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Two African-American half-brothers have been exonerated of rape and murder after more than 30 years behind bars in North Carolina. Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown were found guilty in 1984 of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. There was no physical evidence tying them to the crime, but police obtained confessions that McCollum and Brown have always said were coerced. Police at the time failed to investigate another man, Roscoe Artis, who lived near the crime scene and had admitted to a similar rape and murder at around the same time. After three decades, the case saw a major breakthrough last month when testing by North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission tied Artis’ DNA to the crime scene. After a hearing presenting the new evidence Tuesday, the two brothers were declared innocent and ordered freed. Over the years, death penalty supporters have cited the brothers’ case in order to back capital punishment. In 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party pasted McCollum’s mug shot on campaign mailers. In 1994, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia pointed to McCollum as an example of why the death penalty is just. We are joined by two guests: Vernetta Alston, one of the lawyers representing Henry Lee McCollum, and a staff attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation; and Steven Drizin, clinical professor at Northwestern Law School and assistant dean of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, where for more than a decade he was legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the case of two African-American half-brothers who have been exonerated of rape and murder convictions in North Carolina after over 30 years behind bars. Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown were found guilty in 1984 of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. There was no physical evidence tying them to the crime, but police obtained confessions that McCollum and Brown have always said were coerced. In fact, during his trial, McCollum recanted his confession 226 times.
AMY GOODMAN: Police at the time failed to investigate another man, Roscoe Artis, who lived near the crime scene and had admitted to a similar rape and murder at around the same time. After 30 years, the case saw a major breakthrough last month when testing by North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission tied Artis’s DNA to the crime scene. After a hearing presenting the new evidence Tuesday, the two brothers were declared innocent and ordered freed. This is McCollum speaking Wednesday after he was released from death row.
HENRY LEE McCOLLUM: I’m happy. I’m very emotion. I want to thank God for the glory. Praise all go to him. And I’ve been through—I’ve been through a long journey and sent to prison. I came here in '84 with me and my brother, Leon Brown. And it was a rough experience. Sometime I felt like giving up and stuff. But I said, "No, I can't do that." The life move on. I knew one day that I was going to be blessed to get out of prison. I just didn’t know when that time was going to be. Almighty God that kept me going strong. A lot of joy, rejoicing, happiness and everything, because I was very anxious when they told me this news and stuff. I wanted to get away from this place. And last night, I only had like a couple hours of sleep and stuff. And it’s wonderful. I mean, I just thank God. I just thank God that I’m out of this place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Both Henry McCollum and his brother, Leon Brown, have mental disabilities. McCollum’s IQ is between 60 and 69, and Brown has scored as low as 49. Both were originally sentenced to death. After a second trial, Brown was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison, while McCollum remained on death row. In a recent interview with The News & Observer after the DNA testing pointed to a likely exoneration, he said he never lost hope that he would one day see freedom.
HENRY LEE McCOLLUM: Since I have been here, I have never stopped believing that one day I would be able to walk out that door. I never stopped believing that. A long time ago, I wanted to find me a good wife, I wanted to raise a family, I wanted to have my own business and everything. I never got a chance to fulfill those dreams, never got the chance, because the people took 30 years away from me, and they destroyed my life. Now, I believe that God is going to bless me to get back out there.
AMY GOODMAN: Over the years, death penalty supporters have cited the brothers’ case in order to back capital punishment. In 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party pasted McCollum mug shot on campaign mailers. In 1994, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia pointed to McCollum as an example of why the death penalty is just.
For more, we go to Raleigh, North Carolina, where we’re joined by Vernetta Alston. She’s one of the lawyers representing Henry McCollum, and a staff attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you describe the scene yesterday, Vernetta Alston, when Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were freed?
VERNETTA ALSTON: Well, I was there for Henry’s release. I unfortunately wasn’t able to go to Maury to see Leon’s. But for Henry’s at Central Prison, it was exciting. And he was happy. He was clearly relieved. His dad and stepmother were, I think, nervous and very excited for their son to come home. And Henry, you know, had a handful of other supporters, including myself and another member of his legal team. And it was a relief.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Vernetta Alston, could you talk a little bit about the origins of the case, when they were originally arrested and the issue of the confessions and how confessions were gotten from them?
VERNETTA ALSTON: Sure. So, in September of 1983, both Henry, who was 19, and Leon, who was 15—and as you mentioned, they’re both intellectually disabled—were taken to the police—or Henry was taken to the police station by law enforcement officials and questioned for between four and five hours. And Leon came to the station—excuse me—shortly after Henry, just to check, just to see what was happening. And once he got there, he was brought into a room by two other law enforcement officials, and both boys were questioned into the early hours of the morning. And they were manipulated and threatened and told that if they just sign these statements, that they could go home. And so, you know, around 2:00 in the morning, both boys signed these statements that were filled with details that were only known to law enforcement officials at the time. And they thought that they could go home. And, you know, they quickly learned that that wasn’t the case, and they were arrested.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about their protests of innocence in prison, particularly Henry McCollum, your client?
VERNETTA ALSTON: [inaudible] I represent Henry. Henry has maintained his innocence since the day he was first detained at the Red Springs Police Department, and he has been steadfast in that claim ever since. In every meeting that I’ve had with Henry over the past two-and-a-half years, the only thing that he wanted to talk about was his innocence. And to prison officials, he’s maintained the same refrain, that he was completely innocent of this crime, and his brother Leon was, as well.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the 1994 debate, where Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia pointed to Henry McCollum as an example of why the death penalty is just. He wrote, quote, "For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!" Scalia has long been a vocal supporter of capital punishment and has suggested that an innocent man has never been put to death—at least in recent years. Vernetta Alston, what would you say to Justice Scalia now? And he was having a debate with Justice Blackmun at the time.
VERNETTA ALSTON: [inaudible] that statement, he was wrong. And this case and cases like it prove that he’s been wrong ever since, and he’s wrong now. Innocent people are on death row. Innocent people likely have been put to death. And that should be a huge problem. And I think it illustrates how irredeemable the death penalty is as a punishment.
AMY GOODMAN: In his interview with The News & Observer, Henry McCollum said he made up the story about attacking the girl, Sabrina Buie, so he could just go home after he had been interrogated for several hours. In this clip, he describes the detective’s behavior during questioning and his response.
HENRY LEE McCOLLUM: I was like sitting in a chair. He got all up in my face, hollering at me. That kind of—that kind of shook me. It scared me up a little bit, because I had never been in no police station before, being questioned by a police. Then he’s talking about, "You know you killed that girl. You know you killed that girl." I said, "Man, I didn’t kill nobody, man. I ain’t seen that girl that night." And he said, "When I come back in here, you better tell me the truth," and all that, right? I said, "I told you the truth, where I was that night." He said, "No, you told me you was at home." I said, "That was where I was: at home. I wasn’t out no 12:30 at night." I’d say he came back in like five minutes later. I had made up my mind, right, because I had never been under this much pressure, with a person hollering at me and threatening me and all that crazy stuff. So, what I did, I gave him a false name and made up a story, this is the way the crime happened, when a crime didn’t really happen that way and all that, right? Because I was trying to go home, I gave him false confession.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Henry McCollum in prison in that interview. Vernetta Alston, if you could respond to what he said? Henry McCollum had two trials?
VERNETTA ALSTON: He did. He did. And we know now that he was threatened, that, you know, because of his disabilities, because he was poor and wasn’t in a position intellectually to defend himself, that he was manipulated in that confession and forced to tell a story, again, so that what he—he thought he could go home. That’s what they told him. They said if he gave them that information, that he could leave.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Vernetta Alston, I wanted to ask you not only about the—you’ve talked about the police misconduct in this case in terms of the confessions, but what about the prosecution withholding evidence that could have been used to exonerate the men? Could you talk about that, as well?
VERNETTA ALSTON: Absolutely. So, one of the biggest pieces and one of the most alarming things that we’ve learned in the last few months through the Innocence Inquiry Commission’s work is that law enforcement had requested that a fingerprint, a known fingerprint found at the crime scene next to sticks with the victim’s blood on it—a request had been made for that fingerprint to be compared to Roscoe Artis, whose DNA was found at the scene and who committed a very similar rape three weeks later. That request—
AMY GOODMAN: Rape and murder, right?
VERNETTA ALSTON: Of rape and murder, correct. So that request was made three days before Henry’s trial and was never carried out. And based on what we know now, that request was never divulged to Henry’s trial attorneys by the state. And that represents a huge violation of Henry and Leon’s constitutional rights. And these cases, in 1984, were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt, who was a notorious, notorious supporter of the death penalty and who secured between 40 and 50 death sentences during his tenure as district attorney. And so, I think what we’ve seen as a pattern in those cases is that he was incredibly reckless, to the point where all but two of his convictions, his death sentences, had been overturned. And the only two that haven’t are folks who have been executed. And so, I think that should signal a huge problem with all of his cases, in terms of what he’s turned over, what he hasn’t, in his own rush to judgment, in his own priorities in getting a conviction rather than seeking the truth.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion after break. Vernetta Alston, stay with us, one of the lawyers for Henry McCollum and a staff attorney for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. When we come back, we’ll also be joined by Steve Drizin, who is the legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Stay with us.
[break]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue to look at the case of Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown, two African-American half-brothers who have been exonerated of rape and murder convictions in North Carolina after over 30 years behind bars.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the case and the broader issue of false confessions, we’re joined by Steve Drizin. He’s clinical professor at Northwestern Law School, also the assistant dean of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, where for more than a decade he’s legal director of their Center on Wrongful Convictions. Still with us, Vernetta Alston, one of the lawyers for Henry McCollum and a staff attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. She is with us in North Carolina. He is with us in Chicago. Steven Drizin, how did this case happen? Talk about the case of Brown and McCollum, and after 30 years, it was discovered that the DNA actually belonged to another man.
STEVEN DRIZIN: Well, the case happened as in many cases of false confessions. It begins with a brutal, horrific crime, often the murder and rape of a small child. And police officers are desperate to solve that case, and they zero in on suspects who are innocent, but, for whatever reason, believe they are guilty. In this case, the only reason they suspected Henry McCollum is because a local 17-year-old girl had said she didn’t like the way that he stared at women in the community. So once they focused on McCollum, they brought him in and they grilled him relentlessly for hours. And they threatened him with the death penalty, and they promised him that he would go home. And they prepared a detailed written statement for him to sign. And at that point in time, as he says, "I would have pretty much signed anything in order to go home."
The fact that this confession was unreliable was apparent on the very face of this confession. As his attorney remarked, there were a ton of details in the confession that only law enforcement officers had known. They obviously put those in the confession. But when they asked him a question about who he participated with in the crime, he named two other young men who were never even charged in the case, because they had rock-solid alibis. So, once this confession entered the case and entered the stream of evidence, it’s the most powerful piece of evidence in a court of law, and their conviction and sentence of death was pretty much assured.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve Drizin, the issue of how often these confessions become the basis of capital punishment cases, could you talk about that?
STEVEN DRIZIN: Well, we know that among the cases that have led to exonerations of people by DNA evidence, that approximately 20 to 25 percent of those approximately 320 exonerations involve false confessions. We also have evidence of hundreds of other false confession cases, and almost all of them, more than 80 percent of them, are in murder cases, which in most states qualify for capital punishment.
AMY GOODMAN: Vernetta Alston, the whole issue of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, what is that? And how were they the ones, ultimately, to exonerate the two half-brothers?
VERNETTA ALSTON: Sure. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission is an independent state agency that was created around 2007, 2008. And so they function independent of—they’re not related to any prosecutorial agencies or any defense organizations. They’re an independent agency that looks into claims of innocence to find, you know, evidence that hasn’t been uncovered and to verify claims of innocence. They got involved in 2010, following a letter from Leon Brown in 2009 asking them to look into his case. So, from 2010 up until basically Tuesday, they’ve had an active investigation going on in Leon Brown’s case, with the understanding that the evidence related to Leon’s case is identical to that for Henry McCollum. So that’s how they got involved. And they’ve conducted—they’ve done an exhaustive investigation and have tested and retested many of the items of physical evidence that were found. They’ve conducted interviews. They’ve done a phenomenal job in this case.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve Drizin, the importance of this commission in North Carolina? And I understand it’s one of the only ones like it in the country. And the impact that this could have in other states around the country?
STEVEN DRIZIN: You can’t overstate the importance of this commission. These two men would have probably died in prison if it wasn’t for their exhaustive investigation. And there is no other state with such a commission. The beauty of the commission is that it has subpoena power. It can obtain documents that oftentimes are not produced by the state to defense attorneys. That, in fact, happened in this case. It can expedite DNA testing and can send it to a private lab and make sure that the results qualify for being uploaded into a national database. It did a wide-ranging and exhaustive investigation, and it was completely independent of any of the parties in the case. So when they took a fresh look at this case, they were not looking at it with blinders on. There was no chance of tunnel vision. They were just seeking the truth.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what prompted North Carolina to establish the commission?
STEVEN DRIZIN: A number of wrongful convictions, including several in death penalty cases, led the then-Supreme Court chief justice, I. Beverly Lake, to convene a commission on actual innocence. And that commission looked at all of the causes of wrongful convictions in North Carolina and passed and suggested a number of reforms to prevent wrongful convictions. And one of the reforms it suggested was to have an independent body outside of the court system to be able to evaluate claims of innocence.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Drizin, Henry McCollum’s own lawyers pressured him to plead guilty in the second trial. Can you talk about this?
STEVEN DRIZIN: It just shows to me a couple things. One is, is the way in which the death penalty can corrupt the search for truth. Clearly, police officers coerced and threatened these suspects with the death penalty at the beginning. The prosecutor wore his death penalty convictions like notches on his belt in this case. And even the death penalty lawyers, two of the best death penalty lawyers I know of, they felt compelled to pressure Henry to confess to an expert, because they figured that they were going to—that Henry was going to get convicted after his case had been reversed, and that they needed him to confess in order to save his life. So the mere presence of the death penalty corrupted the search for truth at every single process of this case. And you have to understand one thing. I salute the lawyers in this case, the defense lawyers. They did a miraculous job to keep these two men alive for 31 years. But the reality was, is back in 1983, and even in 1988, when these men were tried, we didn’t know very much about false—[no audio]
AMY GOODMAN: We seem to have just lost the audio for Professor Steve Drizin. He is a clinical professor at Northwestern Law School, assistant dean of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, where for more than a decade he was legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I’d like to ask Vernetta Alston, your client, Henry McCollum, was for 30—more than 30 years in prison. During that time, about what, more than 40 other death row inmates that he was sharing cells with or was incarcerated with ended up being executed? Could you talk about the emotional damage done to him during all these years?
VERNETTA ALSTON: Absolutely. Yeah, Henry witnessed or saw 42—lived through 42 executions while he was on death row. He saw many of his friends, many of the people he spent most of the days with, executed. And it took a tremendous toll on him. It got to the point where, when an execution was scheduled and was set to be carried out, he would get so anxious and so depressed, that the staff would have to isolate him. They’d have to put him basically in a cage by himself, just so they could watch him, because he would become so distraught and so emotional at seeing one of his friends taken to an execution chamber. And that pattern persisted over the many years that he had to see his fellow inmates executed. And so, it has resulted in, you know, I think, years of depression and anxiety that he still struggles with.
AMY GOODMAN: Steven Drizin, we’re talking to you from perhaps the death penalty [sic] capital of the United States, from Chicago. Can you talk about—or, the issue of false convictions. Can you talk about what is happening in Illinois?
STEVEN DRIZIN: Well, we’re not the death penalty capital of the United States; we abolished the death penalty.
AMY GOODMAN: I meant to say "false convictions."
STEVEN DRIZIN: Yeah, we are the false confession capital of the United States. And part of the reason we abolished the death penalty is because over the past decade or so we’ve had literally dozens of cases of young African-American men who were pressured into falsely confessing to murders and rapes that they did not commit, very much like the McCollum case. And as those cases began to mount, pressure to first put a moratorium in place and then to abolish the death penalty happened here in Illinois. And I hope that the McCollum case, which is one of those "I’m mad as hell, and I just can’t take it anymore" kind of cases, leads North Carolina to finally abolish the death penalty there.
AMY GOODMAN: Steven Drizin, I want to thank you for being with us, clinical professor at Northwestern Law School, assistant dean of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, for more than a decade the legal director for their Center on Wrongful Convictions. And thank you so much to Vernetta Alston, one of the lawyers for Henry McCollum, a staff attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll have a discussion with the candidates in the Democratic primary for governor and lieutenant governor here in New York state. Stay with us.
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New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is being challenged in his own party’s upcoming primary. We host a discussion with two candidates facing off on the party’s ballot. We are joined by Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout and her running mate for lieutenant governor, Tim Wu, who coined the concept of net neutrality. We are also joined political activist Randy Credico, also running for governor. While most of the Democratic establishment has backed the Cuomo ticket, the Teachout-Wu campaign has received some notable endorsements, including the Public Employees Federation, the state’s second-largest union of government workers, as well as the state chapters of the National Organization of Women and the Sierra Club. Credico, who has previously run for New York City mayor and U.S. Senate, is running on a platform calling for economic justice and the reform of the state’s drug laws. So far, Cuomo and his lieutenant governor candidate Kathy Hochul have declined all invitations to debate their challengers. We invited them to join us today for this discussion, but they declined.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to politics here in New York state, where Andrew Cuomo, one of the nation’s most well-known Democratic governors, is facing a challenge from within his own party as he seeks re-election. Voters head to the polls next Tuesday for the state’s Democratic primary. Cuomo’s quest for re-election has taken some unexpected turns as he faces two primary challengers, Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout and comedian and activist Randy Credico. Last week, The New York Times declined to endorse any of the candidates in the primary. The paper criticized Cuomo in part because of his decision to disband a commission he had created to root out corruption in state politics. The paper praised Teachout’s push to fight corruption and reform the state’s campaign finance system.
Meanwhile, the Times editorial page did endorse Teachout’s running mate, Tim Wu, for lieutenant governor over former U.S. Congresswoman Kathy Hochul, who is running with Cuomo. Wu is a Columbia Law professor, best known for coming up with the open Internet principle of "net neutrality." If he were to win, Wu would become the first Asian American elected to a statewide office in New York state.
AMY GOODMAN: While most of the Democratic establishment has backed the Cuomo ticket, the Teachout-Wu campaign has received some notable endorsements, including the Public Employees Federation, the state’s second-largest union of government workers, as well as the state chapters of the National Organization of Women and the Sierra Club. Randy Credico, who has previously run for New York City mayor and the U.S. Senate, is running on a platform calling for economic justice and the reform of the state’s drug laws.
So far, Governor Cuomo and former Congressmember Hochul have declined all invitations to debate their challengers. We invited them to join us today, but they declined. But we are joined by the other Democrats on Tuesday’s ballot: Zephyr Teachout and her running mate, Tim Wu, as well as Randy Credico.
And we welcome you all to Democracy Now!
RANDY CREDICO: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Zephyr Teachout, why are you running? Why do you feel there needs to be a change in New York?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Andrew Cuomo, despite calling himself a Democrat, has governed as a Republican. His whole policy and everything he’s pushed has been tax breaks, tax giveaways for the wealthy, and it’s really hurting New York state. New York is now the most unequal state of all the states, with the most segregated schools. So I am running for the old-fashioned reason that I know I would be a better governor, that my values align with the values of New Yorkers. And I’d actually fight for all New Yorkers.
AMY GOODMAN: You just came from the fast-food workers’ protest earlier this morning?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Yes, yes. Now, I joined and I’m happy to stand with the fast-food workers who are protesting for a fair wage and a union. In New York City, you need $15 an hour just to make a living. And I talked to some of the people who were there protesting, asking where they found their courage. I talked to a woman who had walked off the job seven times, striking KFC. And she said, "Well, it’s my family." And when she said her family, what she meant is the other people that she works with and the other people who are in the same situation. And she said, "For myself, I could do it maybe once, but for my family, and all of us, I find the courage."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you were originally recruited by the Working Families Party as a potential gubernatorial candidate, and then—the very party, the independent party, the more left-wing party in New York politics. And then, at their own convention, they essentially cut a deal with the governor. Among the things that he promised to do would be to support a state—a raise in the state minimum wage.
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about that whole situation and your decision to go ahead and run anyway?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Yeah, sure. I was recruited around March 15th. And when they recruited me, I explained that I’m also a Democrat and also wanted to run in the Democratic primary. So when Andrew Cuomo heard about my candidacy in the Working Families Party primary, he did something that is remarkable for a Democrat only because it’s Andrew Cuomo, which is he finally agreed to support a Democratic Senate. I think people really need to understand how much he is not a Democrat. He really has worked behind the scenes to have a Republican Senate. We have a really Democratic state here. But I decided to continue to run because, despite Andrew Cuomo’s promises, he didn’t say anything about fracking. He has made no commitment to ban fracking. He has made no commitment to fully fund our schools. And our schools are in a crisis. And he made no commitment to actually turn our tax system rightside up. Right now it’s the wealthiest New Yorkers pay less as a percentage of their income than the middle 20 percent.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Randy Credico, I wanted to ask you—you have a long history with Andrew Cuomo. Years back, you joined with him in the fight to do away with the Rockefeller drug laws, and now you’ve decided not only to challenge him, but also to vie for the nomination with Zephyr Teachout. Talk about your decision to enter the race.
RANDY CREDICO: Well, I was in the race long before Zephyr was in. I got into it in January because Andrew Cuomo is a reactionary Democrat. But the Democratic Party is a reactionary party. He’s a Lieberman Democrat, Cuomo. Zephyr is an Obama-Clinton kind of Democrat. I am a Amy Goodman Democrat or Bill Kunstler Democrat or Jeremy Scahill Democrat. I represent the far left of the Democratic Party.
Andrew Cuomo, I did work with him back in 2003 against the Rockefeller drug laws. In fact, you wrote a column about it. Back then, he called for a complete elimination of the laws. And we got some change. However, now that he’s been in office as governor, he hasn’t mentioned it. He hasn’t granted one clemency—not one clemency since he’s been in. That’s what really prompted me to run against him. I mean, Southern governors, like Orval Faubus and George Wallace and Lester Maddox and all the rest, all gave clemency. He hasn’t given one clemency or pardon the four years that he’s been there, even though he had all these cracks in the changes of the Rockefeller drug laws.
And there are a number of other reasons. We need to reform the criminal justice system—I mean, not just reform it, really start all over again. I was recently arrested here for filming the police and spent 24 hours in Bronx Central Booking, just for filming the police. I want to tell you something. I’ve been in jail in Nicaragua. I’ve been in jail in Honduras. I’ve never seen conditions like the conditions that we have in that particular jail that I was in. But it’s all over the state. We have 55,000 people in prison in the state.
AMY GOODMAN: Compare how New York, Randy, compares to the rest of the country when it comes to drug laws.
RANDY CREDICO: Well, it’s still very bad. You can still get 12 years in prison for the attempted sale of a $5 bag of cocaine, for attempted sale or for steering. You know, you talk—this great episode that you had prior to this, on the death penalty in North Carolina. You can actually get off with DNA, if you’re convicted of rape or of murder. You can’t on drug charges. There are thousands of people who are framed, who will say, "OK, I’m guilty," because they don’t want to spend a year in Rikers awaiting trial. Thousands. But you can’t get off on DNA. You just can’t get off. So—and that’s across the country. There are thousands and thousands of people in jail who shouldn’t be there. We have 55,000. When Attica went up in smoke in 1971, which the anniversary is coming up, you know, we had 10,000 people in jail. Now we have 55,000 people in jail, almost exclusively people of color. That’s why I’m really running, is to represent them. If I could get all their families to vote for me, I would win next Tuesday.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tim Wu, I wanted to ask you—you’ve gotten some surprise endorsements from not only The New York Times, the New York Observer, and your ticket has been endorsed not only by the Public Employees Federation, but also, I think, the Buffalo teachers’ union, as well. Could you talk about what you would hope to do for lieutenant governor, which is essentially a job that no one really knew about—
TIM WU: Right, right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —until Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign, and David Paterson, the lieutenant governor, took over as governor.
TIM WU: Yeah. Well, I’m running, generally, because I feel there’s a battle going on for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party right now. It’s beginning right now between people who are more serious about the problem of inequality in our country, people who are less serious about that problem. Lieutenant governor position in New York, I think, has been a position of wasted potential. It’s a constitutional position. And I think it could be used as a position of public advocacy, where I would serve as an independent voice in state government and a critic of some of the things that go on. We have a problem with checks and balances in state government, and we need to have it addressed. And one of the ways is to reinvent the role of lieutenant governor, and that’s why I’ve been running. The New York Times, the Observer, other groups have endorsed my vision, and I’m very proud of that.
AMY GOODMAN: You are known as an Internet activist. You really originated the whole concept of net neutrality. On September 10th, there’s going to be what’s known as, what, an "Internet slowdown." Activists are organizing around the country and the world. You might go to their website, and the spinning wheel of death will be there—
TIM WU: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —showing what it will be like if the—basically, if net neutrality is done away with. Explain what it is and why your issue around net neutrality weighs into your desire to be lieutenant governor of New York.
TIM WU: Yeah, sure. You know, the reason a million people took the time to write in comments to the federal government about net neutrality is because they believe that equality in our times is threatened, and they see the Internet, the open Internet, which has long been the bastion of equal speech, where, you know, an obscure blogger has a similar voice to a wealthy newspaper—and they say, "We want the Internet open. We believe in a society that is more equal." In some ways, I think the passion for net neutrality right now is really reflective of a deeper concern with widening inequality in this country. The Internet slowdown is designed to dramatize what it would be like to live on—or, to have an Internet where the rich get faster speeds, the slow get slower. It’s like divided sidewalks or something. It feels so wrong, that people are getting fired up about it.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re also challenging the Comcast-Time Warner merger?
TIM WU: I am. I think the states should take an active—federal government and the states should take an active role in blocking a merger which is very bad for Americans, very bad for the entire country. Cable rates, the prices we pay for cable, are unregulated, generally, and have gone so high, they’re threatening the day-to-day life of lower-income and middle-income people. They’ve become this enormous thing. They’re rising many, many times the price of inflation. And they’re just in a position to extort payments. We need to stop this merger and start asking, why are we letting these monopolies just charge us these outrageous prices and threaten the Internet, open Internet? And, you know, it’s a serious problem, and I think it should be stopped.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Zephyr Teachout, I’d like to ask you about the whole issue of public corruption. When Andrew Cuomo ran for governor the first time, he said he was going to clean up Albany. He established a commission, the Moreland Commission, that was supposed to look into corruption. And then he disbanded the commission, and now there’s a federal investigation of whether his office or people around him had some kind of a role in trying to thwart some of the investigations of the Moreland Commission. Could you talk about the importance of this particular issue of Cuomo’s track record on this?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: His track record is terrible. And he broke his core promise. His core campaign promise was to clean up Albany, to push for publicly funded elections, which we all know we need to do, because if we don’t get at the root issue of who is funding campaigns, it’s hard to get at all the other issues. He promised to push for a Republican—for a Democratic Senate by vetoing incumbent protection gerrymandered districts. He promised to get rid of a loophole that allows corporations in New York can give directly to candidates. And instead of all of that, we have this real scandal in New York, because he created an anti-corruption commission, saying it can search anywhere, go anywhere, and the minute it started getting close to his friends, his business associates, he shut it down. And now there’s new news, evidence that his top aide was saying what subpoenas they should be issuing and what subpoenas they weren’t. This is a very serious violation of public trust. And the reason it matters is because the big money real estate and the big banks and the business associates of Andrew Cuomo are getting special favors. They are getting the tax giveaways. And meanwhile, New Yorkers are really suffering. You know, the wage gap is growing. So many people are food-insecure. This is New York state, which has a deep commitment to being egalitarian, to being open, to public education. So the reason I care about corruption is because of how it affects people’s lives. I mean, this is an old boy network in Albany.
AMY GOODMAN: How does what’s happening and the issue of corruption in New York compare to the country? You have a book coming out called Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Well, I think it’s a terrible example of what’s happening. I mean, certainly it’s gotten worse since 2010 nationally because of Citizens United. But there’s a deep cynicism that we have to overcome. And I think people are actually seeing that you still have the power of the vote, you can still kick out people like Andrew Cuomo, but the outside money has a very insidious effect, and it’s why it’s so urgent to change the way we fund elections.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Randy, I would think that on many of these issues, you and Zephyr Teachout would agree, but you’re running against her, as well as against Cuomo. Could you talk about the differences that you see between you?
RANDY CREDICO: There’s a lot of differences, a lot of differences that we have. Like I said, she’s a mainstream Democrat. When this is over, if I lose on Tuesday, I’m supporting Howie Hawkins in the Green Party. She hasn’t ruled out supporting Andrew Cuomo, in spite of his corruption, which I don’t think is such a big thing, by the way. I think the biggest problem in this state we should focus on is the economy. There’s all this stuff, and I think it’s a Chuck Schumer hit job on Andrew Cuomo. That’s his guy there, the U.S. attorney. The same guy who put Jeremy Hammond and Lynne Stewart in jail is the guy that she’s rooting for. I’m not rooting for that guy.
So, what I’m rooting for is that we change this economy. My economic adviser, Richard Wolff, has laid out a blueprint, that I’m following, which is to tax Wall Street, the 1 percent Tobin sales tax; a progressive real estate tax; cutting out 421-a, which gives big breaks to all the sports teams in the city, if they give—provide some affordable housing—and they never do; and to tax stocks and bonds, intangible assets, along with the tangible assets, like cars and homes.
So, we have—there are a lot of differences here. She won’t talk about Israel. I will—I have condemned Israel for their occupation of Gaza. Andrew Cuomo went to Israel, visited the caves, but didn’t visit the graves and Gaza. I will say it. I mean, it’s sudden death to talk about Israel. It really is, in New York politics. But I stand on principle on that. She hasn’t spoken out. And you have to talk about your position on the occupation of Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Zephyr Teachout, your position on this issue?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: You know, I actually think we agree on a lot of different issues, but I have stayed neutral. As governor, I will be representing all of New York. And I’ve certainly talked to people and feel great compassion for what’s happening on both sides of the conflict. And I will be a governor of Jews and Muslims in New York. But I’m not running for president, and I’m not going to be making foreign policy decisions.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tim Wu, in terms of your opponent, what would you delineate? Kathy Hochul is actually most known for opposition, when she was a congressperson, to driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and has a pretty conservative record in Congress, yet Governor Cuomo has chosen her this time around as his running mate.
TIM WU: Yeah, sure. You know, Governor Cuomo had a wide range of choices for who he could have chose to be his running mate, the lieutenant governor candidate. And somehow he found a bank lobbyist for the job, maybe on the idea that banks are underrepresented in the state Capitol, which I don’t think is true. He found a bank lobbyist with one of the most conservative voting records that a Democrat has had in Congress. She voted to drill the Arctic Refuge, Wildlife Refuge. She voted multiple times to repeal parts of Obamacare. She voted multiple times to gut the Clean Air Act. She has done things which, in my mind, are—you know, I believe Democrats can have differences of opinion, but she has gone against the main tenets of the Democratic Party. She even joined—there was this dramatic incident where the House Republicans were on one of these witch hunts, where they were—you may know, the Fast and Furious—citing Eric Holder for criminal contempt. The House Democrats got up and left the House, physically left the House for that vote. Kathy Hochul, Cuomo’s choice for lieutenant governor, stayed with Speaker Boehner, voted to hold, for the first time in history, the attorney general, Eric Holder, for—cite him for criminal contempt. And so, she has shown over and over again that she is far too conservative, and I think disqualifying for the state, this Democratic Party.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But yet, it was just yesterday that the progressive new mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and the founder—co-founder of the Progressive Caucus, Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, all lined up to support her.
TIM WU: Yeah. With respect Mayor de Blasio, we agree on most—in fact, de Blasio and I agree on almost everything. Today in Politico magazine, we were named together as "the new new left," along with Zephyr Teachout. And then, yesterday he made this tremendous error, this mistake of endorsing Kathy Hochul. I think they don’t agree on any issues. And it was, to my mind—she has been trying to misrepresent herself as a progressive Democrat now. I think he’s become an accomplice to her misrepresentation. I think he’s made a terrible mistake, and he’ll regret it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wish they were there to—here to represent themselves. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul were invited to be a part of this debate. I want to thank you all for being with us. Zephyr Teachout, candidate for New York governor on the Democratic ballot. Tim Wu is her running mate for lieutenant governor. Randy Credico is also a candidate for New York governor on the Democratic ballot. And the election, the primary, is Tuesday.
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Next Wednesday, Sept. 10, if your favorite website seems to load slowly, take a closer look: You might be experiencing the Battle for the Net’s “Internet Slowdown,” a global day of grass-roots action. Protesters won’t actually slow the Internet down, but will place on their websites animated “Loading” graphics (which organizers call “the proverbial ‘spinning wheel of death’”) to symbolize what the Internet might soon look like. As that wheel spins, the rules about how the internet works are being redrawn. Large Internet service providers, or ISPs, like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon are trying to change the rules that govern your online life.
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