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- A Reporter in the Death Chamber
On June 22, 2000, Thomas Loden Jr., a 35-year-old Marine recruiter, kidnapped a 16-year-old girl named Leesa Marie Gray from the side of a road in Itawamba County, Mississippi. Loden raped and sexually battered Gray for four hours. Then he strangled her to death. When police found him, they discovered that he had carved the words I’m sorry into his chest.Loden pleaded guilty to capital murder. I first met him 21 years after the killing, on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which is better known as Parchman Farm.Loden told me conspiratorial tales about the murder and spoke mainly in non sequiturs. Unlike some men on death row, who either are honestly transformed or at least put on a convincing performance of penitence, Loden seemed to me to be an unreconstructed killer. But he asked me to read documents about his case, and I agreed. In the year that… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.18 hours ago - Witness
Art by Peter MendelsundLately, I’ve been having dreams about my own execution. The nightmares mostly unfold in the same way: I am horrified to discover that I’ve committed a murder—the victim is never anyone I know but always has a face I’ve seen somewhere before. I cower in fear of detection, and wonder desperately if I should turn myself in to end the suspense. I am caught and convicted and sentenced to death. And then I’m inside an execution chamber like the ones I’ve seen many times, straining against the straps on a gurney, needles in both arms. I beg the executioner not to kill me. I tell him my children will be devastated—and somehow I know they’re watching from behind a window that looks like a mirror. I feel the burn of poison in my veins. After that comes emptiness.Maybe everyone dreams of dying, even if not in quite… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.18 hours ago - The Real Problem With the Democrats’ Ground GameThey called it the “Big Send.” Democrats gathered in living rooms, libraries, and coffee shops across the country to write letters to millions of potential voters in swing states and competitive congressional districts, urging them to vote in November. During the 2020 pandemic election, the novel but decidedly 20th-century tactic had cut through the glut of digital messages that inundated Americans’ cellphones and inboxes, and organizers hoped it would similarly boost turnout for Democrats in 2024.It did not.In a study set to be released later today, the group behind the letter-writing effort, the nonpartisan Vote Forward, found that personal messages sent to more than 5 million occasional voters deemed at risk of staying home last fall had no effect on turnout. (The group’s campaign produced a modest increase in turnout among a second, slightly smaller set of low-propensity voters, but it still fell short of previous Vote Forward programs.) What’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.18 hours ago
- More States Consider Curbing Drug Testing at Childbirth
A growing number of states are considering legislation to set up protections for patients who might be drug tested when they give birth. Three of the bills were introduced following an investigative series by The Marshall Project and Reveal that exposed the harms of drug testing at childbirth — including how many patients are often reported to child welfare authorities over false positive or misinterpreted test results, and how women have faced child welfare investigations and removals over medications the hospitals themselves gave them. In New York, a bill that would require hospitals to obtain consent from patients before drug testing has been advancing. Two proposed bills, in Arizona and Tennessee, failed to make it out of their legislative sessions. “We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.18 hours ago - A Federal Program to Protect US Cities Against Extreme Heat Has Just EvaporatedThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Straddling the border with Mexico along the Rio Grande, the city of Laredo, Texas, and its 260,000 residents don’t just have to deal with the region’s ferocious heat. Laredo’s roads, sidewalks, and buildings absorb the sun’s energy and slowly release it at night, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. That can make a hot spell far more dangerous than for people living in the surrounding countryside, where temperatures might stay many degrees cooler. The effect partly explains why extreme heat kills twice as many people each year in the United States than hurricanes and tornadoes combined. To better understand how this heat island effect plays out in Laredo, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last summer and enlisted more than 100 volunteers… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.18 hours ago
- Tech Moguls Want to Found a Crypto Paradise on a Native American ReservationEarly last year, a group of entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts from around the world gathered inside a newly built dome on the Honduran island of Roatán to grapple with a problem: For thought leaders who want to move fast and break things, what can be done about laws that get in the way? The conference, sponsored by the Salt Lake City–based Startup Societies Foundation, was being put on in Vitalia, a longevity-themed “pop-up city” that caters to American medical tourists sidestepping cumbersome FDA regulations. Its motto: “We’re here to make death optional.” Vitalia was in turn located in Próspera, a semiautonomous city on Roatán. Imagine a nesting doll, a city within a city within a city—all on a Caribbean isle. Próspera, the project of entrepreneurs funded by venture capital firms backed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and venture capital mogul Marc Andreessen, was established in 2017 and continues today,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.18 hours ago
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