Nigeria’s victims of “corpture”

Those who were surprised to learn that child soldiers operate in Uganda will be gutted by the revelation that protesters are tortured in Nigeria. Nobody covered the night with pictures of Joseph Kony (which makes me laugh hysterically because I am a horrible, horrible person), but perhaps they might make up for it by dripping thick black paint all over everything as a bitter homage to Chevron. That is, assuming someone makes a slick half-hour video with a kindergartener in it. But enough about that guy.

In the case of Bowoto v. Chevron, 19 Nigerians are attempting to use the Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991 to sue Chevron, alleging that its Nigerian subsidiary backed a military crackdown on a 1998 protest against its business activities in the Niger Delta. A previous appellate court ruling found that the Act only holds individuals liable for torture, and not corporations or organizations. The U.S. Supreme Court refused yesterday to take up another appeal.

I’m afraid the victims don’t have much of a legal argument here; the unusually brief text of the legislation clearly requires the defendant to be an individual, and one acting in an official capacity for a foreign nation at that. There is nary a word about the culpability of any corporation or organization – even if, in reality, they have any. So the plaintiffs’ beef is with the letter of the law, not the courts’ take on it.

It may be necessary to draft new legislation or revisit this one to include American corporations or organizations under the following circumstances:

• They either ordered the torture to take place, or knew it was happening and did not stop it.
• They supplied or helped to supply the necessary resources for the torture.
• These orders/resources came from their headquarters.

All of that evidence is a lot to ask of plaintiffs who have undergone torture, especially considering the size of Chevron’s legal team. But if an American company is indeed complicit in torture, you have to make it impossible for them to argue otherwise. That finding would have a much greater impact than suing the guy who hit you.

Vacation update: Had lunch with Jim Horan, who was the policy director for Tom Horner’s (I-MN) 2010 gubernatorial campaign, in which we discussed Minnesota politics and the local non-profit sector. Later, spent some time walking around downtown, which is an excellent downtown. Adam bought Van Jones’s Rebuild the Dream at B&N, which he is enjoying so far. (Note to those dumb enough to ask: Adam is more liberal than me, but he is not a Communist.)

Don’t you need a castle to defend first?

Here in handgun-free (legally speaking) Canada, there have been a number of instances that have prompted calls for a castle doctrine. My personal favorite is the case of Ian Thomson of Port Colborne, Ontario, who fired a few bullets out of a revolver when he woke up to three masked men throwing goddamn Molotov cocktails at his house. And it’s on video! Thomson, a former firearms instructor, had his personal collection of guns confiscated and his firearms license revoked. Outrageous? Of course. I feel sorry for him. Not George Zimmerman. That guy’s messed up.

In what is destined to become one of the more sensational American crime stories of 2012, Orlando’s Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin for no clear reason, other than Zimmerman’s contention that he looked like he was high and had the nerve to be in public at the time. Florida’s castle doctrine permits the use of deadly force to apprehend a criminal when you are “in fear of great bodily injury” or harm to “hearth and home.” Although neighbors reported a scuffle, Martin was unarmed. Zimmerman has not been arrested.

On the surface, it sounds to me like Zimmerman started the whole thing. Unless he can prove the opposite, or that Martin did produce some sort of weapon or other way to harm him – grabbing for his larynx might count – I would recommend a charge ranging from manslaughter to second-degree murder. Maybe neighborhood watch is Zimmerman’s duty, but any Block Parent where I come from knows not to pick fights unless the “dangerous person” is actually being dangerous.

But even if Zimmerman weren’t so psychotic, this issue is ultimately about what’s on the books. Martin’s death has sparked serious debate over the sensibility of Florida’s castle doctrine. Detractors complain that it allows people to shoot first and ask questions later. I wonder how long it takes to ask oneself mentally, “Is this person really a threat to me?” There’s little room for interpretation when they’re firebombing your house.

I would not hesitate to pump a few into some asshole who was trying to attack me, my family or my house. But the onus would then be on me to prove that this was indeed the situation. Once you are unable to do that, no castle doctrine should save you. If that provision isn’t already included in the Florida law, I can’t imagine what’s preventing it.

One last consideration. I know many of you will make hay out of the fact that Martin was black and Zimmerman was white, or that Martin was young and Zimmerman was (presumably) not. But let’s keep race and age out of this and focus on the crime at hand.

Hazing’s initiation into the federal code begins

Are you currently a participant in an organization whose membership required you to be subjected to abuse, harassment or humiliation of any stripe, to which you ultimately consented? First of all, you’re an idiot; no organization is worth that. Second of all, you might want to prepare for that organization’s uppance to come. In the wake of the high-profile hazing death of a Florida A&M marching band member, Rep. Frederica Wilson (R-FL) is preparing to put forward a bill that would make hazing involving physical assault a federal crime.

Forty-four states already have hazing on the books as a felony. I, personally, would make the act of hazing itself a misdemeanor and any ensuing hospital stays or deaths a felony. It’s pretty tough for any club to cover those up, unless they go Desperate Housewives and hide the body in a pit in the woods. But the sad fact is that you can’t count on acts of hazing not resulting in injury or death to be reported. Imagine if you were in that position yourself. Would you want to risk whatever the act of reporting would result in?

Of course, it shouldn’t be all on the hazers’ shoulders. Any college or university without anti-hazing measures written and enforced should expect a thinner check from its state government and the federal government, perhaps a refund if incidents rise. Any workplace that looks the other way when hazing occurs should be fined. I would be shocked into silence if any of these people sanctioned hazing; nonetheless, it is their responsibility to watch out for these individuals, and set what I think we all agree are some very sensible rules.

I am generally wary of any new federal laws on principle, and given the nature of existing federal crimes in the United States, I doubt hazing would make it; assault and murder haven’t, unless they happen on federal soil or to federal personnel. But Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota and Wyoming shouldn’t wait for high-profile hazing deaths of their own to write up their own laws. If Wilson’s bill goes at least as far as prompting them to do this before the feds do, I’d consider it a victory for her.

Keep Dorothy out of Kansas

It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.

This week’s fail was brought to you by the city of Topeka and, to a lesser extent, District Attorney Chad Taylor of Shawnee County, Kansas. We all know that government budget cuts tend to cause some pain, but never before did I think anyone would take that this literally. Cutbacks forced Taylor to stop prosecuting domestic abuse cases in Topeka, including some in which the offenders were released without being formally charged. His attempt to dump the cases on Topeka’s municipal government led them to decriminalize domestic abuse.

Yes, you read that right. The decriminalization took place on Tuesday; Taylor, thankfully, resumed the prosecutions after a very justified public outcry on Wednesday. From his statement:

I am deeply saddened by the city of Topeka’s unfortunate decision to place resources and political grandstanding before its constituents’ safety. I am also deeply encouraged by the strong, angry response of the people of Topeka and Shawnee County.

You know what saddens me? Taylor’s recklessness in unloading his work onto the county seat without knowing if they were able to take it or not. Asking if this was feasible before they made any decisions on the level of, I don’t know, decriminalizing domestic abuse would have been a sufficient first step. This, in its own way, is placing resources before his constituents’ safety. There’s bound to be something less important than domestic abuse to quit prosecuting. Drug possession laws are one example. Seat belt laws are another.

And as for the city council. Did you know that “government and service workers” comprise 50 percent of Topeka’s workforce? Surely they could have found a few who weren’t involved in domestic abuse cases to lay off. It is suspected that the repeal is what Taylor means by “political grandstanding” – an attempt to force his hand to keep up the prosecutions. Does that seem like a sensible way of going about it to anyone else? The public outcry over Taylor’s move on its own would only have been slightly less.

What’s clear from this debacle is that Shawnee County and Topeka cannot be trusted to keep their fiscal houses in order. That it came to this should be enough to tell them that fundamental change in their municipal and county economic policies is required before they spend another dime of someone else’s money. I wouldn’t want them to have even one after this.

Prove Troy Davis’s guilt

I wanted to save a column on the Troy Davis case for Saturday, since it truly is Fail of the Week – nay, Year – material, but by then it may be pointless. The response to this debacle from the family of Mark MacPhail, the off-duty police officer who allegedly died at Davis’s hands, is a perfect illustration of what happens when raw emotion becomes a substitute for sound legal judgment. I am not a fan of attacking victims’ families, but this one needs a serious reality check.

At the time of this writing, Davis has not been lethally injected, and it is unclear when or if it will happen. Hundreds of protesters have gathered to remind anyone who is watching of the presence of reasonable doubt, which may, under logical circumstances, have been enough for the courts and pardons officials involved in this case. His execution has been stopped three times in four years, and despite pleas for federal intervention, because this was a state case, that won’t happen. At least they’re playing by the rules.

Here’s MacPhail’s widow, Joan MacPhail-Harris: “He has had ample time to prove his innocence. And he is not innocent.” MacPhail was killed in 1989. 22 years should have been even more ample time for the prosecutors in this case to prove his guilt, which seems like a much more pertinent effort. After seven out of nine witness recantations and the absence of physical evidence, they have failed.

So what is the motivation behind the justice system’s refusal to acknowledge the hollowness of the accusation? Racism has come up, as Davis is black and MacPhail was white, although I doubt it’s so simple. Perhaps they simply want to satisfy the pleas of the MacPhail family? I can’t imagine they’d be satisfied if it turns out much later that Davis was the wrong man. That would mean two innocent deaths.

Equally bewildering, though, is the lack of an alibi. In the articles I have read about the case, I have yet to find one that mentions where Davis was at the exact time of MacPhail’s murder. As mentioned, seven out of nine people who placed him at the scene have changed their stories. But Davis has not placed himself anywhere else. His sister, Martina Correia, has not been called to testify. More doubt, and very reasonable doubt at that. It’s enough.

The one clear element of this fiasco is that we don’t know. No person should have to die because of failure, on the part of individuals or of a system, to answer some very basic legal questions. To let this happen would be just as unfair and unnecessary as MacPhail’s death, and he, a police officer himself, would be very unlikely to have endorsed that.

Disposal Day #77: A bad week for justice

STORY #1: Shut up, Nancy Grace

So, as you are by now all aware (and if you’re not, please put the bottle down slowly), Casey Anthony is innocent in the murder trial of her two-year-old daughter Caylee. OK, maybe not innocent, but acquitted, at least of the murder. Thus ends another chapter in the Murder Trials That Unnecessarily Dominate the News Cycle saga. I imagine any poll taken after the verdict would reveal that vast majorities want this woman dead or in a hole.

I’m only writing about this here because there is now a political element to the story. With Anthony charged with lying to investigators, lawmakers in Florida and Oklahoma are calling for a “Caylee’s Law” that would require parents to report a child’s death within two hours; not doing so would be a felony under their proposal. Some have signed a petition for a federal version of such a law, which would of course be unconstitutional. Don’t expect popular opinion to change because of that.

STORY #2: Yes, do mess with Texas

Texas may be getting job creation right, but law enforcement is a whole other matter. A Mexican national was executed yesterday for raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl in 1994. Various courts have agreed that he should have gotten help from the Mexican consulate, which may have proven his innocence, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to let a matter that should have been taken up by Congress fall to the judiciary.

Regardless of whether or not Humberto Leal was guilty, no foreign national should be denied help from their home country, and if no law exists requiring that already, there should be one. (This would be a federal matter because it would involve multiple nations.) Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced legislation to that effect last month. If you don’t know why progress on that matter has been slow, you must be new to politics. Good luck to you.

STORY #3: Stay classy, Steve Hirsch

I really should have seen this coming. Vivid Entertainment, makers of fine adult entertainment by and for people whose careers are dead, had offered Anthony a chance to star in one of their films, but their viewers refused to watch anything with her in it. I assume they wanted to put her in the same movie as the other Anthony they tried to recruit. Can we get a federal law requiring these idiots to just go away?

Fail of the Year 2010

On the closest Saturday to New Year’s Day, I will bestow this award upon the past year’s ultimate fail. This one, selected by voters, was posted on June 19 as “The fail to end all fails.”

This week’s fail was brought to you by Muhammad and Waqas Parvez of Brampton, Ontario, father and brother of Aqsa Parvez, whom they killed for daring to suggest that going out to a movie with her friends and getting a part-time job might not be such a bad idea. Honor killing is probably the most obvious fail in the world, but not much else happened this week and it deserves to be denounced over and over and over again until it stops for good.

Before we start, I should let everyone know that today’s column must not be taken as an indictment of Islam itself or the people who abide by it. I’m sure at least one ultra-fundamentalist, or perhaps some politically correct invertebrate, out there will think of it that way. Rather, it is an indictment of those who pervert Islam in order to justify the act of honor killing – or any kind of killing, for that matter, but we’ll focus on this one. I’m all for respect for other cultures and religions, but that respect must be turned off as soon as murder or the infliction of severe pain starts in its name, especially against a minor.

I haven’t been to Brampton, but I assume the majority of its citizens regard a bunch of teenage girls going out at night as normal. Yet the Parvez men (I use the term “men” loosely; “tapeworms” is more like it) had somehow become convinced that 16-year-old Aqsa’s desire to live a life out of step with their views of female behavior – youthful rebellion that was proportional to what was being restricted – was a real source of shame. Thus, the solution is to plead guilty to second-degree murder and spend 18 years* in jail? Not quite, jackasses.

Regretfully, repeated attempts to make honor killers see the complete absence of logic in their arguments have fallen short. That does not mean we should give up. If any young woman is in a family situation in which honor killing is acceptable, and she has access to any authority figure outside of the family, she must be encouraged to let them know, and that authority figure must do something about it. She should not be left in that position if she wants to get out badly enough to risk it.

Most honor killings in the world happen in remote areas with little non-religious governance, if any. I’d suggest that its perpetrators stay there, but they ought to immigrate so they can be under the jurisdiction of people who see them for the degenerates they are.

You can’t do that in a free country

Immigration to the United States provides Americans with the opportunity to learn about new cultures and customs to which they may not have been exposed otherwise. This is especially important when those customs are considered illegal and/or a blatant violation of one’s human rights. According to this piece, the number of lawyers using cultural relativism as a defense is on the rise, thus more cross-cultural training for all lawyers may be in order.

The example is a woman from the African nation of Togo, sentenced to 27 years in prison for human trafficking. Her crime was bringing “at least 20 girls between the ages of 10 and 19 . . . on fraudulent visas to New Jersey, effectively enslaving them and forcing them to work in African hair braiding salons for no pay.” Fraud and child labor in a tightly braided package.

Her lawyer’s argument is that in Togo, cutting off phone access and holding passports are considered “protective.” As I see it, if it involves forcing someone to work for no money, especially when that person isn’t even old enough to register for Facebook, and they’re not even related to you by blood, it goes far above and beyond the call of protection. This woman in particular is alleged to have threatened the girls with religious retribution if they got out of line; clearly she wasn’t confident in her ability to make them trust her, even though she supposedly lifted them out of poverty.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse even for citizens, and it certainly shouldn’t be for new immigrants. If you are going to spend any amount of time in a foreign country, the onus is on you to learn the laws and etiquette lest you make an ass, if not a criminal, of yourself. My support of multiculturalism as a concept has very strong limits.

Before we consider giving trial lawyers any help in doing their jobs, we ought to determine the lines that, if crossed, would constitute a crime by any cultural standards. It may be necessary to integrate these lines into citizenship exams, just in case.

• intentional physical harm/death
• sexual coercion
• involuntary servitude
• threats and/or intimidation
• withholding of personal documentation
• fraud or falsification
• invasion of privacy

If cross-cultural training becomes standard-issue for trial lawyers, it might provide all those hapless sociology majors with employment outside of academia. Anything to lower the unemployment rate, I guess.

Big Brother is watching your hands

It may seem like something out of a dystopian novel for the government to have a centralized database of DNA or similar identifiers. I always favored it, to an extent, just because of how much faster it would be to convict people with it. But of course there will be problems with an initiative of this nature, as we are finding out with a fingerprint database being used to identify and deport illegal immigrants.

Arizona must be delighted at this, if not smug that they started it or irked that their homegrown solution will be overridden. One community that is wholly dissatisfied is San Francisco, who does not want their right to be a sanctuary city taken away. It was established in a previous column that immigration and its legality is under the jurisdiction of the federal government only. So even if this program didn’t exist, San Fran would only be a sanctuary city for so much longer. We won’t discuss federal vs. state/city rights in this case beyond that.

. . . immigrant groups have begun to speak up, telling the governor [Bill Ritter (D-CO)] in a letter last week that the initiative will make crime victims reluctant to cooperate with police “due to fear of being drawn into the immigration regime.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says this is not true, that only perpetrators of crimes will be printed. Having watched many, many episodes of Law & Order, I can think of no reason why a victim would be printed unless they committed a crime of their own. And I can’t picture Det. Olivia Benson looking into a victim’s eyes and softly asking, “Was the man who did this to you an illegal immigrant?”

Some people have expressed worry over the program’s potential to “sweep up” illegal immigrants who have committed relatively minor crimes, such as traffic infractions. Thus, I would recommend a tiered enforcement plan for immigrants who end up in the proverbial dustpan. The highest tier would be for felonies that would result in deportation; the lowest would be for the least relevant misdemeanors and would entail, I don’t know, maybe cutting off some of their benefits. Something to distinguish it from if it were committed by a citizen.

The point of this whole plan is to find out who has committed the crime of illegal immigration, which may not hurt people in most instances but can hurt an economy if left unchecked and is, either way, against the law. If you’re going to come into the country illegally, do everyone a favor and do everything else legally. I doubt ignorance of the law would be a good excuse here.

Our headquarters, our problem

Last week, we discussed a lawsuit being slapped against Pfizer by survivors and relatives of victims of allegedly nonconsensual drug trials conducted in Nigeria 14 years ago. The suit is being filed in the U.S. under the Alien Tort Statute, “which empowers federal judges to hear civil lawsuits filed by non-US citizens for violations of the ‘law of nations.’” Essentially, it has the power to turn a U.S. court into the World Court.

Out of the main logistical elements of a civil suit – where the plantiffs are from, where the defendant is headquartered, and where the violation took place – only the second one is American in this case. The plaintiffs wish to sue Pfizer in one of its own country’s courts because they fear that corruption in Nigeria will not work in their favor. Read chapter 3 of Amy Goodman’s The Exception to the Rulers, the one in which she covers the relationship between the Nigerian government and Chevron, and tell me they don’t have a point.

I suppose a violation of the “law of nations” would mean a violation of a law that, at least in essence, exists everywhere. However, each country has its own way of doling out and enforcing compensation for civil suits. This would not be a problem if we’re talking about the U.S. vs. Nigeria, but any other country that wishes to use this statute should be mindful of that fact, since their own country might do them one better, even if their target is based in the U.S.

One of Pfizer’s lawyers raised an objection to the use of the ATS in this case because of its potential impact on future cases: It “threatens to become an ever more expansive vehicle for burdensome litigation and crippling liability that imposes a kind of discriminatory tax on American companies doing business abroad.” In short, people in other countries will want to kick our companies’ asses. On the other hand, if those companies carry out practices like this one, I say, discriminate away. No sense in letting them get away with such an appalling lack of ethics. But use of the ATS should be limited to the most harmful violations of civil law, and not for something that annoys people without killing them.

We don’t need to discuss the accusations themselves because, frankly, they disgust me. You can read about it on your own by clicking the link. I will only say that the job for the lawyers of the plaintiffs is to find a smoking gun: Do any papers exist showing that the Pfizer people in Nigeria planned to test drugs on children without consent? Was this the result of a corporate directive? They should just go Erin Brockovich on their asses, with much less cleavage.