Thursday, 28 February 2019

ACLU: A Connecticut Bill Would Help Ensure That Re-Entry Doesn’t Last a Lifetime for the Formerly Incarcerated

A Connecticut Bill Would Help Ensure That Re-Entry Doesn’t Last a Lifetime for the Formerly Incarcerated
Connecticut could be the first to make the formerly incarcerated a protected class under the state’s antidiscrimination law.

This year, I moved from one city in Connecticut to a new one. On top of the usual stress of trying to find an affordable, comfortable place to live, I was burdened with extra anxiety.

Despite my success in the 12 years since being released from prison, I dreaded explaining my criminal record again. Weeks into my search, I revealed that part of my past to a potential landlord. When I did, that home’s door was closed to me.

My experience is not unique.

Ninety-five percent of the millions of people who are incarcerated in prisons throughout the country will return home one day. When we do, we face tens of thousands of legal barriers — more than 600 in Connecticut alone — to supporting ourselves, our families, and our communities. Public and private landlords, educational institutions, insurance companies, most state licensure boards, and other gatekeepers to society generally have the right to discriminate against prospective tenants, students, and policyholders because of our criminal record.

In many states, employers also have this right. Re-entry shouldn’t last a lifetime. But because of the isolation, stigma, and legal discrimination we face, it sometimes feels like we are still serving time, just in a community-based prison.

Connecticut, however, could be the first state to change that.

A bill introduced in the legislature would prevent people in Connecticut from being discriminated against based on their criminal record in housing, employment, insurance, education, credit, and state government programs and accommodations. As the first state to introduce or try this kind of legislation, Connecticut, a place dubbed the “Second Chance State,” has an opportunity to show millions of justice-impacted people nationwide that there is a path forward for a better future.

This week, the bill had its public hearing. The room was so packed with bill supporters, the committee chair had to move the hearing to a bigger space. As I testified in support of the bill on behalf of Smart Justice, dozens of people stood up behind me to show that when I spoke about the need for change, I was not just speaking for myself. I was representing tens of thousands of people in Connecticut, and millions more across the country, who have been harmed by mass incarceration and who are too often unheard in legislative conversations about our own lives.

All people in the U.S. pay the human and financial prices of discrimination against people living with a criminal record, and we cannot afford the cost. In Connecticut, formerly incarcerated people between the ages of 20 and 29 were eight times more likely than average to die within a year of leaving prison. Fifty-two percent of people who died from an overdose in our state last year were previously incarcerated by the state.

Economists estimate the U.S. gross national product is reduced between $78 billion and $87 billion because so many formerly incarcerated job seekers are kept out of the workforce. And with Black and Latino people disproportionately incarcerated, we are disproportionately rejected when we seek to build a life worth living, which hurts our families and communities.

Preventing discrimination against people who are living with a criminal record makes all of our communities stronger and safer.

The evidence shows that when people who are living with a criminal record are given a fair chance to reintegrate into society, we succeed. The nation’s largest employer, the U.S. military, found that enlistees with felony records are more likely to be promoted to sergeant than those with no conviction history, irrespective of other factors. Evidence also shows that when someone who is formerly incarcerated has a fair chance at building a stable life, they are less likely to commit another crime. The problem is that most of us never get that fair chance to try for success.

Right now, Connecticut has an opportunity to be a beacon of hope for millions of people across the country. This bill, introduced by a legislator whose own family has been directly affected by the justice system, recognizes that a person’s record of arrest or conviction does not tell you whether they will be a good neighbor, employee, or insurance policyholder. We should be judged based on who we are today, not a moment from our past.

Redemption is possible. I’m living proof of it.



Published February 28, 2019 at 08:45PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2GTcoj6

ACLU: A Connecticut Bill Would Help Ensure That Re-Entry Doesn’t Last a Lifetime for the Formerly Incarcerated

A Connecticut Bill Would Help Ensure That Re-Entry Doesn’t Last a Lifetime for the Formerly Incarcerated
Connecticut could be the first to make the formerly incarcerated a protected class under the state’s antidiscrimination law.

This year, I moved from one city in Connecticut to a new one. On top of the usual stress of trying to find an affordable, comfortable place to live, I was burdened with extra anxiety.

Despite my success in the 12 years since being released from prison, I dreaded explaining my criminal record again. Weeks into my search, I revealed that part of my past to a potential landlord. When I did, that home’s door was closed to me.

My experience is not unique.

Ninety-five percent of the millions of people who are incarcerated in prisons throughout the country will return home one day. When we do, we face tens of thousands of legal barriers — more than 600 in Connecticut alone — to supporting ourselves, our families, and our communities. Public and private landlords, educational institutions, insurance companies, most state licensure boards, and other gatekeepers to society generally have the right to discriminate against prospective tenants, students, and policyholders because of our criminal record.

In many states, employers also have this right. Re-entry shouldn’t last a lifetime. But because of the isolation, stigma, and legal discrimination we face, it sometimes feels like we are still serving time, just in a community-based prison.

Connecticut, however, could be the first state to change that.

A bill introduced in the legislature would prevent people in Connecticut from being discriminated against based on their criminal record in housing, employment, insurance, education, credit, and state government programs and accommodations. As the first state to introduce or try this kind of legislation, Connecticut, a place dubbed the “Second Chance State,” has an opportunity to show millions of justice-impacted people nationwide that there is a path forward for a better future.

This week, the bill had its public hearing. The room was so packed with bill supporters, the committee chair had to move the hearing to a bigger space. As I testified in support of the bill on behalf of Smart Justice, dozens of people stood up behind me to show that when I spoke about the need for change, I was not just speaking for myself. I was representing tens of thousands of people in Connecticut, and millions more across the country, who have been harmed by mass incarceration and who are too often unheard in legislative conversations about our own lives.

All people in the U.S. pay the human and financial prices of discrimination against people living with a criminal record, and we cannot afford the cost. In Connecticut, formerly incarcerated people between the ages of 20 and 29 were eight times more likely than average to die within a year of leaving prison. Fifty-two percent of people who died from an overdose in our state last year were previously incarcerated by the state.

Economists estimate the U.S. gross national product is reduced between $78 billion and $87 billion because so many formerly incarcerated job seekers are kept out of the workforce. And with Black and Latino people disproportionately incarcerated, we are disproportionately rejected when we seek to build a life worth living, which hurts our families and communities.

Preventing discrimination against people who are living with a criminal record makes all of our communities stronger and safer.

The evidence shows that when people who are living with a criminal record are given a fair chance to reintegrate into society, we succeed. The nation’s largest employer, the U.S. military, found that enlistees with felony records are more likely to be promoted to sergeant than those with no conviction history, irrespective of other factors. Evidence also shows that when someone who is formerly incarcerated has a fair chance at building a stable life, they are less likely to commit another crime. The problem is that most of us never get that fair chance to try for success.

Right now, Connecticut has an opportunity to be a beacon of hope for millions of people across the country. This bill, introduced by a legislator whose own family has been directly affected by the justice system, recognizes that a person’s record of arrest or conviction does not tell you whether they will be a good neighbor, employee, or insurance policyholder. We should be judged based on who we are today, not a moment from our past.

Redemption is possible. I’m living proof of it.



Published March 1, 2019 at 02:15AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2GTcoj6

ACLU: In an Era of Religious Refusals, the Do No Harm Act Is an Essential Safeguard

In an Era of Religious Refusals, the Do No Harm Act Is an Essential Safeguard
The bill would restore the original intent of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by making clear that it cannot be used to discriminate.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration granted a request from the state of South Carolina for an exception to a federal rule barring discrimination in federally funded child welfare programs. With its action, the administration allowed government-contracted and taxpayer-funded child welfare agencies in South Carolina to turn away would-be foster and adoptive parents because they do not share the agency’s religious beliefs.

The justification for this action was the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. When it was passed by Congress and signed into law in 1993, RFRA was intended to protect religious freedom, especially for religious minorities. RFRA was a response to the 1990 Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith that many — including the ACLU — saw as a bad ruling that lessened constitutional protection for religious freedom.

RFRA prohibits the federal government from “substantially burden[ing]” a person’s religious exercise unless doing so is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. Minor burdens on religious exercise were not supposed to trigger RFRA protection and even substantial burdens were permitted where necessary to achieve a compelling government interest, such as prohibiting discrimination.

The Trump administration’s decision to permit federally funded child welfare agencies to place their own religious beliefs over the best interests of the children who are in their care is an example of the ways in which RFRA has been increasingly invoked to provide a blank check to discriminate or to impose religious beliefs onto others. RFRA was intended to provide a shield for the exercise of religious freedom, not be used as a discriminatory sword.

Congress can and must act to address the ways in which RFRA has been abused.

One way to do so is to pass the Do No Harm Act, which is an essential safeguard in an era when we have increasingly seen religious freedom used to license discrimination. The legislation — which is being introduced on Thursday by Reps. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) — would restore the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to its original intent as a protective shield for religious minorities. It would preserve the law’s power to protect religious freedom, while clarifying that it cannot be used to harm others by, for example, trumping laws that protect against discrimination and provide access to health care — two areas where we have seen clear abuses.

In addition to federally funded child welfare providers in South Carolina being able to turn away would-be foster and adoptive parents because they are the “wrong religion,” other recent examples illustrate why it is essential to amend RFRA as the Do No Harm Act would.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores that large, for-profit, closely held corporations can use RFRA to undermine a law that would otherwise require them to provide employees insurance coverage for contraception. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed concern that Hobby Lobby could lead to RFRA being used to permit discrimination against minority groups.

And then in August 2016, in EEOC v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, a federal court in Michigan ruled in favor of a funeral home that fired a transgender employee due to her gender identity. It held that the employer could use RFRA as a defense to a sex discrimination claim under Title VII, the federal law that prohibits employment discrimination. This decision was overturned by a federal appeals court, whose decision has in turn been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Finally, in October 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions released guidance on protections for religious freedom under federal law. The guidance includes an extreme interpretation of RFRA that will serve as a blueprint for discrimination.

Religious freedom is a core American value and something that the ACLU has fought to defend since the founding of our organization a century ago. That freedom, however, does not include the right to discriminate against or harm others. We have seen the RFRA twisted from a law designed to safeguard the rights of religious minorities into a tool of discrimination. Congress must act to put an end to these abuses once and for all.



Published February 26, 2019 at 09:45PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2T59jmF

ACLU: In an Era of Religious Refusals, the Do No Harm Act Is an Essential Safeguard

In an Era of Religious Refusals, the Do No Harm Act Is an Essential Safeguard
The bill would restore the original intent of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by making clear that it cannot be used to discriminate.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration granted a request from the state of South Carolina for an exception to a federal rule barring discrimination in federally funded child welfare programs. With its action, the administration allowed government-contracted and taxpayer-funded child welfare agencies in South Carolina to turn away would-be foster and adoptive parents because they do not share the agency’s religious beliefs.

The justification for this action was the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. When it was passed by Congress and signed into law in 1993, RFRA was intended to protect religious freedom, especially for religious minorities. RFRA was a response to the 1990 Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith that many — including the ACLU — saw as a bad ruling that lessened constitutional protection for religious freedom.

RFRA prohibits the federal government from “substantially burden[ing]” a person’s religious exercise unless doing so is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. Minor burdens on religious exercise were not supposed to trigger RFRA protection and even substantial burdens were permitted where necessary to achieve a compelling government interest, such as prohibiting discrimination.

The Trump administration’s decision to permit federally funded child welfare agencies to place their own religious beliefs over the best interests of the children who are in their care is an example of the ways in which RFRA has been increasingly invoked to provide a blank check to discriminate or to impose religious beliefs onto others. RFRA was intended to provide a shield for the exercise of religious freedom, not be used as a discriminatory sword.

Congress can and must act to address the ways in which RFRA has been abused.

One way to do so is to pass the Do No Harm Act, which is an essential safeguard in an era when we have increasingly seen religious freedom used to license discrimination. The legislation — which is being introduced on Thursday by Reps. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) — would restore the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to its original intent as a protective shield for religious minorities. It would preserve the law’s power to protect religious freedom, while clarifying that it cannot be used to harm others by, for example, trumping laws that protect against discrimination and provide access to health care — two areas where we have seen clear abuses.

In addition to federally funded child welfare providers in South Carolina being able to turn away would-be foster and adoptive parents because they are the “wrong religion,” other recent examples illustrate why it is essential to amend RFRA as the Do No Harm Act would.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores that large, for-profit, closely held corporations can use RFRA to undermine a law that would otherwise require them to provide employees insurance coverage for contraception. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed concern that Hobby Lobby could lead to RFRA being used to permit discrimination against minority groups.

And then in August 2016, in EEOC v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, a federal court in Michigan ruled in favor of a funeral home that fired a transgender employee due to her gender identity. It held that the employer could use RFRA as a defense to a sex discrimination claim under Title VII, the federal law that prohibits employment discrimination. This decision was overturned by a federal appeals court, whose decision has in turn been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Finally, in October 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions released guidance on protections for religious freedom under federal law. The guidance includes an extreme interpretation of RFRA that will serve as a blueprint for discrimination.

Religious freedom is a core American value and something that the ACLU has fought to defend since the founding of our organization a century ago. That freedom, however, does not include the right to discriminate against or harm others. We have seen the RFRA twisted from a law designed to safeguard the rights of religious minorities into a tool of discrimination. Congress must act to put an end to these abuses once and for all.



Published February 26, 2019 at 04:15PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2T59jmF

Wednesday, 27 February 2019

ACLU: North Carolinians Voted to End Cooperation With Trump’s Deportation Force. ICE Retaliated.

North Carolinians Voted to End Cooperation With Trump’s Deportation Force. ICE Retaliated.
The federal agency stepped up raids after sheriffs stopped notifying it about the immigration status of people arrested.

President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security frequently claims to be motivated by a dedication to law and order, but its immigration enforcement tactics are often directly contrary to local communities’ legal and electoral choices.

Recent raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in North Carolina were a failed attempt to achieve by force what was soundly rejected at the ballot box last November: Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. ICE targeted places and people based on democratic decisions North Carolina counties made about their policing resources and values, including upholding the Constitution.

Sweeping Change Across North Carolina

In the 2018 sheriffs’ elections in North Carolina, several long-term incumbents in Wake, Durham, Mecklenburg, Forsyth, and Henderson counties were defeated. Their successors ran — and won — on the promise of accountability to the diverse communities that they serve and against being part of Trump’s deportation force. This included the termination of 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE that notify federal agents of the immigration status of detained individuals. Immediately, sheriffs began enacting the will of the people.

In North Carolina’s three most populous counties — Wake, Mecklenburg, and Durham — each newly elected sheriff publicly stated their intention to disentangle their local law enforcement work from federal immigration enforcement.

Sheriff Gary McFadden of Mecklenburg County and Sheriff Gerald Baker of Wake County both publicly ended their 287(g) programs, joining other major cities’ counties like Harris (Houston) and Los Angeles in considering 287(g) to be harmful to community policing by frightening residents and an unjustified subsidy of federal immigration enforcement by local budgets that have other public safety priorities. Law enforcement leaders such as the Major Cities Chiefs Association say that entangling federal immigration enforcement with state and local policing, as 287(g) does, is mistaken.

In the months since their elections, sheriffs in Forsyth and Henderson counties have now both also made statements about their interest in disentangling from their relationships with ICE. Sheriff Lowell Griffin in Henderson County has stated that their 287(g) program, set to expire at the end February, drains his office of essential financial resources, although it remains to be seen if he will renew the program despite the financial losses incurred by his office.

In Forsyth County, Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough has stated that he will no longer honor ICE detainer requests and will require a judicial warrant: “We will not be an extension of immigrant investigations.” He also expressed concern saying, “Basically, I’m detaining somebody’s Fourth Amendment right without due process.”

ICE’s Retaliatory Detention Rampage in North Carolina

ICE engaged in a five-day statewide operation in North Carolina starting Feb. 5. ICE targeted the three counties — Wake, Durham, and Mecklenburg — where sheriffs have publicly ended their collaboration with ICE.

The operation resulted in the detention of over 200 immigrants and was admittedly haphazard in nature, resulting in ICE detaining at least 60 immigrants who were not targets of ICE immigration enforcement, but were simply in the “wrong place at the wrong time.”

In defending the raids, ICE officials directed their ire at local law enforcement for ending collaboration with ICE. ICE Field Office Director Sean Gallagher named “the dangerous policies of not cooperating with ICE,” as the impetus for the operation.

Gallagher went so far as to confirm the indiscriminate detention of immigrants that are not ICE priorities for immigration enforcement, saying, “If these [287(g)] programs would be in place, I wouldn’t have to put so many officers on the street [...] and you would have less people — like you were talking about — workers going to work that would be arrested. Absolutely.”

Sheriffs upholding the Constitution are refusing to break the law, not declining to enforce it. But ICE Southern Region Communications Director Bryan Cox was intentionally misleading in alleging a lack of cooperation. He said, “The reality is now given that the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Department will no longer cooperate with ICE, ICE has no choice but to send its officers into the community, into neighborhoods, into workplaces to make those same arrests.” ICE is aware of every person booked into these jails through fingerprint sharing: If they want to detain someone, all that’s needed — like from every other law enforcement agency — is a warrant that’s independently issued by a judge and supported by the Constitution’s probable cause requirement.

Fighting Back: North Carolinians Are Standing Firm

In the wake of ICE’s coercive and retaliatory operations across North Carolina, community groups are taking up the important work of rapid response and community building. Groups like Siembra NC, Familia Si, 287(g) No, CIMA, Comunidad Colectiva, Comite Popular Somos Raleigh, and Comite de Accion Popular are mobilizing with allies to support sheriffs who protect their residents’ rights and put serving their communities first.

We support this broad coalition, which includes faith-based and nonprofit organizations, and call on Gov. Roy Cooper to condemn the retaliatory ICE operation in North Carolina. We also call on ICE to be transparent and report publicly about how, where, and why each individual was detained during the operation. North Carolinians voted last November for community policing and respecting the Fourth Amendment, and ICE’s scare tactics won’t roll back our progress.



Published February 28, 2019 at 04:00AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2SwrBZ1

ACLU: North Carolinians Voted to End Cooperation With Trump’s Deportation Force. ICE Retaliated.

North Carolinians Voted to End Cooperation With Trump’s Deportation Force. ICE Retaliated.
The federal agency stepped up raids after sheriffs stopped notifying it about the immigration status of people arrested.

President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security frequently claims to be motivated by a dedication to law and order, but its immigration enforcement tactics are often directly contrary to local communities’ legal and electoral choices.

Recent raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in North Carolina were a failed attempt to achieve by force what was soundly rejected at the ballot box last November: Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. ICE targeted places and people based on democratic decisions North Carolina counties made about their policing resources and values, including upholding the Constitution.

Sweeping Change Across North Carolina

In the 2018 sheriffs’ elections in North Carolina, several long-term incumbents in Wake, Durham, Mecklenburg, Forsyth, and Henderson counties were defeated. Their successors ran — and won — on the promise of accountability to the diverse communities that they serve and against being part of Trump’s deportation force. This included the termination of 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE that notify federal agents of the immigration status of detained individuals. Immediately, sheriffs began enacting the will of the people.

In North Carolina’s three most populous counties — Wake, Mecklenburg, and Durham — each newly elected sheriff publicly stated their intention to disentangle their local law enforcement work from federal immigration enforcement.

Sheriff Gary McFadden of Mecklenburg County and Sheriff Gerald Baker of Wake County both publicly ended their 287(g) programs, joining other major cities’ counties like Harris (Houston) and Los Angeles in considering 287(g) to be harmful to community policing by frightening residents and an unjustified subsidy of federal immigration enforcement by local budgets that have other public safety priorities. Law enforcement leaders such as the Major Cities Chiefs Association say that entangling federal immigration enforcement with state and local policing, as 287(g) does, is mistaken.

In the months since their elections, sheriffs in Forsyth and Henderson counties have now both also made statements about their interest in disentangling from their relationships with ICE. Sheriff Lowell Griffin in Henderson County has stated that their 287(g) program, set to expire at the end February, drains his office of essential financial resources, although it remains to be seen if he will renew the program despite the financial losses incurred by his office.

In Forsyth County, Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough has stated that he will no longer honor ICE detainer requests and will require a judicial warrant: “We will not be an extension of immigrant investigations.” He also expressed concern saying, “Basically, I’m detaining somebody’s Fourth Amendment right without due process.”

ICE’s Retaliatory Detention Rampage in North Carolina

ICE engaged in a five-day statewide operation in North Carolina starting Feb. 5. ICE targeted the three counties — Wake, Durham, and Mecklenburg — where sheriffs have publicly ended their collaboration with ICE.

The operation resulted in the detention of over 200 immigrants and was admittedly haphazard in nature, resulting in ICE detaining at least 60 immigrants who were not targets of ICE immigration enforcement, but were simply in the “wrong place at the wrong time.”

In defending the raids, ICE officials directed their ire at local law enforcement for ending collaboration with ICE. ICE Field Office Director Sean Gallagher named “the dangerous policies of not cooperating with ICE,” as the impetus for the operation.

Gallagher went so far as to confirm the indiscriminate detention of immigrants that are not ICE priorities for immigration enforcement, saying, “If these [287(g)] programs would be in place, I wouldn’t have to put so many officers on the street [...] and you would have less people — like you were talking about — workers going to work that would be arrested. Absolutely.”

Sheriffs upholding the Constitution are refusing to break the law, not declining to enforce it. But ICE Southern Region Communications Director Bryan Cox was intentionally misleading in alleging a lack of cooperation. He said, “The reality is now given that the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Department will no longer cooperate with ICE, ICE has no choice but to send its officers into the community, into neighborhoods, into workplaces to make those same arrests.” ICE is aware of every person booked into these jails through fingerprint sharing: If they want to detain someone, all that’s needed — like from every other law enforcement agency — is a warrant that’s independently issued by a judge and supported by the Constitution’s probable cause requirement.

Fighting Back: North Carolinians Are Standing Firm

In the wake of ICE’s coercive and retaliatory operations across North Carolina, community groups are taking up the important work of rapid response and community building. Groups like Siembra NC, Familia Si, 287(g) No, CIMA, Comunidad Colectiva, Comite Popular Somos Raleigh, and Comite de Accion Popular are mobilizing with allies to support sheriffs who protect their residents’ rights and put serving their communities first.

We support this broad coalition, which includes faith-based and nonprofit organizations, and call on Gov. Roy Cooper to condemn the retaliatory ICE operation in North Carolina. We also call on ICE to be transparent and report publicly about how, where, and why each individual was detained during the operation. North Carolinians voted last November for community policing and respecting the Fourth Amendment, and ICE’s scare tactics won’t roll back our progress.



Published February 27, 2019 at 10:30PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2SwrBZ1

Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela

Zoe Valery | Longreads | February 2019 | 18 minutes (5,018 words)

 

— Orocual tar pit, northeastern Venezuela, 2007 C.E.

Ascanio Rincón was standing on a veritable fossil paradise when one of his students brought to his attention a tooth that was sticking out through the dirt. The site presented innumerable shards of prehistoric bones that had been fortuitously unearthed by a steamroller digging a trench for a pipeline. After assessing the value of the site, the young paleontologist stood his ground to protect the tar pit where millions of fossils have been preserved by the asphalt, eventually forcing the workers to redraw the course of the oil duct. When he cleaned around the tooth that was embedded in the trench wall, he found that it was attached to the skull of a creature that the steamroller had missed only by inches. He looked at the eye socket in disbelief: “A saber-toothed tiger was looking at me in the eye,” he recalls. This specimen would constitute a groundbreaking discovery for Rincón and a landmark for the field of paleontology in Venezuela and at large.

To this day, Richard Parker — named after the tiger in Life of Pi — remains one of the most remarkable findings in the country and one of Rincón’s dearest fossils. The sabre-toothed tiger has shed light on a migratory wave during the Ice Age that the scientific community previously had not been aware of. Due to the current mass migration of people from Venezuela, Rincón is one of the only scientists left in the country tapping into the overwhelming wealth of fossils yet to be uncovered at the Orocual tar pit. Like most of his colleagues, the eight students he had trained have all left the country, joining 3 million other Venezuelans fleeing the rampant economic crisis, creating what has been described by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees as the most dire refugee crisis on the continent. Rincón is an endling — the only extant individual of a species — in his field: the last vertebrate paleontologist in Venezuela.*

Bone by bone, Rincón slowly reconstructs not just prehistory, but also a past that weighs on present-day Venezuela.

Like many other professionals in Venezuela, Rincón earned $4.10 each month last year in a country where the cost of a dozen eggs reached $150 on the black market in 2016. Scarcity has become widespread in this oil state with the highest inflation rate in the world — a hyperinflation that could hit 10,000,000 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Prices have risen above 1,000,000 percent in the past year. Venezuela’s economy has been in decline for years, falling apart at a meteoric rate during Nicolás Maduro’s presidency with the collapse of crude prices in 2014. The country has become increasingly reliant on oil, which constitutes 98 percent of its total exports. Food shortages have reached alarming levels that are described in cataclysmic terms by the global media.

“Everything is difficult,” Rincón laments. “This is science in extreme conditions.” Nowadays, Rincón excavates on his own, recruiting whoever agrees to help him wield pickax and shovel. Still, with very little money, paying for his fieldwork excursions out of pocket, Rincón continues to perform what he calls “big league science” by regularly publishing in the top scientific journals of his field. In 2011, Rincón’s paper on Richard Parker appeared in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. He gave the tiger the scientific denomination of Homotherium venezuelensis, which translates into “Venezuelan man-beast.”

 

* * *

Homotherium venezuelensis

Richard Parker … or Ascanio Rincón?

 

He battles dampness with a dehumidifier that often overflows with the condensed moisture distinctive of the outskirts of Caracas, where his small office is located, in the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) at the end of a long hall of empty rooms, vacated by colleagues who have fled the country. He faces a scarcity of supplies — toilet paper, plastic bags, bond paper, Sharpies — that has become prevalent in Venezuela. Still, with more than 20,000 fossils collected from his excursions, Rincón’s small office is a repository of paleontological treasures and geological data. For Rincón, reading the earth’s strata is akin to looking through a box of photographs, each layer constituting a snapshot of a particular period. He remarks that, in the present, we are looking at the last photogram of 4,500 million years of evolution.

The office of Ascanio Rincón. Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincón.

A public figure who often gets recognized on the street, the 44-year-old Rincón is active on social media, posting photos of the Jurassic — Cenozoic or Pleistocene might be more accurate — world that he has studied throughout the 25 years of his career. A 360-degree picture on his Facebook account transports the viewer to the center of his 24-square-meter workplace, which constitutes a self-contained landscape with its own archival geology. New beasts arise from the office’s spatial constraints amid a mélange of interlocking teeth, horns, and aeons: a Cerberus made up of tapir, a toothed bird, a crocodylian here; a jumble of three giant femurs and a dinosaur-like cranium over there. With his characteristic ponytail and sporty prescription glasses, Rincón sits, with brush in hand, in front of a bone mass that outsizes his own torso. On the other side, framed by open jaws of all sorts, his assistant delicately touches Richard Parker’s skull.

The most recent “photogram” on Rincón’s Facebook wall — which offers a layered display of his blurred professional and personal lives — is a selfie of him at his desk alone. Rincón’s assistant has long since left the country in search of better opportunities elsewhere. But Richard Parker’s skull remains on his desk, with its fleshless, sabre-toothed smile. Regularly posing with the tiger’s fossil in photos, Rincón is reminiscent of Hamlet holding up the skull of Yorick. Yet here the crucial question he constantly asks himself, amid new difficulties to live and work in Venezuela, is the same one faced by everyone living in the country today: to leave or not to leave. Rincón is depressed, squeezed between the pressures of this dilemma.

The skull of Richard Parker. Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincón.

Leaving the country is a particularly difficult predicament for Rincón. To leave, as his wife urges they do, would mean to give up a primeval paradise with a myriad of species waiting to be discovered. So far, Rincón has discovered 15 new species and genera in total. Abroad, he would be just one more scientist, a displaced paleontologist. Yet his 8-year-old son would have not only a future but a present that is clear of unbearable violence and scarcity. Not to leave, on the other hand, means he can remain, in his words, “the paleontologist of Venezuela” carrying out his own scientific crusade.

Despite the fact that every public institution in Venezuela is under the control of the current regime, which punishes dissent with firing and political persecution and imprisonment, Rincón is openly opposed to Nicolás Maduro, who came to power as the successor of Hugo Chávez in 2013 and banned opposition parties from contesting in the 2018 presidential election. Maduro now faces the most significant challenge to his presidency amid widespread protests in Venezuela and the world in support of the opposition leader and head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, who aims to serve as interim president until new elections are held. Rincón was wounded by pellet shots during the widespread protests against the government in 2017, which left a death toll of more than 100 people, many of them minors. In the current state of turmoil and uncertainty, Rincón, who has expressed his support for Guaidó on social media, describes science as his “trench” and is intent to continue to fight his battle in his home country on these terms. Yet, even if Venezuela manages to transition to democracy in the near future, Rincón thinks the general situation in the country will remain unstable and difficult for a very long time. Still, although he sometimes entertains the possibility, emigrating is not on the visible horizon for Rincón. His horizons remain solely geological, packed with fossils begging to be unearthed on native soil.

Rincón grew up on the small island of Toas in the Lake of Maracaibo, cruising the oil-rich waters daily on a motorboat to get to the mainland to study biology in the state capital. Instead of pursuing a more conventional career in fossil fuels, he was fixated on fossils. He continued his studies at the IVIC and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 2006, Rincón finished his postdoc in paleontology at the University of Texas, Austin. He was happy to return to his homeland, a fossil paradise, where a vast, unexplored territory and the promise of funding awaited. In Venezuela, where, the old joke goes, “all the dinosaurs went to die” — an inspiration for the setting of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World — Rincón found his country lost to a colossal economic crisis. The national, state-owned company Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA) had proposed to finance his excavations, and the IVIC had offered him the position of head of laboratory. Neither of these promises was fulfilled.

Rincón’s research has taken him from the deserts of Colombia and Peru and the Bolivia Plateau to the Antarctic islands. In Venezuela, however, he has experienced a crippling immobility. He hasn’t been able to visit his family in his hometown since 2017 due to the high costs of traveling. Over the past year, Rincón has been forced to repeatedly cancel his plans for an excavation at the same site where he found Richard Parker. His car has four bald tires and bad breaks that need replacing in order to face roads that are extremely dangerous due to poor conditions and threats of carjacking — or worse. Each tire costs around $150. Even if he receives international grants to finance his excavations, the currency-exchange restrictions set by the Venezuelan government would make it practically impossible to bring the money into the country. The vehicles owned by the scientific institute, just like most of its projects, are stalled due to a lack of spare parts and no budget to repair malfunctions. His fieldwork shoes are worn out and falling apart. There’s no way to glue them back together, but he doesn’t have the heart to throw them away.

Rincón illustrates the now normalized scarceness in Venezuela by describing a scene that has become standard practice at the institute. Whenever someone opens a Krazy Glue tube, they announce it out loud for everyone to gather round and bring their broken objects. Someone from the electronic cryomicroscopy department might bring their glasses; someone working on tropical ecology could attempt to save their coffee mug. Rincón might bring something similar or one of his latest contraptions assembled from garbage pieces, such as a camera support or a lamp. Rincón spends his days piecing together fossils, attempting to reconstruct prehistoric creatures and their trajectories just as much as broken everyday things that are irreplaceable and no longer existent in Venezuela.

Skeletons are sticking out among the Venezuelan population. What are the bones of current generations going to say? How can ruin ossify in this way?

One of Rincón’s most recent attempts to go back to Orocual was thwarted by poor health. He was preparing to go on a research trip when his blood pressure suddenly rocketed to 150 bpm. He thought he was having a heart attack. When he learned this wasn’t the case, he was relieved beyond measure, knowing as he did that hospitals in the country endure shortages of basic things like soap and experience blackouts that can disrupt surgeries. Rincón, who suffers from hypertension, is unable to find medicine in Venezuela, where import prohibitions imposed by the government have impeded the possibility to receive medical supplies via courier. Maduro denies the existence of a humanitarian crisis, and has blocked attempts to bring in aid in the form of food and medical supplies. Though the country has accepted limited aid, Human Rights Watch has said it is “not on the scale necessary to alleviate the current crisis.” The international pressure is currently mounting on the country’s borders, as the opposition seeks to bring in international aid that is condemned by Maduro as an invasion attempt that could pave the way for U.S. military intervention. At the Colombia-Venezuela border, Maduro’s government has barricaded the bridge connecting the two countries with an oil tanker and shipping containers to prevent the delivery of food and medical supplies collected by the United States, Colombia, Canada, and Venezuelans abroad. Clashes between government forces and the population have resulted in at least four civilian deaths, hundreds of injuries, and the burning of several trucks carrying the supplies. In blocking the border, the Venezuelan troops are also looking after their own interests. Under the Maduro administration, the National Guard has greatly profited from food trafficking in the country, which has become a better business than the illegal drug trade, also dominated by the Army. Military power is pervasive in Venezuela and extends to the control of the mining and oil industries — PDVSA is run by a major general — and the distribution of medical supplies, among other things.

On the day of his hypertensive scare, Rincón felt compelled to release on social media an image of the monthly paycheck issued to him by the scientific institute. It reads, after retirement and insurance holds, 1,104,134.64 bolívares. One kilogram of tomatoes costs around that figure in Venezuelan supermarkets. With his post, Rincón wanted to dispel the rumor that he is a millionaire and the suspicion that he’s “plugged” to the government’s privileges. His critics point to his relationship with state-owned PDVSA as evidence of his complicity with the Maduro regime.

At the Orocual tar pit. Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincón.

Rincón relies on PDVSA to gain access to the tar pit of Orocual. Due to the economic instability of the industry, the oil company has only been able to provide him with three meals a day and accommodation in exchange for acknowledgment and, occasionally, geological intel that might be useful for hydrocarbon exploration. Rincón is regularly informed about any fossil deposits that oil workers find in the field. It is no coincidence that PDVSA’s and Rincón’s paths are intermeshed. Oil and asphalt favor fossil preservation because of the oxygen vacuum they create. There are hundreds of tar pits scattered throughout Venezuela, and countless creatures found their end in these sticky quagmires, yielding fossils up to 2 million years old. The oil seep at Orocual, where PDVSA has several oil fields, is part of the Orinoco Petroleum Belt, one of the largest oil reserves on the planet. This is where the Venezuelan man-beast fell into a deadly crude trap.

Exploring a cave. Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincón.

Unable to carry out fieldwork at the moment at Orocual, where a plethora of bone fragments still await collection, Rincón has resorted to looking for fossils in Caracas. One of the sites he explored last year was a cave within the city, where he practiced a form of paleontological speleology. As dangerous as venturing inside a cavern with very basic equipment — worn-out boots, a rope, a helmet, a flashlight with few, precious batteries — may seem, for Rincón, the real danger lurks outside the cave, where he has heard shots fired in the nearby neighborhood. For the past few years, Caracas has topped the list of most violent cities in the world, with a murder rate of 111.19 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. “Insile” (insilio in Spanish) is a term that has been circulating to describe the sense of inverted exile or feeling of being a foreigner in one’s own country that is prevalent in the increasingly hostile capital city and in the country at large. A seasoned speleologist habituated to enclosed spaces, Rincón mentions that he was surprised to experience his first panic attack due to claustrophobia inside the cave during one of his excursions.

Feeling trapped in his office, Rincón currently fills his time by working on his next papers about past findings. Poring over a Classical Greek dictionary, he thinks about possible names for his most recent discovery. This is how he named in 2015 another major breakthrough of his career, the femur of a giant sloth, which reads like a line from a haiku or a Homeric epithet.

 

* * *

Eionaletherium tanycnemius

“The Long-legged Beast That Wanders Through the Beach”

 

Bones carry the story of the organism to which they belonged, Rincón remarks. He refers to this arrangement of the layers in bones (their osseous stratigraphic sequence) as fingerprints — boneprints — unique to each individual. Through chemical analyses of stable isotopes, he explains, scientists are able to read the specimen’s dietary history by measuring traces of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Forensic analyses of this kind also throw light on the individual’s age, weight, body mass, metabolic rate, and how much energy they had. Everything is registered in the bone, including the stress and traumas that an individual — or an entire population — has gone through. “From their ‘ontogenetic conservation,’ you can learn what an organism ate at various stages of its life: what it ate when it was young, what it ate in adulthood, and what it ate in its old age,” Rincón says. For instance, we know that these ancient sloths from northeastern Venezuela moved even more slowly than the ones alive today.

Through bones, Rincón examines ontogenesis, the study of the developmental history of an organism or anatomical feature from its earliest stage to maturity. The word has an interesting etymology: ontos-, “to be,” and –geneia, “mode of production.” To define “being” according to a mode of production is especially suggestive in this single-export oil country. With production at its lowest in 30 years, the state-owned oil company faces an exodus of its workforce, unprecedented in the history of the oil industry. Moving backward in time, PDVSA — and, consequently, Venezuela itself — increasingly resembles this slow giant entrapped in its own crude pit.

Eionaletherium (sloth). Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincón.

When explaining at what point a bone can be considered a fossil, Rincón says, “The chicken you had yesterday — if you managed to find it — could be, in a way, already considered a fossil.” He laughs as he draws an analogy that sounds tragicomic in the face of the food crisis. “Indeed,” he observes, “to find chicken to eat in Venezuela is a fortuitous event. This is, more or less, what happens with fossils. You must be extremely lucky because they’re rare occurrences in nature.”

Somewhat resembling forensic analyses in paleontology, economists have been forced to resort to new indicators in order to grasp the magnitude of a crisis that exceeds traditional metrics. One of the most shocking markers, devised by Ricardo Hausmann at Harvard University, has been the calculation of the number of calories that the minimum wage allows a person to buy, which currently stands at fewer than 900 a day. An average person expends more than 2,000 calories a day. Venezuelans have come up with a term for the generalized weight loss and nutritional deficiency that have resulted from the food crisis: the “Maduro diet.”

Moving backward in time, PDVSA — and, consequently, Venezuela itself — increasingly resembles this slow giant entrapped in its own crude pit.

People are starving in the country with the largest oil reserves in the world. Rincón himself recently stated on social media that he had lost around 10 kilos (22 pounds) because of the food shortage, his weight plummeting to just 64 kilos (141 pounds). His wife and son have grown thinner as well. The United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, has identified a malnutrition crisis in Venezuela. A common sight on the streets of Caracas today is that of people going through the garbage seeking food to feed themselves and their families. Particularly shocking is the mounting severe malnourishment in children who, just skin and bones, often die of famine upon reaching the hospital; hundreds of skeletal babies have died of hunger in the emergency rooms in the past two years. The Venezuelan government has censored and kept secret the figures indicating infant mortality rates (a study published in the The Lancet Global Health estimated 21 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016), yet bodies speak for themselves: Skeletons are sticking out among the Venezuelan population. What are the bones of current generations going to say? How can ruin ossify in this way?


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* * *

Tachiraptor admirabilis

Rincón’s Admirable Campaign

 

In 2013, among volcanic rocks composed of tuffs, sandstones, and silt in northwestern Venezuela, Rincón and his team found a tibia and an ischium (the curved bone at the base of the pelvis) that would, once more, mark a watershed in paleontological studies. Dinosaur fossil discoveries are extremely rare in the northern region of South America and the larger Gondwanan landmass to which the continent was attached around 500 million years ago. La Quinta rock formation, which crops out near the border of Colombia, had yielded Venezuela’s first and, until Rincón and his colleagues’ finding, only dinosaur fossil: a herbivorous species named Laquintasaura venezuelae. Their discovery, the Tachiraptor admirabilis, was the first meat-eating dinosaur ever discovered in Venezuela. It immediately captivated the public, generating enthusiasm for Rincón’s work. “People like anything that kills, bites, and draws blood,” Rincón says, laughing. “The Tachiraptor gave me fame — but no fortune, as you can see!”

Rincón describes the discovery as “electrifying,” not least for the historic locality where it was found, La Grita, a strategic point in Simón Bolívar’s Admirable Campaign for Venezuelan independence. In 1813, Bolívar, who remains today South America’s most iconic military hero, set out to end Spanish rule in the western provinces of what is now Venezuela. Two hundred years later, Rincón would conduct his own admirable paleontological campaign and name his finding after the historical milestone. “Tachiraptor” means “thief of Táchira,” the state where the predator’s remains were found. For Rincón, the link to Bolívar’s Admirable Campaign was inevitable, so “admirabilis” immediately had a natural ring to him. Bolívar’s name, however, has heavy political connotations in present-day Venezuela. “I am not a politiquero [a politically motivated person], but we had to acknowledge Bolívar’s Admirable Campaign,” he says. “It was too great a coincidence. It was just obvious.”

That Venezuela has been built around the figure of Bolívar can be inferred from its urban anthropology. The main square of almost every city in the country is named after him. Yet, like the national currency that bears Bolívar’s name, the hero’s image has also been devalued. Today “Bolivarianism” is less identified with the purely historical military and political figure that helped five other Latin American countries attain independence from Spain in the 19th century than with Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. Chávez, who became president in 1999, officially changed its name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The populist president fashioned himself and his government’s political image around Bolívar — and vice versa. Bolívar, the heir of an upper-class family in Caracas, was reinvented as a low-income figure of humble origins that echoed those of the young Chávez. History textbooks were rewritten and new legends of the hero-turned-god were broadcast in the president’s four-hour television show.

Yet the most shocking maneuver of the Chavista regime to appropriate the cult of Bolívar was the exhumation of the Liberator’s skeleton in 2010, when the country’s oil economy was already in decline after years of squandered bonanza. To the nation’s shock — the procedure was televised — the removal of the remains was performed at midnight by a team of figures in white suits and masks, all busily bent at work over the skeleton. Two years later, the government displayed an official portrait of Bolívar’s features derived from a study of the exhumed skull. This Bolívar, some pointed out, bore a resemblance to Chávez’s face.

Rincón, who recalls the exhumation as an uncanny episode, dislikes the facial reconstruction carried out by the government, which he considers crude and inexact. For him, the anatomical proportions were blatantly disregarded.

“If I know about something, it’s bones. One can tell if a muscle imprints volume onto the cranium or not,” he said. Rincón criticizes the procedure’s cryptic nature, lack of scientific rigor, and the absence of forensic and physical archeologists.

Rincón strives to hold paleontology in Venezuela to the highest standards. His sternness when tearing apart false discoveries assembled from disparate fossils has earned him enemies in the field. “To undo chimeras or rectify errors is what science is all about,” he says.

At the Orocual tar pit. Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincón.

In Venezuela, even bones have become politicized. Rincón’s long-departed colleagues baptized their fossil findings in the Urumaco Desert in northwestern Venezuela with the name of Bolívar and other national heroes. In 2006, the team found two giant sloth specimens that they named Bolivartherium, in honor of Bolívar, and Mirandabradys, after Francisco de Miranda, considered the herald of Venezuelan independence. “They wanted to pay homage to Bolívar’s Republic,” says Rincón. “Each person has their own line of thought. I always prefer technical names, or that of a person that was important for paleontology, rather than national heroes. I think there are other spaces for that.”

“The admirabilis was a must, though,” he says. “When you describe a species, you’re the intellectual author of that hypothesis, of that idea, so you’re free to name it whatever the hell you want.”

Resisting a tendency that he considers somewhat propagandistic, Rincón pays homage to very different heroes when naming new species. Because of the recent cancellations of his expedition to the Orocual tar pit in Maturín, Rincón resorted to unearthing the findings of old paleontological collections from the 1972 expedition conducted by a Harvard University team in the same Urumaco region, where oil workers reported the presence of a variety of fossils. Bryant Patterson, the leader of the expedition, had found two giant sloth specimens that were left unexamined after his death. Rincón completed Patterson’s unfinished study and published the results in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology last year.

Rincón named one of these specimens Urumacocnus urbanii, after Franco Urbani, a member of the Academy of Physical, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. The other specimen was immortalized under the name Pattersonocnus (“Patterson’s Claw”) diazgameroi, in memory of Patterson and of Venezuelan paleontologist María Lourdes Díaz de Gamero, who left behind her own legacy of significant contributions to the microbiology of the region.

“For me, it was important to bring together the greats of the earth sciences in one scientific work,” he explains. “They’ll go down in history in this way.”

Bone by bone, Rincón slowly reconstructs not just prehistory, but also a past that weighs on present-day Venezuela. While resisting politicized patriotism at home, Rincón also fights a battle abroad against prejudice in the international scientific community that resists the idea of serious, “big league” science being done in Venezuela. Rincón makes sure that the name of his country resonates in scientific publications. He is proud of publishing from Venezuela on Venezuelan specimens. The demonym venezuelensis in Richard Parker’s binomial nomenclature, for instance, bears geographical significance due to the migratory movement that the specific location illuminates. Like many of his contributions, the “Venezuelan man-beast” was purposely named to have an impact on both his peers and the popular imagination of his fellow citizens. “We made him [Richard Parker] Venezuelan because we were marking our territory. In a way, we wanted to say: ‘Yes, we also do paleontology in Venezuela and we publish in the top ten journals of vertebrate paleontology. We made him Venezuelan, with Venezuelan material,” he says. “We just wanted to point out: There’s the product. There it is.”

Abroad, he would be just one more scientist, a displaced paleontologist.

Publishing in the world’s top journals of paleontological studies is as important to Rincón as sharing his findings on social media. He also wants to create his own series on YouTube to make his discoveries accessible to the general public. Rincón’s optimism and efforts have been praised by the media, who hail his decision to stay in Venezuela as heroic.

“I feel that the BBC news article about my story created this sort of heroism around me. I became like something of a symbol of those of us who stayed to endure this disaster. It seems that people felt there was some hope left,” he says. “I certainly don’t feel like a hero. I just do what I love.”

Looking at what lies beyond the horizon in these days of growing uncertainty within Venezuela and in the international community regarding the country’s government, Rincón continues to work and hopes that this dark age will be over soon, and that it will leave a dense deposit of lessons to help piece the country back together. He hopes to be able to pass his passion on to the next generation by founding a paleontology academy in Venezuela someday, but also thinks about his son’s future and the opportunities he would enjoy abroad if they were to leave the country, after all. But even if a long-awaited political change takes place in Venezuela, time is not on his side. “Things have come to a standstill in Venezuela. Politicians do politics and their time frame is different to that of science,” he says. “If, some distant day, things change and politicians finally realize that paleontology is useful and relevant, it will be too late for me.”

For now, Rincón waits in his office, glancing now and then at Richard Parker’s skull and wondering if he will be able to go back to Orocual this weekend, or perhaps the next. That is, if he finds a car; if PDVSA or the institute provide financial support; if he clears the deadly roads to Maturín; if he finds supplies; if he manages to keep himself and his family afloat in the quagmire of the economic crisis; and if his heart resists the mounting pressures that squeeze him, ever more tightly, between the narrowing horizons of a life and career in Venezuela — a sensation akin to the unprecedented claustrophobia attack he experienced in the cave as he looked for fossils in the dark and the batteries he had managed to find ran out, extinguishing his headlight.

* The claim that Rincón is “the last paleontologist” in the country is contested by a group of Venezuelan paleontologists headed by Dr. Jorge Carrillo-Briceño, based in Zurich, who points out that there are other geologists and biologists/zoologists still in the country (Rodolfo Sánchez, Edwin Chávez-Aponte, and Imerú Alfonso) that have made significant contributions to the field. It is also important to clarify that there are micropaleontologists working in the country today. Yet, Ascanio Rincón remains effectively the only vertebrate paleontologist by degree and profession currently living and working in Venezuela. ↩
 

* * *

 
Zoe Valery is a Venezuelan writer pursuing an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories — but cannot resist veering toward nonfiction when she stumbles upon an interesting subject.
 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy-editor: Jacob Z. Gross

How Do You Shepherd If You’ve Never Had a Sheep?

For the New York Times, Elizabeth Dias spoke to two dozen gay Catholic priests and seminarians about life in a church where their existence is both an open secret and a deep shame.

Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. It was 1982 and he was on a retreat with his classmates from St. Lawrence, a Roman Catholic seminary for teenage boys training to become priests. Leaders asked each boy to rank which he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplegic or gay.

Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word “gay.” They called the game the Game of Life.

The church controls a priest’s job, his housing, his healthcare, his pension, his life. Being openly gay threatens all of that, even if the priest remains celibate — a requirement that is in itself troubling.

Even before a priest may know he is gay, he knows the closet. The code is taught early, often in seminary. Numquam duo, semper tres, the warning goes. Never two, always three. Move in trios, never as a couple. No going on walks alone together, no going to the movies in a pair. The higher-ups warned for years: Any male friendship is too dangerous, could slide into something sexual or could turn into what they called a “particular friendship.”

“You couldn’t have a particular friendship with a man, because you might end up being homosexual,” explained a priest, who once nicknamed his friends “the P.F.s.” “And you couldn’t have a friendship with a woman, because you might end up falling in love, and they were both against celibacy. With whom do you have a relationship that would be a healthy human relationship?”

Read the story

ACLU: It’s Time to Make Sure Our Kids Are No Longer Bound, Shackled, or Locked Away When They’re at School

It’s Time to Make Sure Our Kids Are No Longer Bound, Shackled, or Locked Away When They’re at School
Congress is finally holding a hearing on the use of restraints and seclusion in our schools.

In 1998, teachers in West Virginia strapped a 4-year-old autistic girl with cerebral palsy to a wooden chair. Why? She was being “uncooperative” because she needed to use the bathroom. The girl suffered bruises and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 2003, school officials in Michigan held a 15-year-old autistic boy in a face-down restraint for an hour after he had a seizure and lost control of his extremities. He died without receiving medical attention.

These are just two of many barbaric stories from a 2009 Government Accountability Office report on the use of restraint and seclusion in schools. “Restraint” involves using physical, mechanical, or chemical means to restrict a child’s ability to move their arms, legs, head, or body; and “seclusion” is the involuntarily confining of a child alone.

In collecting hundreds of stories, the GAO report found that children with disabilities were most likely to face abusive or even fatal use of restraint and seclusion. Moreover, it found that there were no federal laws or regulations restricting the use of seclusion and restraints in public and private schools as well as widely divergent state laws. Similar reports from the National Disability Rights Network highlighted the harms of restraint and seclusion and urged the federal government and Congress to take action.

Yet in the last decade, not much has changed. Horrific uses of restraint and seclusion continue to emerge.

Max Benson, a 13-year-old autistic boy, died after being forced into a face-down restraint for an extended period of time. Gigi Daniel-Zagorites, a teenager with a genetic condition that makes speaking difficult, was barricaded behind a bookcase and cabinet. Alex Campbell, an autistic teenager, turned into an advocate for federal action against restraint and seclusion after he was trapped in a converted storage closet on multiple occasions.

But despite the long history and continued use of these practices, there is still no federal law setting national standards for the use of seclusion or restraint.

Additionally, restraint and seclusion are still disproportionately used on students with disabilities and students of color. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection, while students with disabilities made up 12 percent of enrolled students, they made up 66 percent of students subject to seclusion and 71 percent of students restrained. Additionally, while Black students make up 15 percent of all students, they made up 23 percent of students secluded and 27 percent of students restrained.

Continued inaction is not an option.

Students with disabilities and students of color continue to suffer short- and long-term psychological harm, even physical injury or death. Furthermore, the practices serve to push them out of the general education classroom, drastically reducing chances for success later in life. At last count, 122,000 students were restrained in one school year. Thirty-six thousand were locked up in small rooms — some of them the size of coffins — and left there.

But Congress can make significant progress this year. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Education and Labor will hold a subcommittee hearing on the inappropriate use of seclusion and restraint. Soon after, Congress may consider specific legislation to create national standards to protect students from inappropriate restraint and prohibit the use of seclusion altogether.

This legislation, the Keeping All Students Safe Act, was first introduced in 2009 and passed the House of Representatives, but never received a vote in the Senate. In recent years, the bill has been improved, but it has not advanced in either chamber of Congress.

The Keeping All Students Safe Act features a number of crucial protections, including:

  • Prohibiting the use of seclusion and both mechanical and chemical restraints
  • Prohibiting physical restraint or physical escort that is life threatening, that restricts breathing, that would specifically harm a student based on their disability or health care needs, or any other form of behavior intervention designed to inflict pain (also known as “aversive interventions”)
  • Prohibiting the inclusion of physical restraint in a student’s individualized education plan
  • Requiring states to ensure a sufficient number of school personnel are trained and certified in crisis intervention

The legislation also includes important reporting and notification requirements, and it establishes a system of competitive grants to assist states in meeting minimum standards.

The Department of Education recently announced an initiative to address the inappropriate use of restraint and seclusion, working directly with schools to provide technical assistance. This initiative is welcome, but it is not enough. Congress must take action to put these critical protections into law. Schools should be doing all they can to integrate students with disabilities and students of color into the classroom, not punish them with draconian and life-threatening practices.

Every day that Congress waits another child is manhandled, traumatized, and pushed away from school and potentially into the damaging and dangerous school to prison pipeline. The Keeping All Students Safe Act will protect all of our children, and help make school a place to learn, not a place to fear. 



Published February 27, 2019 at 09:00PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2GMnpmp

ACLU: It’s Time to Make Sure Our Kids Are No Longer Bound, Shackled, or Locked Away When They’re at School

It’s Time to Make Sure Our Kids Are No Longer Bound, Shackled, or Locked Away When They’re at School
Congress is finally holding a hearing on the use of restraints and seclusion in our schools.

In 1998, teachers in West Virginia strapped a 4-year-old autistic girl with cerebral palsy to a wooden chair. Why? She was being “uncooperative” because she needed to use the bathroom. The girl suffered bruises and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 2003, school officials in Michigan held a 15-year-old autistic boy in a face-down restraint for an hour after he had a seizure and lost control of his extremities. He died without receiving medical attention.

These are just two of many barbaric stories from a 2009 Government Accountability Office report on the use of restraint and seclusion in schools. “Restraint” involves using physical, mechanical, or chemical means to restrict a child’s ability to move their arms, legs, head, or body; and “seclusion” is the involuntarily confining of a child alone.

In collecting hundreds of stories, the GAO report found that children with disabilities were most likely to face abusive or even fatal use of restraint and seclusion. Moreover, it found that there were no federal laws or regulations restricting the use of seclusion and restraints in public and private schools as well as widely divergent state laws. Similar reports from the National Disability Rights Network highlighted the harms of restraint and seclusion and urged the federal government and Congress to take action.

Yet in the last decade, not much has changed. Horrific uses of restraint and seclusion continue to emerge.

Max Benson, a 13-year-old autistic boy, died after being forced into a face-down restraint for an extended period of time. Gigi Daniel-Zagorites, a teenager with a genetic condition that makes speaking difficult, was barricaded behind a bookcase and cabinet. Alex Campbell, an autistic teenager, turned into an advocate for federal action against restraint and seclusion after he was trapped in a converted storage closet on multiple occasions.

But despite the long history and continued use of these practices, there is still no federal law setting national standards for the use of seclusion or restraint.

Additionally, restraint and seclusion are still disproportionately used on students with disabilities and students of color. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection, while students with disabilities made up 12 percent of enrolled students, they made up 66 percent of students subject to seclusion and 71 percent of students restrained. Additionally, while Black students make up 15 percent of all students, they made up 23 percent of students secluded and 27 percent of students restrained.

Continued inaction is not an option.

Students with disabilities and students of color continue to suffer short- and long-term psychological harm, even physical injury or death. Furthermore, the practices serve to push them out of the general education classroom, drastically reducing chances for success later in life. At last count, 122,000 students were restrained in one school year. Thirty-six thousand were locked up in small rooms — some of them the size of coffins — and left there.

But Congress can make significant progress this year. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Education and Labor will hold a subcommittee hearing on the inappropriate use of seclusion and restraint. Soon after, Congress may consider specific legislation to create national standards to protect students from inappropriate restraint and prohibit the use of seclusion altogether.

This legislation, the Keeping All Students Safe Act, was first introduced in 2009 and passed the House of Representatives, but never received a vote in the Senate. In recent years, the bill has been improved, but it has not advanced in either chamber of Congress.

The Keeping All Students Safe Act features a number of crucial protections, including:

  • Prohibiting the use of seclusion and both mechanical and chemical restraints
  • Prohibiting physical restraint or physical escort that is life threatening, that restricts breathing, that would specifically harm a student based on their disability or health care needs, or any other form of behavior intervention designed to inflict pain (also known as “aversive interventions”)
  • Prohibiting the inclusion of physical restraint in a student’s individualized education plan
  • Requiring states to ensure a sufficient number of school personnel are trained and certified in crisis intervention

The legislation also includes important reporting and notification requirements, and it establishes a system of competitive grants to assist states in meeting minimum standards.

The Department of Education recently announced an initiative to address the inappropriate use of restraint and seclusion, working directly with schools to provide technical assistance. This initiative is welcome, but it is not enough. Congress must take action to put these critical protections into law. Schools should be doing all they can to integrate students with disabilities and students of color into the classroom, not punish them with draconian and life-threatening practices.

Every day that Congress waits another child is manhandled, traumatized, and pushed away from school and potentially into the damaging and dangerous school to prison pipeline. The Keeping All Students Safe Act will protect all of our children, and help make school a place to learn, not a place to fear. 



Published February 27, 2019 at 03:30PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2GMnpmp

Tuesday, 26 February 2019

ACLU: Prosecutors Have the Power to Stop Bad Roadside Drug Tests From Ruining People’s Lives

Prosecutors Have the Power to Stop Bad Roadside Drug Tests From Ruining People’s Lives
Local prosecutors can play a pivotal role in preventing flawed roadside tests from jeopardizing innocent people’s liberty.

Three years ago on New Year’s Eve, Dasha Fincher was arrested in Monroe County, Georgia, after the deputies performed an on-the-spot test of a bag of blue substance that they found in the car in which she was a passenger. The suspicious stuff in the bag came up positive for methamphetamines. After her arrest, the judge in her case set bail at $1 million because she was perceived as a drug trafficker.

There was just one problem. The roadside drug-test was wrong. The blue substance wasn’t meth — it was cotton candy. Fincher would spend three months in jail because of the faulty test.

Fincher’s story of cotton-candy-gone-meth isn’t an aberration. The prevalence of false-positive results associated with roadside drug tests is terrifyingly common. ProPublica warned that “a minimum of 100,000 people nationwide plead guilty to drug charges that rely on field-test results as evidence” and that because the tests are so frequently used “even a modest error rate, then, could produce hundreds or even thousands of wrongful convictions.”

Despite these gross (and documented) miscarriages of justice, prosecutors continue to seek unaffordable bail and charge defendants with serious crimes that carry high sentences on the basis of roadside drug test results that are unreliable. It doesn’t have to be this way. Local prosecutors can play a pivotal role in preventing these injustices from the get-go.

For instance, the unmatched power of their office allows the prosecutor to end pretrial detention in cases in which criminal charges would be based on a roadside test. Inconclusive, unverified results cannot be the basis of detention. Thus prosecution that relies on these tests must not involve the setting of cash bail. Further, prosecutors must ensure that lab confirmations are prompt. No one should be sitting in jail because the labs are backlogged and because the device used by cops is defective.

This can be accomplished through robust supervision and screening practices, but even in offices that have these practices, there is a need to do more to prevent the incarceration of innocent people or exonerate them. As such, prosecutors and local municipalities should create or expand Conviction Integrity Units to evaluate the prior cases in which these tests were used as evidence in one’s conviction.

This wouldn’t be heralded as monumental reform.

Prosecutors do this already — around the country prosecutor offices review convictions in which misconduct, bad evidence, or error led to the wrongful incarceration of innocent people, but to address false-positives results of roadside drug tests prosecutors need to get proactive. These offices must ensure that the damage done to the wrongfully convicted individual is avoided at all costs. 

Not asking for bail in these cases is a good start, but prosecutors must also refrain from pursuing plea deals in cases in which arrest is exclusively supported by a roadside test. This would ensure that the individuals who had been subjected to wrongful arrest are at least free from the pressure of deciding whether to plead guilty for something they didn’t do—just because the lab hasn’t figured out that they’re innocent yet.

Three months in jail for cotton candy doesn’t inspire confidence in the criminal justice system for anyone. At least these recommendations would begin to rebuild the public trust and integrity that false-positives have degraded. If the legitimacy of our system isn’t enough of a reason to prompt change, perhaps fear of paying out large money settlements to the wrongfully convicted would get cities to act on this issue.

In the three months Fincher spent in jail for possession of cotton candy she missed the birth of her grandchildren while waiting on exonerating lab results. Seeking damages, she sued the company that made the $2 roadside test for the time and life events she can’t get back, arguing that the company negligently designed the product because they “knew or should have known” that the device could lead to false arrests.

To succeed in her claims, Fincher would have had to show that the harm of defective design could have been avoided if the company adopted a reasonable alternative design. Unfortunately, earlier this month a district court in Georgia dismissed her complaint mainly because she included “two purported alternatives” in her response to the company’s rebuttal but the court said she included them “simply too late.”

This is not the first time Georgia protected this company from liability. In a 2017 case, Kerron Brown and Justin Mallory sued the Sirchie after each spending weeks in jail due to a false positive. This case was also dismissed because their “complaint contained no facts about reasonable alternative designs” of the drug testing kits. 

And there are a lot more people like Dasha Fincher, Justin Mallory and Kerron Brown out there, even in Georgia.

After they learned about Fincher’s story, Fox 5’s Investigation Team started looking into the prevalence of this practice. Based on their analysis of Georgia police records, the reporters found that at least 145 people were wrongly charged with felonies after “a field test falsely claimed they had drugs. Instead of ecstasy, cocaine, or methamphetamines, people jailed actually had common items like incense, headache powder or cleaning supplies.” At least three people were found to have pled guilty “before the lab results came back.”

Our war on drugs has been a moral disaster, but even if prosecutors don’t think that decriminalization, or even outright legalization is the solution, they should put into place protections to ensure no one’s liberty is jeopardized based on a bad roadside drug test. Instead, they should be released until lab results confirm the presence of illegal drugs to guard against turning another innocent person’s life into a nightmare.

There’s no good reason any person should go through what Dasha Fincher endured, and prosecutors have the power to make sure what happened to her never happens again.



Published February 26, 2019 at 11:00PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2VnMZBr