is no reason not to give a violent cop the benefit of the doubt:

McRae is the officer seen in the video repeatedly hitting Duanna Johnson in the booking area at 201 Poplar. McRea had arrested her for prostitution, but the charges were later dropped.

In the video, you can see McRae hitting Johnson with what appears to be handcuffs. Memphis Police Association attorney Ted Hansom, representing McRea, said Thursday that handcuffs were not used as a weapon by the officer.

Once it starts, the handcuffs were out to handcuff that person, Hansom said. You don’t have time to say let me put these down and then we will resume this.

Hansom said the video shows a different story when it is slowed down. . . . Hansom said the video is not the whole story, and it will be his job to explain it all.

. . . The video shows McRae hitting Johnson in the face. She was also pepper sprayed. But it also shows Johnson hitting McRae at least once.

Hansom points out that there is no audio on the video so you do not know what is being said.

He also said McRae had reason to believe the 6 Feet 5 inch Johnson was a threat. Hansom said he has studied the video.

I saw some actions on the complaining party. So if they are coupled with statements or prior conduct or dealing with this person and knowing the size of that person might put you in apprehension of what’s going to happen, Hansom said.

— WMC-TV (2008-06-19): McRae’s attorney says video is not the whole story

Along the way this class act demonstrates his sensitive awareness of issues surrounding police brutality in some communities:

The way he is being depicted with just this video tape. It doesn’t tell the story. It’s the Rodney King approach [sic!]. Lets look at a few minutes of video and make our decisions. It’s not that simple, Hansom said.

— WMC-TV (2008-06-19): McRae’s attorney says video is not the whole story

And informs us that merely refusing to refuse an order to stand up, while you are in a secure area, is apparently enough to count as a threat to the safety of a heavily armed cop surrounded by other cops:

Hansom said the video shows a different story when it is slowed down. He said it is clear Duanna Johnson could easily have been considered a threat, because she was in a secure area and was refusing orders from Bridges.

— WMC-TV (2008-06-19): McRae’s attorney says video is not the whole story

The Shelby County Sheriff’s Department, which runs in the jail in which McRae beat the hell out of Duanna Johnson, is mainly concerned to deny any responsibility (because their flunkies stood by and did nothing but watch in the course of this brutal beating), and to launch a criminal investigation into who finally made this tape, which should have been public knowledge four months ago, available to the newsmedia.

I know, I know. In any big police department there are A Few More Bad Apples, and every now and again there is just going to be Yet Another Isolated Incident. Sometimes life is like that. Terrible things like this just happen. Sometimes there are no red flags, no real warning signs.

McRae was fired after an administrative hearing for beating a transgendered woman he arrested Feb. 12 for prostitution. The video, which didn’t record sound, showed the officer repeatedly hitting Duanna Johnson in the intake area of the Shelby County Jail at 201 Poplar. Johnson said McRae made derogatory remarks. McRae is shown hitting Johnson and then using pepper spray.

McRae’s personnel file showed only three reprimands for minor offenses during his nearly four years on the force. His latest evaluation said he exceeds expectations.

— Memphis Commercial Appeal (2008-06-27): Officer fired over beating had accusers

Here are some of the ways he exceeded expectations.

Who would have ever thought that Bridges McRae might do something like this to a black trans woman in prostitution?

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting tidbit about Memphis police department procedure:

Police Director Larry Godwin said if an officer receives multiple complaints, the department may move the officer to another precinct to see if the complaints continue.

— Memphis Commercial Appeal (2008-06-27): Officer fired over beating had accusers

When Catholic bishops engage in this kind of practice with priests accused of child sexual assault, it’s called a conspiracy and a massive cover-up. When the boss cops do it, it is treated as if it were a perfectly mundane bit of bureaucratic detail, as just so much business as usual.

The comments on the local Memphis newspaper stories are actually more encouraging to me than I expected them to be. I’m heartened to see as many people as I do with the empathy and the courage necessary to speak out about this kind of outrage in public, and to call out the Mephis Police Department as an institution. But there is also the usual sado-fascist howling that you would expect, and the usual efforts to use absolutely any prejudice available against the victim of violence in order to smear her, ridicule her, and exonerate the cops for absolutely anything they might do to her. If you needed any more convincing on this point, take this as evidence that, even if it is on tape, even if it is in a public place in front of a crowd of witnesses, if you fall under one or more demographically suspect categories, there is absolutely nothing a cop could do to you that would be so low, so vile, so obviously over-the-top, or so brutal that cop couldn’t still count on hordes of Law-‘n’-Order creeps to befoul every public forum with victim-smearing and fabricated excuses on his behalf. He can fully expect that no matter what he might do, in full view of other police officers and a camera, still other officers will either stand by and do nothing, or come running to his aid, and that unless the tape reaches the media, he will almost certainly never face any personal consequences whatsoever for doing it. If he had walked up and shot her in the face I wouldn’t expect anything more to happen to him than what has happened to him so far. The Gangsters in Blue get each other’s backs, and it’s likely that nothing would ever have happened to him at all, beyond yet another unfounded complaint being recorded in his closed IA file, except for the fact that somebody bravely defied the law to get this tape out to the newsmedia.

The truth is, when every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police themselves almost invariably doing everything in its power to ignore, cover up, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless the victim may be, it beggars belief to keep on claiming that there is no systemic problem here, that cops ought to be given every benefit of the doubt, or blanket condemnations of policing in major American cities are somehow a sign of hastiness or unfair prejudice against good cops. The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things: either a professionalized system of violent control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, and unrepentant abuse against powerless people–or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

See also:

• GT 2008-02-26: Cops are here to protect you. (#2)
• GT 2007-09-27: New York cops attack and pepper-spray trans activists