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June 20, 2016 Issue
How a New York State prisoner became a jailhouse lawyer, and changed the system.
By Jennifer Gonnerman
Derrick Hamilton's legal education began in 1983, when he was seventeen and in the jail for teen-age boys on Rikers Island. He'd been an enthusiastic student as a child—his family called him Suity, because he liked to wear a suit to school. But in high school he'd begun skipping classes and getting into trouble. At fifteen, he was charged with robbery and sentenced to sixty days in jail. The arrests continued, for petty larceny, assault, criminal use of a firearm. Then, in March of 1983, a bread deliveryman was fatally shot near Lafayette Gardens, the public-housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Hamilton lived, and he was charged with the murder. He insisted that he had not done it, and entered a plea of not guilty.
Derrick Hamilton was wrongfully convicted of murder, and spent more than two decades trying to prove his innocence.Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The New Yorker
His father, a livery-cab driver, hired a lawyer named Candace Kurtz to represent him, and she urged him to start studying in the jail's law library, so that he could better understand his predicament. Hamilton is now fifty, tall and heavyset, with a shaved head and a thin scar running down the right side of his scalp. "I took it seriously," he recalled recently, "because here's some stranger saying, 'Hey, listen. Get out of wherever you're at. Wake up, kid, this is real.' " He started spending time in the library, and eventually taught himself enough criminal law to become one of the most skilled jailhouse lawyers in the country.
But, in the fall of 1983, two months after Hamilton turned eighteen, a jury found him guilty. He was given thirty-two years to life for the murder and for an earlier, unrelated gun charge, and was sent to Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near the Pennsylvania border. There he earned a high-school-equivalency diploma and took a class on how to conduct legal research. In 1985, he was sent to Siberia, as inmates call Clinton Correctional Facility, which is twenty miles from the Canadian border. In the law library there, he met a group of veteran jailhouse lawyers, one of whom gave weekly tutorials on criminal procedure.
There is no job description for a jailhouse lawyer. It's an occupation born of desperation: most prisoners cannot afford lawyers, and are eligible for a free attorney only for their first appeal. After that, they have to either learn the law themselves or find a jailhouse lawyer to help them. In state prisons, jailhouse lawyers typically lack law degrees—some never finish high school—but New York does guarantee access to a law library, which is run by inmate clerks.
The older prisoners in the Clinton law library gave Hamilton a job as a "counterman." At the time, Clinton housed about twenty-five hundred prisoners, and there was almost always a line at the library counter. Often, inmates asked for materials that might help them fight their convictions. "I would show the guy how to go to the point that relates to his case, so he didn't have to read the whole thing," Hamilton told me. "This way, he could get his answer and keep it moving." Prisoners also needed general legal advice, about divorce, power of attorney, paternity, child support. "You would learn so much at the counter," Hamilton said.
Like many of the men he helped, Hamilton was a father; by the time he was eighteen, he had three children by three women. He married the mother of his son, Davone, in 1987. By then, his father had hired another lawyer, George Sheinberg, to handle his appeal, and Sheinberg managed to get the murder conviction reversed. Hamilton went on trial again for the same crime, but soon after it began he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was released in 1989, after serving six years. He still maintained his innocence—he had entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant does not have to admit any guilt—but he considered his punishment justified, given his earlier gun charge. "The six years was rightfully done," he said.
After his release, he returned to Brooklyn, to his wife and Davone, who was then five. He barely recognized his old neighborhood. The crack epidemic had taken hold: empty glass vials littered the sidewalks; friends' mothers were prostituting themselves to pay for their addiction; childhood friends had become dealers. He had six siblings, and one of his brothers had joined the trade. The most disturbing change was that his father was gone. A year earlier, he had been murdered near Lafayette Gardens.
To escape the chaos, Hamilton spent time in New Haven with an older half brother, who ran a talent agency there. But, six months after his release, Hamilton crossed the state line without his parole officer's permission, and was sent back to prison for a year. When he got out again, he was twenty-four, and he had the scar on his head—the result of a fight in the prison yard. The best way to stay out of trouble, he decided, was to leave town. He and his half brother came up with the idea of opening a hair salon in New Haven, with the help of a beautician they knew.
Two weeks before the opening, in March of 1991, police officers arrived at the salon, handcuffed Hamilton, and drove him to a local station house. There an N.Y.P.D. detective interrogated him about a murder that had occurred in Bedford-Stuyvesant on January 4th. Hamilton knew the victim, Nathaniel Cash, who was twenty-six and had recently left prison. He had been shot nine times, and someone at the scene named Hamilton as the killer. The detective, Louis Scarcella, then thirty-nine, reminded Hamilton of the actor Joe Pesci, as he swaggered about the room, brandishing a cigar. But what Hamilton remembered most clearly, he says, is that Scarcella told him that "he didn't care whether I did it or not, because I didn't serve enough time for my previous case, and I would be going back to jail."
The murder trial took place in Brooklyn State Supreme Court, in July of 1992. It should have been easy to establish Hamilton's innocence. He said that at the time of the shooting he had been in New Haven, meeting with two women who worked at his half brother's talent agency—he was trying to help arrange auditions for their acts at the Apollo Theatre. The District Attorney's office had only one supposed eyewitness: Cash's girlfriend, Jewel Smith, a twenty-two-year-old mother of two, who had a number of arrests for shoplifting and was on parole. She had given conflicting versions of what happened, and then, a few days after Hamilton's arrest, she had gone to the office of George Sheinberg, who was again representing him, and signed a statement saying that Hamilton "was not there when Mr. Cash was shot."
When the trial began, however, Smith testified that she had seen Hamilton kill Cash. Detective Scarcella claimed that Smith was afraid of Hamilton, and the prosecutor argued that that was why she had earlier changed her story. The women from the talent agency had not been contacted in time to appear in court, and two other alibi witnesses who were scheduled to testify for Hamilton didn't show up. Sheinberg asked for more time to bring the witnesses in, but the judge, Edward M. Rappaport, denied his request. The jury voted to convict.
Soon after, on Rikers Island, Hamilton wrote a motion asking Judge Rappaport to set aside the verdict, based on new evidence. Jewel Smith had told a private investigator, hired by a friend of Hamilton's, that she had lied in court because Scarcella and other officials warned her that, if she didn't, they "would put me in jail" and "take my kids." (She had violated her parole by spending time with Cash.)
Judge Rappaport ordered a hearing, at which Scarcella and the prosecutor denied threatening Smith. Michael Vecchione, who represented the D.A.'s office, admitted that Smith was "a person you cannot rely on," but he maintained that she had told the truth at the trial. After the hearing, Rappaport turned to the defendant. "I must say this, Mr. Hamilton. You're a hard advocate. You fight hard," he said. But, he added, "I call it the way I think it should be." He sentenced him to twenty-five years to life.
Several months later, Hamilton found himself in Attica, in western New York. Inmates considered it the most brutal prison in the state; nobody had forgotten what happened in 1971, when prisoners rioting against the horrific conditions seized control of the prison for five days. There he ran into Alvena Jennette, whom he had known in Brooklyn. Jennette said that he, too, was serving a sentence for a murder he did not commit. He asked Hamilton who had investigated his case, and, when he said Scarcella, Jennette shouted, "That's the cop who set me up!" He said that Scarcella had framed him and his two half brothers on murder charges, and all three were serving eighteen years to life. Hamilton recalled, "From that moment on, we knew something was terribly wrong."
"It's perfect for starting a family."
The full scale of the problem of wrongful convictions began reaching the public only in the nineteen-nineties, when DNA evidence was introduced in criminal cases. In 1992, two former Legal Aid attorneys, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founded the Innocence Project, using DNA evidence to exonerate innocent prisoners. At the time, Scheck recalls, "the notion of hundreds, if not thousands, of people being wrongly convicted was considered unlikely if not impossible by both the public and many in law enforcement." Since then, DNA evidence has helped secure exonerations for more than three hundred people. But it exists in only a small percentage of cases, and without it there is almost no way for a prisoner to unequivocally prove his innocence. There was no DNA evidence in Hamilton's case, so, even as news of the exonerations spread through the prison system, the hope of clearing his name remained slim.
Nevertheless, he went to the law library every day, and in his cell he kept a copy of the thousand-page "Prisoners' Self-Help Litigation Manual." He collected affidavits from Kelly Turner and da'Vette Mahan, the women he said he had been meeting with at the time of Cash's death, and also one from a witness a friend had tracked down, who said that he had seen two other men shoot Cash. In 1995, Judge Rappaport granted Hamilton another hearing, but he didn't find the eyewitness credible. He also refused to allow the women to testify, even though one of them, Turner, was now an officer with the New Haven Police Department. His rationale was procedural: their names had not been on the original list of witnesses at the trial.
Each setback strained Hamilton's relations with his family. His wife had given birth to their second child after he was arrested, but they split up before the trial started. Three of his children visited him, but as they got older they blamed him for being in prison. "For years, I told my kids I was coming home," Hamilton said. "You become a liar in their eyes. They don't understand the legal process." His mother had kidney disease, and went to see him just twice. (She died in 2004.) Hamilton had got married a second time, in 1993, to another woman he had known in Brooklyn. That marriage also ended, but not before his wife had hired Scott Brettschneider, an attorney based in Queens, to file his appeal.
Brettschneider handled a dozen trials a year, mostly homicide and drug cases. In 1997, he and a colleague flew upstate to meet Hamilton, who brought piles of documents to their first meeting. "I had never seen a guy with so much paperwork in my life," Brettschneider recalls. "He had everything." They lost the appeal, but Hamilton stayed in touch, sending him copies of his pro-se legal work—papers he'd prepared himself—and asking his advice. In reply to one letter, Brettschneider wrote, "Keep fighting because it was apparent to me that something very wrong had occurred in your case."
From the moment Hamilton entered the prison system, he began hearing about Jerry Rosenberg, known as Jerry the Jew, who was for many years the most renowned jailhouse lawyer in the country. In 1997, Hamilton was transferred to Wende prison, in Erie County, and finally met him. In 1963, when Rosenberg was twenty-five, he was convicted for his role in the murder of two police officers, during the robbery of a tobacco store in Brooklyn. He was given a death sentence, which was later commuted to life. Rosenberg was an eighth-grade dropout, but he became a fixture in the law library at Attica, where he spent many years. During the negotiations in the 1971 riots, he served as the inmates' legal adviser. The attorney William Kunstler, who was called in as part of a team of civilian observers, said, "I'm up against the best. I'm up against Jerry the Jew."
Three years later, Rosenberg became the first prisoner in New York permitted to represent a client in court. Over time, he claimed to have assisted inmates in more than three hundred cases, and to have won most of them. In the law library at Wende, he and Hamilton discussed legal doctrine, but, Hamilton said, "Jerry at that time was burnt out on law. He was done with it." Rosenberg never managed to win his own release; he died in prison at the age of seventy-two, after being confined for forty-seven years.
Hamilton, too, had more luck with other prisoners' cases than he did with his own, since he could pick which ones to take on. He read trial transcripts, wrote motions, and sometimes persuaded a judge to grant an inmate a hearing. Although jailhouse lawyers are prohibited from charging prisoners for their services, many do. Payment can take the form of cigarettes, or even several hundred dollars deposited by an inmate's family into a jailhouse lawyer's prison account. Hamilton usually worked for no charge and preferred not to call himself a jailhouse lawyer, because so many had a reputation for exploiting fellow-inmates. "It's very disgraceful that guys are hustling other people out of commissary or their family's money and don't have the knowledge or expertise to do a good job," he said.
His first big victory as a jailhouse lawyer came on behalf of Julio Acevedo, in 1997. Acevedo was serving time for the murder of Kelvin Martin, known as 50 Cent, the notorious criminal after whom the rapper 50 Cent reportedly named himself. When Acevedo was eighteen, he and a cousin worked as bodyguards for Martin. To explain his crime, Acevedo related an improbable-sounding story: members of a drug gang kidnapped him and his cousin, then told him that they would kill his cousin unless he killed Martin. So Acevedo shot Martin, in a housing project in Fort Greene. The jury had voted to convict Acevedo, and he was serving twenty years to life.
But Hamilton found trial testimony in an unrelated case, from a drug-gang enforcer turned government informant, in which he admitted on the stand to the kidnapping and to forcing Acevedo to shoot Martin. Hamilton wrote a motion, and Acevedo was released, after serving eight years.
By 2000, there were some four thousand inmates in New York State prisons held in solitary confinement. The early-nineteenth-century idea of solitary confinement as a means of rehabilitation had long been abandoned; now it was simply viewed as an effective way to maintain control over unruly inmates. Hamilton spent about ten years in solitary, confined to a cell for twenty-three hours a day. Sometimes officials said that he was a safety risk; other times, he was charged with breaking a prison rule. In the fall of 2000, after he had been transferred back to Attica, he was accused of smoking marijuana, which he denied, and was placed in the Special Housing Unit, or shu, as solitary-confinement units are called in New York. He spent most of the next four years there.
In the Attica shu, there were a hundred and sixteen cells. Among the other inmates were Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, and Colin Ferguson, who killed six passengers on a Long Island Rail Road train. Each cell measured eight feet by six feet, and the bars on the front of some cells were covered with Plexiglas. There was a desk in each cell, welded to the wall, but it wasn't large enough for Hamilton to spread out his legal papers, so he took his mattress off the metal bed frame, rolled it up, and sat on it, hunching over his bed, as he worked. When a guard slid a food tray into his cell, he ate beside his bed, like a lawyer eating at his desk.
Hamilton was not permitted to visit the law library, but he could have two law books delivered to his cell every day. Whenever he was denied something that he felt he was entitled to—the right to spend an hour outside each day, to be served a hot breakfast, to see a doctor—he filed a grievance with the prison. If that didn't work, he filed a claim in federal court. "The law saved my life," he says. "That was the one thing I could become fixated upon every day when I woke up and when I went to sleep." Typewriters were not allowed, so he wrote his claims in longhand, and his right middle finger was often swollen and painful from gripping a pen. There was also constant noise in the shu, which made it difficult to concentrate.
In 2003, he wrote a twenty-two-page complaint, Hamilton v. Conway, et al., which he filed in federal court. "Plaintiff is being tortured on a daily basis in Attica Correctional Facility Special Housing Unit," he wrote. "Plaintiff is subjected to having to listen to loud banging all day and night" and to "screaming and yelling" and to "feces being thrown in plaintiff's cell" by "mentally disturbed prisoners" who were housed near him. He argued that the noise violated the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. He included affidavits from five other inmates. One wrote, "Attica Special Housing Unit sounded like a third world country being bombed."
Hamilton after his exoneration, in 2015, with his wife, daughter, and brother. Photograph by Anthony Lanzilote / The New York Times / Redux
Photograph by Anthony Lanzilote / The New York Times / Redux
James Conway, Attica's superintendent from 2002 to 2010, was the first defendant named in the complaint. Now retired, he remembers Hamilton well. "He was very respectful, very intelligent, very litigious," Conway says. Whenever he passed Hamilton's cell, he "would be doing legal work. He'd put his pen down, stand up, and we'd have a chat." Conway started at Attica in 1972, when there was a single, ten-cell area for mentally ill prisoners, known as the "bug gallery." By 2002, there were some four hundred men on the prison's mental-health caseload, and about forty severely mentally ill inmates in the shu. Sometimes they would lie "on their beds and bang their feet against the Plexiglas," Conway said. "Just imagine that going on for hours and hours overnight." He admits that Hamilton "had a legitimate complaint," but adds, "I didn't have a lot of solutions for the problem."
By 2003, Hamilton was thirty-seven and had been confined for twelve years. At times, he became too depressed to work. His only reprieve was weekly visits with a woman named Nicole Esters. She had met him in 1990, when she was twenty, and he was starting work on the salon. "For him, being a young black male coming from the projects, to even want to venture out of the five boroughs to try to start your own business, I thought it was just a remarkable thing to do," she says. She believed that he was innocent, and she stayed in touch with him over the years, as other friends fell away. After his second marriage ended, they grew closer. Although she had two children and a full-time job as an accountant, she often drove six hours from New York City to Attica to see him.
They weren't allowed to meet in a regular visiting room. Instead, Hamilton sat in a cage in the shu visiting area, and they spoke through a grate and held hands through a slot at the bottom of it. Esters could tell that his time in solitary was changing him. He had been taking pills for cholesterol and high blood pressure, but she worried more about his psychological well-being. For one thing, he said the same thing over and over. When she asked him about this, he explained that, to be heard in the shu, inmates had to repeat themselves, and it had become a habit. In a claim, he had demanded mental-health treatment, and Esters wrote in an affidavit, "He advises me the torture and noise level in segregation drives him more and more crazy every day."
In January of 2005, Hamilton and Esters were married by a clerk in a visiting room at Attica. Two months later, he was transferred to Shawangunk prison, in Ulster County, eighty miles north of New York City. There he met Nelson Cruz, who was then twenty-four, and had been incarcerated since five days after his seventeenth birthday. He, too, had been convicted of fatally shooting a man in Brooklyn, and said that he was innocent. He was particularly eager to meet Hamilton. "Every time Derrick gets into a facility, everybody knows him," Cruz said. "First thing that crosses everybody's mind is: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" Hamilton says that he considered Cruz "a very respectful young kid who you could tell from the outset didn't belong there." He read the police reports from Cruz's case, and was amazed to learn that Louis Scarcella had worked on it. Hamilton believed Cruz and promised him, "I'm going to get you out of here."
Every few years, Hamilton filed another motion in his own case, and when it languished in court he did something almost unprecedented: he called the judge's chambers to try to expedite it, sometimes posing as a reporter for the Daily News, "to make the judge think someone important cared about my case." As DNA evidence helped to secure the release of more innocent people, there were frequent news stories about wrongful convictions. Jewel Smith saw a television show on the topic, and in 2007 she wrote a letter to Governor Eliot Spitzer saying that "an innocent man is convicted in your state." She explained that Scarcella had warned her during questioning that if she "wanted to leave the precinct and go home I had to identify Derrick as the person that committed the crime." (The Governor's office forwarded the letter to a state agency to investigate, but, in the end, nothing came of it.)
In May of 2009, after four years in Shawangunk, Hamilton was told that a group of inmates had threatened to kill him, and he was put in "involuntary protective custody," known as I.P.C. "I've been in prison all these years," he said, recalling how he laughed when he first heard the news. "Nobody ever protected me before." I.P.C. is similar to other forms of solitary confinement, except that most prisoners sent to solitary are given a release date; a sentence to I.P.C. typically is indefinite.
Hamilton suspected that his new housing status had to do with the dozens of grievances he had filed. In one, he had alleged negligence in the death of Larry Davis, who had been Shawangunk's most famous prisoner. (In 1986, Davis shot six N.Y.P.D. officers, but a jury acquitted him of attempted murder. He was later convicted in the fatal shooting of a drug dealer.) In February of 2008, a prisoner stabbed Davis in the yard. Hamilton said that he saw Davis shortly afterward, slumped in a hallway, and that officers left him there "for fifteen minutes to bleed out." (An investigation by the State Commission of Correction mentions no wrongdoing by employees.)
Hamilton fought the decision to place him in I.P.C. At an administrative hearing, he sat at a table, his wrists cuffed behind his back. He called inmates to vouch that he had no enemies. They testified that he was a "caring type of dude," who was "cool with everybody, young, old, all nationalities," and that he had a "very good reputation for helping people out with their cases." Nevertheless, he lost the hearing.
One day, in August of 2009, during the hour that he was let out of his cell, Hamilton happened to see a CNN report on Troy Davis, a prisoner on Georgia's death row, who had been convicted of killing an off-duty police officer. Davis maintained his innocence, and many of the prosecution's witnesses had recanted. The case had gone to the Supreme Court, which had just ordered the district court to hold a hearing to determine "whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes petitioner's innocence." It was precisely the kind of hearing that Hamilton had been trying to get for more than fifteen years. He realized, "This is the case that's going to change a judge's ability to procedurally bar innocent people." He had a motion pending, and to buttress it he started work on a brief citing the Davis decision.
But Hamilton was growing increasingly despondent about his indefinite confinement in I.P.C. On November 2nd, he wrote a letter to the prison's superintendent. "The only way out of the torture you have subjected me to is suicide," he said. "Death will be a welcomed companion compared to what you've subjected me to the last seven and a half months."
That morning, while a prison counsellor stood nearby, Hamilton shouted from his cell, "I want out of here. You are either going to carry me out or I am walking out!" He swallowed a handful of pills from his medicine supply, and was taken to a local emergency room, then transferred to a psychiatric unit at another prison. A supervisor wrote in his medical record that Hamilton "is adamant" that if he were sent back to Shawangunk "he will kill himself."
Two weeks later, he was moved to Auburn Correctional Facility, in central New York, and was sent straight to solitary. Officials at Shawangunk had filed misbehavior reports, claiming that he had staged the suicide attempt in order to get out of I.P.C. Despite statements from the Shawangunk counsellor—who said that Hamilton was "pacing back and forth" and "in a suicidal state" before swallowing the pills—he was sentenced to a year in the shu.
Shabaka Shakur and Daniel (Fat Danny) Rincon were jailhouse lawyers who worked in the Auburn law library. They, too, claimed to have been wrongly convicted, and each had met Hamilton years earlier in other prisons. When they heard that he was in the shu, Shakur recalls, "Danny went to the superintendent and told him, 'You have a guy there who's really good at the law. We need him in the law library.' " After several months, Hamilton was given a "time cut," and moved to a regular cellblock.
Nelson Cruz had also transferred to Auburn, and was housed two cells away. He told Hamilton that he, Shakur, and Rincon often met in the library to work on their cases. They called themselves the Actual Innocence—or A.I.—Team. ("Actual innocence" is a term used in post-conviction claims.) Rincon had been imprisoned for a 1991 quadruple murder in Manhattan, and Shakur was serving time for a 1988 double murder in Bushwick. As it turned out, Louis Scarcella had also been the detective on Shakur's case. He testified at Shakur's trial that he had confessed to him—a claim that Shakur had been denying for more than two decades.
To join the A.I. Team, a prisoner had to show his court documents to the others, who decided if he had a plausible case. Richard Rosario, then thirty-seven, was serving twenty-five years to life for a 1996 street murder in the Bronx. He claimed that he had been in Florida at the time, and he had a dozen alibi witnesses. The A.I. Team decided to admit him, and eventually there were ten members.
"Arm fish—insurance won't cover that."
The camaraderie helped lift Hamilton out of his depression. Many mornings, Cruz woke to hear Hamilton calling, "Put that coffee on! Let's go! Let's go! It's time to work!" Cruz made "prison coffee," using a hot pot to heat the water and a sock to filter the brew, which he poured into a thermos and sent to Hamilton on a "line," made from a sheet. "All day long, you'd hear the typewriter," Cruz told me. "He'd shut it down about twelve o'clock, twelve-thirty. At seven in the morning, you'd hear it again."
In the spring of 2010, Hamilton wrote a letter to Jonathan I. Edelstein, a lawyer in Manhattan who focusses on post-conviction cases. He followed it with copies of his latest motion and brief, and the affidavits that he had obtained fifteen years earlier from his alibi witnesses in New Haven. Edelstein replied:
Dear Mr. Hamilton:
Thank you for your letter of May 27, 2010. I reviewed the materials you presented to me and, frankly, they made me sick. I've been in this business a long time and I'm used to seeing people screwed by the system, but I couldn't believe the way the court used a procedural dodge to avoid even looking at the Turner and Mahan affidavits. I really think you should go to the media with this, because people should be outraged that clear evidence of innocence was just thrown in the garbage.
Edelstein, then thirty-eight, had worked his way through John Jay College and Fordham Law School. His office was on Madison Avenue, but it consisted of one cramped room, which he shared with a partner, Robert Grossman. They had no receptionist, and stored their files in the hallway. Edelstein gets letters from prisoners nearly every day, but Hamilton's pro-se work stood out. "He was able to write a coherent and persuasive argument," Edelstein says. "By pro-se standards, that's Shakespeare. Or, to use a more professionally correct analogy, that's Clarence Darrow." In his letter, Edelstein commended Hamilton for citing the Troy Davis ruling in his brief, and he offered to write an amicus brief that Hamilton could submit to the court.
Hamilton had previously considered going to the media, and now he asked Nicole to organize a protest outside the Brooklyn State Supreme Court. On the morning she chose, a snowstorm hit, and only six friends and relatives turned up. But their signs, reading "Free Derrick Hamilton!," caught the attention of Oren Yaniv, who was a court reporter for the Daily News. Two months later, he wrote a story that appeared under the headline "inmate, locked up for 20 years for brooklyn murder, says he'll be set free if witnesses testify."
By then, Hamilton was eligible for parole. Prisoners seeking parole are typically expected to show remorse, but Hamilton filed another lawsuit, arguing that the parole board should consider his evidence of innocence before making its decision. Edelstein wrote to the board on his behalf, declaring, "I am totally convinced that he is innocent of the shooting of Nathaniel Cash, and would stake my name and reputation that this is so." Hamilton submitted a package of documents, including the Daily News story and another letter from Jewel Smith.
On October 18, 2011, Hamilton appeared before two parole commissioners. "Mr. Hamilton, you've given us a lot to think about," one of them, Christina Hernandez, told him. "If, in fact, you're incarcerated for something that you did not commit, I hope that you're successful in your appeal." Seven weeks later, Hamilton was released, after nearly twenty-one years. Nicole drove to Auburn to pick him up, and on the way to Brooklyn they stopped in Albany, so that he could see his son, Davone, who was now twenty-eight.
Brooklyn had gone through another transformation. The crack houses were gone; the number of homicides had dropped by three-quarters since 1991; and Hamilton's childhood neighborhood was gentrifying. Across the street from Lafayette Gardens, on the corner of Franklin and Lafayette Avenues, there had been a bodega called Mary's, where Hamilton used to buy Bon Ton potato chips and Mountain Dew. Now in its place was Dough, a bakery serving hibiscus and tropical-chili doughnuts, with mocha-java coffee.
Hamilton moved in with Nicole, who was working for a cosmetics company. He was about fifty pounds heavier than when he entered prison, with sore knees, weaker eyes, and two missing teeth. ("There's no such thing as a root canal in prison," he says.) It wasn't easy to readjust to normal life. He rose every morning at five, and paced the rooms. He ate his meals in five minutes, as he had in the mess hall, in case an officer decided to take his food away. It felt strange to share a bed with his wife. "At times, you jump up wanting to fight because nobody is supposed to be in your bed," he said. One night, while they were sleeping, he punched Nicole in the head. "He said, 'I'm sorry. I had a dream I was fighting in the rec yard,' " she told me.
It helped to spend time with his children—now all in their twenties, with jobs and homes of their own—and to get to know his five grandchildren. In October of 2012, Hamilton and Nicole had a daughter, whom they named Maia. When Nelson Cruz called from prison, Hamilton told him, "It's beautiful out here."
Unlike many people who leave prison, Hamilton had skills that made him employable. Scott Brettschneider, who had represented him in the late nineties, hired him as a paralegal, and he was often at the courthouses, filing papers and meeting with clients, with Maia strapped to his chest in a baby carrier. "He could pass the bar exam," Brettschneider says. "This is somebody who educated himself in jail to the point where his knowledge is so much more extensive than that of most of the lawyers I deal with on a daily basis."
In early March of 2013, Hamilton got a panicked call from Julio Acevedo, whom he had helped get out of prison sixteen years earlier. The night before, Acevedo had been driving a friend's car in Williamsburg, and smashed into a livery cab. A young Orthodox Jewish couple in the back seat were killed. Hamilton persuaded Acevedo to turn himself in, then went to meet him with two police officers. Acevedo was charged with manslaughter, and hired Brettschneider to represent him.
The case generated a lot of outrage, and Frances Robles, a reporter for the Times, was assigned to write about it. She met with Brettschneider and Hamilton to discuss the case. Afterward, Hamilton told her his own story. When Robles called him back a few days later with more questions, he mentioned Louis Scarcella, and gave her the names of some other men whose cases the detective had handled.
Scarcella had retired in 1999, after twenty-six years on the force, as a highly decorated detective. But in 2011 the Brooklyn D.A., Charles J. Hynes, had started a Conviction Integrity Unit, which decided to reinvestigate the case of David Ranta, who had been convicted of a fatal shooting in Williamsburg in 1990. Scarcella had testified that Ranta had confessed to him; Ranta claimed that the statement was fabricated. The reinvestigation concluded that he had been wrongly convicted, and he was released on March 21, 2013, after twenty-three years in prison.
Robles hadn't heard of Ranta, but, after talking to Hamilton, she had begun looking into other cases that Scarcella had handled, including that of Alvena Jennette, who had been the first to alert Hamilton to the detective's tactics. Jennette had been released in 2007, after serving twenty-one years, and Hamilton and Robles went to see him at his mother's house, in Crown Heights. By that time, Hamilton says, "he didn't want anything to do with the criminal-justice system. I had to tell him, 'Look, man, this is somebody who is going to investigate this. Let us see your evidence.' " Jennette went into his basement and returned with a plastic garbage bag full of legal documents.
On May 12, 2013, the Times published a front-page story about Scarcella, co-written by Robles, which mentioned Jennette and Hamilton, and detailed a long history of alleged misconduct, including falsifying confessions and coercing witnesses. In at least six murder cases, including Jennette's, the article said, Scarcella had relied on the same alleged eyewitness, a prostitute with a crack addiction. The D.A.'s office had announced plans to review every homicide case that Scarcella had worked on, focussing on those which had gone to trial and ended with a conviction. The review eventually expanded to seventy-one cases. When the Times asked Scarcella about Hamilton's allegations, he said, "He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar."
That fall, in the election for Brooklyn District Attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor, defeated Hynes, who had held the office for twenty-four years. Thompson overhauled the Conviction Integrity Unit, renaming it the Conviction Review Unit and increasing its staff from two prosecutors to nine. It was allotted an annual budget of $1.1 million, which made it the largest such unit in the nation. In his first year, Thompson exonerated ten men, including Jennette and his two half brothers. One of them, Robert Hill, was still incarcerated, and was released. The other, Darryl Austin, had died in prison in 2000.
"Can I ask you a personal question?"
In January, 2014, Hamilton won his most significant legal victory: a landmark case, known as People v. Hamilton. It had begun with the brief that Hamilton wrote after learning of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Troy Davis case. Davis lost his evidentiary hearing, and was executed by lethal injection on September 21, 2011. That day happened to be Hamilton's forty-sixth birthday, and he took it as a sign that he should keep fighting. Edelstein and his partner, Grossman, refined Hamilton's argument, and Edelstein argued the case in court. They won: for the first time in New York history, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court had decided that a defendant convicted of a crime who has a plausible claim of innocence is entitled to a hearing to present his evidence.
People v. Hamilton went even further than the Davis decision, by stipulating what should happen after an evidentiary hearing: if a defendant can show "clear and convincing" evidence of his innocence, his conviction will be overturned. Barry Scheck says, "If there's strong evidence you didn't commit the crime, there must be a constitutional right to vacate your conviction." He added, "And that's what's been established in the Hamilton case in New York State."
Before Hamilton got his evidentiary hearing, the D.A. asked him to appear in Brooklyn State Supreme Court. On January 9, 2015, Mark Hale, the prosecutor in charge of the Conviction Review Unit, stood up and told the judge that the "sole eyewitness against Mr. Hamilton at trial"—Jewel Smith—had been "unreliable, untruthful, and incredible in her testimony." Hale added, "The District Attorney has determined the conviction against Mr. Hamilton cannot stand."
After twenty-four years, Hamilton had cleared his name. He walked out of the courtroom, with Maia in his arms and Nicole at his side. The Times ran a photograph, under the headline "wrongly convicted man was his own best advocate." When a reporter from the Post asked Hamilton about Detective Scarcella, he said, "I think prison is a nice way of dealing with men like that."
Scarcella has never been prosecuted for his alleged malfeasance; the statute of limitations for perjury is five years. Not long after Hamilton was exonerated, he filed two lawsuits—one against New York State, in the Court of Claims, the other against the city, the N.Y.P.D., Scarcella, and others, in federal court. The litigation is ongoing and the defendants have denied all allegations. "I never did anything wrong in my life," Scarcella told the Staten Island Advance. Now sixty-four, he lives on Staten Island, and collects a pension from the city.
Hamilton currently lives in New Jersey, with Nicole and Maia, and works in a small office that he shares with another paralegal. Since his victory in People v. Hamilton, he has received many more requests for help. Letters from prisoners cover his desk, and his cell phone rings constantly. The calls that trouble him most are those from inmates whom he knows personally and believes to be wrongly imprisoned. "When you know a guy is innocent, if you have any decency or human elements in your being, it's almost impossible for a good person to just forget," he said. "And that is my dilemma."
He and Brettschneider knew that they couldn't handle all the work on their own. "We needed attorneys with money and attorneys with time," Hamilton told me. They needed to pay investigators to visit old crime scenes, track down witnesses, and collect affidavits. Soon after leaving prison, Hamilton had met Ilya Novofastovsky, a civil attorney with an interest in wrongful convictions. Novofastovsky runs the Novo Law Firm, in Manhattan, and Hamilton urged him to start the Novo Innocence Project. Hamilton helps manage the project, and Brettschneider agreed to join the team.
Every week, Hamilton, Brettschneider, Novofastovsky, and another lawyer or two from the firm sit around a conference table in Novo's offices. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, everybody wore a suit and tie except Hamilton, who had on a sweater, jeans, and sneakers. Shortly after 5 P.M., he asked*,* "You ready? Let's get into the cases." The lawyers glanced at the Case List Summary Report, a five-page document listing thirty-seven clients or potential clients. Most were still in prison; almost all had been convicted of homicide. Hamilton knew twenty-one of them.
It quickly became clear that he has his own way of evaluating a case's merits. He vouched for one of the inmates: "I've known the guy for a very, very long time, and he's always maintained his innocence." He recognized a key witness in another case as a longtime crack addict: "He might say anything anytime anywhere." He remembered another man from Shawangunk: "One of my criteria is: If a guy is innocent, he would spend more time in the law library. This guy never went to the law library. Not once." His conclusion: "We shouldn't have this case." The meeting ended at eight o'clock. Hamilton was slumped in his chair, rubbing his head. "At times," he said, "it gets very fatiguing."
One of the best days that Hamilton has had since leaving prison was June 4th of last year, when a judge dismissed the charges against Shabaka Shakur, from the A.I. Team, making him the eighth person investigated by Scarcella to have his murder conviction vacated. The judge had cited a "reasonable probability" that Scarcella had fabricated Shakur's confession to the killing of two men in Bushwick, and ordered a new trial; the D.A.'s office declined to prosecute Shakur again. Two attorneys, Leah Busby and Ron Kuby, had helped Shakur with his case, and Shakur is now a paralegal in Kuby's office. "Derrick and I broke the mold," Shakur told me. "There's a saying that real good jailhouse lawyers get everybody else out but themselves, but we were able to get other people out, and we were able to get ourselves out."
Still, the other members of the A.I. Team remained in prison. Daniel Rincon is in Five Points, near Auburn. Nelson Cruz is now in Green Haven, in Dutchess County. He and Hamilton have spoken every week or two since Hamilton was released, and Brettschneider has taken Cruz on as a client. Cruz recently became ill with Bell's palsy, which paralyzed the left side of his face, but he is recovering and waiting for the Conviction Review Unit to finish investigating his case. Then, one morning in March, Hamilton spotted a headline in the Daily News: "bronx da moves to toss 1996 murder conviction of man who served almost two decades behind bars." The prisoner was Richard Rosario, from the A.I. Team.
Hamilton immediately drove to the Bronx. In the County Hall of Justice, he paced the terrazzo floors, greeting people he knew: Rosario's attorneys, a TV reporter, a man from New Jersey who had been exonerated. Hamilton hadn't worked on Rosario's case since he left Auburn, but Rosario had called him many times, and he knew that Rosario's attorneys had cited People v. Hamilton in their brief. "Richie is getting out!" Hamilton said, to no one in particular. "This is a good, good, good day."
Finally, Rosario was led into a third-floor courtroom. Reporters filled the jury box, and, for a few minutes, the only sound was the clicking of photographers' cameras. Hamilton sat in the back row, watching as an officer removed Rosario's handcuffs. One of his lawyers spoke for a few minutes, then the judge declared, "You are hereby released." Everyone clapped, and the crowd filed out into the hallway. Soon, Rosario appeared, in a new suit and tie, clasping his wife's hand, looking slightly dazed. Hamilton called out, "Richie Rich, baby!" Rosario spun around. "Derrick Hamilton!" he shouted. The two men slapped hands and embraced. ♦
Published in the print edition of the June 20, 2016, issue.
Jennifer Gonnerman joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She is the author of "Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett."
More:InnocenceNew York Police Department (NYPD)NewsPrisonersPrisonsSolitary ConfinementWrongful Convictions
Our Local Correspondents
A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
A Daughter's Death
The father of a star high-school athlete confronts New York City's patterns of violence.
Annals of Justice
The Price of a Life
What's the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?
By Ariel Levy
Annals of Human Rights
The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?
By Atul Gawande


text:
/**
 *
 */
package com.apress.isf.spring.aop;

import java.lang.reflect.Method;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.aop.AfterReturningAdvice;

/**
 * @author Felipe Gutierrez
 *
 */
public class AfterLoggingModule implements AfterReturningAdvice {
	private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(AfterLoggingModule.class);

	public void afterReturning(Object returnValue, Method method,
			Object[] args, Object target) throws Throwable {
		if(log.isDebugEnabled()){
			log.debug("@@@@(AFTER) Method called: " + method.getName());
			if(args.length ==0 )
				log.debug("@@@@(AFTER) No arguments passed.");
			for(Object arg:args)
				log.debug("@@@@(AFTER) Argument passed:" + arg);
			log.debug("@@@(AFTER) Result: " + returnValue);
		}
	}

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
using System;
using System.Reactive.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.Reactive.Testing;
using NUnit.Framework;

namespace Shoutr.Tests
{
    [TestFixture]
    public class BroadcasterTests
    {
        private TestScheduler _scheduler;
        [SetUp]
        public void Setup()
        {
            _scheduler = new TestScheduler();
        }

        [Test]
        public async Task GetHeaderObservable_ReturnsFirstAndLast_WhenOnePayloads()
        {
            var bc = new Broadcaster();
            var serializedHeader = new byte[] { 1, 2, 3, 4};
            const int rebroadcastSeconds = 1;
            var payloadObservable = Observable.Return(new byte[] { 9, 9, 9});
            var observable = bc.GetHeaderObservable(serializedHeader,
                TimeSpan.FromSeconds(rebroadcastSeconds),
                payloadObservable,
                _scheduler);

            var headers = await observable.ToArray();
            Assert.AreEqual(2, headers.Length);
            CollectionAssert.AreEqual(serializedHeader, headers[0]);
            CollectionAssert.AreEqual(serializedHeader, headers[1]);
        }

        [Test]
        public void GetHeaderObservable_ReturnsExtra_WhenOnePayloadDelayed()
        {
            var bc = new Broadcaster();
            var serializedHeader = new byte[] { 1, 2, 3, 4};
            var rebroadcastSeconds = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1);
            var payloadObservable = Observable
                .Return(new byte[] { 9, 9, 9})
                .Delay(rebroadcastSeconds.Add(TimeSpan.FromTicks(1)), _scheduler)
                .Concat(Observable.Never<byte[]>());

            byte[] mostRecent = null;
            int count = 0;
            var sub = bc.GetHeaderObservable(serializedHeader,
                    rebroadcastSeconds,
                payloadObservable,
                _scheduler)
                .Subscribe(b =>
                {
                    mostRecent = b;
                    count++;
                });

            CollectionAssert.AreEqual(serializedHeader, mostRecent);
            Assert.AreEqual(1, count);

            _scheduler.AdvanceBy(rebroadcastSeconds);

            CollectionAssert.AreEqual(serializedHeader, mostRecent);
            Assert.AreEqual(2, count);
        }
    }
}


text:
Ohio State is testing 12,000 on-campus students weekly as well as 8,000 off-campus students. Wilce Health is one of the testing sites.
Ohio State Sends Students to Quarantine at a Marriott as Isolation Dorms Fill
By Pete Grieve Columbus
UPDATED 2:15 PM ET Sep. 08, 2020 PUBLISHED 5:46 AM ET Sep. 04, 2020 PUBLISHED 5:46 AM EDT Sep. 04, 2020
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Several buses shuttled COVID-19 positive Ohio State students to a Marriott hotel near campus Thursday where the students will isolate for the next two weeks.
Ohio State students entered quarantine at a Marriott hotel Thursday as on-campus isolation space filled up
Gov. Mike DeWine said young people ages 18 to 22 accounted for 35 percent of the state's positive tests last week
The university declined to comment on the hotel quarantines citing privacy reasons
Ethan Deutsch, a sophomore who lives in campus housing, received a call from a university employee around 1:00 p.m. Thursday informing him that he would need to pack up and head to a bus stop in the North Campus area that afternoon.
Deutsch was notified in the morning that his test came back positive. The result was not a surprise, he said. The notice came just as his symptoms started to worsen.
"At first, it felt like really high-tier allergies, and I wasn't sure that I was sick until I woke up this morning and I felt really bad," he said.
He was given the choice to go home, but he opted to quarantine with the university, which meant going to the hotel.
"They told me that the current quarantine dorms are full so they would be moving us to the Marriott today," Deutsch said.
Three buses transported students to the hotel Thursday. Students were assigned to a bus that had a pick-up location near their residence. Deutsch said the bus driver stepped off the bus while about a dozen students boarded. The first four rows of seats were blocked off to separate positive students from the driver.
At the hotel, students formed two single file lines to check-in. They received a supply of food, a gallon of water, an information pamphlet, an activity sheet, and a resistance exercise band. The accommodations have been luxurious and the university handled the situation responsibly, Deutsch said.
"They are treating us very well. The desk space is a kinda small for college students—it depends on what your workload is—but it's a very nice room," he said.
The university declined to comment on students being quarantined in hotels. A university spokesperson cited privacy reasons. The hotel front desk referred a request for comment to the university's student life office.
Ohio State has launched a COVID-19 dashboard that shows how many students are in isolation and quarantine dorms. As of Sept. 1, 208 students who have tested positive were in isolation, 104 students who have been exposed were in quarantine, and 150 beds were available.
A Sept. 4, update showed the university had nearly doubled its total number of beds for isolation and quarantine. The update showed 335 students who have tested positive were in isolation, 142 students who have been exposed were in quarantine, and 381 beds were available.
Sunday night, the dashboard showed 1,500 students have tested positive since August 14. The university's cumulative student positivity rate was 3.71 percent, and the seven-day average was 5.81 percent.
Young people in the 18 to 22 age group have accounted for 35 percent of the state's positive cases in the last week as colleges outbreaks have worsened, Gov. Mike DeWine said during his briefing Thursday.
This chart shows weekly case data for younger age groups from March to August. The 18-22 age group has jumped to 35-40% of all cases. To our friends in college, we ask you to be careful. You might not get seriously sick, but you can spread the virus to someone who could. pic.twitter.com/gxgiKvmhTr
— Governor Mike DeWine (@GovMikeDeWine) September 3, 2020
The University of Dayton reported 1,135 cases and Miami University reported 925 student cases in their most recent updates. Of the three schools, Ohio State is the only college currently holding in-person classes. Ohio State's case numbers surpassed Dayton's, making the outbreak on the Columbus campus the worst active outbreak anywhere in the state, according to the Ohio Department of Health.
"To our friends in college, we ask you to be careful because while all of us when we were your age thought we were invincible, you can pass this on," DeWine said. "That really is the danger: It gets passed on to someone who is older, someone who has a medical problem."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I wanted dessert but didn't want to try out a recipe that took more than 30 minutes to make. I found this one, and while I'm not a huge fan of fruit desserts (I prefer chocolate!), I thought I'd give this a try since "active recipe time" was 20 min, and we already had graham crackers and heavy cream in the house.
This recipe turned out great.


I really wanted to be at JPRC tonight to see my bike getting finished but my wife needed me to be designated driver for her sisters "pottery" birthday party. I wasn't too thrilled but, I couldn't resist when they said "hey you got an hour, build something". Was actually pretty fun, wish I had a few more minutes to add more and the fine details.


text:
Q: How to Animate marker position in Mapbox android SDK? there is no example code on the website.I found [old version in java](https://docs.mapbox.com/android/legacy/maps/examples/animate-marker-position/) but it is too old.
I want to know how to use kotlin and sdk v10.9.1 to do it.

A: Try to allow fused location in your code. Please check Unable to get current (real time) location using FusedLocationProviderClient this can help you some way.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Dennis Boon in his video runs Quake on his Amiga 3000UX with a Mediator PCI bridge board and a Voodoo 3 card. Now this would not be nothing special about, but he is running Quake on his NIC Card !, Yes Killer NIC.
The Killer NIC models contain a Freescale PowerQUICC, 64MB ram, Gigabit Ethernet port and an USB 2.0 port. Two variants are available one with processor running at 400 MHz and 333 MHz (CPU K1 lacks a heat sink).
So this card is actually a PowerPC CPU and with latest Sonnet drivers it is possible to run WarpOS PPC software on your Amiga 3000/4000.


Made for football coach and referee.
This whistle is perfect for training and match use.
Audio efficiencyWhistle with good level of audio efficiency.
This is a very good whistle, so loud !! My son love it so much !!
It generates very low sound.


text:
Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.
Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)
Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. is the 27th entry in the Toho-produced Godzilla film series and 5th in the Millennium era. It's a direct sequel to Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla. The cyborg Mechagodzilla aka Kiryu, now aided by Mothra, fights against Godzilla. Hiroshi Koizumi returns as Dr. Shin'ichi Chûjô from the 1961 film.
The following weapons were used in the film Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.:
1 Howa Type 64 Rifle
2 Howa Type 89
3 Sumitomo Minimi
4 Sumitomo M2HB Machine Gun
5 25-mm Oerlikon KBA Automatic Cannon
6 35-mm Oerlikon KDE Automatic Cannon
Howa Type 64 Rifle
JSDF personnel are armed with Howa Type 64 rifles.
Howa Type 64 - 7.62x51mm
Two soldiers with Type 64 rifles guard the corpse of Kamebos.
A soldier carries Type 64 rifle at the left.
A barrel is seen.
Howa Type 89
In one scene a unit of JSDF marches with Howa Type 89 rifles.
Howa Type 89 in 5.56x45mm with integral bipod
Note that the rifles lack magazines.
Sumitomo Minimi
A Sumitomo Minimi machine gun is mounted on a Komatsu LAV.
Sumitomo Minimi on bipod - 5.56x45mm
A Minimi on pivot mounting is seen at the right.
Sumitomo M2HB Machine Gun
Sumitomo M2HB heavy machine guns are mounted on various armored vehicles.
Browning M2HB on vehicle mount - .50 BMG
M2HB are mounted on Type 90 MBTs.
M2HB on Type 82 CCV.
25-mm Oerlikon KBA Automatic Cannon
25-mm Oerlikon Contraves KBAs are mounted on Type 87 reconnaissance vehicle.
Oerlikon Contraves 25mm KBA cannon - 25x127mm
Type 87 is armed with 25-mm KBA gun.
A barrel of KBA gun is seen at the foreground.
35-mm Oerlikon KDE Automatic Cannon
35-mm Oerlikon KDE automatic cannons are mounted on Type 89 IFVs.
Oerlikon KDE - 35x228 mm
A Type 89 IFV approaches.
Side view of fast moving Type 89 IFV.
The Godzilla Film Franchise
Shōwa Era Godzilla (1954) • Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964) • Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster (1966) • Son of Godzilla (1967) • Destroy All Monsters (1968) • Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)
Heisei Era The Return of Godzilla (1984) • Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) • Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) • Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth (1992) • Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994) • Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)
Millennium Era Godzilla 2000 (1999) • Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000) • Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001) • Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002) • Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003) • Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)
Reiwa Era Shin Godzilla (2016)
US Produced Godzilla (1998) • Godzilla (2014) • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) • Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
Retrieved from "http://www.imfdb.org/index.php?title=Godzilla:_Tokyo_S.O.S.&oldid=1187946"
Japanese Produced/Filmed


text:
CBI Countries
Country Programme
Antigua and Barbuda is a dual-island nation located in the Caribbean Sea, with a history of colonial rule by Britain. Traces of this past can be seen in its official language, laws, and culture. Antigua, the larger of the two islands, is an important flight transfer hub for the region. Barbuda suffered significant damage in the 2017 hurricane season, resulting in its entire population being evacuated to Antigua. China has stepped in as a major partner in the island's rebuilding efforts. Antigua and Barbuda remains highly reliant on tourism as a primary source of income, and is known for its 365 beaches.
Official name: Antigua and Barbuda
National anthem: Fair Antigua, We Salute Thee
Location: Caribbean, Americas
Capital city: St John's
Independence: 1 November 1981, from the United Kingdom
Government type: Constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy
Head of State: Monarch represented by the Governor General
Head of Government: Prime Minister
Basis of legal system: English common law
Currency: Eastern Caribbean dollar
Climate: Tropical
The Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment Programme was established by the Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment Act, 2013, and was last modified in May 2018. Antigua and Barbuda offers three investment alternatives for successful applicants.
The first alternative allows applicants (up to a family of four persons) to make a minimum contribution of US$100,000 to the National Development Fund (NDF), a not-for-profit organisation created with the purpose of running both public and private projects as well as charitable initiatives such as improving access to healthcare and education.
The second alternative requires the applicant to make an investment of US$400,000 or more into one of the Government's approved real estate projects for a period of five years. Such developments include leasehold schemes, hotels, and villas that add value to the nation's tourism sector. From 1 May 2018 to until 31 October 2018, under a limited time offer, an applicant with no more than three additional family members may make a joint investment with a 'related party,' with both the applicant and the 'related party' making a minimum investment of US$200,000. A 'related party' is one with the same Licenced Agent as the applicant.
The last alternative entails an investment of US$1,500,000 into an eligible, Government-approved, business project. Applicants can apply as joint investors so long as each applicant makes a US$400,000 minimum investment into a project worth at least US$5,000,000.
Government and due diligence fees apply for all three alternatives to citizenship, with the former starting at US$25,000 for any application of up to four persons applying under the NDF. Fees increase with the number of persons included in an application, and are higher for applications under the real estate and business options. In all cases, ten percent of the Government fees are due upon submission of the application and are deemed non-refundable.
In the past year, there have been some delays in application processing, resulting in six-month turnaround times from the date of submission to the Citizenship by Investment Unit (CIU), the Government body responsible for reviewing all applications under the Programme. Due diligence procedures are strict, and a number of nationalities are excluded outright from the application process.
Although there is no mandated interview or knowledge-based test, Antigua and Barbuda requires applicants to travel to the nation, or to an embassy or consulate, to sign an oath of allegiance. Furthermore, once awarded, citizenship is conditional on the applicant spending five days on Antiguan or Barbadian soil within five years of obtaining citizenship. This requirement is waived for children until after they reach the age of majority at 18.
In June 2017, Antigua and Barbuda lost visa-free access to Canada, one of its most significant selling points. There were, however, some additions to the list of countries and territories to which citizens of Antigua and Barbuda may travel, including Monaco and the Ukraine. Antigua and Barbuda accepts dual nationality.
Learn more about the CBI Index by downloading the report below
Thank you for your interest. Please fill in your details to download the report.
Download additional reports optgroup-2019OpinionCitizenship vs ResidencyTax residency: beyond citizenshipendoptgroup2019optgroup-2018CBI Index 2018 (Russian)CBI Index 2018 (Chinese)CBI Index 2018 (English)endoptgroup2018optgroup-2017CBI Index 2017 (English)endoptgroup2017
2018 © All rights reserved


text:
Golf more than a game for Wally Betts and Ralph Edwards
Curtis Duffield TimesReporter.com sports writer
Wally Betts and Ralph Edwards started playing golf competitively in the early 1960s in the Friday Night Dennison Eagles League at Big Bend Golf Course in Uhrichsville.
Most golfers will tell you in the beginning they were instantly hooked. For Betts and Edwards, it was the same, as these former co-workers at Warner and Swasey got hooked quickly, hitting the links whenever free time allowed them or when the wives gave permission.
Fast forward to 2019 (57 years approximately), Betts and Edwards are still passionate about playing a game that has made so many great memories for them. Golf has been a vital part of their friendship that has carried into almost seven decades. Either if they play golf with and/or against each other, they enjoy everything that golf has to offer. But it is off the course where their friendship has brought out the best in one another.
"He's a super nice guy, a great friend," Ralph Edwards said about Betts. "We're not just golf buddies. We're friends. And have been for many years. He's someone I can count on. When my wife passed a little over a year ago and my son who passed a few months before she did, I had a hard time. But him and his entire family have been very supportive of me. They've been there for me. I really appreciate it."
Betts, 86, of Gnadenhutten and Edwards, 84, from Uhrichsville, still play golf three times a week, including Friday nights. The duo along with Jim O'Donnell, Ernie Snyder, Lyle Howard, Jack Wheatley and Darrell Miles also play together on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.
Both Betts and Edwards know their best days playing golf are behind them, as both have accepted it. They might even say they enjoy the game a bit more now as they don't use as much competitive drive. One thing is certain, the two are respected by just about everyone that has come across these two "legends" on the course or in the clubhouse over the years.
"They just exhibit what you would think as golf being a gentleman's game," said Big Bend Golf Course owner Cathy Cottis. "Even when the round is over, everyone will come in and have a beer and just sit around Wally and Ralph, who have their own table, and just listen to all the great stories these two respected men have to say."
Betts and Edwards have been part of the ups and downs of the last couple of decades of what the golf economy has become. In 2006, nearly 30 million Americans played golf which was an all-time high. Then just six years later that number dropped to 25 million in 2011. The numbers have gone back up slightly with the rise of youth golfers. The same scenario can be said at just about every other course in America, including Big Bend.
Friday nights at Big Bend have always been one of the busiest of the week to play in a league. During the peak years, which lasted around three years, Fridays would bring in close to 80 to 90 golfers a week. League play sometimes lasted into the night. The golfers who were done with their round turned on their car headlights from the parking lot to help those playing No. 9, the 180-yard, par-3.
The National Hole-in-One Registry has showed that roughly 450 million rounds of golf are played each year in the U.S., around 25,0000-30,00 rounds per course. Each of those courses report around 10-15 aces a year, which means an ace is scored about every 3,500 rounds. So about 1 to 2 percent of golfers will post a "1" on their scorecard. So a majority, who have or will play golf, end up going a lifetime without making that prestigious ace.
Betts and Edwards, who have been playing golf for the past 700 months or so, including 550 plus holidays that have come and gone, have five hole-in-ones combined. Edwards holds a slight edge with three. Edwards said he last had one about 10 to 12 years ago. The two longtime friends, who've experienced just about everything you can golfing, know that it is more than game. It is the camaraderie on the course that these two longtime friends learned a long time ago that's what the game of golf really is in the end.
"They're just two really good guys. Big Bend is a better place because of them," Cottis said, tearing up about two of her best customers.
Reach Curtis at (330) 364-8434 or email
cduffield@timesreporter.com
Twitter: @TRCDuff
Coshocton County
Tuscarawas County
Friday Night Ohio
Bark Stark
Times Reporter ~ 629 Wabash Ave. NW
New Philadelphia, OH 44663 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service
Garaway
Tusky Valley
FridayNightOhio
How They Voted?


text:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace JsonMessages.Authentication
{
	public class ValidateAuthenticationTokenResponce : JsonMessage
	{
		public bool OK = false;
		public string Responce = string.Empty;
	}
}


BackgroundsUSA™ offers full background screening services. Below you will find information for Employers, as well as information on Criminal background searches, and Credit background searches.
BackgroundsUSA™ provides the following screening services. Search by type of information required, or see our suggested searches according to your basic industry grouping.
For more information on background screening, click on: The Basics: Why Screen?
BackgroundsUSA™ can work with you to customize a background screening and employment application process, to help relieve you of much of the burden of hiring. Many employers outsource the following background screening functions to Backgrounds USA. However, we can do as much or as little as you require in your hiring process.
If an employer fails to search for previous criminal activity and an employee with a prior criminal history commits a crime on the job, the employer can be held liable. It is recommended that a criminal records search be ordered on all employees. The law allows employers to use public record information, including criminal records, as part of their hiring process. However, one of the most confusing aspects of background screening is the criminal justice system, as there is no one national criminal database. Each state, each county, each federal jurisdiction, maintains its own records, reporting standards and charges.
Theft and white collar business crime make up a large percentage of the criminal caseload in America each year. Poor credit ratings, as well as personal and business bankruptcy rates have also increased dramatically over the past decade. Protect your business by ensuring the creditworthiness of your employees, associates, and business clients.


Band to Join, Bass Guitar, Drums, Other Percussion, Keyboard, Background Singer, Harmonica, Banjo, Mandolin, Fiddle, Dobro, Steel guitar, Upright bass, Ukulele.
Band practices 1 a week. Workshop at home everyday.
07 - Kiss Me In The Rain Radio SingleKiss Me In The Rain - Radio Edit is the shortened version of Kiss Me In The Rain. This song is about being in a relationship and working out their problems.
02 - Show MeBucket List is Mary Anne Message's Debut Album. Her songs are inspired by her own life events. Smooth tones laced with grit, it's where Shania Twain meets Pat Benatar or Carrie Underwood morphs into Joan Jett. Enjoy!
03 - Kiss Me In The RainBucket List is Mary Anne Message's Debut Album. Her songs are inspired by her own life events. Smooth tones laced with grit, it's where Shania Twain meets Pat Benatar or Carrie Underwood morphs into Joan Jett. Enjoy!
04 - Sweet NoiseSweet Noise is a song about remembering the good times and the good emotions regarding a lost loved one.
05 - Smile TodaySmile Today is about finding love as a single parent and getting married in the end.
06 - Tall Dark & ChevyWhere Dreams don't make any sense but you love to re-dream the dream!


imp. & archaic p. p. of Write.
To root with the snout. See 1st Root.
You say yourself he never wrote to you like that.
- "The Cricket", Marjorie Cooke.
I wrote a great deal out here, it was so quiet, and in this room.
- "Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle", Joseph Sheridan LeFanu.
Then he must have returned there since he wrote that letter.
- "A Mysterious Disappearance", Gordon Holmes.


Weatherproof sundial with a smart, solid feel similar to slate.
Made in the UK from 86 redundant plant pots collected from Garden Centres in the UK.
Suitable for horizontal use only.
Set to UK latitude. Comes complete with instructions.
Boxed in eco friendly packaging.
Approximate size: 24.5cm x 19cm.
All ashortwalk products are made directly from recycled waste collected through UK recycle schemes and domestic household waste. For example, the Eco Bird Feeder was made from 8 plastic plant pots collected from UK garden centres and shops. The placemats and coasters were once disposable coffee cups!
Here are some interesting facts from ashortwalk which we have recycled!
*Each UK household produces over 1 tonne of rubbish annually, amounting to about 31 million tonnes for the UK each year.
*Every year, the average dustbin contains enough unrealised energy for 500 baths, 3500 showers or 5,000 hours of television.
*On average every person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every 7 weeks.
*Every 8 months the UK produces enough waste to fill Lake Windermere (the largest lake in England).
*In less than 2 hours the UK produces enough waste to fill the Albert Hall.
*The cost of managing the municipal waste produced in England is around £1.6 billion per year.
All ashortwalk products are designed and manufactured in a small factory in Perranporth, North Cornwall.
Buying British made recycled products doesn't get any better! It is true 'closed loop recycling' coupled with 'closed loop economics'. Apart from ashortwalk, 19 different UK companies are directly involved in designing, making, distributing and selling a typical ashortwalk product. That doesn't include all the spider companies that supply those 19 companies; from the burger van outside the factory to the solicitors and accountants.
ashortwalk is a design and manufacturing company based in North Cornwall who specialise in turning every day waste destined for landfill into unique, functional products for the home and garden.


text:
Paul K. MacDonald is an American political scientist and a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He is known for his research on global power politics, U.S. foreign policy, and the political and military dimensions of overseas expansion.

His work has been widely published in the American Political Science Review,  International Organization, International Security, Security Studies, Washington Quarterly, Review of International Studies, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs.  He is also a faculty member of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs, and an affiliate at the Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

In the Foreign Affairs review of MacDonald's book Networks of Domination: The Social Foundations of Peripheral Conquest in International Politics, G. John Ikenberry comments: "The book is a sober reminder that great military power and dreams of empire cannot guarantee control of even a small foreign country -- much less world domination." Jack Snyder similarly noted that MacDonald's research helps "sharpen the insights of those who think about grand strategy and those who study how social network patterns shape our world."

His most recent book, Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment, challenges conventional international relations theories regarding great power transitions.

Education and Career
MacDonald earned his B.A. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 and his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2007. He became an Assistant Professor at Williams College in 2008, and joined Wellesley College in 2011. He was awarded Wellesley College's highest teaching award, the Anna and Samuel Pinanski Teaching Prize, in 2018.

MacDonald has held research positions at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. In 2019, he was a visiting fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Publications

Books
 Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.

 Networks of Domination: The Social Foundations of Peripheral Conquest in International Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014

Selected Journal Articles and Chapters

 "The Governor's Dilemma in Overseas Empires," in The Governor's Dilemma: Indirect Governance Beyond Principles and Agents, Kenneth Abbot, Bernhard Zangl, Duncan Snidal, and Philipp Genschel, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

"Embedded Authority: A Relational Network Approach to Hierarchy in World Politics," Review of International Studies, vol. 44, no. 1 (January 2018).
"'Retribution Must Succeed Rebellion': The Colonial Origins of Counterinsurgency Failure," International Organization, vol. 67, no. 2 (April 2013)
 Paul K. MacDonald, Joseph M. Parent; Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment. International Security 2011; 35 (4): 7–44. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00034
 "Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: the Competing Epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory," American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 4 (November 2003).

External links
 "The Return of Great Power Competition," panel discussion at CATO Institute. January 15, 2019

References

Living people
American political scientists
Wellesley College faculty
Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)
University of California, Berkeley alumni

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
This repository holds sample code for a number of classic data structures implemented in Python

##Usage

####Linked List

####Doubly Linked List

####Insertion Sort

####Merge Sort

####Quick Sort

####Radix Sort
radix_sort.sorti():   sorts a list of integers
radix_sort.sorts():   sorts a list of strings

##Continuous Integration Status
[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/CharlesGust/data_structures.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/CharlesGust/data_structures)

##Collaborations
On the hashtable implementation, Ben Friedland helped convince me to use native Python
lists instead of the "Bucket" object I had created that I thought was a requirement of
the specification. The resulting code is a lot cleaner as a result.

General resources consulted include the Python Documentation and Wikipedia.

Ben Friedland also suggested reading about Quicksort at:
http://en.literateprograms.org/Quicksort_%28Python%29#Using_list_comprehensions
which was a very useful resource.

##Resources
In general, I referenced the Python 2.x docs and Stack Overflow for many questions, particularly
around package, module importing in sibling directories. Unfortunately, I don't know where
I read the particular syntax to precede the package name with ".."

Cross directory importing:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4383571/importing-files-from-different-folder-in-python


text:
Mike Baird stands by his decision to ban greyhound racing
Thursday 14th July 2016 6:48 pm. Kat Ernst
PREMIER Mike Baird is determined in his mission to end greyhound racing in NSW, repeating his stance at a press conference on Thursday, exactly one week after his bombshell announcement shook the greyhound industry to its core.
Having met with industry representatives throughout the day, Baird said he was still confident in his decision which will see the sport become illegal as of July 1, 2017.
"Today the Deputy Premier (Troy Grant) and I have had a difficult, but constructive and necessary meeting with the industry," Baird said.
"This is not an easy time, we understand the difficulties the industry is facing and we are determined to do everything we can to support them in the transition.
"In the discussion with the industry we made it very clear to them that this was not an easy decision.
"It weighed heavy on our hearts as we made the decision, but we have made it.
"We also said to them very clearly that we want to work with them in the transition on two fronts; both with the welfare with the dogs and how we support them, and at the same time how we help and support those within the industry."
Baird also announced John Keniry as the person in charge of a task force which has been put in place to oversee the close down of the industry.
"What we will be looking at over the next few months is talking to people as widely as we can so we understand the issues and then putting together a package which hopefully will provide a smooth transition for this industry," Keniry said.
"We will focused on working with all the participants within the industry…and doing a thorough and a fair job with due regard to animal welfare."
Also speaking at the press conference was Deputy Premier and Racing Minister Troy Grant who remains confident in his decision, despite several NSW Nationals Party members coming forward to state they oppose the greyhound racing ban.
"I have spoken to every one of the NSW Nationals Party members, being 24 in total, and/or have communicated by way of text with them," he said.
"What we have heard in the public commentary is particularly three of the members of the National Party who have raised their individual concerns and in regards to the process by which they learned of the decision.
"I have given my members no instructions in relation to how they should form their view.
"I dont gag the National Party members from representing their communities and saying what they think."
The legislation to ban greyhound racing in NSW is set to be brought before the Parliament on August 2.
Topics: Animal Welfare ,National ,New South Wales Greyhound News
Premier's office says Reform Panel will consider breeding caps
Parliamentary Inquiry Puts Pressure On GRNSW
NSW Greyhound Racing Inquiry Submissions – The Summary
Misleading greyhound figures still being fed to NSW public
Legislative Assembly passes bill to ban greyhound racing
sparklingspear
ALL supporters of Greyhound racing should be in the gallery to boo him, and any of his supporters
dogem53
pretty damn pathetic when NEWSON,interviewed on SYDNEY RADIO today, ADMITS THE INDUSTRY WAS MAKING PROGRESS in cleaning up its act. the two points he kept thrusting in front of the interviewer(BEN FORDHAM) was the attitude of trainers/owners who INSISTED ON USING DEAD CARCASSES,and the breeding situation. NEWSON admitted they had no reports of continuing LIVE BAITING since the original case blew open,they did receive SOME inside iformation,but nothing substantial that could/would raise the live baiting again. so,here we have the man in charge of running GRNSW, at first being heavily confronted by angry dog people,but as time goes along,HE SEES… Read more »
lone widow
More shame on the National party if they support the liberals on august 2. We will never forget.
Hugh_
dogem53 The industry can't operate without breeding huge numbers of surplus animals that must be either euthanised or thrust into an already overcrowded pool of unwanted pets. How do you propose to fix that problem? The problem is that proponents of the industry don't have a problem with mass euthanasia, but the public does. That's where you see an unwillingness to change. In fact you have people like Bruce Teague on this very website arguing that wastage is justified because it's necessary for the "preservation of the breed". The industry has opposed breeding limits, stronger regulation, stronger inspection powers, they… Read more »
Deborah555
Hugh_ dogem53 The breeding rate in the last 12 months has been reduced by 50% I'd call that self regulation brought about by participants . Participants have accepted lower prize money in exchange for better welfare outcomes. The industry can operate without breeding huge numbers. What some participants have objected to is the administration's obsession with kennel sizes and not the real issues which are overbreeding and not enough rehoming. So we just did it ourselves 50% reduction in 12 months without any overpaid pollie needed at all. A very high standard of welfare is required to get a dog to… Read more »
lone widow I think the National party politicians are the only politicians left who care about anything other than infrastructure in Sydney. Quite a few of them have stepped up to support greyhound racing. Let's hope they continue to support, not just the greyhound people, but all the people in regional Australia. Baird has shown he is simply on a mission to sell every state owned income producing asset so he can pounce around about his surplus ( doesn't say much about where the replacement for electricity generation income will come from five years from now though.) This "captain's call" just… Read more »
Deborah555 Hugh_ dogem53 It doesn't matter if the breeding has dropped by 50% or whatever %. That doesn't change the equation of a breeding program where the objective is to obtain fast runners. Of the dogs bred, only a minority will have what it takes. The rest are surplus to the industry. Or are you suggesting that with this drop in breeding that the percentage of bred dogs that race has increased? Is that what you're claiming? Unless all dogs are tracked and it can be demonstrated that none of them are killed, then the absolute number of dogs bred doesn't… Read more »
Hugh_ Deborah555 dogem53 whether a dog is fast Hugh is relative to the other runners. With less dogs the times might go down but racing can still occur. I can assure you Hugh that my retired greyhounds are looked after well and loved and cared for regardless of how much money they won or actually didn't win might be a more accurate statement. Any greyhound in my kennel is cared for and fed well regardless of their ability. Greyhounds are tracked Hugh. Pups are micro-chipped before three months of age, registered if they race. Well Hugh if you haven't got a fast one you… Read more »


text:
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Mary Slattery
E-mail: mary.slattery@corcoran.com
Mary Slattery simply loves being of service to people. There's just no other way to say it. Knowing that her efforts can make a difference in someone's life is all the reward she needs for working hard on her clientele's behalf when listing or selling a home. Born in Springfield, Missouri and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Mary earned a BA in Theatre and Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and headed direly to New York City the minute she graduated to pursue a career as an actress. In the Big Apple, she enjoyed success off-Broadway, on soaps, in television and radio commercials and as a spokesperson in industrial
Mary soon found her way behind the scenes as well working as a producer of corporate industrial shows and television talk shows.
Mary purchased her first Hamptons home in 1997 and began to split her time between Manhattan and the Hamptons. Her love of the East End grew and she made the decision to plant permanent roots out east in 2000. Mary's innate service orientation led her to work in fundraising and special events for such fine East End charities as The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton Cultural Center, Southampton Fresh Air Home, Southampton Hospital, and ultimately as Director of Development for The Retreat in East Hampton. With her interpersonal savvy, market knowledge and widespread connections, Mary's segue into real estate came quite naturally. Today, she strives for solid working partnerships with fellow East End real estate agents, who share her belief in the value of team coverage and implementation of strong public relations and marketing skills to best serve their clients and customers. Believing wholeheartedly that all success is based on relationships, and that the best way to find and maintain those relationships is involvement in one's community, Mary is very proud of her participation and support of area causes including Have A Heart Community Trust, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton Arts Center, Bay Street Theater, The Ellen Hermanson Foundation and Southampton Youth Services, Inc. She is especially proud to serve on the Executive Committee of Corcoran Cares as East End Co-Chair.
Mary who resides in Water Mill with her AKC champion English Cocker Spaniels, practices fitness programs such as Barre classes, yoga and power walking. Mary is an avid theater and concert attendee in New York City and on the East End and truly enjoys the peace and serenity found in the Hamptons.
© 2020 Dan's Hamptons Media


text:
Posts Tagged 'Johnny Isakson'
The GOP Is Not Your Savior | The Libertarian Institute
Unfortunately, the answer is that the Republicans would not have saved us, and for two reasons, one historical and the other philosophical: (1) Republicans have never saved us from the bad policies and programs of Democrats, regardless of whether they had partial or total control of the government and could have done something, and (2) Republicans are philosophically not much different from Democrats, regardless of how often and how loud they recite their conservative mantra about the Constitution, the free market, limited government, federalism, traditional values, free enterprise, a balanced budget, individual freedom, free trade, and property rights.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-gop-is-not-your-savior/
by Laurence Vance
If Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) had not gotten sick and resigned his Senate seat, then the title of this article would have been "Will the Republicans Save Us?"
After serving in the Georgia state house and senate, Isakson served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. He was re-elected in 2010 and 2016. Although his Senate term did not expire until January 2023, in August 2019 he announced that because of his Parkinson's disease and other health challenges, he was resigning his Senate seat effective at the end of 2019. Under Georgia law, the governor—Brian Kemp, a Republican—was allowed to make an appointment to fill the unexpired term until the next regularly scheduled statewide election (November 3, 2020). He selected Republican Kelly Loeffler, the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), who had never held political office. She assumed office in January 2020.
Under Georgia election law, all candidates for a special election, regardless of their political party, compete in a "jungle primary" where every name is on the November general election ballot. If no candidate in what is usually a crowded field receives more than 50 percent of the vote, then a runoff election is conducted in January. All told, there were twenty-one candidates—including a write-in candidate who received seven votes—most of whom received less than 1 percent of the vote. Loeffler finished second in the special election with 25.9 percent of the vote. That is why she was in the January 5 runoff election for the Senate seat she held at the time. But although Loeffler claimed to be the most conservative Republican in the Senate, and was considered to be the richest member of the Senate, she lost in the runoff election to the Democrat Raphael Warnock by the slim margin of 50.8 to 49.2 percent.
It is because of this special election that Georgia was the only state to hold two Senate elections in 2020. In the Senate, the 100 senators are divided into three classes with staggered terms. Thus, only one-third of the Senate seats are contested at any election, and never more than one Senate seat in a state. In the regular Senate race in Georgia, the incumbent Republican David Perdue—the cousin of former Georgia governor and Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue—was seeking a second term. But as he received only 49.7 percent of the vote (47.9 percent went for Democrat Jon Ossoff and 2.3 percent went for Libertarian Shane Hazel), Georgia law required a runoff election between the top two candidates. But in the January 5 runoff election, Ossoff defeated Perdue by a margin of 50.4 to 49.6 percent.
Winning these two Georgia Senate seats is how the Democrats wrested control of the Senate from the Republicans, who had controlled the Senate since January 2015. Prior to the Georgia runoff election, there were 50 Republicans in the Senate and 48 Democrats (including the two independent members of the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, who caucus with the Democrats). So now that the Senate is tied 50-50, the Democratic vice president, the former senator Kamala Harris, gets to cast the tie-breaking vote, effectively giving Democrats control of the Senate.
The Democrats
One-party control of the government is dangerous. Gridlock in the Congress helps prevent one party — whether Democrats or Republicans — from exercising unbridled power. Thus, even if one Georgia Senate seat had been won by a Republican, it could have stopped bad legislation proposed by Democrats from passing (assuming that all of the Senate Republicans voted together). But the reality is that life under Democratic rule will be especially dangerous to privacy, liberty, and property.
Now, we know that the Democratic Party for many years has been the party of liberalism, progressivism, collectivism, socialism, paternalism, statism, environmentalism, "social justice," economic egalitarianism, organized labor, taxpayer-funded abortion, public education, climate change, affirmative action, welfare, higher taxes on the "rich," universal single-payer health care, increased government regulation of the economy and society, increased government spending, larger and more-intrusive government, and assorted income-transfer programs and wealth-redistribution schemes. The Democratic solution to every problem, injustice, or crisis — real, imaginary, or contrived—is invariably more government, more government intervention, or more government money.
The Democratic Party is not just going to pick up where it left off at the end of the Obama administration. Democrats in Congress will stop at nothing to achieve their agenda. The Democratic Party of today is even more radical than it was twelve years ago during the first two years of Obama's first term, which was the last time that Democrats had total control of the federal government (House, Senate, presidency).
What's On the Table
In an episode of "The Libertarian Angle" recorded just two days after the Electoral College vote was certified, Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger and Citadel professor Richard Ebeling examined the question of life under Democratic control and it was not a pretty picture they painted. According to Hornberger and Ebeling, we are going to see massive increases in federal spending, and the debt ceiling rendered totally irrelevant; massive foreign intervention, since Biden is essentially owned by the national-security state; increased focus on official enemies, expansion of the role of the military in American life, expansion of the welfare state, the revitalization of Obamacare, the attempt to implement a full-fledged government health-care system, and the expansion of the war on drugs (a war that Biden supported when he was vice president and Harris supported as a prosecutor); increased federal regulations, massive welfare-state socialism, a more centrally planned economy, massive debauchery of the currency, tax increases, increased anti-trust enforcement, a national increase in the minimum wage, elements of the "green new deal," and emphasis on equality of outcomes and proportional representation of minorities in all groups; and more money creation by the Fed, increased inflation, wage and price controls to combat inflation, and a more interventionist foreign policy. They concluded that under a Biden administration, everything is on the table that could be a danger to our liberty, privacy, income, wealth, property, and freedom in the marketplace.
To this we can certainly add increased deficit spending, further increases in the national debt, unrestricted funding for Planned Parenthood, loosened restrictions on taxpayer-funded abortions, increased enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, expanded gun-control laws, a federal family-leave policy, government-funded child care, increased resources devoted to fighting climate change, increased violation of privacy and civil liberties in response to the coronavirus, fewer welfare-work requirements, and increased promotion of the transgender movement.
On the basis of statements in the 2020 Democratic Party platform, the recommendations in the "Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations," and statements from Biden himself, we can also look forward to extended unemployment benefits, a $15 per hour minimum wage, and more-generous refundable tax credits that give even more Americans tax refunds of money that they never paid in; increased funding for food stamps, WIC, and school-meal programs; greater "investment" in mass transit and transportation public-works projects, "fair" trade policies and deals, expanded farm and housing subsidies, a national goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings and vehicles, and "environmental justice"; increases in corporate tax rates, aggressive attempts to increase the supply of "affordable" housing, increased government efforts to close the racial wealth gap, increased spending on K-12 education, tuition-free college, increased federal education grants, extended student-loan payment suspension, and student-debt relief; and making Washington, D.C., the 51st state, an increased push for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, the ending of cash bail, the passing of an Equal Rights Amendment, increased condemnation of "hate speech," the reauthorization and expansion of the Violence Against Women Act, the securing of equal pay for women, and increased funding for arts and culture.
This article was originally featured at the Future of Freedom Foundation
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: a balanced budget, Constitution, federalism, free enterprise, free trade, GOP, Individual freedom, Johnny Isakson, limited government, Property Rights, the free market, traditional values | Leave a Comment »


text:
Q: StaleObjectStateException: Transaction Error in Grails I have a TaskList entity with many workable Task entities and certain Tasks can "close" the TaskList.
class TaskList {
    ...
    static hasMany = [
        tasks: Task
    ]
}

class Task {
    ...
    static belongsTo = [taskList: TaskList]
}

Now when a Task is updated and it can "close" the TaskList, I make a TaskListService call to closeList()
class TaskListService {
    def closeList(TaskList taskList) {
        taskList.status = "CLOSED"
        taskList.save()
    }
}

// TaskController pseudo-update
def update () {
    Task taskInstance = Task.get(params.id)
    //... do something with the taskInstance
    taskListService.closeList(taskInstance.taskList)
}

My problem is when a user updates the TaskList entity while the TaskListService is updating it.
class TaskListController {
    def update () {
        TaskList taskListInstance = TaskList.get(params.id)
        //... do some stuff
        taskListInstance.properties = params
        taskListInstance.save(flush:true)
    }
}

org.hibernate.StaleObjectStateException: Row was updated or deleted by another transaction (or unsaved-value mapping was incorrect): [com.giotta.TaskList#1]

How do I avoid this version conflict?

A: If you expect concurrent edits, you have to use explicit locking. You're using optimistic locking, which is so named since you use it when you hope that there won't be concurrent edits, and that in rare cases where this happens you can just handle the problem.
Use the lock() method instead of the get() method and do the update after that. Note that locking only makes sense in a transaction, so pass the id to the service instead of the whole instance.
class TaskListService {
    def closeList(long taskListId) {
        TaskList taskList = TaskList.lock(taskListId)
        taskList.status = "CLOSED"
        taskList.save()
    }
}

// TaskController pseudo-update
def update () {
    Task taskInstance = Task.get(params.id)
    //... do something with the taskInstance
    taskListService.closeList(taskInstance.taskListId)
}

Here I'm using the taskListId dynamic property. You may need to change that to taskInstance.taskList.id