Forgive my late comment on it, but in early November, PBS' Frontline did a fantastic program titled The Confessions. If you haven't heard about the case (I hadn't), I'd really recommend watching or listening to the program, but to boil it down as short as possible, a woman named Michelle Moore-Bosko was raped and murdered in her Virginia apartment in 1997, and through a series of bad police and prosecutorial decisions, seven US sailors were wrongly dragged into it, and four were ultimately convicted on rape or murder charges and imprisoned by Virginia. They were eventually freed on a partial clemency by Governor Tim Kaine in 2009, having spent most of 12 years in prison.
All this happened despite the eventual (but still timely enough) confession of acting alone by a known sexually violent man who had no association with the accused sailors, and had the only DNA from the crime scene. The first sailor was implicated just by the random suspicious comment of someone in Michelle's building (where he also lived) during initial police canvassing and after he was induced to (falsely) confess by sheer psychological wear-down, one by one additional sailors were pulled in as each would be brought in, grilled for extended times by one detective with a long record of extracting confessions, and when their DNA did not actually match the crime scene, they were coerced to name additional people involved and re-state their confessions to match a growing list of suspects, which ultimately reached 8. The case took numerous absurd twists and turns and really the program does an excellent job showing how the State's case against the seven (three never convicted) strained credulity by the end, despite the confessions.
PBS covers many aspects of this preposterous travesty of justice, because it is obvious that many flaws in the criminal justice system aligned to create such a massive error. There is no monocausal explanation, a bad cop, bad prosecutors, bad supervisors, bad Judges and sloppy defence lawyers all played significant parts in the result, but if I had to name the factor which, if absent, would have prevented the outcome while still leading to the eventual conviction of the actual murderer, it is the Death Penalty.
I recently subscribed to PBS' NOW audio podcasts and listened to this in my car. It's from January, but it hits every note of alarm I have felt about the state of actual journalism in America:
This weekend, PBS will air the last new regular episode from journalist extrordinaire, Bill Moyers, in his show Bill Moyers Journal. It's hard to think of this except in terms like "tragedy" and "unmitigated disaster." Moyers has more than earned his retirement (semi retirement one hopes) but still I lament the withdrawal of a clarion, unabashed liberal voice from the discourse. I can't help but compare him to Justice Stevens, whose retirement will likely lead to a rightward shift on the court, so too it is nearly inevitable that Moyers' replacement at PBS will be at minimum unable and probably unwilling to provide the kind of clear commentary and relentless analysis Moyers has provided. No one else has the stature to take on the sacred cows of the DC elite discourse the way Moyers does.
Before I go further, please go set your PVR to record or jot a note somewhere to watch the program whenever it airs on your PBS affiliate. It would be a nice send off for the retiring warrior to get a decent spike in the ratings and kick start one last round of discussion as he has done so often with his many excellent programs.
I cannot hope to do Moyers' career justice (though Eric Alterman comes close in a well worth reading piece comparing Moyers favourably to Murrow, and this 3-part series on his role in founding the Peace Corps is amazing) so I would like to use the occasion to highlight the ongoing importance of public media in the modern era, and mourn the lack of support given it in America.
In the last diary, I outlined the ongoing collapse of journalism as we know it. My conclusion is that this is a public good, and a highly salutatory one (likely indispensable) for the kind of egalitarian and Just society we want. Since it evidently a market failure without a viable business model, government will need to provide it.
Fortunately, such institutions already exist. In America, PBS and NPR have survived (barely) a long era of government under leaders who really despise them. Now is the time to revive these institutions, and rebuild them for the 21st Century.
Scott Horton has a story on a documentary that will make the case that the highest levels of the Bush administration authorized torture, at the level of even authorizing particular techniques on individual prisoners. Problem is that PBS has refused to air it, until next year:
PBS would not run the show-at least not until President Bush has left office. The show delivers impressively on a promise to "connect the dots in an investigation of interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody that became 'at a minimum, cruel and inhuman treatment and, at worst, torture'"
While this might lead one to indict PBS, I think the real story is more interesting, and highlights the importance of strong public media.
I'm on a PBS special tomorrow at 8:30pm on the Donna Edwards - Al Wynn primary race. I'm assuming it's going to run through the Ned Lamont race and the fights within the Democratic Party. I hope it doesn't suck. Here's the link: http://www.pbs.org/n...
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