Part II: Soldiering on? The invisible injuries of war

By: Law is Cool · November 8, 2009 · Filed Under Health Law, International Law, Politics · Add Comment

Guest Post by Krystalline Kraus | Reproduced from www.rabble.ca with permsision

Next week, on November 11, veterans will get only two minutes of recognition — if people stop to reflect at all — while the rest of the year their sacrifice is forgotten.

If Canada’s mission in Afghanistan does end in 2011, 35,000 men and women will have served in that theatre — 133 have been killed thus far — and the Canadian Forces’ (CF) low estimate is that as many as 2,000 could be returning home with an Operational Stress Injury (OSI) such as PTSD.

These soldiers will return home with, among other things, an OSI or plagued by survivor’s guilt and the pressure to do good by their dead friends; first they bury them and then they bury their own feelings. As the saying goes: Survivors die twice.

Massacre at Fort Hood

The problems the U.S. military would prefer to hide violently surged to the public’s attention when Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old U.S. Army psychiatrist, allegedly opened fire yesterday afternoon at Fort Hood, Texas. He is accused of killing 13 people and wounding 30.

A New York Times article features an interview with Hasan’s cousin, who states that he expressed deep concern about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan; the cousin also notes that Hasan’s job was to counsel returning soldiers suffering with PTSD which gave him an intimate window into the horrors of war. This made him fearful of deploying to either theatre. His cousin also claims he was having second thoughts about his military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim.

Post tags: afghanistan, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Dallaire, Department of National Defense, Fort Hood, iraq, krystalline kraus, National Association of Probation Officers, Nidal Malik Hasan, Operational Stress Injury, PTSD, suicide, Texas, The Canada First Defence Strategy, Walter Natynchuk

Into the minds of the condemned: statements from Death Row

By: Lawrence Gridin · September 30, 2009 · Filed Under Criminal Law · 1 Comment

What’s it like to live on Death Row? What’s it like to die there?

I wonder how a person can stand to wait in a small cell, watching the second hand of a clock tick down to their execution? After an average 10 year wait, the person is finally led down a hallway, strapped to a gurney, and injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.

Since 1982, when Texas began utilizing lethal injections to kill people, 441 people have been executed by the State. Moments before the execution, the warden asked each of these inmates whether they had any last words. All of their last statements have been recorded.

A friend of mine sent me a link to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Death Row page, which contains every last statement given since 1982.

I have to admit that I sat for an hour and read over a hundred of these last statements. There was something incredibly powerful and compelling about the final words that a person speaks when they know they are about to die. I had a hard time pulling myself away from them.

It doesn’t matter whether you are for or against capital punishment. If we move beyond the cold statistics of the offender’s height, race, and education level, their last statements poignantly remind us that these convicts are human beings that bleed and feel pain like you and I.

Many of the statements express remorse. Others are shocking. Some are even funny. But the common thread that ties all of the statements together is the foreboding sense of inevitability, resignation, and acceptance of a pre-determined fate. I have reproduced some of the statements below (in their entirety):

Post tags: Criminal Law, death penalty, death row, last statement, murder, TDC, Texas, united states

Death by procedure

By: Law is Cool · August 20, 2009 · Filed Under Civil Rights, Criminal Law · Add Comment

US judge ‘ignored death row plea’

The prisoner, Michael Wayne Richard, was put to death hours after she allegedly shut the court, despite being told an appeal was imminent.

Post tags: court, death sentence, execution, Michael Wayne Richard, professional misconduct, Sharon Keller, Texas, us

B&E or Homicide? Choose Quick!

By: Law is Cool · May 21, 2009 · Filed Under Criminal Law, International Law · Add Comment

If you had to choose between being killed, or having your house robbed while you were out or asleep, which would you choose?

Earlier today the Texas Senate passed a bill that would allow concealed handguns on campus, presumably including law schools.

According to Statistics Canada (2001), the homicide rate in Canada is 1.8 per hundred thousand. In the U.S. it’s more than three times that, at 5.5 per hundred thousand. Aggravated assault? 143 in Canada, and 324 in the U.S.

NRA supporters always claims that guns help keep America safe. And they might have a point.

Breaking and entering rates in the U.S. are lower than in Canada, at 521 per hundred thousand to 954. And motor vehicle thefts are 414 compared to 728 per hundred thousand.

But it’s just as plausible that more crimes in the U.S. are commissioned armed than not as compared to Canada. And it’s not just an American problem.

Over half the handguns discovered related to crimes in Canada were smuggled from the U.S. It’s a little better than Japan, where 30% of their illegal handguns come from the States. But then they have this big ocean separating them too.

Maybe we can feel some comfort in knowing that a full 80% of crime scene guns in Mexico were also smuggled from the U.S. And that Texas is as far from the Canadian border as possible.

Maybe.