Detective work.

[rivka]

Last week, elynne posted that she's thinking about supporting Howard Dean. In the comments, a couple of people mentioned critical pieces about Dean: hopeforyou linked to a post by greendalek accusing Dean of opposing civil liberties, and someone I don't know linked to a harshly critical column in Counterpunch.

My first glance at the Counterpunch piece identified things which were obviously false, and easily proven to be false. The author said, for example, that

"what Dean really means is that he is willing to disregard environmental safeguards and worker's rights, as long as the wheels of economic capital start churning. No wonder then that Dean supports the expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). But you won't find much information about this in his campaign propaganda."

I suppose it is literally true that Dean wants to "expand NAFTA." But he wants to expand it by *including* labor and environmental protections. In a speech here (I've linked to it before), Dean said,

"If we're going to do trade with Mexico or China or Brazil, now Brazil has a strong trade union movement, but if we're going to trade with these countries, they need to have the same labor standards that we have in the United States of America, no child labor, right to organize, time and a half for overtime, occupational safety and health inspections, and if they don't I don't feel obligated to re-import their products, because we're not subsidizing the creation, in the best interest of the United States, of a middle-class country elsewhere. So if it's OK for Maytag to move its plant from Galesburg to Mexico, then it has to be OK for the Machinists to go down and organize that plant, and if it's not, we're under no obligation to re- import those machines at half or a third of the cost.

Secondly, the same has to do with NAFTA, secondly, in terms of the environment
we need the same environmental standards everywhere."

I had just finished reading this speech and posting a link to it when I read the Counterpunch piece, and so the distortion of Dean's position was particularly glaring. That made it easy enough to dismiss the column as a nasty hatchet job. But I hadn't encountered the civil liberties accusations before, so curiousangel and I dug a little deeper.

Most of the complaints about Dean as being a foe of civil liberties seem to come from two sources. First of all, he's made some complaints about people who appear to be guilty getting off "on technicalities." For example:

"We had a case where a guy who was a rapist, a serial sex offender, was convicted, then was let out on what I would think and believe was a technicality, a new trial was ordered and the victim wouldn’t come back and go through the second trial. And so the guy basically got time served, and he was the man who murdered a 15-year-old girl and raped her and then left her for dead and she was dead."

(greendalek included the first part of this quote only, leaving out the part making it clear that what upset Dean was that the guy went on to rape and murder a teenaged girl after he was released.)

I find it hard to be deeply offended by this statement of Dean's. I think this is the kind of case that makes just about everyone frustrated with the justice system, even if they simultaneously recognize the importance of protecting defendants' rights.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Dean has ever advocated policies that limit civil liberties or defendants' rights. What are mostly presented as evidence of his crimes against civil liberties are tightly edited quotes, devoid of context. For example, one commentator wrote that Howard Dean announced that he wanted to appoint to the Vermont Supreme Court a justice who would consider "common sense more important than legal technicalities" and "quickly convict guilty criminals." He offered this as evidence that Dean doesn't believe innocent people are ever put on trial, because "when politicians like Dean call for 'swift and certain conviction of the guilty' [it] actually means 'swift and certain conviction of the accused,' since a person is only guilty when they’ve been convicted."

Dean's actual positions on civil liberties are progressive. He's spoken in favor of the Innocence Protection bill, which institutes a federal guarantee of competent counsel and the right of inmates to get DNA testing of old evidence. He's pledged to order a federal commission to study wrongful convictions and recommend reforms. And he wants to roll back John Ashcroft's policies promoting the federal death penalty. None of this is cited by the Dean-is-anti-civil-liberties people. Nor can they cite damning civil liberties performance in Vermont, except to say that the public defender's office didn't have enough money - which has long been a problem in all fifty states, and doesn't appear to be a specific fault of Dean's.

Oh: they also cite a case in which, in Counterpunch's terms,

citizen reporter Scott Huminski was barred from Vermont courts, a DC lawyer stated in an interview with Eugenia Harris from the First Amendment Center that, "the real heart of the issue is whether local government officials can unilaterally silence speech and exert arbitrary power over their citizens." Seems Howard Dean stuck by his word and appointed judges that care little about real "justice."

It's hard to know where to start with this case. Essentially, this guy Huminski calls himself a citizen-reporter because he used to attend court proceedings, write stuff about them on big signs, and post the signs on his house and car. He was convicted on obstruction of justice charges related to a landlord-tenant dispute, subsequently sued just about everyone in the Vermont legal system for violating his civil rights, and lost several appeals relating to the case. He kept coming back to the courthouse where he'd been convicted, bearing large signs accusing the judge who convicted him of being a "butcher of the Constitution." They kicked him out of the courthouse, and eventually issued a permanent ban because he kept coming back and disrupting court proceedings - and because he threatened to "take the law into my own hands," which made the judges fear for their safety. The court rulings in Huminski's favor, cited in the links greendalek posted, appear to have been temporary injunctions lifting the courthouse ban while the appeals were being considered. (The injunctions have since been rescinded by the same federal judge.)

In other words, it doesn't seem like there's anything more to this than a crank taking on the legal system. Certainly nothing in the long, sordid story reflects badly on Dean.

This has gotten awfully long and rambling, and I'm not sure how many people ever took the civil liberties accusations seriously. I told hopeforyou I'd look into them, and now I have. What I've found has been a whole lot of smear, and not much in the way of facts. Suffice it to say that I'm still supporting Dean, and I hope that others will research his positions independently rather than accepting heavily slanted summaries - from either side.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

"Technicalities" can mean at least three things:

1. Being really really sure you actually have the person who did it.

2. Procedural stuff.

3. Making sure that the defendant is smart and sane enough to be "really" guilty.

1 seems obvious to me. 3 I take less seriously than most people on the left do. 2 os the tricky one because you have to let some guilty people off to keep the police from doing bad stuff to get convictions.

As you say, everyone's going to complain about "technicalities" sometimes.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

*swoon* *thud*

-J

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Next, on The Discovery Channel: bizarre courtship rituals of geckos!

[anisoptera.livejournal.com]

Thanks for digging. I was hoping I could rely on you to get the straight dope on Dean for your LJ readers. :)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Good work sweetheart. Thanks for doing it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Now you know why I said I was pretty busy last night. :-)

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the research. I'm leaning towards Dean; if I lean far enough I'll fall over.

[ranunculus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all that digging. It is really great to have a resource for all this stuff!

Now, can you find anything on imigration policy? I really want to table for Dean here in San Francisco's Mission district, but with a huge population of Latino voters I know that I will be asked repeatedly about his stance on this. So far I haven't been able to get any clue about what he might think on this subject.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

He's got a statement on immigration policy here (http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=policy_statement_civilrights_immigration). It seems kind of rhetoric-heavy and policy-light, though.

The Dean website has some Spanish-language flyers (http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=downloads) you can download and distribute, if you do decide to table.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Okay, I found something else. From a Q&A (http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0817deanQampA17.html) in the Arizona Republic:

Q: What do you think of Protect Arizona Now, the proposed initiative that would require state and local government workers to check the immigration status of everyone seeking public services?

A: I totally oppose that. I think it's anti-Latino. I'm against that kind of stuff. We need to be sure the federal government is paying its fair share for health care, education and security. We also have to keep in mind that some of these vigilante groups aren't the best way to enforce immigration laws.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear.

In general, this thread is pushing me more Deanwards.

I wish there were a practical way to remove marriage from the provenance of government all together. It seems like to be fair, it needs to be "any consenting adult can have a civil marriage with any consenting adult(s)" or "marriage shouldn't be a civil affair at all."

[starstraf.livejournal.com]

Thanks for digging - I always am more interested once the bad press starts coming out and seeing how it is handled. You are doing a great campaign job!

The ONLY negative thing I have heard people say about Dean is that he is against gay "Marriage" and only pro "Civil unions" and that this really upsets some folks in the GL community (But most of the others aren't even for "civil unions" )

[scromp.livejournal.com]

He's not against "gay marriage", he's against making it the business of the federal government. Hear hear.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

He's not against "gay marriage", he's against making it the business of the federal government.

He's said that the federal government has an obligation to see that the rights of GLBT citizens are protected, but that states get to decide how they want to do it. So if a state wants gay marriage, they can have gay marriage. If a state wants to secure the rights of GLBT partners in other ways, they can do it in other ways. Makes sense to me.

[scromp.livejournal.com]

I think I was a little too terse. What I meant is that the ultimate point is that the government has no business saying who can and cannot be married -- federal OR state. It should instead simply extend the same benefits fairly to everyone who is married by whatever way they choose to be. From the Larry King show:

Marriage is a religious institution, the way I see it. And we're not in the business of telling churches who they can and cannot marry. But in terms of civil rights and equal rights under the law for all Americans, that is the state's business, and that's why we started civil unions.

That is the crux of the "civil unions" vs "gay marriage" dustup, and I think he's got it exactly right. Additionally, I think it's important for supporters to clearly understand the difference, because next year the GOP is going to conflate the two in order to smear Dean with religious folks.

Dean = interested in local control?

[haaz.livejournal.com]

This sounds to me like he's leaving it a matter of local control, something that is technically (ahhh!) a GOP plank that they never seem to follow. This makes sense: it may lead to a law getting challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, which may result in a good law being federalized by a USSC decision. (A fair and balanced(tm) USSC decision. ;-)

Re: Dean = interested in local control?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he's fairly consistently supported local control - for gun laws, as well as for civil unions/gay marriage.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

I take everything seriously. It makes me unbearably dull. Thanks so much for your research.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

*laugh!*

You're welcome.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Important safety tip: never pis off a trained researcher. :-)

Thank you for doing the digging on this, rivka, and for posting the links to original source material so people can go look it up to their own satisfaction, too.

If you haven't already, may I suggest you contact the Dean organization in Maryland and forward this piece on to them? As Dean gets more popular, he will face more half-assed mudslinging of this ilk. Having the refutation already researched seems like something they would appreciate having in their files.

[erin-c-1978.livejournal.com]

Great research. Barring some as-yet-unknown dealbreaker, I'll certainly vote for him.

Additional info

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Writing in howard_dean, cos suggested the following additions to this post:

In any article debunking claims that Dean is anti-civil liberties, I think it's important to mention his stance on the USA PATRIOT Act, because those of us who are very concerned about freedom and constitutional rights tend to be extremely concered about the USA PATRIOT Act and are bound to ask. Dean's opposition to this act is fairly solid. Here's a repesentative quotation you could include:

"Too many in my party voted for the Patriot Act. They believed that it was more important to show bipartisan support for President Bush during a moment of crisis than to stand up for the basic values of our constitution. They trusted this President, knowing full well that John Ashcroft was the Attorney General. Only one senator had the courage to vote against the Patriot Act--- Senator Russ Feingold, and he deserves credit for doing so. We need more Democrats like Senator Feingold -- Democrats who are willing to stand up for what is right, and stand against this President’s reckless disregard for our civil liberties. We don’t need John Ashcroft -- or any other Attorney General -- rifling through our library records. As Americans, we need to stand up -- all of us -- and ensure that our laws reflect our values. As President, I will repeal those parts of the Patriot Act that undermine our constitutional rights, and will stand against any further attempts to expand the government’s reach at the expense of our civil liberties."

Excellent quote, and excellent point. Thanks, cos!

This comes from Dean's official response to the MoveOn primary candidate questionnaire: http://www.moveon.org/pac/cands/dean.html

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Thank you very kindly for posting this. I find it telling that the only negatives I've seen about Dean so far are smear campaigns. Now, people can disagree with what the man has to say, but they need to disagree with what he *says*, not what they *want* him to have said.

[and-ham.livejournal.com]

Fantastic work, added you as a friend and added this as a memory. Way to give 'em hell. :)

Great minds think alike

[giaxcomo.livejournal.com]

Hee! After seeing the same (http://www.livejournal.com/users/greendalek/72005.html) post by greendalek, I did some digging of my own. So, to toot my own horn, take a look at my reply here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/giaxcomo/29260.html).

Wow!

[greendalek.livejournal.com]

I'm tickled beyond belief that so many folks are willing to research Dean to get at the "meat" of what to expect in his Presidency --I found a lot of discouraging stuff, but boy has it been great to have those findings debated. (Believe me, I LIKED Dean and was all set to back a fellow Vermonter all the way to the White House).

Admittedly much of my hesitancy about Dean has more to do with the party he's running under, the group that will ultimately be calling the shots and holding the purse strings of a his administration. Y'know what I'd like to see? A newly-elected President take the Oath of Office, and then promptly renounce his/her membership in his/her political party. Likewise with all Cabinet members. Leave that party affiliation crap in Congress; as enforcer of the Constitution, the Executive Branch should be above that kind of thing.

I'm enjoying the debate, myself --and believe me, I'd like nothing more than to be decisively shown that Dean is truly in favor of REAL liberty, the kind of no-exception Liberty that are supposed to be made crystal clear in the Bill ofRights (and that's all ten of 'em, not just select favorites). I'm a cranky free-market lovin' Libertarian (like you haven't figured that out, and while nobody wants to see Dubya out of office more than I, I at least want to have some realistic understanding of who'll be replacing him!

I tip my tri-cornered hat to you, milady.

Re: Wow!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

the party he's running under, the group that will ultimately be calling the shots and holding the purse strings of a his administration.

I don't know what you mean. Congress has the sole power of appropriation and must approve all budgets - not the DNC or RNC. If Dean's elected in 2004, barring a vast electoral upset in Congress, that will mean that Congressional Republicans will hold the purse strings, not Dean's political party.

I'm interested in hearing whether any of this additional evidence has led you to revise your conclusion that "I can safely conclude that Mr. Dean is not truly in favor of Liberty --he has just as many issues with the Bill of Rights as does George Dubya."

As for your reference to "all ten" of the Bill of Rights, I'm assuming you already know that Dean has a 100% rating from the NRA and opposes any additional federal gun control laws? I'm pretty sure he's also opposed to having soldiers quartered in people's homes, but he hasn't issued an actual position paper on that one yet.