Social justice journalist Beth Schwartzapfel has an important piece on juveniles sentence to life without parole (LWOP) and the legal fight to eliminate LWOP for young offenders:

A common perception is that these kids are “the worst of the worst,” and indeed, many juveniles sentenced to life have done terrible things. But HRW estimates that a quarter of them were, like Jennifer, convicted of “aiding and abetting” or of felony murders. Almost 60 percent had no prior criminal convictions. More than 70 juveniles were just 13 or 14 years old at the time of their crime — some so small when they arrived in prison that all the uniforms were too big for them. Anecdotally, many, like Jennifer, had been subjected to abuse and neglect, their childhoods marred by instability, poverty and violent or criminal behavior by the adults in their life. [AJAM]

The Supreme Court has already declared mandatory LWOP for juveniles to be unconstitutional and a handful of states have eliminated it as a punishment for young offenders. 

[Photo credit: shingst, Creative Commons.]

Texas’s draconian new abortion law has left the 1.2 million women of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas without an abortion provider. While pro-choice groups challenge some parts of the law in court, Valley women are forced to travel hundreds of miles for a clinic abortion. The Valley is one of the poorest regions in the United States and extended journeys to abortion clinics are beyond the reach of many poor valley women who have to budget not only for the procedure itself but for transportation, lodging, lost work hours, and often, the cost of childcare. 

One Valley abortion provider reinvented himself as a miscarriage management consultant after the new law prohibited him from performing abortions this fall. He examines his patients and subtly steers them towards self-abortion with misoprostol if he thinks it’s safe for them to do so. He can’t tell them to go out and get the drugs, but he doesn’t have to, misoprostol miscarriages are already part of the culture. If the drugs don’t work all the way, he tells them they can always come back for surgery to finish the process. 

Miscarriage management is a flashback to the pre-Roe days when sympathetic doctors would tell women to hurt themselves or visit back alley abortion providers in order to get a miscarriage started. Once a woman began bleeding, the doctor could legally perform surgery to resolve the miscarriage and end the pregnancy. 

The Texas law hasn’t stopped abortions in the Valley, it has just made them more difficult and dangerous. 

Bad news for reproductive freedom in Louisiana: 

Women in Louisiana could lose all access to abortion services if the state succeeds in enacting a secretive overhaul of its clinic regulations. The requirements are so stringent that not one of the five clinics currently operating in Louisiana would meet them, according to a lawyer advising the clinics. The new regulatory framework would also impose a de facto thirty-day waiting period for many women—an exceptional requirement.

“What it amounts to is a back-door abortion ban,” said Ellie Schilling, a New Orleans attorney. “The way the [Department of Health and Hospitals] went about passing these regulations was in a secretive and undemocratic way. The public definitely doesn’t know what’s going on.” [The Nation]

A 30-day waiting period would almost certainly be deemed unconstitutional if this provision is challenged in court. If anything constitutes an undue burden on a woman’s right to choose, a needless monthlong delay would surely qualify. Medically speaking, a 4-week delay would impose additional risk and expense on many women seeking abortions. The further along a woman is in her pregnancy, the more difficult and expensive the procedure becomes. 

Unscrupulous lenders have always preyed on military families, who are apt to be some combination of young, preoccupied, and broke. Payday lenders dot the neighborhoods around military bases. Real banks are cashing in, too. Fort Hood National Bank regularly allows account-holders to overdraft their accounts by several hundred dollars, charging a $35 fee per overdraft. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that 3 out of 10 of the banks that collected the most overdraft fees had branches on military bases.

[Photo credit: bradipo, Creative Commons]