Hi friends,
On Friday, I was eager to get outside before the weather made that dangerous, impossible, or just too unpleasant. I got to a museum and the public library. It was a good day, but I didn’t manage to post.
We were lucky, here in New York City.
I hope you had and have heat and light. I hope your week ended well and that you’ve spent time in good company, celebrating whatever you celebrate.
Holiday time is also clemency season in the US. I think this is sad, since forgiveness and generosity and recognition of growth and change seem like year-round stuff.
Clemency entails the spirit of justice, which includes mercy, fairness, and forgiveness. I look up these words every year at this time, which is another reason to make them part of an all-season vocabulary.
Advocates have urged Hochul and past governors to use their clemency powers more often and for more people, as a tool to reduce the prison population and to give people second chances. They argue that it could incentivize incarcerated people to stay out of trouble and to participate in rehabilitative programming. They also cite research that people tend to commit crimes at much lower rates as they get older.
Let your state legislators know that you support greater parole eligibility for older people in prison.
Until last week, Hochul had not approved any clemency applications in 2022; she pardoned nine people and commuted the sentences of four others last Wednesday. There are 450 people seeking pardons and nearly twice that number who have asked for sentence commutations.
Steve Zeidman, director of the CUNY School of Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic, thinks Hochul and other governors should do more to shrink the prison population.
“You don't address mass incarceration one person here, two people there. The crisis lingers and isn't addressed,” he said. “That takes vast, industrial strength use of the clemency power that most governors have. I just think someone has to, you know, be the first one to take the step in a meaningful way.”
Call on Governor Hochul to be the first one to use industrial-strength clemency power.
There is a stack of nearly 18,000 applications for pardons or commutations at DOJ’s Pardon Attorney’s office. The president’s mass pardon in October for people convicted of marijuana possession scrubbed some records clean, but did not result in anyone’s release from the Bureau of Prisons.
He seems petrified to release anyone currently incarcerated, and he is equally afraid of telling anyone who has applied that the answer is no. He wants to look like he is doing something with these symbolic gestures, but his clemency record is abysmal.
Tell the President to use his industrial-strength clemency power! This quick action is from the ACLU.
Covid complacency is a problem, especially if you have contact with people who are elderly, disabled, or immune-compromised.
Dr. Peter Hotez – who is nominated for a Nobel peace prize along with his colleague Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi for their work developing Corbevax, a Covid-19 vaccine they refused to patent so it could be replicated by middle- and lower-income countries – also issued a chilling warning about the future of this pandemic or any others.
“The next big coronavirus pandemic is coming – the fourth one. I can’t tell you if it’s going to be next year or five years or 10 years, but it’s coming,” he warned.
Hotez bemoans our abysmal rate of uptake of the bivalent booster and the missed opportunity it represents. He notes that the anti-vaxxers are winning.
Get your bivalent booster if you haven’t done so already!
As Covid and other respiratory diseases surge, NYC health officials are recommending that people mask indoors and even outdoors, when they are in crowds. The MTA and the governor are deferring to public health officials, who are being insufficiently proactive.
Leaving the decision to mask up to individuals ignores the nature of both public health and public transit. Public policy must recognize that individual decisions about acceptable risks affect other people.
“Many disabled and immunocompromised New Yorkers avoid public transportation because they are unwilling to risk their own lives or those of their loved ones when the majority of people don’t mask,” said Cara Liebowitz, advocacy coordinator for the Brooklyn Center for the Independence of the Disabled.
Please tell the MTA to restore the mask mandate!
A mandate won’t get everyone to wear a mask, but it may shift the balance. We owe this to each other.
with love,
L