Huffington (Issue #60) by Huffington.

LARRY SUMMERS IS A BULLY

| BAD BRIDGES | MISBEHAVING PROSECUTORS

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

THE THIRD METRIC

AUGUST 13, 2013

DOES OFFICE YOGA BRING UPWARD-FACING PROFITS? THESE COMPANIES THINK SO. BY PETER S. GOODMAN

08.04.13 #60 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Bradley Manning Judged... Weiner Sexted Out JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst DATA: The State of Deficient Bridges Q&A: Paul Schrader on LiLo’s ‘Cone of Chaos’ HEADLINES

ON THE COVER: GETTY IMAGES/BLEND IMAGES RM, GETTY IMAGES/TETRA IMAGES RF, KRISTIAN SEKULIC/GETTY IMAGES (YOGIS); TROY DUNHAM (DESKS); THIS PAGE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF PROMEGA CORP.; AP FILE PHOTO/JUDI BOTTONI

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Voices PETER S. GOODMAN: Larry Summers Is an Unrepentant Bully

CALM IN THE STORM Getting centered on the company dime. BY PETER S. GOODMAN

MALLIKA RAO: Watching the Rain Fall at MoMA QUOTED

Exit CULTURE: Should Detroit Sell Their Art to Save the City? STRESS LESS: A Rounder Version of Success TASTE TEST: When ‘I Didn’t Spit It Out’ is the Mark of a Decent Coconut Water TFU

THEWhen WRONG SIDE OF THE LAW the prosecution gets it dead wrong. BY RADLEY BALKO

FROM THE EDITOR: Mindfulness Meets the Bottom Line ON THE COVER: Photo Illustration

for Huffington by Troy Dunham

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Mindfulness Meets The Bottom Line IN THIS WEEK’S issue, Peter Goodman takes a look at the increasing number of companies embracing mindfulness, meditation and other stress-reduction practices. Peter spotlights Promega, a biotech company on the outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin. Promega offers meditation classes, yoga, fitness centers, workspaces infused with natural light and healthy meals — all features the company’s executives determined were good not only for employee well-being but also for the bottom line. As chief medical officer Ashley Anderson Jr. puts it: “a healthy workforce is a productive workforce.” Peter also delves into the scientific research on the link between mindfulness and productivity.

ART STREIBER

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of WisconsinMadison, has shown that meditation leads to changes in our brains, urging us toward wellbeing and resilience. He is currently trying to

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

determine whether “a concentrated meditation program deployed at the company level can yield savings in health care costs.” On that point, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini — who brought meditation and yoga to Aetna after they helped him recover from a serious skiing accident — offers a profile in leadership: “I may be weird, but I’m also in charge of the company.” Elsewhere in the issue, Radley Balko takes a close look at prosecutorial misconduct and lack of accountability in several local and state judiciaries, with a focus on Louisiana. Radley hears from John Thompson, who was wrongly convicted twice and spent 18 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 14 of them on death row. His death warrant was signed eight times; when his attorneys finally found the evidence that cleared him — evidence his prosecutors had known about for years — he was only weeks away from execution. Radley’s conversations with local law officials reveal major obstacles preventing them from imposing any real accountability on wayward prosecutors. As Louisiana’s chief of the Office of Disciplinary Coun-

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As chief medical officer Ashley Anderson Jr. puts it: ‘a healthy workforce is a productive workforce.’” sel says, in his 17 years on the job he can only recall three occasions when a prosecutor was disciplined for misconduct. “This isn’t about bad men, though they were most assuredly bad men,” says the wrongly-convicted Thompson. “It’s about a system that is void of integrity. Mistakes can happen. But if you don’t do anything to stop them from happening again, you can’t keep calling them mistakes.” Finally, as part of our ongoing coverage of stress, we’re featuring an infographic showing some of the most worrying statistics on the personal, economic and social costs of overwork and burnout.

ARIANNA

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AP PHOTO/PATRICK SEMANSKY

POINTERS

JUDGEMENT DAY

Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who gave hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks, was convicted of 19 out of 21 charges on Tuesday. But Army judge Col. Denise Lind found him not guilty of the most serious charge against him, aiding the enemy. Prosecutors had tried to argue that Manning knew his leak would end up in the hands of al Qaeda, and many press freedom advocates had said that convicting him of aiding the enemy would threaten to criminalize journalists. The 25-year-old from Crescent, Okla., faces up to more than 100 years in prison.

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FROM TOP: SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES; STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

POINTERS

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WEINER’S SEXTING FALLOUT

New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, who admitted last week to sending lewd online messages even after stepping down from Congress, has dropped from first to fourth place in the Democratic primary, a Quinnipiac University poll found. Weiner has support from just 16 percent of likely Democratic voters, while City Council Speaker Christine Quinn leads with 27 percent of the vote. “[I]t looks like former Congressman Anthony Weiner may have sexted himself right out of the race for New York City mayor,” said the director of Qunnipiac’s polling institute.

TALIBAN FREES PRISONERS

Taliban fighters disguised as police freed about 250 prisoners from one of the main jails in Pakistan this week. More than 100 militants armed with bombs carried out the attack. “It is very difficult to attack such a place without proper information or contacts,” one police source told Reuters, noting that some prisoners may have been communicating with the Taliban. Militants carried out a similar attack in April of last year in the Bannu district and freed almost 400 prisoners.

‘WHO AM I TO JUDGE?’

Pope Francis made headlines this week when he took a surprising stance on the sexual orientation of priests. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” he told reporters on a plane headed back to Rome after his first foreign trip as pope. In the past, the Vatican has treated homosexuality as a “disorder,” and Pope Benedict XVI would not allow men to become priests if they had “deep-seated homosexual tendencies.”

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POINTERS

TRAIN DRIVER WAS ON PHONE DURING CRASH

Investigators announced Tuesday that a train operator in Spain was on the phone while driving, ultimately accelerating way above the speed limit and derailing the train. Seventy-nine people were killed. The investigation of the train’s black boxes revealed the driver, Francisco Jose Garzon Amo, had gotten a call from a national rail company official about his approach to his final stop. The train reached 119 mph and he hit the brakes just moments before the crash. He has been provisionally charged with multiple counts of negligent homicide.

BIG WIN FOR ABC NEWS

6 FROM TOP: PABLO BLAZQUEZ DOMINGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES; IDA MAE ASTUTE/ABC VIA GETTY IMAGES

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More than a year after ABC beat NBC in the morning show rating wars, ABC’s World News With Diane Sawyer surpassed NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams in the 25-54 age category for a week — the first time it has done so since November 2008. World News has not been able to beat Nightly News in terms of total viewers for a sustained period of time, but it has been inching ever closer.

THAT’S VIRAL TRANSGENDER TEEN COUPLE TRANSITION TOGETHER

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

WELCOME HOME!

GERMANY’S NEW ‘HEAVIEST BABY’

WE WIPE OUR HANDS OF THE ’90S ONCE AND FOR ALL

TREATING McDONALDS EMPLOYEES FAIRLY WOULD ONLY COST YOU 68 CENTS

DOUGLAS GRAHAM/CQ ROLL CALL

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LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

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JOHN BOEHNER’S OWN SUCCESS METRIC SHOWS HE’S NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL ARLIER THIS MONTH, our own Amanda Terkel reported that the current Congress was “on pace to be the least productive in modern history,” having only “15

bills signed into law so far.” CBS News’ Bob Schieffer greeted House Speaker John Boehner (ROhio) with this grim statistic on Face the Nation last week. Now, let’s have some Real Talk: You actually aren’t going to shame John Boehner with the news that his House Of Representatives isn’t

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in May.

Enter passing a ton of laws. That’s not what the GOP base expects from its lawmakers. But the speaker can’t sit there on teevee and say that his metric for success is how many consecutive hours they spend twiggling their fudge tunnels with their thumbs, either, so Boehner reached for a different measurement: BOEHNER: Well, Bob, we should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal. We’ve got more laws than the administration could ever enforce. All well and good, except that Boehner’s even worse at repealing laws than he is at enacting them, as Jason Sattler points out: Based on this metric, Boehner’s tenure is even more of a failure than judging him by the paltry number of bills the House has passed that have become laws. Though House Republicans have voted to repeal the whole of Obamacare nearly 40 times and the law’s employer and individual mandates once, those repeals will never be law.

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They’ve never even been voted on by the Senate — and likely never will. Of course, despite all this, I actually think that if John Boehner had his druthers, his House of Representatives would be a lot more productive. The problem is that his House colleagues would take Boehner’s druthers out to the loading dock and set them on fire.

It’s worth considering the possibility that Boehner is maybe a man slightly more sinned against than sinning.” It was Boehner, if you recall, who made an effort to midwife a “grand bargain” with the White House. His lean and hungry colleague, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), killed it off. And Boehner pretty much operates each day in a caucus that’s not shy about having knives out for him. Noam Schieber offered up a fairly compelling, sympathetic take on Boehner back in March, arguing that he was keeping the House from going into a coma through a lot of high-wire improvisation and handholding and psyche-smoothing.

AP PHOTO/CBS NEWS, CHRIS USHER

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And so, the House managed to pass a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, and some Hurricane Sandy relief, measures that I’m pretty sure found Boehner weighing the long-term survival of his party’s brand against his caucus’ near-term antipathy to governing. To get these things done, he had to break the Hastert Rule. There was some indication that he might have done so again to get comprehensive immigration reform over the goal line, but his too-raucous caucus

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Boehner pretty much operates each day in a caucus that’s not shy about having knives out for him.” finally got wise, and the clock’s run out on that strategy. It’s worth considering the possibility that Boehner is maybe a man slightly more sinned against than sinning, in other words. In the meantime, if you’re wondering why this Congress has become such a festering swamp of do-nothingism, read Jonathan Chait’s piece on the “Anarchists of the House.”

Boehner speaks during an interview for CBS’ Face the Nation in his Capitol Hill office on July 19.

DATA

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SOURCE: TRANSPORTATION FOR AMERICA. TIME, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE, ABC NEWS, BRIDGEHUNTER.COM, AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIN ENGINEERS “2013 REPORT CARD FOR AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE”. COLINBROUG/STOCK.XCHNG (BRIDGE); POLEROBI/STOCK.XCHNG (WATER)

The State of Deficient Bridges In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama urged repairs of “the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.” He proposed a plan called “Fix it First,” which would have invested $50 billion in repairing transportation infrastructure, starting with the most urgent repairs. Instead, Congress failed to avoid the sequester, and transportation repair spending was dealt a $1.9 billion cut.

DEFICIENT BRIDGES SPAN THE NATION PERCENTAGE OF DEFICIENT BRIDGES PER STATE BELOW 7 PERCENT

“Structurally Deficient” bridges per state with notable collapses in the past 50 years

ICONIC “STRUCTURALLY DEFICIENT” BRIDGES

7 - 11.9 PERCENT

12 PERCENT AND ABOVE North LaSalle Street Bridge, Chicago, Ill.

MAY. 23, 2013 Skagit River Bridge, Mount Vernon, Wash. DEATHS: 0

Steel Bridge, Portland, Ore.

OCT. 17, 1989 San FranciscoOakland Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. DEATHS: 1

When the Interstate 5 Bridge over the Skagit River in Washington State collapsed on May 23, it was a stark reminder of our nation’s aging infrastructure. While this incident had no fatalities, there are hundreds of other bridges in Washington with worse sufficiency scores and more than 150,000 structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges across the nation. — Katy Hall

AUG. 1, 2007 I-35 Bridge 9340, Minneapolis, Minn. DEATHS: 13 OCT. 17, 1989 The Cypress Street Viaduct, Oakland, Calif. DEATHS: 42

JULY 2, 1965 Melan Arch Bridge, Topeka, Kan. DEATHS: 8

Percentage of bridges classified as “structurally deficient” in 2012

Longfellow Bridge, Boston, Mass.

Brooklyn Bridge, New York, N.Y. JUNE 28, 1983 Mianus Bridge, Greenwich, Conn. DEATHS:3

APRIL. 1, 1989 Hatchie River Bridge, Covington, Tenn. DEATHS: 8

MANY OF THE NATION’S BRIDGES NEED REPAIRS Percentage of bridges classified as “functionally obsolete” in 2012

DEC. 15, 1967 Silver Bridge, crossing Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Kaguna, Ohio DEATHS: 46

Average age of a bridge before it is reconstructed or repaired

Percentage of existing bridges that have exceeded their 50-year design life

Q&A

FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/MARKUS SCHREIBER; COURTESY OF IFC FILMS

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Paul Schrader on Working With Lindsay Lohan

“She loves to live in a kind of cone of chaos, and if a situation is not chaotic, she will create something that makes it chaotic.”

Above: Director Paul Schrader at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007. Below: James Deen (left) and Lindsay Lohan in Schrader’s new film, The Canyons, in theaters Aug. 2.

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

AP PHOTO/MICHEL EULER (SUMMER), SAM HODGSON/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (YELLEN) (WHO WILL RUN THE FED?); AP PHOTO/PATRICK SEMANSKY (WHISTLEBLOWERS BE WARNED); AP PHOTO/RICHARD DREW (CARLOS IN DANGER); JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (LET’S MAKE A DEAL)

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HEADLINES

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The Week That Was TAP IMAGE TO ENLARGE, TAP EACH DATE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

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Dimitry Prosvirnin and Dmitry Sorokin of Azerbaijan compete in the Menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 3-meter Synchro Springboard Diving preliminary round at the 15th FINA World Championships.

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Denpasar, Indonesia 07.26.2013 Participants prepare to launch a shark-shaped kite into flight during the Bali Kite Festival, a seasonal religious tradition intended to send a message to the Hindu gods to bring abundant harvests and crops. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 07.27.2013 A pair of Polish nuns watch as young Catholic pilgrims attending World Youth Day enter the water at Copacabana beach. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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Taipei, Taiwan 07.28.2013 Some 1,213 participants get ready to apply facial masks at an event sponsored by a local face mask company, where participants broke a Guinness World Record for the most people applying face masks for 10 minutes at a time. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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Jakarta, Indonesia 07.29.2013 A worker steamrolls thousands of bottles of alcoholic beverages as part of a police operation during Ramadan at South Jakartaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s police headquarters. About 10,681 alcoholic drinks, most made locally, were destroyed after police seized them from vendors who failed to show documents permitting their sale.

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Mallorca, Spain 07.27.2013 A member of Spain’s UME (Unit Military Emergency) works to extinguish a fire on a mountain near the town of Andratx. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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Osaka, Japan 07.26.2013 A ringed seal swims in a water tank at the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan as part of the facilityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Arctic exhibit. In March, the aquarium completed its renovations to add interactive exhibits. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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Probolinggo, Indonesia 07.24.2013 Villagers await offerings thrown by Hindu worshippers at the crater of Mount Bromo during the Yadnya Kasada Festival â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a monthlong festival in which the Tenggerese people toss rice, fruits and livestock into the crater as offerings to the gods. Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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PETER S. GOODMAN

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AP PHOTO/FENG LI, POOL

Larry Summers Is an Unrepentant Bully IN THE FALL of 2008 — just after many of the nation’s largest financial institutions teetered toward collapse, prompting the government to unleash a taxpayer-financed rescue — I called Larry Summers at his Harvard office to ask him whether he had any regrets. Specifically, I wanted to know how Summers had come to view his actions as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, where he had joined then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to dismantle the government’s authority

to regulate trading in derivatives — the very financial instruments then playing a central role in the crisis. Summers immediately took charge, barking that we were off the record — a directive that I rejected, prompting him to raise his voice. He accused me of conducting a “jihad” aimed at unfairly implicating him as a cause of the financial crisis. I promised to call him again before my piece ran, giving him time to reflect. I left messages but didn’t hear back, so I left one more, reminding him of my previous calls. When he finally called, his legendary condescen-

U.S. National Economic Council Chairman Larry Summers meets with Chinese leaders in Beijing, in 2010.

Voices sion was fully engaged. “The probability that you left me a message that I did not receive is approximately zero,” he said. When it turned out that his secretary had been mixed up about the date of my messages (or maybe it was Larry who was mixed up?), he turned on her, criticizing her sharply with me on the line. There are worse things in life than terrible phone manners, imperiousness and excessive confidence, but these traits have just become more relevant amid the disclosures that Larry Summers appears to be the front-runner to take over as Federal Reserve chairman assuming Ben Bernanke steps down early next year. By intellectual pedigree, Summers may be unrivaled as claimant to the chair. He has a bachelor’s from M.I.T., a Ph.D. from Harvard, a slew of academic awards and an unmistakably brilliant mind. Anyone who has talked to Summers must surely grasp what prompted President Barack Obama to bring him aboard as his leading economic adviser. Summers excels at boiling down difficult subjects to their essentials and analyzing competing positions crisply. He speaks in PowerPoint sentences, with the

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sort of authority and sweep that a president needing to make a tough decision must crave. But history is full of examples of people whose remarkable brains have effectively inured them to important dimensions of reality. This is how Ivy League-trained technocrats in the Kennedy administration led us into the pointless killing ground of Vietnam, so certain of their world-views that they did

History is full of examples of people whose remarkable brains have effectively inured them to important dimensions of reality.” not bother to examine conditions on the ground. This is how Greenspan persuaded Congress and several presidents to trust in his libertarian fantasy that leaving the markets alone would make milk and honey spew forth from the earth. He was so resolute in his views and so forthright in his articulation that those around him were fearful of challenging him lest they risk embarrassing themselves. The result was

Voices a collective delusion that gripped the polity: Housing prices can never fall. This became the underpinning for an economic tragedy from which tens of millions of Americans have yet to escape. “It’s like dealing with a professor of a complex subject that you’re supposed to know something about,” the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Arthur Levitt, said of Greenspan when we talked in the fall of 2008. “I always felt that the titans of our legislature didn’t want to reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that Mr. Greenspan was setting forth. I don’t recall anyone saying, ‘What do you mean by that, Alan?’” Now imagine what happens in response to a similar question: What do you mean by that, Larry? The result is likely to be an impatient lecture rather than an exchange of thinking that might improve policy by injecting alternate views into the conversation. Summers possesses the same sort of supreme assuredness that rendered Greenspan impervious to competing perspectives, plus another trait that may be even more disturbing in a Fed chairman: He is a bully. He cannot help but run

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over people who hold positions counter to his own (especially if said people are women). His clashes with female professors at Harvard are legendary. More recently, Summers squelched Christina Romer, his White House economic team colleague, as she sought a larger dose of stimulus spending than he deemed wise. Back in the late 1990s, Sum-

[Summers] speaks in PowerPoint sentences, with the sort of authority and sweep that a president needing to make a tough decision must crave.” mers ran over Brooksley Born, then head of the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission, when she presciently sought to use her agency’s authority to regulate derivatives. He personally called her and hollered at her, according to Born’s commission colleague, Michael Greenberger, who was in the room at the time. “He said, ‘You’re going to cause the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, if you regu-

Voices late this,’” Greenberger told me. When I bumped into Summers more recently, in January 2012, he remained both unrepentant and unreflective. I asked him if he had any regrets given the benefits of hindsight. Could he have done more to avoid the financial calamity? Could he have accelerated economic recovery? He just scowled and dismissed his critics as people who lack the requisite sophistication about economics and politics. The realm of the Federal Reserve is arcane to most people, but suffice it to say that it is in something like a control tower overseeing a busy major airport: It is supposed to recognize dangers early enough to do something about them. The Fed tightens the flow of money when investment bubbles begin to emerge. It eases the credit taps when the economy is slowing. It is the ultimate overseer of the financial system, the institution that is supposed to be looking out for signs of dangerous speculation and inadequate transparency. It is in short an institution that ought to be headed by a keen student of history — a group that includes Larry Summers — but also someone capable of examining their own personal history in

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pursuit of needed tweaks to their thinking. The chairman ought to be open to absorbing and considering the admonitions of others, cognizant that no one’s thinking is as sharp as several brilliant minds probing a problem together. Summers is temperamentally ill-suited for this all-important job. His life can be summed up in a simple equation: Brilliance plus arrogance yields perilous foolishness.

The realm of the Federal Reserve is arcane to most people, but suffice it to say that it is in something like a control tower overseeing a busy major airport: It is supposed to recognize dangers early enough to do something about them.” His absolute faith in the soundness of his views coupled with his demonstrable tendency to disdain people who disagree have put him on the wrong side of history. We can do far better than hand him the keys to the Fed. Peter S. Goodman is the executive business editor of The Huffington Post.

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Watching the Rain Fall at MoMA

Y FAMILY once visited the foothills of the Himalayas during monsoon season, for mysterious reasons. We stayed in a guest house with an open stairwell where the rain dropped to the ground as if it were a solid thing. Some afternoons I sat in the chair by my room’s window pretending to read. I couldn’t stop watching the rain instead — sweeping in like a dust storm, and soon enough, plunging just beyond the glass in sheets. ¶ It was beautiful, but inconvenient. To tour anything in town, we typically jumped

Visitors gather in the “Rain Room” at MoMA in New York on May 15. The installation creates a field of falling water that stops in the area people walk through, allowing them to stay dry.

Voices out of the car, held shawls aloft as we scanned the view, jumped back in and headed home. My dad divulged a detail at the time, not in defense of his itinerary design, but parallel to it: apparently, tourists from the Saudi Arabian desert also time their trips to India to coincide with the rains. They rent hotel rooms with big windows and never leave, according to my dad. “Rain is so new for them,” he said mournfully, as if he were describing a life of extreme deprivation. “All they need to do is stare.” Those water-mad Saudis came to mind at 7 a.m. last Tuesday. I was waiting in line — along with seemingly all of New York — to see the Rain Room. Its creators, a young London-based art collective called rAndom International, describe it as a “hundred square metre field of falling water through which it is possible to walk, trusting that a path can be navigated, without being drenched in the process.” The magic is done through a series of body-mapping cameras, nine controllable spouts, and 2,500 liters of water falling at 1,000 liters per minute, filtered and cycled back to the spouts from whence the water came. The result is as unnatural

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a version of a natural phenomenon as one can imagine. You’ll feel like Moses parting the Red Sea, promised the Guardian. Last weekend marked the last to visit the installation in its current state. London papers reported visitors queuing up to 12 hours at a time when it debuted in that city. In New York, the rumors are comparable. A Gothamist staffer stood for eight hours and let his mind

No one at my office does this sort of stuff, but they understand I like it. Cultural stuff.” wander; not worth that wait, he declared, though he couldn’t presume to judge for others since he got to see the end. I too woke at dawn to make the decision for myself. By 7 a.m., I was established in line, between a golden-skinned mother, there with her two toddler girls, and a chatty finance guy whose boss gave him the morning off. “No one at my office does this sort of stuff, but they understand I like it,” the analyst, name of Matt, explained to us. “Cultural stuff.” A grandmotherly naturopath

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Voices from Boulder, Colo., joined the discussion. Farida Sharan, as her students know her, loves rain. “The other day, I left the Guggenheim, and it was showering,” she told us, smiling broadly. “It was so lovely. I walked all the way back.” The rest of us weren’t quite on board. Mid-summer in New York tends to be wet, but this year has been particularly soggy. The mother of two explained that she brought a family-sized umbrella just in case. She wondered if she’d made a good parental decision, bringing her kids to an adult party. Beyond the initial choice, there were tricky calculations: whether to wake them up earlier in hopes of a shorter wait, or let them sleep and suffer the consequences. “The only other thing they’ve done like this was Disney World,” she said. “And that was a shorter line.” We inched forward. Matt told us about showing up the weekend before, naively thinking he might get in. It was 9 a.m. on a Saturday. He was told by a guard to expect to wait all day, though he’s a member. Apparently, where we were standing, by an egg sculpture, represents four hours to go. The mother became alarmed. I volunteered to suss out the numbers ahead.

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In the promise land up front, I discovered a white rapper from Virginia. His management suggested he film a stealth music video in the Rain Room, which is why he was there, complete with a camera man, and stiff-billed hat. He was staying in Long Island; he’d woken up at 3 a.m. When I told him the 10-minute viewing time was just a suggestion, that rAndom International actually flew to New York to impress upon the MoMa that visitors should linger as long as they like (10 visitors at a time), he broke into relieved grins. “This video gon’ happen,” he told me. “Check out my YouTube page. I got two million views.” I decided not to tell my mom friend back in line that I’d just upped our wait time. Further back, two teachers on summer vacation told me they’d been offered triple the price of their member guest passes from people hoping to skip the general admission line. I pointed out the booth up front where anyone could spring for a membership on the spot. At $85 for a single person, that was a stiff fee just to see the Rain Room, but could be worth it if you’d buy the membership anyway. Plus you’d join the shorter line. The revelation an-

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Voices gered one of the teachers, an athletic-looking Texan who felt the integrity of the member line was compromised. Soon, she was saying the word “scam” a lot. Clearly my fun facts were not diffusing any latent tension. I tried to discreetly melt away. The rapper made that hard. “Thanks for the tip!” he shouted. Back home, anxiety was being relieved. “You’re a great mother,” Farida reassured the mom. “They’ll thank you some day when they know what it is they saw.” Eventually the line opened up, and we moved in view of the warehouse. “Good for the kids to see something different,” Matt whispered to me. We wound through the final stretch, a maze outlined by those stretchy bands used in airports. Farida reminisced about the years she roomed with Jim Morrison’s lover, Pamela Courson, in the sixties. “Pam,” she called her. “Jim Morrison’s Pam.” Soon, Farida was designing long white sheaths for Pam to wear. The conversation took an obvious turn. All of us agreed that yoga is great. By the time we got to the guard whose job it was to determine how many should be let into the

MALLIKA RAO

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room to wait their turn inside, there was no question. “Six,” Matt said firmly, when the guard asked how many were in his group. He had entered a single man. Now he was a patriarch. Inside, the grid shone with refracted light. We entered together. Farida stretched into a standing yoga pose and the rain opened like

One of the little girls started to cry. “I hate it,” she said, pointing to the drops. a curtain around her. I reached out to touch a line of water — it was there and gone. The menacing sweep in the lower Himalayas was thousands of miles away. There was no danger here. An expensive Canon could safely be held up and clicked — as Matt was demonstrating just then. One of the little girls started to cry. “I hate it,” she said, pointing to the drops. We smiled ruefully above her head as if we knew something she didn’t. Outside, the line was six hours long. Mallika Rao is an arts and entertainment reporter at The Huffington Post.

Voices

QUOTED

“ I’ve fucked it up.”

— Francisco Jose Garzon Amo,

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AP PHOTO/LA VOZ DE GALICIA/MONICA FERREIROS; MAX MUMBY/ INDIGO/GETTY IMAGES; JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION; M ZHAZO/HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY

the driver of a derailed train in Spain that killed 78 and left dozens with critical injuries

“ I guess we can dismiss any perspective Fox News hosts have on Islam based on the fact that they’re Christians, then?”

— HuffPost commenter Mediorite,

on FOX News’ Lauren Green asking religious scholar Reza Aslan how he could write a book on Jesus given that he’s a Muslim

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“ Thank goodness he hasn’t ears like his father!”

— Queen Elizabeth II, after first seeing her new great-grandson, Prince George Alexander Louis

“ I was offered to play Janis Joplin. I’m a little prettier than Janis Joplin so it’s always like that.”

— Courtney Love

to The Huffington Post, on how casting for biopics works

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/PAUL SAKUMA, FILE; SHUTTERSTOCK/DEBORAH KOLB; AMANDA EDWARDS/GETTY IMAGES; ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

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“ Treat your employees like crap and they treat your customers like crap. Simple.”

The only way three people can keep a secret is if two of them are dead.

—HuffPost commenter Carl_Caroli,

on the worst companies to work for in the U.S., with Dish network at #1

—HuffPost commenter wllharrington, on the J.K. Rowling leak about her mystery novel coming from a British law firm

“ I would have brutally kicked his ass.”

— Mario Batali

to Anthony Bourdain on Piers Morgan Live, regarding Justin Bieber peeing into a restaurant mop bucket

“ When you have to take people’s phones away at your wedding so they don’t disrupt your event, you need new friends.”

–HuffPost commenter Bryn_Collins, on whether marrying couples should ask their guests to surrender their smartphones

COURTESY OF PROMEGA CORP.

08.04.13 #60 FEATURES CORPORATE ZEN

THE UNTOUCHABLES

CORPORATE ZEN THE THIRD METRIC

UNWINDING ON COMPANY TIME ... TO REACH THE BOTTOM LINE?

PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY OF PROMEGA CORP.

BY PETER S. GOODMAN

As a half-dozen women filter into a yoga studio on a recent afternoon, passing glowing candles and Buddhist statuary, they absorb the ethereal voice of a woman crooning praises to the earth via a boombox set on a bare wooden floor. They sit on yoga mats, gaze toward foliage outside and draw in a collective breath, echoing the instructor leading this midday meditation class. They are not here on vacation. Nor are they at a spa or a gym. For the women gathered here, this is part of the workday at Promega Corp., a biotech company on the outskirts of this university town. They are here on company time, paying rates heavily subsidized by their employer, because the

people running Promega have concluded that meditation classes — along with yoga, ubiquitous fitness centers, workspaces infused with natural light, and healthy meals — contribute to a happier, healthier working experience. And happier, healthier workers make for a stronger business. In other parts of Promega’s expansive campus, scientists are scribbling on whiteboards in pursuit of fresh applications derived from the genome. Line workers are inspecting DNA analysis kits used by crime scene investigators, then depositing them into orange boxes bearing the company logo. Executives occupying conference rooms plot the conquest of new markets in the Middle East and Asia. All of these pursuits are central components of a private business that employs 1,200 people world-

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wide and claims $300 million in annual revenues. So, too, is the scene in the meditation class, Promega executives assert. “You create a culture of wellness,” says Promega’s chief medical officer, Ashley G. Anderson Jr. “If you create a culture in which vibrant physicality is an admired thing, you’ve achieved a lot. A healthy workforce is a productive workforce.” Across a widening swath of the American corporate landscape, meditation, yoga and other practices once confined to the bohemian fringes are emerging as new techniques toward the harvesting of profit. Promega is among the increasing ranks of companies that have come to embrace so-called mindfulness activities — concentrated meditation aimed at sharpening focus and reducing stress — in a bid to improve the well-being of their workforces and, by extension, the bottom line. This is no gut-level gamble. A growing body of research suggests that yoga and meditation may reduce the stress that tends to assail bodies confined to desks for hours at a time. Companies are investing in the notion that limiting stress will translate into fewer

VERY E COMPANY KNOWS THAT IF THEIR PEOPLE HAVE [‘EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE’], THEY’RE GONNA MAKE A SHITLOAD OF MONEY. employee absences, lower healthcare costs and higher morale, encouraging workers to stick around. Many of the companies that have launched such programs have stripped meditation of any hint of Eastern spiritual provenance, reducing it to a management elixir aimed at capturing the full potential of the people cashing the paychecks. Chade-Meng Tan, a widely celebrated Silicon Valley meditation teacher whose specially designed unit, Search Inside Yourself, has been taught to more than 1,000 Google employees, describes the objective as cultivating “emotional intelligence,” or EI. “Everybody knows this EI thing

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is good for their career,” Meng recently told Wired magazine. “And every company knows that if their people have EI, they’re gonna make a shitload of money.” No one really knows how many companies have adopted meditation and yoga practices, but the number is clearly on the rise. Approximately one-fourth of all major American employers now deliver some version of stress reduction, according to journalist David Gelles, whose forthcoming book, Mindful Work, explores the spread of meditation and yoga inside the business world — a trend now reaching beyond Silicon Valley. At Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, workers begin shifts

with breathing exercises designed to focus them on the task at hand and clear their minds of distractions. General Mills, the food behemoth, has infused much of its corporate culture with mindfulness meditation. “It’s about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected,” the company’s deputy general counsel Janice Marturano tells Gelles. “That compassion to ourselves, to everyone around us — our colleagues, customers -- that’s what the training of mindfulness is really about.” The programs available to employees are as varied as the individual philosophies of their employers, but they share one basic understanding: Stress is an expensive threat to the balance sheet. Mind-

Nature trails for walking and cross country skiing that border Promega’s campus in Madison, Wis., give employees the option to work out or take a break in a natural, outdoor setting.

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fulness is an antidote to stress. Stress harms human health, resulting in higher medical bills borne by employers. Stress interferes with sleep, yielding employees whose judgment may be impaired, making them prone to costly mistakes. Stress shuts down the sort of creative thinking that can generate profitable ideas. Workplace stress respects no boundaries, following workers home and reconstituting itself as family stress that then finds its way back to the cubicle in a feedback loop of tension. Unchecked, this sort of stress can fill an office with burnt-out people consumed with managing dread, anger and anxiety instead of the company’s business. “When people go home and they have had a stressful day, that influences the family,” says Bill Linton, Promega’s founder and chief executive officer. “The dog gets kicked. It has an effect in the community. That’s not a good outcome.” WELL-BEING AS A SKILL Mark Bertolini, chief executive officer of Aetna, the medical insurance giant, frequently tells the story of the broken neck he suffered in a skiing accident nearly a decade ago. The resulting pain

WHEN PEOPLE GO HOME AND THEY HAVE HAD A STRESSFUL DAY THAT INFLUENCES THE FAMILY. THE DOG GETS KICKED. was excruciating. So excruciating that it set him on a desperate search for any therapy that might provide relief. This is how he stumbled into yoga and meditation. This is how he eventually came to have his company make meditation and yoga classes available to employees. “Some people think I’m weird,” Bertolini says. “They say I’m only doing it because of my own experiences. And I say, ‘I may be weird, but I’m also in charge of the company.’” But to those who may claim the boss is being frivolous, Bertolini emphasizes that the program was provoked by concern for the sorts of corporate interest that get captured in a spreadsheet: Aetna determined that workers in its most stress-prone positions were racking up medical bills that exceeded

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those of other employees by an average of $2,000 a year. Last year, Aetna reduced its health care costs by 7 percent — a savings the CEO pegs in part to limiting stress through meditation and yoga. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has emerged as an authority in the nascent field of studying the effects of Asian-inspired meditation practices on the traditionally un-Zen-like domain of the business world. In the summer of 1997, he led a research project that studied the impacts of a limited meditation program on the brain and immune system functions of workers at Promega. One team of workers engaged

in a weekly meditation class led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the medical professor celebrated as a pioneer of mindfulness training. A control group went about their lives as usual, without meditation. Following the eight-week class, Davidson’s researchers hooked up the participants’ to an EEG machine to record their brain activity. The team gave participants flu shots and then took blood samples. The people who got the meditation showed “changes in their brain function toward ways associated with well-being and resilience,” Davidson says. They also showed “improved response to vaccine.” For Linton, Promega’s CEO, those findings merely reinforced what he accepted as truth. “It affirmed for me the value of mindfulness and meditation,” he says.

Promega employees have a variety of yoga classes at their disposal throughout the week, no matter their experience.

CORPORATE ZEN

“ I MAY BE WEIRD, BUT I’M ALSO IN CHARGE OF THE COMPANY.” Mark Bertolini, president and incoming chief executive officer of Aetna, Inc.

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CORPORATE ZEN

Davidson is the founder of The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, a Madison research entity that has become the center of efforts to study the impacts of meditation and yoga in schools and in the business world. Many of the corporate programs the center is pursuing involve quick sessions of meditation incorporated in the workday at regular intervals — perhaps three minutes of every hour. “In the workplace, we think these kinds of strategies improve efficiency, improve attention, fostering emotional balance, facilitating interpersonal interest and teamwork and cooperative activities more generally,” Davidson says. “Those 21 minutes taken out of a day will more than pay back in terms of attention productivity and wellness, with fewer absences.” Davidson’s center operates on an assumption that forms a central tenet of many of the Asian-inspired practices at play — the idea that meditation is a means of cultivating a better state of being, a space of greater clarity and less stress that ultimately produces mental and physical health benefits. “We consider well-being to be a skill,” Davidson says. “We can actually practice to enhance our

STRESS IS AN EXPENSIVE THREAT TO THE BALANCE SHEET. well-being. Every strand of scientific evidence points in that direction. It’s no different than learning to play the violin or play golf. When you practice, you get better at it.” The scientific literature has already demonstrated that meditation reduces stress and anxiety, says Davidson. Evidence suggests that it also boosts the immune system and reduces markers of inflammation associated with a range of ailments from ulcers and diabetes to asthma and cardiovascular stress. For Davidson, the key question is whether these basic linkages mean that a concentrated meditation program deployed at the company level can yield savings in health care costs. “The evidence at this point is modest,” Davidson says. “This kind of an approach is more of a promissory note than one based on hard scientific evidence, but we’re interested in gathering evidence. But there’s good reason to believe that this might be true.” As Lucy Kubly arrives for the noon meditation class at Promega

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on this recent afternoon, she requires no proof. An administrative manager, she spends her workday overseeing the schedules and inboxes of two busy Promega executives. Her brain struggles to keep pace with an unrelenting gusher of correspondence, meetings needing to be arranged, travel emergencies to fix. Her 45 minutes spent breathing and making her mind go blank is her means of getting the static out of her thinking, freeing her to excel at her job. “I have so many action items on my plate at all times that I can’t ever get my brain clear,” Kubly says. “This is a chance to just clear out. If you’re doing what is right for yourself, then you’re doing what is right for your organization. You get clarity, and that helps you make better decisions.” CAPITALISM WITH A SOUL Ask Linton what prompted Promega’s push into yoga and meditation, and he quickly rejects the notion that it was about making more money. “That’s a byproduct of what the purpose is,” the CEO says. “When everything’s all about the bottom line, that creates stress.”

ORK SHOULD W BE MUCH MORE THAN A JOB. Trim and unassuming, with silver hair parted on the right side, Linton, 65, is partial to khakis and navy blue button-down shirts, a style that blends easily into the Midwestern background in which he has spent the last four decades of his professional life. He is fond of extolling the virtues of a cold beer at the end of the workday. But his easy demeanor and everyman sartorial bent mask a mind inclined to challenging traditional conceptions about seemingly established things — not least, the nature and function of business. In Linton’s accounting, a business is merely one component of its surrounding community. It ought to be engineered in the interest of collective well-being. “Work should be much more than a job,” Linton says. “It should be meaningful for those who work at a company and help them develop as people.” Such views fit into a new school of corporate thinking that (at least rhetorically) builds on the supposed failings of business to address the needs of so-

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ciety. Whole Foods Market’s John Mackey has emerged as a proponent of what theorists have called “conscious capitalism,” an entrepreneurial mode that puts social and environmental concerns alongside the usual aspirations of profit-making commerce. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is in this camp, too, publicly urging business leaders to push for more than profit while working for improvements in education and expanded access to health care. Far from revolutionaries intent on waging Marxist struggle, such executives are card-carrying capitalists who see free enterprise as

a crucial artery of innovation and fortune. But they critique the role that capitalism has come to play in determining how we live. They assail the short-term thinking that has too often driven corporate strategies, sometimes sticking the public with unaccounted for costs in the form of pollution, joblessness and economic anxiety — often to the long-term detriment of the businesses themselves. In short, they want a new kind of capitalism, one that places well-being alongside revenues and market share as objects of prime consideration. In Linton’s reckoning, the basic organizing principles that govern many businesses have become disconnected from the needs of

Third spaces located around the Promega campus invite employees to work in a different environment to gain new perspective, fresh thinking and a break from their primary work space.

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employees and the broader public. He is particularly impatient with one idea that has long dominated conventional thinking about business — that corporate managers must focus like a laser on returning value to a company’s shareholders. Executives generally care about the value of a company’s stock because their compensation often includes stock options, but ordinary workers typically see few benefits when share prices rise. “If you try to maximize shareholder value,” says Linton, “you set up a system in which the interests of executives and workers are not aligned.” Linton also disdains the idea that businesses must seek to maximize cash flow above all. Cash flow is imperative for any company that wants to keep the lights on, something Promega has managed to do since Linton founded it 35 years ago. But a business has to have productive uses for its money, or cash flow is pointless. Promega’s bottles of chemical solutions are used by research labs and folded into the manufacture of other biotech products. Promega’s expertise in DNA technology has generated kits used in paternity testing and in crime

I F YOU TRY TO MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER VALUE, YOU SET UP A SYSTEM IN WHICH THE INTERESTS OF EXECUTIVES AND WORKERS ARE NOT ALIGNED. scene investigations, a growing area of its trade. But having a portfolio of useful wares is merely a beginning, Linton says. The question that provokes his imagination is one not typically encountered in business school: What’s the point of it all? “A business enterprise can be far more than a bunch of numbers that create a bottom line and return profit to shareholders,” Linton says. “Businesses have an opportunity, just like people, to say, ‘What are we here for?’ My goal is to align the self-actualization of the business with the selfactualization of the people who actually work here.” Self-actualization is a word that gets a vigorous workout in the

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Linton lexicon. (Transformation is another.) He is partial to the hierarchy of needs as delineated by the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, whose pyramids famously laid out an architecture of human concern — base needs such as breathing, water, sex and sleep at the bottom, and the loftiest need at the top: “selfactualization,” in Maslow’s initial conception later swapped out for “transcendence.” This, says Linton, may as well be Promega’s organizational chart. This is why he has made meditation and yoga available to all of his employees, Linton says. This is why every building on campus has a fitness center available for free

to every employee. This is why the campus guesthouse where he puts up visiting customers comes equipped with a sauna. (“We want to give them an unforgettable experience,” Linton says.) This is why every building on Promega’s campus — an architectural stew of Frank Lloyd Wright, Swiss ski chalet and Japanese pagoda that is the base for some 700-plus employees — is full of what interior designers call “third spaces,” meaning areas neither home nor office, such as bright, informal cafes and banks of soft-backed chairs where people can hang out or mingle, still creating but freed from their cubicles. This is why every building contains a mother’s room, a private place where a nursing mother can pump breast milk.

Promega employees have the option to work out by themselves, or with a group of co-workers. Fitness equipment is available to employees on campus, 24/7.

CORPORATE ZEN

“ [WORK] SHOULD BE MEANINGFUL FOR THOSE WHO WORK AT A COMPANY AND HELP THEM DEVELOP AS PEOPLE.” Bill Linton, Chief Executive Officer of Promega Corp.

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CORPORATE ZEN

This is why Promega’s chefs oversee their own on-site organic garden, using it to supplement a subsidized menu of restaurant-worthy healthy food. And this is why a new $130 million factory set to open on the Promega campus later this summer contains restrooms worthy of a Four Seasons hotel, a cafeteria with granite countertops, double-high atriums, cherry wood accents over the entrances, and a living wall composed of real plants and trickling water — a concentrated attack on the long grey winter that seizes Wisconsin. “We want to bring the outdoors inside as much as possible,” Linton says. All of this lavish treatment is why Linton has resisted a former temptation to take his company public, a step that would have handed a measure of control to people who manage money on Wall Street, and who would ask simpler questions than those that consume him. Questions like: Why does a factory need natural light and marble floors beneath the urinals? How many cents per share in earnings did all that cost? He gets that Wall Street would would not like his answers: Because he wants the people who

MY GOAL IS TO ALIGN THE SELFACTUALIZATION OF THE BUSINESS WITH THE SELFACTUALIZATION OF THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WORK HERE. work in that factory to be happy. Given multiple opportunities to make the point that happy factory owners make for long-term profit, Linton demurs. “I can’t necessarily tie this selfactualization to helping us gain cash flow or develop better products,” Linton says. “You can’t calculate the return on investment.” ‘IT HELPS THE BOTTOM LINE’ But the people Linton oversees at Promega are not so reluctant. Many assume that limber bodies and calmer minds — the fruits of yoga, meditation, cardiovascular exercise and nutritious food — are indeed spilling into the results of the business. “People are more engaged,” says

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Sharon Sheridan, who oversees the company unit that produces genetic identification instruments. “There’s a general sense of positivity here. I absolutely do think it helps the bottom line. When people are more engaged, they’re more collaborative.” The popularity of the wellness initiatives amounts to a recruiting tool, say the company’s human resources people. Such programs also help explain why 91 percent of Promega’s employees stick around from one year to the next, according to the company, minimizing disruptions and holding down training costs. “Healthy employees, engaged

employees, they are here for the long term,” says Darbie Miller, a Promega human resources officer. “And if they’re here for the long term, the company wins.” Michael Slater, a senior research scientist at Promega’s research and development center, takes time to teach yoga to his colleagues in addition to his primary pursuit surveying laboratory results. He sees this not as an extracurricular activity, but at least in part as a means of helping Promega produce its best work. “I’ve always felt that if people were better attuned to nature and their inclinations, the community would benefit,” Slater says. “I have no metric to prove that, but that’s my belief.” Slater, now 58, has a silver goa-

Restored prairie swale surrounding the Promega campus facilitates stormwater run-off, creating another home for wildlife and further enhancing the campus’s natural surroundings.

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tee and wears round wire-rimmed glasses. He stumbled on yoga in the 1990s as a means of alleviating excruciating hip pain. He later dabbled in meditation as a participant in the research project conducted on the Promega campus by Davidson, the University of Wisconsin research scientist. At the time, Slater was mourning several deaths in his family and struggling to handle the responsibilities of freshly becoming a father. “I was kind of primed for it,” Slater says. “I was looking for a little help, just coping.” He threw himself into the classes with Kabat-Zinn. His wife, a poet, pronounced him easier to live with. “My wife was really happy with me, because I got much nicer,” Slater says, somewhat bemused. “Apparently, I lost some of my edge.” Like many technology companies, Promega is at peace with flexible time. No one counts how many hours people sit at their desks. No one seems to raise an eyebrow when an employee turns away from a computer screen to pick up a yoga mat and head to the Mind and Body studio. If anything, a collective understanding has emerged that stepping out in this way is an

I CAN’T NECESSARILY TIE THIS SELFACTUALIZATION TO HELPING US GAIN CASH FLOW OR DEVELOP BETTER PRODUCTS. YOU CAN’T CALCULATE THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT. intrinsic part of the work. “Some people think you can’t get good thinking out of people unless you really apply the screws,” Slater says. “I think of it differently. Unless you get to a really clear, still place in your mind, you can’t think effectively.” The result of this is a fitness ethic that permeates the Promega culture. While many companies offer employees fitness centers and inducements to ride their bicycles to work, with rewards ranging from T-shirts to cash bonuses, what is striking at Promega is the extent to

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which these pursuits have reversed the usual dynamic. In many companies, employees sneak off to the gym with a sense of guilt. At Promega, it’s the desk-chained set that harbors a sense of doing it wrong. “No one ever really pressures you to be fit, but you see how much effort people put into being fit,” says Mike Rosenblatt, who dropped 50 pounds after joining a company-organized weight loss class at the Wellness Center. “Unless you embrace it, too, you’re almost on the outside looking in.” Some here say organizing life around exercise has made them more concentrated and focused. Monika Wood, a scientist who oversees data projects, rides her bicycle

between work and home, a trip of 16 miles that takes her about an hour. The exertion not only keeps her fit, but also places an imperative on being more organized while helping her avoid procrastinating. “I tend to get all my things done much more efficiently,” Wood says, “because I don’t want to bike home in the dark.” A HEALTHY SUBSTITUTE Five years ago, after the birth of her second daughter, Lucy Kubly, the executive assistant, found herself chronically devoid of energy. “I was struggling all morning,” Kubly says. “Then, 1 o’clock would hit and I’d feel like I was not getting anything done. I’d find myself staring at a blur of email, just looking and not really doing anything.” She often recharged with a can of

Promega employees participate in a wall yoga class — one of a variety of different yoga classes available to anyone working at the company’s campus.

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Coke and a candy bar, relying on a sugar rush. The pounds she added while pregnant never went away. Then, she began going to company-subsidized aerobics classes held in the Mind and Body studio in the basement of the research and development building. “It was amazing,” Kubly says. “It motivated me and made me healthier and more energetic.” She stopped snacking, began eating more fruits and vegetables at home, and dropped 15 pounds. She began sleeping better and feeling less stressed throughout the day. Her cholesterol improved. Her high blood pressure returned to normal. How does one measure these impacts to Promega’s business? The accounting is more art than science. But Kubly says she sees a doctor less frequently and brings greater energy to her work. Soon, she began going to meditation classes. On a recent Thursday afternoon, she’s among the six women being led in deep breathing by instructor Joyce Lyle. “If at any point during our meditation you feel yourself losing focus, like you feel the workday creeping back in, the breath is always available,” Lyle says. “The breath can anchor us into the moment.”

I ABSOLUTELY DO THINK IT HELPS THE BOTTOM LINE. WHEN PEOPLE ARE MORE ENGAGED, THEY’RE MORE COLLABORATIVE. The women in the room have assumed the lotus position atop cushions stacked on their mats. “Let those sitting bones sink down,” the instructor says. “And now the shoulders that have been holding so much today, just let them relax.” She turns off the music. “Notice your breath,” she says. In this room inside this company that makes its money deriving products from the ticking engine of life itself, everything is still. “It just helps you feel at peace,” Kubly says later, back at her cubicle. “I always leave and have this tremendous sense of clarity.” Peter S. Goodman is the executive business editor of The Huffington Post.

the

UNTOUCHABLES Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Misbehaving Prosecutors (and the System That Protects Them) By RADLEY BALKO

PREVIOUS PAGE: AP PHOTO/BILL HABER; THIS PAGE: AP PHOTO/PATRICK SEMANSKY

Some questions seem particularly prone to set John Thompson off. Here’s one he gets a lot: Have the prosecutors who sent him to death row ever apologized? ¶ “Sorry? For what?” says Thompson. The 49-year-old is lean, almost skinny. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes and sports a thin mustache and soul patch, both stippled with gray. “You tell me that. Tell me what the hell would they be sorry for. They tried to kill me. To apologize would mean they’re admitting the system is broken.” His voice has been gradually increasing in volume. He’s nearly yelling now. “That everyone around them is broken. It’s the same motherfucking system that’s protecting them.”

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He paces as he talks. His voice soars and breaks. At times, he gets within a few inches of me, jabbing his finger in my direction for emphasis. Thompson pauses as he takes a phone call from his wife. His tone changes for the duration of the conversation. Then he hangs up and resumes with the indignation. “What would I do with their apology anyway? Sorry. Huh. Sorry you tried to kill me? Sorry you tried to commit premeditated murder? No. No thank you. I don’t need your apology.” The wrongly convicted often show remarkable grace and humility. It’s inspiring to see, if a little difficult to understand; even after years or decades in prison, exonerees are typically marked by an absence of bitterness. Not Thompson, but you can hardly blame him. Even among outrageous false conviction stories, his tale is particularly brutal. He was wrongly convicted not once, but twice — separately — for a carjacking and a murder. He spent 18 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 14 of them on death row. His death warrant was signed eight times. When his attorneys finally found the evidence that cleared him — evidence his prosecutors

had known about for years — he was weeks away from execution. But what most enrages Thompson — and what drives his activism today — is that in the end, there was no accountability. His case produced a surfeit of prosecutorial malfeasance, from incompetence, to poor training, to a cul-

“ They tried to kill me. To apologize would mean they’re admitting the system is broken.” ture of conviction that included both willfully ignoring evidence that could have led to his exoneration, to blatantly withholding it. Yet the only attorney ever disciplined in his case was a former prosecutor who eventually aided in Thompson’s defense. “This isn’t about bad men, though they were most assuredly bad men,” Thompson says. “It’s about a system that is void of integrity. Mistakes can happen. But if you don’t do anything to stop them from happening again, you can’t keep calling them mistakes.” Over the last year or so, a number of high-profile stories have fostered discussion and analysis of prosecutorial power, discretion

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and accountability: the prosecution and subsequent suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz; the Obama administration’s unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers; the related Department of Justice investigations into the sources of leaks that have raised First Amendment concerns; and aggressive prosecutions that look politically motivated, such as the pursuit of medical marijuana offenders in states where the drug has been legalized for that purpose. In May, an 82-year-old nun and two other peace activists were convicted of “sabotage” and other “crimes of violence” for breaking into a nuclear weapons plant to unfurl banners, spray paint and sing hymns. Even many on the political right, traditionally a source of law-and-order-minded support for prosecutors, have raised concerns about “overcriminalization” and the corresponding power the trend has given prosecutors. Most recently, the Justice Department came under fire for its investigation of leaks to the media, including a broad subpoena for phone records of the Associated Press, and for obtaining the phone and email records of Fox News reporter James Rosen. In

the Rosen case, Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on a warrant that claimed that merely publishing information that had been leaked to him made Rosen a criminal co-conspirator. Many have pointed out that such a charge would make it a crime to practice journalism. President Obama has since expressed his dismay at the Rosen warrant, but his response was curious. He asked Holder to investigate the possible misconduct that not only occurred under Holder’s supervision, but in which Holder himself may have participated. In asking Eric Holder to investigate Eric Holder, Obama illustrated the difficulty of adequately addressing prosecutorial misconduct as well as anyone possibly could: Prosecutors are relied upon to police themselves, and it isn’t working. A growing chorus of voices in the legal community says the problem is rooted in a culture of infallibility, from Holder on down. And it’s against this backdrop — this environment of legal invincibility — that we get the revelations of massive data collection by the National Security Agency, government employees who lie to Congress with no repercussions, and government investigators, courts and prosecutors operating in secret. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court

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dismissed Thompson’s lawsuit against Orleans Parish and the office of former District Attorney Harry Connick (father of the debonair crooner). The court’s decision in Connick v. Thompson added yet another layer of protection for aggressive prosecutors, in this instance by making it more difficult to sue the governments that employ them. It was just the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions going back to the 1970s that have insulated prosecutors from any real consequences of their actions. Prosecutors and their advocates say complete and absolute immunity from civil liability is critical

to the performance of their jobs. They argue that self-regulation and professional sanctions from state bar associations are sufficient to deter misconduct. Yet there’s little evidence that state bar associations are doing anything to police prosecutors, and numerous studies have shown that those who misbehave are rarely if ever professionally disciplined. And in a culture where racking up convictions tends to win prosecutors promotions, elevation to higher office and high-paying gigs with white-shoe law firms, civil liberties activists and advocates for criminal justice reform worry there’s no countervailing force to hold overzealous prosecutors to their ethical obligations.

John Thompson speaks to reporters in New Orleans after the Supreme Court overturned a $14 million judgment, accusing prosecutors of witholding evidence in order to help convict Thompson of murder.

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In the end, one of the most powerful positions in public service — a position that carries with it the authority not only to ruin lives, but in many cases the power to end them — is one of the positions most shielded from liability and accountability. And the freedom to push ahead free of consequences has created a zealous conviction culture. Nowhere is the ethos of impunity more apparent than in Louisiana and in Orleans Parish, the site of Thompson’s case. The Louisiana Supreme Court, which must give final approval to any disciplinary action taken against a prosecutor in the state, didn’t impose its first professional sanction on any prosecutor until 2005. According to Charles Plattsmier, who heads the state’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, only two prosecutors have been disciplined since — despite dozens of exonerations since the 1990s, a large share of which came in part or entirely due to prosecutorial misconduct. Since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Connick v. Thompson in March 2011, several defense attorneys in New Orleans have responded by filing complaints against the city’s prosecutors.

Leading the charge is Sam Dalton, a legal legend in New Orleans who has practiced criminal defense law in the area for 60 years. According to Dalton and others, not only have these recent complaints not been investigated, in some cases they have yet to hear receipt of

“ Mistakes can happen. But if you don’t do anything to stop them from happening again, you can’t keep calling them mistakes.” confirmation months after they were filed. Even the head of the board concedes that significant barriers to accountability persist. Thompson is certainly aware of that. “These people tried to eliminate me from the face of the earth,” Thompson says of his own prosecutors. “Do you get that? They tried to murder me. And goddamnit, there have to be some kind of consequences.” THE PROSECUTOR’S BUBBLE There are a number of ways for a prosecutor to commit misconduct. He could make inappropriate comments to jurors, or coax

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witnesses into giving false or misleading testimony. But one of the most pervasive misdeeds is the Brady violation, or the failure to turn over favorable evidence to the defendant. It’s the most common form of misconduct cited by courts in overturning convictions. The name refers to the 50-yearold Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, which required prosecutors to divulge such information, like deals made with state’s witnesses, crime scene evidence that could be tested for DNA, information that could discredit a state’s witness and portions of police reports that could be favorable to the defendant. But there’s very little to hold prosecutors to the Brady obligation. Courts most commonly deal with misconduct by overturning convictions. To get a new trial, however, a defendant must not only show evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, but must also show that without that misconduct the jury likely would have acquitted. The policy may seem more sensible than one of setting guilty people free because of low-level prosecutorial misconduct that had no impact on the verdict, but civil liberties advocates say it sets the

bar too high. “It requires appellate court judges to sit as jurors,” says Steven Benjamin, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It puts them in a role they were never intended to be in, and asks them to retroactively put themselves at trials they didn’t

“ It takes a really extreme case to overturn a conviction.” attend. It takes a really extreme case to overturn a conviction.” Moreover, throwing out a conviction is intended to ensure due process for a given defendant — not to punish a wayward prosecutor. Appellate court decisions that overturn convictions due to prosecutorial misconduct rarely even mention the offending prosecutor by name. At the other end of the severity scale, someone could bring criminal charges against a misbehaving prosecutor. But this is vanishingly rare. While there’s no authoritative count of the number of times it’s happened, a 2011 Yale Law Journal article surveying the use of misconduct sanctions found that the first such case to reach a verdict in the U.S. was in 1999.

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(The jury acquitted.) More recently, the 2006 Duke lacrosse case resulted in criminal contempt charges against Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong. He was disbarred and sentenced to a day in jail. Former Williamson County, Texas, District Attorney Ken Anderson currently faces felony charges for failure to turn over exculpatory evidence in the case of Michael Morton, a man who served 25 years in prison for his wife’s murder until he was exonerated by DNA testing on evidence Anderson allegedly had helped cover up. The charges against Nifong and Anderson are newsworthy precise-

ly because they’re so uncommon. “The situation in Texas is encouraging, but I can’t think of any other examples beyond that one and the Duke case,” Benjamin says. In 2008, Craig Watkins, the district attorney in Dallas County, Texas, suggested that both criminal charges and disbarment for willful Brady violations should be more common. The mere utterance of such a thing from a sitting prosecutor was unexpected, even from a DA like Watkins, a former defense attorney who has been widely praised for his efforts to reform the culture in the Dallas DA’s office. The New York defense attorney and popular law blogger Scott Greenfield called it “earth-shattering.” Yet Watkins’s suggestion glosses over the fact any such charges would need to be brought by an-

Thompson spent 14 of his 18 years at Louisiana State Penitentiary on death row before the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed his case in 2011.

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other prosecutor, likely a state attorney general. Even if state legislatures were to formally criminalize Brady violations, it seems unlikely that many prosecutors or state attorneys general would pursue charges against their colleagues, and certainly not enough to make criminal charges an effective deterrent. The federal government could also bring criminal civil rights charges against prosecutors who knowingly withhold exculpatory evidence. But this is also exceedingly rare. Bennett Gershman, who studies prosecutorial misconduct at Pace University Law School, could cite only one instance in which it has happened: the federal government’s pursuit of charges against former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino for withholding exculpatory evidence in a terrorism case he prosecuted shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Convertino was acquitted. Suing prosecutors whose misconduct contributes to wrongful convictions is even more difficult. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled out torts law as an option for plaintiffs nearly a century ago. And in the 1976 case Imbler v. Pachtman, the court ruled that under federal civil

rights law, prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity from any lawsuit over any action undertaken as a prosecutor. The court later extended this personal immunity to cover supervisory prosecutors who fail to properly train their subordinates. Now even a prosecutor who knowingly submits false evidence in a case that results in the wrongful conviction — or even the execution — of an innocent person can’t be personally sued for dam-

Prosecutors are relied upon to police themselves, and it isn’t working. ages. The only way a prosecutor can be sued under present law is if she were acting as an investigator in a police role — duties above and beyond those of a prosecutor — at the time she violated the defendant’s civil rights. But even here, prosecutors enjoy the qualified immunity afforded to police officers: A plaintiff must still show a willful violation of well-established constitutional rights to even get in front of a jury. The 2009 Supreme Court case Pottawattamie v. McGhee shows how absurd the logic behind

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES

“ He’s the attorney general. He should be protecting us from the people in the legal system who would do us harm, and he hasn’t done anything about it.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks in Arlington, Va., in 2011.

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prosecutorial immunity can get. Prosecutors were found to have fabricated evidence to help them convict two innocent men, Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee, who between them spent more than 50 years in prison. Attorneys for the prosecutors, along with the Office of the Solicitor General and several state attorneys general, argued they should be immune from any liability. They said that while the prosecutors may have been acting as police investigators when they fabricated the evidence, the actual injury occurred only when the jury wrongly convicted Harrington and McGhee. It followed that because the prosecutors were acting as prosecutors when the injury occurred, they were still shielded by absolute immunity. Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal even argued to the court that there is no “free-standing due process right not to be framed.” During oral arguments in the case, Justice Anthony Kennedy summed up this defense less than sympathetically: “The more deeply you’re involved in the wrong, the more likely you are to be immune.” And there was at least some indication during the oral arguments that some jus-

tices were moving toward limiting prosecutorial immunity. But before the court could rule, Pottawattamie County settled with Harrington and McGhee. For now, the question of whether a prosecutor can be held personally liable for knowingly manufacturing evidence to convict an innocent person remains unsettled. John Thompson’s case dealt with the issue of municipal liability. He couldn’t sue any of the prosecutors personally, but in theory, he could still go to federal court to sue the city or county where the prosecutors worked. But simply being wronged by a rogue prosecutor isn’t enough. He would also have to show that employees of the government entity he was suing routinely committed similar civil rights violations; that these violations were the result of a policy, pattern or practice endorsed by the city or county; and that the prosecutor’s actions were a direct consequence of those policies and practices. That’s a lot to prove, but municipal liability could bring some justice to people wronged by a flawed system. And if such lawsuits result in large awards, perhaps they could begin to apply some political pressure to policymakers and public officials to change their ways.

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But here, too, the federal courts have built a formidable legal moat around recompense for the wrongly imprisoned — and around indirect accountability for the prosecutors who put them away. Since 1976, only a narrow theory of municipal liability and the possibility of professional sanction remain as viable avenues to hold prosecutors accountable. And in an era where the prevailing criminal justice climate has been to find more ways to fill more prisons as quickly as possible, neither has done much of anything to deter misconduct.

That’s generally true across the country, and it’s particularly true in Orleans Parish. A TRADITION OF INDIFFERENCE In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of two felonies; first for the armed robbery of a university student and two others, then three weeks later for the murder of Raymond T. Liuzza, Jr. The armed robbery conviction kept Thompson from testifying on his own behalf at his murder trial — doing so would have allowed prosecutors to bring up the other conviction in front of the jury. So he was convicted for the murder, too. For the next 14 years, Thompson

Sam Dalton, who has practiced criminal defense law for 60 years in New Orleans, is leading the charge against prosecutors’ misconduct.

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fought both convictions, eventually with the assistance of attorneys at Loyola University’s Capital Defense Project and Gordon Cooney and Michael Banks, both attorneys at Morgan and Lewis, a corporate law firm in Philadelphia. Thompson was up against a prosecutorial climate that critics had long claimed valued convictions over all else, one that saw a death sentence as the profession’s brass ring. The New York Times reported in 2003 that prosecutors in Louisiana often threw parties after winning death sentences. They gave one another informal awards for murder convictions, including plaques with hypodermic needles bearing the names of the convicted. In Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans, some wore neckties decorated with images of nooses or the Grim Reaper. One of Thompson’s prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney James Williams, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007, “There was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty.” Williams kept a replica electric chair on his desk. “It was hooked up to a battery, so you’d get a little jolt when you touched it,” recalls Michael Banks, one of Thompson’s

attorneys. In 1995, Williams posed with this mini-execution chair in Esquire magazine. On the chair’s headboard, he had affixed the photos of the five men he had sent to death row, including Thompson. Of those five, two would later be exonerated and two more would

“ He said we needed to focus on the murder. So I pled guilty to the robberies. I wish I hadn’t. But I was 16. I was a child. You do what your attorney tells you to do.” have their sentences commuted. By 1999, Thompson had already forestalled seven death warrants, and was staring down number eight. He had exhausted most of his legal options, and was just weeks from execution. In a last-ditch effort to save him, a defense investigator went combing through old records at a New Orleans police station and came across the microfiche file that would save Thompson’s life. The file held the results of a blood test performed on a swatch of clothing taken from one of the

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victims of the armed robbery for which Thompson was convicted. The blood on the cloth belonged to the perpetrator. The swatch of clothing itself has never been found, but according to the test results, the armed robber’s blood was type B. Thompson’s is type O. Thompson’s death sentence was vacated, the armed robbery conviction was eventually thrown out and he was granted a new trial for Liuzza’s murder. His attorneys

were able to show that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence at Thompson’s first murder trial, too, including an eyewitness description of Luizza’s killer from the key prosecution witness who implicated Thompson. In the new trial, Thompson was also able testify and give his alibi. It took the jury 35 minutes to acquit him. When the buried blood test was first made public in late April 1999, Harry Connick, the Orleans Parish district attorney, called a press conference. He announced an internal investigation, to be led by

Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick launched an internal investigation in 1999 after investigators found new evidence in Thompson’s case.

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Assistant District Attorney Jerry Glas. A week later, Glas resigned. During a deposition at Thompson’s civil trial, Glas gave the reason for his resignation. He believed Williams, the prosecutor, knew about the swatch of clothing and the blood test, but had concealed the test and may have helped destroy the blood sample. He also believed the other prosecutors in the case — Assistant District Attorneys Eric Dubelier and Gerry Deegan — may have been implicated. Glas recommended that Williams be indicted, and he wanted more time to investigate Dubelier. Deegan had since passed away, but in a sworn deposition, another former prosecutor said that on his deathbed, Deegan had told of the existence of the exonerating cloth and blood test, and admitted that he had helped to hide it. Glas revealed all of this to Connick in May 1999, along with his plan to present it to the grand jury. Connick promptly closed down the grand jury, and Glas resigned. By the time Thompson filed his misconduct lawsuit against Orleans Parish in 2005, another wrongly convicted New Orleans man had already filed a similar suit

and come up short. Shareef Cousin was convicted in 1996 for the 1995 murder of Michael Gerardi, who was shot and killed in front of his date, Connie Babin, just after the two had eaten dinner in the French Quarter. Babin would later claim she was “absolutely positive” that Cousin, who was 16 at the time, was Gerardi’s killer. Cousin’s trial produced one particularly odious example of misconduct. The prosecution called on James Rowel, a friend of Cousin’s. They expected him to testify that Cousin had confessed the murder to him. Instead, to the surprise of everyone, Rowel denied Cousin had ever confessed. Instead, he informed the courtroom that prosecutors had promised him leniency on his own pending charges if he would falsely implicate his friend. Connick’s prosecutors attempted an awkward correction by calling a police officer and Rowel’s former attorney to the stand, both of whom claimed that Rowel had told prosecutors about the confession of his own volition. The prosecutors then attempted to submit that testimony to jurors as substantive evidence of Cousin’s guilt. It was a move the Louisiana Supreme Court later called “a flagrant misuse” of evidence. Cousin also had an alibi: He was

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playing in an organized basketball game at the time of the murder. He had video evidence, plus testimony from two Parks and Recreation supervisors, an opposing player and his coach that put him on the basketball court when Gerardi was murdered. The jury convicted him anyway, and sentenced him to death. During Cousin’s appeal, his attorneys discovered more misconduct. Assistant District Attorney Roger Jordan had suppressed statements from Babin that cast serious doubt on her testimony. Prior to her “absolutely certain” claim, Babin had told police that she hadn’t gotten a good look at the gunman, and that she wasn’t

wearing her contact lenses at the time of the attack. Without her prescription lenses, she said, she could only see “shapes and patterns.” At some point between the time she made those statements to police and her trial testimony, Babin had somehow grown increasingly sure about Cousin. The Louisiana Supreme Court overturned Cousin’s conviction in 1998, and Connick’s office declined to try him again. Like John Thompson’s, Cousin’s murder defense was complicated by the fact that Orleans Parish prosecutors were simultaneously pursuing other charges against him for unrelated crimes — in his case, four armed robberies. “My attorney told me that the prosecutors were going to try each of the robberies separately,”

Former Durham, N.C., district attorney Mike Nifong takes the witness stand in his own defense after pleading not guilty to a criminal contempt of court charge in 2007.

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Cousin recalls. “I didn’t do them. But he told me there was no way we could beat four armed robbery charges and also win the murder case. He said we needed to focus on the murder. So I pled guilty to the robberies. I wish I hadn’t. But I was 16. I was a child. You do what your attorney tells you to do.” Because of the robbery convictions, Cousin remained in prison until 2007. But he filed his lawsuit in 2000, from prison, hoping to collect under both municipal and personal liability. Cousin first alleged that the Orleans Parish DA’s office was mired in a culture of prosecutorial misconduct, which had been created by policies and practices set by Connick. He also attempted to hold prosecutors personally liable under the narrow exception from absolute immunity permitted when prosecutors act as investigators. In March 2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected all of Cousin’s claims. On the exception to absolute immunity, the court found that once police had identified Cousin as a suspect, there was a strong presumption that everything the prosecutors did going forward they did in the role of prosecutors

preparing for trial, not as investigators attempting to solve a crime. It was arguably the correct outcome under the law, given the precedents already set by the U.S. Supreme Court. But the specifics of the Fifth Circuit Court’s opinion show just how unfairly those precedents can play out. The court ruled that even if prosecutors had intimidated and coerced

“ Except in some rare cases, misconduct isn’t going to hurt a prosecutor’s career. And it can often help.” James Rowel into lying on the witness stand, they clearly did so in their role as prosecutors, not as investigators, and were therefore immune from liability. The court said the same thing about allegations that prosecutors lied about Babin’s initial statements, and about Cousin’s contention that prosecutors buried evidence pointing to other suspects. One particularly explosive allegation from Cousin was that Connick’s office had trumped up charges and illegally detained witnesses whom Cousin had planned

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to call to testify in his defense, which not only violated the rights of those witnesses, but also made it impossible for Cousin’s attorneys to find them so that they could testify. The court acknowledged that if true, this would be an egregious and malicious example of misconduct. But because it was done in pursuit of Cousin’s conviction, it was still “prosecutorial in nature, and therefore shielded by absolute immunity.” The court then turned to Cousin’s other hope to collect: his argument that the policies and practic-

es in Connick’s office had created a culture of indifference about disclosing exculpatory evidence. Despite the dozen-plus cases of misconduct cited by Cousin’s attorneys, the court ruled against him. According to the opinion, Cousin’s “citation to a small number of cases, out of thousands handled over twenty-five years” wasn’t enough to show a pattern or practice of deliberate indifference. That analysis is likely flawed. “A Brady violation is by definition a cover-up,” says Banks, the attorney for Thompson. “So we only know about the violations that have been exposed.” Emily Maw, director of the

Ken Anderson, a former district attorney from Texas, chokes back tears as he recalls a prosecution that wrongfully sent a man to prison for 25 years.

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New Orleans Innocence Project, a group that advocates for the wrongfully convicted, says violations in low-level cases are much less likely to come to light. “It’s expensive to discover a Brady violation. They’re usually found after conviction, with the help of investigators and attorneys poring through police reports and prosecutors’ files.” In fact, because Brady violations are suppressions of evidence, they’re only likely to come to light once a defendant is given full access to the state’s complete case file. In Louisiana, that only happens after conviction. Moreover, the only defendants who have the right to a state-provided attorney after conviction are those who are facing the death penalty. Indigent defendants sentenced to life or less must find pro bono help, or they’re on their own. This means that the only convictions systematically vetted for Brady violations in Louisiana are death penalty cases. And here, the numbers are quite a bit more alarming. Between 1973 and 2002, Orleans Parish prosecutors sent 36 people to death row. Nine of those convictions were later overturned due to Brady viola-

tions. Four of those later resulted in exonerations. In other words, 11 percent of the men Connick’s office attempted to send to their deaths — for which prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence in the process — were later found to be factually innocent. Over the years, even some of the judges in Orleans Parish had expressed concern about the culture in Connick’s office. In a 2011 brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the attorneys for another murder defendant named Juan Smith cited press accounts going back to the 1990s describing judges that were “increasingly impatient with what they say are clear violations of discovery laws by prosecutors.” One article reported that judges had “voiced their dismay” over an “active unwillingness to follow the rule of law.” Some judges had even ordered prosecutors to take legal classes. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Smith’s conviction just last year, again because of Brady violations. The U.S. Supreme Court had already rebuked Connick’s office for its culture of misconduct. In the 1995 case Kyles v. Whitley, Justice David Souter’s majority opinion scolded Orleans prosecutors for “blatant and repeated violations” of Brady, and described a culture that had “descend[ed] to a gladi-

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atorial level unmitigated by any prosecutorial obligation for the sake of the truth.” None of this was enough to convince the Fifth Circuit to find a pattern of unconstitutional behavior in Cousin’s case. In the end, the Fifth Circuit opinion suggests that the status quo in Orleans Parish and elsewhere is perfectly adequate: “Where prosecutors commit Brady violations, convictions may be overturned. That could be a sufficient deterrent, so that the imposition of additional sanctions ... is unnecessary.” John Thompson filed his lawsuit against Orleans Parish and his prosecutors in 2005, two years after Cousin had been denied. “We were pretty limited by that decision,” Banks recalls. “We could have tried again, and there were even more examples of misconduct we could have used, but we didn’t want to risk having the court refer back to that decision and dismiss us out of hand.” Instead, Thompson’s attorneys decided to pursue another possible opening to municipal liability. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested that a single incident of a civil rights violation could be so grievous that it could give rise to

a lawsuit on its own. As an example, the court theorized a police shooting in a city that employed an armed police department, but didn’t bother to train its officers in the use of lethal force. Thompson’s attorneys argued that the violation in his case, and Connick’s failure to train his staff in Brady requirements, was egregious enough to qualify as such an event. But it was a narrow argument that barred Thompson from bringing up all the violations Connick’s office had committed in other cases. Thompson was still able to present ample evidence of indif-

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins calls for a review of the death penalty in Texas, which has performed the nation’s most executions.

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ference — even hostility — to the Brady requirement. For example, after being chastised by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Kyles case in 1995, Connick said he saw “no need” to make any changes to his office policy. In depositions, Connick claimed he wasn’t even aware of the fact that the court had ruled against him in Kyles. He also testified that he had stopped reading law books and legal opinions after taking office. During arguments in the retrial after the court’s decision in Kyles, one of Connick’s subordinates told jurors that the court was wrong about the obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence, just as it had been wrong in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous 1896 segregation decision that sanctioned “separate but equal.” Another former Connick assistant testified in 2007 that the office policy when it came to exculpatory evidence was to be “as restrictive as possible,” and, “when in doubt, don’t give it up.” The trial jury ruled for Thompson, and awarded him $14 million in damages. He also won at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, perhaps because the court was aware of its ruling in Cousin’s lawsuit, and could no longer simply

ignore what was going on in New Orleans. But Orleans Parish appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in 2011, the court rejected Thompson’s suit in a 5-4 split. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion illustrates how taking various theories of immunity in isolation can present a distorted, context-starved picture of what’s really happening in America’s courtrooms, and ef-

“ There was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty.” fectively shield prosecutors from any accountability. Thomas noted, for example, that because Thompson hadn’t attempted to argue a pattern of misconduct in Connick’s office, the court couldn’t consider it. That was true, but it was because the Fifth Circuit had rejected that argument two years earlier, in Cousin’s case. Thomas also wrote that because prosecutors get specialized training in law school and are required to complete continuing education, a district attorney like Connick can be safe in assuming that his subordinates are already aware of their

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Brady obligations. Therefore his failure to train them on the matter wasn’t such a big deal. Thomas’s opinion was at odds with Connick’s professed ignorance of Brady and the DA’s own admission that he hadn’t bothered keeping up on the law. But even if Thomas was correct, consider the implication: It would mean that as far as the U.S. Supreme Court is concerned, when prosecutors fail in their obligations under Brady, they must do so knowingly and willingly. That means the city can’t be held liable. But when prosecutors cheat willingly and knowingly, they’re protected by absolute immunity. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent for the minority. She was so incensed by the court’s decision that she read her opinion from the bench. The net result of the Supreme Court’s immunity decisions is a sort of case-by-case buck-passing. In declining to attach liability under one theory, the court inevitably makes a good argument for why it should attach under a different one. Unfortunately, the court has already denied liability under that theory, too, and either has no interest in overturning that decision, or won’t consider the possibility,

because it wasn’t argued. Ultimately, the majority opinion in Thompson’s case falls back on the argument that the legal profession is perfectly capable of regulating itself. “[A]n attorney who violates his or her ethical obligations is subject to professional discipline, including sanctions, suspension, and disbarment,” Thomas wrote. In theory, perhaps. But not in reality, and once again, not in New Orleans. A CULTURE OF CONVICTION The particularly striking thing about that argument — that selfregulation and professional discipline are sufficient to handle prosecutorial misconduct — is that even in the specific Supreme Court cases where it has been made, and where the misconduct is acknowledged, the prosecutors were never disciplined or sanctioned. None of the prosecutors in Pottawottamie v. McGhee suffered professional repercussions for manufacturing evidence, for example. Neither did any of the men who prosecuted Thompson. In fact, there’s a growing body of empirical data showing that the legal profession isn’t really addressing prosecutorial misconduct at all. In 2003, the Center for Public Integrity looked at more than 11,000 cases involving misconduct

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since 1970. Among those, the center found a little over 2,012 instances in which an appeals court found the misconduct material to the conviction and overturned it. Less than 50 cases resulted in any professional sanction for the prosecutor. In 2010, USA Today published a six-month investigation of 201 cases involving misconduct by federal prosecutors. Of those, only one prosecutor “was barred even temporarily from practicing law for misconduct.” The Justice Department wouldn’t even tell the paper which case it was, citing concern for the prosecutor’s privacy. A 2006 review in the Yale Law Journal concluded that “[a] prosecutor’s violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned by courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies.” An Innocence Project study of 75 DNA exonerations — that is, cases where the defendant was later found to be unquestionably innocent — found that prosecutorial misconduct factored into just under half of those wrongful convictions. According to a spokesman for the organization, none of the

prosecutors in those cases faced any serious professional sanction. A 2009 study by the Northern California Innocence Project found 707 cases in which appeals courts had found prosecutor misconduct in the state between 1997 and 2009. But of the 4,741 attorneys the state bar disciplined over that period, just 10 were prosecutors. The study also found 67 prosecutors whom appeals courts had cited for multiple infractions. Only six were ever disciplined. Most recently, in April, ProPublica published an investigation of 30 cases in New York City in which prosecutor misconduct had

Richard Convertino was acquitted of federal charges accusing him of withholding exculpatory evidence in a high-profile terror case in 2007.

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caused a conviction to be overturned. Only one prosecutor was significantly disciplined. The 2011 Yale Law Journal survey of state disciplinary systems also found a host of problems with the way misconduct complaints against prosecutors are handled. In many states, for example, the entire disciplinary process occurs in secret, ostensibly to protect the reputation of the accused attorneys. (Nevermind that the people who were harmed by the misconduct weren’t afforded the same courtesy.) In some states, prosecutors are given the option of admitting wrongdoing and accepting a private reprimand, meaning neither their actions nor the disciplinary board’s investigation will ever be made public. That hides the misconduct from the media, from defense attorneys and from the voters who elect these prosecutors. Secrecy also makes it more difficult to assess the pervasiveness of misconduct. Only one state, Illinois, publishes data on the number of complaints its disciplinary board has received and investigated. The Yale review also found that some complaint processes are needlessly complicated. As of 2011, only four states offered the

ability to file complaints online. Mississippi reminds potential complainants that “all lawyers are human,” and warns of the damaging consequences of unfounded complaints. In 23 states, complainants have no option to appeal if their complaint is dismissed. The survey concluded that in too many states, “complaints must

“ A Brady violation is by definition a cover-up. So we only know about the violations that have been exposed.” work their way through a byzantine structure” of procedures. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that most states have more checks to protect prosecutors from false misconduct complaints than they have to protect residents from false convictions. Even when misconduct is exposed, it doesn’t necessarily slow down a prosecutor’s career. In Mississippi, for example, District Attorney Forrest Allgood has repeatedly used expert forensic witnesses whose credibility and credentials have been widely criticized by other forensic specialists. Two men Allgood has convicted of

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murder (one of whom was nearly executed) were later exonerated by DNA testing. Two others — a mother accused of killing her newborn, and a 13-year-old boy — were acquitted after they were granted new trials. Allgood continues to win reelection. In Missouri, Kenny Hulshof was so good at winning convictions he was regularly called upon by the state attorney general’s office to oversee death penalty cases. He has since been cited by two appellate judges — one state, one federal — for withholding evidence. In 2008, the Associated Press uncovered five other cases Hulshof prosecuted in which the defendant’s guilt had since come into question. Nevertheless, Hulshof rode his tough-on-crime reputation to six terms in the U.S. Congress, a GOP gubernatorial nomination and then to a gig at the prestigious law firm Polsinelli. In 2007, a California Court of Appeals found that a Tulare County deputy district attorney, Phil Cline, had improperly withheld an exculpatory audiotape of a witness interview in the murder trial of Mark Soderston. The tape was so damning to the prosecution’s case, the court wrote, that “

[t]his case raises the one issue that is the most feared aspect of our system — that an innocent man might be convicted.” Unfortunately, Sodersten had had already died in prison. The court was so troubled by the case that it took the unusual step of evaluating his claim even though he was dead. Not only was Cline never disciplined by the state bar, he was elected district attorney in 1992 and continued to win reelection, even after the court opinion chastising him. The other prosecutor in the case, Ronald Couillard, went on to become a judge. One of the most egregious and widespread examples of prosecutorial aggression and overreach in the history of the American criminal justice system was the mass panic over alleged ritual sex abuse in the 1980s and 1990s, and the wrongful convictions of dozens of innocent people that followed. Prosecutors across the country sent people to jail on horrific allegations of bizarre occult and satanic rituals that included sex with children, penetrating children with knives and orgies with children and animals. But the allegations inevitably stemmed solely from interviews investigators conducted with children, and in most cases there was no physical evidence of any abuse.

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Few of the prosecutors in those cases suffered any harm to their careers. Most continued to get reelected, and some went on to higher office, including Ed Jagels in Kern County, California; Scott Harshbarger and Martha Coakley in Massachusetts; Daniel Ford, who is now a judge, also in Massachusetts; Robert Philibosian and Lael Rubin in California; and Janet Reno in Florida. “Publicity and high conviction rates are a stepping stone to higher office,” says Harvey Silverglate, a Boston-based criminal defense attorney and outspoken civil libertarian. He says prosecutors accused of going too far can frame the allegations as a testament to their willingness to lock up the bad guys. “Except in some rare cases, misconduct isn’t going hurt a prosecutor’s career. And it can often help,” he says. Back in Orleans Parish, the lead prosecutor in the John Thompson case, Eric Dubelier, was not only never disciplined, he was eventually appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, where he handled narcotics cases. In a prosecutor’s world, that’s a promotion. He was then promoted

again to the Justice Department’s Transnational and Major Crimes Section in Washington, D.C., where he worked for eight years. Since 1998, he has been a partner at the large international law firm Reed Smith, where he heads up its division on white-collar crime. Silverglate says that’s a common career track for federal prosecutors. “They often go on to take

11 percent of the men Connick’s office attempted to send to their deaths… were later found to be factually innocent. positions in white-collar law defense. And these are extremely lucrative positions — 1 to 2 million dollar salaries. And they aren’t being hired to litigate. The skills it takes to be a good prosecutor don’t transfer to criminal defense. They’re being hired to negotiate plea bargains with the friends they still have in the U.S. attorney offices. It’s a huge racket.” “Tell me again about accountability,” Thompson says from his office along St. Bernard Avenue, a rough, working-class neighborhood near the Treme. “You hear

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the politicians talk about criminals taking responsibility for their actions. That man [Dubelier] tried to have me killed. They had evidence of my innocence, they covered it up, and they tried to kill me anyway.” He gets up from his desk, paces, and his voice begins to rise again. “That’s premeditated murder! I don’t know how you call it anything else. And now he makes millions of dollars at one of the most powerful law firms in America.” Thompson shakes his head. He paces back to his desk and sits down. “So tell me again about accountability.”

WHAT ISN’T UNETHICAL Knowingly withholding exculpatory evidence is unquestionably a breach of ethics. But many of the recent stories to inspire public anger at the criminal justice system involve conduct that most state bar associations don’t even consider unethical. While there were separate allegations of Brady violations in the Aaron Swartz case, for example, much of the backlash has been over what many saw as an unreasonably harsh battery of charges brought against the young activist. The prosecutors didn’t have evidence for many of the charges, and they knew they didn’t, the argument goes, so the charge stacking was really just an

Terry Harrington (center) leaves the Clarinda Correctional Facility in Iowa after the state’s Supreme Court vacated his conviction in a 1977 murder case.

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effort to bully Swartz into pleading guilty rather than go to trial and risk the possibility of a long prison sentence. When asked about the appropriateness of the charges in the Swartz case, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress he thought they were “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.” Dalton is at the heart of a current effort by some in the state’s defense bar to impose some accountability on prosecutors in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in John Thompson’s case. Now that the possibility of civil liability has been all but removed, there’s a new urgency to either prod the state’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) to address misconduct, or to expose its ineffectiveness if it doesn’t. “The Brady problem really became atrocious under Connick,” Dalton says of the former Orleans district attorney. “Nondisclosure was routine, and it’s ridiculous to say he didn’t know about it. He was too competent not to know what was happening. And it has gotten only marginally better since.” (The district attorney’s office in Orleans Parish did not return requests for comment.)

In Louisiana, ethics complaints against practicing attorneys are first considered by the ODC. If the office finds clear and convincing evidence of misconduct, it forwards its findings to an independent hearing committee made up of two lawyers and one nonlawyer, all of whom are volunteers. That committee must then sign off on the misconduct finding for the charge to go forward. Ultimately, the Louisiana Supreme Court makes the final decision on whether or not the charge has merit, and if so, on how to discipline the offending lawyer. Current ODC chief counsel Charles Plattsmier admits there are major obstacles preventing his office from imposing any real accountability on wayward prosecutors. In his 17 years on the job, he can only recall three occasions in which a prosecutor has been disciplined for misconduct. Plattsmier wouldn’t talk about specific cases, but from public records, it’s clear one of those disciplinary actions came against Roger Jordan, the prosecutor who convicted Shareef Cousin. For suppressing evidence in that case, the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2005 suspended Jordan from practicing law for three months, but then suspended that penalty. As long as Jordan isn’t found to have commit-

AP PHOTO/CHARLIE NEIBERGALL

Tears roll down Terry Harringtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cheeks in the moments after his release.

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ted misconduct again, he’ll never have to serve the suspension. The court noted that it was the first time it had ever disciplined a prosecutor for misconduct. Another occasion was the action taken against Mike Riehlmann, the attorney who heard the deathbed confession about the blood evidence in Thompson’s case. Riehlmann played no part in the actual prosecution of Thompson, and he eventually worked with Thompson’s attorneys to help set Thompson free. Yet he was the only attorney involved in the entire affair to face any discipline. Because Riehlmann did not disclose the confession for five years, Connick filed an ethics complaint against him. (Riehlmann was once a prosecutor, but not under Connick, and not at the time Connick filed the complaint.) Connick’s complaint was upheld, and Riehlmann’s law license was suspended for six months. Dalton attended the hearing where the Louisiana Supreme Court suspended Riehlmann’s law license. “Under the Louisiana Bar code of ethics, any attorney who is made aware of ethical misconduct by another attorney is obligated to file a complaint,” Dalton says. But

Riehlmann’s sanction illustrates what may be the biggest barrier to self-regulation: Lawyers do not want to report other lawyers for ethical violations. “As I sat there and listened to these justices come down on this guy, really scolding him, I wanted his attorney to challenge them,” Dalton recalls. “Those justices are all licensed lawyers in Louisiana. And some of them had found that prosecutors had withheld evidence in that

“ [A] prosecutor’s violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice.” same case, in violation of Brady. I wanted to ask them, why didn’t you file a complaint?” It’s a good question. According to Plattsmier, Louisiana judges are bound by a code of judicial conduct that supersedes the bar’s code of ethics. But that doesn’t get them off the hook. The code “instructs judges to report and assist in misconduct investigations.

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But the word it uses is should, not shall,” Plattsmier says. “So some judges take that instruction very seriously, but some just don’t find it relevant.” Plattsmier’s office does not have jurisdiction over judges. Discipline of judges is handled by other judges. “You have to remember that nearly all judges are former prosecutors,” Dalton says. “There’s an undercurrent of alliance between judges and prosecutors, so there’s a certain collegiality there. They run in the same social circles. They attend the same Christmas parties.” Since his release, Thompson has given public talks, spoken on panels and participated in forums on how best to address prosecutor misconduct. He knows all about the Christmas party problem. “Even when I talk to judges and prosecutors who acknowledge there’s a problem, who are sympathetic, even they will bring that up. They’ll say, ‘I’ve known Jack all my life. My kids go to school with his kids. He came to my Christmas party last year. How could I file a complaint against him? How could I discipline him, or take away his law license, when that’s how he feeds and takes care of his family? I know Jenny and

the kids. I can’t do something that’s going to put them out of their home.’” “I get that,” Thompson says. “If I’m honest with myself, if I’m forcing myself to see the world through someone else’s eyes, I get that. But then what can we do about that? Who is going to file these complaints? Me? From a jail cell?” He continues: “I just come back to the fact that they wanted me dead. I understand that maybe, in your heart of hearts, you really

“ Publicity and high conviction rates are a stepping stone to higher office.” believed this guy was guilty. But at some point you started to find evidence that he wasn’t. And instead of exposing that evidence, you hid it. Once you did that, you became a conspirator in my murder. If you’re a prosecutor, your job is to prosecute murderers. To protect innocent people from being murdered. I was an innocent guy that the people in that office conspired to murder. And now you’re saying you, Mr. Prosecutor, you can’t protect me from these

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men who tried to kill me, because their wives and kids go to your Christmas party? You should be trying to put them in jail! But you can’t even file an ethics complaint against him. No way. I understand what they’re saying. But it just isn’t an excuse.” It isn’t just other prosecutors who shy away from reporting misconduct. According to Plattsmier, his office receives around 3,200 complaints per year. Family law gets more complaints than any

other area of practice. “Criminal law gets its fair share,” Plattsmier says, “But the criminal law complaints are almost exclusively against members of the defense bar. You can imagine why that might be. Everyone who gets convicted, whether it’s of murder or a parking ticket, they tend to blame their lawyer.” According to Plattsmier, in his time at ODC, complaints against prosecutors have been almost nonexistent. That also seems to be true elsewhere. In 2010, Illinois considered over 4,000 complaints against attorneys licensed in the

Shareef Cousin is a co-founder of Resurrection After Exoneration, a non-profit that helps exonerees reenter society.

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state. Of those, 99 alleged prosecutorial misconduct. Just one of those reached the stage of a formal hearing. After a forum on wrongful convictions last year at Tulane University, Plattsmier asked the Innocence Project of New Orleans for a list of cases in which an innocent person had been convicted due to prosecutor misconduct. “I checked the list to see how many of the prosecutors had been reported to our office. Even I was surprised when we found that none of them had. No one had filed a complaint.” Though defense attorneys may seem most likely to file those complaints, few of them do — and there are some good reasons why not. For one, ethics complaints usually aren’t considered until criminal and civil trials are settled. That way, if a state supreme court makes a finding of ethical misconduct, it will have no impact on a client’s criminal appeal or his lawsuit. More important, Plattsmier says, defense attorneys are reluctant to file complaints because of the damage a complaint could do to the working relationships they have with prosecutors. A complaint could make

an aggrieved prosecutor and his colleagues less likely to cut deals or to ask judges for leniency for an attorney’s other clients. There’s also the problem Harvey Silverglate described: When a defense attorney does find evidence of misconduct, it can be a bargaining chip, explicitly or implied, to negotiate a better plea bargain — with the understanding that the misconduct not be made public.

“ You have to remember that nearly all judges are former prosecutors... so there’s a certain collegiality there. They run in the same social circles. They attend the same Christmas parties.” So while mass reporting of misconduct by criminal defense attorneys as a whole would likely be of enormous benefit to the criminal justice system and to defendants and general, there’s little incentive for an individual attorney to report an individual prosecutor. “That’s why what Sam Dalton is doing is so important,” says

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Ben Cohen, a defense attorney who practices in New Orleans, but lives in Ohio. “Filing an ethics complaint against a prosecutor can be devastating for a defense lawyer. It can ruin you professionally. You can’t get a plea. You risk having them take it out on your clients. What Dalton has done is set an example. For a man of his stature, it means something.” Cohen recently filed his own ethics complaints alleging misconduct in the case of Jamaal Tucker, a client who in October 2010 was convicted of killing a man outside a public housing project in New Orleans. Assistant District Attorney Eusi Phillips’s first two attempts to convict Tucker ended in mistrials, one after Judge Julian Parker found that prosecutors had violated his order to turn over exculpatory evidence. Parker even threatened to convene a grand jury to investigate the misconduct. One witness testified in Tucker’s second trial that he was recanting his prior statements, and could no longer recall witnessing the shooting. Prosecutors then threatened him with perjury charges. The same witness then testified again at Tucker’s third trial, perjury

charges still hanging, and was once again able to recall what he thought he had seen. Two other witnesses had cut deals with prosecutors, yet were still permitted to tell the jury otherwise. One of them, Morris Greene, told the jury that he was testifying against Tucker “out of the goodness of my heart.” But Greene had sent a letter to the office of current Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro asking for money and leniency on his own charges for armed robbery in Lafayette Parish. That letter wasn’t turned over to Tucker’s defense. Cohen knew of the charges against Greene, and sent an investigator to sit on the proceedings in Lafayette, about 135 miles west of New Orleans. According to Cohen, a prosecutor in Lafayette Parish told the court that he had just received a phone call from Cannizzaro, and that he would be allowing Greene to withdraw his guilty plea in the armed robbery case. Greene was released. The judge in Tucker’s case then subpoenaed Cannizzaro to explain the mysterious phone call. Instead, on the day Cannizzaro was scheduled to testify, his office conceded and Tucker was granted a new trial. The ODC found no ethical violations on the part of Cannizzaro

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or Phillips. “The justification was that there was no proof of a deal, so there was no ethical violation,” Cohen says. “But any first-year law student could tell you why that’s wrong. Even if there wasn’t a deal, Greene’s letter shows that he asked for and was expecting one, and that’s what was driving his testimony. ... The letter was never disclosed, and he was allowed to testify that he was expecting nothing.” (Just before publication, Cohen was informed that his appeal of the ruling was successful, and that his complaint against Phillips would be reinstated.) Plattsmier says he sympathizes. “I understand the frustration. I do. You hear about these overturned convictions, and then you hear that only three prosecutors have been disciplined in 20 years, and the natural reaction is, ‘So what’s wrong with the system?’” Beyond a reluctance to report misconduct, Plattsmier points to other possible explanations for the discrepancy between appeals court findings of misconduct and so few disciplinary actions against prosecutors. First, he says, because disciplinary boards usually only start investigating

a case after it has been resolved both criminally and civilly, time can be a factor. “Criminal cases have long, long lives,” he says. “It can be years or decades before misconduct is discovered. You’re then going back to piece together

Defense attorneys are reluctant to file complaints because of the damage a complaint could do to the working relationships they have with prosecutors. events from long ago. That can be a challenge. The prosecutor you’re investigating may not even be a prosecutor anymore, so there may no longer be a file. That’s not an excuse. It’s just a reality.” Plattsmier also emphasizes that a finding of “misconduct” by an appeals court isn’t necessarily a breach of ethics. To constitute an ethical violation, the misconduct must be willful. For example, if defense attorneys discover after conviction that a police officer withheld information favorable to the defendant, an appeals court would likely classify that failure to disclose as prosecutorial mis-

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conduct. But it wouldn’t be an ethical violation on the part of the prosecutor. “You must know of the evidence in order for it to be an ethical violation not to turn it over,” Plattsmier says. One way a prosecutor could protect himself from accusations of failing to turn over exculpatory evidence gathered by police, then, is to make a habit of not asking the police for such evidence. That can create an unhealthy culture in which prosecutors take a don’t-ask-questions approach to police misconduct. In September 2011, for example, Cannizzaro dropped drug charges against Eddie Triplett, who had already served 12 years in prison for cocaine possession. In 1999, two New Orleans police officers had detained another man on the street under suspicion of drug possession. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, they also detained Triplett. Police attributed the cocaine they found on the first man to Triplett, then testified against him at trial. Triplett was released after his attorneys found the long-suppressed police report which described what had actually happened. The two officers involved are still on the force in

New Orleans. And though Cannizzaro was somewhat critical of the police department after freeing Triplett, one of his assistants publicly defended the officers. While it’s probably unfair to point the finger at prosecutors when police withhold evidence, it’s also important to at least acknowledge that not holding prosecutors accountable can encourage a willful blindness to police misconduct. In the Triplett case, a prosecutor more skeptical of the police, or at least more vigilant

Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January as he was being prosecuted for computer fraud after downloading a large number of academic journal articles.

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about reviewing police reports and case files, could have prevented an unjust conviction. That sort of push and pull of incentives for prosecutors can complicate efforts to improve the system. But there appear to be more functional problems at work in Orleans Parish, even since the Supreme Court’s Thompson decision. Sam Dalton began his personal campaign for prosecutor accountability nearly two years ago by going after six prosecutors for alleged misconduct during the murder trial of Michael Anderson. Nothing has happened since. Anderson was convicted in 2009 of gunning down five men in an S.U.V. in the New Orleans neighborhood of Central City three years earlier. He was sentenced to death. It was the first capital case won by Cannizzaro, who at the time was new to his job as district attorney. Anderson was awarded a new trial in 2010 when a judge found that prosecutors had failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. That evidence included a recorded interview in which the state’s main eyewitness made statements that undermined both her story and her credibility, and a deal the

state had cut with a jailhouse informant who claimed Anderson had confessed to him. The informant, Ronnie Morgan, was facing his own charges for several armed robberies. Prosecutors let him testify in Anderson’s trial that he was getting no favors for his testimony, even though he was later allowed to plead to charges in what another judge would call “the deal of the century.” Dalton filed eight complaints with the ODC in October 2011. By the following March, he had yet to even hear confirmation that the ODC had received his complaints. He sent another letter. He still received no response. In August of last year, he sent a colleague to the ODC office to at least make sure the complaints had been delivered. She was told that they hadn’t. Dalton’s colleague then produced the name of the ODC staffer who had signed for the FedEx package containing the complaints. At that point, the office conceded that it had in fact received the complaints, but was still researching them, and would notify Dalton by the end of the month. When he had received no response by the middle of September — nearly a year after his initial filing — Dalton sent yet another letter. As of this writing, he still has yet to hear back from

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the ODC. Last August, Kathy Kelly of the Louisiana Capital Post-Conviction Office also filed a complaint with the ODC, against Roger Jordan, the prosecutor in the Juan Smith case. As of this writing, she too has yet to hear back from the office. Plattsmier says that while he can’t talk about specific cases, he would be “very surprised” if his office had taken months to confirm receipt of a complaint. “That would indicate to me that something is very wrong, that there is some sort of miscommunication. I would encourage anyone who has filed a complaint and not heard anything back at all to contact me directly,” he says. Dalton emphasized that Plattsmier is an excellent attorney and an honorable man whom he holds in high regard. “I wouldn’t ever question his integrity,” Dalton says. Emily Maw at the New Orleans Innocence Project echoed that sentiment. “I think he’s an ally. He recognizes there’s a problem. And he has reached out to us for ideas on how to fix it.” But Dalton still wonders what’s going on with his complaints. “I just can’t explain it. It has to be something intentional coming

from someone, somewhere,” he says. “It could be anything from just a friendly alliance with people in power to something more sinister. But it isn’t accidental.” RESURRECTION AND REFORM Back on St. Bernard Avenue, John Thompson is working with a plumber. Shareef Cousin is eating lunch. Five years ago, the two men cofounded Resurrection After Exoneration, a non-profit organization that helps exonerees re-enter society.

Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood prosecuted two men who were sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit before being released in 2008.

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“John and I planned this whole thing on death row,” Cousin says. “We had cells right next to each other.” Thompson comes out from a back room. “Cell two and cell three!” he calls out. “We always knew we was going to get out.” “We motivated each other,” Cousin says, “inspired each other to keep up the fight. So we always knew we wanted to work together to create something positive from all of this when we got out.” Bearded and bespectacled, Cousin comes off as restrained and pensive. Where Thompson is loud and brash, Cousin is quiet and standoffish. Thompson started our interview by scarfing down a box of fast food. Cousin has a plate of what looks like health food, but insists on putting it aside as we talk. Cousin had his own experience with the difficulties of re-entry. In 2008, shortly after he got out of prison, he pleaded guilty to using his boss’s identity to apply for and use some credit cards. “When I got out of prison, I had spent half my life behind bars,” Cousin says. “I was impressionable. I had some mental health issues that had gone untreated. And I had

little money. Those aren’t excuses. But the experience made me more aware of the problems exonerees face when they get out. Especially the mental health aspects, which I think get overlooked. People understand that people first getting out may need money or housing. But doing time does things to people, even innocent people. If you don’t get your mind right, get some counseling, you could find yourself back in prison.” At Resurrection, Cousin now counsels recent exonerees and directs them to mental health services. He also trains and employs some of them at a screen-printing company he and Thompson started through the non-profit. “Right now we have contracts to print school uniforms for several schools in Orleans Parish,” he says. “And we have the city’s ear right now, so we’re in the process of lining up more.” Cousin talks briefly about his case, and about prosecutorial misconduct, but he isn’t interested in delving into specifics. “I let John handle reforming the system,” Cousin says. “It just gets me too upset. I don’t like to be angry. So I handle the re-entry stuff. I let him deal with the activism.” Currently, Thompson is planning an exoneree march on Washington. “We’re hoping to get at

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least one exoneree from all 50 states,” he says. “And we’re going to take a petition to Eric Holder demanding that he go after these prosecutors. That’s his job. He’s the attorney general. He should be protecting us from the people in the legal system who would do us harm, and he hasn’t done anything about it.” Nationally, the public is becoming more aware of prosecutor misconduct, thanks in part to the Ken Anderson and Mike Nifong prosecutions, the seemingly endless stream of DNA exonerations and publicity over cases like Thompson’s. After a first term in which he became the national face of reforming the culture in prosecutors’ offices, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins won reelection by a slim margin in 2010. And on a few occasions, voters have chosen to punish wayward prosecutors. The same year in Colorado, for example, voters declined to retain state judges Terence Gilmore and Jolene Blair, two former prosecutors who in 1999 won a murder conviction against Tim Masters. Masters was later exonerated, and in 2008 Gilmore and Blair were reprimanded by the

Colorado Supreme Court for their misconduct in the case. But in much of the country, prosecutors still mostly earn voter favor by racking up convictions. And the political and criminal justice systems present some formidable obstacles to reform.

When a defense attorney does find evidence of misconduct, it can be a bargaining chip… with the understanding that the misconduct not be made public. In 2004, for example, the California legislature created the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a panel of current and former judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and police officials. They were charged with coming up with policies that could help prevent wrongful convictions. In 2006 the group delivered a series of sensible recommendations, including simple changes to the way eyewitnesses are presented with lineups, requiring corroboration before using testimony from jailhouse

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informants and requiring video recording of police interrogations. The measures passed both houses of the state legislature, but were then vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger after heavy lobbying by the California District Attorney’s Association. Common misconceptions among prosecutors about their Brady obligations remain, and disabusing them of those notions may be an important first step toward reform. “I think education of prosecutors can help,” Plattsmier says. “We’ve been working with

DAs to make sure their offices are thoroughly educated on their Brady obligations.” Plattsmier says one misperception concerns the materiality test the Supreme Court has laid out for Brady violations. This is the doctrine that says that even if a prosecutor withheld information favorable to the defense, the conviction can stand if the withheld information likely wouldn’t have altered the verdict. “Some prosecutors have assumed that gives them the authority to decide what information is and isn’t material to guilt. But that isn’t how it works. It isn’t up to their discretion. From

Rep. Kenny Hulshof (RMo.) gives his concession speech in Missouri’s gubernatorial race in 2008.

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an ethics standpoint, if it’s favorable to the defense, they’re obligated to turn it over. And we’ve told them that the fact that the information they withheld was deemed immaterial by a court doesn’t preclude us from opening an investigation.” Another possible reform would simply be to require prosecutors to share everything with defense attorneys — what’s known as an “open file” policy. “I think open file is the minimum reform we need right now,” says Michael Banks, the attorney for Thompson. “There will always be rogue prosecutors to deal with, and we need some changes to handle them better. But open file would really improve the way evidence is handled.” Others are more skeptical. “Open file only works if you have a prosecutor who keeps a good file,” says the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Steven Benjamin. “Prosecutors who hide information or who don’t investigate police reports and procedures aren’t going to have that information in their files. I think it would help with unintentional mistakes, but it won’t help much with willful misconduct, or with willful blindness.”

“Open file could help,” Plattsmier says. “But you have to be wary about the safety of witnesses. There are some real concerns there.” Of course, neither better prosecutor education nor open file access would address the fact that even the most willful, egregious

“ You hear about these overturned convictions, and then you hear that only three prosecutors have been disciplined in 20 years, and the natural reaction is, ‘So what’s wrong with the system?’” misconduct is rarely punished. “I wouldn’t be at this job if I didn’t think we were making a difference,” Plattsmier says. “You don’t take this job to be liked. I save a lot of money on stamps every Christmas. Things are getting better, but I understand the view that it isn’t enough. Ultimately, I think the courts are going to have to take a more active role in this. Judges are going to have to start reporting misconduct to the bar.

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They’re really in the best position to do so.” Thompson says the reform message could be more effective if it focused on the other injustice of a wrongful conviction: The real perpetrator goes free. The killer in Shareef Cousin’s case has never been caught. “Stop showing pictures of the innocent and wrongly convicted,” Thompson says. “Start showing the faces of the people the real murderer kills later. And then let’s point out that when prosecutors conspire to convict the wrong man, they’re aiding and abetting those later crimes. Are we ready to address that?” Banks recalls a recent Innocence Project event where he met an exoneree whose daughter was just two weeks old when he went to prison. “He got out 23 years later. My own daughter is 23. I remember thinking how incredible it must have been to be released from prison and to have seen this woman, his daughter, now fully grown, whose entire life was really a timeline of his time behind bars.” At one point in our interview, Thompson’s son comes into the Resurrection office. The visit moves him to make another point:

Thompson, who had two children at the time of his conviction, missed out on watching his kids grow up. “The families of the wrongly convicted, they’re victims too,” Thompson says. “Even if you get compensated for the time you did, they pay it to you annually. When you die, the checks stop coming, even if they haven’t paid what they owe you. You can’t pass it on to your family. Your kids don’t get compensated. So the longer they leave you in jail, the less they have to pay you.” Thompson has now been out of prison for 10 years. He’s still angry. He probably always will be. “John is tireless,” Banks says. “He’s a fighter. He just never stops.” And yet despite his efforts, the final indignity may be that Thompson’s name is now attached to a Supreme Court decision that in all probability will make injustices like the one that befell him more likely, not less. “I’m scared to death for my kids,” Thompson says. “I’m scared for my grandkids. I’m scared for my country. I’ve been all over America talking about this. And I see nothing that says we’re ready to do something about this as a people.” Radley Balko is a senior writer and investigative reporter for The Huffington Post.

JEFF KOWALSKY/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

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CULTURE

HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

Should Detroit Sell Their Art to Save the City? BY MALLIKA RAO

HEN THE CITY of Detroit declared bankruptcy last month, the iconic Detroit Institute of Arts was among the civic institutions whose fate came into jeopardy. Art world insiders feared that masterpieces by such greats as Pi-

casso and Warhol could be raffled off in a fire sale, depriving Motown of a cultural legacy in a short-sighted drive for cash. Others pointed out that the pensions of Detroit’s aging retirees could be saved for the price of a few canvasses. But is the city really going to auc-

Visitors admire Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry fresco cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

JEFF KOWALSKY/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Exit tion the DIA’s collection to raise cash? How would that even work? Experts consulted by HuffPost say Detroit likely has legal standing to deaccession the museum, as the process is called, despite an opinion to the contrary by the state attorney general. However, other, more creative options exist that could protect the threatened works while still bringing in cash to pay off the city’s $18 billion debt. “The DIA was started back when Detroit was flourishing in the ‘20s. The city had a lot of extra money, and so some of the art — including, unfortunately, some of the most important pieces — were purchased right out of the City of Detroit funds,” said James J. White, a professor of bankruptcy law at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The city’s potential claims to the collection — a bonanza that includes a 16th-century Tintoretto, valued at $100 million in an independent assessment by the Detroit Free Press, and Matisse’s “The Window,” valued at $150 million — would likely trump any state-levied protections in federal bankruptcy court, according to White. That means the charitable trust cited by Attorney General Bill Schuette

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In 2011, the state of Michigan earned more than $2 billion in tourist dollars, due purely to cultural institutions. in his recent 22-page opinion wouldn’t necessarily keep the DIA’s treasures off the auction block. Deaccessioning is considered a last resort in the art world. While Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr hasn’t officially indicated whether he intends to sell any works, he raised the antennae of art pundits earlier this summer when he asked the museum to supply an inventory of its stock. The 128-year-old institution represents considerable assets: The Free Press assessment found the bulk of the DIA collec-

Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” stands outside the Detroit Institute of Arts’ front entrance.

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CULTURE

HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

MARTIN GEE (CARAVAGGIO’S WOMEN, THIS VAN GOGH PORTRAIT); AP PHOTO/PAUL SANCYA (PICASOO GOUACHE); AP PHOTO/CARLOS OSORIO (AND THIS VAN GOGH PORTRAIT)

DIA'S MASTERPIECES

With a collection ranging from a $100 million Tintoretto to a $150 million Matisse, you don't have to live in Detroit to understand the gravity of the situation. Here are some of the most impressive art pieces the DIA has to offer.

THIS VAN GOGH PORTRAIT... CARAVAGGIO’S WOMEN

“Self-Portrait,” Vincent van Gogh, 1887, oil on canvas

... AND THIS VAN GOGH PORTRAIT

A PICASSO GOUACHE

“The Conversion of the Magdalen,” Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, c. 1598, oil and tempera on canvas

“Portrait of Postman Roulin,” Vincent van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas

“The Bather by the Sea,” Pablo Picasso, 1939, gouache

Exit tion to be worth some $3 billion — or around the same value as the city’s pension obligations. Perhaps due to the coincidence of the figures, some see plundering the DIA as an alternative to gouging pensions — which Orr notoriously listed as malleable city assets in the bankruptcy filing last month. The white marble museum, located in the city’s flourishing Midtown area, is an easy target. “What is it that we’re supposed to care about?” asked Tim Worstall in a recent Forbes piece supporting the sale of the collection. “A few pieces of canvas or real lives as they are actually lived?” But stripping the museum’s walls may not actually make economic sense. “If the whole point is to maximize returns, you wouldn’t dump $3 billion worth of art on the market,” said Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law at DePaul University. “It would be against the long-term interest of the City of Detroit, and you probably would not get top dollar.” Not only would flooding the art market potentially reduce the value of the works for sale, but offloading the art would deprive

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the city of a vital source of native revenue. In 2011, the state of Michigan earned more than $2 billion in tourist dollars, due purely to cultural institutions, according to a study of government statistics by the nonprofit advocacy group Art Serve Michigan. Businesses are also more likely to set up shop in cities with compelling cultural draws, Gerstenblith points out. She says a fire sale is far from

What is it that we’re supposed to care about? A few pieces of canvas or real lives as they are actually lived?” the only option. One possible alternative is an agreement akin to holding joint custody of the works with another museum. As an example of a working “partial interest” plan, Gerstenblith points to the Fisk University Museum in Tennessee. Last summer, the museum offset some of its parent institutions’ crushing debt by selling a 50 percent stake in its 101-piece collection of Renoirs, Picassos and Matisses — all donated by Georgia O’Keeffe — to Crystal Bridges, the ambitious

JEFF KOWALSKY/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

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private museum founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton. “The university was in big financial trouble,” Gerstenblith said. “They went through a whole bunch of litigation, and in the end, the works are going to spend half their time in one museum, and half in the other.” Given the loss assumed by saturating the market, “the city might actually get more money” by limiting the nature of the sale in such a way, she added. Then there is the option of striking a philanthropic deal with a buyer — a dream scenario that happens to jive with the realities of the market.

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The Free Press assessment found the bulk of the DIA collection to be worth some $3 billion — or around the same value as the city’s pension obligations. “Collectors buying art in China tend to buy Chinese art, and European museums are not doing much purchasing right now,” Gerstenblith said. “I think — I hope — it’s much more likely they’d be purchased by a U.S. museum or a U.S. collector who would lend or donate them back. There are creative options that can avoid an outright sale.” Mallika Rao is an arts and entertainment reporter at The Huffington Post.

A visitor views a wall of paintings by Pablo Picasso at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

STRESS LESS

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HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

A Rounder Version of Success Most people hate going to work. According to a new Gallup study, only 30 percent of the 100 million Americans who work fulltime are engaged at work, while half are uninspired and another 30 percent simply “roam the halls spreading discontent.” Reassessing priorities might help some people find jobs that they want to be doing.

“We’ve all bought into this male definition of success, money and power, and it’s not working. It’s not working for men, and it’s not working for women. It’s not working for anyone,” Arianna Huffington told the Today show in June. That’s where the Third Metric can help us pursue a more sustainable, healthy and enjoyable version of success. — Katy Hall

STRESS LESS

DEFINING SUCCESS OLD DEFINITION

NEW DEFINITION

Friendship

Money

Power

SUCCESS Health

SOURCE: GALLUP, FORBES

Family

Power

Money

SUCCESS

A weekly feature that highlights ways to handle the pressures around us.

Passion

THE THIRD METRIC

Mindfulness Giving Back

Sleep Empathy

Wisdom

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STRESS LESS

8 10 STRESS

OUT OF

AMERICANS ARE STRESSED ABOUT THEIR JOBS

SOURCE: HARRIS INTERACTIVE & EVEREST COLLEGE, 2013 WORK STRESS SURVEY; AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION; INSTITUE FOR WORK AND HEALTH; BELGIAN JOB STRESS PROJECT; PARTNERSHIP FOR WORKPLACE MENTAL HEALTH; AMERICAN EXPRESS; THE LIFE TWINS STUDY

HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

$300 BILLION ESTIMATED ANNUAL COST OF WORKPLACE STRESS TO U.S. BUSINESSES DUE TO:

Absenteeism

Medical fees

Legal fees

Worker turnover

Down productivity

Insurance fees

Stress and anxiety cause more workers to be absent than physical illnesses do. WORKPLACE STRESS HAS BEEN LINKED TO:

Faster aging

High blood pressure

Diabetes in women

Depression

Stress takes its toll:

75 57

PERCENT OF WORKERS WHO REPORT PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS OF STRESS

PERCENT OF U.S. WORKERS WHO DON’T USE THEIR ALLOTTED VACATION TIME

SUCCESS Success can be defined in different ways, but most Americans no longer consider money to be the top priority. PERCENTAGE WHO DEFINE SUCCESS TO INCLUDE:

85% Good health 83% Finding time for important things 81% Having a good marriage/relationship 81% Knowing how to spend money well 79% Having good work/personal life balance 75% Having a job you love 69% Making time to pursue passions 66% Being physically fit 65% Embracing new experiences/changes 65% Trying to learn to do new things 33% Having a lot of money

There’s no one definitive path to success, and the majority of Americans know this. PERCENTAGE WHO BELIEVE THAT THE PATH TO SUCCESS IS LIKELY TO INCLUDE SOME DETOURS AND UNEXPECTED CHANGES

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TASTE TEST

HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

When ‘I Didn’t Spit It Out’ Is the Mark of a Decent Coconut Water BY KRISTEN AIKEN

OCONUT WATER has grown in popularity over the past couple of years, becoming the “healthy” replacement for sports drinks. Everyone’s drinking it. Rihanna’s drinking it. It’s even supplied in our office’s free vending machines. We just have one question. Why? The flavor of coconut water has never appealed to us, so we decided it’s about time we opened our minds and our taste buds to its possibilities. We gathered 12

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMON DAHLEN

major brands of coconut water, tasted them blindly, recorded our thoughts, and ranked them. We even brought in outside editors for help, hoping to offset our prejudicial scores. Turns out, everyone pretty much hates most coconut water. There were a couple decent brands in the bunch, but we’re going to do you a favor and tell you which brands were absolutely wretched. A few of the lowlights: “Tastes like rotten old plant water that results after leaving your flowers in a vase for way too long.” “Tastes like motor oil. I gagged.” “DEAR LORD, MURDER ME.”

As always, this taste test is in no way influenced or sponsored by any of the brands involved. Nor any others, for that matter.

HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

TASTE TEST

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TAP ON EACH COCONUT WATER FOR THE TASTERS’ VERDICTS

VITA COCO

KOH COCONUT

BLUE MONKEY

UFC

TASTE NIRVANA

C²O

NATURE FACTOR

365 EVERYDAY VALUE

NAKED

ZICO

O.N.E.

GUILTLESS GOURMET (WORST IN SHOW)

TFU

MICHEL LINSSEN/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES (COBAIN); AP PHOTO/THOMAS K. FOWLER (COP); JOYCE NALTCHAYAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (BEANIE BABIES); NORTH POLE ENVIRONMENTAL OBSERVATORY (NORTH POLE); GLENN JAMES/NBAE VIA GETTY IMAGES (REDICK)

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HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

Virginia Tech Student Asks Nirvana to Record a Video, Is Unaware Kurt Cobain Is Dead … or a Man

Pepper-Spraying Cop Claims Psychiatric Injury From Incident

FAMILY SPENT $100,000 ON BEANIE BABIES THINKING INVESTMENT WOULD PUT KIDS THROUGH COLLEGE

05 4

The North Pole Is Actually a Lake Right Now

NBA Star J.J. Redick Allegedly Had an ‘Abortion Contract’ With His Ex-Girlfriend

06 MARK BOWDEN/GETTY IMAGES (BRITISH WOMEN); OLE SPATA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (GOOGLE GLASS); DIETER SPEARS/ GETTY IMAGES (FAKE FIREFIGHTER); GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR OPEN (KITTEN); EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP (KANYE AND KIM)

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HUFFINGTON 08.04.13

TFU

More Than 60 Percent of British Women Check Their Phones During Sex

Fake Firefighter Started Blaze So He Could Put It Out

GOOGLE GLASS PORN IS HERE

Vegan Diet Nearly Kills Kitten

Kanye and Kim Reportedly Blew $750K on GoldPlated Toilets

Editor-in-Chief:

Arianna Huffington Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Editor: Adam J. Rose Editor-at-Large: Katy Hall Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Food Editor: Kristen Aiken Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Pointers Editor: Marla Friedman Quoted Editor: Gina Ryder Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Editorial Intern: AJ Barbosa Creative Director: Josh Klenert Design Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Senior Designer: Martin Gee Design Intern: Jamie Carusi Infographics Art Director: Troy Dunham Production Director: Peter Niceberg AOL MagCore Head of UX and Design: Jeremy LaCroix Product Manager: Gabriel Giordani Architect: Scott Tury Developers: Mike Levine, Sudheer Agrawal QA: Joyce Wang, Amy Golliver Sales: Mandar Shinde AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:

Tim Armstrong

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