03.28.07
Posted in news at 1:29 am by danvk
I watched PBS Frontline’s Burden of Innocence tonight and bade farewell to whatever confidence I had in our legal system. The show follows several men as they’re released from long prison sentences by DNA evidence. They rarely adjust, and often wind up back in prison. It’s exceptionally difficult to get monetary compensation for wrongful imprisonment in most states and, what amazed me most, it’s impossible to get your name off the list of convicted felons. This makes getting a job next to impossible, which leads no the rest of their problems.
Clicking around, I found the sad case of Gary Dotson. Shortly after having sex with her boyfriend, Cathleen Crowell, a teenage girl, made up a rape accusation as a cover in case she got pregnant. She didn’t get pregnant, but the rape charge somehow found a life of its own. Gary Dotson was later charged and put in jail based largely on her false testimony. Fast-forward eight years and Cathleen (shock!) has a guilty conscience. She publicly renounces her story. But for various political reasons, the charges still stick. It isn’t until more competent lawyers and DNA evidence come into the mix that he’s finally exonerated. As a final sick twist, it turns out that she based her rape story on a scene in a trashy romance novel, Sweet Savage Love. I highly recommend reading the story I linked to above.
I had no idea how easily misleading statistics and logic could be used in a court of law. The most terrifying thing about all of this is that a perfect storm of politics, media and science were necessary for Gary Dotson’s release. How many thousands of other people haven’t had their perfect storm?
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03.20.07
Posted in news, politics at 9:22 pm by danvk
I was struck by this story by Holly J, a woman who attended the recent anti-war protest in Washington. It’s mostly about the anti-anti-war protesters, who frighten her on her way to the protest. Then she unexpectedly comes face-to-face with one, and finds some perspective on the whole issue.
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03.14.07
Posted in news, web at 12:04 am by danvk
Mad props to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for creating an online video archive. The archive contains most segments from February 2000 onwards. This includes some rather momentous events, like the September 11, 2001 broadcast. I was in French class when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. A messenger came and told the teacher, but she decided the events weren’t significant enough to stop French class, or even to tell us what had happened! Ever since, I’ve wanted to watch the Today Show broadcast from that morning, to see the reactions right when it happened. NBC hasn’t opened their archives, but this is a step in the right direction.
The site has its problems. The streaming is a bit slow, and is only available in Real or Windows Media Player format. The “keyword search” is terrible. I suspect this will become yet another case where people will use Google in place of a site’s own search engine. It’s possible to view all the broadcasts for a specific date, but you’ll have to hack URLs to get at it. That September 11 URL I linked to above is
http://vvi.onstreammedia.com/cgi-bin/visearch?user=pbs-newshour
&template=template.html&squery=%2BVideoAsset:pbsnh091101
Just change the 091101 at the end to whatever date you like to view that day’s broadcasts. This is a pretty basic feature for a newscast video archive. It should have an interface. And the “Close Caption Transcript” popup reaches hitherto unexplored niches of Web UI weirdness.
The NewHour video archive is a wonderful resource. It has its UI problems. Its search is terrible. I wish it went back to 1975, when the NewsHour started. But this is a great start, and I’m sure more is yet to come. I hope other news shows take a cue from PBS and the NewsHour.
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