Executioners’ Swan Song Executioners’ Swan Song
Capital punishment will be one of the defining issues of the coming year.
Dec 22, 2000 / The Editors
In Fact… In Fact…
PROGRESSIVES FRISK IN FRISCO Tom Gallagher writes: They don't make routs much bigger than the one San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and allies experienced on December 12. After the runoffs of the city's first district Board of Supervisors elections since the days of Harvey Milk and Dan White, Brown-backed candidates had lost nine of eleven seats to an insurgency built to a considerable extent on Tom Ammiano's remarkable 1999 write-in mayoral campaign and fueled by the widespread perception of a city for sale. While deputy public defender Matt Gonzalez increased his 44-to-28 percent preliminary edge to 66-to-34--despite switching from Democrat to Green in the interim--none of Brown's runoff candidates reached even 52 percent (one drew only 19 percent) despite an overwhelming soft-money advantage. DEATH ROW SURVIVORS Scattered through the text of Robert Sherrill's article in this issue are photographs of eight former Illinois death-row prisoners taken by Loren Santow, a Chicago-based, widely published freelance photographer. The photos of men wrongly condemned to death were taken for a poster conceived by Rob Warden, a writer and activist, to publicize the errors endemic to the system. Before the present moratorium and since the restoration of capital punishment in Illinois, twelve prisoners have been executed, and thirteen freed because of innocence or lack of evidence. See Death Row Roll Call on the Nation website (www.thenation.com/deathrow) for a list of inmates awaiting execution and links to register a protest. NATION NOTES We congratulate the following friends who were awarded the National Humanities Medal: Toni Morrison, editorial board member; Barbara Kingsolver, Nation cruise panelist; and Earl Shorris, contributor and founder of classics courses for the poor. And National Medal of the Arts winner Benny Carter, reader.
Dec 22, 2000 / The Editors
No Honeymoon No Honeymoon
The election reveals a deep need for voting reform.
Dec 14, 2000 / The Editors
Daniel Singer Daniel Singer
Death came as a release for Daniel Singer on December 2, but we feel like protesting its rude intrusion.
Dec 7, 2000 / The Editors
Wanted: Three Electors Wanted: Three Electors
Let the chattering classes focus on chads and undervotes and Florida recounts and what the courts--state and federal, all the way up to the Supreme Court--would or wouldn't do. L...
Dec 7, 2000 / The Editors
In Fact… In Fact…
PINOCHET NABBED Any last hope former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet may have harbored that history would judge him kindly was dashed recently when a Santiago judge formally ch...
Dec 7, 2000 / The Editors
In Our Orbit In Our Orbit
STILL LOSING RUSSIA "As a result of the Yeltsin era, all the fundamental sectors of our state, economic, cultural and moral life have been destroyed or looted," lamented Alexand...
Dec 7, 2000 / Books & the Arts / The Editors
Rush to ‘Closure’ Rush to ‘Closure’
Here's the Bush idea of electoral reform: Cancel the election. The Florida legislature's move to choose the state's electors and declare George W. Bush the next President is only...
Nov 30, 2000 / The Editors
In Fact… In Fact…
PALM BEACH STORY With challenges to vote counts flying furiously throughout Florida, we presume to advise an attorney for one group of complainants--those voters in Palm Beach Co...
Nov 30, 2000 / The Editors