and thus became the most-killing governor in the history of the United States."
I wonder how many innocent people were executed in Texas under Bu$h's record setting gubernatorial regime.
Published on Monday, May 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
From Texas to Abu Ghraib: The Bush Legacy of Prisoner Abuse
by Heather Wokusch
Governor Bush also flouted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by choosing to execute juvenile offenders, a practice shared by only Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Significantly, in 1998 a full 92% of the juvenile offenders on Bush's death row were ethnic minorities.
Conditions inside Texan prisons during Bush's reign were so notorious that federal Judge William Wayne Justice wrote, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."
In September 1996, for example, a videotaped raid on inmates at a county jail in Texas showed guards using stun guns and an attack dog on prisoners, who were later dragged face-down back to their cells. Funding of mental health programs during Bush's reign was so poor that Texan prisons had a sizeable number of mentally-impaired inmates; defying international human rights standards, these inmates ended up on death row. A prisoner named Emile Duhamel, for example, with severe psychological disabilities and an IQ of 56, died in his Texan death-row jail cell in July 1998. Authorities blamed "natural causes" but a lack of air conditioning in cells that topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a summer heat wave may have killed Duhamel instead. How many other Texan prisoners died of such neglect during Bush's governorship is unclear.
As president, Bush presides over a prison population topping 2 million people, giving America the dubious distinction of having a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country. When considering that the US has three times more prisoners per capita than Iran and seven times more than Germany, the nation looks more like a Gulag than the Land of the Free.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0510-01.htmBu$h is like the "pResident from hell", spreading more despair, hopelessness, poverty, darkness, pollution, death, and destruction every day.
When John Kerry is elected President in November, our country will take a new direction of peace, hope, prosperity, environmental preservation, freedom and democracy. Deep down, even reasonable republicans know this.
I can't wait until November 3, when the ominous, dark gray soot filled clouds of the Bu$h years dissipate over America, and we can all breathe freely and easily again.
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