An Innocent Man Deserves a Hearing

Ohio.com
An Innocent Man Deserves a Hearing

As Carrie Wood, an attorney for Noling from the Ohio Innocence Project, puts it, “Someone who has been sentenced to a term of probation on the streets has more protection than someone sentenced to death.” When non-capital defendants are denied post-conviction DNA testing, they have access to appellate court review. That is not so for capital defendants. They are shut out. Which means that state law does not provide equal protection to the range of defendants seeking DNA testing.

What since has been discovered is how the confessions were coerced, an investigator for the Portage County prosecutor’s office using familiar and nefarious interrogation tactics. He started with the 16-year-old. The friends have recanted their testimony, one before the trial began.

The Authoritarian Islamic turn of Erdogan in Turkey

WSJ
“There was a young man from Ankara …”

Teasing a certain sensitive authoritarian with the President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition.

“The very possibility of putting someone on trial for being rude about Erdogan is as illiberal or rather anti-liberal as these things come,” Mr. Murray wrote in the Spectator magazine. And so a few weeks ago he launched a devilish protest, the President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition, the ruder the poem (limericks preferred), the better. His aim, he said, was to contrast Britain with both Turkey and Germany—and to show the futility of authoritarian efforts to ban criticism.

Al-Monitor.com
What’s left of Turkish democracy?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stepped up his no-holds-barred offensive on Turkey’s sagging democratic traditions and institutions.

The option of getting the votes needed in the current parliament "could develop from the cooperation with the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), whose leader, Devlet Bahceli, has lately been flirting with the AKP to suppress the political rebels in his own party. Or it could develop from the jailing of a few dozen deputies of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), for links with terrorism and running a mini-election for the emptied seats, which the AKP is likely to win.

"The second option, yet another early general election, is what those in Ankara consider possible also. Accordingly, early elections at the right time — perhaps this autumn — could push both the pro-Kurdish HDP and the nationalist MHP below the 10% threshold, giving the AKP more than enough seats to present its new constitution, and the 'presidential system,' overnight."

Florida weighs whether to overturn death sentences for nearly 400 inmates

WP - Mark Berman
Florida weighs whether to overturn death sentences for nearly 400 inmates

Florida has more death row inmates than nearly any other state in the country, and it remains a bastion of capital punishment as fewer executions are carried out nationwide. But after a frantic few months that saw Florida’s system of imposing death sentences struck down and rewritten, it remains an open question what will happen to the hundreds who remain on the state’s death row — and how much longer any of them will stay there.

On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could lead to nearly 400 death-row prisoners receiving life sentences, a move experts say could be the country’s single biggest jettisoning of death sentences in years.

The Rapid Pace of Genetic Engineering

The first full human genome was sequenced in 2007.

We are thus now in the midst of a revolution in genetic information and technology as well as a revolution in the internet and cultural information.

WP - Joel Achenbach
Pondering ‘what it means to be human’ on the frontier of gene editing

“CRISPR is not the first method for manipulating genes, but it’s by far the cheapest, easiest, most versatile. Its many attributes have generated incredible excitement as well as apprehension. While the approach hasn’t been applied yet in humans for therapeutic purposes, that’s on the horizon. So are worrisome scenarios involving genetic enhancements and purely cosmetic applications.”

Pondering ‘what it means to be human’ on the frontier of gene editing

WP - Joel Achenbach
Pondering ‘what it means to be human’ on the frontier of gene editing

“CRISPR is not the first method for manipulating genes, but it’s by far the cheapest, easiest, most versatile. Its many attributes have generated incredible excitement as well as apprehension. While the approach hasn’t been applied yet in humans for therapeutic purposes, that’s on the horizon. So are worrisome scenarios involving genetic enhancements and purely cosmetic applications.”

Medical ethics may help lead the the abolishment of the death penalty.

From the Hippocratic Oath:

I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.

AMA Declaration of Professional Responsibility:

Preamble

Never in the history of human civilization has the well-being of each individual been so inextricably linked to that of every other. Plagues and pandemics respect no national borders in a world of global commerce and travel. Wars and acts of terrorism enlist innocents as combatants and mark civilians as targets. Advances in medical science and genetics, while promising great good, may also be harnessed as agents of evil. The unprecedented scope and immediacy of these universal challenges demand concerted action and response by all. As physicians, we are bound in our response by a common heritage of caring for the sick and the suffering. Through the centuries, individual physicians have fulfilled this obligation by applying their skills and knowledge competently, selflessly, and at times heroically. Today, our profession must reaffirm its historical commitment to combat natural and man-made assaults on the health and well-being of humankind. Only by acting together across geographic and ideological divides can we overcome such powerful threats. Humanity is our patient.

Declaration

We, the members of the world community of physicians, solemnly commit ourselves to:

1. Respect human life and the dignity of every individual.
2. Refrain from supporting or committing crimes against humanity and condemn all such acts.
3. Treat the sick and injured with competence and compassion and without prejudice.
4. Apply our knowledge and skills when needed, though doing so may put us at risk.
5. Protect the privacy and confidentiality of those for whom we care and breach that confidence only when keeping it would seriously threaten their health and safety or that of others.
6. Work freely with colleagues to discover, develop, and promote advances in medicine and public health that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.
7. Educate the public polity about present and future threats to the health of humanity.
8. Advocate for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.
9. Teach and mentor those who follow us for they are the future of our caring profession.

We make these promises solemnly, freely, and upon our personal and professional honor.

CNN -- Ralph Ellis, Eliott C. McLaughlin and Dave Alsup
Pfizer moves to block its drugs from being used in lethal injections

"Pfizer makes its products solely to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve. We strongly object to the use of any of our products in the lethal injection process for capital punishment.

"States have to decide: Are they going to try to break the law in order to carry out executions, are they going to rely on questionable compounding sources or are they going to change their method of executions or abandon the death penalty altogether?" he said.

Florida weighs whether to overturn death sentences for nearly 400 inmates

WP - Mark Berman
Florida weighs whether to overturn death sentences for nearly 400 inmates

Florida has more death row inmates than nearly any other state in the country, and it remains a bastion of capital punishment as fewer executions are carried out nationwide. But after a frantic few months that saw Florida’s system of imposing death sentences struck down and rewritten, it remains an open question what will happen to the hundreds who remain on the state’s death row — and how much longer any of them will stay there.

On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could lead to nearly 400 death-row prisoners receiving life sentences, a move experts say could be the country’s single biggest jettisoning of death sentences in decades.