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Pell v. Procunier, which upheld the constitutionality of the California Department of Corrections’ decision to forbid press interviews with specific inmates, was decided 40 years ago this summer. Looking back on that ruling and on Angela Davis’ famous 1972 prison interview (above), Adrian Shirk traces the ruling’s ramifications through the decades and explains why the rarity of such interviews today is a bad thing:

Since Pell v. Procunier, access to inmates has diminished steadily from coast to coast.

In 2013, media-access scholar Jessica Pupovac noted in The Crime Report that today, “at least five states (Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan) make any access the exception to the rule” and that Kansas and Michigan flat out refuse to arrange interviews with specific inmates. In Florida, Kansas, Michigan, New York, and New Hampshire, inmates must “put reporters on their visitation or phone call list if they wish to speak to them, thus forfeiting a visit or call with family or friends.” In Wyoming, officials can screen all questions ahead of time, and if an interview veers from the approved list, a minder can end it. Even state correctional departments that don’t explicitly deny media access to specific inmates still have sanction under Pell to make ad-hoc restrictions and deny access on a case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, the California State Correctional Manual remains unchanged.

The fact that journalists are still allowed direct contact through mail protects a decent portion of testimonial integrity. But what if the inmate is illiterate? Or dyslexic? Or simply can’t communicate well on the page? The ruling also assumes that visual and sonic information is not integral to reporting and does not carry its own unique body of information. In Freedom of the Press: A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky and R. George Wright propose that while a document like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” may have had deeper and broader effects than any number of broadcast interviews, a “televised interview may convey a sense of visual immediacy and dynamism far beyond the capacity of typical letter writing or letter reading.”

Sandra Haurant reports on a new French law that asks restaurants to label their dishes as from-scratch or otherwise:

It might be surprising that a country whose cuisine has World Heritage status needs such a law. And yes, there are plenty of restaurants across France serving delicious freshly cooked food. But midrange restaurants in particular have faced criticism for using factory-made shortcuts in the kitchen.

A survey carried out by French catering union Synhorcat suggested 31% of restaurants (not including cafeterias, bars and fast food outlets) used industrially prepared foods Others claim the proportion is much higher – Xavier Denamur, restaurateur and fresh-food campaigner and filmmaker, carried out his own personal survey, which took him to dozens of restaurants throughout France. He believes closer to three quarters of restaurants relied on industrially produced food.

Lizzie Porter, meanwhile, argues that French cuisine’s greater flaw is monotony, which bureaucratic intervention doesn’t address:

[T]he last thing France needs is yet more rules and symbols to nurture and promote its best cuisine. Already, diners are confronted by an army of stamps and logos that purportly mark quality. Label Rouge denotes free-range eggs and poultry “reared using traditional, free-range production methods”, for example, while AOC – “appellation d’origine contrôlée” (controlled designation of origin) – specifies products, including cheese, meat, lavender and lentils, which have been grown and processed by specific producers in designated geographical areas.

The ins and outs of all the various quality stamps are enough to leave even the most passionate foodie scratching his or her head. Indeed, the proof is in le burger when it comes to younger French generations, who seemingly cannot get enough of fast food chains like McDonald’s and Quick (a French version of Maccy D’s). And when the first Parisian Burger King opened last year, locals queued around the block for a taste of the Whopper.

While France has commendably preserved an independent restaurant industry and pockets of excellent regional cuisine, the latter of which has all but fallen by the wayside in Britain, its haughty belief that its classics are better than everyone else’s is the bigger concern. Instead of stifling restaurant owners with another layer of bureaucracy with which they may comply (inspections on restaurants claiming to offer food “fait maison” are to come into force next year), the French government would be better to foster an environment in which diversity and ingenuity in cooking are encouraged.

(Photo by Amy Ross)

Not even scientists are safe from it:

The paper, published in PLOS ONE, surveyed more than 600 anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, zoologists, and other scientists about their experiences while doing fieldwork away from the university. And the picture was disturbing – here were many experiences of sexual harassment and assault, as well as little awareness of how to report abuses.

Now, the survey was not a random sampling of researchers – so this can’t be used to extrapolate the frequency of sexual harassment. But it’s the best existing data set yet on harassment and assault within science. And the data suggests that this indeed an issue in need of closer attention.

Brandy Zadrozny delves into the findings:

Incidences were much more common with women: 71 percent of women reported harassment and 26 percent reported assault on site, compared to men’s 41 percent and 6 percent respectively. …

[T]he majority of women victims were subordinates who oftentimes worked directly under their perpetrators, while harassment aimed at men usually came from peers. Similar to existing harassment research that shows the most vulnerable are often predominantly targeted, 96 percent of women reported they were trainees or employees at the time of unwanted sexual attention. Five were still in high school.

Caelainn Hogan revisits one woman who came out about her experiences:

Two years ago, a young woman identified as “Hazed” spoke out about her experience of sexual harassment in the field and her professor who joked that only “pretty women” were allowed work for him, confiding in [study coauthor Kate] Clancy who made the story public in a blog post on Scientific American in 2012. “There were jokes about selling me as a prostitute on the local market,” the young woman wrote. The size of her breasts and her sexual history were openly discussed by her professor and her male peers, and daily pornographic photos appeared in her private workspace. “What started out as seemingly harmless joking spiraled out of control, I felt marginalized and under attack, and my work performance suffered as a result,” she wrote.

Henry Gass notes that this is the first study to examine harassment during scientific field studies:

The trips can last for weeks or months, taking scientists to wild and remote areas, far from home and support systems. …. While there isn’t much data to support it, [Study coauthor Katie] Hinde said many survey respondents had described a “what happens in the field, stays in the field” attitude. “I speculate that yes, some academics consider ‘the field’ as different from other workspaces such as the office, lab, or classroom in such a way that relaxes or suspends workplace norms of behavior,” Hinde wrote in a follow-up email.

A California judge has ruled that the state’s death penalty is unconstitutional because it’s too slow and unpredictable:

In a case brought by a death row inmate against the warden of San Quentin state prison, [US District Court Judge Cormac] Carney called the death penalty an empty promise that violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. “Inordinate and unpredictable delay has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State,” the ruling read. A death penalty appeal can last decades, Carney said, resulting in most condemned inmates dying of natural causes.

Dylan Matthews looks closely at the ruling:

Carney’s opinion was accompanied by a long appendix table detailing the outcomes of every death sentence between 1979 and 1997 [see above chart]; he excluded sentences after that year because “for all but a small handful of those individuals, state proceedings are still ongoing, and none have completed the federal habeas process.” The data excludes convictions that were overturned by the California Supreme Court and those whose “post-conviction proceedings have not been stayed based on their lack of mental competency to face the death penalty.”  …

What’s more, Carney argues, there isn’t anything separating the rare cases where executions actually occurred from the vast majority where they didn’t. Whether someone dies by execution is primarily determined, he writes, “depend[s] upon a factor largely outside an inmate’s control, and wholly divorced from the penological purposes the State sought to achieve by sentencing him to death in the first instance: how quickly the inmate proceeds through the State’s dysfunctional post-conviction review process.”

Andrew Cohen grimly notes that Carney’s rationale “isn’t that the state’s capital system is prone to error, or rife with racial disparity, or arbitrary in its application, even though it is plaintively all of those things”:

Instead, this appointee of George W. Bush concluded that the “machinery of death” grinds too slowly in California for it to sustain itself under the Eighth Amendment. Delay, he contends, is the decisive constitutional flaw in the grim mechanism.

“Just as inordinate delay and unpredictability of executions eliminate any deterrent effect California’s death penalty might have,” Judge Carney wrote, “so too do such delay and unpredictability defeat the death penalty’s retributive objective.” And without those two justifications for capital punishment, deterrence and retribution, the judge argues, there is no constitutional basis for the government to kill one of its citizens, at least none the United States Supreme Court has recently recognized.

Tom McKay calls the ruling “a major state-level victory for death penalty abolitionists,” and law professor Hadar Aviram describes it as “the first time I can think of since the 1970s that a judicial opinion has taken on the death penalty as a whole rather than just the individual.” But Scott Shackford warns opponents of capital punishment not to get too excited:

The ruling is very specific to the nature of the delays in California and thus it’s not clear whether the case has implications outside of the Golden State. Certainly it takes years for other states to coordinate their executions, but it’s not necessarily the case that California’s slow (and extremely expensive! Let’s not forget how expensive it is! California’s highest public salaries are in the prisons and criminal justice spheres.) process is like those in other states.

And also, before anti-death-penalty advocates celebrate, this ruling is about the process, not the outcome. It is not a judgment against the use of the death penalty. It is a judgment against California’s broken system and its inability to apply it fairly and consistently.

Ashby Jones has more on the Golden State context:

For years, critics of the death penalty in California have argued that the system in the state, which often involves numerous appeals and lengthy waits for qualified, court-appointed lawyers, is woefully inefficient. For instance, a 2011 study co-authored by Arthur Alarcón, a judge on the Ninth Circuit, found California had spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since it was reinstated in 1978 – about $308 million for each of the 13 executions since then.

Mark Berman adds:

Voters in California rejected an attempt to eliminate the state’s death penalty in 2012. There was a push this year to speed up the execution process and shorten appeals (an initiative supported by three former California governors), but it failed to make it on the ballot, so organizers are planning to make a push for November 2016.

But, he notes, the national picture looks very different:

There has been a shift in recent years away from the death penalty, with one-third of the states that have banned capital punishment doing so since 2007. The last state to abolish the death penalty was Maryland last year, though New Hampshire came very, very close earlier this year. Still, executions are happening less often than they did even two decades ago, a decline that has occurred as American support for capital punishment has also fallen.

Dan Markel zooms out:

Having worked my way through the opinion by Judge Cormac Carney (a GWB appointee), I imagine the outcome won’t stand on appeal to SCOTUS should it get there. That said, with Justice Kennedy as the swing vote deciding on California issues, you never know for sure. Moreover, Justice Breyer has in the past voiced concern about foot-dragging death penalty delays.