21 September 20
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21 September 20
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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva | The Extradition of Julian Assange Would Undermine Freedom of Speech
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Guardian UK
Lula da Silva writes: "The British courts will soon be deciding the fate of the Australian journalist Julian Assange, a man who has been unjustly charged as a criminal. Assange committed no crime. He is a champion of the cause of freedom."
READ MORE
Supporters of the activist group Shut Down DC march to the apartment of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in Washington on Saturday. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Revealed: Evidence Shows Huge Mail Slowdowns After Trump Ally Took Over
Sam Levine and Alvin Chang, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The United States Postal Service saw a severe decline in the rate of on-time delivery of first-class mail after Louis DeJoy took over as postmaster general."
READ MORE
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to members of the media on September 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
It's Not Hypocrisy: Mitch McConnell's Machinations Are Something Far More Degrading.
Lili Loofbourow, Slate
Loofbourow writes: "There shouldn't have been any mystery about what Mitch McConnell - of all people - would do when a Supreme Court vacancy opened up six weeks before Election Day of 2020."
Mitch McConnell’s machinations are something far more degrading.
was watching the president of the United States suggest to a mostly maskless crowd that a Democratic congresswoman had married her brother when the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. The shock of her death sledgehammered a country teetering on an ugly and desperate edge. It came in waves. It wasn’t merely the loss to the country, or the sadness that a champion of equal rights had died. Nor was it the fact that an increasingly corrupt Republican Party is very close to forcing through the judicial supermajority it needs in order to lock in minority rule and overturn American women’s right to reproductive choice. (You will no doubt hear often in the coming weeks that, of the five conservative Supreme Court justices, four were nominated by presidents who had lost the popular vote.) There was a flashback to the contempt and grief Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing aroused in so many appalled onlookers. And then there was the dread of realizing that a citizenry breaking—financially, politically, even cognitively—under five different kinds of instability was going to have to endure more. We have been in a bad way for a long time, but this is the hurricane on top of the wildfire that follows the earthquake.
What’s enraging is that we shouldn’t be here. We have institutions and norms and precedents, so what should happen next is almost absurdly plain. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made his thinking on the subject quite clear back in 2016, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, nine months before the election. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” There shouldn’t have been any mystery about what Mitch McConnell—of all people—would do when a Supreme Court vacancy opened up six weeks (rather than nine months) before Election Day of 2020.
And there wasn’t. Shortly after Ginsburg’s death was announced, McConnell declared his intentions: Trump’s nominee would receive a vote in the Senate, and though he left the timing slightly unclear, he has no intention of letting the will of the American people (who have already started voting) determine what should happen. He made quick work of the optimists on Twitter suggesting that he surely wouldn’t be so hellbent on total power that he’d risk destroying the country by breaking the precedent he himself had articulated. Wrong. He would. And anyone who took him at his word when he rejected Merrick Garland’s nomination was made a fool when he reversed himself on the question of whether (to quote the man himself) “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”
I want to pause here to note, humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him at his word to fools. I mention that not because it “matters” in any sense McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation’s decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated—a society depends on some degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.
Many of us are coping with that lacerating redefinition by knowingly rolling our eyes. Ginsburg’s death hurts, but more than one strain of political grief is operative. This is why so many political reactions at present seem to orbit around the question of whether an unwanted outcome was unexpected. “And you’re surprised?” is a frequent response to some new instance of Trumpian corruption. This brand of cynicism has spread, quite understandably: It’s an outlook that provides some cognitive shelter in a situation that—having historically been at least somewhat rule-bound—has one side shredding the rules and cheering at how much they’re winning. Folks who at one point gave Republican declarations of principle the benefit of the doubt (I include myself) feel like chumps now. Conversely, the cynical prognosticators who used to seem crabbed and paranoid just keep getting proven right. Whatever the worst thing you imagine McConnell doing might be, he can usually trump it.
Just by way of example: A former White House official told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer for a piece in April that McConnell reassured donors that he would install a Supreme Court justice for Trump regardless of how close to the election Ginsburg’s death might be. He apparently referred to the prospect of replacing Ginsburg in the event of her death as “our October surprise.” In 2019, McConnell gleefully tweeted a photo of some tombstones, one of which had Merrick Garland’s name on it—hours after a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 people died. He has said that stopping Garland’s nomination is the proudest moment of his career. It’s uniquely painful that this is the person architecting Ginsburg’s replacement in violation of his own contemptible theories.
I am not saying anything new here. But what I am interested in, because I think it must be understood, and because the stakes of it have never been higher, is what McConnellizing does, affectively, to so many American citizens. What it feels like, in other words. We are overdue for a real reckoning with what it means to be degraded by our own leadership. And make no mistake: It is degrading when people lie to you openly and obviously. Leaving the polity aside for a moment, it’s the kind of emotion we humans aren’t great at coping with. Sometimes we react by snorting at anyone who expects any better (that is again the “you’re surprised?” cynicism). But if you can’t cover it with cynicism, it simply hurts.
Shall we experience being degraded together? Here is the justification McConnell offered shortly after Ginsburg died for violating his own rule:
In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.
This last sentence—which you will recognize as the heart of McConnell’s argument—is a lie. But before I supply the dull fact proving that it is a lie, I’d like us to pause and notice the extent to which whatever I am about to say will not factor into how you feel reading the above. Whatever I say, it will not provide you relief for me to demonstrate that this tortured reasoning McConnell supplied is horseshit. You are already meant to understand it as horseshit. That’s the insult. That’s where one part of what I guess we could call patriotic pain comes from.
OK, now for the dull facts: What McConnell says in that statement is not true. In 1988 (an election year!), the Democratically controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy—President Ronald Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court. McConnell tried to circumvent this reality by crafting his new rule to exclude any vacancy “that arose” in an election year (Lewis Powell retired in late 1987).
Does an exercise like this leave us anywhere? I think it might. I think we have a habit of misnaming political experiences in ways that help us metabolize loss. I think, for example, that we have a bad habit of calling McConnell’s double standard—which will be devastating to a country already struggling through various legitimacy crises—“hypocrisy.” And sure, step onto Twitter after Lindsey Graham also unabashedly went back on his own word and you’ll see many a person rolling their eyes at anyone pointing out that Republicans are hypocrites, as if it matters. One can sympathize with the eye-rollers—of course hypocrisy doesn’t matter. But that’s mostly because hypocrisy isn’t the word for what this is. Hypocrisy is a mild failing. It applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to for their own good; it does not apply to parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance money while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true.
When Ginsburg died, those whose rights she championed were caught in a cruel double bind. Raging against the indecent replacement effort feels wrong, because raging before it happens can feel like implicitly conceding. Treating the matter dispassionately, on the other hand, sensibly pointing out that McConnell has stated clearly what should happen, means granting him a good-faith reading he does not deserve. Thanks to the swiftness with which he declared his intentions, we are no longer under any obligation to attempt the latter. All that remains is to let honest anger do what it must.
It will not help to call the leadership we have right now hypocrites; they will not care, and I doubt the charge will motivate the people who need to be motivated much. But insofar as our own reactions are concerned—and while we think about how to counter an obvious and ugly attempt to steal the Supreme Court seat of a feminist champion of equal rights even as Americans have already started voting—it may help to register the lies they tell you as the calculated insults to your intelligence and to your citizenship and to your country that they are. Fully witnessing and registering insults and degradation is more painful than sneering that you aren’t surprised. But I’ll be blunt: People are more willing to fight people who insult and degrade them than they are to fight mere “hypocrites.”
We deserve better than this. I confess I had no personal feelings about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing; my admiration and gratitude were purely professional and civic. But I found this quote—a response to Irin Carmon asking her how she’d like to be remembered—deeply moving: “Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.”
Human rights advocate Durvi Martinez demands ICE release their fellow Migrant Justice leader Victor Diaz on May 1, 2016. In March, Martinez was deported to Mexico, where they died of Covid. (photo: Migrant Justice)
Targeted, Imprisoned, Deported, Dead: How ICE's Detention Can Be Deadly to Migrants
Arvind Dilawar, In These Times
Excerpt: "Human rights advocate Durvi Martinez was first detained by Vermont State Police. Then ICE stepped in."
urvi Martinez left Mexico after experiencing “intense and violent discrimination” as a transgender woman, says Will Lambek, a staff member with Migrant Justice, a labor union for dairy farmworkers. Martinez, then 27, arrived in Vermont in 2015 and worked on a dairy farm, joining Migrant Justice after attending one of its worker assemblies. Soon, Martinez (they/ them) was involved in Migrant Justice’s many marches and actions in defense of undocumented immigrants, the backbone of Vermont’s dairy industry.
“One of their first marches with the organization was following the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrest of a Migrant Justice leader named Victor Diaz,” Lambek says. “Durvi participated in and helped to lead that march, and that was ultimately successful in getting Victor released — and he’s still in the country and remains a Migrant Justice leader today.”
Martinez would have a different fate, one that illustrates how ICE perpetuates transphobic violence and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic in the United States and abroad — and the complicity of local police in doing so.
Martinez became part of Vermont’s indispensable, yet extremely persecuted, undocumented dairy workforce. According to the 2019 book Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont, one in seven Vermont dairy workers are Latinx migrants, 90% of whom are thought to be undocumented. Because more than 94% of Vermont residents are white, and a significant number of Vermont dairy farms are within 25 miles of the Canadian border, Latinx farmworkers are highly visible and vulnerable targets for ICE.
Migrant Justice and other immigrants’ rights groups successfully pushed for the passage of the Fair and Impartial Policing policy (FIP) in 2017, to help defend Vermont’s undocumented population. In theory, FIP prevents local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities, with exceptions for public and officer safety.
On January 11, Martinez was arrested by Vermont State Police for allegedly driving under the influence. A Vermont State Police officer then alerted U.S. Customs and Border Protection about Martinez, based on “the totality of the circumstances,” says Adam Silverman, public information officer with the state police. Those circumstances, Silverman acknowledges, were simply Martinez’s two previous border-crossing arrests. ICE took custody of Martinez the next day.
Martinez was then held in men’s prisons despite being a trans woman, first by the U.S. Marshals at Northwest State Correctional Facility in Swanton, Vt., then by ICE at Strafford County Corrections in Dover, N.H.
John Curtis, a supervisory deputy with the Marshals, says the policy is not to imprison trans people in facilities that don’t match their gender identity, but “I don’t know the specifics on her, or him, or however she identifies,” regarding Martinez. ICE failed to respond to In These Times’ request for comment but has touted two prison units dedicated to trans women. Most trans prisoners, however, are held with the general population, where harassment, assault and mistreatment have been reported.
According to Migrant Justice, at some point after March 10— the start of Martinez’s ICE imprisonment — Martinez requested a “credible fear screening,” the first step in the process of seeking asylum from transphobic violence in Mexico. But before Martinez could secure an immigration attorney, ICE was moving ahead with deportation. Lambek thinks the speed of Martinez’s deportation could be linked to the pandemic. During that time, ICE was under pressure to reduce the number of people it imprisoned because social distancing is impossible in prisons. Rather than release people to sponsors, ICE chose to rush deportations. At most, ICE gave Martinez 10 days to pursue asylum. They were deported March 20.
That fear of Covid-19 was ultimately realized: On July 1, Martinez died of the coronavirus in Mexico. According to Lambek, Martinez was first denied care at a public facility before their family was forced to seek treatment at a private hospital.
As may have been the case with Martinez, critics warn that deportations are exporting the virus to other countries. The United States deported more than 100 people with Covid-19 to Guatemala, for example, between mid-March and mid-April. The U.S. Marshals Service says it wasn’t aware of any reported cases of Covid-19 at Northwest State Correctional Facility, but the Vermont Department of Corrections reports 45 positive tests at the prison as of August 31. An administrator at ICE’s Strafford County facility reports two positive cases as of August 12.
Whether Martinez contracted Covid while imprisoned in the United States, on the forced journey to Mexico, or while in Mexico, Migrant Justice believes the possibility that Martinez contracted Covid outside the United States does not absolve ICE nor the Vermont State Police.
“Migrant Justice holds ICE responsible for Durvi’s death, even if they didn’t contract Covid in detention,” Lambek says. “Both the conditions of detention and their deportation certainly led to their contraction of the disease and, ultimately, their death. And to the extent that Vermont State Police were proactively involved in alerting ICE to Durvi’s arrest and transferring Durvi to ICE’s custody, in violation of their own policy — that culpability extends to the state police as well.”
Lisa Brown photographed at her home in Killeen, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2020. (photo: Matthew Busch/Intercept)
Trump Prepares to Execute Christopher Vialva for a Crime He Committed as a Teenager
Liliana Segura, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Vialva is the first Black man to face execution during Trump's killing spree. He is set to die on September 24."
isa Brown was visiting federal death row for the first time when she caught a glimpse of a man she’d seen only on the news. He was pale and recognizably ex-military, with a basic training buzzcut. It was Timothy McVeigh.
“Oh my God, he’s real. That was the first thing that came to my mind,” she said. Until that moment, the man known as the Oklahoma City bomber was a kind of monstrous abstraction; a persona whose crimes were too overwhelming to absorb. But at that moment, seeing him in a visitation room with his attorneys as Brown walked toward the restroom, he looked like any other man in a prison jumpsuit. “I remember that was just really shocking to me.”
Brown was at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, to see her son Christopher Vialva. He had only recently arrived on death row. In June 1999, just over a month after his 19th birthday, Vialva and a group of younger teenagers had carjacked and killed a young married couple in Fort Hood, Texas, shooting them and setting their car on fire. Vialva’s co-defendant, Brendan Bernard, was 18 at the time. He too was sentenced to die.
Vialva and Bernard were the first people to get a federal death sentence in the Western District of Texas. It was six years after Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill expanded the federal death penalty, and new death sentences were climbing. Although all the cases involved coldblooded killings, they were not the kinds of terrorist acts or mass murders that Americans might have associated with federal death row. Several of the condemned were strikingly young. Vialva told his mother that one man had spotted him in the recreation yard in Terre Haute and shaken his head. “Damn, man,” he said. “They’re putting babies in here.”
McVeigh was executed in June 2001. His death left 20 men awaiting execution. Thirteen were Black, including Vialva and Bernard. In a clemency petition for Juan Raul Garza, one of a handful of Latinos on death row, lawyers argued that the federal death penalty showed clear evidence of racial bias. But the U.S. Department of Justice rejected the claim. Garza was executed eight days after McVeigh.
In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, a Black man named Louis Jones Jr. became the third person executed by the George W. Bush administration. Brown remembers feeling that it was tragic and unfair. Jones, a former Army Ranger who raped and murdered a white soldier named Tracie McBride, had served in the Gulf War and returned with severe psychological problems. Testimony at his 1996 trial revealed that he had begun drinking heavily and gotten divorced. His ex-wife said he had become “very crazed … panicked … spinning out of control.”
Brown grew up in a military family; she was “an Air Force brat” who enlisted in the Army as soon as she graduated high school. The description of Jones reminded her of one of her exes, a pilot who returned from deployment “so messed up.” “We were promised when we served that they would take care of us for the rest of our life, as far as our medical and stuff,” she said. “And that is the furthest thing from reality.” It was disturbing to her that Jones had been shown no compassion when it came to his mental health issues. “He served his country and they damaged him,” she said.
The executions in Terre Haute stopped after Jones’s death. Although capital prosecutions continued under the Obama administration — and his DOJ tried to set at least one execution date in 2010 — drug shortages and lethal injection litigation kept the killings on hold for years. But after Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, the writing was on the wall. Executions would surely restart. It was only a question of when.
Last year, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced the first federal execution dates in 16 years. All of the men had been convicted of crimes against children and the elderly, which Barr emphasized in his announcement. “And so I’m like, OK, they’re going through all the child murderers first. Right?” Brown said. “Because that’s easier for society to swallow.” She told her son not to worry yet. “Little did I know.”
On July 31, following the executions of Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Purkey, and Dustin Honken, Barr announced two new dates. The first was for William LeCroy on September 22. The second was for Vialva. In an email, Vialva described how he was informed by the Bureau of Prisons. “They brought me out of my cell and took me to the Unit Team office, where the Warden was waiting,” he wrote. The warden wore a mask. Vialva could not see his expression. “I sat down at the table. There was a piece of paper in front of me. The Warden then tells me that I have been scheduled for execution September 24.” Later Vialva called his mother to tell her the news. “I spent the rest of the night thinking about my mother’s heart breaking, and what this was going to do to her.”
That same day, Vialva and LeCroy were moved to the death watch range. Two other men were already there: Lezmond Mitchell and Keith Nelson, who would die in August, two days apart. In letters and emails to a friend, Vialva described the grim atmosphere that week. Mitchell did not speak to anyone, he said. But “Nelson did a lot of talking his last 2 days. … It was like he feared the silence,” he wrote. “It was hard to listen to him go back & forth in his emotions. It got to the point where he just wanted it to all be over.” At one point, news broke that Nelson’s lawyers had won a stay of execution, which angered Nelson. “I know that may sound strange, but a stay is not always good news when you are preparing your mind for dying,” Vialva explained. “We all know the stays won’t last. All they will do is prolong an already stressed and agonizing situation.”
Before he was taken to die on August 28, Nelson encouraged Vialva to get his affairs in order. “He told me I am a ‘good dude’ and he hates that I must follow him,” Vialva wrote. But his last memory of Nelson was disturbing. “Right before they grabbed Nelson for the death house he vomited violently.” Shortly afterward, “they chained and shackled him and led him away. As he walked by he just said ‘A’ight Will, a’ight Chris.’ I saw redness in his eyes from all the vomiting.”
Vialva told his mother the same story. “Christopher said it was ‘horrific,’” Brown said. “And that’s a word my son doesn’t use very often.”
A History of Racism
On September 24, Vialva is set to be the seventh person executed in the federal death chamber this year. He is the first Black man in line to die under Trump.
In a year that has seen historic nationwide protests targeting police violence against Black people, racism has gone largely undiscussed in the context of the federal executions. Last week, the Death Penalty Information Center released a major study reminding Americans that racism is inextricable from capital punishment, tracing its roots to slavery and lynching. Although Lezmond Mitchell, the only person of color among the five men executed so far, was tried before a nearly all-white jury, his lawyers were barred from investigating the role that racial bias might have played during deliberations. On the eve of Mitchell’s execution, one of his previous lawyers decried the racism at the heart of his case.
Vialva was sentenced by an almost all-white jury too. But Brown, who is white, bristles at the emphasis on her son being the first Black man facing execution under Trump. She stresses what his lawyer, advocates, and friends on death row have also said: that Vialva is simply not the same person he was at 19. He is a loving son and brother, a voracious reader, and a positive influence on his neighbors in Terre Haute. After converting to Messianic Judaism, his mother’s faith, he has spent the last decade worshipping alongside other men. “His mere presence stabilizes environments,” one man recently wrote. “On the range where we are confined, fellow inmates rely on him for stimulating conversation, to relieve the boredom of our solitary confinement.” Vialva is also known for his crocheting. After a couple at Brown’s congregation in Texas had a baby, she said, “He literally bartered with the other inmates to get the yarn to make blankets.”
The issue of Vialva’s race is also fraught for reasons that are harder to talk about. Although he has identified as Black since he was young, Brown feels like it erases part of who he is. But as Vialva’s lawyers have emphasized aspects of his background that could have compelled jurors to spare his life — including childhood trauma, evidence of organic brain damage, and suicidal ideation beginning when he was 11 years old — Brown has also had to confront her own family’s scarring bigotry. After the American Civil Liberties Union sent out a press release about the case that described Brown’s family as including “avowed white supremacists” — a description she firmly rejected — Vialva’s attorney relayed a childhood memory that Brown had never heard. At Brown’s wedding to her ex-husband, she said, Vialva had spotted a relative with an Aryan Brotherhood tattoo on his hand. The man was not a close family member, Brown explained, and he had been in and out of prison. “There’s a lot of — what do you call it? — prejudice, racial bias in my family,” she said. “But I don’t have no sheet-wearing relatives.”
Vialva was born in May 1980. His father was a soldier from Trinidad, who Brown met at Fort Benning, Georgia, and married at 19. Case records show that he was eventually court-martialed — and that in their brief time living together, he was violent and abusive toward Brown. In an allegation Vialva’s father called a “pathological lie” in a 2004 declaration, Brown accused him of biting their son when he was a newborn. She left him shortly afterward.
Although Brown says she was trying to protect Vialva from his dad, her own father compounded the trauma. “My father disowned me when he found out that I married Chris’s dad,” she said. “I have one photo of my dad holding my son. Other than that one time, he has never touched my son. Barely even acknowledged he was alive.” After that, Brown had relationships with men who were abusive and rejected Vialva. All of them were white. “He asked me one time, ‘Why haven’t you ever dated Black men again?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, somebody shut off that switch.’”
Vialva’s longtime attorney, Susan Otto, met him in 2003. He was a “work in progress,” she said. Like many who arrive in prison at a young age, he was angry and bitter. Over the years, she came to understand how deeply he had been harmed by his home life and confusion over his racial identity. In high school, where he found friends who looked like him, he was often disciplined for being disruptive in school but was not known to be violent. In declarations to his attorneys, classmates and friends said they were shocked when they heard about his crime.
Condemned With Little Scrutiny
On September 10, Otto delivered a presentation to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. Prosecutors in the office make a recommendation to the deputy attorney general, who then decides whether to send the clemency application to the president. In ordinary times, Otto said, “You’re offered the opportunity to come to Washington and make a personal presentation to the internal committee of the DOJ. But because no one is in the building, we did it virtually.”
As the longtime public defender of the Western District of Oklahoma, Otto saw the evolution of the federal death penalty up close. It was a bipartisan project, driven in part by high-profile crimes. She remembers the murder that inspired Congress to make carjacking a federal crime. A renowned research chemist named Pam Basu had been brutally attacked by two young Black men — one was 16 — while driving her daughter to her first day of preschool in Maryland. “She got tangled up in the seat belt and ended up being dragged to death,” Otto recalled. “And there was a huge outcry about carjacking and deaths associated with carjacking and how violent it was.”
Otto recalled how the death of basketball star Len Bias in 1986 had been weaponized to help launch the war on drugs. It was not long afterward that Ronald Reagan revived the federal death penalty through a law that came to be known as the Drug Kingpin Act. “I think what people forget is that it all started with the Drug Kingpin prosecutions,” Otto said. “We were going to put a stop to violent street crime.” After Basu’s grisly murder made international headlines, Otto thought, “OK, here it comes.” In 1992, the Anti-Car Theft Act made carjacking a federal crime. Two years later, Clinton’s crime bill made it eligible for the death penalty.
But as Vialva has told Otto, “Pablo Escobar isn’t anywhere around” on federal death row. “To the extent that you started all of this thinking that you were going to chop off the head of the snake, and it was going to end drugs in America, it failed miserably,” she said. “What you ended up with was a bunch of people of color, mostly African Americans, who were in what they classified as street gangs, who distributed drugs.”
Today, there are 57 people on federal death row. Twenty-six are Black. Seven are Latino. None of them are there for treason, espionage, or terrorism. And all of them could have been prosecuted in state court for their crimes. Among those who have been executed so far, some, like Lezmond Mitchell, whose death sentence also hinged on federal carjacking charges, were sentenced to die only after the Department of Justice insisted on seeking death despite opposition from victims’ relatives and its own local U.S. attorneys.
Despite the wide assumption that the federal death penalty is the “gold standard” for capital cases, in reality, these defendants often encounter the same poor lawyering and misconduct found in state trials — yet with the benefit of even less judicial scrutiny after the fact. State death penalty convictions are subject to review, first at the state level and then by the federal courts. But federal convictions only get the latter. Although people on federal death row are in theory entitled to evidentiary hearings in the same courts where they were convicted — a chance to present evidence of ineffective assistance of counsel or other proof that a trial was unfair — district court judges have routinely denied such hearings.
Vialva’s case is a perfect example. His trial records reveal myriad problems, from ineffective assistance of counsel to an expert who assessed his future dangerousness using junk science. But these issues have never been heard in court. The same judge who presided over his trial has rejected motions for an evidentiary hearing, decisions upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. “I spent 17 years in this case and never once stood up in a courtroom — either a district courtroom or an appellate courtroom — arguing on behalf of Christopher Vialva,” Otto said. “And that has never happened to me in my career, ever.”
A Terrible Crime, a Troubling Trial
The murders that sent Vialva to die were undeniably cruel. On the evening of June 21, 1999, a car was reported on fire in the Belton Lake Recreation Area on the grounds of Fort Hood, a large military base in Killeen, Texas. Firefighters and law enforcement found two burned bodies in the trunk of the vehicle. They belonged to a 28-year-old woman named Stacie Bagley and her 26-year-old husband, Todd.
A group of Black youths was arrested shortly afterward. Investigators quickly elicited incriminating statements. The younger teens, who were between the ages of 15 and 17, said Vialva had convinced them to target a random stranger by asking them for a ride, then robbing them of their money and belongings. After one of the boys approached Todd Bagley while he used a payphone outside a convenience store, three others got in their car with Stacie. They led the couple to a remote location, then Vialva told them that “plans have changed.” They forced the Bagleys at gunpoint to get into the trunk. After driving to collect money from different ATMs, Vialva reportedly said that the couple had seen too much. He shot them both in the head.
The facts of the crime were galvanizing to those who were committed to narratives of Black criminality. A year earlier in Texas, James Byrd Jr. had been dragged to death in a murder so shocking and racist it would inspire federal hate crime legislation. In a letter to federal prosecutors, white supremacist David Duke demanded that the Bagleys’ murder be prosecuted as a hate crime. “This horrible interracial crime has gone completely unmentioned by the national media and is yet another example of the media’s bias against reporting Black on White crime,” Duke wrote.
In fact, the case got considerable publicity, both in Texas and Iowa, where the couple was from. A front-page story in the Des Moines Register described how the Bagleys had been visiting Texas on vacation while also attending religious revivals in the area. The two were youth ministers and devout Christians; one relative told the newspaper that the couple read scripture to their attackers before being shot. Another story described their life as devoted to their faith and to each other. “Their walls were mostly bare, except for a picture of Jesus.”
Vialva and Bernard were tried together less than a year later, at the federal courthouse in Waco. Representing Vialva was Dwight Goains, who had gone to law school as a second career, after operating a business peddling medical supplies to surgeons outside Houston. Within his first five years of practice, Goains developed a reputation for representing the “baddest of the bad,” according to a 1992 profile. “I want the difficult cases,” Goains boasted. “To me they are a lot more challenging, and I enjoy the trial work.” At least one client had already been sentenced to die by the state of Texas. Another would be sent to death row the following year.
Goains was assigned to accompany a less experienced lawyer, Stan Schwieger. But in reality, neither was equipped to handle the trial. In an affidavit submitted as part of Vialva’s appeals in 2004, veteran death penalty lawyer Richard Burr of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel explained that, under federal law, the district court was supposed to consider the recommendation of the local Federal Public Defender prior to assigning a lawyer. But neither Schwieger nor the district court ever contacted that office. Although Schwieger did reach out to Burr for assistance in July 1999, by then it was too late for advice on qualified legal counsel — he and Goains had already been appointed to the case.
In a meeting in August 1999, Burr wrote, “I was struck by Mr. Goains’s apparent hostility to investigating and developing mitigation evidence.” Although Schwieger appeared to grasp the importance of doing a psychosocial history and investigation into reports that Vialva had mental disorders and brain dysfunction — potentially lifesaving information — Goains “resisted it.” He appeared to consider it a distraction from the guilt phase. “By the end of the meeting, I felt like I had been trying to persuade a hostile decision-maker to pursue a course of action he had already ruled out,” Burr wrote.
Schwieger recalled other missteps in his own 2004 declaration. Although federal law set a limit of $7,500 to pay for investigative work and experts in a capital case, it allowed defense attorneys to request approval for additional funds from both the trial judge and circuit court. But he and Goains failed to follow through, even though their own budget made clear that they would need more money to pay a mitigation expert. “When we exceeded the $7,5000 maximum, the funding stopped,” he wrote. By the time the trial judge signed off on more money, jury selection was moments away.
But perhaps most egregious is the fact that, at the time Vialva’s lawyers were supposed to be preparing for trial, Goains was actively seeking employment with the same U.S. Attorney’s Office that was trying to send his client to death row. Schwieger wrote an email to Vialva’s mother just weeks before the trial telling her that Goains had “become a front runner” for a position in the Waco field office, while reassuring her that it had not impacted their work. “Dwight spoke personally with Chris about this yesterday,” Schwieger said, “and Chris wanted Dwight to stay on board.” In fact, according to the former chair of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, who provided a declaration, Goains’s conduct was a profound ethical breach as well as a conflict of interest. Even if Vialva did not fully understand his rights on this matter, the trial judge should have recognized this red flag. Nevertheless, in a hearing just three days before trial, U.S. District Judge Walter Smith elicited a waiver from Vialva that allowed the trial to proceed.
Goains presented no witnesses on Vialva’s behalf during the first part of the trial. Nor did he or Schwieger cross-examine government witnesses to point out critical holes in the state’s case, such as the lack of forensic evidence linking Vialva to the crime. The evidence against Vialva rested primarily on the testimony of two of the other teenagers, who had cooperated in order to save themselves. The jury swiftly found him guilty.
During the sentencing phase, when Vialva’s lawyers were supposed to convince jurors to spare his life, their own expert instead cast him as dangerous, testifying that he would not share a cell with him. This compounded testimony from the state’s forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Coons, who said it was his expert opinion that Vialva was a man without a conscience. In 2010, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals would find that Coons should not have been permitted to testify in a different case because his expert opinions were neither scientifically valid nor reliable.
Goains went to work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office after the trial. In 2007 Smith appointed him as a federal magistrate judge for the Western District of Texas. Despite the obligation of capital defense attorneys to preserve their files in death penalty cases so that they may be used by appellate attorneys, Goains never provided his files to Vialva’s legal team. When Otto went to see him at his office in Alpine, Texas, shortly after being appointed to the case, he told her he did not know what had happened to them.
Smith quietly retired from the bench in 2016 after facing an investigation by the U.S. Judicial Conference into allegations of sexual misconduct. Smith had been recently reprimanded for making sexual advances toward a clerk in 1998. In a deposition, she accused Smith of smelling like alcohol at the time; the investigation would reveal evidence that Smith had a drinking problem for years.
In Otto’s view, these revelations recast Smith’s handling of Vialva’s trial and appeals. When she was assigned to the case in 2003, she said, it took more than a month for Smith to approve her appointment — a significant delay, since it cut into the one year she had to file Vialva’s federal habeas petition. After she did — and after she supplemented it following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2005 decision striking down the death penalty for crimes committed by juveniles — Smith sat on the petition for years. In 2012, he denied everything.
Smith did not respond to emails about the case. Neither did Goains or Schwieger. In a phone call, the jury foreman, Calvin Kruger, who is now 76, remembered being unimpressed with the defense attorneys. Above all, he was deeply disturbed by the crime and Vialva’s apparent lack of remorse. “It was pure torture what he did to those two people,” he said. Jurors had been told that Stacie Bagley was still alive after being shot in the face and died of smoke inhalation. A few years ago, Kruger said, he was asked by legal advocates if he would consider supporting a call to reduce Vialva’s sentence to life without parole. He refused. Still, “it was not an easy decision,” he said. Nor was it easy to sign his name on the jury form. “I still think about it sometimes.”
Kruger was unaware of the five executions in Terre Haute earlier this year. When I began to tell him about the cases as compared to Vialva’s, he interrupted with a question that reflected many people’s assumptions: “Terrorists?” he asked. In fact, until recently, the sole person under a federal death sentence for terror charges was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose death sentence was vacated this summer.
I asked Kruger what he remembered about the makeup of the jury that sent Vialva and his co-defendant to death row. Kruger did not remember any Black jurors, although one Black man did serve on the jury. But he described the jurors as young and old, with different levels of education. Did it concern him that the lack of Black jurors meant Vialva did not receive a jury of his peers? “No,” he said. “It had nothing to do” with their decision. “Nothing at all. And I consider myself a liberal person.”
How to Say Goodbye
On September 15, Vialva’s attorneys released a link to a YouTube video featuring their client. It is titled “Christopher Vialva Message to the Media.” He is seated against a white background. He wears a beige prison uniform, a knitted kippah, and a white and blue prayer shawl over his shoulders. He reads from a piece of paper held awkwardly in his handcuffed hands, occasionally pausing to push up his glasses.
“I’m speaking out now because the U.S. government is trying to execute me and many others using your tax dollars, and there’s no substantial national media coverage on federal capital punishment,” he says, adding that Americans are not informed about the racial disparities, the lack of judicial review, and other problems with the federal death penalty. “People are unaware that many of us here were arrested before we were old enough to drink. … How many people do you know in their 30s or 50s that don’t have regrets about things that they’ve done at the age of 19?”
“I’m not making this plea as an innocent man,” he went on. “But I am a changed and redeemed man. I committed a grave wrong when I was a lost kid and took two precious lives from this world. … Every day I wish I could right this wrong.”
As Vialva’s execution date approaches, one of his newest and most fervent supporters is an Indiana lawyer and activist named Ashley Kincaid Eve, who has published their correspondence on her website. She has also helped compile testimonials from the men who have known Vialva in prison, some of which have been sent to the Trump administration. Reading them has been comforting to Brown. Along with one of the other young men involved in the case, Bernard, Vialva’s co-defendant, sent her money to help cover the cost of travel to see her son. On Friday, she drove from her home in Killeen to Terre Haute, where she plans to witness Vialva’s execution.
In one of his most recent letters to Eve, Vialva wrote about the rest of the men on death row. “I keep hearing about the anxiety of the others here,” he said. “They are all waiting in anticipation for new dates to be issued. Some guys assume they are next. Some won’t talk about it in fear they may speak it into existence.” He predicted that the prison would move a couple more people to the death watch range before his execution date, giving some sense of relief to those who remained. “However once it hits my week of execution, the cycle will begin again. Again they will start to wonder: Am I next. While I don’t want anyone else to come over here, I really hope, whoever it is, it is not someone I am close with.”
On Thursday, Vialva sent me another email. “I am really on auto pilot now,” he wrote. “I am just running out of emotional gas.” For weeks he had been filling out forms to prepare for his execution date. “I had to fill out a witness list. I had to turn in a last meal request. I then had to divvy up stuff to give away or throw away. I had to decide what property I was going to give my mom. Then there is the process of thinking of how to say goodbye to all my friends and family; words just won’t come. … I have less than a week now and I am just tired.”
Orlando Letelier was a Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister under Salvador Allende. He and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed in the US on September 21, 1976 by a car bomb. (photo: Jacobin)
44 Years Ago Today, Chilean Socialist Orlando Letelier Was Assassinated on US Soil
Alan McPherson, Jacobin
Excerpt: "On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile who was forced into exile after the US-backed coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, was assassinated by a car bomb in the heart of Washington, DC."
The US-backed 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende resulted in Allende’s death and the torture and murder of thousands of leftists throughout the country. But the brutality of the new regime, headed by General Augusto Pinochet, didn’t stop with the coup.
In coordination with other right-wing dictatorships in South America such as Brazil and Argentina, Pinochet would soon launch Operation Condor, a hemisphere-wide campaign of political violence — backed by the United States — against leftists. Estimates of the exact number of deaths as a result of the operation range widely, but have been put as high as sixty thousand.
One of those deaths was that of Orlando Letelier. Letelier was a Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister under Allende who was jailed in Chile after the coup. He and his family were living in exile in the United States on September 21, 1976, when a bomb hidden in his car exploded as he drove through Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, killing Letelier along with his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt and injuring her husband Michael.
Historian Alan McPherson tells the story of the assassination, along with its lead-up and aftermath, in Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice.
The following is adapted from Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice by Alan McPherson.
ong before September 21, 1976, far from home in Washington, DC, Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel had experienced a political transformation. Through law school friends, some from Venezuela during its era of dictatorship from 1948 to 1958, “I got my political education,” Isabel Letelier recently recalled. “It was the first time I had ever really heard about dictatorship and torture, about corporations keeping more than their share, about nationalization of natural resources. Orlando himself was talking about copper belonging to the Chileans. . . . That was an awakening.”
She told Orlando she considered herself on the “Christian left,” but she couldn’t find a party to join.
Letelier remembered his second year of university as his own awakening. “The truth is that, when I was young, politics mattered little to me, even less so socialism.” As he read more and had long discussions with Salvador Allende, then a senator, and others, he grew a social conscience and joined the Socialist Party. Early on in their relationship, he told Isabel that finding out about the extraction of copper, Chile’s primary export, by foreign corporations was “a blow to my heart.”
Allende lost the 1958 presidential election but kept running in the 1960s. Letelier’s connection to the Marxist, however, spelled personal disaster. Not only was he fired from the copper department where he worked, but also he was told, “Do not waste any time trying to find a job with this government. You are not going to find a job from north to south. You are being punished for being a traitor to your class. This is a lesson you should learn now when you are young.” The Leteliers were resourceful. Three months after Letelier lost his job, in late 1959, he and the family left for Venezuela, where his exiled friends were now back and in power and offered him a position with the Vollmer Group doing market studies. Soon after, the governments of the Americas created the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, and its first president happened to be Letelier’s former law professor, Felipe Herrera. He offered Orlando a job.
At 3 AM one day in late 1970, the whole clan at Chile Chico, the Leteliers’ cottage in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, was awakened by Isabel’s shouts: “Allende won!”
Their old Chilean friend, the physician, senator, and head of a leftist coalition called Popular Unity, had pulled off the feat of winning Chile’s presidency while openly Marxist.
Letelier, following the results from Washington, immediately drove out to the Shenandoah Valley, honking his horn as he approached the property. Isabel and he hugged.
“I’ve decided to resign my post at the IDB —”
Isabel cut him off: “— We’re going back to Chile!?”
Not quite. Orlando did fly back, and Isabel began to pack up the house. Upon his return to Washington, however, he announced a change of plans. “How great that you’ve got everything ready, but the trip will be a bit shorter than planned. Instead of changing countries, we’re changing states: from Maryland to Washington!”
Allende had named Orlando, among his most loyal followers, Chile’s new ambassador to the United States. In February 1971, the Leteliers moved from the suburb of Bethesda to the ambassador’s residence inside the District of Columbia, on Massachusetts Avenue, beginning three tumultuous years that mirrored those in Chile.
The Right Man for the Job
Allende’s Marxist agenda was on a collision course with Washington’s. His very victory showed a democratic path to socialism that challenged US interests. Once in office, he became friendly with Cuba and other communist regimes. Allende also planned to nationalize US-owned copper mines.
In retaliation, the Richard Nixon government, through its CIA and its national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, first tried to prevent Allende’s confirmation as president by plotting the kidnapping of the Chilean army commander in chief who oversaw it. Nixon also told his CIA to “make the economy scream.”
When the gambit failed and Allende ascended to the presidency’s La Moneda Palace, the Nixon team installed what Allende called “the invisible blockade” with the help of US corporations. The ruthless campaign of propaganda, diplomatic pressure, and economic sabotage, fueled by tens of millions of dollars in CIA funds, aimed to turn Chileans against their president and foment a military coup.
Letelier, as ambassador, advised his president to avoid confrontation with the United States, which provided half of Chile’s industrial supplies and nearly all its military equipment. He was the right man for the job, being, as the CIA assessed in 1971, “a reasonable, mature democrat with a profound belief that Allende would revolutionize the structure of Chile without interfering with fundamental liberties or traditions.”
Washington seemed to respond in kind. Nixon claimed to respect Chile’s self-determination. Kissinger labeled “nonsense” press reports that the White House sought to confront Chile. One US diplomat recalled that most Latin America experts in his shop “had very good opinions of Letelier.” Even Kissinger said of Letelier, “I knew him. I liked him personally.”
But the Nixon administration felt tremendous pressure from US businesses. It was also on the warpath against communism.
First, it delayed for several months accepting Letelier’s appointment as ambassador. In July 1971, Chile nationalized three US copper mines. In October, it announced it would offer no compensation because of “excess profits” over the years.
Retaliation was swift. In mid-August, the US Export-Import Bank president Henry Kearns called Letelier to his office. Kearns was smiling as he delivered chilling news: the bank would not finance $21 million worth of Boeing jet airliners so long as Chile did not compensate the copper companies. In 1972, another Letelier deal fell through, to reschedule $300 million in debt to US banks.
To make matters worse, secrets about US efforts to keep Allende from the presidency leaked, and the ambassador’s residence and chancery were broken into five times. Two of the burglars, apparently seeking sensitive documents, were also involved in Watergate. Letelier took to keeping documents in a bedroom closet because the CIA also bugged his embassy.
The Warnings Were Accurate
By September 1973, Orlando had become minister of defense, and the Leteliers were back in Chile. At 6:22 AM on September 11, the Leteliers’ phone woke Isabel. She answered and turned to Orlando: “It’s Salvador.” Her husband had only fallen asleep three hours earlier, worried about intelligence reports of a coup. The warnings were accurate.
“The navy has revolted,” announced Allende. “Six truckloads of navy troops are on the way to Santiago from Valparaíso. The Carabineros are the only units that respond. The other commanders in chief don’t answer the phone. Pinochet doesn’t answer. Find out what you can.”
A Ministry of Defense admiral reassured Letelier: “It’s some kind of a raid, nothing more.” Allende was skeptical. “Take control of the Defense Ministry if you can get there.”
Isabel walked with her husband to his car. His bodyguard had called in sick, but his driver was waiting. Isabel took the man by his lapels: “You take care that nothing happens to him.”
At 7:30 AM, Letelier arrived, unarmed, at his ministry across the street from the presidential palace. Troops surrounded his building, and officers and some armed civilians wore orange scarves, denoting coup plotters. A guard at the door would not let him pass, but a voice from inside shouted, “Let the minister in.” Upon entering, Orlando felt a sharp rifle butt poke his back ribs. His allegedly sick bodyguard held the rifle.
Isabel learned where Orlando ended up only weeks after the coup. “Dawson Island, it is a dreadful place. It is very cold, windy . . . and because of the cold current, the Humboldt Current. . . Nobody lives there.”
Orlando Letelier did, for eight months.
The concentration camp where Letelier and his fellow political prisoners were kept was fenced off by a double row of barbed wire and surrounded by guards armed with antiaircraft guns in watchtowers. Letelier lived in an eight-by-fifteen-foot room with seven other men. To lighten the mood, they christened it “El Sheraton.”
The United Nations Human Rights Commission called the treatment of the Dawson prisoners “barbaric sadism.” The decisive intermediary in freeing Letelier was Caracas governor Diego Arria. He was the right-hand man of Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez and longtime friend of Orlando.
Arria’s stature had risen to the point where, in 1974, Time featured him among a select group of world leaders. Still, it was unprecedented for a governor to take on a diplomatic mission. He flew to Santiago on September 10, 1974 and obtained an interview with Pinochet.
The Venezuelan first spoke of a cut-rate sale of his country’s oil to Chile. “This depends upon your freeing Orlando Letelier.”
One month after Letelier flew from Santiago to Caracas, Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC, wrote to “Compañero Letelier.” Following up on a phone call from Saul Landau, he offered him an associate fellowship “to work with the Latin American work group and to develop ideas about hemispheric security.” Letelier accepted.
Letelier informed Barnet he would concentrate on Chilean affairs. He immediately regained his boundless energy for working — and networking. This, despite Pinochet’s henchmen warning him to stay quiet and reminding him that the dictator could mete out punishment “no matter where the violator lives.”
“I Never Learned What the Surprise Was”
“Isabel, I have a surprise for you. Have lunch with me.”
“Today will be difficult. I have work.”
“But you will love this surprise,” Orlando insisted. “Come and get me at 12:30 and leave your work for the afternoon.”
Isabel acceded. After all, her husband was a charmer. The couple, parents to four teenage boys, had recently reunited after a months-long separation sparked by Orlando’s infidelity. “A second honeymoon,” Isabel called it.
Besides, there was no time to argue. It was 9 AM on September 21, 1976, time for Orlando to go to work at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle.
Two of Orlando’s colleagues happened to ride with him that day. Michael and Ronni Moffitt, both twenty-five and recently married, had had their car break down the day before. Having become friends with their mentor and his wife, they had enjoyed a late dinner at the Leteliers’ then driven home in Orlando’s car. They were back the following morning to pick him up.
The Moffitts waited while Letelier, ever tardy, showered and dressed, skipped breakfast, and rushed out the door. Isabel barely had time to kiss him goodbye. Michael offered to keep driving, but Orlando took the wheel of his 1975 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu Classic, an unusual muscle car for such a sophisticate. Out of gallantry, Michael opened the front passenger door for Ronni. He plopped himself on the back seat.
That morning was a drizzly, misty one in the nation’s capital. In less than an hour, Orlando and Ronni would be dead. Michael would be traumatized.
“I never learned what the surprise was,” Isabel recalled over forty years later.
A palm tree plantation in Malaysia. (photo: Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Getty Images Plus)
Humans Destroyed Intact Ecosystem Land the Size of Mexico in Just 13 Years
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "Between 2000 and 2013, Earth lost an area of undisturbed ecosystems roughly the size of Mexico."
That's the mind-melting finding of a new study published in One Earth Friday, and the researchers say it has "profound implications" for global biodiversity and for humans who rely on natural resources.
"We were expecting there to be high levels of intact ecosystem and wilderness loss, but the results were shocking," lead researcher Brooke Williams of the University of Queensland told The Guardian. "We found substantial area of intact ecosystems had been lost in just 13 years – nearly two million square kilometres – which is terrifying to think about. Our findings show that human pressure is extending ever further into the last ecologically intact and wilderness areas."
In total, the researchers found that 1.9 million square kilometers (approximately 700,000 square miles) of previously intact ecosystem area had been "highly modified" during the study period. They also found that 58.4 percent of Earth's land ecosystems were under "moderate or intense" pressure from human activity, while only 41.6 percent of ecosystems were intact and 25 percent were true wilderness.
The 1.9 million square kilometers lost were mostly tropical and subtropical grasslands in Asia, South America and Africa, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which participated in the research. The rainforests of Southeast Asia also suffered significant human encroachments.
To achieve these results, an international team of 17 scientists from six countries used satellite imagery to assess the human footprint on land-based ecosystems and how it had changed between 2000 and 2013, The Guardian explained. The researchers found that human pressure increased on nearly 20 percent of the globe and decreased on only around six percent.
"Data does not lie," senior author James Watson from WCS and the University of Queensland said in the WCS press release. "Humanity keeps on shrinking the amount of land that other species need to survive. In a time of rapid climate change, we need to proactively secure the last intact ecosystems on the planet, as these are critical in the fight to stop extinction and halt climate change."
The study comes amidst other dire news for wildlife and biodiversity. A UN study released last week found that world governments had failed to achieve any of the 20 targets they had set for preserving biodiversity by 2020. Another study published this month found that wildlife populations had plummeted 68 percent on average over the last 50 years.
Williams explained to WCS why the loss of intact ecosystems is such a big deal for humans and other animals.
"Intact lands are relied on by biodiversity for habitat, and by people for ecosystem services such as climate regulation and clean water," Williams said. "We continue to take these last functioning places for granted, and our results show urgent action is needed to protect those lands that do remain intact."
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