{"id":570,"date":"2005-06-21T01:10:47","date_gmt":"2005-06-21T08:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=570"},"modified":"2005-06-21T01:10:47","modified_gmt":"2005-06-21T08:10:47","slug":"from-singapore-by-way-of-alabama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/21\/from-singapore-by-way-of-alabama\/","title":{"rendered":"From Singapore, by way of Alabama"},"content":{"rendered":"

From my j-school friend Zakir<\/a>, who just took a trip down to Alabama after leaving New York before heading home to his native Singapore.<\/p>\n

Hey y’all, <\/p>\n

Hope you’re doing well. Apologies for the mass mail, but I said I’d send a proper update since school ended, and if I haven’t mentioned it, I spent over a week in early June in Alabama reporting thanks to a grant. I managed to get out of the Deep South in one piece. I was in the thick of a white supremacist (the Council of Conservative Citizens
\na.k.a. the ‘Uptown Klan’) rally and protest against the Southern Poverty Law Center, where 50 marchers draped themselves in Confederate flags and sang Dixie. All at the heart of where the Civil Rights movement began, and barely an hour after I’d been to Dr. King’s barber.<\/p>\n

I’d gone in search of a story on how some activists were working for a moratorium on executions and the challenges they faced. The state bar association wanted to publish a booklet on the pros and cons of a moratorium on the death penalty, and the attorney-general’s office refused to write the section on cons so the project had to be dropped.
\nI spoke to a death row inmate, exonerees (one after 18 years), families and attorneys, and it was plain shocking how capital cases were still handled in this day and age – drunk and inexperienced attorneys, prosecutors hiding evidence, forced confessions, the works. Alabama is the state with the highest per capita rate of death sentences handed down, and it’s not over with the execution\/s – Grace Singleton, whose mentally retarded son Cornelius was executed in 1992, still wants to right the record. Her son, IQ 57, confessed to murder while his girlfriend was sitting on his lap. She was excited to read about the trial of the men involved in Emmett Till’s murder 50 years before that she wanted to clear her son’s name before she died. Oh, she also wants to get on Oprah to help her case.<\/p>\n

Two blocks down the avenue facing the state Capitol, a man was painting the Ten Commandments on slabs of stone. I stop to chat, we get round to the death penalty, and he wishes he’d brought along his concordance as we spend a half hour flipping through the Bible looking for passages that justify the death penalty. But that Sunday, I was shocked to hear the pastor at Dr. King’s old church slam missionaries for having wreaked as much damage as military force had, destroying whole cultures and civilizations. He criticized congregants for not speaking out against this travesty, war included. And watching the local (baseball) team, the Montgomery Biscuits, at the ballpark, the cultural significance of “three strikes, you’re out” finally hit me.<\/p>\n

A local talk radio host found me at an execution day vigil, and I went on his talk radio show on Radio Montgomery for two hours, where redneck “hang ’em all” legislators and flaming liberal “we’re still in the dark ages down here” pastors called in, and talk (I only had under a minute to report what I’d discovered before being interrogated) went
\nfrom caning and flogging (like in Singapore) and hanging\/lethal injections to the Downing Street memo. Anyhow, ‘Bama is an experience I’d highly recommend if you get a lead or story or any excuse to travel there.<\/p>\n

cheers,
\nzak<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From my j-school friend Zakir, who just took a trip down to Alabama after leaving New York before heading home to his native Singapore. Hey y’all, Hope you’re doing well. Apologies for the mass mail, but I said I’d send a proper update since school ended, and if I haven’t mentioned it, I spent over a week in early June in Alabama reporting thanks to a grant. I managed to get out of the Deep South in one piece. I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-9c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}