Posts Tagged ‘mail’
Death Row appeal lost in the mail. Alabama says, “So what!”
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from a death row inmate who faces execution after a mailroom mix-up at one of the nation’s most prominent law firms.
Lawyers at the firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, had agreed to represent Cory R. Maples, a death row inmate in Alabama, without charge. When an Alabama court sent two copies of a ruling in Mr. Maples’s case to the firm in New York, its mailroom sent them back unopened and stamped “Return to Sender.”
Two associates handling Mr. Maples’s case had indeed left the firm, but it appears that no one told the court or the mailroom that new lawyers there had taken over. A court clerk in Alabama put the returned envelopes into the court file and did nothing more…
In urging the court not to hear the case, Troy King, Alabama’s attorney general, wrote that Mr. Maples had been represented by “a team of attorneys from a multimillion-dollar law firm” who should know that rules are rules.
“Filing deadlines apply to death row inmates,” Mr. King wrote. “Countless attorneys have missed filing deadlines over the years, and state and federal courts routinely dismissed their client’s tardy appeal as a consequence. This case is no different, and it presents nothing new or nationally compelling.”
Mr. Garre responded that the case, Maples v. Thomas, No. 10-63, was hardly routine. Among other things, he said, “the state contributed to the missed deadline” and “a man’s life is at stake.”
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal. Which surprises me as much as the cold heart of the Alabama Attorney General doesn’t.
Chickenshit commentary of the week!
Do you ever tire of articles, op-ed pieces, commentary from TV Talking Heads that avoid the point altogether? Here’s this week’s best example – Bob Greene at CNN offering a “humorous” commentary about the US Postal Service:
You seemed a little bit interested in last Sunday’s column: the one about the prospect of Saturday mail delivery being eliminated by the U.S. Postal Service.
That is what Postmaster General John E. Potter has asked Congress to authorize. Because of a budget crisis and a drastic decline in the number of items Americans send through the mail each year (an estimated 20 billion fewer items mailed this year alone), Potter wants to stop delivering mail on Saturdays.
Along with last week’s column, there was a feature where readers were invited to cast their votes on the subject (not a scientific poll, as they say; I think this means that Albert Einstein wasn’t counting the ballots).
More than 397,000 of you took the time to vote. The question was: “Would you miss Saturday mail if the Postal Service stopped delivering it?…”
Sixty-eight percent of you said you would not miss the Saturday mail if it stopped coming. Only 32 percent of you said you would miss it…
Postmaster General Potter says that getting rid of Saturday delivery would save more than $3 billion a year. My guess is that not only are they going to have to do away with Saturday mail — the time is probably coming when delivery on other days of the week will disappear, too.
So the question is not whether the days of mail delivery will be curtailed. It’s whether we will be happy about it.
The real problem hasn’t changed in 50 years. Junk mail doesn’t pay for itself.
The sleazy junk mail factories should be subsidizing the post office for all of us! From Capital One to Publishers Clearinghouse to my local Chevy Dealer’s Lucky Ignition Key – do you think these cruds look forward to shipping “the latest, greatest cookbook offer” to my front door via UPS or FedEx?
Congress will likely discover some populist lie acceptable to both Republican and Democrat lobbyists to maintain USPS subsidies. You wouldn’t want America’s biggest freeloaders to carry their own weight would you?
What I also don’t expect is an honest challenge to the corporate status quo from a smiley flack working for Time-Warner.
Holocaust letters survive Nazi death camps
The faded papers hint at stark details in the lives of Nazi concentration camp inmates. This undated photo shows the only recorded example of the censor mark of the International Military Tribunal.
Letters secretly carried by children through the sewers of Warsaw, Poland, during the 1944 uprising. A 1933 card from a Dachau camp commander outlining strict rules for prisoner mail. A 1943 letter from a young man, who spent time in Auschwitz, to his parents.
The more than 250 World War II postal documents — cards, letters and stamps — have been acquired by an Illinois foundation from a private collector and will soon be on permanent display in the Skokie-based Illinois Holocaust Museum.
Some of the exhibit is available online.
Milk-in-mail protest targets EU chief
The EU’s top farm official is begging German farmers to stop mailing her milk.
Farmers have bombarded Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel with some 10,000 liters of milk to show their anger over an EU proposal to increase milk quotas that may cause prices to fall.
Most of the milk — sent by regular mail and addressed to Fischer Boel — had spoiled in transit, and some of the cartons had burst open.
Fischer Boel pleaded with farmers in a message on her blog Monday to stop sending milk, saying she was happy to talk to them directly to find a solution to their grievances.
Reminds me of opposition to the U.S. military draft during the VietNam War – when the Feds were still putting out postage-paid forms to register for the draft at every post office.
Some folks would wrap a brick and attach one of the postage guaranteed cards. Mail them to the Federal Draft Board.
