(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

In today’s New York Times, reporter Nina Bernstein authors a compelling narrative about Ahmad Tanveer, a Pakistani New Yorker whose 2005 death was only publicly revealed today — nearly four years after he passed away in anonymity at the Monmouth County Correctional Facility in Freehold, N.J.. Despite efforts by a number of news organizations and groups like the ACLU to get Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release any and all information in their possession about every detainee who has died in their custody, Tanveer’s case was not uncovered until the ACLU sued for information, and the Times diligently pushed hard for the truth. As Bernstein writes in her piece today, Tanveer’s case “underscores the secrecy and lack of legal accountability that continue to shield [our nation’s immigration detention] system from independent oversight.”

The Times’ story today is the direct result of thousands of documents obtained by the ACLU from ICE and other Department of Homeland Security entities through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in June 2007, and a subsequent lawsuit filed one year later. Tom Jawetz, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project, has spent months poring through the documents and analyzing what they reveal — including Tanveer’s previously unknown death. We worked with Bernstein to cultivate this story, which includes some very strong original reporting that shows how it is that the death of a man in the custody of the U.S. government could so easily slip through the cracks. For years, ICE has been allowed to create a makeshift system of immigration detention centers across the country with little to no oversight, and no mandate for accountability or transparency. The result: hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year are thrown into detention facilities where they live for weeks, months and in some cases even years on end with little contact with the outside world. They have no access to adequate medical care, even in the face of life or death emergencies.

Among the documents that Bernstein references in her story and which were obtained by the ACLU is a two-page handwritten letter from one of Tanveer’s fellow detainees who pleads for an investigation into the death. The letter documents how Tanveer complained about severe chest pain to an officer who made him wait for two hours before a nurse checked his blood pressure and called an ambulance. By then it was too late: Tanveer died upon arrival at the emergency room.

A second document obtained by the ACLU, a memo from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General which was drafted about a month after Tanveer’s death, refers Tanveer’s case to ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The memo makes clear that ICE was under no obligation to report back to the OIG any of its findings. No investigative report by ICE has yet been produced — maybe someone should have required a response.

The callousness with which our government’s officials have too often treated the deaths of immigrant detainees in their custody is nothing short of a national disgrace. But at long last, a full picture of the failings of our government to ensure adequate medical care and provide necessary oversight is finally beginning to come into focus.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

The venerable Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, can still remember a day from his childhood growing up in the abject poverty of a South African township when he happened to stumble upon a tattered old copy of Ebony magazine.

Inside that particular issue were stories and images of a man named Jackie Robinson, and of a baseball team called the Brooklyn Dodgers, stories and images that Tutu says were captivating for a young man who wasn't normally allowed to dream very far beyond the seemingly hopeless segregation that defined the world in which he lived.

"I didn't know baseball from ping-pong," the man who would grow up to become the primary architect of South Africa's historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission said last week in front of an audience at the Riverside Church in New York City, one of the nation's most prominent Protestant cathedrals. "But that didn't matter. I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to know that someone who looked like me could overcome such obstacles and play Major League Baseball."

And so began a love affair with the United States, the country that for Tutu and his contemporaries symbolized hope and the promise of equality, and which was equally epitomized by the exploits of the heavyweight prize fighter Joe Louis and the resilient spirit of the civil rights movement.

"All of us kids knew by heart the Gettysburg Address," Tutu said.

One can imagine, then, what a punch to the gut it might have been to find out that the same United States that gave birth to democracy and the concept of equal rights for all people, also endorsed the death penalty, one of the world's gravest injustices.

"It was a disillusionment that is hard to describe to know that this land that we adored had this huge blight on it — that you believed in the death penalty," Tutu said. "I simply could not imagine how that could be so."

Tutu joined noted author and historian Thomas Cahill at Riverside last week to discuss the life and execution of Dominique Green, killed by the state of Texas in 2004. But Texas could not kill Green before he underwent an extraordinary journey of personal transformation which began with his abuse, neglect and eventual abandonment as a child, and resulted in his blossoming into a man who helped numerous other prisoners endure the torturous nature of death row. Green's poetry and artwork have been displayed at exhibits around the world. Cahill's recent book is entitled A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green.

Tutu's searing words against the senseless execution of a man who never had a real shot in this life, and against the death penalty in any instance in this country, could not have been timelier.

Budget shortfalls that have plagued statehouses from coast to coast have provided the backdrop for the most significant abolition movement in recent memory. Because of the exorbitant cost to taxpayers of maintaining the death penalty, legislatures in Colorado, Montana, Kansas, New Hampshire and Maryland have all recently debated ending the use of the death penalty. And in New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson must decide by midnight tonight whether to sign a bill passed by the state's Senate last week that would end the use of capital punishment in that state.

But the fiscal problems that prompted these states to consider abolishing the death penalty threaten to obscure the social and moral implications of our nation's continued reliance on executions.

The death penalty is indeed an unjustifiable expense, but even more significant are the serious and rampant flaws inherent to our capital punishment system that simply cannot be ignored. The 130 innocent people who have been exonerated during the past 35 years after being sentenced to death speak to the gamble that is taken every time an execution is carried out. Study after study has shown that the death penalty is plagued by racial, economic and geographic discrimination. And there is absolutely no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime.

One can't help but wonder why we remain so committed to its use.

"Why do you do this when you are such a wonderful people," Tutu said to Riverside's congregation last week. "Why? Why? Why, when you are such an incredible people. Just look at Nov. 4. Look at what you have done. Whether you like it or not, you are part of a system and it is turning you into a violent people. Please, for your own sakes and for the sake of the world, allow the better side of yourselves, your generosity, your compassion, to shine through. Please."

(Originally posted on DailyKos.)

The New York Times today reported the latest death of a person in immigrant detention. Guido R. Newbrough, 48, was a construction worker born in Germany but who lived in the United States for the last 42 years while sporting a "Raised American" tattoo on his shoulder. Newbrough died Nov. 27 in a Virginia hospital after being detained for 11 months at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. According to the Times, he died of endocarditis, caused by a virulent staph infection that is typically cured by antibiotics. But as Times reporter Nina Bernstein writes, his infection went untreated "despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death." His pain was so bad in the days leading up to his death, the Times reported, "that he began sobbing through the night" and took to banging on doors and screaming for help. Rather than respond to his obvious medical needs, the paper reported, prison guards threw him to the floor, dragged him away, and locked him in an isolated cell.

Newbrough's death and the treatment he reportedly received at Piedmont are tragic in their own right. But what makes this story even worse is that another immigration detainee died at that very same facility two years earlier. And while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were able to conclude then that "[d]etainee health care is in jeopardy" at the facility, it is unclear what steps—if any—were taken to fix the dangerous health care deficiencies.

The ICE report (PDF) that is so critical of health care at the Piedmont facility was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request (PDF) by ACLU National Prison Project lawyer Tom Jawetz. That report was produced in the aftermath of the Dec. 2006 death of Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea native who died while in detention after his liver failed over the course of several weeks. Sall's death prompted a review of medical care at Piedmont by ICE, which concluded that "This facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervision and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees. The medical health care unit does not meet minimum ICE standards." But ICE never made that report public, and it likely would never have seen the light of day had the ACLU not sought out the report. Instead, ICE officials told its public affairs staff to formulate a public response (PDF) that made it appear as though ICE officials did everything they could to care for and revive Sall is the final moments of his life.

What the documents show is that ICE officials were well aware of the horrendous medical conditions at Piedmont and the facility's inability to adequately care for detainees with serious medical needs. Despite this knowledge, it does not appear that immigration officials did much of substance to ensure that future detainees were protected from a facility where their health care would be "in jeopardy" — and Newbrough bore the fatal brunt of this failure.

Perhaps nothing better crystallizes the significance of yesterday's landmark judicial ruling mandating that infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio take a number of concrete and substantive steps to improve the conditions and level of health care delivered to prisoners at the Maricopa County Jail then a letter received by the ACLU of Arizona from a criminal justice and sociology professor in southern Kentucky.

The professor begins his letter by making clear that he has never been much of a fan of the ACLU. He writes that he’s a supporter of the death penalty and that he believes we often are too soft on the inmates in our nation’s prisons and jails. But then he acknowledges that a vast majority of the prisoners that spend time behind bars at some point or another return to their communities, that, as a result, rehabilitation needs to be a primary aspect of incarceration and that increased education and enhanced mental health for prisoners are in fact achievable goals if the taxpayer money used to lock them up was used effectively.

“In this case, you all are bringing attention to a bad situation that has been going on for too long,” the professor writes.

For decades, the Maricopa County Jail, and the facilities the house pre-trial detainees — people who have been arrested but not yet tried or convicted — has been a literal house of horrors. Medical and mental health care has been non-existent, handfuls of detainees have been forced into a single cell leaving some to sleep without mattresses or blankets, access to things like toilets and soap and toilet paper has been spotty and the food prisoners are forced to eat often is moldy.

Arpaio not only has exhibited no concern for maintaining these conditions, he has bragged about them and used them to bolster his claim that he is “America’s toughest sheriff.” But yesterday a federal judge ruled him to be in violation of the Constitution, ordered him to ensure that medical and mental health care is provided to those who need it, that prisoners receive uninterrupted access to prescription drugs, that they have access to clean toilets and soap and that he prove to the ACLU on a quarterly basis that he is doing so.

According to Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and the ACLU’s lead counsel in the effort to force Arpaio to treat the prisoners in his care humanely, the ruling is a major victory for everyone who has or ever will have a loved one in Arpaio’s jail. But if the plight of the incarcerated in Maricopa County isn’t enough to move you, maybe the argument fronted by our professor-friend in Kentucky is.

Taxpayers deserve better than to have to prop up a jail system that only further damages the inmates who pass through its doors. Taxpayers deserve the criminal justice systems they pay for to effectively treat the men and women who spend time in them. Taxpayers deserve to have healthy and productive citizens returned to the communities in which they live.

Maybe now the taxpayers in Maricopa County finally will get what they deserve.