Two issues of importance to large groups of Americans with little political power—Blacks and Latinos—have come up in the Leftist press lately and for good reason:

• The Death Penalty—Justice Stevens condems the Death Penalty. I’ve written about this before, including the racial bias in who is executed by the state, and the situation is only getting worse—” According to the anti-capital punishment Death Penalty Information Center, more than three dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since 2000.”. Kent Scheidegger, advocate for the Death Penalty, claims that there is no systemic flaw in the Death Penalty: “I wouldn’t say that 20 or 30 cases out of 8,000 constitutes a broken system.”.
• Voting Rights—Today’s Democracy Now! has a number of segments of interest to those who want to preserve their voting rights. We must keep in mind that neither major corporate party cares about insuring the right to vote for non-Whites and the poor (which includes some Whites). In 2000 in Florida, some poor Whites but chiefly Blacks and Latinos were “scrubbed” from the voting rolls because their names coincided with the name of a convict, not because these people were convicts (which is a problem in itself, ex-convicts ought to have their rights restored or else one is arguing for perpetual punishment). The Democrats and Republicans were both able to run a series of campaigns for various offices and not raise the issue of restoring voting rights to those who never should have lost them. In 2006 many of those adversely affected still can’t vote. Not renewing the portions of the Voting Rights Act up for renewal in 2007 means setting up the entire country up for the kind of mistreatment those Floridians have suffered. This should be intolerable.