photo by Alex Lear
Kalamu ya Salaam - Educator for Change
<p>Kalamu Ya Salaam - Educator for Change from Respectful Revolution on Vimeo.</p>
In New Orleans, Kalamu Ya Salaam is a writer, a filmmaker and an educator. All his life, Kalamu has been motivated by a burning passion for empowering young people with both thinking and writing skills. More than a teacher, he is a mentor who's been inspiring generations of students into finding meaningful paths for their lives through creative expression.
BamaLoveSoul Presents
Y’all Feel That?:
Erykah Badu Remixes,
Flips & Covers Pt 2
– September 28, 2012
Once again we find ourselves curating a mix of a large number of producer’s love for one amazing artist: Erykah Badu! This mix is more than just a Badu tribute, it’s a testament of her creativity and it’s influence on so many. We put out the call for Badu remixes, covers etc and received so many it was impossible to include them all in this mix.
The remixes reflect Erykah’s daring and dynamic, unique and always interesting track selections with a twist. In the words of my man DJ Needles, “Please to enjoy!” If you do, make sure to grab Badu’s attention by hitting her on twitter @fatbellybella | Download HERE
BamaLoveSoul Presents Y’all Feel That?: Erykah Badu Remixes, Flips & Covers Pt2 by Various Artists
JBmBeatz – Texas Tea (The Badu Medley)
Beat Attic – Incense & Brandy
School of Rock – Apple Tree
Soldier (simon S Remix)
Soldier (Gudina’s I Can’t Believe It’s NOt BUtter Flip)
Love of My Life (Jack Smith Remix)
Bag Lady (Salah Ananse Transatlantic Soul Mix)
Southern Girl (Opolopo remix)
Southern Girl (Moonshine Remix)
oriJanus – 21 Feet Tall
The Light (Cornbread Remix)
Real Thing (Marvel Remix)
Warren Xclnce x Ohforeal! – Tmrrw x Ystrdy
Robert Glasper – Afro Blue (AnuTheGIANT Remix) feat Erykah Badu
Robert Glasper – Afro Blue (9th Wonder’s Blue Light Basement Remix) feat Phonte
Honey (Souled Remix)
Cleva (Captain Planet Remix)
I Want Moombah (J Boogie 12″ Edit)
Sometimes (Manmademusic More ooft Edit)
Drama (Manuel Riccardi Deep mix)
Window Seat (Boddhi Satva Ancestral Soul Remix)
In LOve With U (Steva’s Basement Mix)
Bump (Soul1LDN Classic Remix)
Next Lifetime (Deluxepusher Dub)
Tyrone (Ain’t My Style) (The Main Ingredient Remix)
Bjork vs Badu – Come to Me / Bag Lady
Bare Beats + Stray Dog – Kiss Me On My Neck
On & On (Sid Mercutio Cover)
Jchu – No Love
Weekend Music Break
September 29, 2012 By
Got caught up in other stuff yesterday, so this week’s Bonus Music Break comes a day late. “Sister Deborah” Owusu-Bonsu calls herself a “creative hustler” and yes, she is the sister of FOKN Bois’s Wanlov the Kubolor, which helps explain the video above.
Yahkeem from Motherwell, Port Elizabeth (also known as the Nelson Mandela Metropole) in South Africa’s Eastern Cape:
E.L.’s “infusion of Japanese and Chinese culture with Ghanaian Azonto music” (H/T 25toLyf):
Serge Beynaud, working those Abidjan-Paris connections:
New Sexion d’Assaut. ‘Ballader’ (“taking a stroll on the Champs-Elysées”):
I’ve been listening to Staf Benda Bilili’s album ‘Bouger Le Monde’ a lot lately. It’s excellent:
From the archives (1974), taken from the “Soul Power” documentary, Miriam Makeba performs ‘Qongqothwane’:
Makeba introducing the song in French reminded me of a question I’ve asked elsewhere but to no success so far: between 1985 and 1990, and in between touring with Paul Simon, she lived in Brussels (in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert area). I’ve never found the house she lived in. Anyone knows where exactly she stayed?
Now and then I browse the web looking out for work by the elusive cinematographer Kahlil Joseph. This video he did for Flying Lotus recently is sublime:
Lee Fields’s retro soul style (I’m a fan, of his live shows especially):
And Alabama Shakes got a new studio video out too:
Guidelines for
Crab Creek Review's
2012 Fiction Contest
Entry Dates: Sept. 15, 2012 – Dec. 15, 2012
· Submit up to 3,000 words of previously unpublished fiction, double spaced.
· Entry fee: $10, payable (PayPal button below) to Crab Creek Review.
· Email submissions only.
· Send your cover letter in the body of the email (not in an attachment). It should include your contact information: mailing address, a brief bio, and the name of the fiction piece you are submitting.
· Send your fiction piece in an MS Word Doc attached to your email. Please send your work in New Times Roman and 12 pt. font. Title your attachment with your full name and “Fiction Contest”.
· Name and contact info should not appear on your fiction piece.
· Send contest submission to (after PayPal payment): crabcreekcontest@gmail.com
· Simultaneous submissions acceptable when noted in cover letter, as long as we are notified immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere.
· Deadline for all submissions: Dec. 15, 2012.
· The winning writer will receive $200 and publication in Crab Creek Review.
· All entries will be considered for publication.
· The winner will be determined by our guest judge, Shann Ray (see bio below).
(We ask that friends, associates, and students of the judge not submit to this contest.)· Contest results will be posted on our website in late January/early February.
$10 Contest Submission Fee
Shann Ray’s collection of stories American Masculine (Graywolf Press), named by Esquire as one of Three Books Every Man Should Read and selected by Kirkus Reviews as a Best Book of 2011, won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize and was the winner of an American Book Award in 2012. Sherman Alexie called it “tough, poetic, and beautiful” and Dave Eggers said Ray's work is “lyrical, prophetic, and brutal, yet ultimately hopeful." Ray is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Division. Ray's book of creative nonfiction, leadership and political theory Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (Rowman & Littlefield), was named an Amazon Hot New Release in War and Peace in Current Events, and engages the question of ultimate forgiveness in the context of ultimate violence. The winner of the Subterrain Poetry Prize, the Crab Creek Review Fiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Inlander Short Story Contest, and the Ruminate Short Story Prize, his work has appeared in some of the nation’s leading literary venues including Poetry, McSweeney‘s, Narrative, Story Quarterly, and Poetry International. Shann grew up in Montana and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Spokane, Washington where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.
2012 NEW AMERICAN POETRY PRIZE
The submission period for the 2012 New American Poetry Prize opens October 1. Winner will receive a publication contract, including 25 complimentary copies and $1,000.
Final judge this year is David Kirby, the author of more than two dozen volumes of criticism, essays, children’s literature, pedagogy, and poetry. His numerous collections of poetry include The Ha-Ha (2003), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Florida Book Award and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award. Kirby has also won several Pushcart Prizes, the Guy Owen Prize, the Kay Deeter Award, the James Dickey Prize, the Brittingham Prize, and the Millennium Cultural Recognition Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Florida Arts Council. Since 1969 he has taught at Florida State University, where he has received several teaching awards.
We prefer online submissions, which save paper and help to keep things organized. To use our convenient online submission system, please click here.
To submit using traditional post, please send your manuscript (approx. 48-100 pages) and the $20 reading fee to the following address (checks payable to "New American Press"):
New American Poetry Contest
Attn: Okla Elliott
2003-A S. Orchard St.
Urbana, IL 61801We read manuscripts blind, so please include a separate cover sheet with your manuscript's title and your name, address, telephone number, and email address, but be sure to exclude any identifying information from the manuscript itself.
Postmark deadline is December 31, 2012.
2012 NEW AMERICAN FICTION PRIZE
The submission period for the 2012 New American Fiction Prize is now closed. Winner will receive a publication contract, including 25 complimentary copies and $1,000.
Final judge this year is Kyle Minor, whose recent work appears in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), Surreal South (Press 53, 2007), and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006). Random House named Kyle one of the “Best New Voices of 2006,” and The Columbus Dispatch named him one of their ”20 Under 30 Artists to Watch” in 2007.
Please see our Frequently Asked Questions for more info. Further questions can be directed to David Bowen.
Call for Abstracts for Edited Collection
- Imprints of Revolution:
Global Resistance, the Popular,
and (Post)/(Neo) Colonialism
Deadline: 15 October 2012
Imprints of Revolution: Global Resistance, the Popular, and (Post)/(Neo) Colonialism is an edited collection that explores public representations of socialist revolutions. The edited collection assesses how the concept of revolution is appropriated through public images and explores its re-conceptualization as a mobilizing practice in response to contemporary global issues. The goal of the collection is to explore how revolutions are imagined and re-imagined by governments, residents, and political actors, and how in turn these imageries function as responses to the specific issues of globalization and mass tourism. We would like to discuss the local, urban experiences of revolutions both trans-nationally and trans-culturally. Contributors are encouraged to explore any aspect of revolutionary experiences but should develop the political and historical links between their topics and the revolutionary movement in question.
We are especially interested in, but are not limited to, scholarship that focuses on the visual legacies within Cuba, China, Ghana, Mexico, the United States, and Vietnam. We anticipate this to be a multidisciplinary work and invite submissions from emerging and established scholars working within any field. Scholars in anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, political studies, communication studies, American studies, ethnic and/or race studies, media studies and gender studies are especially encouraged to submit proposals. Contributors:
If interested, please submit a 500-word abstract of the proposed chapter, as well as sources consulted / cited and a brief biography of 200 words of less detailing professional and academic qualifications by October 15, 2012. All materials should be submitted electronically by April 15, 2013. Essays will be subject to a peer-review process.
Please send proposals and inquiries to both editors.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: Lisa B.Y. Calvente (DePaul University) at lcalvent@depaul.edu and Guadalupe García (Tulane University) at ggarcia4@tulane.edu
Dinaw Mengestu
The Rumpus Interview
With Dinaw Mengestu
Dinaw Mengestu’s name may be hard to pronounce (dih-NOW men-GUESS-too), but you’ll soon be hearing it a lot more. Earlier this year, the Ethiopian-born author was named to The New Yorker’s list of the top 20 fiction writers under age 40, and his second novel, How to Read the Air, was published last week. Like his acclaimed debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, the new novel explores the dislocation of African immigrants. This time around, the narrator is Jonas Woldemariam, a withdrawn and slippery character who, following the death of his father and the collapse of his marriage, retraces a road trip his Ethiopian immigrant parents took through the Midwest 30 years earlier. Just don’t believe everything he says.
I caught up with Mengestu last weekend before a reading at The Booksmith in San Francisco, where he talked about the importance of imagination, responded to his “ridiculous” recent New York Times review and lied to my face (by request).
***
The Rumpus: Your background clearly influences your work, so let’s start there. Can you tell me a bit about what it was like in Ethiopia for your family, and when and why you immigrated?
Dinaw Mengestu: I left Ethiopia when I was two years old [in 1980], but my father left just before I was born because, in 1974, there’d been a Communist Revolution and all sorts of bad, unfortunate things happened during that time. The country felt very unstable and insecure at that point, so he and my mother decided together that he needed to leave. My father’s family was very vulnerable—parts were actually part of the Communist government that came into power; others were very much opposed to it since they were losing their family lands and their wealth. My father’s brother was arrested and killed. Other members of his family were thrown into poverty.
Rumpus: Did he take a dangerous, roundabout way into the U.S., as Yosef, the father, does in How to Read the Air?
Mengestu: Nope. He got on a plane, went to Rome for business—he was working for Ethiopian Airlines—and then got asylum. Eventually he settled in Peoria.
Rumpus: In the novel, which is set partly in Peoria, everyone is pretty isolated, dislocated. Was there a particular mindset that this book came out of?
Mengestu: I knew that I wanted to write from the perspective of somebody imagining this family history that they have no real access to. So the book was very much about this process of imagination, the distance between one generation and the next, and the attempts to recreate the past and to write fiction out of that. Jonas, the character who’s controlling the story, is so internally isolated, he’s so walled off from his own past and sense of identity, that the only way he has of achieving any peace is through the process of, “Let me go back and recreate what I don’t know.”
Rumpus: To me, one of the most interesting things about the book is that it’s told in this elusive, conditional voice, like, “I wish that I could tell you this is what happened…” or “If you asked exactly what he was thinking, he would have said…” Why did you approach the novel’s narration in this way?
Mengestu: One, there is a necessity to imagination that I believe in very deeply. Fiction fills a role in our lives that I think nothing else can. When you read a novel, you’re being asked to believe in it as if it were real, to care about these characters as if they really do exist. And second, we wish things often. There’s this desire to wish the world to be a better place, to wish our lives, to wish our parents, to wish our own personal experiences would have happened in a way that was slightly more fulfilling. The narrator is having a real conversation with history that allows him to reform it and reshape it. It keeps the past from being a static, sealed-off event.
But what he’s also doing in the process is he’s putting his father to rest. It’s fiction that serves to bring him closer to someone else and to himself at the same time. And that’s essentially what literature does—it invites you to believe in characters that technically don’t exist, in the hopes of knowing something about yourself at the end.
Rumpus: Central to all these “imagined memories” and revisions is the fact that Jonas is basically a liar—he’s a good liar, and says it comes naturally to him. Are you a good liar?
Mengestu: Of course I’m a good liar—I’m a fiction writer. I could tell you anything.
Rumpus: Can we play Two Truths and a Lie?
Mengestu: Sure.
Rumpus: Ok, tell me three things about yourself.
Mengestu: Um… The first woman I fell in love with broke up with me on my birthday. My sister and I have not spoken to each other in two years. And, if I could live anywhere in the world, it would be by myself in Hawaii.
Rumpus: Hmmm. If she broke up with you on your birthday, that was cold. I’ll go with that one.
Mengestu: All right, you had a 33% chance of getting something right.
Rumpus: I win!
Mengestu: At least there was a consistent tone in all of them. …But I’m always troubled when people want to know what’s real in fiction, to parcel things out into the parts that are true and not true. People always think that [the novels] have a tie to my own personal biography. Really? Because there’s Peoria and I lived in Peoria for six years as a child?
Rumpus: This brings me to a question about the recent New York Times review of How to Read the Air. It was a rave by Miguel Syjuco—
Megestu: You call that a rave? It was bullshit.
Rumpus: He called you “remarkably talented.” But yes, my question is, he ends with the desire to see you write beyond your own experience. Do you think that’s a fair critique?
Mengestu: I think that’s a ridiculous critique. One, I’m not writing directly from my own experiences, I’m writing about people from Africa in America, people in a state of migration; and I’m hardly the first person to have touched on that experience of arriving in America and becoming American.
To say that somehow I need to step beyond that subject, as if it were just a subject, as if you sit down and you write a theme and then you explore that theme in your five-paragraph essay, it’s sort of ridiculous. You write out of characters and you write out of the vast landscape of experiences. In this case, the sense that you “move beyond” the African immigrant experience, as if that experience could somehow be completed or fulfilled—if I wrote 40 more novels, I will not have done justice to the diversity and range that’s possible. All I’m doing is adding small additions to what will be a growing, much larger, much more diverse sense of what it means to write American literature. Because it is American literature, it’s not immigrant literature.
Saul Bellow spent his entire career writing novels that pretty much concern the experience of Jewish American second generations—and obviously I’m not comparing myself to Bellow, but would you say, “Bellow needs to stop writing about that”? No. Philip Roth—“Just get over the Jewishness.” Toni Morrison should get over her African American experience thing in her fiction. And Edward P. Jones, my God, how many times is he going to write about black people in D.C.? It’s absurd.
Rumpus: It seemed a weird judgment.
Mengestu: It’s a weird judgment from somebody who’s also very much writing about his own life in the Philippines. And I’m like, really? Your second book that you’re writing is about Filipinos and the Philippines, so why are you telling me—and I’m not writing biography in any sense. He did a very lazy like, “I’m going to Wikipedia you, and then say that I know what you’re writing out of.”
Rumpus: To the question of novels vs. biography, both of your books have an emotional component of these father-son relationships, and fathers who’ve died. Is your father still alive?
Mengestu: Very much alive. We’re very very close. He lives in Virginia, with my mom. Father-son relationships are just an aperture for me to talk about the fact that we are always affected by history.
Rumpus: Another way that the past seeps into the present in your novels is with the legacy of violence. It’s tied to Africa, but then also has expressions in these personal relationships: Yosef is violent toward his wife; and then there’s a crucial scene in which Jonas forcefully grabs his wife’s wrist.
Mengestu: Violence is very important to this book. That character of the father, he’s not an evil, awful man, but he is a violent and angry man by the time he gets to America. The life that he lived and the process of migration are the things that radically alter him into a man who is capable of a certain brutality. That brutality manifests itself on a domestic level, but its causal source is very much political and tied into the context of political violence in Africa. When he gets to America he’s always trying to release himself, always imagining ways of becoming free; but he’s releasing frustration by beating his wife, beating his child. His son tries to create himself in opposition to that, and is very private and hermited and secluded. But that scene that you pointed out is an expression of the fact that, as hard as he may try to keep that bottled up inside, when there’s a moment for a release he realizes how easily and quickly he can become that man.
Rumpus: Backing up to your first novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, your main character is also an Ethiopian immigrant, who owns a corner store in Washington, D.C. What was the inspiration for this character?
Mengestu: It really began because I saw this Ethiopian immigrant behind the grocery store counter, and then the voice of the narrator just kind of sparked right there. Once I had that voice, the opening lines, the tone of melancholy of that voice was very evident.
Rumpus: Both of your books take their titles, and maybe some tonal inspiration, from poetry. The epigraph of How to Read the Air is from Rilke’s Duino Elegies [“You still don’t understand? Throw the emptiness in/ your arms out into that space we breathe; maybe birds/will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves.”], and “the beautiful things that heaven bears” is a line from the end of Dante’s Inferno. How is poetry important to your work?
Mengestu: I think of both books as being very much in conversation with those poems. Before the novels begin, there’s a certain compulsion to return to certain poems; and then I find shortly afterwards that there’s a novel somehow attached to that. I’d been reading Duino Elegies for years anyway, and there’s a rhythm inside of those few lines that kept coming back into my head. And back when I began writing the [The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears], I knew there was a very specific concern with beauty and a sense of beauty that was slightly out of reach. Dante is suspended between these two states; he’s out of Hell and he has not reached Heaven, but he’s allowed this glimpse into the paradise that he will eventually travel to. [In the novel], the character is suspended between two places, with a very problematic past, with the sense of longing for something beautiful.
Rumpus: Earlier this year, The New Yorker named you to their “20 under 40” list of the best young fiction writers, which was actually how I first heard of your work. What was it like to get that recognition?
Mengestu: When that first list came out [in 1999], I was in college and just beginning to think of myself as someone who wanted to possibly write, but never having the courage to be like, “I’m going to be a writer.” I spent a lot of my last years in college reading contemporary writing, and that New Yorker list was a great introduction. I read pretty much everyone on that list over the next year. And then of course in the back of your head you’re like, “Wow, it’d be really fucking great if that was ever done again and I was on that list.” As complicated and as fraught as lists like that can be, personally, it’s my dream come true. Totally, unabashedly.
Rumpus: You’ve also written political journalism for magazines like Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and you were back reporting in Africa this summer. What were you doing?
Mengestu: Yes, I was in eastern Congo. I was trying to find some guys with guns to hang out with. No, there’s a rebel militia formed after the Rwandan genocide that’s been in eastern Congo since then, creating a lot of terror and misery. So it was to profile them, basically, because most of what you hear about eastern Congo is reduced to these very quick sound bites of horrific accounts of rape, which are true without a doubt, and exploitation of minerals and mines. This is for Granta.
Rumpus: Aside from that article, what’s next? Now that we’ve established that you can’t write about Africa or immigrants.
Mengestu: Yeah, I’m writing about my suburban housewife experience. It’s a third novel, but it’s in such an early phase it’s very hard to say anything about it other than it sort of begins sometime after the end of the colonial era in Africa. Maybe it ends there. It will be more set in Africa than anything I’ve done before.
Rumpus: Your work grapples with place and identity, and now you live in Paris, so you’re on your third continent. Do you consider yourself an African writer, an African American writer, or just a writer and you wish people would stop asking you to define yourself?
Mengestu: You always consider yourself just a writer, and then definitely an American writer. If there is one country’s sense of national identity and literature that should be broad enough and expansive enough to allow for a multitude inside of that, it should be America.
***
First photograph by David Burnett. Second by Anne Shulock.
Anne Shulock is a journalist living in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Millions, Salon and Sactown magazine, and she blogs on Open Salon. Most recently she was the editorial assistant at Zoetrope: All-Story, where she searched for the next great short story writer in the slush pile.
__________________________
Dinaw Mengestu reads a passage from How to Read the Air about a young Ethiopian immigrant couple who set off on a road trip in search of a new identity. (Running Time: 17:32)
AUDIO READING CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience. Now Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut with a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms his reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.
One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son, Jonas, will be born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today, a story -- real or invented -- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.
Dinaw Mengestu: Dinaw Mengestu, the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He has written for Rolling Stone and Harper's, among other publications. In 2010, he was chosen as one of the 20 best writers under 40 by The New Yorker.
>via: http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=38061
James Bain
May 21st, 2012More than 2,000 people have been exonerated of serious crimes since 1989 in the United States, according to a report by college researchers who have established the first national registry of exonerations.
Researchers say their registry is the largest database of these types of cases and showcases some of the major issues with the criminal justice system, including that the leading causes of wrongful convictions are perjury, faulty witness identification and misconduct by prosecutors.
"No matter how tragic they are, even 2,000 exonerations over 23 years is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons and jails," says a report released by the authors. "If that were the extent of the problem we would be encouraged by these numbers. But it’s not. These cases merely point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about."
Read the report (PDF) | Exonerations by state and county (PDF)
The registry itself, which looks deeply into 873 specific cases of wrongful conviction, examined cases based on court documents as well as from groups that have long documented wrongful convictions. That group of wrongfully convicted spent more than 10,000 total years in prison, according to the report, with an average of 11 years each.
Many of the cases of the wrongfully accused were championed by the Innocence Project, a well-known group that works with many inmates to try to clear their names based on DNA evidence. The group has documented 289 post-conviction DNA exonerations. The earliest came in 1989, when DNA testing was being heavily used to re-examine cases for the first time.
The database is a fully searchable list of those who were convicted, broken down by their crimes, sentences and reason for exoneration. Some go into extensive detail about the long and treacherous roads to exoneration that prisoners have undergone.
James Bain is the longest-serving prisoner to be exonerated by DNA evidence, spending 35 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. He was convicted in 1974, at age 19, of kidnapping and raping a 9-year-old boy in Lake Wales, Florida.
His life was returned to him in December 2009, when a Florida judge freed him after DNA testing proved he did not commit the crime.
"Bain’s photo was included in a lineup of five photographs, and the victim picked Bain as his attacker. Based on the identification and little else, Bain was convicted and sentenced to life in prison," according to the database. "Bain had no criminal record at the time of his arrest, and insisted he was at home watching television with his sister when the crime occurred."
In the backyard of his mother's home in Tampa, Bain stood among grapefruit and orange trees that weren't even planted when he went to prison and said he'd like to tour the country on his motorcycle."You spend 35 years in prison, and just the little things, like a grapefruit tree or an orange tree ... Those had vanished for me," he said. "I never thought I'd get a chance to see another one of these."
Bain is only one part of a much larger story. Although the registry report makes clear that most convictions in the U.S. are correct, the database shows a larger need to look closely at how the criminal justice system works, the authors say.
The report also shows which states have exonerated the most people. It notes that Illinois and New York may top the list in part because of the large presence of two major wrongful conviction centers in each state. From 1989 to 2011, the following states had tallied the most exonerations:
1. Illinois: 101
2. New York: 88
3. Texas: 84
4. California: 79
(Federal: 39)
5. Michigan: 35
6. Louisiana: 34
7. Florida: 32
8. Ohio: 28
9. Massachusetts: 27
10. Pennsylvania: 27The report also takes a look at the leading cause of wrongful convictions for specific crimes.
The project's findings alone, the authors say, are reason enough to look closely and continue to monitor convictions across the country."We cannot prevent all false convictions, but we must not compound these tragedies by stubbornness or arrogance or, worst of all, indifference," the report says. "The more we learn about false convictions the better able we will be to prevent them, or failing that, to identify and correct them after the fact."
Read more on wrongful convictions:
Man wrongfully imprisoned for decades happy to start relearning life
Damon Thibodeaux was sentenced to death for the New Orleans-area murder of his half-cousin Crystal Champagne based largely on his recanted confession. Thibodeaux spent 15 years in prison for the crime before his exoneration through DNA testing on September 28, 2012.
The Crime
Fourteen-year-old Crystal Champagne was last seen alive on the late afternoon of July 19, 1996, when she left the family’s Westwego, Louisiana, apartment for a Winn-Dixie at the nearby strip mall. When she did not return home as expected, her family, several friends and law enforcement began a search for her that ended on the following evening with the discovery of her body along the levee in Bridge City. There was a piece of red extension cord around her neck and the right side of her head and face had been beaten. In addition, her shirt was pulled above her breasts and her shorts around her knees and ankles, suggesting a possible sexual assault.
The Confession and Trial
Thibodeaux was among the suspects brought in for questioning by police after the murder. He initially denied any involvement in the crime and agreed to take a polygraph. He was informed that he had failed the polygraph.
After additional hours of interrogation, he gave a recorded statement confessing to consensual and non-consensual sex with the victim and then to beating and murdering her. Only 54 minutes were recorded out of the entire 8 ½ hour interrogation. This confession was inconsistent with the crime in numerous details. After learning from detectives that the victim had been strangled, Thibodeaux confessed to using a white or gray speaker wire from his car. Thibodeaux was fed non-public details about the crime, but here he guessed incorrectly. He couldn’t have known about the red electrical cord, which had been burned off a section of cord found hanging from the tree above her body.
Although forensic examiners could find no evidence of semen in the victim’s body, a detective theorized that a sexual assault still could have occurred and that post-mortem maggot activity had consumed and degraded the evidence.
Additionally, two eyewitnesses testified that they saw someone pacing near where the body was found. They both selected Thibodeaux from a photo array and identified him in court.
Post-Conviction
In 2007, based on evidence of Thibodeaux’s innocence, the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office initiated a joint reinvestigation with the Innocence Project and the rest of Thibodeaux’s legal team. The parties conducted multiple rounds of DNA and forensic evidence testing of the crime scene and other physical evidence and interviewed numerous fact witnesses.
The eyewitnesses who identified Thibodeaux as the man they had seen pacing near the crime scene had already seen Thibodeaux’s photo in the news media before taking part in the identification procedure. Moreover, they revealed that the sighting had occurred the day after the body was found, when Thibodeaux was already in custody.
DNA testing performed by Dr. Edward Blake and other forensic experts concluded that there was no evidence connecting Thibodeaux to the murder and that, contrary to Thibodeaux’s statement, the victim had not been sexually assaulted. DNA testing of the maggots revealed no evidence of semen. DNA testing on both Thibodeaux and Champagne’s clothing confirmed that he could not have been the perpetrator. DNA on the cord in the tree, which had tested positive for blood in the original investigation, revealed male DNA that did not belong to Thibodeaux.
The reinvestigation further confirmed that Thibodeaux’s confession was false in every significant aspect and included a thorough examination of the reasons why Thibodeaux had falsely confessed, including exhaustion, psychological vulnerability and fear of the death penalty. The prosecution’s own expert had concluded that Thibodeaux falsely confessed based on fear of the death penalty, but this information was never shared with the defense.
District Attorney, Paul Connick, Jr., joined the Innocence Project, the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana and the law firm of Fredrikson & Byron in agreeing to overturn Thibodeaux’s conviction and death sentence, and he was released in September 2012 after 15 years on death row and 16 years of wrongful incarceration as the 300th person exonerated through DNA testing.
Chuck D
Rap Sessions:
Hip-Hop Activism
in the Obama/Tea Party Era,
Featuring Special Guest
Chuck D
September 13, 2012
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Chuck D - ISWG/fileFor the sixth year, the Institute partners with Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop to bring a distinguished panel of scholars, journalists, and activists for a townhall-style meeting addressing important issues in our communities. Rap Sessions is led by critically-acclaimed journalist, activist, political analyst, and Institute Fellow Bakari Kitwana.
This year's panel explores the ways the election of Obama, the emergence of the Tea Party, and the shifting national political landscape has both strengthened and diminished hip-hop's effectiveness at galvanizing youth.
Panelists include: Chuck D, hip-hop activist, entrepenuer, producer, and MC; Rob "Biko" Baker, executive director of The League of Young Voters; Rosa Clemente, community organizer and journalist; Laura S. Washington, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and political analyst for ABC-7 Chicago; and Jasiri X, independent hip-hop artist.
Recorded Thursday, September 13, 2012 at the Columbia College.
