Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

St. Mary’s Freshman Takes On His Teachers Over the Pledge of Allegiance

…[T]he freshman at Leonardtown High School in St. Mary’s County, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland and his principal, yesterday taught his teachers a lesson in free speech and reinforced his right to abstain from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school.

Theodore became upset this year when, he said, a friend in his homeroom was “reprimanded” by the teacher for remaining seated during the pledge. The teacher, according to Theodore, said that she had a brother in the military in the Middle East and that it was disrespectful to his sacrifice not to stand.

“I thought, ‘We have to research this,’ ” said Theodore, an honor roll student.

Without telling his principal, Theodore — with help from his father — wrote to several First Amendment organizations, including the ACLU of Maryland, to find out what rights students have. As it happened, the ACLU was already on the case. At least four students in three public school systems — St. Mary’s, Baltimore and Prince George’s counties — had reported being forced to either stand or say the pledge although they wanted to abstain, said ACLU of Maryland lawyer Richard Griffiths.

“It was a succession of all of these pledge things from around the state that made us stop and say maybe we should try to get everybody on the same page about what the law says,” Griffiths said. So the ACLU contacted school system superintendents in every county in Maryland, as well as the state Department of Education.

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The nation’s 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 took place Friday morning at 2:15. The execution of Kenneth Boyd in North Carolina for murdering his wife and her father comes at a time of growing misgivings over the death penalty, as reflected in jury verdicts, opinion polls and the actions of courts and state legislatures.

Death sentences have declined to their lowest level in three decades, with juries sentencing 125 people to death last year, compared with an average of 290 per year in the 1990s. The number of inmates executed last year was the lowest since 1996, and the Supreme Court has twice in the past three years limited who can be punished with death.

In Virginia, which has executed more people since 1976 than any state but Texas, Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) commuted the death sentence of Robin M. Lovitt this week because the state had thrown out what may have been conclusive evidence, making this the first year since 1983 that Virginia will not have had an execution.

In Maryland, Cardinal William H. Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore, prayed with Wesley E. Baker this week and said he would appeal to Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) to commute his death sentence to life without parole. Baker is on death row for murdering teacher’s aide Jane Tyson during a robbery outside a Catonsville mall.

Public opinion polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, but that is a significant drop from the peak, in 1994, when 80 percent of respondents told Gallup pollsters they were in favor of capital punishment. When asked if they would endorse executions if the alternative sentence of life without parole were available, support fell to 50 percent.

Amid the refinement of DNA techniques and the sporadic release of inmates from death row because of uncertain guilt, a growing number of people tell pollsters they believe that innocent prisoners have been executed. Although the majority of cases over the past three decades have been upheld, legal errors and sometimes poor defense work revealed during layers of appeals have convinced many Americans that the system is imperfect.

“There’s a skepticism about the accuracy of the system and, to some degree, the fairness,” said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It’s not quite the ticket to the statehouse if you promise to execute more and more and speed it up. You have religious leaders voicing concerns. You have conservatives. The lines aren’t as clear as they were before.”

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Many Surprised as Pelosi Calls for a Fast Pullout

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s embrace Wednesday of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq highlighted the Democratic Party’s fissures on war policy, putting the House’s top Democrat at odds with her second in command while upsetting a consensus developing in the Senate.
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“If Karl Rove was writing the timing of this, he wouldn’t have written it any differently, with the president of the United States expressing resolve and the Democratic leader offering surrender,” Wittmann said, referring to Bush’s top adviser. “For Republicans, this is manna from heaven.”

David Sirota, a Democratic strategist in Montana long critical of the party leadership’s timidity, fired back: “It is not surprising that a bunch of insulated elitists in the Washington establishment — most of whom have never served in uniform — would stab the Democratic Party in the back and attack the courage of people like Vietnam War hero Jack Murtha and Nancy Pelosi for their stand on Iraq.”

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