22 April 22
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We must protect democracy against this
I thought long and hard about sending you today’s newsletter because all of us are stressed enough about Putin’s war, new strains of the pandemic, and the latest consequences of climate change. But several of you responded to yesterday’s letter by wanting more information about how Trump and his co-conspirators (Steven Bannon, Michael Flynn, and others) are laying the groundwork for what can only be described as an attempted coup in the 2024 presidential election.
So I felt I had to share this with you.
Their plan is to take over the machinery of our democracy from the ground up by electing Trump loyalists in this coming fall’s midterms — so that in the 2024 presidential election only Trump loyalists will be certifying elections. As Bannon said: “We’re taking over all the elections.”
Remember, Trump ultimately failed to overturn the 2020 election because a few election officials — secretaries of state in particular — rightfully certified the results despite heavy pressure from him and his enablers to overturn them. In 37 states, the secretaries of state are the chief elections officers. That means they oversee elections and voter registration. In 2020, they held the United States’ rickety democracy together by certifying Joe Biden’s win.
But what happens if secretaries of state won’t protect democracy? In most states, secretaries of state are elected. And it’s precisely those elections that Trump and Bannon are targeting, especially in key swing states. For example:
— Trump’s choice for Georgia’s Secretary of State is Jody Hice, who voted against certifying the 2020 election in the Georgia House.
— His choice for Michigan’s Secretary of State is Kristina Karamo, who falsely claimed to have witnessed election fraud.
— His choice for Arizona’s Secretary of State is Mark Finchem, a QAnon-supporting member of the Oath Keepers militia who participated in the January 6 insurrection.
At least 20 other candidates now running for secretary of state around the nation do not believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 election. In addition, thousands of others who have taken up Bannon's call have signed up to be local elections officials and poll workers. These positions are the last lines of defense in a democracy.
We’ve seen what happens when secretaries of state put partisan interests ahead of election integrity. In 2018, Brian Kemp ran Georgia elections as its secretary of state — while he was running for governor against Stacey Abrams. During his tenure, Kemp oversaw the purging of almost 1 and a half million voter registrations and the closing of more than 200 polling places. In the weeks leading up to the election, he put more than 50,000 voter registrations on hold, 70% of which belonged to Black people. He won by 55,000 votes.
And remember back in the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore won the popular vote? Nonetheless, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who had been co-chair of George W Bush’s statewide campaign, ended up calling Florida for Bush, which handed him the election.
Trump and Bannon’s goal is to replicate these abuses across America and put into power next fall Trump loyalists who care more about electing Trump in 2024 than in upholding democracy.
What can we do about this? In 2020, millions of people organized, volunteered, and voted to keep American democracy alive. In coming months, we must work to elect public servants who will uphold democracy and stand up to those who are hellbent on undermining it.
So please:
Make sure your friends and family know what the stakes are this fall. (For starters, you might take a look at the video that I’ve pasted below, which I and my colleagues at Inequality Media are releasing today — and share it as widely as possible.)
Next, get information about who is running for secretary of state in your state and for local election positions in your locale. If you have reason to believe they’re more dedicated to Trump’s reelection than to democracy, spread the word.
Third, get involved directly. Volunteer to be a poll worker or local election official. Every position matters.
Many thanks.
RR
Dead bodies are placed into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022 as people cannot bury their dead because of the heavy shelling by Russian forces. (photo: Evgeniy Malotetka/AP)
Melissa Lucio holding her daughter Mariah next to another one of her daughters, Adriana, in an undated family photo before Mariah’s death. (photo: AP)
Ms. Lucio is facing execution on April 27 for a crime that never occurred.
The State of Texas has scheduled Ms. Lucio’s execution for April 27, for a crime that never occurred. On Feb. 8, attorneys for Ms. Lucio filed a motion to withdraw or modify her looming execution date, and on March 22, her legal team filed a petition for clemency to the governor and Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. But Ms. Lucio’s life is still in jeopardy. On April 15, Ms. Lucio’s attorneys filed a habeas petition with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals seeking a stay of her execution and arguing that she deserves a new trial because she is innocent and the State relied on false evidence,and hid favorable evidence, to convict her.
Read and share these key facts before Texas makes the irreversible mistake of killing an innocent woman.
1. Mariah’s death was a tragic accident, not a murder.
Mariah fell down a flight of stairs while the family was moving homes on Feb. 15, 2007. The toddler had a mild physical disability that made her unstable while walking and prone to tripping. Two days later, she took a nap and didn’t wake up.
Instead of taking the steps to learn about Mariah’s health history and investigating the causes of her injuries, authorities immediately jumped to the conclusion that she had been murdered and, through a coercive interrogation, pressured Ms. Lucio to make a false statement.
Nearly 1 in 3 exonerated women were wrongly convicted of harming children or other loved ones in their care and over 70% were wrongly convicted of crimes that never took place at all — events that were accidents, deaths by suicide, or fabricated — according to data from the National Registry of Exonerations.
2. Melissa has maintained her innocence for over 14 years.
Ms. Lucio has maintained her innocence on death row for more than 14 years. During her interrogation, Ms. Lucio asserted her innocence more than 100 times, until she was manipulated into falsely taking responsibility for some of Mariah’s injuries by police officers. The interrogating officers refused to hear the truth: that Melissa did not, and would not, ever hurt her children.
3. Melissa was coercively interrogated by police two hours after her daughter died.
Detectives rushed to judgment and, just two hours after Mariah died, took Ms. Lucio in for questioning. During the interrogation, officers berated and intimidated Ms. Lucio, who was pregnant and in shock from the loss of her child, for five hours. They used coercive methods known to produce false confessions. Research has shown that survivors of sexual abuse and violence, like Ms. Lucio, are even more vulnerable to falsely confessing under such coercive conditions. And experts who have reviewed Ms. Lucio’s case, including her interrogation records, have concluded that Ms. Lucio “was relentlessly pressured and extensively manipulated” during the interrogation.
After several hours of interrogation, Ms. Lucio said, “I guess I did it,” and made other incriminating statements, to get the officers to end the interrogation. Her inadvertent statement was then characterized by the prosecution as a confession to murder. Two of the officers who interrogated Ms. Lucio were present at Mariah’s autopsy, leading to a biased autopsy process, and an incomplete investigation into Mariah’s health history and causes of her injuries and death.
4. False and misleading evidence was presented at Melissa’s trial.
At Ms. Lucio’s trial, the medical examiner testified that the bruises and injuries on Mariah’s body could only have been caused by abuse. However, pathologists who have reviewed the evidence have concluded that this testimony was false. Mariah’s autopsy showed signs of a blood coagulation disorder, which causes profuse bruising throughout the body. At the time of her death, Mariah was healing from an injury to her arm, which the medical examiner also said was a sign of abuse. However, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon who reviewed the evidence concluded that the medical examiner’s testimony was misleading and “there is nothing about” Mariah’s “fracture that indicates that it was the result of an intentional act or abuse” This was an extremely common type of injury among toddlers that can result from a fall from standing height.
The medical examiner also testified at trial that a mark on Mariah’s body were bite marks. Bite mark analysis has been wholly discredited since Ms. Lucio’s trial because it has no scientific basis. Studies have shown that even trained forensic dentists can’t agree whether or not an injury is a bite mark. In 2016, in recognition of the fact that bite mark evidence lacks scientific validity and following the exoneration of a man in Texas convicted based on faulty bite mark evidence, the Texas Forensic Science Commission recommended a state-wide moratorium on the use of bite mark evidence in criminal cases.
5. The state presented no evidence that Melissa abused any of her children.
Thousands of pages of Child Protective Services records show that Ms. Lucio’s 12 children never said she was violent with them and no case workers noted signs of abuse. No physical evidence showed otherwise.
“The State presented no physical evidence or witness testimony establishing that Lucio abused Mariah or any of her children, let alone killed Mariah,” Judge Catharina Haynes wrote on behalf of the seven dissenting judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. “The jury was deprived of key evidence to weigh: that is the point.”
Ms. Lucio struggled at times to provide for her family, but was a caring mother, who did her best given her incredibly difficult circumstances.
6. Melissa is a survivor of a lifetime of sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Ms. Lucio is a survivor of life-long, repeated sexual assault and domestic violence. She was sexually abused by family members beginning at the age of 6.
Ms. Lucio endured abuse throughout her childhood and into her teenage years. At 16, she became a child bride to escape. However, Ms. Lucio’s husband perpetuated the cycle of abuse. Still a minor and unable to leave the abusive marriage, Ms. Lucio was trapped and developed a substance use problem. Her husband later abandoned her and their five children.
Ms. Lucio had nine more children, including Mariah. Her next partner, who was also abusive, repeatedly raped her, and threatened to kill her. A psychologist who reviewed recent testing of Melissa said that Melissa has “highly abnormal” levels of vulnerability to police coercion because of her background.
7. The jury did not hear Melissa’s defense and some of her jurors are calling for a new trial.
On April 12, attorneys for Melissa filed a supplemental clemency application including a new declaration from a fifth juror — Melissa’s jury foreperson — who joins the calls of four other jurors and the alternate to halt Melissa’s pending execution or grant her a new trial where new evidence of her innocence can be considered.
“I am now convinced that the jury got it wrong and I know that there is too much doubt to execute Lucio. If I could take back my vote, I would,” Johnny Galvan Jr., one of the jurors in Ms. Lucio’s case, wrote in a recent op-ed in the Houston Chronicle.
In particular, the jury never learned about the extent of Ms. Lucio’s history of child sexual abuse and domestic violence and how it shaped her reactions immediately following her daughter’s death. The trial court prohibited this testimony but allowed the Texas Ranger who coerced Ms. Lucio’s incriminating statement to testify, falsely, for the prosecution that Ms. Lucio’s slumped posture, passivity, and failure to make eye contact told him that she was guilty.
Without that context, the jury was undoubtedly swayed by Ms. Lucio’s statement and the Texas Ranger’s testimony about her demeanor during the interrogation.
The omission of this crucial evidence was particularly damaging because the prosecution had a weak case for capital murder, and an even weaker case for a death sentence. Ms. Lucio had no prior record of violence.
8. Cameron County D.A. Armando Villalobos was running for re-election and seeking a “win,” and is now serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion.
Lacking solid physical evidence, Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos presented Ms. Lucio’s conciliatory statement to the jury as a “confession” to homicide and sought the death penalty.
At the time, Mr. Villalobos was seeking re-election, and came under fire for failing to thoroughly investigate or prosecute more than 100 previous allegations of child abuse. Ahead of the election, Mr. Villalobos sought to make an example in Ms. Lucio’s case, which helped him appear “tough on crime.” Today, the former district attorney is serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion.
9. Melissa’s case has all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction built upon a false confession.
Nearly all proven false confession cases have the following three things in common:
- An innocent person is misclassified as a guilty suspect
- Police coerce an innocent person into falsely incriminating themselves
- Police “contaminate” the person’s statement — meaning they feed the innocent person crime facts or a specific narrative of guilt. There is now evidence that all three of these things happened in Ms. Lucio’s case.
As soon as police officers encountered Ms. Lucio, they misclassified her response to the grief and shock of her daughter’s death as indicative of guilt. The officers relied on their presumptions about how a mother “should” act in this tragic scenario and their “gut-feeling, without a thorough forensic examination of the evidence” to draw an unscientific “presumption of guilt,” which then created “tunnel vision” of investigators and the interrogating officers. Officers used powerfully manipulative techniques — many of which rise to the level of “risk factors” for false confession — to coerce Ms. Lucio to incriminate herself.
What we know today — which we didn’t know 15 years ago — is that survivors of significant trauma and domestic abuse, like Ms. Lucio, are particularly vulnerable to the coercive police interrogation that Ms. Lucio endured for over five hours. As experts explain, “particularly when wielded by male police officers” the type of interrogation used against Ms. Lucio “simply recapitulates the psychodynamics of domestic abuse.” So, it makes sense that women, like Ms. Lucio, who learned to survive domestic abuse by “accommodating and conforming to the wishes of the violent partner” will likewise accommodate and conform to the demands of a threatening, armed male police officer in the interrogation room.
Officers contaminated the “confession” by repeatedly showing Ms. Lucio photographs of relevant evidence and suggesting certain words and facts, which she ultimately parroted back to the officers. As two experts on false confessions have determined, due to the officers’ tactics and Ms. Lucio’s vulnerability, her incriminating statements are not a reliable “confession” of her guilt, but rather are “a regurgitation of information relayed to her from investigators throughout the interrogation.” Lucio Successor Writ Application, at 136 (quoting David Thompson’s Expert Report).
10. There is widespread — and growing — support for clemency for Melissa across Texas
To date, over 100 bipartisan Texas lawmakers signed letters urging the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency for Melissa. Hundreds of anti-domestic violence/sexual assault organizations and 18 Texas exonerees have voiced support for clemency for Ms. Lucio. More than 130 Baptist, Evangelical and Catholic faith leaders in Texas, including the executive director of the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas and the director of the Rio Grande Valley Baptist Association, support clemency for Ms. Lucio. Eighty-three Texas legislators from both sides of the aisle have signed a letter urging the governor and Texas Board of Pardon and Paroles to grant Ms. Lucio clemency. And 30 groups that work on behalf of the Latinx community in Texas have said they support clemency, too. More are learning about Ms. Lucio’s case and advocating for her each day.
Speak out before Texas makes an irreversible mistake — time is running out.
The Cameron County’s new district attorney, the courts, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and Gov. Abbott must undertake a meaningful review of Ms. Lucio’s innocence claim, the coercive tactics used in her interrogation, and the tragic circumstances of Mariah’s accidental death, before an irreversible injustice occurs.
- Call Gov. Abbott and the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
- Add your name to stop the execution.
- Make sure everyone on Twitter knows her name: Tweet now
- Use this social media toolkit to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Abortion-rights supporters chant their objections at the Kentucky Capitol on Wednesday, April 13, 2022, in Frankfort, Ky., as Kentucky lawmakers debate overriding the governor's veto of an abortion measure. (photo: Bruce Schreiner/AP)
A US soldier fires an FGM-148 Javelin missile during a combined arms live fire exercise in Jordan on August 27, 2019. (photo: Sgt. Liane Hatch/US Army)
The boards of defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are encouraging their shareholders to vote against transparency measures. Maybe the US government shouldn’t fund companies whose profits would be harmed by the collection of human rights data?
Like most annual shareholder meetings, those in attendance are being asked to vote on a set of proposals. The boards of the respective companies suggest how they should vote and make a case for why. The boards have an obligation to help shareholders make more money from their investments; hearing their advice on proposals is part of that deal.
But what does it mean to profit from an investment in a weapons manufacturer? Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes responded to the escalation of tensions in Ukraine a few months ago by saying, “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.” The Joe Biden administration announced on April 13 that the United States would send $800 million more in military aid to Ukraine — the package includes five hundred Javelin anti-tank missiles jointly manufactured by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. When it comes to the defense industry, we can’t separate out profits from war.
General Dynamics, the company responsible for a component of the bomb that was dropped on a school bus in Yemen killing dozens of children, is asking shareholders to vote against a proposal for the company to provide a human rights report. The proposal, if put into effect, would require General Dynamics to release a report on the company’s “human rights due diligence process to identify, assess, prevent, mitigate and remedy actual and potential human rights impacts associated with high-risk products and services, including those in conflict-related areas.” The shareholder proposal cites an Amnesty International report from 2019 that concluded that the company did not meet its human rights due diligence responsibilities. The proposal also suggests that failing on the human rights front may have “legal, financial and reputational risks” for shareholders.
The board of directors at General Dynamics suggests shareholders vote against this proposal because they don’t believe there is “additive value to an amorphous human rights report” and it would “destroy significant shareholder value.”
It also argues that the proposal attacks US foreign policy, not the company itself. The board links its company’s mission to the national security of the United States throughout its argument. Considering that half of the Pentagon budget goes directly to private companies like General Dynamics, that conflation does make a perverse amount of sense. But it’s also a deflection. For example, the board does directly take on the proposal’s concerns about war crimes in Yemen and Palestine. But it does so by deferring responsibility to the US government — which happens to sell General Dynamics products to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Lockheed Martin shareholders will have the opportunity to vote on an identical proposal. The board’s rationale for shareholders voting against it is that the company published a human rights report in 2021 and “such a report would impose impracticable requirements on our operations and would interfere with our ability to serve our primary customers, the U.S. government and its allies.” The board doesn’t explain why a report on human rights would interfere with serving the United States government. In 2018, 70 percent of Lockheed Martin’s revenue came from the US government alone.
To strengthen its argument, Lockheed Martin’s board notes that many of the products it sells are already subject to oversight by the executive and legislative branches, which are tasked with preventing unauthorized use of weaponry. Lockheed Martin has no direct control over the failure of end-use monitoring of weaponry, but in reality weapons sold from the United States end up being hard to track once they are shipped. The form used in the initial stages of end-use monitoring by the United States government, DSP-83, does not specify which branch of a given military will use the weapons. For example, the applicant, or “end-user,” may be listed as the “Armed Forces of Saudi Arabia,” within which are several different units. Bad end-use monitoring leads to insufficient human rights data regarding weapons manufactured by US companies.
Arguments made by the boards of Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are suggesting that paying more attention to the human rights violations carried out with their products would (1) tank stock prices for their company and (2) discredit the human rights reputation of the United States. But what they’re really asking is for shareholders to give them permission to keep ignoring the real-world consequences of the products they make and sell.
Likewise, Boeing’s shareholders were asked to vote against a proposal for Boeing to provide more transparency on its lobbying activities. The board made similar arguments to Lockheed Martin’s against human rights reports — that additional lobbying reports are unnecessary and would harm shareholders.
Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project reported that the average taxpayer “contributed about $2,000 to the military last year.” About 45 percent of that went to corporations like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and others. Lockheed Martin alone received a payout from American taxpayers last year totaling about $75 billion.
A huge portion of the US budget goes directly to weapons manufacturers, making every American who pays their taxes an involuntary stakeholder in these companies. Perhaps if human rights and lobbying reporting would harm some of the world’s biggest corporations, it is time to demand our tax dollars be invested somewhere else.
Pygmy marmosets, tiger cubs and African grey parrots among endangered species for sale on Facebook, investigation by Avaaz reveals. (photo: EPA)
Solar panels in Zion National Park, Utah. Camilo Morales. (photo: Getty Images)
The plans include increasing renewable energy capacity by almost 10,000 megawatts by 2023, which would nearly double existing capacity, The Hill reported.
“The Department of the Interior continues to make significant progress in our efforts to spur a clean energy revolution, strengthen and decarbonize the nation’s economy, and help communities transition to a clean energy future,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a press release. “The demand for renewable energy has never been greater. The technological advances, increased interest, cost effectiveness, and tremendous economic potential make these projects a promising path for diversifying our national energy portfolio, while at the same time combating climate change and investing in communities.”
The new steps announced by Biden’s Department of the Interior (DOI) Wednesday all advance towards the goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2025 and creating a carbon-free power grid by 2035.
The DOI said that it had pinpointed possible improvements to energy transmission lines across 11 Western states and improved a policy to help staff members assess wind and solar projects on public lands. Further, it announced that it had given out its first competitive leases for solar energy in Utah. The leases were awarded to Minersville Solar Energy LLC for more than 4,800 acres. Once fully developed, the land could support 600 megawatts of electricity and generate a total of 215 jobs.
The announcement came the day after the DOI submitted a report to Congress outlining its progress so far at expanding renewable energy capacity on public lands, as Reuters reported.
In the report, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said it had permitted 10 solar projects and two geothermal projects during 2021. While this is an increase of 35 percent compared to 2020, renewable energy development on public lands is still well below private development. Capacity increased by 2.89 gigawatts on public lands in 2021, but 27 gigawatts for the U.S. overall. The 12 additional projects will be enough to power more than 300 million LED lights, according to The Hill.
BLM said it needed around 66 new staff members to respond to increased demand for renewable energy permits and to streamline the review process with other agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service, Reuters reported.
DOI’s focus on renewable permitting comes as the Biden administration faces criticism from climate activists for its decision to restart oil and gas drilling on public lands, a breach of one of President Joe Biden’s major campaign promises.
In response to the criticism, the Biden administration said the decision was the result of a court ruling.
“Today’s action… was the result of a court injunction that we continue to appeal, and it’s not in line with the president’s policy, which is to ban additional leasing,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday, as The Hill reported.
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