07/29/13 – Brian Stull – The Scott Horton Show

Oh man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there!
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here!
Okay.
Hands up!
Turn around!
Whoa, easy!
Into the scanner!
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down!
It's just my- Hold it right there!
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector!
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
That's right!
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet.
And it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's securityedition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey guys, I got his laptop.
Alright you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.scotthorton.org is my website.
I'm streaming from there, from noagendastream.com.
Weekdays here from 11 to 1 Texas time.
Noon to 2 in the east.
You can find the full interview archive.
More than 2,900 interviews now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash scotthortonshow.
So, do that.
Alright, next up today is Brian Stull.
He is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.
Welcome to the show, how's it going?
Very good, how are you Scott?
I'm doing real good.
Thanks very much for doing this work.
If you don't do it, it doesn't get done.
So, I'm speaking on behalf of not just a lot of people locked in solitary, which, boy, I hope that never happens to me, but all the people in America who appreciate the fact that somewhere out there there's an ACLU lawyer who's trying to do something about the worst depredations that our government commits against the people of this country.
So, thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.
Thank you, it's nice to hear.
Alright, good.
Now, so you got this, talking about mental illness, this report is crazy.
I almost can't believe it, but I know it's true.
It's called Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Colorado's Continued Warehousing of Mentally Ill Prisoners in Solitary Confinement.
Give us the bad news.
Yeah, actually, Scott, so the report that the ACLU put out last week, I'm sure that Colorado report is very related.
Our report is about solitary confinement on death row, and it's called A Death Before Dying.
Oh, no, I got my ACLU reports mixed up.
Well, we have a lot of good work being done by the ACLU, and this one's focusing on death row, and there's a lot of other work being done on solitary confinement across the nation.
So the one I know about, though, is the one concerning death row.
Oh, I see.
Is this the, when I was on death row, I saw a bunch of dead men walking solitary confinement, killed everything inside them?
Is that the one you're talking about?
Exactly, exactly.
That's what Anthony Graves shared with us, who was an innocent man on Texas' death row and endured years of solitary confinement, even though he was innocent, and was fighting his appeal under conditions that are essentially crazy-making.
He was lucky to make it out of there alive.
All right, well, I'm sorry I prepared for the wrong interview, but I've got half an hour, and I'm willing to hear everything you've got to say.
So go right ahead and let us know, and I'll follow up wherever I can.
Okay, well, Scott, what we have here is it's a paradox.
The state wants to be able to execute people, and set aside objections to the death penalty, the process that we have for determining who gets executed in this country, it's rife with error.
We have ineffective lawyering.
We have prosecutors who are hiding evidence that shows innocence or shows someone shouldn't be executed.
We have errors in the instructions the jurors are given.
We have jurors doing things they're not supposed to do during deliberations, consulting outside sources.
We have mentally ill defendants, and we have an appeal process that's set up to deal with finding these errors.
And that appeal process takes time, and there are a lot of technicalities in that appeal process that the state will rely on to try to prevent the courts from getting to the heart of these errors and the heart of the question, was this trial where the state is saying someone should be sentenced to death, was that a fair trial?
So we have this very necessary appeal process, and that can take years and years.
In the meantime, the person who is sentenced to death gets, before their appeals are done, their first punishment, which is being thrown in solitary confinement.
And they sit in solitary confinement while they're supposed to be fighting for their lives doing these appeals that they are absolutely entitled to.
So you have, on the one hand, you need these appeals to make sure that we have every safeguard to make sure that that penalty is fairly meted out.
And then, on the other hand, you start punishing them and putting them in crazy-making conditions from the get-go, from the date of that sentence in the trial court.
And it's just a broken system.
And the report that we put out talks about how people end up in solitary confinement on death row and the conditions that are there and the problems that causes.
Let me answer the first part first.
How do they end up in solitary confinement when they're sentenced to death?
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you, because I think there's a TV-watching part of my brain that thinks that they don't go into solitary until after they stab some other guy in the cell block or try to kill a guard or something like that, and then you go in the hole for that.
You're absolutely right.
That's kind of the perception that people have.
And generally, although we think the use of solitary in all prisons is often overboard and used too much, but generally outside of the death row context, you do have to commit some sort of misconduct, could be stabbing a fellow guard, but doing something before they restrict your liberties even further and then ultimately put you in solitary confinement.
But with death row, it's completely the opposite.
When you are sentenced to death, in the overwhelming majority of states, they put you in solitary confinement from the get-go as a matter of your sentence, and you cannot behave well to get out of it.
There's no incentive system.
There's no model inmates get out of solitary confinement.
It's all death row inmates go right to solitary confinement.
Do not stop.
Do not pass go.
Do not collect $200.
That's where you are, even though that solitary confinement is not part of the sentence.
All right, now let me ask you about what exactly solitary confinement means, because can they at least yell to each other across the hall, that kind of thing, or you can't even hear any other inmates for a mile around?
It's designed to completely socially isolate you from other human beings, and human beings are social animals who rely on each other to keep our sanity.
That's part of our humanity.
So do they sometimes find ways to communicate?
They do.
They're desperate.
They're basically locked in a cell that is the size of your bathroom, and our survey looks at the size of death row cells throughout the country, and they range from 6 by 9 to 8 by 10 at the largest.
So it's a very, very, very, very small cell, and you can see some photos of the cells in Texas, which are like the cells everywhere.
So basically you'll have a concrete slab or some sort of metal bunk on which a thin pad will be laid out, and that's your bed.
And reach over from your bed like you would at home to your alarm clock, and in your death row cell you'll have your hand in the toilet.
So there's the toilet.
And that's basically what you have in there.
You'll have a little locker for your possessions, sometimes a little desk, and that's it.
And you're locked in there.
Part of solitary confinement means that you're locked in there for 22 to 24 hours per day, and you'll get out to go to exercise, and the guards will escort you to an exercise pen, which is a cage that might not be much bigger than the cell you just came from, but it might have a ball in there, sometimes a basketball net or some small or insignificant piece of recreational equipment, and you can go in there for half an hour, and then they'll bring you back in that whole process.
By the time they chain you up and drag you down there and then do the same thing in reverse, that will be your hour out of the cell, and maybe you'll get another hour out of the cell with the same sort of transport to go to the shower or do something like that.
So solitary confinement means you're in that cell by yourself.
You're in there 22 to 24 hours a day and that you have no human contact.
And to answer your question, you know, these doors...
So wait, even the exercise time is in solitary.
You don't even get to play ball or whatever for an hour.
Right, right.
It's not like, you know, you mentioned TV, the prison movies you see where everyone's out in the yard playing ball together or hatching plans or, you know, pairing off or getting into groups.
You're by yourself.
And they do, the prisoners absolutely do try to yell out their door onto the tier and get the attention of the guy who's next to them or bang on the wall.
I guess that is the contact they have, but it's not human.
Yeah, it's designed to prevent that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Wow.
So, man, there's so much to go over here already.
But first of all, these are all very bad guys, maybe.
I mean, you know, my wife, she's an investigative reporter, and she just loves reading the true crime stuff.
And, you know, as much as I complain about what the government does to people all day and their foreign wars and this, that, and the other thing, the American people a lot of times do absolutely horrible things to each other.
The crimes that they commit against children, stepfathers, against their girlfriends, kids, that kind of stuff, people are sick.
And some of the stuff that they do, I don't care what happens to them, man.
Screw them.
And so how good of a standard of proof do we need anyway, right?
I mean, there are some victims of crime and some survivors of victims of crime right now who are playing the world's smallest violin for you, pal.
Well, and we sympathize with victims of crime and obviously, you know, don't want anything like that to happen to anybody.
And I'm very familiar with victims of crime.
Our purpose here is not to cause them any distress, but at the same time we are all familiar with the fact that our judicial system has errors in it.
And our system needs to be reviewed and we have appeals and we have rules.
And while that process is being carried out, while we're determining whether someone on death row truly can be executed, the state is not entitled to essentially torture them through solitary confinement.
We need to know for sure.
Anthony Graves, he was innocent.
He was undergoing these conditions.
And he was pursuing his appeals in these conditions.
That's just completely unacceptable.
Across the country, there have been 142 people who have been exonerated from death row.
Many of those people had to endure solitary confinement conditions.
Many of the people who are sentenced to death who are not innocent, the courts later determine or a later jury later determines after the errors are taken care of that maybe this person committed a murder, but they are not going to be sentenced to death.
They are entitled to a life sentence.
So our point is they should not be tortured while we figure out this process of whether they deserve to live or die or whether they, in fact, deserve to go home because they're innocent.
And also, if the states in this country want to sentence people to solitary confinement, if that is the judgment because of the concern we have for crime victims and because of the concern about the seriousness of this crime, then our laws would allow that to be a sentence, solitary confinement.
The jury should be deciding that.
It shouldn't be a punishment added on in the prison system without any jury making that determination.
And again, if it's torture, then the jury doesn't have the right to decide that about anybody.
Well, maybe the jury should have a right to decide that about someone, but none of the men on death row, the 3,000 men on death row in this country, have been sentenced to solitary confinement.
Well, it's still an important point, but I'm just saying the Eighth Amendment can't be overridden by a legislature or a jury or a judge, or it shouldn't be able to be.
You're absolutely right.
And that's the thing, too, is this is your number one uphill battle, is you have got to put the word solitary and torture in the same sentence enough times to where the American people get it through their head.
You know, if we were talking about the CIA kidnapping Al-Qaeda suspects somewhere, we would call it no-touch torture, like what they did to Jose Padilla.
There's not a bruise on him, Judge.
All we did was sensory deprivation until we drove him completely out of his mind.
And that's torture.
It is torture.
And you have to make them stop for just a second and imagine that happening to them.
If you've ever seen the movie The Hurricane with Denzel Washington, where they lock him in solitary, he gets in a boxing match with himself in that cage, you know?
He goes completely mad.
Imagine that happening to you.
That is torture.
That's no different than putting somebody on the rack or hanging them upside down or keeping them awake for three weeks or, you know, whatever other tortures the American government comes up with from time to time.
Stacking naked people in pyramids.
I don't know what the point of that was.
You're right.
Well, it is.
It is torture.
And John McCain spent time in solitary confinement in the Hanoi Hilton, and he talks about solitary confinement as being torturous.
It's not part of the death sentence, and it has to end.
Hey, you know what?
I want to tell you a story.
By the way, everybody, I'm talking with Brian Stull from the ACLU about solitary confinement for people on death row, which it's your very important point and along the lines of your very important point that, yeah, they may have been convicted, but at least all their appeals haven't been exhausted.
It's not even written in the law that this is supposed to be part of their punishment, et cetera.
But here's what I want to add to it.
I used to be a cab driver here in Austin, and one time there was this really nice lady who was an assistant district attorney down in Harris County in Houston, which I think their first place for most executions in the world, and then China's in second place behind Harris County, something like that.
Maybe you know the stats.
But anyway, they just put black people to death down there, man.
They don't even care.
All day long, that's all they do.
And so what this lady told me was, and this didn't apply to her, of course, definitely not, but to every other assistant district attorney down there, this was their slogan.
If they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal.
And what that means is if the cops bring us someone, we put them in prison no matter what.
And we don't care.
We don't even stop to think about whether they deserve to be in prison or not, whether they did it or not.
We do everything we can to lock them in prison.
And then, like you're saying, once they're in solitary and the burden of proof is on them, if they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal.
That is criminal justice in America, according to the lady who acts that way all day.
Well, that's a very, very troubling story.
And I can't paint a broad brush about prosecutors.
I think there are some very good prosecutors out there.
But I think that we do see that sort of attitude far too often.
And it's very, very dangerous.
And after all, if you have that job in Houston and the cops are bringing you people all day long, eventually it's like making burgers or something.
You just don't care anymore, right?
It's just a job now.
Yeah, I think what she said really highlights the importance of having an appellate system to review what has happened in the trial court.
And during that system, the warden should be keeping prisoners safe until it's done.
You know what, I don't understand the excuse, really.
Because you could, I mean, well, the excuse isn't protecting the prisoners from each other, right?
Because you could have them in cells where they're just all open bar cells where they can't reach each other, but they can still all talk to each other, you know?
Oh, there's no excuse about that.
I think corrections officials and corrections experts who really know prison management will tell you.
We have a quote in our report from a former warden from California that it's not needed for prison safety.
If it is needed for prison safety, then we can restrict conditions for individuals who are dangerous, perhaps using restrictions that are less than solitary confinement.
But that can be individualized treatment.
And it's a broad brush here.
It's not for everyone.
There's a quote from Jeannie Woodford in our report who says, as a former warden at San Quentin, she knows that safety is the most important concern and that she says we can put people on death row without putting them in solitary confinement, and they can be brought into contact with others, and there are ways to manage that, and solitary confinement is a cop-out.
Well, you know, I've got to bring up the communists, because I just saw the other day The Lives of Others.
It was recommended by a caller to the show, actually, about the Stasi in East Germany, and there's a scene in there where the one Stasi is explained to the other Stasi, I guess during training or whatever.
Oh, you know what we do with these riders?
We just lock them in solitary for eight months, and then after eight months, you know, they never really make a peep again.
They're never the same again after that.
And you can see how for someone on the outside, eight months goes by, shrug, right?
They don't even have to think about that person they locked in the hole back eight months ago.
But whatever was going on down in the hole throughout that eight months, at the other end, we never have a problem with them again.
So, you know, like this whole report, this other report about the mental illness in here, I'm sure there's a lot of chicken-and-egg question here where you lock somebody in solitary.
Now they're crazy.
Now you're really torturing a crazy person, you know?
That is absolutely right.
And the fact is that people who are sentenced to death, if they are truly guilty, they have come from horrific conditions.
They've come from lifetimes of abuse and lifetimes of poverty and lifetimes of trauma and mental illness.
So a large percentage of them are going to have mental health problems to start, and then you add solitary confinement to it.
And all of the experts who have looked at this say that solitary confinement creates insanity in healthy people and exacerbates mental illness in people who already have it to very, very, very unsettling degrees.
And that makes it impossible for us to have a reliable appellate process to determine if it's right for these folks to be actually sentenced to death.
Is it right that there's 80,000 Americans in solitary right now?
Yes, that's the figure that I have as well.
You know, the thing of that is, I wonder whether this is sort of like with the invasion of Iraq or something like that, where it's just too horrible for society to admit that it's true.
Have we really gone this far down the path of sadism and lawlessness, that this is what we do?
This is how we have set up, not just this is what our government does as a policy, but this is how we have set up our society to operate in a way.
Nobody wants to admit that because then we're the bad guys, and where's all the red, white, and blue and freedom and justice and liberty and all that?
Well, there's definitely a disconnect between those values that we hold up as American and what we do to people in prison.
I'm not the expert on solitary outside of death row.
We have other people in the ACLU who are experts in that area.
But it's very, very clear that it's bad policy, and people are being released from solitary confinement into our communities.
I'm talking about the non-death row cases.
And that's very, very troubling with how sick and how mentally ill solitary can make you, that the next step is when they're done with their sentence, we just release them into our community.
I think the truth is that the American people, if fully educated, would not support this type of policy.
But, you know, we don't have enough programs like yours, Scott, where people are talking about this and getting the word out.
I think once the word is out that this is going to be rejected, and we will become a better society for it.
Yeah.
You know what?
I agree with that too, or I sort of have to, right?
I guess my dad raised me with some quote of Winston Churchill saying, the American people will eventually do the right thing, eventually.
You know, it takes them a while, but finally, once they get their act together, they will.
And it reminds me of a statement by Ron Paul where he said, you know, actually, I am quite a flip-flopper, and I have changed my opinion on one thing, and that is I'm no longer for the death penalty because I just don't think we can trust the system to get it right.
The combination of the judges, the lawyers, the jurors, the cops working together to solve the crime, not good enough.
It's just not good enough.
Yeah, I think that's a natural view for libertarians.
I don't always agree with libertarian thought, but if you don't trust the government, if you're tired of government programs and you don't trust the government to do basic things like fix our roads, how can we trust them to make that decision of who lives and who dies?
Right.
And it's like you're saying, you got real people exonerated from death row, and only because of people like you and people like the Innocence Project and whatever, doing the hard work to get them sprung.
Otherwise, they'd go to the chair.
That's absolutely right.
So you can't really dispute that, you know?
That means if they've already, like, this many people go, I know they like to, I guess they like to say, well, that's just proof the system works.
Some of them have been set free or something, but I don't know, man.
Now, we believe that that's proof that there are people who have been executed who are innocent, like Carlos De Luna, like Cameron Todd Willingham, both from Texas.
We believe that when you just find this evidence out almost by fluke, or because you really have a zealous lawyer, you find this evidence of innocence, and you're able to finally get a court to act on it, that there are going to be other cases where it's just not discovered until it's too late.
No doubt about it.
All right, listen, man.
Again, I thank you and the rest of you ACLU people.
I don't agree with you guys on everything either, but I sure love the way you sue the government all day and try to make them stop doing horrible things to people and this kind of thing, torture in America, you know, the USA or the homeland or whatever you call it.
Man, it's not supposed to be this way, and we can change it, I think, and especially due to people like you and the great work you're doing.
So thank you very much, Brian.
Actually, Scott, can I just give a plug here?
The report is on our page at the ACLU.
You can read the whole report.
There are some pictures there as well of death row in Texas, and also I appreciate all of the thanks you gave to the ACLU and the Innocence Project there in Texas.
We have great organizations fighting the death penalty and fighting these injustices.
We have the Gulf Region Advocacy Center in Houston and Texas Defender Service and the Office of Capital Risks and a great clinic at the University of Texas Law School, and they're all doing fabulous work there, and I hope your listeners will support them.
Right on.
Hey, thanks very much.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Brian Stoll from the ACLU.
The report is A Death Before Dying, Solitary Confinement on Death Row at ACLU.org.
You can find it right there, A Death Before Dying, Solitary Confinement on Death Row.
For everybody else, Scott Horton here for Rocky Mountain Miners at rockymountainminers.com.
Ever wanted to destroy the Federal Reserve System?
Now's your chance.
New free market currencies are making our fake government money a thing of the past and good riddance.
If you want to mine new bitcoins and litecoins into circulation, you need a computer set up to crack the codes to the new coins.
Get the Prospector from rockymountainminers.com.
It's ready to do the work right out of the box.
Crack the equations, spend the money.
Use promo code SCOTTHORTONSHOW and save $100.
Get all the info and get the Prospector at rockymountainminers.com.
Hey, Al Scott here inviting you to check out Modern Times Magazine at moderntimesmagazine.com.
It's a great little independent publication out of Phoenix, Arizona, featuring unique views on economics, politics, foreign policy, sports, and music, with great art scene coverage and fiction writing as well.
That's Modern Times Magazine at moderntimesmagazine.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Aren't you sick of the neocons in the Israel lobby pretending as though they've earned some kind of monopoly on foreign policy wisdom in Washington, D.C.?
These peanut clowns who've never been right about anything?
Well, the Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first, and telling the lobby to go take a hike.
The empire's bad enough without the neocons making it all about the interests of a foreign state.
Help C&I promote peace.
Visit their site at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and, of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com.com for some examples and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey, y'all, Scott here, hawking stickers for the back of your truck.
They've got some great ones at libertystickers.com.
Get Your Son Killed, Jeb Bush 2016, FDR, No Longer the Worst President in American History, The National Security Agency, Blackmailing Your Congressman Since 1952, and USA, Sometimes We Back Al Qaeda, Sometimes We Don't.
There's over a thousand other great ones on the wars, police, state, elections, the Federal Reserve and more at LibertyStickers.com.
They'll take care of all your custom printing for your bandier business at TheBumperSticker.com.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.