Fitzsimon File

Governor-elect Beverly Perdue expanded the leadership of her transition team this week, adding prominent African-American leaders and female business executives to the three white male Raleigh insiders she earlier named to head up her efforts. Good for her.

Members of Congress from North Carolina say they can't keep up with the requests for tickets to the inauguration of Barack Obama as president. The excitement around his election doesn't seem to have dissipated much in the last two weeks and social justice advocates are still scrambling to harness all the positive energy and collective hope created by Obama's campaign to make a difference in North Carolina policy debates.

There's plenty to work on. That was made clear in several places Tuesday as not much of the best of the state was on display.  Lawyers with the North Carolina Attorney General's office spent the morning trying to convince the State Supreme Court to pave the wave for executions to resume at Central Prison.

Executions have been on hold in North Carolina for more than two years while the courts consider the role of doctor when the state puts an inmate to death. State law requires that a doctor be present. The State Medical Board voted to discipline any doctor that participated in the execution procedure and the dispute has been working its way through the courts.

There is also a lawsuit pending about the lethal injection procedure the state uses to kill people. The legal issues don't seem that complicated and the moral issues are even clearer. The Attorney General's office is fighting vigorously to resume executions when the lawyers know that race plays a role in the system.

They know that the death penalty is random and arbitrary and wealthy people who commit murder are rarely sentenced to death. 

In most of the cases in recent years where innocent men were freed from death row, they were freed over the objections of prosecutors and the Attorney General's office.  Not much hope or positive energy in that.

While state lawyers were fighting to begin executing people again, a few blocks away a legislative committee was listening to a report on a federal immigration program that allows local sheriff department personnel to become immigration officers.

The North Carolina Sheriffs' Association gets state funding to help counties with the program touted by Senator Elizabeth Dole and others as a way to get tough on immigration. Seven counties have chosen to participate and the program requires sheriff's departments to determine the citizenship status of people arrested and turn over undocumented workers to federal immigration authorities.

Dole and others originally said the program was designed to identify and deport immigrants here illegally who had committed violent crimes, not to harass immigrants who commit minor traffic offenses.

Figures provided by Eddie Caldwell of the Sheriffs' Association showed that 33 percent of the more than 3,100 people deported so far this year were arrested for violating traffic laws. Caldwell described people interviewed who turned out to be in the country legally as "nonremovable," a label that sums up much of the attitude toward immigrants in many parts of the state. 

Not a surprise though when you consider the head of the Association's Executive Committee is Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell , who said in an interview with the News & Observer that "Mexicans are trashy" and said "All they do is work and make love."   Not much evidence there of a new day in the state.

Just a few rooms away from the discussion about nonremovables, another legislative committee was discussing how to compensate the more than 3,000 living victims of the state ‘s horrific eugenics program that sterilized women against their will until the early 1970s.

The committee was wrestling with how much financial compensation the victims should receive and there seemed to be a consensus that it couldn't be too much because the state faces a severe budget crisis. 

This is not the first time a study committee has discussed helping the victims. A similar group met a few years ago when the state was not facing a budget shortfall. Nothing was done that year. Now the victims may be told that the state that mutilated them doesn't have the money to help them.

Nothing like an overwhelming display of political courage.

State officials clamoring to resume putting people to death, law enforcement leaders hailing the deportation of speeders and lamenting nonremovables, and lawmakers unwilling to demand help for people whose lives were devastated by the state.

Hard to think of more compelling examples of policies and attitudes that simply cannot stand in a civilized society or in a state in which leaders proclaim that it is a new day.  Talk about change we need.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.