The Supreme Court Strikes Down Death Penalty for Child Rape
The Supreme Court has struck down a Louisiana law that allowed the execution of people convicted of a raping a child. In a 5-4 vote, the court said that the law allowing the death penalty to be imposed in cases of child rape violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. His four liberal colleagues joined him, while four other justices dissented.
The decision prompted an unyielding rebuttal from the conservative wing of the court, and condemnation from both presidential candidates, even though no one has been executed for rape in the United States since 1964. Though capital punishment can be imposed for crimes against the state, such as treason, espionage and terrorism, of the 3,300 inmates on death row nationwide, only two face execution for a crime other than murder. Both were convicted under the Louisiana law in question, which authorized the death penalty for anyone who rapes a child younger than 12.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. questioned the majority’s logic that every murderer sentenced to death is more “morally depraved” than any child-rapist. “I have little doubt that, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, the very worst child rapists, predators who seek out and inflict serious physical and emotional injury on defenseless young children, are the epitome of moral depravity,” he wrote. Alito was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates strongly denounced the court’s decision.
Trumbo: Reminders of Political Persecution in America
The Fall of Dalton Trumbo
Trumbo is a new film about the Hollywood blacklisting of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, opening in theaters this week. The film includes a wealth of documentary footage from the House Un-American Activities Committee years and is, in its own way, a very personalized history of the notorious Hollywood blacklist.
Dalton Trumbo was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter who wrote dozens of movie scripts during the 1930s and ’40s, including Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Kitty Foyle. His anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun won the National Book Award in 1939. But in 1947, Trumbo was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as part of the Hollywood Ten, who were questioned about their ties to the Communist Party. Trumbo refused to testify and was found in contempt of Congress.
Subsequently, he was kicked out of the screenwriter’s guild, and all of the Hollywood motion picture studios almost immediately blacklisted him. For his refusal to testify in the HUAC hearings, Trumbo eventually served nearly a year in federal prison. Dalton Trumbo’s ruination took him from being one of Hollywood’s highest-paid writers to a Hollywood pariah.
After Trumbo was released from prison, he remained on Hollywood’s blacklist for nearly a decade, but went on to have a prodigious writing career under a list of at least 13 pseudonyms (writing for films that included Roman Holiday, Gun Crazy, The Brave One). Trumbo’s film The Brave One, written under the pseudonym Robert Rich, won an Academy Award in 1957. It is the only unclaimed Oscar in the history of the Academy Awards. Trumbo finally received credit for his work on Exodus and Spartacus in 1960.
In 1970, Dalton Trumbo delivered a speech about the HUAC hunt for good guys and bad, which contained this admonishment: “There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.”
Dalton Trumbo’s life story stands as a poignant reminder of a weird, scary time, a paranoid era which, some think, could happen again. Some Hollywood observers maintain that the potential for similar political persecution still exists, perhaps not in the exact form it happened before. However, they claim that there are things going on now in the current political administration that should serve as reminders that it could happen again.
Dalton Trumbo: A Blacklisted Writer in His Own Words:
The Hollywood Ten (Trumbo, 2nd Row, Left)
The Hollywood Ten
A Letter from Prison to My Wife: Read by Actor Josh Lucas
Trumbo: The Official 2008 Movie Trailer
Studs Terkel: A National Literary Icon
Studs Terkel and the HUAC Blacklist
This article has also been written in honor of a friend, 96 years old Studs Terkel. At the time when Senator McCarthy began blacklisting supposed subversives, Studs Terkel hosted Studs’ Place, a network television program on NBC, and wrote a regular column for the Chicago Sun Times. However, immediately after he refused to give names to McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, NBC pulled his television program and the Sun-Times cancelled his newspaper column. Terkel was unable to work until 1953, when a Chicago radio station hired him, telling Terkel “p*ss on the blacklist.” Subsequently, Terkel has written a number of acclaimed books, won the Pulitzer Prize (1985), two National Book Awards, and received The National Humanities Award (1997) and The George Polk Career Award (1999).
The Old Photomaton: Portraits for the Poor, Rich and Celebrities
In 1926, a Jewish inventor from Siberia named Anatol Josepho opened a photo-booth concession, the first Photomaton in the world. Mr. Josepho kept the Photomaton “studio,” as he called it, open 24 hours. In April 1927, Time magazine reported that 280,000 customers had entered his booths in the first six months. It was such an instant hit that the photo booth spread from that spot in Times Square to arcades, amusement parks, state fairs, bus depots and five-and-dimes around the country. Across eight decades it has recorded countless youthful frolics, loving kisses and inebriated indiscretions. Its popularity survived the Depression, the vanishing of the old arcades and five-and-dimes and the proliferation of disposable, digital and cellphone cameras.
But today, the old-fashioned booths with their “dip ‘n’ dunk” chemical developing process and breathless wait for the damp strip of black-and-white images to slide out are disappearing into scrapheaps or into the homes of collectors (Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino among them), giving way to booths that are powered by digital, computerized equipment.
When it first opened, there were people standing all the way around the block. They spent 25 cents each to pose and then wait the eight minutes it took to process a strip of eight small photos. The old photo booths served as little portrait studios for the poor, the rich and even celebrities (in the old days). Among them was New York’s Gov. Al Smith, not the last political figure to step into a photo booth. In 1953, the newlyweds Jack and Jackie Kennedy took glowing self-portraits in one.
In the 1960s, Andy Warhol often used the photo booths tin Times Square to take portraits, including his own, which he incorporated into his art. When Warhol went to a 42nd Street arcade, he always had to try several photo booths so he could find the one that had the right combination of chemicals to produce the best imagery. He was ofent there all day with rolls of quarters, and he was quite choosy about the poses. Warhol’s use of photo booths was consistent with his appreciation of mug shots, snapshots and news photos. Warhol was a great connoisseur of these vernacular types of photography. He wasn’t making judgments. He understood that it doesn’t have to be a work of art to be a great image.
Times Square: A History of the Early Photo Booths
The Comical Side: Photo Booth Pranks
The Avant-Garde: Photo-Silhouette Booth
The Old Photomaton: Portraits for the Poor, Rich and Famous
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