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On Monday night, the state of Arkansas killed inmates Jack Jones and Marcel Williams, completing the United States’ first double execution since 2000.
For Sister Helen Prejean, an activist nun from Louisiana who has become a leading figure in America’s anti-death penalty movement, it was a night of heartbreak.
Prejean, whose book about capital punishment, Dead Man Walking, was made into an award-winning film, has been tweeting her concern about Arkansas since February. That’s when Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced plans for a flurry of executions. The state initially planned to conduct eight executions over a 11-day period in April, arguing its supply of a lethal injection drug would expire on April 30.
Prejean has been rallying opponents of the death penalty together to call and tell Hutchinson and Arkansas’ attorney general Leslie Rutledge to “stop the killing spree.”
As a Catholic, Prejean’s activism is rooted in her faith. When Gov. Hutchinson tweeted out a Bible verse on April 23, one day before his state planned to carry out double executions, Prejean was quick to respond with some choice words for the fellow Christian.
On Monday, after hearing that the last legal avenues to prevent the executions were exhausted, Prejean turned her attention to mourning and telling the inmates’ stories.
Jones, 52, faced the death penalty for the 1995 rape and murder of Mary Phillips, an Arkansas bookkeeper, and for attempting to kill Phillips’ 11-year-old daughter.
Years later, Jones’ lawyers said he suffered from poor health. He was a diabetic patient and an amputee. His lawyers worried that the high doses of drugs he was on could prevent the lethal injection from working properly.
And according to Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project, he also suffered from mental illness and was a victim of sexual abuse.
In a series of tweets sent out as Jones faced death, Prejean used research compiled by the Fair Punishment Project to describe the inmate’s past. And in doing so, she reminded her followers of his humanity.
The AP reported that Jones was executed shortly after 7 p.m Monday evening.
Marcel Williams, 46, was on death row for raping and killing a 22-year-old woman named Stacy Errickson in 1994.
Williams, who weighed 400 pounds, was diabetic. His lawyers were concerned that Williams faced a “torturous” death because of his obesity.
Like she did for Jones, Prejean took to Twitter to tell her followers about Williams’ past.
According to the Fair Punishment Project, Williams had apparently grown up in “crushing poverty” and had been the victim of sexual abuse since he was a child. Prejean used the Fair Punishment Project’s research to tell Williams’ story.
Williams’ death was briefly delayed Monday night after his lawyers expressed concern about how Jones’ execution was carried out. The lawyers claimed Jones was “gulping for air,” which Arkansas’ attorney general denied.
A federal judge lifted the stay on the execution. The AP reports that Williams was pronounced dead at 10:33 p.m.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson initially scheduled eight executions within a span of 11 days, which would have been the highest number of killings in such a compressed period since the Supreme Court death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Arkansas has killed three inmates so far this year, with one more scheduled for Thursday. The four others have been blocked.
In a Facebook post last week, Prejean reiterated her belief that the death penalty isn’t merciful or just ― she believes it’s vengeful.
“The Jesus that I know spoke out against vengeance, even to the point of giving up his own life. Jesus was a convicted criminal executed by the state,” she wrote. “That’s why I don’t understand how Governor Hutchinson can call himself a pro-life Christian while planning to kill 8 people in 11 days. The death penalty is antithetical to everything Jesus stood for and is a gross violation of the sanctity of life.”
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Albert Bell celebrated his graduation in cap and gown last month ― but he wasn’t leaving school. He was leaving behind two decades of incarceration.
On March 23, Bell and around 150 other men graduated from the Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing & Able program, which provides job training to people who have experienced incarceration or homelessness. Bell, 36, was also celebrating another milestone: A couple weeks later would mark the first time he was out of prison, off parole and off probation since he was 16 years old.
“My first time incarcerated at 12 was frightening,” Bell told HuffPost last month. “But I had to put on a front, and that persona started growing on me, I started accepting the life.”
“By the third and fourth time I was incarcerated, it became comfortable ― and that became frightening,” he added. “I wouldn’t bite my nails in jail, but I did in society ― so I was more comfortable incarcerated. And that’s scary.”
Watch the video above to hear more of Bell’s story.
One of the hardest parts about leaving prison is getting back on your feet ― and not ending up back in prison. An estimated two-thirds of people released from prison in the U.S. are rearrested within three years, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study from 2005 to 2010.
But Ready, Willing & Able graduates beat the odds: They are 60 percent less likely to be convicted of a felony three years after graduating the program, according to a 2010 Harvard University study.
The program includes seven months of paid work cleaning streets in New York City, followed by four to six months of paid job training, as well as education.
“What I feel I had inside prison ― that I never had outside of prison ― was love,” Bell said. “Inside of prison, around these individuals who are going through the same experiences that I am, they know me inside and out.”
“My supervisors and people in the Doe Fund have experienced what I did, so they have that same caring that I had inside,” Bell added. “The average person in society doesn’t know how it feels to be stepped on and discarded ― the people at the Doe Fund do.”
Since 1990, more than 22,000 people have participated in the Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing and Able program, according to the website.
After graduation, Bell started a new job as a recruiter for the organization.
“This graduation means nothing more than the approval and happiness and acceptance of my mother,” Bell told HuffPost. “I hope this is the one thing in her life and my life that would make her proud of me.”
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WASHINGTON ― Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he thinks President Donald Trump has been successful during his first 100 days. But he really, really wishes Trump would stop with the early morning tweetstorms.
Trump has not been able to make much progress on any of his top campaign promises, including repealing the Affordable Care Act or building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
But McConnell said that Trump’s military actions abroad and his support of the GOP’s push to repeal some Obama administration regulations are examples of the president’s early successes.
“I think the president is doing just fine with what he is promoting,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill.
“I like the Congressional review actions. I like the strike in Syria. I like the bunker buster bomb in Afghanistan,” he said, referring in the case of Afghanistan to the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb dropped on Islamic State caves. “I like the more assertive foreign policy.”
But even in his brief summation of Trump’s 100-day start, the Kentucky legislator felt compelled to mention the tweeter-in-chief’s social media practices.
“As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not a big fan of the president’s tweeting habits,” McConnell said before downplaying the importance of those 140-character broadsides.
“If you focus on what he’s actually doing, I think he’s doing exactly the right thing for the country,” McConnell said.
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NEW YORK ― Energy Secretary Rick Perry supports remaining in the Paris climate agreement, but wants the United States to renegotiate its terms, he said Tuesday.
That puts him on one side of a schism forming within President Donald Trump’s White House over how to handle the historic 195-country deal to slash emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, senior adviser Jared Kushner, support remaining in the agreement; chief strategist Steve Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt ― two of the more radical, far-right voices in the White House ― want Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to exit the agreement.
Perry, in a Tuesday morning speech at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference, tempered his view. He touted decreasing emissions last year in the U.S. and China ― the world’s top polluters ― and criticized European countries, such as Germany, for not doing enough to shrink their own carbon footprint.
“There’s a lot of cheerleading the Paris accord and keeping the United States involved in that,” Perry said. “But the two countries that are making the real impact on emissions are the U.S. and China. So, I’m looking over at my friends in Germany and France going, ‘What are you all doing?’”
It’s true that German emissions rose by 0.7 percent last year, driven largely by an increase in vehicles on the road and the continued use of coal to generate about 40 percent of the country’s electricity. The numbers stand in stark contrast to Germany’s hard-line policy supporting renewable energy, which now produces 30 percent of its electricity. The country plans to shutter all its nuclear power plants by 2022 as part of its energiewende, or energy transition, policy.
“You have Germany, for instance, who has made the decision to go away from coal, to get out of the nuclear business, to double down, to hear them tell it, on renewables,” Perry said. “But the fact is their emissions have gone up because they’re using more coal, and they’re using coal that is not clean technology.”
“My point is, don’t sign an agreement and then expect us to stay in an agreement if you’re not going to really participate and be part of it,” he added. “The United States has taken actions to affect in a positive way. I’m not going to tell the president of the United States, ‘Let’s just walk away from the Paris accord,’ but we probably need to renegotiate it and they need to get serious about it.”
Speaking in the heart of liberal-leaning Manhattan at one of the clean energy industry’s most popular events, Perry repeatedly assailed opponents and critics of the new president, who will complete his first 100 days on Saturday. At one point, the cowboy boot-clad secretary said he would hold his tongue on why Texas trumps New York, so as not to offend his host, Michael Bloomberg, the Bloomberg LP CEO and former New York mayor.
Taking aim at German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government in particular is on-message for the Trump administration. Merkel’s support for refugees and global trade contrasts with Trump, whose bombastic style and abrupt policy reversals put him at loggerheads with her soft-spoken and technocratic approach to leadership. Merkel reportedly had to explain the “fundamentals” of European trade to Trump 11 times. During a White House visit, Trump refused to shake hands with the chancellor, who enjoyed a close relationship with former President Barack Obama. After Trump’s surprise victory in November, Merkel was dubbed the “leader of the free world” because of the new U.S. president’s cozy ties and lip service to autocratic dictators.
Perry criticized the Obama administration for favoring renewable energy, such as wind or solar power, over carbon-capture technology, a controversial technique of sequestering emissions from burning coal, gas and oil, and pumping them deep underground. The technology provides the basis of Trump’s promise to bolster “clean coal,” despite the fact that attempts to pull it off at power plants in the U.S. and Canada have so far failed.
It is not reasonable to rely exclusively on fossil fuels. It is not feasible to rely exclusively on renewables.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry
“Our predecessors led a war on coal,” Perry said, referring to the suite of Obama-era policies to limit carbon emissions from new coal-fired plants.
He accused the previous administration of scuttling scientific research that offered politically inconvenient conclusions. It’s unclear if he was referring to findings about the cost or viability of renewables, or about greenhouse gas emissions’ role in causing global warming. Perry, who has publicly rejected the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is manmade, made no mention of climate change during his roughly 50-minute appearance on stage at the conference.
“We will not hijack science for pet causes while suppressing it when it doesn’t fit a political agenda,” Perry said. “The last eight years saw policymaking driven by a political agenda.”
“Those days are over,” he added.
During his speech, Perry announced that he signed an order authorizing the Golden Pass liquefied natural gas plant in southeast Texas to begin exporting to countries that don’t have a free-trade agreement with the U.S. Construction of the new terminal, he said, would create 45,000 direct and indirect jobs over the next five years.
In a clear criticism of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), a close ally of defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Perry bashed unnamed Northeast governors who refuse to green-light natural gas pipelines and projects.
“Gas pipelines are a form of transportation that can drive the national economy and improve energy security,” he said. “Part of the country here in the Northeast is being denied natural gas access to their homes because of political opposition. Consumers are going to decide with their wallet, their vote or their feet when they move somewhere else.”
That isn’t to say Perry rejected renewable energy outright. During his three terms as Texas governor, wind energy skyrocketed, transforming the oil-rich state into by far the largest wind producer in the country. With 11,592 turbines and 20,321 megawatts, Texas has three times the capacity of Iowa, the runner up.
Many economists argue that heavy government investment in renewables is needed to help the industry compete with fossil fuels, which have for over a century enjoyed generous subsidies and tax incentives, and that the societal cost of carbon emissions should be factored into energy markets. Disregarding that, Perry said the Trump administration’s heavy emphasis on fossil fuels was more of a correction for its predecessor’s support for renewables than a complete reversal of policies.
“No reasonable person can deny that the thumb and in some cases the whole hand has been put on the scale to favor certain political outcomes,” he said. “It is not reasonable to rely exclusively on fossil fuels. It is not feasible to rely exclusively on renewables. We’re working to find the right balance.”
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