text:
The Myth Of Innocence
published in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology - March 31, 2005
Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois
For decades in America, questions about the death penalty centered on philosophical and sometimes religious debate over the morality of the statesanctioned execution of another human being. Public opinion ebbed and flowed with support for the death penalty, declining as civil rights abuses became a national concern in the 1960s and increasing along with a rapid rise in violent crime in the 1980s.
Those who oppose capital punishment call themselves "abolitionists," clearly relishing the comparison to those who fought slavery in the 19th century. In the mid-1990s these abolitionists, funded by a cadre of wealthy supporters including George Soros and Roderick MacArthur, succeeded in changing the focus of the debate over the death penalty from the morality of executions to questions about the "fundamental fairness" or, in their minds, unfairness of the institution. The abolitionists were frustrated by polling that showed that virtually all groups of Americans supported capital punishment in some form in some cases.
Led by Richard Dieter of the neutral-sounding Death Penalty Information Center, opponents of capital punishment undertook a sweeping make-over of their campaign. In addition to painting America as a rogue state-a wolf among the peaceful lambs of the European Union who had forsaken the death penalty-the latter-day abolitionists sought to convince America that, as carried out, the death penalty was inherently racist, that the unfortunates on death row received wretched and often incompetent defense counsel, and, most appalling, that a remarkable number of those sentenced to death were in fact innocent.
Dieter and his allies pointed to the fact that while African-Americans make up only slightly more than ten percent of the American population, they constitute more than forty percent of those on death row. In addition, they described some cases in which the appointed lawyers were nothing more than golfing pals with the judge making the appointment, that some of these lawyers had no previous experience with murder cases, and that in at least one case the lawyer appears to have slept through portions of the trial.
Abolitionists painted a picture of massive prosecution, funded by the endless resources of the government and pitted against threadbare public defenders either barely out of law school or, if experienced, pulled from the rubbish heap of the legal profession.
But most compelling of all the arguments that called capital punishment "fatally flawed" were the stories of men who had served years on death row, a few coming close to their scheduled execution only to be released because a court had determined that they were "exonerated." Television programs showed dramatic footage of Anthony Porter, freed from Illinois's death row, running into the arms of his savior, Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess. A handful of other stories of "innocents on death row" filled magazines, television programs, and symposia on college campuses across the country.
In the face of horrific crimes like the murder of more than 160 people by Timothy McVeigh, death penalty opponents sought to recruit new converts. By the time of the 2000 presidential campaign, they had succeeded in moving the debate to a point where supporters of capital punishment felt beleaguered and outgunned. A growing number of classic conservatives, from William F. Buckley to Pat Robertson, expressed their mistrust of capital punishment. The arguments succeeded in driving down public support for the death penalty from a high of almost 80% in the late 1980s to a low of around 65% in the year George W. Bush ran against Al Gore for president.
Recognizing that the polls still showed majority support for the existence of the death penalty, abolitionists started advocating for a "moratorium," suggesting that short of abolition, a halt should be declared to executions while the issue was intensively studied. They found an unlikely ally in then-Governor George Ryan of Illinois.
Ryan, a conservative Republican, had just two years earlier, in 1998, won election in part by underlining his support for capital punishment. But in 1999 the Chicago Tribune began running a hard-hitting series of lengthy articles, accusing Illinois prosecutors of serious misconduct and highlighting a number of cases in which men sentenced to death row had been released when appellate courts found serious errors in their trials or claims of misconduct by police or prosecutors. Although prosecutors and at least one state Supreme Court justice questioned Ryan's authority simply to halt the death penalty process, Ryan's action effectively prevented the execution of any of the 170 men on that state's death row.
Ryan became a folk hero. He was lauded on college campuses across the country, cited as a profile in political courage by foreign politicians, and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace prize. Just before leaving office in 2003, Ryan stunned many when he announced a sweeping clemency, using his executive powers to release 164 men from death row and granting outright pardons to four more.
Sensing a possible sea change in public sentiment, the abolitionists pushed for other states to follow Ryan's example. The moratorium became a leading campaign issue in the Maryland governor's race in 2002, following the outgoing governor's decision to place a moratorium on that state's use of the death penalty and commission a study to determine whether race plays a role in the application of the death penalty.
After these apparent victories, the tide started to turn, but not in the way the abolitionists expected. Governor Ryan was dogged by a federal investigation into bribery and corruption charges that drove his approval rating to less than twenty-five percent. His name became so toxic in Illinois politics that a Republican candidate for governor in 2004, whose last name was also Ryan but was no relation to the Governor, campaigned on first name. After securing indictments and convictions against his top aides and even his campaign committee, federal prosecutors indicted Ryan on charges of bribery, corruption, and racketeering.
In Maryland, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who had pledged her continued support for the death penalty moratorium, suffered a defeat in the 2002 election in the wake of the Washington-area sniper shootings. And, finally, the murder of 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, reminded many Americans that some crimes merited the ultimate punishment.
Having largely abandoned the moral arguments against capital punishment, the modern abolition movement is now based on a trio of urban legends: (1) the death penalty is racist at its core; (2) those accused of capital murder get grossly inadequate representation; and (3) a remarkable number of people on death row are innocent.
In the last ten years the violent crime rate in America, including the murder rate, has decreased dramatically. A series of recent studies by economists showed an undeniable correlation between the death penalty and deterrence.
One researcher who reported that pardons may have actually cost lives nonetheless added a postscript to the study, saying that despite the results of his study he personally believed that the death penalty remained biased against minorities.
How could the death penalty not be racially biased given the disproportionate number of African-Americans convicted of murder? A Cornell University study issued in March of 2004 by law professors John Blume and Theodore Eisenberg and statistician Martin Wells-all opponents of the death penalty-showed that the conventional wisdom about the South's so-called "death belt," where blacks are said to be much more likely to die than whites convicted of similar murders, simply does not hold up. In the words of the authors, "[t]he conventional wisdom about the death penalty is incorrect in some respects and misleading in others."
Until the Cornell study, the abolitionists had relied largely on the studies of David Baldus for their accusations of racism. Baldus, an Iowa law professor, claimed that race was a key factor in the imposition of death sentences. The Cornell University study, however, drawn from statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, showed that while African-Americans were convicted of committing 51.5% of all murders, they comprised only 41.3% of death row's population. The study revealed that roughly ten percent of the murders were crossracial and that in twenty-eight states, including Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, blacks were under-represented on death row. States like Texas, which had the greatest number of people on death row, actually had a lower per capita rate of imposing the death penalty than Nevada, Ohio, and Delaware.
The Cornell study thereby confirmed what many prosecutors had suspected: that a white murderer sentenced to death was twice as likely actually to be executed than a black person sentenced to death. It may be shockingly politically incorrect to say, but the fact is that the most horrific murders-serial killings, torture murders, and sex crimes against childrentend to be committed more frequently by white murderers than blacks.
The next urban legend is that of the threadbare but plucky public defender fighting against all odds against a team of sleek, heavily-funded prosecutors with limitless resources. The reality in the 21st century is startlingly different. There is no doubt that before the landmark 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright appointed counsel was often inadequate. But the past few decades have seen the establishment of public defender systems that in many cases rival some of the best lawyers retained privately. The Chicago Tribune, while slamming the abilities of a number of individual defense counsel in Cook County capital cases in the 1980s, grudgingly admitted that the Cook County Public Defender's Office provided excellent representation for its indigent clients.
Many giant silk-stocking law firms in large cities across America not only provide pro-bono counsel in capital cases, but also offer partnerships to lawyers whose sole job is to promote indigent capital defense. In one recent case in Alabama, a Portland, Oregon law firm spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of lawyer time on a post-conviction appeal for a death row inmate. In Oregon, where I have both prosecuted and defended capital cases, it is common for attorneys to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the state for their representation of indigent capital clients. And the funding is not limited to legal assistance. Expert witnesses for the defense often total tens of thousands of dollars each, resources far beyond the reach of individual district attorneys who prosecute the same cases.
As the elected prosecutor of what is considered a mid-sized county in Oregon, I have a set budget that rarely gives me more than $15,000 a year to cover the total expenses of expert witnesses for all of the hundreds of cases my office prosecutes each year. Yet in one recent murder trial, one witness in the mitigation phase admitted he had already billed the state indigent defense program for over $30,000. In a related case the investigators for the defense were paid over $100,000.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we come to discuss why it matters whether someone is "innocent," "exonerated," "acquitted," or merely let go. Words like "innocence" convey enormous moral authority and are intended to drive the public debate by appealing to a deep and universal revulsion at the idea that someone who is genuinely blameless could wrongly suffer for a crime in which he had no involvement. But in the practice of law, words matter enormously. To call someone "innocent" when all they managed to do was wriggle through some procedural cracks in the justice system cheapens the word and impeaches the moral authority of those who claim that a person has been "exonerated."
Scott Turow, the bestselling novelist, spent some time as a federal prosecutor before joining a high-end Chicago law firm. He became interested in the death penalty through pro bono work that he and his firm performed for a group of death row defendants who were eventually released. Governor Ryan appointed Turow to a seventeen-member commission that sought to review Illinois's death penalty laws. The commission was heavily laden with "former prosecutors" like Turow, who were now criminal defense lawyers. Only one commission member was a sitting prosecutor. That member, Mike Waller, was the lone dissenter on many of the recommendations that were adopted almost in their entirety by the Illinois legislature.
Turow has written two recent books, one fictional-Reversible Errors - already a TV movie-of-the-week-and a slim, austere volume of his personal reflections, Ultimate Punishment. The novel sold well, like most of Turow's other works. It paints the traditional urban myth of overzealous and politically-ambitious prosecutors and incompetent forensics resulting in a tragic miscarriage of justice, thwarted by a brave civil attorney who is dabbling in pro-bono capital defense work, aided by his love interest, a recovering addict who sold her office as a judge and fell from grace.
Popular culture, most of it not as well-crafted as Turow's, has created an entire alternate universe that posits a legal system that regularly hurls doe-eyed innocents onto death row through the malevolent machinations of corrupt cops and district attorneys who either earn bonuses for the innocent people they convict or are so intent on advancing their careers that they disregard the truth and conceal evidence that might clear the defendant. These fantastic constructions are prominent in television programs like The Practice (mercifully axed), in movies like True Believer and True Crime as well as in popular fiction. There is an axiom in journalism that it's not news how many planes landed safely today. Accordingly, it's not surprising that the news articles that make the front page of major publications are about the exceedingly rare cases where the convicted defendant did not, in fact, commit the offense.
One of the most striking examples of truth and fiction blended in popular culture is a play called The Exonerated, which just finished a successful two-year run off-Broadway and is now touring the United States. The play profiles six people who were once on death row and now walk free. The clear implication is that they are innocent in the classic sense of that word-that they didn't do it, weren't there, didn't participate. Yet two of the six, Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs and Kerry Cook, stand convicted by their own guilty pleas of the murders for which they were supposedly "exonerated." A third, Robert Hayes, is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for a crime eerily similar to the one for which the play claims he was exonerated. Neither the script, nor the reviews of, nor most of the press for The Exonerated bear any resemblance to the stark facts of these cases.
Imagine everything you did between the years of 1976 and 1992. Now remove all of it. Those 16 years were taken away from Sunny Jacobs, convicted and sentenced to death for a crime she did not commit. But her story is not unique. And it could happen just as easily to you. The Exonerated tells the true stories of six innocent survivors of death row.
- Advertisement for the play The Exonerated
Susan Sarandon, Debra Winger, Mia Farrow, Vanessa Redgrave and other stars of stage and screen have been pleased at the chance to read the words of a woman who stands convicted of two murders. The Exonerated was rated the third-best play of 2002 by Time magazine, and many reviewers (and, most likely, audiences) have accepted these effective theatrics as the truth. For example, veteran theater critic John Simon declared that "docudramas can take liberties with the truth in subtle, sometimes unintentional ways," but that he has "no reason to disbelieve" authors Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank's version of the truth.60 Obviously Mr. Simon has only seen and read the play, not the trials involved. In fact, Sunny Jacobs, the main character in The Exonerated, is legally guilty, and contrary to claims made by the play, cannot be deemed factually innocent. Sunny Jacobs is a woman who has been exonerated only by theater critics or other glitterati who take these claims at face value.
During the off-Broadway run of The Exonerated, one reviewer recounted that, after Sunny and her children were kidnapped by the real killer, "Sunny and [her common law husband] were arrested for murder along with the killer, who made a deal with the state attorney and accused the couple." In an English production of the play, Jacobs is described as "a yoga instructor" who calls herself "a hippie. I was a peace-and-love person. I'm a vegetarian." No mention of her several arrests for gun and drug charges or her admission that she participated in gunning down two men. Another review calls her "a young mother trying to protect her children and her mate . . . caught in a police shooting. . . ."
Here are the facts, gained from the trial transcripts, published opinions of the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and from reviewing the tapes and transcripts of police interrogations:
Canadian constable Donald Irwin was on a "ride-along" with his friend Phillip Black, a trooper for the Florida State Police, on the morning of February 20, 1976. Trooper Black had met Corporal Irwin of the Ontario Provincial Police and the two had visited each other's homes over the years.
Black and Irwin were checking a car parked at a rest stop along 1-95 near Pompano Beach. The Camaro was occupied by two men-Jesse Tafero (Jacobs's boyfriend and the father of their infant son) and a prison pal of Tafero's named Walter Rhodes-and Jacobs and her two children. Two truck drivers saw the trooper order the men out of the car, leaving only Jacobs and her two children in the car. Jacobs admitted to firing one shot from inside the car. The State's theory, which ultimately resulted in convictions, was that she then handed the gun, which she had purchased in North Carolina, to Tafero, who fired several more shots.
Both Irwin and Black lay dying when the group stole the trooper's car and took off. One of the truck drivers who witnessed the event saw a man later identified as Rhodes with his hands in full view (i.e., no gun in hand). A TASER dart was discovered in the door of the cruiser. In the Camaro, an empty container for a TASER weapon was found in the back seat near where Jacobs and her kids had been seated. Expended shells from a semi-automatic pistol registered to Jacobs were found both outside and inside the car, consistent with some shots being fired from inside the car.
After taking the trooper's car, the group then kidnapped an elderly man and his Cadillac, initially claiming they had to take a sick child to the hospital. With Rhodes at the wheel and with the 9mm pistol (owned by Jacobs) strapped to a holster around Tafero's waist, they tried to run a roadblock. Police opened fire and shot Rhodes in the leg.
Officers initially were unclear about Jacobs's relationship to the men. She clarified it by kissing Tafero and later telling her nine-year old that she loved him and for him "to keep [his] mouth shut." Shortly thereafter, officers asked Jacobs, "Do you like shooting troopers?" "We had to," she said, and while being transported she told officers that she had fired the first shot.
Jacobs's version in the play? "It all happened so fast, you know. I just ducked down to cover the kids. . . . We were kidnapped at that point. ... I know there must be a roadblock. 'Hey we're gonna be rescuedl Help is on the way, you know, the cavalry!'"
The prosecution gave Walter Rhodes, who denied firing any of the fatal shots, a lie detector test; when he passed they allowed him to plead guilty to murder in the second-degree. he agreed to testify against Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs. Tafero was tried first, convicted, and sentenced to death.93 Jacobs was tried next and also convicted. Although gushing reviews of The Exonerated refer to readings from actual transcripts, Jacobs never testified at trial before a jury. Her only testimony was before a judge in a pre-trial motion, seeking to keep statements she made to investigators away from the trial jury. She chose to invoke her constitutional right not to testify, but now wants to be vindicated in the court of public opinion, where there is no Fifth Amendment.
The jury recommended life in prison but the judge overruled the jury and imposed a death sentence. The Florida Supreme Court in turn overruled the trial judge and reduced the sentence to life. Jacobs served five years on death row, not sixteen as the play would have the audience believe, before being released into the prison's general population. Another decade went by and the case ended up before the federal appeals court that oversees Florida. In ordering a new trial, the Eleventh Circuit made no findings about Sunny Jacobs's factual innocence but held that a polygraph administered to Walter Rhodes contained answers that were inconsistent with some of Rhodes's testimony, and should have been turned over to the defense. The court also ruled that some of Jacobs's statements should not have been admitted against her at trial (these did not include her statement that she had fired the first shot). The appeals court ordered a new trial for Jacobs.
Jacobs was represented by top-notch defense counsel who had become personally devoted to her cause. She was released from prison in 1992 after entering an Alford guilty plea, allowing her to claim she didn't really commit the crime but still plead guilty to take advantage of the plea offer. Jacobs pled guilty to two counts of Murder in the second Degree, the same charges to which Rhodes pled. At the plea and sentencing hearing, the prosecutor recited the facts the state could prove. Jacobs and her lawyers agreed the state could prove those facts. Witnesses had died, and Rhodes had recanted and then unrecanted at least twice. (He now maintains that his original testimony was correct.) After sixteen years of battling in the courts, the prosecutor decided that a plea to Murder in the second Degree and seventeen years in prison was an acceptable result.
In the play, the clear impression is that Sunny Jacobs was freed from prison by a guardian angel: "But after all that, one day, the guard came into my cell and told me I was getting out. I thought he was trying to trick me."
No court ever "exonerated" Sonia Jacobs. She was convicted of the same crime as Walter Rhodes, who actually served more time than Jacobs. She is legally guilty by virtue of a plea and sentence. But she came from a wealthy white family. Her background isn't what people expect from a murderer. The elegant Mimi Rogers played her in a made-for-TV movie, In the Blink of an Eye, which aired on ABC in 1996 The inconvenient facts of her cold-blooded executions of two innocent men from the back seat of a Camaro while her nine-year-old son looked on were deleted from the movie, to make her release from prison palatable to the television audience.
The Jacobs case caught my attention a few years ago and I have spent hundreds of hours reading trial transcripts and appellate decisions, listening to tape recordings of Jacobs's questioning and conducting extensive interviews with several of those involved with the case. After such scrutiny, the claim of "exoneration" made by the eponymous play simply fails. The concept of "innocence" is cheapened when used to describe Jacobs, whose guilt is supported not only by her own plea, but more importantly the actual facts surrounding her case.
In an article published November 27, 2003, Contra Costa Times reporter Georgia Rowe glibly parroted, "American history is rife with people who were convicted of crimes they didn't commit."
In 1998, Northwestern University sponsored a conference that celebrated a group of people it claimed were innocents on death row. One of the men on stage was Dr. Jay Smith, made infamous by Joseph Wambaugh's book Echoes in the Darkness and one of the 118 men the Death Penalty Information Center fetes as having been "freed from death row." The real story is not so festive.
Dr. Smith was convicted of the murder of high school English teacher Susan Reinert and her two children. A jury concluded that Smith and another teacher had conspired to murder Reinert, and that her children were collateral damage of the murder scheme, killed because they might have given witness. Reinert's body was recovered, but the children have never been found.
A state appellate court held that prosecutors had failed to disclose the existence on the victim's body of a few grains of sand that might possibly have supported Smith's claim of innocence. Smith's conviction was set aside and he was freed from a life sentence in prison. Emboldened by his newfound freedom (and despite his undisturbed convictions for theft by deception, receiving stolen property, possession of a firearm without a license and possession of marijuana), Smith filed lawsuits against the State of Pennsylvania, the officer who arrested him and everyone connected with his prosecution.
There was only one problem: Smith was not innocent. In its final decision throwing Smith's case out of court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded: "Our confidence in Smith's convictions for the murder of Susan Reinert and her two children is not the least bit diminished by consideration of the suppressed lifters and quartz particles, and Smith has therefore not established that he is entitled to compensation for the unethical conduct of some of those involved in the prosecution."
Yes, there are a few people who actually did not do it. Some are true poster boys: Kirk Bloodsworth, a Maryland man who was convicted of murder and later exonerated by DNA testing. cases like Bloodsworth's show that the years and layers of appeals required in capital cases do in fact catch the rare mistake that wrongfully jails or condemns an innocent man.
Most have stories more akin to Anthony Porter, whose release was due in large part to the work of journalism students at Northwestern University. What doesn't make it into the stock footage of him running jubilantly into the arms of Professor Protess upon his release from prison is how he got to prison in the first place. Porter was committing an armed robbery in the same park, at the same time as a drug murder. he ran from the park, gun in hand, in full view of witnesses who identified Porter to the police.126 Porter denied not only the murder, but even being in the park, a lie he maintained until after his convictions were affirmed.127
The justice system is far from perfect and has made many mistakes, mostly in favor of the accused. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died or lost their livelihoods through embezzlement or rape because the American justice system failed to incarcerate people who were guilty by any definition.
Since the death penalty was re-authorized in 1976 by the Supreme Court, there have been upwards of 500,000 murders. About 7,000 murderers were sentenced to death and about 3,700 remain on death row today.130 About nine hundred and fifty have been executed. Appellate courts at the state and federal levels have imposed what one justice called "super due process"132 for convicted capital murderers, overturning almost two-thirds of all death sentences, a rate far exceeding that in other cases. Virtually none have been overturned because of "actual innocence."
Some claim that a civilized society must be prepared to allow ten guilty men to walk free in order to spare one innocent. But the wellorganized and even better-funded abolitionists cannot point to a single case of a demonstrably innocent person executed in the modem era of American capital punishment.
Instead, let's tally the additional victims of the freed: Nine, killed by Kenneth McDuff, who had been sentenced to die for child murder in Texas and then was freed on parole after the death penalty laws at the time were overturned. One, by Robert Massie of California, also sentenced to die and also paroled. Massie rewarded the man who gave him a job on parole by murdering him less than a year after getting out of prison. One, by Richard Marquette, in Oregon, sentenced to "life" (which until 1994 meant about eight years in Oregon) for abducting and then dismembering women.137 he did so well in a woman-free environment (prison) that he was released-only to abduct, kill and dismember women again.138 Two, by Carl Cletus Bowles, in Idaho, guilty of kidnapping nine people and the murder of a police officer. Bowles escaped during a conjugal visit with a girlfriend, only to abduct and murder an elderly couple.
The victims of these men didn't have "close calls" with death. They are dead. Murdered. Without saying goodbye to their loved ones. Without appeal to the state or the media or Hollywood or anyone's heartstrings.
Discouraged over polls that have consistently shown public support for capital punishment between sixty-five and eighty-five percent over the last quarter century,140 proponents of the death penalty have decided to tap into an understandable horror that people who are truly innocent of the murder of which they stand convicted are on death row. They are turning into doeeyed innocents the few murderers who have slipped through one of the countless cracks in the law afforded to capital defendants. They want us to believe that any one of us could be snatched at any time from our daily freedoms and sentenced to die because of a false and coerced confession, police corruption, faulty eyewitness identification, botched forensics, prosecutorial misconduct, and shoddy and ill-paid defense counsel.
There are a handful of people who have spent time, in some cases many years, on death row, for crimes they genuinely did not commit. The number bandied about by the abolitionists is just past the 100 mark. But a closer examination using a more realistic definition of innocence-that is, had no involvement in the death, wasn't there, didn't do it-drops the number to thirty or even twenty-five. At a seminar in February of 2004 held by the Federal Bar Council of New York, U.S. District Court judge Jed Rakoff, who made history in 2001 by ruling the death penalty unconstitutional, acknowledged that his research showed the number to be closer to thirty. The larger question is whether the problem of wrongful convictions in capital cases is an episodic or epidemic problem.
For those who believe that no rate of error is acceptable, the death penalty can never be "reformed" sufficiently, despite the claims that they are seeking only to insure a fairer system. Yet these same advocates urge the substitution of life without parole, claiming (as is sometimes true) that many inmates consider a life sentence to be worse than execution. Peel back the layers of this reckoning and you'll find these advocates claiming that it is just as horrible to threaten to take away the remaining days of a murderer's life, and therefore we must abolish all long prison sentences as well as the death penalty. In a debate at the American Bar Association's annual convention in Chicago in 2001, I confronted Nadine Strossen of the American Civil Liberties Union on that very question. I asked her, if I would-for the sake of argument-abandon my support for capital punishment, would she, on behalf of the ACLU, affirm her support for sentences of life without possibility of parole? She honestly responded that she could not; that it was an ever-changing political and moral environment. And therein lies the dilemma. If there are people so dangerous, so evil that that they can never be trusted to walk among us, how will we answer to their next victims? What level of risk are the j abolitionists willing to accept for those who will die at the hands of a McDuff, a Marquette, or a Massie?
The number of death sentences is, in fact, decreasing. Criminal sentences for crimes other than murder have become tougher, terms of imprisonment more certain, and perhaps more significantly, the rate of murder is down overall. Prosecutors and juries are properly and appropriately becoming even more discriminating about determining who should die for their crimes. It is a journey not taken lightly.
Likewise, casting the accused as true innocents caught up by a corrupt and uncaring system only discredits a movement that has legitimate moral arguments. Nothing excuses making the victims nameless and faceless, making martyrs out of murderers, and turning killers into victims.
Some may wonder why it should matter if the number of people who were genuinely exonerated is 30 or 150. Many will claim that even one innocent person put to death is an intolerable number, but those who make that argument are demanding an impossibility-a perfect system. Such errors are episodic, not epidemic, and merit the most rigorous review, precisely as occurs in 21st century capital jurisprudence.
But if one of the primary engines in the debate over capital punishment is that wrongful capital convictions are rampant, then the devil is very much in the details. To call a man with blood on his hands innocent stains not only the truth, but calls into question the actual innocence of the fewer number who are truly exonerated.
In a subject as emotionally charged as the death penalty these claims must be made precisely-by all sides. Intellectual honesty is a critical ingredient to a meaningful discussion of this important subject. Death penalty opponents risk losing their credibility when they are reckless with the truth.
Citation Details
Title: The Myth Of Innocence
Author: Joshua Marquis
Publication: Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (Feature)
Date: March 31, 2005
Publisher: Northwestern University School of Law
Volume: 95 Issue: 2 Page: 501-521
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Why Criminal Defense Attorneys Hate Josh, Part I
The thong arm of the law.
by Willamette Week staff [click on link for printer friendly page]
* Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis, the most quoted prosecutor in Oregon, may also be the most despised by defense lawyers-and now there's merchandise to prove it. In November, a lawyer called a cop an "asshole" when his client was wrongfully arrested based on an expired warrant. Marquis responded by charging the lawyer with disorderly conduct. In tribute to freedom of speech, some wag dreamt up a line of merchandise including tote bags ($12.99), T-shirts (starting at $8.99) and a thong ($7.99)-all bearing the prosecutor's likeness and the words "Fuck Josh Marquis." Marquis, looking at http://www.cafepress.com/fuckmarquis after being notified of the site by Murmurs, said, "Oh, my god-a thong, too."
And from this update on 10/19:
Marquis proved on Monday that the law does indeed have a thong arm. He successfully convicted Corvallis defense lawyer John Rich of disorderly conduct for frightening people and yelling at least one obscenity at a cop in the courthouse -- thus closing the case that inspired the merchandise. The result of the six-and-a-half-hour trial: a $90 ticket for Rich (who was not the thongmonger). Marquis has no regrets, saying, "If a citizen did this, they would probably be thrown in jail."
Further reading:
Why Criminal Defense Attorneys Hate Josh
Part II
Part III
Part IV
by Willamette Week staff [click on link for printer friendly page]
* Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis, the most quoted prosecutor in Oregon, may also be the most despised by defense lawyers-and now there's merchandise to prove it. In November, a lawyer called a cop an "asshole" when his client was wrongfully arrested based on an expired warrant. Marquis responded by charging the lawyer with disorderly conduct. In tribute to freedom of speech, some wag dreamt up a line of merchandise including tote bags ($12.99), T-shirts (starting at $8.99) and a thong ($7.99)-all bearing the prosecutor's likeness and the words "Fuck Josh Marquis." Marquis, looking at http://www.cafepress.com/fuckmarquis after being notified of the site by Murmurs, said, "Oh, my god-a thong, too."
And from this update on 10/19:
Marquis proved on Monday that the law does indeed have a thong arm. He successfully convicted Corvallis defense lawyer John Rich of disorderly conduct for frightening people and yelling at least one obscenity at a cop in the courthouse -- thus closing the case that inspired the merchandise. The result of the six-and-a-half-hour trial: a $90 ticket for Rich (who was not the thongmonger). Marquis has no regrets, saying, "If a citizen did this, they would probably be thrown in jail."
Further reading:
Why Criminal Defense Attorneys Hate Josh
Part II
Part III
Part IV
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DEVELOPING: University of Oklahoma officials say authorities have found no evidence of shots being fired on campus and no injuries have been reported.
The school had posted a notice on its website earlier Wednesday saying there had been reports of a shooting and that people should avoid Gould Hall, which is near the center of campus.
University spokeswoman Catherine Bishop says in a statement that normal campus operations have since resumed except for Gould Hall, where additional checking is continuing Wednesday. She says no evidence has been found of any shots being fired.
EARLIER: University of Oklahoma officials say there are reports of shots fired on campus and are telling everyone to stay where they are.
Local police say they have no independent confirmation of a shooting Wednesday but have sent up to a half-dozen officers to the campus, which is about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City.
The university posted a notice on its website Wednesday that people should avoid Gould Hall. A notice sent by its Twitter account said: "Seek immediate shelter in place."
Norman Police Capt. Tom Easley said five to six of the city's officers went sent to the school to assist campus officers. Medical teams and the fire department were placed on alert but Easley said "we have no confirmation of anything yet."
Check back at HeraldTribune.com for more on this developing story.

subset: commoncrawl


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Beware Of Those Who Claim They're 'Saving The Culture Business' When They're Really Protecting Those Who Strip Artists Of Rights
from the 'culture-business'-ain't-culture deptWe've talked a few times about the ridiculously unsupported and unsupportable claim by Robert Levine that the "tech industry" (by which he means "Google") is somehow destroying culture by "free riding" on content. There are so many things wrong with this argument that it would take an entire book to debunk them one by one. But, as we've recently shown, the culture business isn't dying at all -- instead, it's been growing quite nicely over the past decade. So what's going on? Lateef Mtima, from the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice at Howard University does a nice job dismantling Levine's argument by showing that what Levine is arguing isn't about "saving the cultural busness," it's about saving a few giant media conglomerates who used to be the gatekeepers to culture (often at the expense of artists -- especially minority artists), and pretending that without those companies, there wouldn't be much culture. As Mtima notes, this is, ultimately, an incredibly elitist position:
Culture is not something reserved to an elite. No particular business or set of businesses and no particular business model should be protected from the winds of innovation and change in the name of preserving culture. A people's culture is just that -- the people's culture....And this is really a key point. The few companies that Levine is looking to save are not the deciders and arbiters of culture, no matter how much Levine wants them to be. In fact, they're often the companies who are really cheapening culture themselves and stripping the rights from the artists themselves, signing them to ridiculously one-sided contracts that are almost criminal in how they strip artists of their own rights and toss them out on the street for the profit of a few business fat cats.
Initially Levine presents his book on the pending doom of American culture as an appeal really done on behalf of the financial interests of artists, writers, and musicians. (One might be forgiven for skepticism and for asking where was/is Levine on the issue of IP corporate establishment exploitation of African American and other marginalized artists who have been pillaged by those entities for more than a century.)It really is quite a disgusting, paternalistic, almost antebellum argument: that these poor artists need some big conglomerate to come "rescue them," take control of their rights, in order to produce "the culture business." The reality is quite different of course. What's happening every day out here, in the real world, is that new companies -- often from the "tech industry" that Levine insists is killing off his heroes at the major labels and studios -- are providing the tools for amazing new cultural works to be produced, distributed, promoted, shared and monetized. Witness the great success of companies like Kickstarter, and the fact that they're doing it without typical Hollywood smarminess.
Of course "protecting struggling artists" is only the cover story. Levine actually knows what many other Americans realize–that most artists are trapped in contractual peonage with their corporate distributers and that they often retain no property interests capable of being ravaged by third-party pirates.
But the real cultural elitism from Levine shows through in his disdain for the kinds of amazing culture produced all the time outside of the circles of the gatekeepers.
Levine utterly ignores creative and impactful and socially desirable user-generated material such as the insertion into a picture of Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" a still from the video of a policeman nonchalantly pepper spraying demonstrators engaging in the Occupy movement. Such works make statements and connect people culturally in ways Levine apparently does not value and would stop....Levine's argument, in the end, comes down to a somewhat sickening assertion that without the Universal Musics of the world, artists wouldn't be able to produce their cultural works. It's that poor artists need big corporations to mold and shape their cultural creations, or such culture won't exist. To both the public and many artists, that argument isn't just laughable, it's insulting.
.... The constitutional grant of power to Congress to regulate copyrights and patents explicitly states that the purpose of such laws is to benefit the public. Innovation is to insure progress for everyone, not merely wealth for a few. The Internet may indeed be destroying the culture business, or at least some of it in its entrenched form, but it is not destroying culture. Intellectual property law is not designed to be, never has been intended to be, and must not be allowed to become the footservant of moneyed erstwhile overlords.


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Life here at the LaVida house is full, but good.
I thought I would just show you a little bit of what I have been doing in my office:
Working on an baby afghan for a friend.
Making some calorie-free cupcakes (pincushions):
And filling monogram orders (oops!, forgot to take pics of those!)
Today and tomorrow I will be working on a cake for a baby shower this weekend. It's a tea-themed shower and I'm excited to try a new cake design, and super excited to celebrate a new baby!
I am looking forward to spending a good chunk of time in my office this summer crafting and creating. There is so much to do, and so little time!
Oh and one more thing....many of you have asked about CowTales. I was introduced to CowTales last August when the Island Girls met on Whidbey Island.
If you haven't had one of these, and you are a caramel lover, go get some, they are de-lish.
Also, since I can't seem to stop typing this morning, head over to this blog that is all about candy. I love to read his candy reviews. (Have aI ever mentioned here that I have a small sweet tooth? All right it's more like a large molar, but anyway...) After reading this post I have been trying to get my hands on these gourmet gum drops, but Whole Foods has been completely sold out.
My dentist is so sad.
All right, I have to run, but tell me: What is your favorite candy? No sweet tooth? What do you eat for a "treat"?


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Hi michael alan, D'Angelo and Renee,Iris, thanx so much for the nice words and taking the time to say, we really do appreciate it and if your letter is any indication, and we think it is, 2013 is going to be GREAT for Travel Costa Rica NOW. THANX AGAIN!
Things have been so hectic since I got back that I didn't have time to thank you as you deserve.
My cell phone was stolen at Madrid, so I lost all my contacts and some good pictures of Arenal….But still, we had the best vacation ever, and mostly thanks to you!!!!
We did not spend any precious time on looking for things to do or places to sleep. All activities were perfect for us and we were on a perfect mood for them…all guides were great guys and you were so helpful in solving problems on the spot. I have no word to tell you how great you did and how thankful we are.
I am going to put all that on the web when I will have a few spare minutes…I want everybody in Israel and the rest of the world to know that TravelCostaRicaNOW is the best option for Costa Rica and I will certainly be back!!!!
Thanks and a great 2013
Iris Y
TONS of Costa Rica Travel Info and VIDEOS on our website: Travel Costa Rica NOW and if you want to visit our YouTube Channel: iCostaRica24 ENjoY!


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MEXICO CITY (AP) - Thousands of 'tween' girls jammed a vast square with their parents and screamed in unison throughout teen superstar Justin Bieber's free concert Monday night, an event that was expected to draw 200,000 people to the historic center of Mexico's capital.
Bieber opened with his hit song 'Baby,' while his adoring fans filling the city's main plaza sang along or shouted 'Justin! Justin! Justin!'
'Mexico City, there is a lot of people today!' Bieber told the crowd. 'Every one of you is my biggest fan.'
Dressed in white jeans and a gray T-shirt he took off to reveal a white T-shirt, the singer wore neon yellow tennis shoes and was accompanied by five dancers in neon colors. Four giant screens showed parts of his music videos to the crowd of mainly girls and their parents, who braved a light, intermittent rain during the concert.
The crowd went wild when Bieber asked a girl onto the stage, gave her a bouquet of flowers and sang 'One Less Lonely Girl' into her ear. The girl didn't stop crying.
The gray and reddish stones of the plaza were covered in a sea of purple as the mainly 10- to 14-year-old crowd paid homage to what is reported to be Bieber's favorite color.
After singing a couple of songs while playing an acoustic guitar, Bieber changed into an all- black outfit and sang some of his more energetic songs, including 'Somebody To Love.'
At a news conference before the concert, the teen star said there is no artist he would spend days in line waiting for.
'There is no one I admire so much to do something crazy, but if Michael Jackson were here, I would do it for him. So, I do understand the emotion that the girls feel and that makes me feel very honored,' Bieber said.
Hundreds at the Zocalo, which was filled to capacity, had to cover themselves in plastic rain capes sold by vendors who came prepared for a rainy evening.
The concert closed with fireworks and confetti spewing from the stage.
Earlier, girls shuffled through security checkpoints with hats and umbrellas, staking claim to some of the roughly 80,000 spots allocated in the plaza itself. An additional 120,000 or more fans were expected to watch on giant TV screens erected on nearby streets.
Fernanda Gutierrez Aparicio, a 13-year-old seventh grader at a local middle school, said she spent a week camping out with her mother on a nearby street in hopes of being among the first to enter. She said they returned home only to bathe and look after Fernanda's 15-year-old sister, who recently had surgery.
But her mother, Adriana Martinez, 41, gave up on trying to get her daughter into the front rows because of the press of other fans.
'I was really disappointed. When we got up front, people were crushing you, not letting you breathe,' Martinez said. Even hours before the concert, 'People were jostling each other and it got to the point that you couldn't move.'
To Fernanda, it was all worth it - even missing the week of classes leading up to the two-hour concert that was to open with '3BallMTY' and Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen.
'I told my teacher that I wasn't going to school and not to expect me in class for a few days, because I was going to be out supporting my idol,' Fernanda said.
Fernanda most wanted to hear Bieber sing 'That Should Be Me,' which pretty much reflects her feelings about the Canadian singer.
'I want to be Selena Gomez, to be with him,' she cooed, referring to Bieber's girlfriend.
Authorities said they would have more than 5,000 police on hand, partly to prevent the sort of crush that injured 40 Bieber fans at a free concert in Oslo, Norway, in late May.
'Most of the fans will be between 10 and 17 years old. There will be a lot of girls,' said Hector Antunano, a city official. 'We are being very careful that the majority of the police are women and we are taking precautions so that there is no rush toward the stage.'
Karina Gutierrez, a 13-year-old who uses a wheelchair, was disappointed with the spot authorities assigned to youngsters with disabilities.
She was the first fan to arrive in the special area that was set aside in one of the corners of the plaza, far from the stage.
'Visibility is not very clear from here,' Gutierrez said.
She missed school and her parents didn't go to work so the whole family could attend the concert. Gutierrez arrived to the capital Monday morning with her parents and two brothers from the city of Toluca, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from the capital.
'They wanted to see him from up close,' said Gutierrez's father, Juan Manuel Salinas. 'It's not fair that they are so far back.'
The Zocalo is ringed by some of the most historic structures in the hemisphere: Mexico's Metropolitan Cathedral, the National Palace and the partially excavated remains of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.
The plaza was created by the Aztecs in 1325 and was redrawn after the Spanish conquest of 1521. Bieber's performance emptied the sprawling square of its normal population, heavy on tourists, street vendors and political protesters, some of whom agreed grudgingly to clear space for the concert by abandoning an encampment there after negotiations with the city government.
A similar concert in the Zocalo last month by former Beatle Paul McCartney drew an estimated 230,000 people, including President Felipe Calderon. There was no word on whether the president would take his children to see Bieber.


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Pictures and Review of Derek Lam Spring Summer New York Fashion Week Runway Show
2013 Spring New York Fashion Week: Derek Lam
2013 Spring New York Fashion Week: Derek Lam
Derek Lam's Spring 2013 show started slowly, but by the time Joan Smalls closed the show in a burgundy laser-cut paillette dress, the collection was wide awake and full of energy. By the time a set of bright pencil skirts paired with perfectly slouched jersey pullovers had commanded their way down the runway, no doubt hundreds of editors had made mental notes of "things I must own." Lam has once again prescribed exactly we want to wear — easy sportswear with a twist. The collection started slow, with a cute, simple plaid dress in such a dowdy colour only a model should wear it. The "black, sun, and fatigue" colour continued for a few looks before things got interesting, notably the arrival of the perfect trench coat, followed shortly by a bright blue leather top and dress, and then things got really exciting: macramé done in ink, red ochre, tweed and leather, rendered into textural skirts and dresses. The kicker was in one particularly killer look: easy jersey pullovers, some quilted, some sleeveless, paired with just about the coolest pencil skirts around — think gold leather, multi-coloured macramé, or bright laiser-cut pailletes. This is the look that no doubt made a thousand mental notes —it was so effortlessly chic you can't help but want it in your closet.
- Trends: Macramé, metallic, sporty, lingerie, leather.
- Colours: Burgundy, purple, navy, cocoa, khaki, grey, metallic.
- Key Piece: The macramé pencil skirts and jersey pullovers.
- Accessories: Crocodile slingbacks and pumps.
- Who Should Wear It: Fashion editors (ahem), and effortless girls like Zoe Saldana.


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MEDICA and COMPAMED 2012 Open This Week: Until Saturday Düsseldorf is Medicine Capital of the World
13 Nov, 2012, 11:36 GMT
DÜSSELDORF, Germany, November 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --
From Wednesday until Saturday (14 to 17 November 2012) Düsseldorf is again the medicine capital of the world. Opening their doors then are MEDICA 2012, the world's largest medical trade fair with 4,554 exhibitors from 64 countries, and COMPAMED 2012 (until 16 November 2012), the leading international market platform for suppliers to the medical device industry with 645 exhibitors from 34 countries. MEDICA and COMPAMED will occupy all 19 halls of the Düsseldorf Exhibition Centre. Across all industries, MEDICA is one of the ten largest trade fairs worldwide. Three quarters of all exhibitors at MEDICA 2012 are from abroad and occupy 60 percent of the reserved space (total: 116,200 square metres). After Germany, the exhibitors reserving the most space come from Italy, China, the United States, Britain and France.
Clearly divided by segment, MEDICA 2012 focuses on the entire range of new products to increase the quality and efficiency of medical care in doctors' surgeries and clinics, e.g. medical technology and electromedicine, laboratory technology, physiotherapy products and orthopaedic technology and even Health IT.
MEDICA's target groups include, in particular, doctors and healthcare professionals as well as decision makers working in hospital management and the medical trade.
Parallel to MEDICA 2012, COMPAMED 2012 (in Halls 8a and 8b) will be highlighting everything needed for the manufacture of medical devices and equipment. The range of topics covered includes materials, production-related issues, aspects of quality control, full-contract manufacturing and even after sales services for medical devices.
The halls are open daily from 10 am to 6:30 pm, but only until 5.00 pm on Saturday (MEDICA only).
Information online: http://www.medica.de / http://www.compamed.de
Messe Düsseldorf GmbH
Press office MEDICA and COMPAMED 2012
Martin-Ulf Koch / Larissa Browa
Tel. +49(0)211-4560-444 /-549
Email. firstname.lastname@example.com
SOURCE Messe Dusseldorf GmbH


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My recent Wayback Wednesday series on franchise modes in NBA Live and NBA 2K served to remind me of just how much fun I've had with them over the years. I've wanted to return to franchise gaming for a while now, and writing those articles only added to my enthusiasm. I've gravitated towards MyCAREER and other modes in recent years, which is funny given that in MyLEAGUE and MyGM, we now have some of the deepest franchise experiences in the history of basketball video games. There are reasons why my habits have changed, of course, but I do feel like it's time to make a return to franchise modes.
Now that NBA Live 18 and NBA 2K18 have been out for over a month, receiving multiple official patches and roster updates, it's an opportune time to dive into the franchise experience. With the 2018 season tipping off, my interest in creating a fictional reality on the virtual hardwood has also been piqued. I do still have an interest in the card collecting modes, online team play experience, and MyCAREER, so I'll have to ration my basketball gaming time accordingly. Beyond that, however, I do have a few other matters to consider as I plan a return to the franchise experience that I enjoyed so much as a younger basketball gamer.


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Careers at Laurentian
At Laurentian, each day has its rewards.
From our diverse culture to programs that provide opportunities to enrich your life and explore your career potential, making Laurentian your next career move, is a great move.
The planning process at public institutions involves many key stakeholders, both internal and external, that contribute immensely both the development and execution of the resulting plans. Laurentian is no different in this case.
The overarching university Strategic Plan (2012-2017) was the product of months of consultation and inclusive discussions.This strategic plan was fueled by an exisiting Academic Plan, and has since produced the framework for the Research Plan.


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Look, if you want to invert flight controls on your own game, fine. You're a freak, but it's your game, so whatever. Just know that you should never, ever do it when other people are around.
Or it could lead to disaster. Death, ruin and disaster.
So remember: while it's OK to laugh at this video from internet superstar Freddie Wong, it's also serving as a very serious public service announcement.
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at email@example.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
G/O Media may get a commission
Eight Sleep Pod Cover


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UPDATE: Game five has been rescheduled for 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The Phillies had a 2-0 lead. Then the rain came down. 2-1 lead. Harder. Stronger. 2-2. Game stopped.
Major League Baseball has postponed game five due to rain at a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the sixth. Cole Hamels will lead off the game when it's re-started. Commissioner Bud Selig has not given a time for the game to begin again.
Selig also said he could've stopped the game before the bottom of the sixth, meaning the Phils could've had a 2-1 lead with the game stopped. (Of course, I don't want the Phils winning the world championship on a shortened game.) Instead, Hamels and the Phils had to play through the rain, and the Rays scored the tying run, before the game was finally halted.
Frankly, this is a black eye for baseball, and especially for Selig, who has once again proved incompetent as leader of this organization. The game should've been stopped before the sixth. Throw out the rulebook. This is the World Series. And it's ridiculous — absolutely freakin' ridiculous that this whole charade took place so late.
Forget homerism. The rain created a harsh atmosphere way before the sixth. And now the Phils have a tie game, have little momentum, and complete uncertainty as to when the game will be resumed. Some fans will be shut out of the possible clincher. Hamels may not pitch again this season. And now a huge risk is run — the Phils suddenly find themselves needing to win, and soon, because Tampa awaits. Now it's confusion ruling the roost, handled horribly by the idiot upstairs. I'm sorry Bud Selig, but you struck out this time.
Associated Press photo


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Color Choice
Color Is.....
The latest color offering by the Color Guild, Color Is... features 1320 colors chosen particularly for you, the discerning consumer. In this most comprehensive color range you'll find a large selection of off whites and neutrals, classic colors and the latest in complex and sophisticated shades.
You'll find it easy to locate your favorite because the palette is organized by color family. Rather than being laid out in the traditional rainbow pattern, this system takes advantage of a zigzag pattern that creates a visual interest and draws you into color space. But don't worry, even in this innovative zigzag design, the colors flow in the same manner as a color wheel. So you'll be able to spot your favorite color quickly and easily.
The pivot point of the system places the brightest and most chromatic colors at the center of the display. As you work your way outward toward the end of the display, colors become less chromatic or more muted. The bottom level is reserved for the neutrals versions of all of these families and is separated warm on the left and cool on the right.
Please note: Actual paint colors may vary from the swatches displayed here.
We strongly recommend that you view actual color samples before making a final color selection. Paint is custom-tinted upon ordering and cannot be returned.
Historic Colors
The Historic Colour Collection showcases colors carefully selected from historic buildings and objects which authentically reflect the colors of our past. Coordinated combinations help you create body, trim, and accent paint schemes to dramatize your home, inside and outside. Whether you are decorating an old house or a contemporary one, these combinations add the character and distinction of America's colorful past.
Curators and preserationists from Historic New England work with other museums and private homeowners from across the country to understand, preserve and recreate the Historic Colour Collection.
The Historic Color Collection consists of 149 colors that have been extensively researched by the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). Working with museums, antiques, and historic buildings, the SPNEA as able to create a collection that accurately reproduces the colors of our past. But, do not let the name fool you. These colors look just as beautiful on the contemporary homes of today as they do on the traditional homes of our past.
Please note: Actual paint colors may vary from the swatches displayed here.
We strongly recommend that you view actual color samples before making a final color selection. Paint is custom-tinted upon ordering and cannot be returned.
COLOREVOLUTION. The Art of Paint
In 1890, Ernest Miller, was a pioneering muralist and landscape artist whose brush led him to the Pacific NW. Along with contemporary Fresco artists' like Henri Matisse, Miller joined the modern Fauvist movement of using spontaneously mixed natural colors painted on broad textures of neutral tones. Artists of Miller's tradition see color as one of the most pleasurable human senses and useful tools of human expression – exploring the space where landscape, art and architecture collide.
The goal was not to cover the world with paint, but to reflect and enhance the natural beauty of your environment.
Color is personal. Color is not only a reflection of light, but it is a reflection of you. It tells your story…without a single word. Express and explore these evolutionary colors on the canvas of your home.
The COLOREVOLUTION Collection by Miller — the evolution of art, quality & color.


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Walker proposes ending residency requirements
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett opposed to state move
Milwaukee's mayor fires back at Gov. Scott Walker's plan to lift the residency requirement for city workers and Milwaukee Public Schools teachers.
Some worry that lifting the residency requirement will lead to a string of "for sale" signs on city blocks.
Barb Hanson walked her dog, Ginger, through her Washington Heights neighborhood, past the homes of city and school district employees.
"On our block, it's a lot of teachers," Hanson said.
She said she worries about the governor's plan to lift the city's residency requirement.
"What kind of impact is that going to have on a neighborhood like this?" WISN 12 News reporter Kent Wainscott asked.
"I think pretty devastating, actually. People have an investment in the neighborhood," Hanson said.
She fears people will move, causing a flood of "for sale" signs.
But some said they aren't as concerned.
"I think people live in this neighborhood because of the neighborhood, and if a residency requirement is why they're here, then maybe they shouldn't be here," Milwaukee resident Jo Bruns said.
On the morning after unveiling his budget, the governor pointed to MPS as the reason for his residency plan.
"In performance, in particular Milwaukee has had a challenge, not just this year but many years in the past finding qualified teachers to teach within MPS. One of their barriers I mentioned repeatedly in the past is the residency requirement," Walker said.
It's just one line in the proposed budget, disallowing local units of government from instituting or enforcing residency requirements.
But it's one Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said could have a big impact on the city.
"Are you concerned that there's going to be that sort of flight from the city of Milwaukee?" Wainscott asked Barrett.
"Obviously, I'm concerned about that," Barrett said.
Barrett said residents will leave if the restriction is lifted, and that will impact everyone in the city.
"People are dreaming if they don't think that having a flood of houses on the market is going to drive down property values. It is going to have an impact on property values," Barrett said.
If passed, the governor's plan would lift residency requirements for all communities across the state, but by far, the biggest impact would be felt in Milwaukee.


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Case, 5.56mm
Case, 5.56mm
Case, 5.56mm is a crafting item in Fallout: New Vegas.
This item is used as a component to create 5.56 rounds on the workbench along with some lead, primer, large pistol and powder, pistol.
- 3 to 9 casings can be found on the dead body of an enemy that was wielding a varmint rifle or a service rifle at the time of their death.
- When you fire a weapon chambered in the 5.56mm round, there is a 20% chance you'll get a casing.
- You'll get 25 5.56mm casings if you buy a 5.56mm case box.
- Occasionally some traveling merchants will "sell" 5.56mm casings (among many other calibers), but they will always be for free. Likewise, if you try and sell casings to a merchant, you will not yield any money.
- Can be looted from many NCR troopers.


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beginning of content:
Warning: Reading further will eliminate any excuse not to practice for the SAT.
One Question a Day, Zero Excuses
Make practice part of your routine—any place, any time. Answer a question a day on the Daily Practice for the New SAT app and get immediate feedback. The free app makes it easy to:
- Answer an exclusive, official reading, writing and language, or math question.
- Reveal a hint if you're stuck.
- Read answer explanations and learn from your mistakes.
- Keep at it—daily practice can only sharpen your skills.
Instant Practice Test Scoring
Simulate test day and take the SAT or PSAT/NMSQT on paper. Then—for the first time ever—take a picture of your answer sheet and get an instant score.
Here's how Scan and Score works:
- Take a complete SAT practice test or PSAT/NMSQT practice test, using the official answer sheet to bubble in your answers.
- Open Daily Practice and activate your phone's camera.
- Keeping the app open, scan your answer sheet with your phone's camera.
And there it is in seconds: your score. Scores are saved so you can track your progress.
Next, dig into the question-by-question details, then connect to Official SAT Practice at Khan Academy® for personalized study.


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Shocking Idea: Your Child Molested In A Florida Classroom
I came across a news story that I thought would be worthy of sharing. Central Florida News 13 was reporting about new sex abuse charges leveled against a former classroom teacher, Anthony Silva. Mr. Silva used to be a teacher at Renaissance Charter School in Orange County, until one of his former co-workers called 911 to report that Mr. Silva was inappropriately touching students and simulating sex with them. He was originally charged, and put in jail. Now, Mr. Silva faces new charges of lewd and lascivious molestation, as well as false imprisonment of a child. Apparently, the false imprisonment charges stem from some of Mr. Silva's activities with students inside his own classroom. Of course, Mr. Silva is innocent in the eyes of the law, until he is proven to be guilty. However, it is not often that these types of cases are instigated by co-workers. Typically, child abusers are more careful and secretive about their activities with young children. If sexually abusive acts did occur on school grounds, then the Renaissance Charter School may face civil liability for money damages in favor of the injured students. Institutions like schools owe children a duty to supervise the adults the school place in front of the children every day. Schools should be allowing environments to exist where abuse can occur on the school's campus. We were recently able to achieve a significant recovery for a client who was sexually abused by his Sunday School teacher in the church offices, during a Sunday church service. The church really had no explanation for how that could happen. If you have any questions regarding sexual abuse allegations involving a school or church, call Florida child sexual abuse attorneys Kim Cullen and Robert Hemphill at...Read More »


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|Perl: the Markov chain saw
Re: Whats the average time taken to learn Perl?by Utilitarian (Vicar)
|on Dec 18, 2012 at 14:48 UTC ( #1009386=note: print w/replies, xml )
|Need Help??
When I learnt Perl it was for my own entertainment and I had no academic background and no one to advise me on suitable training material, however I found a very popular script archive on the internet...several years later I think I've cured most of the errors I leant there ;)
If you know C and have some level of familiarity with the Unix shell, Perl will take a relatively brief time to get up to speed for automation and reporting (the precise length of time is a function of your effort and ability).
Production level public facing code will take a bit longer and will require an understanding of multiple areas, not just of programming but of the underlying technologies also.
The trip is quite a long one however the voyage is fun.
print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."
In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom


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Antitrust Case Filings
Antitrust Case Filings
To filter the list of cases, select desired options from the left navigation pane.
View the list of NAICS and SIC industry codes used by the Division. To view all industry codes, visit Census.gov.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1
|Case Open Date
|Incident Date
|Case Type
|Federal Court
|Industry Code
|U.S. v. Metro Denver Concrete Association, et al.
|August 6, 1970
|Civil Non-Merger
|Colorado, District of
|Ready-Mix Concrete Manufacturing


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Encourage children to set goals for the future -- and provide the motivation to reach them -- with our wide selection of counseling resources, educational tools, and incentive rewards. Our budget-friendly college readiness products will not only make your job easier, but also foster parent engagement and help students reach their potential in a positive, safe, and nurturing school environment.
Get students on track with their college and career ambitions through great promotional products designed with exclusive themes like College Is Not Just A Dream…It's The Plan. You'll also find posters, backpacks, pens, and more items featuring our The Tassel Is Worth The Hassle™ design, a memorable way to remind students to stay in school, because their hard work will be worth it when they graduate!
We also offer planners, calendars, glancers in both English and Spanish, and more to aid with career preparation, so children can be better aware of what to expect after graduation. There are also educational tools and fun giveaways that help both students and parents with school transition at nearly every grade. Plus, discover a wealth of materials for sharing with parents at conferences, one-on-one meetings, and counseling sessions, focusing on the many social and academic issues facing today's youth. Whatever you're looking for to supplement your college readiness or counseling and guidance programs, find it here at Positive Promotions.


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Stop Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork
If You're Committed to Losing Weight & Learning Smarter Lifestyle Habits…We'll Help You Achieve those Goals!
If you're content that flimsy advice such as "exercise and eat better" is enough to assist you in achieving a comfortable weight…then good luck to you. But if you're looking for a sensible way to achieve your weight loss goals and learn how you can maintain a stable weight after dieting…then Ideal Protein may be the weight loss program for you.
Contact us today and Ask Us About Your Initial Weight Loss Assessment…Our Weight Loss Protocol can be Tailored to Just About Any Individual, Regardless of Your Goals.
A Weight Loss Plan that can End Your Yo-Yo Dieting
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text: dankarabin 0 Posted February 22, 2013 Greetings all. My friend has just recently gotten me into Dust and while I'm quite the fan of the game I've seen lots of sets and lots on Ebay for sale and they don't list what sets the units are coming from. I was wondering if there was a comprehensive list of what units came from what sets and what units are standalone expansion sets? I just picked up this lot for 250 bucks which seemed like a good deal based on the info I could find at miniature market. Any help is sincerely appreciated. Thank you.. Dust Tactics Lot 1 Original Core Set - I painted a couple of the minis but they arent bad. Also some of the parts on the walkers need to be glued on. 1 Revised Core set 1 Tile set 1 Operation Cyclone - no box 1 Operation Zverograd - No box - I think most of the building pieces are there but I havent played with this one in ages. I cant Guarantee it is all there. 1 OPeration Seelow - Unopened US - I will list all the units -even if they come in one of the boxes above- I have no duplicaet units. 1 Pounder - Medium Walker - OG Core set 1 Hotdog Medium Walker- OG core set 1 The Gunners Squad -Og Core set 1 Recon Boys Squad - OG Core Set 1 BBQ Squad - OG Core set 1 Rosie 1 Death Dealers Squad - Revised Core 1 Bazooka Joe 1 Hell Boys Squad - Revised Core 1 Rhino 1 Tank Buster Squad 1 The Hammers Squad 1 Grim Reapers Squad 1 Blackhawk Light Walker - Core set Axis - 1 Luther - Medium Walker- OG Core set 1 Ludwig - Medium Walker- Og Core set 1 Recon Grenadiers - OG core set 1 Laser Grenadiers - OG core set 1 Battle Grenadiers- OG Core set 1 Axis Zombies Squad 1 Sigird Von Thaler 1 Axis Gorillas squad 1 Sturmpioniere Squad 1 Lara 1 MAnfred 1 Heavy Flak Grenadiers Squad 1 Hans Light Walker 1 Heacy Laser Grenadiers 1 Unopened Zombie Leader pack 1 SSU 1 Koshka 1 SSU Airborne Transport 1 Grand'Ma Medium Walker 1 SSU MEdium Walker - I think kept the extra arms so you can make them what you want-Might only have one set of arms for both 1 SSU MEdium Walker - I think kept the extra arms so you can make them what you want-Might only have one set of arms for both 1 Fakyeli Squad 1 Chinese Volunteers Squad 1 Frontoviki Squad Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites


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|Menu Part
|Cuisine Type
These rajas, made of red bell peppers, onions and mild chiles, are a great addition to tacos.
3 large onions
1 lb. whole mild fresh chiles (such as poblano or Anaheim)
1 medium red bell pepper (or 1 pint mini sweet bell peppers)
Olive or vegetable oil
1. Cut onions crosswise into 1/2-in. thick slices.
2. To grill: Place whole chiles and bell peppers on rack over medium coals. Grill for 10 to 15 mins., until blistered and charred on all sides, turning as needed. Place chiles and bell peppers in bowl and cover for 5 mins. Meanwhile, put onion slices on grill, brush with oil and grill 10 to 15 mins., or until charred on both sides.
3. Peel off and discard as much skin as possible from chiles and bell peppers. Cut out cores and discard seeds. Cut into 1/2-in. wide strips. Separate roasted onion slices into rings and combine with chile and bell pepper strips. Serve with grilled meats or chicken.
4. To broil: Arrange onion slices by single layer in shallow pan and brush with about 3 tbsp. oil. Broil for 15 to 20 mins. or until tender and charred, turning once.
5. Transfer to saucepan and place chiles and bell peppers in same shallow pan. Broil 15 to 20 mins., turning only once or until blistered and charred on both sides. Skin, core and seed chiles and bell peppers and cut into strips. Add to onions, heat through and serve with meat or chicken.
Recipe by National Onion Association


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Oracle and OpenOffice: The Final Insult
Jun 6, 2011 5:00 AM PT
Things are never dull here in the Linux blogosphere, but there's no doubt they would be a whole lot less entertaining without Oracle.
How else, after all, would we get the opportunity to ride on a thrilling emotional roller coaster such as the one Oracle's had us on since it acquired Sun?
Regarding OpenOffice.org, in particular, it's been one hair-raising twist and turn after another. The latest was felt last week, when Oracle decided to snub the Document Foundation and give the software suite to the Apache Software Foundation instead.
"Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future," said Luke Kowalski, a vice president with Oracle's Corporate Architecture Group. "The Apache Software Foundation's model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development."
Eschewing the Obvious
We've known for some time, of course, that Oracle had decided to relinquish OpenOffice to non-commercial status. What we didn't know, however, was which group would be the lucky recipient.
Given its LibreOffice fork, the Document Foundation would certainly have been a logical choice. But since when does logic necessarily come into the picture?
Doing her best to leave her disbelief in a state of suspension, Linux Girl took to the streets of the blogosphere to learn more about what had just happened.
'Giving the Community the Finger'
"What just happened here is that Oracle couldn't resist giving the community the finger one more time," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl. "It's better than Oracle trying to retain it, but it's far worse than simply giving it to the Document Foundation.
"The longer the schism between the versions goes on, the more users will ultimately suffer," Espinoza added.
Indeed, "Oracle is playing the spiteful child, smashing their toys instead of sharing," blogger Robert Pogson agreed. "A thriving community has sprung up around LibreOffice, and even though Oracle decided there was no money to be made from OpenOffice.org, they would not set the code free."
'Free, But Just Barely'
The Apache Software License (ASL) "is a Free Software license, but just barely," Pogson pointed out. "It seems to permit binary-only distribution. Perhaps that fits with what Oracle and IBM do with OpenOffice.org code."
The timing is particularly interesting, too, given that "Oracle just had an argument with Apache over Java," he added. "Is Oracle trying to make a bit more trouble for Apache by throwing a complex web of licenses at them?
"Who knows?" he mused. "Organizations having a temper tantrum don't usually make much sense."
'Small-Minded Spite'
In the end, if the code shifts to ASL licensing, "that will likely mean LibreOffice will drift further away from the code-base," Pogson predicted. "That could divide effort or improve the situation by competition."
The world "is big enough for yet another WYSIWYG office suite," he opined. "Oracle does not own all the code, so they cannot make it all ASL."
Either way, "it all seems rather pointless," Pogson concluded. "A contribution to LibreOffice would have meant more happiness to more people, so the thing seems like small-minded spite."
'Oracle Simply Couldn't Compete'
It's "pretty obvious that Oracle was taken aback by how quickly LibreOffice gained both credibility and traction," opined Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site.
"The distributions that have already switched to LibreOffice are a 'who's who' of linux, including OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint," Hudson pointed out. "I expect the rest to switch in their next release, now that OpenOffice is heading towards irrelevancy."
There's been speculation that "having OpenOffice under a more 'business-friendly' Apache license will help keep it alive, but there's a difference between 'alive' and 'relevant,'" she added. "LibreOffice is obviously going to be the leader when it comes to new features, improvements and overall user base.
"Oracle simply couldn't compete, and having OpenOffice under the Apache Foundation was the best it could do to avoid just giving it to the LibreOffice group," Hudson concluded. "Sour grapes?"
'A Long, Slow Death'
Slashdot blogger hairyfeet saw it differently.
"What happens to OpenOffice? The same thing that will happen to LibreOffice, I'll wager, which is a long, slow death," hairyfeet predicted.
"The simple fact is developers of real quality don't have much if any spare time, and they certainly aren't gonna want to spend a year or two getting up to speed on such a massive monolithic chunk of code like LO/OO, and without the big bucks of Sun/Oracle to pay the bills," hairyfeet added.
'The End of the OpenOffice.org Brand'
Others weren't so sure.
"This is going to depend heavily on whether the large businesses that still support OpenOffice switch to LibreOffice," asserted Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project.
"In the end, user community and developer community are the only things that matter," Travers opined. "It is not clear how this move will address these issues."
Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack saw doom, but just for OpenOffice.org.
"I suspect we're going to see the end of the OpenOffice.org brand," Mack predicted. "The developer mindshare has already moved away, and the new move by Oracle won't reverse that."


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Last night Kanye West performed at Revel in Atlantic City and had as usual some surprises for his fans. Not only did the artist debut a special 7 screen experience, not only did he make it snow at some point of the performance, he also impressed with some crazy outfits. Dressed entirely in white last night, masks were part of the showcase. Next to a special Maison Martin Margiela diamond encrusted face mask, others were also sported through out the show, making it very much an artistic performance.
Click through some impressions of the evening in the gallery above.
Photography: Ibnjasper, givenchydonc, virgilabloh


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· Speed setting (rotary coding switch 15x, digital input 7x)
· Selection of direction of rotation (via rotary coding switch or digital input)
· Adjustment of acceleration and braking ramp (rotary coding switch 8x)
· Status display with LEDs
· Voltage limitation via brake chopper
* The power of EC5000 depends on the application, e.g., conveying good weight, conveying speed, acceleration ramp, and on the EC5000 used.
** The installation in systems at an altitude above 1,000 m is possible. However, this can lead to a reduction of the performance values.


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This layout was inspired by 1st December sketch @ Stuck?! Sketches:
The title says: Excercise
The journaling says: We went down to the park next to the stadium and you decided to go to excercise. You went through all the facilities and didn't miss a single one!
I used: DCWV Fun in the Sun Summer Stack, Kesem Art hebrew letters, Sharpie, buttons, my very first crochet flowers!!!
Monday, November 30, 2009
8:03 PM Posted by Unknown
1 comments:
סחתיין על הסריגה
הבודקות :)
סחתיין על הסריגה
הבודקות :)
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


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well, I probably should have looked at that before I mounted them....the readings seem to be fine though.......and Paul, sorry about that...I'm a bit lazy with commenting and stuff.....And aren't sonars a lot of money? Do they make cheap ones?
It isn't really a set made course, most likely going to be a local park (with trees) and another test using this algorithm specifically would be inside my high school hallways
And are there any good tutorials on how to get an arduino rc car to work the way I want it to with a GPS?
It does all seem to be flight based that's for sure. But can you define your parameters a bit better, when you say navigate via gps do you mean move from known starting point to a known waypoint ? Or from a known start point to a waypoint that is identified by a system other than gps coordinates ?


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Officials: Schools play large role in heroin fight
Parents, schools and educators all play an important role in fighting the state's heroin abuse epidemic, Ohio's governor and attorney general said at a forum Tuesday.
The remarks followed a report by the state Health Department that found a record 680 people died of heroin-related overdoses in 2012, the most recent year for which data was available, a 60 percent increase over 2011.
Heroin is "in every neighborhood, and every community," Gov. John Kasich told educators from about 40 mainly suburban schools districts as he promoted the state's "Start Talking" anti-drug addiction program during a visit to Worthington-Kilbourne High School outside Columbus.
"Do not think you are immune from this. We are not immune from this," the governor said. "This drug problem in our culture is a poison that threatens the essence of who we are."
The program emphasizes the importance of parents, teachers and others talking to children about staying off drugs as a way of lessening the chances they will become addicted.
Attorney General Mike DeWine said action addressing heroin must start at the local level, and has to involve law enforcement, education, prevention and treatment.
"We're not going to arrest our way out of this problem," DeWine said.
Ed FitzGerald, Kasich's Democratic opponent in the fall governor's race, and David Pepper, DeWine's Democratic challenger for attorney general, criticized the state's efforts against heroin as delayed and anemic.


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Around ten Easter bunnies (or hopefully, people dressed as Easter bunnies) were spotted at night leaving foil wrapped candy eggs on every doorstep in the village of Alderholt in East Dorset, England.
via @Heardster
Clare Winton-Giles, a resident of the town, told Metro News that it's something a lot of people there appreciate. She said, "It shows there's still a nice community spirit out there and everyone has got one, no one has been forgotten."
- Reposted by


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| 9.9°C Belfast
Norwich have made their first signing of the transfer window by bringing in Sporting Kansas City striker Kei Kamara on loan until May 6.
The deal is still subject to the 28-year old Sierra Leone international receiving immigration clearance.
The Canaries confirmed Kamara has been granted clearance to play by the relevant footballing authorities and the deal has been agreed between the two clubs and Major League Soccer.
Norwich boss Chris Hughton said: "I'm delighted to bring Kei to the football club, one of Major League Soccer's best players over the last few seasons.
"There is no doubt it is a big jump to make into the Premier League, but it is an exciting challenge both for him and us here at the club to prove his talent.
"Kei also adds some valuable competition up front alongside the current striking options we have here at the club."
The 28-year-old, who requires approval to work in Britain from the UK Border Agency, was born in Sierra Leone before emigrating to the United States when civil war gripped the country and settling in Los Angeles.
He joined Columbus Crew from Orange County Blue Star in 2006 and had short spells at San Jose Earthquakes and Houston Dynamo before joining Kansas City in 2009.
Kamara has scored 31 goals in 98 games for Kansas City.
Norwich are in the midst of a terrible run of form, having lost five and drawn one of their last six Barclays Premier League games, while they were knocked out of the FA Cup by non-league Luton at the weekend.


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Baker goes upbeat in campaign video
Shifts from 'Had enough?' to 'Aim high.'
Republican Charlie Baker, a former state budget chief and health care executive, officially jumped into the wide open 2014 governor's race Wednesday with a more upbeat campaign theme than 2010 when he ran and lost to incumbent Gov. Deval Patrick.
Baker on Wednesday morning posted a 90-second announcement video on his new campaign website – charliebaker2014.com – asking voters to "aim high" and showcasing a more positive campaign theme than his 2010 "Had Enough?" slogan as he tries to recast himself to voters who rejected his candidacy four years ago. He also pledged "bipartisan leadership," a necessary quality for a Republican governor working with a Democrat-controlled Legislature but also a promise that raises questions about whether he'd pull Democrats into his administration.
"We're all concerned about our future and I'm determined to do what I can to make Massachusetts prosperous with a quality of life second to none," Baker said. Baker is not expected to be available for questions until Thursday.
The 56-year-old Swampscott Republican is the first to enter the 2014 gubernatorial contest on the GOP side. While there's time for other candidates to get in, he could have a clear path to the nomination after former US Sen. Scott Brown announced last month he would not run for governor. Baker also avoided a primary during the last cycle when Christy Mihos was denied access to the ballot at the state Republican Convention in 2010.
Having held top Cabinet positions in the Weld and Cellucci administrations before going on to become the CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Baker touted both his public and private sector experience, claiming he helped turn a $1 billion state deficit into a surplus while creating more than 250,000 jobs in Massachusetts, and taking Harvard Pilgrim from the brink of bankruptcy to the nation's highest ranked health insurer.
"Let's aim high. Let's be great, Massachusetts," Baker said in the video.
After losing to Patrick in 2010, when the governor hammered Baker for his role in financing the Big Dig and with escalating health care costs, Baker joined the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners and he's for the most part been out of the public spotlight since his last campaign.
Baker served as health and human services secretary under former Republican Gov. William Weld and secretary of administration and finance under both Weld and the late Gov. Paul Cellucci. Yet despite being a fiscal conservative and social moderate in the mold of his former boss Weld, Baker's campaign failed to generate the crossover appeal in 2010 with conservative Democrats and independents that he ultimately would have needed to defeat Patrick.
"I think he's the most able person I've ever met in public life," Weld told reporters after testifying at a Gaming Commission hearing in Boston. "I think he's got tremendous empathy for how people actually live and a tremendous understanding of policy. I can't think of a better person to be governor of any state. He's also a born executive."
Richard Tisei, a former state senator and Baker's running-mate in 2010, said Wednesday on Boston Herald internet radio that Baker may have received poor advice from consultants in 2010.
"His personality didn't really come through. What he's all about didn't really come through," Tisei said, calling Baker a "great family man" and the "very best hope for the future of the Commonwealth."
Tisei also defended Baker against the renewed attacks around the Big Dig financing scheme that left the state with massive debt, calling it "old news" and a "losing message" for Democrats.
"Charlie wasn't the governor at that point. He was working for the governor," Tisei said.
Though Tisei said another Baker-Tisei ticket is not likely on the offing next year as he considers a second run for Congress in the 6th Congressional district, the former Beacon Hill lawmaker suggested Taunton Rep. Shaunna O'Connell, 2010 GOP candidate for auditor Mary Connaughton, or Gabriel Gomez, who ran and lost the recent US Senate race to Ed Markey, as potential lieutenant governor candidates.
O'Connell told the News Service in August she would "most certainly" be on the ballot for re-election and was not considering other positions during the upcoming election cycle.
Early last month, as he was still considering his political future, Baker suggested that in a second campaign he may let voters peer deeper into his private life. The Republican said he tried hard in 2010 to keep his private life out of the campaign, but realizes now that voters like to get to know the candidate beyond their policy positions, suggesting a more prominent role in a 2014 campaign for his wife Lauren, with whom he has three children.
He also said he didn't do a good enough job painting a picture for voters about what life in Massachusetts would be like under a Baker administration. "I think it's really important to be able to project a vision for what you think the future should be all about . . . We didn't do it well enough," Baker said last month during a Herald radio interview.
Both those learned lessons seemed to be addressed in his introductory video as he talked about family, being a "good husband" and a "loving and responsible" father, and offering an aspirational vision for Massachusetts rather than trying to harness any frustration in the electorate with the current state of government.
"I care about our community where we've raised our family, and being a good son and brother. And, as corny as that may sound, that's exactly why I want to be your governor," Baker said in the video.
Born in Needham, Baker graduated from with an English degree from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University.
"Charlie Baker's plan to create jobs, deliver a great education to every child and promote stronger and safer communities sets him apart as the one candidate investing in the families of Massachusetts. The 2014 election presents the opportunity to change the culture of corruption and abuse in state government and restore balance on Beacon Hill," MassGOP chairwoman Kirsten Hughes said in a statement, without specifying any plan details.
Rob Eno, a conservative Republican blogger, said he was "beyond excited" to work to elect Baker, and said he hoped the candidate understood the importance of building the minority GOP ranks of the Legislature in 2014.
One of the first additions to Baker's campaign team is MassGOP spokesman Tim Buckley. Communications consultant Will Keyser, who previously served as communications director to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and chief of staff for former Democratic Congressman Martin Meehan, will also be an advisor to the campaign, according to a Baker campaign source. Will Ritter, a veteran of the Mitt Romney, Brown, and Gomez campaigns, will work as media advisor to the party in Buckley's absence.
On the Democratic side, Treasurer Steve Grossman, former Obama Medicare chief Donald Berwick, biotech executive Joe Avellone, and former Patrick and Obama homeland security advisor Juliette Kayyem have all announced campaigns for governor, while Sen. Daniel Wolf's campaign has been suspended pending the outcome of a dispute with the state Ethics Commission. Attorney General Martha Coakley, U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano and Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone are also weighing possible runs.
Patrick wished Baker well, but would not say whether Baker could win over the current field of Democrats."Good for him. What can I say. I wish him well. Not too well, but well," Patrick said after an event in Watertown. "I'm going to support the Democratic nominee because so far what I have seen out of the other party is a return to the past rather than a look to the future and I think all of the candidates, prospective candidates on the Democratic side, have been talking about and focused on how we move from where we are to even better times and I've been proud of what we've been able to do in the last six-and-a-half years and will do over the remaining year and half and I want to see a lot of that continue."
Michael Norton, Mike Deehan, and Andy Metzger contributed reporting for this story.