UN EXPERT URGES US AUTHORITIES TO STOP EXECUTION OF TWO PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

 

New York, Jul 17 2012  2:05PM
An independent United Nations human rights expert has urged United States authorities to stop the execution of two people with psychosocial disabilities who are scheduled to be put to death tomorrow in the states of Georgia and Texas.

“It is a violation of death penalty safeguards to impose capital punishment on individuals suffering from psychosocial disabilities,” said the UN Special Rapporteur on arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns.

“It is also contrary to the United States Supreme Court ruling <i>Atkins v Virginia</i>, which held that such executions are unconstitutional,” added the expert, who reports in an independent and unpaid capacity to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Warren Hill and Yokamon Laneal Hearn were convicted of murder in separate incidents, and the convictions have been the subject of a number of legal appeals based on the defendants’ mental health, according to a <“http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12364&LangID=E“>news release issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

However, their death sentences were upheld despite claims that the defendants had psychosocial disabilities, and the existence of a federal ban on such executions. On Monday, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected clemency for Mr. Hill.

Mr. Heyns called on the state authorities “to demonstrate the moral and legal leadership expected of the strong democracy that the United States is by commuting the death sentences of Hill and Hearn, and show the importance it gives to the fundamental right to life.”

In respect of Mr. Hill’s case, the Special Rapporteur voiced particular concern that Georgia is now the only US state that requires proof of what it calls ‘mental retardation beyond a reasonable doubt,’ rather than a preponderance of the evidence as in other jurisdictions, although Georgia was the first state in the US to recognize that such defendants should not be executed.

“This higher standard of proof, making it very difficult to demonstrate that one actually suffers from a psychosocial disability may, I fear, mean that Mr. Hill, scheduled for execution tomorrow, would be a fatality in violation of international as well as domestic law,” Mr. Heyns said.

Regarding Mr. Hearn’s scheduled execution in Texas, the expert noted that “there is evidence to suggest that he also suffers from psychosocial disabilities. This includes an expert opinion that he is affected by structural brain dysfunction likely to have been caused by his mother’s alcohol abuse during pregnancy.”

According to the OHCHR news release, information received by the expert raises issues of a lack of a proper investigation, including mitigating factors, arbitrariness and non-compliance with fair trial safeguards that potentially constitute violations of international standards applicable to the death penalty.
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For more details go to UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news

Message from Our Friend Scott Lissner, Support the Rights of People with Disabilities, Call Your Senator!

I am sending this message along to you both as a personal supporter of the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilites (CRPD) and as representative of The Association on Higher Education And Disability (AHEAD) which supports the Convention as well. 

 

While it does require anything beyond the ADA here in the US, I believe the CRPD has the potential to facilitate international travel, business opportunities and markets for individuals with disabilities as well as expanding options for study abroad international exchanges of students and scholars that are so critical for tomorrow’s education and economy. 

 

I know the CRPD will improve the experience of disability for literally millions of people across the globe.

 

I know the CRPD will not undercut US sovereignty and that calling your senator will send a message that as an individual and a country we recognize that disability is an inextricable part of human experience and that all of us should be treated with fairness and dignity.  

 

The CRPD was considered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week (Thursday, 7/12), with testimony by several disability rights’ advocates.  As a result, the CRPD has been moved to “mark-up,” which is the final step before the committee votes to send the CRPD to the Senate floor for a vote on ratification.  The CRPD is scheduled for mark-up on Thursday, July 19.

 

As you will see from the message below, there are several powerful groups lobbying against the ratification of the CRPD.  As they step up their efforts, those of us in favor of ratification need to step up ours.  AHEAD is urging its members to contact their Senators, to identify themselves as a constituent and a member of the Association on Higher Education and Disability.  I encourage you to consider similar action, regardless of your affiliation with AHEAD.  Call your Senator and Indicate that you support ratification of the CRPD and urge them to ask their colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee to send the CRPD to the Senate floor so that they can vote in favor of ratification.  If your Senator sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, ask him or her to send the CRPD to the Senate floor and then vote for ratification. 

 

You may find contact information for your Senators by visiting:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm   

 

Please email or call your Senators today. 

 

Begin forwarded message from Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund:

 

UPDATE! Lastweek’s warm reception in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was good for us, but it provoked a storm of calls from the opposition led by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum has a large following and he’s using Twitter, Facebook and his substanial email list to provoke opposition and it’s working.We need to raise our voices in determined response!

 

 

MESSAGE: Identify yourself and your connection to disability (person with a disability, parent of a child with a disability, family member, etc.) then tell your Senator that,I support ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and as your constituent I request that you support the CRPD at the Committee meeting on July 19, vote in favor of the treaty in Committee, and move it forward to a floor vote in the Senate!

 

 

CONTACT:

Chairman: Senator John Kerry (D-MA)

(202) 224-4651

 

Chief counsel: Andrew Keller andrew_keller@foreign.senate.gov OR

www.kerry.senate.gov/contact/

 

Ranking Member: Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

(202) 224-6797

 

Chief counsel: Michael Mattler michael_mattler@foreign.senate.gov OR

www.lugar.senate.gov/contact/

 

Dear Orbitz

This morning in my email comes an offer from Orbitz: “Las Vegas four star hotels from $29.  I’d rather have five root canals than go to Vegas. Okay. I’m glad I got that off my chest. 

 

And I would rather have five root canals than go to Amityville, NY on a ghost tour. No more ersatz fright. 

 

And I would rather have five root canals than listen to country music. As Leadbelly said famously: “Never was no white person had the blues.”

 

White people have depression, then they go to Vegas or like me, they take something made by big pharma. 

 

And I’d rather have five root canals than watch tv advertisements by big pharma.

 

Anything else? 

 

I’m tired of neo-liberals talking about neo-liberalism. And I’m tired of words like “agency” and “intersectionality”–please go to a physical location and work with refugees or even better, refugees with disabilities. 

 

See? I told you I was distempered in my post last night. 

 

I’m not tired of John Lennon but I’m tired of Yoko Ono. 

 

John Lennon: “I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight neurotic narrow minded hypo-critics, all I want is some truth…”

 

I am not tired of Bob Marley or the entire Marley family. I want to put them on Mt. Rushmore.

 

I am not tired of poetry but I could do without the $100 million building that Poetry Magazine built for themselves after a rich benefactor left them a pile. Why didn’t they just move to Vegas? Or Amityville?

 

ON an airplane, a guy who works for big oil tells me that hydrogen fuel is going to save the planet. Of course I told him to hurry up. 

 

I am not tired of Michelle Obama. In fact I generally give first ladies a lot of slack. I even gave Nancy Reagan a lot of slack. I never did like Barbara Bush. I suspected her of loving her dogs more than her children. And we all know how that worked out.

 

And I’m not tired of wind in the trees. Theres a near willow that refreshed me yesterday. And I’m not tired of being alone. 

 

I wrote the following last night in a notebook: 

 

And so what does it mean, pale geographies of the heart,

Wishful hour alone at a window? Boyhood I was always alone,

blind kid with puppets and home made songs.

Will the hours ever be softer than they were in those days?

It was sweet to be lonesome with crickets 

Who sang in the broken furnace.

 

**

 

On Saturday last, I told a group of optometrists that the biggest contribution to cultural literacy after the invention of the printing press was the introduction of spectacles. I told them that Benjamin Franklin, James Joyce, and John Lennon were all incapable of seeing without spectacles. 

 

We better have some basic wonder about the things we do. That’s if we’re to get on with civilization. A pencil is a miracle. And shoes. And James Joyce. 

 

**

 

Dear Orbitz: write me when you have an offer that will send me to an island of small horses. 


Summer Hiatus in the Blogosphere

Well it occurs to me that I’m guilty of saying very little on my wee blog as of late. I’m irascible and phlegmatic and shit am I grumpy. It’s not fair to my readers to sound off. But when I total up all the misadventures of my nation, the war in Iraq which has killed over 100,000 civilians; the endless and ill conceived war in Afghanistan; the systemic lies of the corporate media, arguments stacked against the poor and the lower classes, always in favor of giving the rich even more breaks–when I catalogue these things I grow more distempered by the minute. I feel brittle, more than half humorless. I want to bite a live woodchuck like Thoreau. I want to roll in the dirt and howl like Whitman. It’s not easy to blog under such circumstances. I’m supposed to be clever and urbane. Or at least sufficient possessed of cultural irony to make sense of the moment. Instead I think about Paul Ryan’s GOP budget plan which will in fact put hundreds of thousands if not millions of poor and disabled Americans into life threatening extremis. I can’t be witty in the face of this. The objectified and propagandized cruelty of the Republican budget platform is unlike anything we’ve seen in this nation. 

 

So that’s why I’m swing so little. I’m worried. Worried half to death. I have health care and a job. I know how fragile these things are and especially for people with disabilities. 

What’s a blogger to say or do? 

Insights from the Planet of the Blind: An Interview. Part 1.

After reading Planet of the Blind, Kathleen Avery, Senior Director of Marketing at Cleinman Performance Partners, had occasion to talk with the author (Stephen Kuusisto) about his story and all that he’s come to understand.  Thank you, Kathleen, for allowing us to share this with our readers.

Kathleen:  Your book is so rich with visual metaphor, just the most vivid descriptions.  I’m curious how you are able to reference such diverse imagery.  Comparing a man in a rain coat to the sails of Tristan’s ship or an elephant’s ear, for instance…

Stephen:  Well, the first answer to that question is about language.  All nouns are images.  If you say strawberry…or horse…or wheat field…or lighthouse in Maine – you automatically see these things in your mind.  This is why ancient people believed that poets were magical.  They could make you see things.. They once had a radio advertisement on NPR: “Listen to the Theater of your Mind.”  That’s how poetry works.  It throws off powerful nouns and the reader sees them; they’re called power nouns.

Kathleen:  But how do you know what a lighthouse in Maine looks like?

Stephen: I either do or do not (laughs).  And that’s the second answer.  There is a way in which imagination approximates things.  You can actually create things with language that don’t exist.  The poet Charles Simic says, “Go inside a stone, that would be my way…”  He takes you inside the stone and it is the universe all over again.  The truth is you can’t see that at all, but you can trick the mind into seeing what can’t be seen.  This is also why ancient people thought poets were magical.

And, of course, people describe things to me.

You know, people think that blindness is like living in a vacuum.  The general public tends to think that blind people are trapped inside the stone.  They will ask me how I could possibly go to an art museum.  Well, you pick your friends.  You go with friends who will describe what they see.  Is it an immediate experience?  No.  But I like it, because there is poetry in it.  It is mediated.

Kathleen:  Oh, how interesting would it be to listen to different people describe the same Picasso?

Stephen: That would be a fabulous NPR piece!

You can read Kathleen Avery’s interview in its’ entirety by visiting www.cleinman.com/insights-from-the-planet-of-the-blind

**************************

Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012.  As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

 

What a Dog Can Do: An excerpt

No one knows when the forerunner of today’s guide dogs first appeared. Drawings of blind people accompanied by dogs date back to the 17th century. Those early pairings were most likely memorization teams, one pictures the dog leading its partner through the village square.  It’s clear no substantial training was involved. But we can imagine the tremendous bond with dogs that developed between the uncharted and lonely blind people of prior ages. It is a safe bet that dogs solved the puzzle of solitude for blind travelers who lived in a time when sightlessness was a great calamity. (The idea that blind men and women could be taught to read was a late development in cultural history, as Diderot’s essay Lettre sur les aveugles published in 1749 offered the first speculation that raised letters might be possible.) The world of the blind has been a dismal place throughout much of history. It’s possible to say, along with the poet Pablo Neruda that pure faith cannot withstand the assaults of winter, but your survival is more likely with a dog. Sometimes when I think about the ancient blind with their lives of begging and fiddle playing, their relentless wandering, homelessness, sickness, I weep to imagine the righteous loyalty of those early dogs.

From: What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs, by Stephen Kuusisto, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster

**************************

Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012.  As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

The fatal diagnosis

Been doing a lot of whining about my bad back and I'm sorry about that. It's not the pain that's getting to me though. That's mainly annoying.� What's driving me crazy is the way it's limited me. I can't do a lot of the things that I not only could do but enjoyed doing. Take long walks. Putter around the yard. Sit and read for hours. Stand up.

Yesterday I was out on my bike for the first time in over a year and it dawned on me. It hasn't been as much the matter that I can't do these things as that I've been avoiding doing theses things, telling myself to wait until my back feels better. Which of course has contributed to making it feel worse. So what 's really making me nuts is that I've let it turn me into a big baby.

I've seen the doctor. He ordered X-rays. They came back a couple of weeks ago.� No slipped discs. No fractures. I was expecting to be carted off for immediate surgery.

Wait til your appendages start falling off! Then the doc will say those things were just vestigial, don't ya know?