Few groups in recent history have spoken out for labor rights as clearly as the Catholic church. Pope John Paul II said: “It is a fundamental right of workers to freely establish organizations to defend and promote their interests and to contribute in a responsible manner to the common task.”

When workers believe their rights are violated by Catholic organizations, their cry is “Practice what you preach!” They are often joined in this protest by prominent Catholics who read more

”I was amazed by the quality of individuals applying” at a Sept. 13 job fair at the Cleveland Convention Center, said Bill Mazur, director of warehouse operations for Mazel Co. in Solon, Ohio. Although his company needed employees and regularly used job fairs, Mazur said he had to ”have his arm twisted” to go to this one, because the fair was aimed at applicants with criminal records.

The first annual Community Corrections Job Fair was sponsored by Cuyahoga County, the read more

Suburban sprawl has caught the critical eye of several labor leaders who see the decline of cities and inner suburbs as a threat to the future of unions.

Employees in new outer suburbs earn less than their city counterparts, while most cannot use public transportation or find affordable rental housing and child care near their jobs, according to Mike Fitzgerald, president of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134 in Chicago.

The move to the outskirts does not necessarily create read more

13 April 2000

As discussed in the March 16 Culpeper News, the tenants in four houses owned by Wayne Lenn and his brothers in Culpeper County have been without safe water at least since December. The Lenns have now returned from wintering in Florida and plan to have Leazer Drilling Co. Inc. drill a new well on the property in Stevensburg. As soon as they do so, Wayne Lenn said, they will pour cement down the old well and also down an even older one on the site has not been used for years.

One read more

24 February 2001 (published at http://www.justicedenied.org)
For the first time, someone has moved from Virginia’s death row to exoneration, pardon, and freedom. The case of Earl Washington Jr. has generated a great deal of press and some limited legislative efforts to find other innocents in Virginia prisons and to prevent future false convictions. But action appears unlikely on three fronts: halting read more

Earl Washington Update (published at http://www.justicedenied.org)

By David Swanson, JD Staff Writer

Governor Jim Gilmore of Virginia pardoned Earl Washington Jr. of a 1982 murder on Oct. 2, 2000. But Washington has not been freed, as he is serving a sentence for an unrelated crime.

For the first time ever in Virginia, an innocent person condemned to death row has now been pardoned as the result of DNA testing. Earl Washington was convicted of murder 16 years ago, and the trial transcript — read more

To the Editor:
The lead article in the Aug. 24, 2000, Culpeper Star Exponent about the case of Earl Washington Jr. was horribly written even by Star Exponent standards. In the first inch of it the dates of events are wrong and the number of children who were at home at the time of the crime is wrong. In the second column, Al Martin III writes that Earl Washington has been on death row up until the present moment. This is wrong and a serious mistake. Washington was moved from death row read more

In June of 1982, Rebecca Lynn Williams, 19 and white, was raped and murdered in Culpeper. Eleven months later, a 23-year-old black mentally retarded man from Bealeton, Va., Earl Washington Jr., was arrested for the crime. He was tried for capital murder in Culpeper Circuit Court, found guilty by a jury Jan. 20, 1984, and sentenced to death.

More than a decade later, after numerous appeals in the case were denied, Gov. Douglas Wilder, on his last day in office, commuted the sentence from death read more

June 8: Overview
June 15: Chronology
June 22: The original trial
June 29: People involved looking back
By DAVID SWANSON Staff Writer

June 8: Overview

Gov. James Gilmore last week ordered new DNA testing on evidence from a 1984 Culpeper case, testing defense lawyers predict will exonerate a local man who has been behind bars for 17 years, 10 of them on death row.

Gilmore on June 1 ordered additional testing in the case of Earl Washington, a mentally retarded man from Bealeton convicted at age read more

1) No more corporate welfare or giveaways of any kind to corporations with more than 5,000 workers. Invest the money in aid to small businesses and small farms.

2) No more monopolies or mergers that do not benefit competition.

3) Slash two thirds of the military budget and give the money to the poorest Americans. Slash three-fourths of the prison budget, decriminalize addiction, and put the money into a job program to clean up the environment.

4) Eliminate the free garbage removal service from read more

I see the gap between the Right and Left in American politics as in many ways unbridgeable, requiring a leap from religion to secularism or vice versa. But I also see it as in many ways bridgeable, requiring only a willingness to recognize common goals.

The Right talks a lot about Family Values, and the Left talks a lot about a Living Wage. With some modifications in vocabulary, this could be a single successful discussion. Parents could spend time with kids if a single salary could support read more

Cavalier Daily
Last week this paper printed two articles, six editorials, and four letters on the repercussions of an assault, as well as an ongoing count of days the assailants have remained on Grounds.

(As I understand it, one student did the assaulting while two others watched along with a fourth student who has since graduated.)

In its crusade to have three students expelled, the CD has boldly taken on authorities, campaigning against cowardice, injustice, and dishonesty for the sake of read more

To Stanley Fish
cc: Columbia Law Review

12 May 1999

Dear Mr. Fish,

Thank you very much for your Columbia Law Review article “Mission Impossible…”. I enjoyed it immensely, as I do most of your work. (I have read many articles, including those in “Is There a Text in This Class?,” “Doing What Comes Naturally,” and most of those in “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech,” which I am currently reading.) I am not sure, however, whether read more

Report to the Labor Action Group at UVA:
WHAT I LEARNED AT THE ACORN LIVING-WAGE CONFERENCE
Nov. 10-12, 2000, in Baltimore

cc: V.O.P., ACORN, ULR, Greens

I have a huge pile of very useful handouts that I can photocopy. In the meantime I’ll tell you the notes I took and the highlights. I’ll be in C’ville Monday afternoon and can drop off a stack of photocopies if someone can pay a Kinko’s bill or let me use a copier. Let me know Monday morning please.

This fact may read more

A group of University of Virginia students, faculty, and staff is expected to
demonstrate Friday, March 26th, at 1:00 p.m. on behalf of a living wage
for all UVa employees. The demonstration will take place outside the Rotunda
at the center of campus where the Board of Visitors, which sets the
university’s budget, will be meeting.

Demonstrators are planning to form a picket line on the Lawn in front of the
Rotunda and to deliver to the Board a petition signed by over 900 members read more

February, 1999
In April of 1995 I wrote a paper for a graduate philosophy class at the U of Virginia with professor John Simmons. We were reading Rawls, and the paper was called “Reason and Religion in Rawls.” It’s 17 pages long but makes a simple point that is not specific to Rawls. Recently I found the same point made – the only other time I’ve seen it – in a paper by Stanley Fish in “The Revival of Pragmatism,” edited by Morris Dickstein. read more

12 January, 1999
I have sympathy for people who do cruel, selfish and destructive things – in many cases these correspond to committing crimes – because I think these people would be happier if they did not do these things, and this quite apart from the punishment often inflicted on them by their societies. I do not sympathize with the sick culture of much American music, film, and television that romanticizes crime. I do not fail to sympathize with the victims of crimes, read more

11 January, 1999
Various newspapers, beginning with the L.A. Times, have recently been running an editorial by Neal Gabler explaining the sexual inquisition in Washington, DC, as a struggle between proponents and opponents of religion, and taking the side of the religious. I think Gabler is right about the struggle, and would like to comment from the opposing camp.

Of course, beliefs can be put together in any combination. Many people oppose the impeachment of Clinton and attend church. Many read more

When I read Newsweek, I generally skim it, and even then seem to grasp it all without having to really pay attention. But sometimes I hit the George Will column, “The Last Word,” like a brick wall. I have to go back over it carefully three times, and even then can only at best guess what he’s saying. His thinking is so far removed from mine, and he is so convinced that everybody already shares his views, that I often have a hard time grasping his message.

This was the case read more

December 1998
My first encounter with the idea that prisons might be a bad idea was in reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). He spoke of alternatives or substitutes for prisons, and also for factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals, all of which he said resembled prisons. But he said not one word about what such alternatives might be, and his style struck me as pretentious. So I didn’t pay much attention.

I believed, of course, that we ought to have been devoting read more