Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XXIII Number 1, January 2015
UPCOMING EVENTS
Thursday, January 22, 7:30 PM. Monthly
Meeting. We meet at the Caltech Y, Tyson
House, 505 S. Wilson Ave., Pasadena. (This is
just south of the corner with San Pasqual.
Signs will be posted.) We will be planning our
activities for the coming months. Please join
us! Refreshments provided.
Tuesday, February 10, 7:30 PM. Letter
writing meeting at Caltech Athenaeum, corner
of Hill and California in Pasadena. This
informal gathering is a great way for
newcomers to get acquainted with Amnesty.
Sunday, February 15, 6:30 PM. Rights
Readers Human Rights Book Discussion
group. This month we read, "A Marker to
Measure Drift" by Alexander Maksik.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hi All
Happy New Year and best wishes to all!
Hope everyone had a great holiday season and
that 2015 will be a better year for human rights
all over the world.
One of our Group 22 members, Laura Brown,
received a response from President Obama
regarding a letter she sent on Ebola. See a copy
of the letter in this newsletter.
Kathy
RIGHTS READERS
Human Rights Book Discussion Group
Keep up with Rights Readers at
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Next Rights Readers meeting:
Sunday, February 15, 6:30 PM
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado, Pasadena
BOOK REVIEW by Norman Rush
The New York Times, Aug. 23, 2013
A Marker
to Measure Drift
by Alexander Maksik
Can the literary novel ever really get its arms
around the problem of human evil? It keeps
trying - a difficult assignment for the poor
beast. In any case, an undaunted Alexander
Maksik has brought his skills to this very
problem. His second novel, "A Marker to
Measure Drift," recounts a season of homeless
exile in the life of a 24-year-old Liberian woman
fleeing an episode of gruesome violence
incidental to the overthrow of the tyrant Charles
Ghankay Taylor, in 2003. Maksik has produced
a bold book, and an instructive one.
"Marker" is an aftermath novel. Jacqueline, its
heroine, suffers from unbearable suppressed
memories, from remorse over failures to have
anticipated the bloody destiny ordained for her
family. The dangers and indignities of flight and
destitution, stark as they are, weigh less than her
mental torment. Maksik is, of course, hardly the
first American writer to set a tale in the context
of African brutality. The grim fact is that for
some of the more absolute forms of malevolence
- communal violence gone mad, for one -
Africa has been a recurrent theater.
Despite the consensus view that the continent
has, in the last 20 years, risen brilliantly in terms
of G.D.P. growth, explosive gains in elite
income, improved infrastructure and better
governance, outbreaks of mass violence
continue in conflicts taking place at the edges of
public consciousness. Think of Uganda, Nigeria,
Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Susan Minot's new novel, "Thirty Girls," to be
published next year, concerns a victim of the
crazed insurgency led by Joseph Kony in
Uganda. Mark Lee's 1998 novel "The Lost Tribe"
deals with an unnamed Central African republic
most likely based on Uganda. Dave Eggers's
2006 novel "What Is the What" dramatizes the
fate of one of the Sudanese Lost Boys. Philip
Caputo set his 2005 novel "Acts of Faith" in
Sudan, where the unending civil war seemed to
be coming to an end. It is returning in fire. The
subject renews itself, alas, and the geography
accommodating violence expands: the faith-
based slaughters proceeding in Syria,
Afghanistan and Iraq (still!) await their literary
anatomists.
Maksik writes, credibly, across the boundaries
of gender and, in this book, race. He has written
before from a woman's point of view. One
narrator of his first novel, "You Deserve
Nothing," is a young Frenchwoman who
determinedly seduces her instructor at an
international school in Paris. The book received
praise as an evocation of disordered passions, as
an erotic fantasia along the lines of James
Salter's novel "A Sport and a Pastime." (Later, it
came to light that the book was apparently a
roman ˆ clef, when the humiliated woman
Maksik seems to have based his heroine on
accused him of violations of confidence.)
By way of contrast, the heroine of "A Marker to
Measure Drift" is a blameless young woman
who has been rescued from death almost
happenstantially by her French journalist lover
as he scrambles to leave a Monrovia falling into
the hands of an armed rabble of murderous
teenagers. Thereafter permanently abandoned
by her Frenchman, penniless, she is forced to
cobble together an existence, sleeping in caves or
unfinished buildings, in the crevices of the
tourist milieu on the island of Santorini.
"Marker" is a study of scarred consciousness
struggling to come to terms with the violence
done to it in a moment of cataclysmic horror.
Jacqueline needs to relive and transmit the truth
of her descent into hell if she is to renew the
desire to keep living. (A classic realization of the
drive to disarm evil by retelling may be found in
Ant—nio Lobo Antunes's novel "The Land at the
End of the World," based on the author's
experiences as an army medic in Angola during
Portugal's last colonial war.)
In a way, Jacqueline's struggle stands as a
metaphor for the literary novel itself when it
engages enormity. Readers can't help wanting
"the one bright book of life" to end at least
consolingly, if not straight-up happily. There is a
homiletic bias to the stories novelists tend to tell
best. Maksik finds his own way of squaring the
circle of disaster and hope, signaled late in the
book by a shift from past to present tense.
Is Maksik's grueling depiction of a woman in
torment successful as a work of fiction? I think it
is. The point of view is convincing. As for any
idiosyncrasies the reader may be looking for in
Jacqueline's voice as a child of Liberia, they are
few - as might be expected, given her
background as a thoroughly westernized
member of the country's ruling elite who has
been educated in Britain. Her place of refuge,
outdoor Santorini, is keenly described, the
details of the setting jaggedly selected, in the
same way they might impress themselves on a
harried, homeless young woman. The mechanics
of trying to stay fed and sheltered are given
plausibly enough. Maksik's narrative style,
using short, declarative sentences and sentence
fragments, fits the story's tenor and pace.
The sustained representation of Jacqueline's
search for release, for haven, has moments of
bleak poetry: "She couldn't say that she was
leaving, that she had somewhere to be. If she did
she'd have to walk in the direction of that place
and there was no place."
Jacqueline is afflicted with flashbacks, not of the
violence in her past, but of moments that should
have been forewarnings. Illusory images of her
father and mother accompany her. They
dispense irrelevant advice. It's a bad dream
Jacqueline inhabits, but Maksik makes the
reader share it. The novel is a tense read. Will
this unprotected woman, haplessly wandering,
fall prey to predators of the European kind?
That's a concern. She's also careless about where
she leaves her passport.
"A Marker to Measure Drift" isn't constructed to
go deep into the heart of darkness, the
wellsprings of the terrible killing in West Africa.
Maksik brings us to the scene, ultimately, but
not through it. The story ends there.
The question of complicity on the part of
Jacqueline's family in Charles Taylor's reign of
terror comes up in a serpentine way at different
points. "Later," Maksik writes, "she listened to
the BBC as the U.N. unsealed Taylor's
indictment: murder, torture, rape, sexual
slavery, terrorism, looting, the unlawful
recruitment of child soldiers. . . . Her father
looked at her and smiled a cold smile, a smile
that meant, What I'm about to say is the last
we'll speak of it. . . . He said, 'That's Ghankay.
Exceptional men have exceptional habits.' "
It is of course made evident that the degree of
guilt Jacqueline faces serves only to make her
suffering worse. Those who destroyed Taylor
were achieving revenge, after all.
A piety frequently turns up in reviews of
contemporary novels set in violent African
venues: that such works can't help raising
consciousness, leading to moral pressure,
leading to change. How much truth there is in
that I don't know. We keep hearing it. It's a
hope. And I'm sure this hope resides in the heart
of Alexander Maksik, who has illuminated for
us, with force and art, an all too common species
of suffering - grievous, ugly and,
unfortunately, a perennial.
Norman Rush is the author of "Whites," "Mating"
and "Mortals." His new novel, "Subtle Bodies," will
be published next month.
AUTHOR BIO
Alexander Maksik is the author of the novels
You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure
Drift, which was named a New York Times
Book Review Notable Book of 2013. His writing
has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American
Nonrequired Reading, Harper's, Tin House, Harvard
Review, The New York Times Magazine, The
Atlantic, Salon, and Narrative Magazine, among
other publications. He is a contributing editor at
CondŽ Nast Traveler, and his work has been
translated into more than a dozen languages. A
graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has
received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from
the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The
Corporation of Yaddo.
http://alexandermaksik.com
Amnesty Group 22 member gets
response from President Obama
by Laura Brown
As a frequent letter writer for Amnesty
International's urgent actions for the past 6
years, I can count on one hand (while making
the peace sign!) the number of times officials
have written back. Once, I got a letter from the
Minister of Labor and Social Affairs in Prague,
assuring me of his government's support for
Roma families that had been displaced. More
recently, on the first day of Winter Session at
GCC, I found a large, stiff manila envelope from
the White House waiting for me in my teacher's
box. It was a personal response from President
Obama on the issue of Ebola. According to a
New York Times article, "Picking Letters, 10 a
Day, That Reach Obama," a staff member
chooses ten letters a day that are delivered to
President Obama at the White House, and mine
appeared to have been among them.
I had sent off a letter September 26, praising the
president for his substantial commitment to
fight Ebola. I was very impressed that he had
decided to take this humanitarian action,
countering those who said it wasn't our
problem. At the time, he pledged to help West
African nations with a $1 billion-plus plan. "We
need a broader effort to stop a disease that could
kill hundreds of thousands, inflict horrific
suffering, destabilize economies, and move
rapidly across borders," Obama said, as reported
by the Voice of America.
Just three days after the president promised
immediate action on the crisis, the first Ebola
patient diagnosed in America, Thomas Eric
Duncan, was admitted to a hospital in Dallas
with advanced symptoms, and later died. The
World Health Organization reported on January
7, 2015, that there have been at least 8,000 deaths
from Ebola and that there is "no identifiable
downward trend" in Guinea. So, it will take
continued involvement and commitment on the
part of all those who can help to get the upper
hand on this disease. I know our president is
committed, because he told me so! Never
underestimate the value of a well-timed letter.
PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE
Gao Zhisheng
by Joyce Wolf
Five months ago, China released human rights
lawyer Gao Zhisheng from prison, but he is still
not free. He lives now with his wife's parents in
Xinjiang Province, essentially under house
arrest, subject to 24-hour police surveillance.
Radio Free Asia reported on January 8 that Gao
is allowed a brief phone call every few days
with his brother Gao Zhiyi, who said that Gao's
mental health "seems OK now." (Subjected to
torture and solitary confinement during his
three years in Shaya Prison, Gao could barely
speak when he was first released.)
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/gao-
zhisheng-house-arrest-01082015160550.html
The RFA article does not mention the current
state of Gao's physical health, nor can I find any
recent online updates about whether he has
been able to obtain the dental and medical
treatment that he urgently required after his
release.
We would very much like to send Gao Zhisheng
messages of support and New Year greetings,
but it is not possible to send him anything by
mail now, according to the Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/GaoZhishengLawyer.
However, this page posted the following request
on January 7:
"Tell us in the comments below why Gao
inspires you. Feel also free to share this post to
raise more awareness on Gao and his work for
defending activists and religious minorities in
China. (Falun Gong Practitioners, Victims of
medical malpractice, Christians...). Thank you
and Happy New Year!"
If you are on Facebook, please respond or click
on Like. If you would like to respond but don't
have a Facebook account, you can send your
comment to aigp22@caltech.edu and we will
post it for you.
For current news updates, you can check the
Twitter account dedicated to Gao Zhisheng,
https://twitter.com/GaoZhisheng. His wife,
who escaped to exile in the U.S. in 2009, posts in
Chinese at https://twitter.com/GengHe1.
Here's hoping that 2015 may finally be the year
that sees Gao Zhisheng truly free and reunited
with his family!
DEATH PENALTY NEWS
By Stevi Carroll
Andrew Brannan: 1st execution of 2015
The state of Georgia, infamous for the execution
of Troy Davis, holds the 'honor' of performing
the US's first execution of 2015.
Andrew Brannan volunteered to serve in the US
Army in 1968. His combat experience in
Vietnam earned him two Army Commendation
Medals and a Bronze Star. In 1984, Veterans
Administration doctors diagnosed Mr. Brannan
with post-traumatic stress disorder. By 1990, his
condition deteriorated, and he was granted 100
percent disability. In 1996, Mr. Brannan's
doctors further diagnosed him as being bipolar.
In January 1998, Mr. Brannan was stopped by
Officer Kyle Dinkheller. Mr. Brannan had been
driving 98 mph. The video camera in Officer
Dinkheller's vehicle recorded Mr. Brannan's
erratic behavior which included cursing,
dancing in the street, and saying "shoot me."
After a scuffle, Mr. Brannan went to his car, took
out a high-powered rifle, and shot to death
Officer Dinkheller. (How Mr. Brannan had
access to a high-powered rifle given his mental
conditions is a topic for another discussion.)
In a statement just prior to his execution January
13, Mr. Brannan said, "I extend my condolences
to the Dinkheller family, especially Kyle's
parents and his wife and his two children."
In response to Mr. Brannan's execution, Sister
Helen Prejean posted on Facebook, "We send
our young people into conflicts where they
witness and experience horrors most of us will
never know, and we fail to provide them with
the support they need when they return home
and face disability and demons as a result of
those experiences. Where is our culpability in
this? When do we say no to piling horror upon
horror?"
George Junius Stinney, Jr. - Conviction
Overturned
In 1944, George Stinney, Jr., 14, and his sister,
Aime Ruffner, eight, were tending a cow
grazing in a field. Two white girls came up to
these young African-American children and
asked about where to find some plants. Aime
told them she did not know and the white girls
left. Later the white girls were found dead in a
ditch, their skulls crushed by a 12-inch drift pin,
a piece of metal used to hitch railroad cars
together.
Without his parents' knowledge, George
Stinney, Jr. was taken from his home and to jail.
His trial was overseen by an all-male, all-white
jury. His lawyer presented no witnesses in
George's defense and barely cross-examined the
states few witnesses. George was found guilty
and was executed in the electric chair 53 days
after his conviction.
While George Stinney, Jr. did confess, Circuit
Court Judge Carmen T. Mullen said during her
recent ruling on the case that George was
separated from his parents, had no lawyer
present, and may have been "coerced into
confessing to the crimes due to the power
differential between his position as a 14-year-old
black male apprehended and questioned by
white, uniformed law enforcement in a small,
segregated mill town in South Carolina."
The family of George Stinney, Jr., is "thrilled
and relieved" with this exoneration, but as
Miller W. Shealy, Jr., a lawyer who helped argue
this case said, "It's difficult for them to celebrate
because no one's coming home and no one's
getting out of prison."
Frankie Baily-Dyches, a relative of one of the
murdered girls, said, "I believe he confessed.
He was tried and found guilty by the laws of
1944 ... and it needs to be left as is."
George Stinney, Jr., above, was 14 years old
when he was executed in the electric chair in
South Carolina in 1944. He was the youngest
person executed in the US in the 20th century.
Ohio Puts Executions On Hold
First, those pesky European pharmacies refused
to sell the drugs US prison authorities use to
execute people. They said they didn't want their
drugs used to kill people, so prison authorities
decided they would use compounding
pharmacies in the US to produce the lethal mix
that could be injected into the death row inmates
veins to kill them. This was followed by a few
'botched' executions during which the person
being executed writhed - perhaps in pain - and
gasped for breath. The Ohio Department of
Rehabilitation and Corrections is delaying their
upcoming executions during the time they need
to secure their lethal drugs. The two-drug
regimen of midazolam and hydromorphone will
be scrapped as they add thiopental sodium to
pentobarbital, a drug already used. The
paperwork for this change had to be filed with
US District Judge Gregory Frost 30 before Ohio's
next scheduled execution on February 11. At
this point, Warren Henness and Ronald Phillips
have their executions stayed. For Ohio and other
death penalty states, the saying could be "Better
dying through chemistry." With that said, let's
remember that should Tennessee not be able to
have access to lethal injection drugs, their
electric chair is charged up, legal, and ready to
go.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution
In December 2014, 117 countries voted to
support a UN resolution calling for an
international moratorium on the use of the death
penalty. This is the fifth time the General
Assembly has voted on this issue, starting in
2007 when 104 nations cast 'yes' votes.
The most recent resolution included an addition
that focuses on the rights of foreign nationals.
The 1963 Vienna Convention requires the
notification of foreign nationals of their right to
inform their consulate or embassy of their
detention. This is important because in
Southeast Asia, drug mules receive the death
penalty, and some domestic workers in Saudi
Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries are
arrested and do not understand the judicial
process nor the language in which the process is
carried out. The International Court of Justice
ruled in 2004 the US violated the 1963 Vienna
Convention when authorities did not inform 51
Mexican nationals of their rights to notify the
Mexican consulate of their detentions, and in
2014, Edgar Tamayo and Ramiro Hernandez,
two of the Mexican nationals this ruling referred
to, were executed in Texas.
The United States was among the 38 nations to
vote against the UN resolution calling for a
worldwide moratorium on the death penalty.
Life After Justice
What happens to people who are released from
prison, especially if they were wrongfully
convicted? These exonerees are not given the
same re-entry services that parolees receive.
Recidivism rates vary depending on the crime
and can be as high as 70%. The Life After Justice
Center wants to curtail these statistics to help
former inmates successfully re-enter society.
The founders are Antoine Day and Jarrett
Adams. Mr. Day was convicted of first-degree
murder and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
After ten years, his sentence was overturned.
Mr. Adams was released from prison more than
nine years into his prison term when the 7th
Circuit reversed his conviction because of
ineffective assistance of counsel. To see a short
video about these two men who are working to
help others, go to http://vimeo.com/90243116.
Stays of Execution
January
7 Warren Henness Ohio
8 Christopher Roney Pennsylvania
13 Mark Edwards Pennsylvania
14 Rodney Reed Texas
(new date set)
15 Dennis Reed Pennsylvania
15 Richard Vasquez Texas
(new date set)
Executions
December 2014
9 Robert Holsey Georgia
Lethal injection - 1-drug
10 Paul Goodwin Missouri
Lethal injection - 1-drug
January 2015
13 Andrew Brannan Georgia
Lethal injection - 1-drug
15 Johnny Kormondy Florida
Lethal injection - 3-drug
15 Charles Warner Oklahoma
Lethal injection - 3-drug
WRITE FOR RIGHTS (DECEMBER )
GROUP 22 LETTER COUNT
Jorge L‡zaro Nunes dos Santos
BRAZIL 10
Liu Ping
CHINA 13
Rampyari Bai & Safreen Khan
INDIA 9
Moses Akatugba
NIGERIA 10
Murad Shtwei
OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN
TERRITORIES 12
Women & Girls of
EL SALVADOR 9
Raif Badawi
SAUDI ARABIA 12
Chelsea Manning
USA 5
Darrell Cannon & Anthony Holmes
USA 4
Hadiya Pendleton
(USA): 6
TOTAL 90
GROUP 22 JANUARY LETTER COUNT
UAs 35
POC (thank-you card to Sen. Boxer) 1
Total 36
To add your letters to the total contact
aigp22@caltech.edu
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code C1-128
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Amnesty International's mission is to undertake research and action focused on
preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity,
freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the
context of its work to promote all human rights.