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      Pleas for clemency grow ahead of Ernest Lee Johnson’s execution

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      MissouriPleas for clemency grow ahead of Ernest Lee Johnson’s execution Missouri Democrats Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II join Pope in calls to governor for sentence to be set aside Edward HelmoreMon 4 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 10.27 EDTPleas for clemency on behalf of Ernest Lee Johnson, who was convicted of a 1994 murder, are growing more frantic ahead of his scheduled execution by lethal injection in Missouri on Tuesday after the Pope and two members of the US Congress issued calls for the sentence to be set aside.In a statement last week, Pope Francis requested clemency for Johnson in a letter to Missouri governor Michael Parson. The letter did not deny that “grave crimes such as his deserve grave punishment” but called on Parson to consider “the simple fact of Mr Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life.” If carried out it will be the first execution by Missouri since May 2020.The Pope’s call for clemency has been joined by two of Missouri’s Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II, who petitioned the governor to halt the execution.Bush and Cleaver, both members of the Congressional Black Caucus, urged the governor to acknowledge “the moral depravity of executions” and argued that Johnson’s execution perpetuates the same cycles of trauma and violence against Black people as “slavery and lynching did before it”.“The fact of the matter is that these death sentences are not about justice. They are about who has institutional power and who doesn’t,” they wrote. “Like slavery and lynching did before it, the death penalty perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence and state-sanctioned murder in Black and brown communities.”Advocates for the condemned man, including Bush and Cleaver, say that he has had developmental delays since birth, when he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother who battled addiction. Johnson, 61, has also had an operation to take out a tumor that removed as much as 20% of his brain tissue, the AP reported, which advocates say has further reduced his intellectual capacity.Johnson’s public defender, Jeremy Weis, has said that Johnson has scored between 67 and 77 in IQ tests and “meets all statutory and clinical definitions” of intellectual disability. Missouri law broadly defines intellectual disability as “substantial limitations in general functioning.”But last month, the Missouri supreme court ruled that Johnson is not, as he claims, intellectually disabled and denied his request for execution by firing squad based on his claim that death by lethal injection would cause severe pain.Johnson’s death sentence stems from February 1994 when he walked into a general store near his home in northeast Columbia and bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot three employees, Mary Bratcher, 46; Mable Scruggs, 57; and Fred Jones, 58, before hiding their bodies in a walk-in cooler and robbing the store for drug money.Johnson’s scheduled execution has highlighted racial and social inequities in the application of justice. Issuing a call for clemency, the Kansas City Star’s editorial board noted that Parson had swiftly pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white St Louis couple who plead guilty to assault after waving weapons at Black Lives Matter demonstrators last year.The board criticized the governor for failing to convene a board of inquiry but said it did not “even dare to hope that the evidence that Johnson today has the awareness of a child might convince our governor to commute his sentence”.It added: “When the state, our state, does kill this man, as it almost certainly will, it will be yet another indictment of a system so bloodthirsty that it delights in vengeance against those who don’t even know why they’re being punished.”TopicsMissouriCapital punishmentUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump seeking to elevate Republicans who refuse to accept Biden victory

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      The fight to voteDonald TrumpTrump seeking to elevate Republicans who refuse to accept Biden victory Ex-president has endorsed Republican secretary of state candidates who would wield enormous power over elections The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkMon 4 Oct 2021 04.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 04.01 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterDonald Trump and allies are seeding one of their most dangerous efforts to undermine US elections to date, seeking to elevate candidates who refuse to accept Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 to crucial offices where they could do significant damage in overturning the 2024 elections.The former president has endorsed several Republican candidates running to be the secretary of state, the chief election official, in their respective states. If elected, these candidates would wield enormous power over elections, and could both implement policies that would make it harder for Americans to cast a ballot and block the official certification of election results afterwards. Ten of the 15 candidates running for secretary of state in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada have either said the 2020 results were stolen or that they need to be further investigated, Reuters reported earlier this month.The endorsements from the former president underscore the enormous power that secretaries of state have over election rules and procedures, both before and after the election. One of the main reasons Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed in many places were election officials, including Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, who refused to go along with his effort. If those officials are voted out of office next year, it would be a serious blow to the guardrails of US democracy.“It is really troubling that Trump’s grip on the base of the Republican party may lead to the election of people who say that they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump,” Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an email. “That’s demonstrably false, but it does undermine the integrity of any elections that these people would be involved in running should they be elected.”The candidates are seeking votes from a Republican electorate that continues to embrace the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen. Seventy-eight per cent of Republicans believe Biden did not win the election, according to a recent CNN poll. More than half of Republicans believe there is solid evidence Biden did not win, the poll found, even though no evidence exists.Earlier this year, Trump endorsed Jody Hice, a Republican congressman in Georgia running to oust Brad Raffensperger, the current GOP secretary of state who rebuffed Trump’s efforts to get the election overturned. Hice, who appeared at a rally with Trump last weekend, objected to the counting of Georgia’s electoral votes and said he was not convinced Biden won Georgia, even though several recounts affirmed Biden’s victory there. Hice posted a photo on the morning of 6 January describing the day as “our 1776 moment”.Trump has also endorsed Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative he described as a “true warrior”. Finchem was at the Capitol on 6 January, and though he has said he did not enter the building, records show he was in contact with organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally. “When you steal something, that’s not really a win; that’s a fraud,” Finchem said at a 5 January pre-rally. Finchem was also one of the most-vocal supporters of a shoddy, Republican-backed review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, celebrated by Trump, that failed to turn up substantial evidence of fraud.In Michigan, Trump has endorsed Kristina Kamaro, who as a poll watcher in Detroit in 2020 and made unsubstantiated claims of fraud. More than 250 local audits and a Republican-led legislative inquiry have affirmed Biden’s win in Michigan.“Donald Trump has made it his mission to sow doubt in our democracy. His endorsement of Secretaries of State who believe and spread the Big Lie is the next step in the effort to tip the scales in future elections,” said Jena Griswold, Colorado’s top election official and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “More than ever we need election administrators who will respect the will of voters no matter the outcome of an election – our democracy is on the ballot in 2022.”TopicsDonald TrumpThe fight to voteUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Facebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attack

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      US Capitol attackFacebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attackFormer employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes Edward HelmoreSun 3 Oct 2021 13.13 EDTLast modified on Sun 3 Oct 2021 13.15 EDTA whistleblower at Facebook will say that thousands of pages of internal company research she turned over to federal regulators proves the social media giant is deceptively claiming effectiveness in its efforts to eradicate hate and misinformation and it contributed to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.The former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes ahead of a scheduled appearance at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.In an internal 1,500-word memo titled Our position on Polarization and Election sent out on Friday, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, acknowledged that the whistleblower would accuse the company of contributing to the 6 January Capitol riot and called the claims “misleading”.The memo was first reported by the New York Times.The 6 January insurrection was carried out by a pro-Trump mob that sought to disrupt the election of Joe Biden as president. The violence and chaos of the attack sent shockwaves throughout the US, and the rest of the world, and saw scores of people injured and five die.Clegg, a former former UK deputy prime minister, said in his memo that Facebook had “developed industry-leading tools to remove hateful content and reduce the distribution of problematic content. As a result, the prevalence of hate speech on our platform is now down to about 0.05%.”He said that many things had contributed to America’s divisive politics.“The rise of polarization has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years. In truth, there isn’t a great deal of consensus. But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization,” Clegg wrote.The memo comes two weeks after Facebook issued a statement on its corporate website hitting back against a series of critical articles in the Wall Street Journal.TopicsUS Capitol attackFacebookSocial networkingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More