Missouri's Republican governor was called out for lacking the compassion of Republicans in Texas in a new editorial from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"One of the worst crimes any government can commit is to imprison an innocent person. The unjust denial of liberty formed a pillar of the conservative tea party movement during the previous decade and inspired conservatives in the Texas Legislature to get solidly behind bills designed to free the innocent, compensate them for their losses and to punish wayward prosecutors," the editorial board wrote. "In Missouri, however, Gov. Mike Parson can't bring himself to recognize an egregious injustice when he sees it and then take corrective action. The case of Kevin Strickland, 62, is one where a judge, prosecutors, witnesses and the defense all seem to agree: He did not commit the 1978 triple murder for which he is serving a life sentence. The fact that he is Black appears to have weighed heavily in the judicial railroading that landed him in prison."
The newspaper contrasted Parson with his GOP colleagues in the Lone Star State.
"If Strickland were in Texas, he would undoubtedly be free by now, and his cause not only would be embraced by top Republicans but they would also be joining Democrats in demanding millions of dollars in compensation for him. We know this because of Texas GOP lawmakers' stellar record in championing the cause of at least two exonerees honored on the legislative floor — one Black and the other white — after having been caught in similar webs of injustice. Is there something about liberty and justice that Texas Republicans know that has eluded their Missouri counterparts?" the newspaper wondered.
Parsons has been harshly criticized for saying a pardon for Strickland is not a "priority" for his administration.
"It should be a top priority for Parson because an innocent man appears to be paying every day for a crime all others in the case insist he did not commit. His injustice is compounded by the fact that a racially biased prosecutorial system ensured his cries of innocence would be stifled for four decades. Parson should look to his fellow Republicans in Texas to see how compassion and conservatism don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive," the newspaper suggested.
Watch coverage of the case from ABC News:
Prosecutors call for innocent man’s release, but existing law prevents itwww.youtube.com
In the wake of his early departure from the U.S. House, a panel of Colorado Republicans will pick a candidate to serve out the final months of Rep. Ken Buck's term Thursday — a move that could threaten Lauren Boebert's bid to serve another term in Congress.
Boebert, who formerly represented Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, announced last year that she would run to replace Buck in the more conservative 4th Congressional District.
According to the Associated Press, whoever the panel of Republicans pick to contend a special election for the remainder of Buck's term "would be running in two separate races for the same seat until the June election, giving them greater notoriety, media coverage and expanded fundraising opportunities — a boon for most of the candidates who fall far short of Boebert’s national name brand and campaign chest."
Boebert has not put herself in the running for the special election.
Speaking to the AP, Seth Masket, director at the Center on American Politics in Denver, said that Buck's departure "really threw a wrench into the whole thing."
“It was already a fairly topsy-turvy race, but I think this does make it a little bit harder for her," he said.
But according to Boebert, Buck's resignation and the special election is "a swampy backroom deal" hatched by "the establishment" to "rig an election.”
Boebert has had her share of scandals and controversies, but she's been able to garner endorsements from former President Donald Trump and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last year, she made headlines after being escorted out of a Colorado theater after people complained about her vaping and her seemingly lewd behavior with a male companion.
Commentators have said Boebert's district switch was necessary because she faced the prospect of losing her former, less red, district. Now, according to her, Republicans have a greater chance of retaining the seat and holding their majority.
A judge is considering Thursday if Georgia election subversion charges against Donald Trump should be thrown out on First Amendment grounds, but a legal expert doesn't expect him to be let off the hook.
The former president's attorney Steve Sadow argued Thursday in a Fulton County courtroom that Trump's conspiracy theories about voter fraud were political speech and therefore protected by the U.S. Constitution. But CNN legal analyst Elie Honig expects the same result as the one that met a similar effort in federal court in Washington, D.C.
"The core argument he meant that we just heard from Donald Trump's lawyers is that everything he's being prosecuted for here is protected First Amendment political speech," Honig said, "and you heard the lawyer argue that even if the speech is false, even if it's unpopular, it's still protected.
"Now the response from the prosecutors, from the [district attorney's office] here is that, 'No, he crossed the line to where his speech became part of the charged criminal acts.'"
"Now there's a sort of separate dispute here about whether the court has to accept the indictments, the allegations as they are in the indictment," Honig continued.
"Donald Trump's team says, 'Why do we just have to take it as a given that this was illegal because that's what it says in the indictment, don't we get to contest that?' That leads to the sort of the last point that we heard there, which is the question of when does this First Amendment issue get decided?
"You heard the judge sort of say, 'Well, why isn't the way we decide this is we put it in front of the jury and we let the jury decide at trial? Donald Trump's lawyer objected to that, he said, 'No, we'd like you to throw it out now, why go through with the whole exercise of a trial if this indictment ultimately is going to no good?'"
"One other thing to note," Honig added. "This same argument was made by Donald Trump in his federal case in Washington, D.C., relating to election subversion and the federal judge there, and you heard reference to this judge, Tanya Chutkan, she rejected that First Amendment argument. She said, 'No, I find this is not protected speech, it crossed the line into criminality, and we'll leave it for the jury.' So Trump's team is fighting an uphill battle here, legally, but the judge is willing to hear them out."
We collected audio recordings in 103 languages, and we decided how to convert these into waveforms that show these sounds visually. Colleagues from NASA etched these waveforms into the metal plate that shields the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.
I also designed another part of the message that visually depicts the wavelengths of water’s constituents, because water is so important to the search for intelligent life in the universe.
NASA’s design for the Clipper message heading to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Etching messages into spacecraft isn’t a new practice, and Clipper’s message fits into a decades-old tradition started by astronomer Carl Sagan.
In 1972 and 1973, two Pioneer spacecraft headed to Jupiter and Saturn carrying metal plaques engraved with scientific and pictorial messages. In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft headed to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Nepture bearing gold-plated copper phonograph records. These records contained tutorials in mathematics and chemistry, as well as music, photos and sounds of Earth and greetings in 55 languages.
Water words
As water is essential for life on Earth, searching for its presence elsewhere has been key to many NASA missions. Astronomers suspect that Europa, where Clipper is headed, has an ocean underneath its icy surface, making it a prime candidate for the search for life in the outer solar system.
Part of the Clipper message features the word for water in 103 languages. We started with audio files collected online, but we then needed to analyze those and find an output that could be engraved on a metal plate. I ended up going back to some of the techniques I used in some of my early psycholinguistic research, where I explored how emotions are encoded in speech.
The 103 spoken words we recorded represent a global snapshot of the diversity of Earth’s languages. The outward-facing side of the Clipper plate shows the words as waveforms that track the varying intensity of sound as each word is spoken.
Each person whom we recorded saying the word “water” for the waveform had a connection to water. For example, the lawyer who contributed the word for water in Uzbek – “suv” – organizes an annual music festival in Uzbekistan to raise awareness of the desertification of the Aral Sea.
The native speaker of the Catalan water word – “aigua” – hunts for exoplanets, discovering potentially habitable planets that orbit other stars.
The Drake Equation
Clipper’s message also pays homage to astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – by bearing the Drake Equation, his namesake formula. By drawing on scientific data, as well as some best guess hunches, the Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy currently sending messages into the cosmos.
By one widely quoted estimate, there are a tenth as many of these extraterrestrial civilizations as one’s average lifetime in years. If civilizations survive for a million years, for example, there should be about 100,000 in the galaxy. If they last only a century on average, scientists would estimate that about 10 exist.
Radio astronomers study the universe by examining the radiation that chemical elements in space give off. They spend much of their time mapping the distribution of the most abundant chemical in the universe – hydrogen.
Hydrogen emits radiation at a certain frequency called the hydrogen line, which radio telescopes can detect. During Project Ozma, the first modern-day SETI experiment, Drake looked for artificial signals at the same frequency, because he figured scientists on other worlds might recognize hydrogen as universally significant and broadcast signals at that frequency.
The water hole
As our team developed our water words message, I realized that the message would only make sense if it were discovered by someone already familiar with the contents inscribed on the plate. The Drake Equation would only make sense if someone already knew what each of the terms in the equation stood for.
The Europa Clipper will crash into Jupiter or one of its other moons, with Ganymede or Callisto the leading candidates. But if for some reason the mission changes and it survives that fate, then humans far in the future with a radically different cultural background and different language conventions may retrieve it millennia from now as an ancient artifact.
To ensure we had at least one part of the message that a distant future scientist might be able to understand, I also designed a pictorial representation of the same frequency that Drake used for Project Ozma: the hydrogen line. We engraved this on the Clipper plate, along with a frequency called the hydroxyl line.
When hydrogen (H+) and hydroxyl (OH-) combine, they form water. Scientists call the range of frequencies between these lines the “water hole.” The water hole represents the part of the radio spectrum where astronomers conducted the first SETI experiments.
We displayed the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines using their wavelengths in the Clipper message. The metal plate also has diagrams showing what hydrogen and hydroxyl look like at the atomic level.
We’re hoping that future chemists would recognize these chemical components as the ingredients of water. If they do, we will have succeeded in communicating at least a few core scientific concepts across time, space and language.
Waveforms let our team tie the messages on the two sides of the Clipper plate together. On the water words side, over a hundred words are depicted by their waveforms. On the other side, the wavelengths of hydrogen and hydroxyl – the constituents of water – are etched into the plate.
METI International funded the collection and curation of the water words, as well as my design of the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines, providing these to NASA at no cost.
While designing the message for the Europa Clipper, we got to reflect on the importance of water on Earth, and think about why astronomers feel so compelled to search for it beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The spacecraft is scheduled to enter Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030.