Too Much Doubt: Ivan Cantu and Maimonides on the Burden of Proof for Execution

BY MICHAEL ZOOSMAN

 FEBRUARY 16, 2024
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Maimonides teaching about the “measure of man.” Illuminated manuscript. (Public Domain.)

On February 28th, Texas plans to put to death Mr. Ivan Abner Cantu, the longtime penpal of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty,” an international group of over 3,200 members that I co-founded. Mr. Cantu has been found guilty of the November 4, 2000 murders of his cousin Mr. James Mosqueda, 27, and of Ms. Amy Kitchens, 21, Zichronam Livracha – may their memories be for blessings and their neshamot/spirits loving guides for all who knew them. Texas intends to carry out this horror despite ever-mounting doubts over Ivan’s guilt. It does not take a law degree for a layperson to understand the tremendous scope of this doubt. Perusal of Mr. Cantu’s case reveals numerous glaring issues, such as fraudulent testimony during the trial, newly-uncovered evidence that has not been considered as a result of procedural bars, jurors who support Mr. Cantu’s appeal for a new trial, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of his counsel, to name but a few.

In the American justice system, it is well-known that the legal burden of proof for conviction in a criminal case calls for a suspect to be found guilty  “beyond a reasonable doubt”. That bar should be infinitely high when it comes to the finality of execution. Jewish tradition has a great deal to say about the loftiness of this bar in the rabbinic mindset. To be sure, traditional Judaism did indeed allow a place for the death penalty, albeit with prodigious safeguards to ensure that an innocent person would never be executed.  When it came to the notion of reasonable doubt, Rabbinc law forbade the execution of someone where there was any level of doubt about guilt or fairness.

Arguably the most famous comment on this subject came from the 12th century in the writings of one of our most renowned Jewish sages of all time:  the Rambam (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, 1135-1204). Maimonides, as the Ramban is often called, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher and physician who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages. One of the most renowned pearls of wisdom among the many that Maimonides imparted to the world nearly a millennium ago states the following: “It is better to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.”

The full context of this famous phrase bears consideration. As Maimonides wrote in Sefer HaMitzvot, Prohibition 290:

“The realm of the possible is very broad. Had the Torah permitted deciding capital cases based even on a conjecture so likely that it seems absolutely certain, like the example we mentioned [about the person chasing another with a sword], in the next case we would decide based on a conjecture just a little less likely, and in the next, a conjecture less likely still, until we would sometimes execute people based on nothing more than the judge’s imagination and opinion. Thus the Exalted One shut this door, and demanded that we not punish except when witnesses can testify without doubt or conjecture that they are absolutely certain the defendant did this deed. Inevitably, when we do not convict based even on very strong conjecture, we will sometimes acquit the guilty; while when we do convict by conjecture sometimes we will execute the innocent. But it would be better to acquit a thousand criminals than to kill a single innocent.”

Maimonides’ argument clearly was intended to maximize the protection of the innocent by not tolerating any doubt in capital cases. In this way, his guidance is fully aligned with the traditional Jewish understanding of financial compensation for the value of an “eye for an eye”, (Lev. 24: 19-20) which in its historical context was intended to curtail the collective bloodlust of expansive vengeful massacres that societies practiced in ancient times – and still all too often today.

Texas would do well to heed this Jewish wisdom regarding the miniscule threshold for doubt in capital cases. Indeed, the Lone Star State falsely professes to do just this. To highlight this hypocrisy, consider the words of Mr. Bill Wirskye, who is First Assistant in the Collin County District Attorney’s Office, working directly under DA Greg Willis. In 2017, Mr. Wirskye wrote an article entitled My Wrongful Conviction about the importance of Conviction Integrity Units and how they guard against errors by the state in criminal proceedings. Mr. Wirskye concluded that article by writing that “I now have a new and hard-earned humility about the potential fallibility of both the [justice] system and myself. I hope this humility makes me a better prosecutor. I think it does.” And yet, despite this conclusion, the very same Collin County District Attorney’s office that Mr. Wirskye serves has just recently denied Mr. Cantu’s lawyers from having any access to the ballistics evidence used at his trial. This action once again has blocked the scrutiny necessary for a case riddled with doubts, and has effectively paved the way for this execution.

Mr. Cantu has continually fallen through the lethal cracks of the justice system – a system whose very fallibility Mr. Wirskye allegedly recognized in his article and from which it would seem he has failed to learn any lesson, all assertions to the contrary. If this is indeed the standard of “reasonable doubt” that Texas officials such as Mr. Wirskye tolerate, then the fears that Maimonides articulated a millennium ago for a slippery slope leading to the regular killing of the innocent was indeed prophetic.

Let there be no doubt: the members of L’chaim – as has been explained at length – are against the death penalty in every single case, without exception. L’chaim members maintain that 21st-century Judaism must entirely reject the death penalty. They carry the torch of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said of capital punishment that “Death is not the answer in a civilized society.”

And yet, even for the staunchest supporters of the death penalty, the pending execution of Ivan Cantu, a human being whose guilt is so very much in question, should give every reason for pause. Before approving of the finality of such an execution in the presence of so much doubt, it would behoove all Texans to reflect once more on the wrongful executionpandemic that plagues the United States, including the fact that since 1973, at least 196 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated. Maimonides certainly would not have approved of a system that produces such a record – nor should any reasonable human being.

Readers who agree should consider adding their names to the over 13,000 individuals who already have signed the petition to save Mr. Cantu’s life. They should join the call of all members of civilized humanity as they respond to the very notion of state-sponsored killings with a phrase that is as time-honored as Maimonides’ wisdom, forever chanting:

“L’chaim…to Life!”

Biden’s Generals in Pakistan

BY JUNAID S. AHMED

 FEBRUARY 16, 2024
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Image by Burhan Ahmad.

As the world, and especially Muslims, correctly has been focused on the Zionist genocide in Gaza, we seem to have forgotten President Biden’s criminality in another part of the world. Indeed, just as Israel’s savagery has been wholeheartedly supported by the Biden Administration, the regime change operation in March-April of 2022 in Pakistan was also on Biden’s watch. More and more Pakistanis, especially in the largest and politically dominant province of Punjab, have come to recognize the venality of the military establishment. Though the other provinces of Pakistan had no illusion of the nefarious and violent role of the generals in Pakistani social and political life, people in Punjab had to experience the torturous wrath of the military top brass after the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan – to realize the cold-bloodedness of the military high command.

Khan has been languishing in prison since August of last year on various trumped up and farcical charges. And now, he and another senior member of Khan’s political party, former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, have been sentenced to a ten-year jail sentence because of the ostensible cypher-gate scandal. The ‘cypher,’ a secret diplomatic cable sent to Islamabad by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington in March of 2022, stated quite explicitly the American desire to oust Khan from power. The task was left to Washington’s old Cold War friends in Pakistan’s praetorian guard to fulfill the mission.

After Khan was removed from power by a military establishment-US embassy.in-Islamabad engineered vote-of-no-confidence in parliament, he made it very clear to Pakistanis that this was a regime change conspiracy involving the US on the one hand, and Pakistan’s generals and kleptocratic politicians on the other. At the time, sadly, those who had historically opposed the role of the military in Pakistan’s politics, refused to believe Khan – essentially considering him a conspiratorial nutcase. After more than a year after Khan’s ouster, the American online publication, The Intercept, confirmed that the official diplomatic cable that Khan referred to was in fact real, and that its content laid out in no uncertain terms the American insistence on removing Khan from power. By now, even the most ardent ‘cypher deniers’ have had to acknowledge the veracity of Khan’s claims at the time of the successful regime change operation in the country. The tragedy was that the big media houses in Pakistan acceded to state pressure to erase the name Imran Khan from any public discourse, and that it took a foreign publication’s stellar investigative journalism to expose the treacherous collaboration between Washington and the generals in Pakistan – in particular, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Gen. Bajwa – in subjecting Khan and his political party, PTI, to the most totalitarian forms of repression.

After two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ having created some friction between the American and Pakistani military-intelligence apparatuses, both came to realize that, ultimately, they will always be joined at the hip. The Pakistani military is one of the most vicious relics of colonialism. It transitioned quite smoothly in its neo-colonial relationship with Washington throughout the Cold War. Pakistan’s generals never lose sight of the fact that they make billions from American machinations in West and Southwest Asia. Other than excelling as a satrapy of the American empire, the powerful Pakistani armed forces are good for nothing but extreme levels of repression, torture, disappearances, and murdering its own population.

However, throughout the past two years, Pakistanis have been somewhat bewildered at the extent of the vendetta and ferocious repression targeted at Khan and his political party. It seems to be the case that the military establishment has never felt as insecure as it has after Khan’s ouster and the subsequent massive outpouring of support for him and his party. The well-understood arrangement between any civilian government and the COAS and the military-intelligence establishment was that the former agrees to cede full control of ‘national security’ and foreign policy to the latter. The generals increasingly felt that Khan began to violate this ‘code of conduct’ by positioning himself as the one who would carve out the direction of the country on the world stage. In addition, the generals’ Western patron-masters saw Khan as a thorn in their control of Muslim despots in West Asia, most of whom were on the path of normalization with Israel, turning a blind eye to Hindutva fascism in India, and engineering a pro-Empire- friendly Islam. On the contrary, Khan spoke passionately about justice for Palestinians and Kashmiris, rejected the imperial categories of ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist’ Islam, and denounced the rise of Islamophobia and its dreadful social and political impact throughout the world. His popularity among, and keen desire to bring together, nations such as Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia, Iran, and Qatar was correctly seen as a counter-hegemonic bloc to the Saudi domination of the Muslim world. And finally, Khan’s praise of China’s ability to lift more than 800 million out of poverty and the lessons it offers for developing countries like Pakistan, as well as remaining neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, convinced the US national security state that this man must be eliminated.

It’s important to note that generals’ detestation of Khan was not because he was some revolutionary. But he did help to politicize significant chunks of the population, young and old, and especially in the military establishment’s base of support – the province of Punjab. Punjabis protesting en masse against the military establishment was something unforgivable for the generals. Punjabis were supposed to love or at least respect their military leaders, not despise them as they did following Khan’s ouster.

Comparisons are often made with the popular leader of Pakistan during the 1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – who certainly had a revolutionary character in his rhetoric. But two key differences are often overlooked. Bhutto came to power on the backs of Bengali blood, the genocidal campaign of West Pakistani generals against the population of East Pakistan – which became Bangladesh after winning its war of liberation. Bhutto’s party, the PPP, would have lost to the Awami League political party in East Pakistan had it not been for the merciless military assault on the future nation of Bangladesh. In a cynically transactional manner, Bhutto repaid the favor by effectively rescuing and rehabilitating a humiliated and defeated Pakistani military. In fact, Bhutto would go on to rely on that same military to target political opponents, especially in the provinces of NWFP (now renamed KPK) and Balochistan. Of course, none of this is to deny that Bhutto was a very popular leader.

But secondly, Bhutto’s own shortcomings and political authoritarianism while in power ultimately led to disillusionment within his support base, resulting in a fairly reticent popular response to his ouster by the military dictator, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq – and, as in the case of Khan, a regime change completely supported by Washington.

One can claim that Khan also came on the backs of the military establishment’s very temporary squabble with the other two major dynastic political parties. But like Bhutto, no one can claim that Khan was not immensely popular. The major difference, of course, is the massive outpouring of support for Khan after his ouster, in rallies across the country sustained for more than a year until the barbaric military crackdown began in May of 2023. In fact, the surprise for many was that despite a rather lackluster performance in his period of governance, still Khan was popular as ever, if not more.

The saga of the cases, charges, and convictions against Khan are seen by virtually all of Pakistan’s 240 million people as a politically motivated clown-show. Specifically, the recent convictions in ‘courts’ for which the term ‘kangaroo court’ would be way too generous, deferential, and respectful, are intended to further demoralize and terrorize the population before ‘elections’ to be held on Feb. 8th. Some think that these elections would give Saddam Hussain’s and Hosni Mubarak’s forms of elections good competition.

While Pakistanis in and outside of the country continue to witness one travesty after the next, to see the totalitarianism of the generals and their favored political mafias reach newer and more ruthless heights, the hope remains that, just like in Gaza, the people’s resistance and international solidarity may be able to mount a serious impediment to Biden’s generals’ torture chambers imposed on the country. And the perennial palace intrigues and squabbles of the political and military elite have a tendency to derail all major plans of coordinated and disciplined perpetual punishment of the population.

Nevertheless, one underreported story during the past two years has been of the many officers and overwhelming majority of soldiers who’ve had nothing but revulsion for the shenanigans of the bloodthirsty high command, causing many of them to be ‘disappeared’ or forced to resign, or just resigning on their own, without pension.

Absent the ability of the people to, at this point, initiate an effective and formidable challenge to Washington’s comprador military and political elite, a progressive officers’ coup may not be a bad idea.

The “Spanish-American War” Was Based on a Bloody Lie

BY HARVEY WASSERMAN

 FEBRUARY 16, 2024
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USS Maine: Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This week in 1898, the United States screamed for what became one of the most consequential imperial wars in world history—based on a lie.

On February 15, the Battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor. According to the US Navy, 267 sailors were killed.

Led by the new-born mass circulation “yellow press,” and by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, the “dastardly Spanish” were at fault.

Imperial Spain was at the time brutally suppressing a popular rebellion in Cuba. The sickening slaughter was picked up by the American press, which ignited a popular uproar. Among other things, its front pages featured line drawings of naked white women being assaulted by swarthy Spaniards, evoking the same kinds of racist shrieks spread by the Ku Klux Klan in the unreconstructed post-Confederate South.

Never mind that the US had just brutally suppressed a similar resistance in Hawaii. There pineapple and sugar plantation owners, led by the Dole family, crushed a long-standing constitutional monarchy presided over by the legendary songwriter (“Aloha Oe”) and globally recognized Queen Liliuokalani.

The Hawaiian people had a deep loyalty to their well-established indigenous government, considered the archipelago’s legitimate authority by nations throughout the world. The genuinely content Hawaiian people had zero interest in becoming vassals to the United States.

President Grover Cleveland had refused the plantation owners’ demands that the US take over the archipelago. But Ohio Republican William McKinley, elected in 1896, had “gone down on my knees” to ask God for His approval, which was apparently divinely granted. Quickly annexed, the islands later became the flashpoint for war with Japan. Indigenous Hawaiians to this day deeply resent the US conquest and would like their country back.

When the Maine sank, “conspiracy theorists” throughout the United States argued that there was no proof Spain had done the deed. Most ships at the time were powered by coal. Dust explosions inside their hulls were not uncommon. Prompted in part by such disasters, Winston Churchill in 1911 began converting the British fleet to oil.

But itching for a fight, and lusting for empire, Theodore Roosevelt would hear none of it. He quit his government post and convened a rag-tag volunteer army of “Rough Riders” who invaded the island. “I killed a Spaniard with my own hands,” TR later screeched. “Look at those damn Spanish dead.”

Untold indigenous died in the “freeing” of Cuba…not to mention Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The war in the Philippines dragged on until 1904, where we crushed an indigenous resistance that had previously been fighting the Spanish. The death toll there was well in excess of 3,000. Anti-imperialists like Mark Twain and a wide range of Socialists, intellectuals and activists bitterly opposed the war.

But firm in his belief that the US had a divine mission to conquer “inferior races” in the building of a global empire, the Spanish War became a springboard for Theodore Roosevelt’s imperial career. He became president in 1901 when McKinley was assassinated. In 1906 he sent a “Great White Fleet” around the globe to proclaim the new American hegemony. He became a firm advocate for the disastrous US entry into World War I—until his youngest son Quentin was killed flying a fighter plane.

Thus, following the conquest of Hawaii, the Spanish War became the springboard of America’s global empire.

And it was based on an outright lie, in which the “conspiracy theory” that Spain had NOT sunk the Maine was proven beyond doubt.

The ship, lying at the bottom of Havana Harbor, was not hard to find. Many years later, the US Navy sent divers and exploratory equipment to inspect the Maine. The Navy’s conclusion was definitive: the boat had blown up from the inside. Neither a torpedo nor a mine was involved. Instead, most likely, a coal dust or other type of internal explosion had blown the ship apart. Spain was not a guilty party. The “conspiracy theory” that we had gone to imperial war based on a lie was all too true.

Like previous assertions (by Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln, among others) that President James K. Polk had used a fake battle to justify war with Mexico, like later assertions about the sinking of the Lusitania used as a pretext by Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I, about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened….the “conspiracy theories” about our wars were right on the tragic money.

So all these years later, the screams for the Spanish war were tragic, bloody nonsense.

For the next one that will surely come …fore-warned is fore-armed.

Harvey Wasserman wrote THE PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY: FROM JIGONSASEH TO SOLARTOPIA.  Most Mondays @ 2-4pm PT, he co-convenes the Green Grassroots Election Protection Zoom (www.electionprotection2024).  The Mothers for Peace (www.mothersforpeace.org) could use your help in the struggle to shut the Diablo Canyon nukes.