ACLU details deputy brutality in L.A. jails

>>> texas governor rick perry jockeying with mitt romney for the presidential race . rick perry has never lost an election in his 26 years in elected office. not one. and that is not because he hasn't had hard fights. not because he hasn't had serious well-funded high-profile big-name challengers. just last year, for example, he was challenged in his re-election bid for texas governor by texas ' long serving popular republican senator kay bailey hutchison . and there were two things that i found surprising that the hutchison for governor campaign tried to use against rick perry . the first was the more or less famous rick perry gay hidden text in the campaign website . remember this story? a reporter for the austin american statesman found in the summer of 2009 the kay bailey hutchison campaign website included a huge long list of terms that seemed designs to make her website pop on search engines . sometimes when you google something and click on one of the search results but the website that comes up doesn't actually contain the terms that you searched for? that sometimes happens because websites have this hidden text that you don't see as a user but that hidden text does get read and indexed by search engines . people do it anyway. in the case of the kay bailey hutchison campaign website , when she was running for texas governor against rick perry , among the hidden text she had hidden on her website was the phrase, rick perry gay. she actually had rick perry gay up on the hidden text of her website twice. when asked by the "austin american-statesman" about this the hutchison campaign said they had not done it on purpose, they said it was a computer generated result of the fact a lot of people were searching the phrase rick perry gay. even in saying they would make sure that hidden text was going to be taken down right away, the campaign made sure to get this quote into the newspaper. listen to this. "we did not know these offensive word associations were being searched for by hundreds of thousands of texans every day nor do we condone the computer generated existence on our website . they will be removed promptly." in other words, we're not saying rick perry is gay, we would never say that. we find the whole idea offense i. apparently a lot of people want to know. it is not unheard of for candidates to launch whisper campaigns and insinuate their opponents are gay. it happened in 1994 when george w. bush ran successfully against ann richards in texas for governor. happened again in the republican senate primary last year in delaware when christine o'donnell weirdly tried to insinuate over and over again congressman mike castle was gay. insinuations turns up in a gubernatorial campaign is not an unprecedented thing in american politics . though it is not unprecedented i think it was still a surprising gambit from the kay bailey hutchison campaign. the other surprising thing she tried to use against rick perry is the case of cameron todd willingh willingham , executed by the state of texas in 2004 despite a lot of rather troubling flaws and the evidence used to convict him. despite until the very end he said he was innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted. kay bailey hutchison is a supporter of the death penalty . she raised in her campaign against rick perry , though, the fact perry had intervened in a panel looking into the evidence against cameron todd willingham . hutchison in messing with that panel rick perry both made a mistake and was, quote, trying to ramrod a covering up. this was not in the general election . this is not rick perry running against a democrat or running against somebody who is anti- death penalty . this was a race of two vehemently pro- death penalty republican candidates in texas . which made it a surprising choice for the kay bailey hutchison campaign that they would go after him on the case of cameron todd willingham and whether or not he should have been executed. neither of those surprising choices worked out for kay bailey hutchison . in the primary she lost to rick perry by 20 points and neither of those attacks by her seem to have carried over into rick per perry 's next campaign which is the one he's in now trying to win the republican presidential nomination . the candidates he's up against in this race are throwing a million things at rick perry in terms of his record, but day are neither explicitly nor implicitly accusing him of being gay and the cameron todd willingham case, in that case, frankly rick perry is all but wearing that one like a badge of honor.

>> governor perry , a question about texas . your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times . have you -- [ applause ] have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?

>> no, sir, i've never struggled with that at all. the state of texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the supreme court of the united states if that's required. but in the state of texas , if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer , you're involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of texas . and that is you will be executed.

>> not only is governor perry not losing sleep over executing prisoners, but he rather expertly turns even a question about it around into an opportunity to get the crowd to root for him. to root for him essentially in unison against these kinds of monsters who are coming into texas and doing monstrous things to find themselves on death row . it's the same way governor perry handled it during the kay bailey hutchison race when she brought up the willingham race and accused him of the covering up, his campaign responded like this. it said, if you "oppose the death penalty for someone who murdered his three children, beat his wife while she was pregnant with twins in an effort to force an abortion, repeatedly changed his story, who confessed and whose last words were an obscenity laced tirade aimed at his ex-wife and conviction upheld nine times by federal courts , then they should just say so." so the idea was, you know, what are you, on his side? this monster ? you're worried about this guy's execution? that's why you're on this monster 's side. it's hard for anybody to get political attraction of alleged bad treatment of allegedly bad guys . when politicians get involved in crime and justice issues, the policy changes in one direction, it almost always becomes more conservative than it was before the politicians got involved. the political defense against claims that you are badly treating criminals or suspects or protesters or prisoners has always been to point at those people and say, you're taking these guys' side? these are the bad guys . you're going to take their side? so these debates always go in the same direction and it has always been true and may always be true that nobody has ever lost a race for governor in texas or a republican primary because they mistreated a bad guy . that has never been used successfully against somebody in american politics . at least it very rarely is. and that will be comforting to the governors of florida and georgia, frankly. today in florida , yet another delay in an execution. there have been seven this month nationwide. florida kills its prisoners with a lethal drug cocktail that includes a new drug something called pentobarbotol. makers stopped making it so it could not be used to kill prids prisoners. the danish company doesn't want their drug to be used to kill people. they've said it over and over and over again. the company announced this summer it would no longer sell pentobarbital to prisons in death penalty states. florida has a stock pile . hours before florida carried out the execution of manuel vall, it was delayed pending a review from the supreme court of request for a stay in part because the man's lawyer said the new death penalty drug would cause him substantial harm. the supreme court decided not to block the execution and the state of florida went ahead with it. valle was declared dead at 7:14 p.m . eastern. it was announced today a memorial service would be held friday and funeral saturday in savannah, georgia, for troy davis , who was executed by the state of georgia last week despite the fact the seven of the nine witnesses against him recanted their testimony and three jurors who voted to convict him now say they have significant doubt in the verdict. today also the largest jail in the world which naturally is in america also ended up in the news. did you ever see the movie "the hangover"? i have not seen it. it's popular among the rachel maddow staff. i asked today if people had favorite clips and it was a giant fight, people fighting over what we should show from "the hangover."

>> i looked everywhere. nobody's seen doug.

>> i don't think i've ever been this hung over .

>> what's on your arm?

>> you were in the hospital last night.

>> the only important thing now is we find doug.

>> one of the executive producers of that very popular movie, one of the executive producers of "the hangover" is a guy named scott budnick . in addition to being a hollywood producer, he does something very cool. he volunteers teaching writing to people in jail in l.a. he's done it for years. about five years ago he actually won los angeles volunteer of the year award in the district in l.a. in which he lives because he does this work. today in los angeles , mr. volunteer of the year, the man who was the producer of "the hangover" had a sworn legal declaration released by the aclu in which he describes the multiple times he was in los angeles jails and saw sheriffs deputies beating people up. people who were imprisoned there. people who were not fighting, not resisting, not provoking anything. not doing anything to deserve getting beaten up. but getting beaten up and some cases getting beaten up badly. mr. budnick says things like, "i saw the deputy grab the inmate's head and smash his head into the wall hard. it was so hard i could hear an audible crack when the deputy slammed his head against the wall. at no point did i see the inmate do anything to any of the other prisoners or deputy. the inmate was very respectful to the deputy. after i saw this, i quickly went back inside the courtroom." the biggest jail in the world, the biggest jail in the country, in the world is now in trouble. the fbi has been investigating the l.a. county jail system in secret for months now. part of the reason the jail found out that the fbi was investigating them in secret is that people in the jail, people who work in the jail, found that a prisoner inside the jail had a cell phone . they're not supposed to have cell phones . it turns out the fbi had a bribe to the fbi 's informant inside the jail so the informant could call out to the fbi and tell them what he was seeing for their investigation. ktla has also done an exclusive report earlier this year on a gang in that prison. not a gang of prisoners, but a gang among the jail guards. a gang among the prison sheriff deputies. that gang stands accused of among other things assaulting this former prisoner, a man named evans tutt. he was kicked repeatedly by deputies despite complying with his orders.

>> at least three deputies involved in tutt's case are part of the group who call themselves the 3,000 boys named after the third or 3,000th floor of men's central jail where they're assigned. the group works hard and they play hard. as a symbol, they flash gang-like hand signs. 3 fingers for 3,000. they sport similar tattoos. one even has their number inked on their neck.

>> there's a distinct line drawn between ink and nonink --

>> the ink that this current active l.a. county sheriffs deputy is talking about are the tattoos worn by groups of deputies as symbols of their allegiance to deputy affiliated gangs within the department.

>> they call them subgroups. secret societies .

>> do you think these groups breed propensity for violence?

>> you know, they brag about it. they brag about shootings.

>> the sheriff in charge of the los angeles county system acknowledges the groups exist within his department but denies they're responsible for any sort of violence. regardless because of what they describe as hundreds of reports of unprovoked assaults and beatings, specifically on the 3,000 floor of the jail you heard about, the aclu of southern california is asking the attorney general of the united states and the federal justice department to get involved here. they're asking the fbi -- excuse me, they're asking the justice department to bring a criminal investigation into how the largest jail in the country is being run. they're also asking for the sheriff who is in charge of the facility to resign. his name is lee baca . whether or not sheriff baca does resign, whether or not the justice department does turn this into a criminal investigation , if past is any prologue, no one else other than the sheriff is likely to win or lose an election because of this issue. this is politics but it is politics of a different kind. this is values politics. about who we are as a country. it is a specific kind of political work to fix problems like this. to get attention to problems with the way we are doing the death penalty these days, for example. and sometimes to get attention to the death penalty as a problem, itself. it is political work to raise enough of a ruckus to convince the catholic chaplins and the people like a hollywood producer visiting as a writing tutor , to convince people like that to speak out against the jail they're working in even though they are definitely not there to make waves. because the ruckus has to be loud enough to get people to notice and care that the biggest jail in the world probably ought to be torn down. even the sheriff admit s that. to get people to notice and care that the people for whom they probably don't have too much sympathy, still should not be beaten with impunity. it is not about whether or not you like the person who the guy in the uniform is beating up, but this is about the fact that the guy in the uniform is us. that that is in our name. this is a democracy. government of by and for the people. what sheriffs deputies did to this visitor, a visitor to the l.a. county jail, that's us. that's us. killing cameron todd willingham , that's us. no one really loses and election over stuff like this. it's true. especially on the right. there really is no compassionate conservative voting bloc holding politicians accountable on issues like this. kay bailey hutchison tried it against rick perry and lost to him by 20. these political fights do not decide elections. these political fights, every bit as much as who we elect in the next election will write what history says about who we are

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44710543/ns/local_news-los_angeles_ca/

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