by Mike Farrell
ACLU OF COLORADO
The mission of the ACLU of Colorado is to protect, defend, and extend the civil rights and civil liberties of all people in Colorado through litigation, education, and advocacy. We share Mike’s passion for human rights, particularly in the areas of criminal justice reform and the abolition of the death penalty. We employ a comprehensive approach to safeguarding freedom—carrying out public education through public forums, events, and position papers, together with our legal work and legislative advocacy. We focus on defending free speech and the right to dissent, securing religious liberty, combating racial and ethnic profiling, and protecting the right to equal treatment for all people, including women, LGBT persons, and immigrants. We have a special concentration on criminal justice reform and ensuring the fair and humane treatment of prisoners. Our efforts during Colorado’s 2008 legislative session resulted in the passage of a pair of bills concerning the retention of DNA evidence. Coloradans learned firsthand about the importance of DNA evidence this year with the long-overdue release of Tim Masters, who spent nearly a decade in prison for a murder he did not commit. On the death penalty front, we successfully defeated an attempt—one of many across the nation—to use public fear and sentiment to set a terrible legal precedent. SB 195: Death Penalty for Aggravated Sexual Assault on a Child would have, for the first time, mandated the capital punishment for a crime that does not result in the victim’s death. Its defeat marked a small victory in the fight against the death penalty—if only by preventing a step backwards. We also work to prevent the abuse of police power through numerous lawsuits addressing excessive force and careless police procedure.
Having known Ryan since he declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois in 2000 after being confronted with a system so shoddy that more people had been freed from his death row than had been executed, I have found him to be a man of character. A self-described “conservative Republican death penalty supporter,” Ryan had the personal integrity to recognize a failing system and take the steps necessary to fix it, if possible. Watching the change in him over the years it took to examine the system, and seeing him deal with the political pressure he experienced from every quarter, it was wonderful to see an elected official actually take his job seriously.
I really grew to like George Ryan for the methodical way he went about the task he set for himself, but when he had the courage and personal integrity to buck the political tide and do what was clearly the right thing in his eyes, he became a hero to me. To have him now in this awful situation is a tragedy. My heart breaks for him and for his wife, Lura Lynn.
Reaching Denver, we find the Oxford Hotel, a grand old place in Lo Do (lower downtown), a revitalized area near the train station. It’s a great building just a block away from the Tattered Cover Book Store, where I’m to do a reception for the ACLU of Colorado and then the book event, which they are cosponsoring.
After a late lunch at a good vegetarian restaurant and an invigorating walk through downtown, I change and head to the Tattered Cover, which is in a terrific old three-story brick structure, a refurbished cannery. It’s a fabulous place with two extensive floors of books of all types and old, overstuffed chairs and sofas set around so that people can relax and enjoy them.
The folks from the ACLU are terrific and the event goes well. With an introduction by Cathy Hazouri, President of the ACLU of Colorado, the evening’s discussion tends to focus more on political and social issues, again with special attention to the death penalty, than on Hollywood and M*A*S*H, but that’s fine with me. And, of course, M*A*S*H always finds a way to fit in.
I’m thrilled that Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has come down for the event. Mike has become a valued friend and is one of the great, if unsung, heroes of the death penalty abolition movement. His books, essays, studies, polls, and lectures on the subject provide the basis for some of the most important work done on the issue today. Here in Colorado he has pioneered an effort to bring families still impacted by unsolved murders together with legislators to call for the elimination of the death penalty, with the money wasted on the killing system instead being used to fund efforts to resolve these “cold cases.”
Another good night. Back to the Oxford to turn in as the threatened rainstorm finally shows up. No tornadoes, thank you, at least so far. Given all this, though, it may be a long and tricky drive to Park City, Utah tomorrow.
DAY TWENTY-SEVEN
Thursday, June 5, 2008
CITY OF ORIGIN: DENVER, CO
CITY OF DESTINATION: PARK CITY, UT
MILES TRAVELED: 517 MILES
VENUE: PARK CITY LIBRARY
The rain woke me up—a good thing because the hotel’s wake-up call never came.
Mule and I head out in a downpour amid radio reports of flooding in some intersections and high water on the highways. The rain is coming down in sheets, but once on the highway the worst part is the wall of water sent up by the semis. If one is in front of us, the wipers can’t get the water off the windshield fast enough. When passing, there are moments when it feels as though we’re completely submerged. Blind as a bat, I’m forced to read our progress by the proximity to the truck we’re passing. Unwilling, or unable, to take my eyes off the windshield in the hope of a momentary view of the road ahead, the side of the semi has to be read by peripheral vision. Gets to be pretty scary a couple of times, but Mule is indomitable.
Mercifully, the rain slows as we move north into Wyoming and then west. And I must say, after going through the Plains states, Wyoming actually begins to feel like it. As we climb to higher altitude, snow still on the hills beside us, the ruptured land looks more and more like the Old West. I don’t know if it’s the result of seismic activity or the leavings of a passing glacier, but the rugged land boasts oddly shaped rock outcroppings that are weirdly attractive.
Thinking of Wyoming, though, rugged Western beauty is not the first thing that comes to mind. Former Senator Alan Simpson’s incredibly snide, unforgivably brutal treatment of Anita Hill during the Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, a transparent attempt to savage her in order to save his president’s hapless nominee, is one thought that occurs. Another is that this is the place that gave us an even more infamous troglodyte—the member of the U.S. Congress who refused to support sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime, called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and who later became Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush … and finally manipulated his way into the vice presidency of the United States so he could rule the world. What is it about the politics of this state?
Pulling off to fill up, I am once again required to pay over $4 per gallon of the cheapest gas—$4.08, to be exact. And, wanting to be sure the last mileage calculation was correct, I check it again. After doing some significant climbing, Mule is still getting forty-one miles per gallon. Better than twice what I get in my pickup at home.
Pulling out, I note that there’s suddenly another icon lit up on the dash. This one an exclamation point inside a kind of U. Unsure what it might mean, I assume the exclamation point is saying it’s not good, so I pull over and try to figure it out. Sure enough, it’s identified in the owner’s manual as an alarm. Wonderful, but it doesn’t say what kind of alarm. How helpful.
I can sense nothing in the way Mule is behaving to suggest a problem, but I’m not eager to have something fall off or blow up in the middle of a wild and lonely stretch of Wyoming highway. Cheney or Simpson might just happen by and run me over.
I notice that the U the exclamation point sits in has a sort of flat bottom. Could it represent a tire? I get out and look and they all seem fine. Deciding to drive on, I wrestle with the problem. I have to get to Park City, but this damned light won’t go away. Figuring this is nuts, I stop again and search the manual one more time. And, finally, I find it! I was right, it means there’s something wrong with a tire. Okay, none are flat and we’re still able to roll
, so on we go. A few miles further down the line there’s a sign indicating gas at a place called Elk Station, so I pull off and investigate. It’s a pretty forlorn area with one station and not much else. Seeing no sign of an air hose, I step inside and find a friendly woman who directs me to a red hose in the back—if I’ll just wait, as she has to switch on the compressor. No problem and thank you, ma’am.
Unsure of the proper pressure, I check each tire and put some air in every one. The last one, the left rear, does seem to be lower than the others, so I even them out and hope this solves the problem. Thanking the friendly woman, I fire up Mule and am disappointed to see that the damned light is still on. Having few options, I put her in gear and pull back onto the highway and Mule, her hoof now apparently comfortable, turns out the light!
Zen and the art of Mule maintenance.
Back on the road the radio says Hillary Clinton has indicated she will “suspend” her campaign. Suspend? That doesn’t exactly sound like ending it, does it? There are also reports that two different groups of Hillary supporters are circulating petitions demanding that she be named the vice presidential nominee. Lanny Davis, the lawyer responsible for one of them, says Hillary was told of the effort and didn’t endorse it, but didn’t tell him to quit. This is not good.
The BBC says Zimbabwe’s police have “detained” U.S. and British diplomats who were traveling in the country. Also not good.
Furthermore, Zimbabwe’s authorities have “detained” Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition politician whose campaign threatens to unseat Robert Mugabe. Yet another not good.
And, Zimbabwe has decided to expel all international nongovernmental aid organizations on the pretext that they have been involving themselves in the country’s politics and are supporting the opposition. Very not good.
Lots of not good in the news this morning.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM, to the intel folks) appeared before a military tribunal at Guantánamo today and reportedly told the presiding judge that the procedure was an “inquisition,” that he and his codefendants had been tortured for years and everyone knew it, and that he wanted to be sentenced to death so that he could be a martyr.
Hmmm. Sort of takes the sting out of the death penalty, doesn’t it?
After a lengthy description of the circumstances of the trial and the fact that there are challenges to this process yet to be decided by the Supreme Court, the reporter cites observers from human rights organizations who condemn the entire setup as having been completely tainted by the use of torture to gain confessions.
In fact, an earlier report indicated that while under torture, KSM confessed to things the intelligence people are pretty sure he didn’t do, a testament to the value of information forced out through these grisly means.
A lawyer from the Bush administration, however, leapt to the defense of these trials, claiming that all the evidence presented to this court would be from statements “voluntarily given” to interrogators in a “clean environment.” None of it, he insisted, would be that which was obtained through the use of torture.
“But,” the reporter said, “they have been tortured for years.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but the statements being presented in court now were not given under torture, they were given afterward, voluntarily.”
It boggles the mind. People who were tortured now give incriminating statements voluntarily? Might one not assume that they did so under the impression that if these “voluntary” statements were not forthcoming they might be taken back to the torture chambers?
I wish the reporter had asked, “If these men were so ready and willing to ‘volunteer’ these incriminating statements, why did they have to be tortured in the first place?”
Clive Stafford-Smith, an English lawyer who worked here in the U.S. for many years in opposition to the death penalty and is now representing a number of those incarcerated in Guantánamo, is also interviewed. He says that the claims made by the government—that the absence of scars on the accused proves that they were not tortured—are nonsense. He is representing a man who was tortured with a razor blade, he explains, so his client certainly has scars, but most of the methods of torture used do not leave scars—water boarding, for example. They all, he emphasizes, leave mental scars that, while not visible, are nonetheless scars in every sense of the word.
Enough, enough. Radio off.
Results of wind or water erosion are visible here. Some very oddly shaped mounds and spires dot the ground as we pass. One area sports a sloping ridge topped with serrated rocks that looks amazingly like the back of a dinosaur—stegosaurus, to be precise.
Suddenly, we’re out of the brown, brush-covered highlands and heading down into a beautiful, deep green valley. It turns out to be a series of such valleys that are quite striking, not something I’d have expected to see in Wyoming. The last of them is kind of schizophrenic: on the right it’s an almost mesa-like cliff face sculpted out of red rock, while on the left it’s a softly sloping, deep green hill climbing away from the road that looks remarkably like the Irish countryside.
Nearing Park City, we are now passing through Coalville, Utah. Boy, that name takes me back! This trip does trigger some memories. One year, on our annual summer trip to visit family in Minnesota, my dad’s old clunker couldn’t be trusted to make the trip, so he borrowed my older sister’s car—she was out of school and working and had been able to buy a used Ford. Well, better than Dad’s or not, it broke down in Coalville, Utah, and we had to spend a couple of days in a motel my folks couldn’t afford while the car got fixed—something they also couldn’t afford. Rather than watch Mom and Dad worry, my brother Jim and I spent a lot of time outside throwing rocks.
But we always remembered Coalville, Utah.
Park City is a lovely little spot. I’m told it is “a liberal enclave in a very red state.” I’m put up in a wonderful, comfortable, and very friendly B&B called the Washington School Inn and have time to get situated before going down to the local TV station for an interview and then to the Park City Library for the book event.
A very nice crowd turns up and we have a terrific exchange. Almost all of the questions are about social issues this time, with just a couple about M*A*S*H.
After signing a number of books and posing for a few pictures, I’m taken to dinner at a local restaurant where I get to watch the Lakers lose the first game of the championship series to the Celtics.
Another not good.
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
Friday, June 6, 2008
CITY OF ORIGIN: PARK CITY, UT
CITY OF DESTINATION: SACRAMENTO, CA
MILES TRAVELED: 679
TRAVEL DAY
Lovely place, the Washington School Inn. The room was great—Shelley would have adored it. If only … The bed was huge and soft, what they call a feather bed, I guess, which would not normally have been my choice. I prefer a firm mattress, but this one folded me in its embrace and I slept.
Very warm, friendly people, a good breakfast—this is the kind of place in which one wants more time. But the road beckons.
The clouds are gone, so as Mule and I pull out we get our first full view of Park City and the surrounding mountains. A phenomenal setting; it’s easy to understand why someone would want to get up every morning and take in this vista.
Back on Interstate 80 West we’re engulfed in beauty. The mountains are absolutely wonderful. But I’ll bet the people who have been here for a long time resent all the development that’s going on. Little settlements have sprung up all over the hillsides. They all appear to be tastefully done, but there sure are a lot of them …
Suddenly the highway becomes a giant slalom, snaking its way down for miles through a magnificent canyon that eventually brings us to Salt Lake City. Given the beauty of all we’ve seen this morning, it’s easy to understand why Brigham Young felt he had brought his people to the Promised Land.
Seeing the city brings back memories, though, some pleasant, some not. I
got to know this area fairly well when my partner and I made a movie just north of here in Ogden almost twenty years ago. It was a great time, we were treated well and the picture was pretty good—one of the first for TNT.
The last visit here wasn’t fun. William Andrews was about to be executed and I helped his mother meet with Governor Norman Bangerter to plead for his life. It was an incredibly difficult day, as you might imagine. She was magnificent—human, clear, incredibly strong. He was … a politician.
Heading west toward the Great Salt Lake makes me wonder if Brigham and his band had second thoughts after getting a mouthful of that water.
Once past the lake, the highway lays out straight as a stick for miles, a ribbon of black bisecting a huge mass of stark white land flatter than Iowa and Nebraska combined. Encircled by distant mountains, this area—plain, desert, salt flats, alkali, whatever—is so barren and inhospitable that it can barely sustain a kind of sickly scrub grass, and that only at its very edges. Miles and miles of this stuff, with nary a tree nor a rock to hide behind in the event someone wants to take a pee.
Then, just off the highway at what I assume to be near the midpoint, is a large, odd … something. Sculpture? It’s a squarish post off of which hang a few very large, round objects, one of which seems to have fallen off and broken. A modern, minimalist Christmas tree? Perhaps an artist’s rendering of the solar system? Maybe it’s a statement to space aliens—or possibly a gift from them? I’m sure there’s a point to it … I guess.
Sculpted-something behind us, we’re back to the huge expanse of white nothingness until a new sighting brings a smile. Maybe twenty feet off the road in this blizzard of white, a romantic named James has placed a little wire sign announcing to passersby that JAMES LOVES BRITT, only in place of the word loves he’s put a heart. “Way to go, James!” I shout.