Hi friends,
This is primarily a clean-up post. Two of the actions I tried to include went wrong. It’s been that sort of week. And there’s a new action for a state that has a golden opportunity to clean up its act.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the RECOUP Act, which stands for Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices. Most of us know that when we screw up at work, there are consequences.
We should not allow bank executives who mismanage their banks to continue to collect compensation while their banks are bailed out by federal dollars.
And then I sent you to a link to an action that has vanished.
I also recommended a hopeful and heartbreaking short documentary called “They Know What They Did. They’d Like You to Know Who They’ve Become” about some of the 50,000 Americans serving life sentences without parole.
It is a painful reminder that while some people ruin the lives of others and never face the consequences, others are punished so long and so hard that they never have the opportunity to rejoin society.
I wrote about the six states with second-look laws and a few others that are beginning to reexamine the policy of caging people for their whole lives even if they committed serious crimes as young people .
This year, the US Sentencing Commission proposed new guidelines in order to give federal judges more flexibility to consider parole for people serving life sentences.
The bipartisan Commission sent final amendments to Congress at the beginning of May and unless Congress takes action to reject the second-look amendment, it will take effect on November 1, 2023.
And there was an action with no link at all to let your Congressional representative know that you support the second-look amendment to federal sentencing guidelines.
With grace for Monday-and-Tuesday me, here are the actions you missed, all rolled into one:
Let your Congressional representative know that you support the second-look amendment to federal sentencing guidelines and consequences for bank executives who lead banks that fail.
The state of Louisiana is at a crossroads. With Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards reaching the end of his two-term limit, almost every prisoner on death row has asked for clemency.
"What we've found in Louisiana is that 80% of the time we convicted somebody and sentenced him to death, we were wrong," veteran criminal defense attorney Jim Boren told Baton Rouge Public Radio.
Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General has denied the mass petition from 55 people on procedural grounds.
Impetus for the mass petition came from remarks made by Edwards in March in which. . .[h]e pointed to the risk of executing innocent people, and said the practice of taking lives in the name of justice offended his Catholic faith.
That was the first time since becoming governor that he had spoken publicly against the death penalty.
Send Governor John Bel Edwards a postcard urging him to instruct the clemency board to hold formal hearings on each of the applications.
There’s been a lot written in the wake of the third criminal indictment of Trump.
Read Jamelle Bouie’s most recent commentary on the dangers that Trump posed and continues to pose to the nation.
Finally, because many of us struggle to communicate across the political chasm, I am sharing this refreshing primer on how to respond to MAGA folks when they dismissively insist that Trump did nothing wrong.
Have a great weekend!
with love,
L