Deadline... "an excellent documentary...chronicling the astonishingly flawed criminal justice system in Illinois." - Richard Roeper, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

What would you do if you discovered that 13 people slated for execution had been found innocent? That was exactly the question that Illinois Governor George Ryan faced in his final days in office. He alone was left to decide whether 167 remaining death row inmates should live or die. In the riveting countdown to Ryan's decision, Deadline details the gripping drama of the state's clemency hearings. Documented as the events unfolded, Deadline is a compelling look inside America's prisons, highlighting one man's unlikely and historic actions against the system.

Among them, 33 African American men had been tried by all-white juries. In a nation where approximately 13% of the population is Black, over 50% of jail inmates are African American with one in every three Black men under 30 are either in jail or on probation...

Yesterday WPR entertained the idea that, "Blacks have a compassionate friend in President Bush," providing valuable on-air time to Charles Sahm, deputy director, Inter-American Policy Exchange, Manhattan Institute - a right-wing think tank. He is the author of a piece by the same name that appeared in the August 2nd issue of the L.A. Times.

As governor of Texas, Bush became known as the Texecutioner, presiding over 155 executions (a record number - more than any other elected official in recorded American history!) including the mentally ill and juveniles. After a 38 year hiatus on executions in Texas, Governor Dubya quickly reinstituted the policy after his innaguration. Many of those sentenced to die had incompetent attorneys, including one who slept through parts of the trial and an unusual percentage were African Americans. Of 76 clemency petitions filed by death row inmates between 1993 and 1998, none were granted. Note: Governor George W. Bush was elected to his 1st term in 1994.

Compassionate Conservatism...
On February 3rd of 1998, the State of Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker Brown for her part in 2 extremely brutal murders committed in 1983. In the 15 years that passed between Karla's sentencing and her death she experienced what an extended period of incarceration sometimes precipitates, remorse and rehabilitation becoming a born-again Christian spending her time in prison working in ministry to her fellow inmates.

In early August 1999, then Presidential candidate Governor George W. Bush mocked Karla Tucker's plea for clemency during an interview with Talk Magazine. Bush mentioned that he had watched Larry King's Texas Death Row interview with Karla Tucker.

"I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it," Bush told the magazine. "I watched his interview with (Tucker), though. He asked her real difficult questions, like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' "

The Talk Magazine reporter asked Bush how she answered.
"'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me,' " according to the magazine.

"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq... There was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." - from "A World Transformed" by George Bush Sr. explaining why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War.

Hmmmmm, now if only Dubya could read...

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D. says, "A good place to have started the War on Drugs all those years ago would have been to bring down GD Searle Corp. and prosecute its CEO, Donald Rumsfeld, for his blatant violations of the Constitution and his shameless disregard for the safety of the American people. You see, Rumsfeld is not only the current point man for the disaster in Iraq, but he was also the point man who brought to your table the most toxic substance ever added to food - aspartame (commonly known as NutraSweet). Now that NutraSweet's cousin, Splenda, is taking over the packaged food industry in all those new low-carb products, it's time to take a look back at how these mutants made their way into our lives in the first place." Read on... The sweet poison even the FDA didn't want to approve