Torture, Mississippi Style

Guess where they once used a form of the "water cure"? Jim Crow Mississippi. That probably comes as no surprise. But guess where the practice was outlawed as being barbaric? Also in Jim Crow Mississippi, in the case Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926). From the blog Is That Legal (With a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan:

Waterboarding, known ironically in earlier times as "the water cure", remains -- in the view of this administration and many supporters -- not torture. And if it's not torture, then it's not cruel and unusual punishment or a violation of due process.

But here's the rub.

In 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court called the water cure torture. No qualifiers. No hedging. Just plain, good ol' fashion torture . . . and therefore a forbidden means for securing a confession. These men were hardly a group I'd call *activist* or *liberal* and certainly not bent on subverting our country in the name of coddling criminals.

I'm just not certain what case there is justifying these sorts of measures. I think that the United States can withstand bad foreign policy. I'm not certain for how long we can withstand engaging in practices that even repellent regimes have found to be repellent. It's unnecessary. It does not make us safer. It does not provide us with actionable intelligence. And it violates the very principles that are supposed to separate ourselves from our enemies. I can see no defense for waterboarding and similar practices and I do not know why anyone would try to do so.

The Genarlow Wilson Case

There are significant developments in the Genarlow Wilson case, a circumstance fraught with racial implications, in which a then-17-year old was sentenced to ten years in prison for having consensual sexual relations with a 15-year-old girl. The Georgia Supreme Court has heard elements of Wilson's appeal dealing with whether the sentence is constitutional and whether or not Wilson can be freed on bond while the appeals process occurs. The tntransigence of the Georgia Attorney general's office in this case has been appalling. Not quite Mike Nifong/Duke lacrosse-case-appalling, but of a similar ilk of legal irresponsibility, personal arrogance, moral inexplicability and general unjustifiability. The racial implications merely add to what would still be an outrageous injustice.

Race, Schools, and the Supreme Court

There has been a great deal of worthwhile commentary on the Supreme Court's recent, and to my mind unfortunate, decisions in two recent cases involving race and public schooling, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1, et al. and Meredith, Crystal (next friend for McDonald, Joshua) v. Jefferson County Bd. of Education, et al.
Since I'm not quite ready to engage in full-bore commentary (or to bore you with full commentary) you should go read verious assessments by Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, Stuart Taylor at Newsweek in an online-only commentary, Juan Williams at The New York Times (See also Times articles by Linda Greenhouse and Tamar Lewin as well as the Paper of Record's editorial), Derrick Z. Jackson at The Boston Globe, (See also the Globe's editorial), Mary Dudziak at "Legal History Blog," Jim Castagnera at History News Network (originally from the News of Delaware County),and Ralph Luker (who was a signatory to an amicus brief from sixty historians and from whom I cribbed the links to the reports on the cases) both here and here. (Naturally there has also been some stuff with which I adamantly disagree, such as this.)

Illegal Downloading, the RIAA, and College Campuses

According to a report (which I cannot find online) in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the recording Industry association of America (RIAA) is planning a crackdown on illegal file sharers. The RIAA recently sent out letters to campuses with the IP addresses of computers from those campuses that have been traced to the most extensive illegal sharing. The universities were to give the letters to the students tied to those IP addresses or else face lawsuits. The letters to the students, meanwhile, ask for a settlement payment of $3000 to be paid within a few weeks or else they RIAA will sue for the asserted value of each illegal downloading or file sharing.

The campus that has the most extensive violations? Ohio University. The rest of the top five are Purdue, the University of Nebraska, the University of Tennessee, and the University of South Carolina. (Full disclosure: I did my PhD at Ohio and was a fellow at USC's Institute of Southern Studies for a year, though I actually only spent a couple of weeks in residence.)

I am, frankly, torn about the RIAA approach. On the one hand, it seems monumentally dumb to alienate the single largest and most important music-consuming demographic. This approach seems heavy-handed. It smacks of bullying. It also reveals just how far behind the technological curve the RIAA is.

At the same time, we live in a post-Napster age. No one can reasonably assert, especially if they are a college student, that they are not aweare of the difference between illegal and legal file-sharing and downloading. Some of the users being targeted have downloaded thousands of songs.

It would be nice if the RIAA chose lenience. Scare these kids and make sure they are aware that they only get a pass because of the largesse of the RIAA but that in exchange, from here on out their campus will have to ensure that any targeted student's usage will be strictly monitored. Intellectual property matters, and its theft -- whether through plagiarism or illegal downloading -- is not a victimless crime. At the same time, kids have been making mix tapes and trading bootlegs for ages, and those practices, far from proving detrimental to the music industry, has actually almost universally fueled consumption, album sales, and concert attendance. In a lot of ways, file sharing and downloading simply takes the place of listening to wretchedly restrictive homogenized radio formats where a virtual payola system dominates. Make sure these kids share music the right way, but keep in mind that alienating your loyalist constituency is a dumb business practice.