NEWSBYCOLIN STARGER

Sometimes good things come to those who wait. Three long months after the Supreme Court stayed the execution of Hank Skinner, the Court finally announced yesterday that it had accepted review of the Texas death-row prisoner's appeal. This is a victory for Skinner and his legal team, as well as the thousands of Change.org readers who signed the petition supporting Skinner's quest to prove his innocence through DNA testing.

Of course, as I've previously written, the Court's decision to hear Skinner's DNA appeal does not mean that the Court will actually decide whether Skinner gets the DNA test he seeks. That would be too easy. Instead, the Court will tackle a purely technical issue — whether Skinner correctly used a federal civil rights statute (rather than habeas corpus law) to ask for DNA testing. If the Court rules in Skinner's favor after it convenes next October, it simply means that another judge gets to hear his DNA appeal. No more is guaranteed.

Although the issue before the Court is highly technical, it still really matters. For starters, the grim fact is that if the Court rules against Skinner, there would be nothing to stop Texas from issuing another death warrant. Skinner could very quickly face lethal injection.  By contrast, victory in the Supreme Court would give Skinner and his supporters months more to fight for the DNA testing he deserves. What's more, any kind of victory in the Supreme Court would send a signal to Texas that the Court is directly concerned about justice in his case.

Was the New York Post's exclusive story earlier this week quality reporting or tabloid journalism?

According to the Post's scoop, "maybe thousands" of criminal convictions could be thrown into question by allegations of falsification of drug-test results by a technician in the NYPD's forensics laboratory.

Pretty hot stuff. Over the past few days, dozens of media outlets (examples here and here) have picked up the story, and the underlying plot has thickened. But now, a little criminal justice media criticism is in order.

In the original May 11 story, the Post cited unnamed sources stating that veteran NYPD forensics lab technician Mariem Megalla has been suspended, and that a Bronx drug trial was halted last week because she was supposed to testify. The NYPD apparently sent out an emergency e-mail last week to the city's district attorneys, warning them about the potential evidence disaster, and telling them to re-test all evidence in cases in which Megalla had done work. According to an anonymous source, this all prompted a "panicked meeting" on Monday between cops and DAs on how to deal with the "maybe thousands of cases that need to be looked at because of how long she's been in the department."

Sounds horrible, right? But having raised the specter of thousands of wrongful drug convictions, the story lost some of its raw sensationalism once the allegations against Megalla were actually detailed.

Most Americans have never heard of Curtis Flowers, but Dr. Alan Bean is working hard to change that. Dr Bean, Executive Director of Friends of Justice, previously helped break the Tulia drug sting and Jena 6 stories to national audiences. Now, Dr. Bean argues that another disturbing case of racial injustice deserves our attention. He is right.

Curtis Flowers is scheduled to stand trial on June 7 for a brutal 1996 quadruple-murder at Tardy's Furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. Amazingly, Flowers will be the first capital defendant in American history to go to trial six times on the same evidence. Flowers has already been convicted and sentenced to death three times (in 1997, 1999, and 2004). These convictions were all overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court on account of prosecutorial misconduct that deprived Flowers of fair trials. Since then, Flowers has twice gone to trial (in 2007 and 2008) and twice faced hung juries that could not reach a unanimous verdict.

What makes this case so hard to resolve? Unfortunately, it's all about race.

Flowers is African-American, and three of the victims he is accused of murdering were white. For the most part, the prosecutor and white community of Winona, Mississippi are convinced of Flowers' guilt. On the other hand, the African-American community regard Flowers, the popular lead singer of a gospel quartet that performed regularly in the town, as somebody utterly incapable of perpetrating the vicious murders.

The actual evidence of Flower's guilt or innocence is equivocal, and almost entirely circumstantial.

Is it hypocritical to support the idea of civil disobedience while claiming to respect the law? Given my admiration for figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, I used to think this was an easy question. After becoming a parent, though, I realized that there's a surprisingly fine line between sit-in and a tantrum. It's hard to teach a child to both respect and question authority.

But should it be a crime to teach your child about civil disobedience?

Renee Lynn Espeland learned the answer the hard way this month when she allowed her 12-year-old daughter, Frankie Hughes, to participate in a nonviolent sit-in in Des Moines, Iowa. The sit-in occurred in Senator Tom Harkin's office on April 7. On that day, mom and daughter — both members of the Catholic Worker community — were protesting war funding as part of the Peaceable Assembly Campaign. (Organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence, the campaign seeks to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and end Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.)

When cops came to clear the office, some protesters refused to leave, and young Frankie decided to join their "die-in." For her actions, she received a trespassing charge. But that wasn't all. The next morning, cops served her mom with a misdemeanor ticket for "Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor." That's what a mother gets, apparently, for allowing a child act with moral conviction.

Should former NYPD officer Patrick Pogan go to prison? That's the question a jury of Pogan's peers will face when they consider whether he assaulted bicyclist Christopher Long and proceeded to file false criminal charges against the cyclist in July 2008.

Perhaps a case like this — a police assaulting a bicyclist? — sounds odd. But for the uninitiated, Critical Mass rides, which Long was participating in at the time, are no ordinary cycling events. They started in San Francisco in the early 90s as a way to blend public-space protest, kinetic art and environmentally clean fun. Today, Critical Mass rides are a monthly event in cities across the globe (generally the last Friday of every month). This Friday scheduling constitutes the event's only formal organization, which otherwise proceeds collectively without leaders, pre-planned routes, or undue attention to traffic regulations. ("We're not blocking traffic, we are traffic!" goes the slogan.) I've peddled in my fair share of rides and can testify that a great Critical Mass is a glorious animal running free in streets.

They can also be quite provoking for cops. Ex-Officer Pogan's trial, for example, comes hot on the heels of news that New York City has agreed to pay $98,000 to five riders the NYPD harassed and attacked during the March 2007 Critical Mass.

Given its anarchic pedigree, it's probably no surprise that the NYPD has a long history of tension with Critical Mass. It started when the NYPD arrested hundreds of cyclists on the Friday before the 2004 Republican National Convention. That year, activists decried these arrests and vowed to keep riding. Since then, ongoing conflict and arrests have made such events decidedly more tense. On the one hand, cops accuse riders of snarling traffic and breaking the law. On the other, riders have charged cops with unnecessary brutality, cover-ups and outright lies.

Video evidence, though, seems to favor the free-wheeling protesters' claims.

Confession time: I enjoy blogging on this page, but the sheer volume of the required reading is a nightmare. I try to keep up, I really do. Everyday I scan newspapers and blogs and star the latest reports and cases, all in an effort to stay hip. But our vast criminal justice system never rests and dozens of new stories of injustice emerge every week. The information overload sometimes makes me want to live in a cave far, far away from WiFi hotspots and 4G networks. Until that happy cave time, however, I just read compulsively. It's hardly right even to call it reading, more like information consuming.

So yesterday there I was, frantically consuming information, when the strangest thing happened.  My eyes were stopped dead in their tracks by a single sentence. I had in my hands a copy of the Vera Institute of Justice's latest report — It's About Time: Aging, Prisoners, Increasing Costs, and Geriatric Release. I had figured I knew the basic deal before cracking the report open. Long sentences plus harsh parole policies equal too many old prisoners. Soaring medical costs bad. Therefore, save money and let the geriatrics out.

Indeed, the report gave pretty much that expected story as I quickly flipped the pages. Then comes this sentence: "Although most 50-year-olds are not considered elderly, the aging process appears to accelerate for people who are incarcerated." I stopped. The aging process accelerates? Come again? I slowed down and read the rest of the paragraph. Apparently, the stressors of prison life — separation from family and friends, the prospect of living a large portion of one's life in confinement and the non-stop threat of victimization — actually causes the physiological process of aging to speed up. The consensus view is that "an incarcerated person's physiological age may exceed his or her chronological age."

The thousands of Change.org members who signed our petition supporting DNA testing for Texas death row prisoner Hank Skinner should feel proud about how they'v helped put his case in the national spotlight. Now that the Supreme Court has stayed his execution -- in a last-minute move yesterday -- the national media is finally paying attention.

But don't let the latest developments (or the media coverage) fool you. Skinner's bid to secure DNA testing to prove his innocence is far from over. To understand why, it's vital to understand in plain English what the Supreme Court has -- and has not -- done.

In its order, the Court said that it's halting the execution while it considers whether to accept review of Skinner's appeal. In other words, the Court has not actually decided whether it will review the legal issue in Skinner's appeal. The stay simply stops Texas from executing Skinner while the Court makes up its mind. If the Court decides not to review Skinner's case, the execution goes forward automatically.

To put this situation in perspective, consider that the Court receives thousands of petitions like Skinner's (technically called petitions for a writ of certiorari) every year. Out of these, the Court can only choose to review a tiny percentage of these appeals. Getting the Supreme Court to accept review is thus extremely difficult -- and rare. Every year, dozens of prisoners are executed without the Court ever looking at their cases. Last year, for example, 52 prisoners died in the death chamber -- and 24 of these men were executed in  Skinner's home state of Texas.

But while the overall odds are low, there's still a very real chance that the Supreme Court will accept review of Skinner's case. Nobody knows exactly when the Court will decide on this critical preliminary question, but it's likely we'll know in the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday, Matt reported that state prison populations have decreased for the first time in 38 years. So should opponents of mass incarceration uncork the champagne and cheer the news?

Maybe we can take a quick celebratory swig, but let's not get carried away. The fact is that some of the downward trend has simply occurred because state governments are broke, and trying to cut costs by shrinking inflated prison rolls. Relying on continued economic misery to effect prison reform would be bad karma and bad strategy. Instead, activists need to dismantle the myths that really sustain mass incarceration.

Let's start with the the myth that prisons make us safer. The widespread and persistent belief in this myth is among the biggest hurdles confronting opponents of mass incarceration. People fear crime and violence and the idea of locking up "bad people" has primal appeal. More perniciously, it can't be denied that rates of violent crime are at an all-time low -- a fact that coincides with the all-time high of our prison population (2.4 million souls behind bars). Doesn't this correlation prove that mass incarceration has worked?

Not by a long shot.

I first learned about Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1995 after reading Live from Death Row, which remains for me the sharpest and most well-observed critique of the American prison system I've ever encountered. In the 15 years since its publication, Mumia has continued his prodigious and profound journalistic work under the most oppressive conditions imaginable. His latest book, Jailhouse Lawyers, is another must-read for any activist seeking to understand how law actually operates in America's "hidden, dank dungeons."

But while his journalism deserves more attention, Mumia remains best-known in the mainstream media as the man convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981.

Mumia has steadfastly maintained his innocence over the years. Unfortunately, DNA is not available in Mumia's case, so no side will ever have scientific proof of his innocence or guilt. The full story behind the evidence that exists is complicated, and I recognize that reasonable minds can differ on its conclusions. Still, though, I believe most credible evidence supports Mumia's claim of innocence. (In reaching this conclusion, I've found the tireless reporting of Linn Washington -- who's covered the story since 1981 -- particularly persuasive.)

I'm not alone in this view, either. Mumia has the backing of many prominent supporters and thousands of grassroots activists. And now, activists are calling on the Department of Justice to undertake an investigation into his case. They hope to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder on April 26, when they'll urge him to investigate the extensive history of civil rights violations Mumia had suffered even before the time of the crime, and through his trial until today.

Mumia's efforts to obtain release or a new trial are bitterly opposed by  Read More »

When I was 16, I randomly spied my high school social studies teacher in a crowd outside a Grateful Dead concert. Surprise turned to awe when I witnessed Mr. F suddenly bolt into the street and give the bird to a Berkeley police cruiser stuck hapless in a sea of tie dye. Mr. F ran off before I could say anything, and days later he flatly denied having raising his middle finger at authorities. While this disappointed me at the time, now I suspect he taught a valuable lesson: it may be righteous fun to flip off the cops, but don't brag or linger if you want to get away with it.

Apparently, Robert Ekas never had a Mr. F in his life. The Oregon man made news recently for the federal lawsuit he launched following a one-finger salute controversy. Apparently, Ekas repeatedly made the obscene gesture at Clackamas County police while driving. Cops took offense, pulled him over and then wrote up some bogus traffic citations to teach him a lesson. The citations were subsequently dismissed -- and now Elks has sued, claiming official violation of his First Amendment rights.

As a purely legal matter, Ekas is quite correct. The First Amendment protects offensive non-verbal speech, and citizens have every right to express their dislike of police. So long as Ekas' gesticulations were not threatening or inciting chaos, the police had no legitimate grounds to pull him over or arrest him.

But though Ekas may technically have a case, he's hardly a poster boy for free speech. Indeed, he bears a more striking resemblance to the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy than to any genuine political dissident. In this interview with local news, for example, Ekas actually uses Latin in a bit of nerdy flourish -- digitus impudicus -- to describe his act, but he fails to say anything about real problems posed by police violence that could meaningfully justify his dissent.