Below is a sample of one area, and I would like to emphasize ONY ONE AREA, among many that have been swept under our rugs for decades upon decades and only until recently has it gained enough attention for it to become an issue. One of the reasons for this is due to the past couple of decades the more promenant and whealthy among society have brought thier family members out of the closet and no longer hide them for fear of ridicule as it was so too often done in the past.
There are many holes in the system that will never be pluged up. The fact of the matter is that the constitution and our amendants are in fact there at our disposal along with more human rights then one can shake a stick at. But unless you are aware of what they are beyond simply being able to recite them you cannot use them for your benifit.
The other side of this coin is that those in our society that are driven to achieve power money and sucess and also have no concience to speak of, will and do use the system to achieve that. That's just the way it is.
I can't imagine why the thought of this being a reality to some is so inconcievable this side of just simple inexpierence.
Sometimes it takes learning something the hard way to actually learn it. Or at least be able to see the full scale of something that is otherwise ignored.
I am posting these just for human interest. There are Thousands and Thousands where these came from.
I will not argue there validity with anyone.
Human Rights Watch
This is the real world of human rights.
Equal rights as long as you either completely understand exactly what that means and how to enforce them in legal terms or you can afford to hire someone that does.
Jerome Bowden was in fact a human.
Jerome Bowden
Jerome Bowden was a small, undernourished twenty-four-year-old when he was accused(NOT FOUND GUILTY OF)of robbing and murdering a fifty-five-year-old Georgia woman and badly beating her bedridden mother. Bowden's I.Q. was measured at 59, and he could not count to ten. His mental age was approximately nine.
Neighbors described Bowden "soft-spoken, pleasant, optimistic, and always smiling." One neighbor said:
Before I knew [Bowden], I heard boys talking about him in the neighborhood, calling him crazy and retarded. People used to tease him, but it didn't seem to bother him. He didn't understand. He thought they were paying him a compliment.... He would get lost and wander around for a long time.... One time he took some money from [his employer], but it seems like someone may have put him up to it, because he didn't seem to know what he was doing. He didn't try to hide it. I don't think he meant to keep it. I think maybe he just forgot to turn it in, because he was just standing around with it in his pocket when they came looking for it. This is why I don't think he made the decision by himself. He was easily influenced by others.
Bowden's sister, Josephine, recalled that "Jerome's mind just used to come and go." Once, while mowing his sister's lawn, the mower ran out of gas; Bowden filled the gas tank with water, then wandered off. When he was not working, Bowden would often just sit on his bed and rock himself back and forth for hours on end.
When Jerome Bowden heard from his sister that the police had been looking for him, he went to them to find out how he could help. They confronted him about the crime, and he denied any involvement, but eventually he broke down, confessed, and signed a written statement acknowledging his guilt. James Graves , a sixteen-year-old boy, implicated Bowden in the crime; beyond Graves's statement and Bowden'sconfession, no physical evidence linked Bowden directly to the crime, although a great deal of evidence incriminated Graves.
Bowden denied that he had played a role in the murder. When asked why he had made a false confession, Bowden struggled to find an answer:"Well, that I don't know. Only thing that I knew, since Detective Myles had told me this here.... Had told me about could help me, that he could, you know, which I knew that confessing to something you didn't take part in was-if you confess to something that you didn't do, as if you did it, because you are saying that you did." Apparently Detective Myles promised Bowden that he would help him stay out of the electric chair if he confessed. When his clemency attorney later asked him if he had even read his "confession" before signing it, Bowden said, "I tried."
Although Jerome Bowden could hardly read and could not count to ten, his trial lawyers did not raise his retardation during his defense.
He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. When the state granted a last-minute, ninety-day stay of execution to have his mental capacity evaluated, Bowden's lawyers rushed to his cell with the news, but Bowden did not understand the meaning of a "stay." He asked his attorney if the stay meant he could watch television that night. "Jerome has no real concept of death," his attorney ruefully concluded.
During the stay of execution, Irwin Knopf, a psychologist from Emory University, gave Bowden another I.Q. test at the request of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles. This time Bowden scored 65, higher than on his previous testsbut still clearly within the definition of mental retardation. Knopf nonetheless concluded that Bowden was not sufficiently disabled to merit clemency. To a retarded kid who wasnt even guilty of the crime. But because the murderer that committed the actual crime said the retard did it. He received a lesser sentence
Bowden's lawyers were devastated. Bowden, in contrast, was proud of his performance on the I.Q. test: "I tried real hard," he told his lawyers. "I did the best I could."
Relying entirely on Knopf's test, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles refused to grant clemency for Jerome Bowden. Bowden was "scared," his lawyers said, but he told an interviewer that he was "going off to live on a little cloud," and he hoped a guard who had befriended him "would live on a cloud near him someday."
Despite a public outcry, Bowden was executed on June 4, 1986.
The law in that state has since changed. No longer can a mentally retarded person be sentenced to death. However this does not affect those mentally retarded who were sentenced to death prior the new law. They will still be executed since there sentencing was dated prior to the date of the new law.
BEYOND REASON:
One New Years Eve night a man took his neighbor out and drank a bottle of whiskey. They then killed a man and robbed him.
The man confessed to the crime and identified the retarded neighbor boy as his accomplice in exchange for a lesser sentence.
Limmie Arthur was the seventeenth of eighteen children born to a poor South Carolina sharecropper family. His intellectual abilities are that of a seven-year-old.
Arthur was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1985
Arthur himself was convinced that he had been sentenced to death because he could not read. While on death row, he diligently tried to learn to read with the hopes of eventually obtaining his general equivalency diploma. He thought he would get a reprieve if he was successful.
The South Carolina Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Limmie Arthur had not "knowingly or voluntarily" waived his right to a jury trial, and it overturned his death sentence. Prosecutors agreed to accept a term of life imprisonment instead of trying him again.
