RICHMOND, Va. - Across the U.S., nearly 150 prisoners were released last year when their convictions were overturned. That's a record number of exonerations.

A report by The National Registry of Exonerations shows those people served an average of 14-and-a-half years. Three Virginia men were released, two had been in prison more than 25 years.

Registry editor and University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross says most of the overturned sentences were in Texas and New York, where local officials are taking a stronger approach to seeking justice for people wrongfully convicted.

"We have something like 3,100 different counties in the country, and something like 2,500 separate, local prosecutorial agencies," says Gross. "If more of them made the efforts that were made in those two locations, I'm sure they would find many more cases in which innocent defendants were convicted."

Across the country, defendants were exonerated in cases ranging from homicide to drug possession. The report says their convictions included false confessions, official misconduct, and guilty pleas. A record 75 exonerations, including two in Virginia, were cases in which no crime actually occurred.

According to Lonnie Soury, founder of the website FalseConfessions.org, statistics show the reported cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

"Even the federal Justice Department did a study once and said between 5 and 10 percent of the people in prison are wrongfully convicted," Soury says. "So, if there's 2.5 million people in prison, even 5 percent would be 125,000."

The National Registry of Exonerations report says there were 24 Conviction Integrity Units in the U.S. in 2015. That's double the number from 2013, and four times the number in 2011, although some units have been accused of being ineffective and creating an illusion of progress.




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A groundbreaking radio show from the early 1990s is returning this weekend in Arkansas. The PHAT LIP! You(th)Talk Radio show will be back on the airwaves Saturday on KABF 88.3 FM Community Radio in Little Rock.

The show, produced by Washitaw Foothills Youth Media Arts and Literacy Collective, features young people ages 16 to 24.

Director Kwami Abdul-Bey says the broadcast gives teens and young adults a chance to express their feelings about a variety of topics.

"We want all young people involved in the conversation, so you'll be hearing what they have to say particularly as it has to deal with civic engagement and electoral justice," he said.

The show will air from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. the first and third Saturday of each month, and is also available on KABF.org and through the Shortwave Relay Service.

The talk show is funded by a three-year grant. Some of the topics the students want to address are medical and student debt and funding cuts for social programs.

Jasmine Serrano, a show host, is a junior at Jacksonville High School in Jacksonville, and said she got involved with the project after speaking to members of the Arkansas Legislature.

"In society, we always look at the adults and we always look at the older folks and generations, but we don't really take the time to pay attention to how the current policies and societal perceptions are impacting youth," Serrano explained.

When Abdul-Bey started the original show in 1994, he said it was in response to a documentary that painted Arkansas youth in a bad light. His seventh-grade social studies students wanted to combat the negative stereotypes. He noted the name of the show reflects the music of the times.

"One of my favorite hip-hop artists back in the 1990s was Fat Lip from Digable Planets," he continued. "And 'pfat' at the time was something that was cool, something that was vital as far as the culture was concerned. And 'lip' just means you talk too much."

Reports of the Trump administration considering taxing wealthy Americans to pay for mass deportations and other priorities come on the heels of a new study showing how the move could generate significant revenues without slowing economic growth.

Mary Eschelbach Hansen, associate professor of economics at American University and the report's co-author, said raising tax rates for people who earn more than $609,000 a year to 44% would add 3% to the nation's tax coffers, enough to stave off cuts to popular programs serving low-income Coloradans.

"In current budget proportions, that's about enough to pay for some of the biggest, most important programs like food stamps SNAP, Children's Health Insurance Program, and also Temporary Assistance for Needy Families," Eschelbach Hansen outlined.

While 44% may seem high compared to today's top rate of 37%, it is a lot less than the 92% paid by people who earned more than $400,000 a year under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Republicans have long argued tax cuts create economic benefits for all, and leaders in Congress, including Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., the House Speaker, have said they would oppose any tax hikes.

Eschelbach Hansen argued raising the top tax rate would also increase how much of the national income pie most Americans get to keep, compared to how much the wealthiest get, by about 2%. She added years of trickle-down economics have shown only the wealthy benefit from low tax rates.

"If lowering top tax rates was going to trickle down, then you and I would be much richer than we are now," Eschelbach Hansen pointed out. "Because we have had an era of low top tax rates for decades."

Eschelbach Hansen stressed higher personal tax rates have virtually no impact on long-term economic growth, and lower personal tax rates lead to less economic growth, because people tend to take advantage of the lower rate by moving their income.

"Instead of reinvesting it in your business, where it will grow your business and grow the economy, you'll be more likely to just take it as personal income, which is not going to stimulate growth," Eschelbach Hansen explained.


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By Whitney Curry Wimbish for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Aster Abrahame injured her back at work a few years ago, the pain was so severe that she struggled to perform her job - processing pork loins at breakneck speeds at a JBS Foods meatpacking plant in Worthington, Minnesota. The company sent her to its doctor, who she says performed no examination or test, prescribed a painkiller and told her to report to work the next day. Abrahame's job is already among the most dangerous in the country. Now the Trump administration's U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking steps to remove regulatory protections and permit faster processing lines for pork and poultry companies.

The end goal is to allow meatpacking plants to set their own speeds, a spokesperson for the Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service told Sentient in an email.

"The rule for pork and poultry processing line speed will create [a] new maximum speed option but ultimately the decision for what line speed to utilize will be made by each individual plant," the spokesperson wrote. No new plants may obtain a waiver in the meantime, the spokesperson added, and extensions will only apply to those that have one.

Abrahame spent an excruciating, sleepless night after the company doctor sent her on her way, and in the morning went to her own physician before taking off work for a few weeks. She didn't qualify for workers' compensation and received no pay for the time off. The plant issued a strike against her attendance record, however, and Abrahame went back to work, even though she was still in pain.

"I didn't want to lose my job. After three weeks, I just decided, 'I have to go back to work,'" says Abrahame, 44, who has worked the processing line for 10 years despite the pain that shoots through her chest and shoulder. "I have kids, I have bills." Meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers, like Abrahame, are not only at risk of physical duress and injury, but also experience rates of depression that are four times higher than the national average.

The government's statement that "extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries" is false, labor advocates say - and that the USDA's own data shows otherwise. A recent USDA study found a correlation between the speed at which workers process or butcher meat and their risk for musculoskeletal disorders.

Abrahame says she has seen plenty of injuries that should raise concerns about the Trump administration's deregulatory move here. "I see wrist injuries, shoulder injuries. Some people have back injuries. It's all the company workers - this is how we work here," says Abrahame, who is now a shop steward for her union with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663, which represents 17,000 workers in meat packing and processing and other industries in Minnesota.

Removing Limits on Line Speeds

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in March that the Food Safety and Inspection Service will extend waivers allowing pork and poultry producers to process meat at a faster pace than the previous time limits prescribed, and begin immediate rulemaking to codify these higher limits.

Worker advocates and union groups say it's important to understand that the government only regulates the speed at which animals are "eviscerated," a part of the processing where workers remove internal organs from carcasses.

Evisceration work is largely automated these days. Just two percent of employees at modern plants work the evisceration line, according to the National Chicken Council, with eviscerations capped at 140 birds per minute and 1,106 hogs per hour.

The government doesn't regulate the speed at which workers process meat by hand, which constitutes the rest of the processing to prepare meat for sale and runs more slowly.

The two are related, however, Debbie Berkowitz, practitioner fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University tells Sentient.

The evisceration rate "sets the speeds in the rest of the plants to a degree," says Berkowitz, who is also a former chief of staff and senior policy advisor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Berkowitz has extensively studied processing speeds and written about the danger of raising them, as well as about processors' safety.

She and others point to the USDA's research published in January on pork and poultry plants that shows workers at a higher risk for injury when they work faster, as Sentient previously reported. Researchers looked at musculoskeletal injury rates for workers at plants that had waivers to eviscerate animals faster than the regulatory limit. Six pork processors, which eviscerated at speeds greater than 1,106 animals per hour, and 15 large poultry plants whose waivers allowed them to increase evisceration speed by a quarter to 175 birds per minute.

Eighty-one percent of poultry processors and nearly half of pork processors were at high risk for injury, the researchers found. The risk was associated with the rate at which workers handled individual parts per minute, or what the government referred to as "piece rate."

Forty percent of poultry processor workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity work-related pain in the year before; 42 percent of pork processors workers reported severe to "upper extremity pain."

The numbers are "higher than I've ever seen in any kind of industry," Berkowitz says. "They're astronomical."

Researchers found that the relationship between evisceration speed and how fast workers hand-processed meat varied depending on the plant, but worker advocates say the bottom line is that workers are more likely to get hurt when they're forced to work faster.

A permanent rate increase means "Injuries will increase and it's going to be a lot worse," Berkowitz says.

Berkowitz and others say that in addition to sustaining injuries, workers who get hurt on the line fear speaking up because it could cost not only their job, but their ability to stay in the U.S. Meatpacking and poultry producers are disproportionately refugees and noncitizen immigrants, and "this administration has declared a war on immigrant workers even if they've been here a decade," Berkowitz says. "Workers are going to get scared to bring up any complaints at all."

That fear is true in many immigrant communities, and especially heightened for meat processors, says Julia Coburn, director of projects and strategic initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, who said people still talk about major Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids, such as the 2008 Postville raid or the raids under the first Trump administration.

"A lot of the trust has been broken-or was never there," Coburn says. "Today we're seeing a lot of fear being heightened by what they're hearing in the news." After Trump's March 1 executive order declaring English the official language of the U.S., for example, Coburn said fear began to spread that it was illegal to speak Spanish in public.

Workers Continue to Push for Protection

Though the government puts a cap on the evisceration rates, workers and advocates said it's unclear what the actual speed particular plants are running. That information is treated as a trade secret, says Ruth Schultz, meatpacking director at Abrahame's union, UFCW Local 663.

Workers in Worthington, Minnesota are negotiating a new contract with JBS, pushing for the plant to post line speed standards for every line in each department, train workers to monitor lines and empower them to alert management when speeds are too high. So far, the company has said no, but the union won't budge. JBS did not respond to Sentient's request for comment.

As it stands now, the contract allows for one "walking steward" per shift to time lines throughout the day by counting the number of pieces of meat processed by thousands of workers, Shultz says. But according to Shultz, workers have seen supervisors turn down the speed of the conveyor belt when the steward walks by, then turn it back up after they're gone. That's one reason the union is committed to the proposal, Schultz says.

"The expectation that's there above all is that workers behave like machines...the ultimate priority is keeping the process running at absolute top speed and everything is secondary, including bodily function," says Coburn. "It's horrifying."


Whitney Curry Wimbish wrote this article for Sentient.


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