Prosecutorial lust for death

I have railed against the barbaric practice in the US of having the death penalty, something that many countries have dispensed with. But the existence of the death penalty also brings with it a set of perverse incentives for prosecutors. If they have a so-called death penalty case, one in which the district attorney or other body decides merits the death penalty, then the prosecutors in that case are also evaluated on whether they are able to get the jury to apply that penalty.

In most death penalty cases, there are two phases. The first is to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. If the person is found guilty, the next phase is to decide whether the person is to be executed. The same jury makes both decisions, and it is considered a sign of success if a prosecutor can get a jury to vote for death and is good for their career. So they try everything they can to ensure that the jury that is empaneled will be willing to vote for death if a guilty verdict is reached.
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Gaetz quits

Trump’s controversial nominee for attorney general has withdrawn his name for the position. This took me by surprise since just this morning the House ethics committee was deadlocked on whether to release their report on the various allegations of sexual misconduct, some involving minors, that have plagued him for years. I thought that move would clear the way for his nomination to go through.

In his statement, Gaetz gave the usual ‘for the good of the country’ pablum.

After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.
…

The announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl. The justice department launched its own inquiry of the allegations but declined to bring charges, and Gaetz has consistently denied the claims.

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This should be good. The Onion wants to buy Infowars

Infowars was the site where Alex Jones promoted all his conspiracy theories. Probably the most hateful one was where he claimed that the massacre of 20 first grade children and six teachers at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 never happened but that all the family members and friends and colleagues seen grieving were ‘crisis actors’, advancing the cause of gun control. Not only did this cause those families great pain, but Jones’s lunatic followers took it upon themselves to seek out and harass them, with some of them having to move repeatedly to escape them.

They sued Jones and won $1.5 billion in damages that required Jones to sell off his assets. He tried to declare bankruptcy to evade it but the courts ruled that this maneuver was not allowed.
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Why would anyone own dozens of watches?

As part of the defamation verdict against him Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to hand over his assets to pay the amount he owes to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

Rudy Giuliani has relinquished dozens of watches and a Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148m defamation judgment against him, his lawyer said.

Joseph Cammarata said in a letter filed late on Friday in Manhattan federal court that the trove of watches and a ring were delivered by FedEx to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, in the morning.

The 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 was turned over at an address in Hialeah, Florida, and an undisclosed amount of funds from Giuliani’s Citibank accounts were also surrendered to the two women who won the judgment, according to the letter.
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Stories that make me want to throw things

In films and TV shows, you sometimes see people who are really angry or upset smash things by throwing them across the room or sweeping them off tables. I have never done such a thing or know people who have done so and felt that it may be artistic license taken by directors to show extreme anger. But the most recent story from ProPublica about yet another woman who dies because of the abortion bans was so infuriating that it made me better understand why someone might do something like that.

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.
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DeSantis anti-abortion effort gets smacked down by judge

Florida has an important vote on election day, and that is Amendment 4 that seeks to protect the right to abortion. Florida Republicans had pushed through a law banning abortions after six-weeks, which is effectively a total ban. The Amendment seeks to allow abortions until fetal viability, which is around 22-24 weeks. (I have written about this before.)

Supporters of Amendment 4 had put out the following ad.

Florida’s health department issued an order to TV stations not to air the ads because it was false, since they claim that the law does permit abortions in medical emergencies. But doctors are fearful of doing so under almost any circumstances because the law about exceptions is vague. If TV stations aired the ad, they were threatened with a second-degree misdemeanor, “which carries a sentence of up to 60 days imprisoned or a fine of up to $500.”
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What are these people afraid of?

Elon Musk made an announcement that he is moving the headquarters of Space X from California to Texas. Fine. It’s his company and he can do what he damn well likes with it, although uprooting the lives of the many employees because of his personal pique about some public policy is the action of an entitled jerk.

But what struck me was the reason he gave for the move.

He called a new law signed Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change the “final straw.”

“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk wrote.

What exactly are these people protecting their children from? If children are identifying their gender differently in school but not telling their parents about it, that says to me that the problem lies at home, not at school, that their children are afraid of what their parents might do. Experiencing doubt and uncertainty about one’s gender identity must undoubtedly be very difficult for children to deal with and if they feel the need to seek a school teacher or counselor to discuss this, then requiring schools to inform parents will only result in the children not talking to counselors and instead seeking someone who may be a lot less responsible or qualified.
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The challenge of lab grown meat

Commenter birgerjohansson was kind enough to send me this link about how the UK has become the first country in the EU to approve the use of lab grown meat as pet food.

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.

The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.

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Getting religion back in schools

Religious conservatives in the US are determined to get Christianity back into the school curriculum. For the longest time, they were on the retreat as the US Supreme Court pushed back against attempts to use public schools as vehicles to teach religious ideas, arguing that the First Amendment to the constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” implied that no agency of the state could show preference to one religion over another or to religion over no religion. Thus not only was teaching the Bible excluded but even religious ideas such as intelligent design creationism could not be taught in science classes as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
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Supreme Court rejects Sackler deal

The US Supreme Court rejected the bankruptcy deal that had been negotiated by the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharmaceuticals that was responsible for aggressively and falsely marketing opioids to large numbers of doctors and their patients, resulting in the massive opioid epidemic that we currently have in the US that has devastated families and communities. The drug was heavily marketed to doctors as having low risk of addiction, which was not true.

The Sacklers had brought the settlement in front of a friendly bankruptcy judge that effectively shielded much of the vast personal fortunes they had accumulated and instead passed the cost on to the company, which has filed for bankruptcy, on friendly terms, while not having to admit guilt and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. For more details on why the bankruptcy deal was so bad, see here.
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