Wednesday, December 30, 2020
What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus
Monday, December 28, 2020
Inside Trump and Barr’s Last-Minute Killing Spree
Inside Trump and Barr’s Last-Minute Killing Spree
Private
executioners paid in cash. Middle-of-the-night killings. False or incomplete
justifications. ProPublica obtained court records showing how the outgoing
administration is using its final days to execute the most federal prisoners
since World War II.
by Isaac Arnsdorf ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
In its hurry to
use its final days in power to execute federal prisoners, the administration of
President Donald Trump has trampled over an array of barriers, both legal and
practical, according to court records that have not been previously reported.
Officials gave
public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that
misstated key facts from the cases. They moved ahead with executions in the
middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while
lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while
an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as
“moot” because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret
pharmacy that failed a quality test. They hired private executioners and paid
them in cash.
The unprecedented
string of executions is often attributed to Attorney General William P. Barr,
and his role was instrumental: It was Barr’s signature that authorized the use
of a new lethal injection drug, his quotes that trumpeted the execution
announcements and his position as attorney general that holds the ultimate
authority in capital cases. (Barr is resigning effective Wednesday.)
But a ProPublica
review of internal government records shows that Barr did not act alone. The
push to resume federal executions for the first time since 2003 long predates
Barr, with groundwork beginning as far back as 2011 and accelerating after
Trump took office in 2017. It could not have happened without the help of
Justice Department lawyers; officials at the Bureau of Prisons; two professors
who endorsed the government’s injection method; conservative Supreme Court
justices who dismissed final appeals; and Trump himself, who encouraged the
executions and declined to commute them.
Bottom of Form
Trump and his
surrogates don’t shy away from this. Throughout the campaign they highlighted the
executions as a contrast to Joe Biden’s opposition to the death penalty,
reinforcing Trump’s “law and order” message. White House Press Secretary
Kayleigh McEnany even invoked the
execution of Daniel Lee, who fell in with skinhead groups as a teenager and
renounced those beliefs decades ago, to defend Trump after he declined
to disavow white supremacists in the first debate.
“The activation of
the death penalty and appearance of being tough on crime played into the
administration’s political strategy — the same political strategy that pushed
for separating
children and parents and using
force against peaceful demonstrators,” said Robert Dunham, executive
director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks
executions. “An administration which is concerned about the rule of law and
which respects the Constitution would have allowed court challenges to proceed
and would not have attempted to carry out executions under a procedure that
could be declared unlawful.”
The Justice
Department has killed 10 people since July, with three more executions
scheduled before Biden’s inauguration. Most every federal agency is rushing to
wrap up unfinished business, cementing policy objectives in ways that will
make them harder
for the incoming president to unwind. But the Justice Department’s pressing
forward with executions, even after the election of a new president who opposes
them, is uniquely irreversible.
The White House
and BOP declined to comment. In a statement, the Justice Department said:
“Seeking the death penalty and carrying out capital sentences is not a
political issue, nor have political considerations influenced the department’s
decisions. The death penalty is a law enforcement and public safety issue, and
the department is obligated to carry forward these sentences regardless of who
is the president or the attorney general.”
Trump Has Executed
More Prisoners Than the Last 10 Presidents Combined
The Trump administration has executed more federal prisoners than any presidency since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt was president for 12 years, and his total includes six saboteurs who were tried by a military commission.
“Death Penalty All
the Way”
A slim and
shrinking majority of Americans support capital punishment, according to public
polling. But it remains popular with Republicans, especially white
evangelicals. That coincides with the strongest base of support for Trump, who,
in 1989, famously bought full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding
the death penalty for five young Black and Latino men who were wrongly
accused of attacking a white female jogger in Central Park.
“Death penalty all
the way,” Trump said at a February
2016 campaign event in New Hampshire. “I’ve always supported the death
penalty. I don’t even understand people that don’t.”
Until this year,
the Justice Department hadn’t executed anyone since 2003. This long
interruption was as much practical as legal. A drug that most states and the federal
government used in lethal injections, a sedative called sodium pentothal,
became unavailable because the sole American manufacturer stopped making it.
The drug shortage thwarted the Obama administration’s plan
to execute convicted murderer Jeffery Paul. States began using a
similar drug called pentobarbital, and in 2011 federal prison officials
observed several state executions, according to court
records.
Shortly after
Trump’s presidency began, his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wanted to
resolve these issues so that BOP could resume executions. Associate Deputy
Attorney General Brad Weinsheimer said
in a January 2020 deposition that Sessions began “conversations with
staff and BOP to move forward on that.”
Matthew Whitaker
was involved in the Justice Department’s efforts to find a new lethal injection
drug in 2017, according to court records. Whitaker later became acting attorney
general. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
One of the
staffers involved was Matthew Whitaker, according to Weinsheimer. Whitaker, who
briefly led the Justice Department between Sessions and Barr, didn’t respond to
requests for comment.
BOP made plans to
use pentobarbital. But it had also become scarce as manufacturers shunned its
use in executions. States resorted to using “compounding pharmacies,” which mix
ingredients for custom-made drugs.
BOP planned to
import powdered pentobarbital from a “foreign
FDA-registered facility” but later turned to a domestic
bulk manufacturer. It also hired a compounding pharmacy to create an
injectable solution. The government has guarded vendor identities, since public
scrutiny could pressure them to back out.
A sample of the
compounding pharmacy’s solution failed
a quality test by an outside lab. But according to Weinsheimer, BOP
said the
problem was the lab, not the compound itself, and sent a new batch to
a different lab.
BOP also explored
using a different drug: the opioid fentanyl. In a March
2018 memo, then-BOP Director Mark S. Inch said BOP found a fentanyl
supplier but warned “there may be negative publicity associated with using a
drug to which so many Americans are addicted.”
For unclear
reasons, BOP planned to have the executions carried out by two private
contractors, rather than government employees. The government won’t disclose
the contractors’ names or profession, and it pays them in cash. “If we didn’t
pay them in cash,” a BOP lawyer said in a deposition, “they probably wouldn’t
participate.”
“Killing Is Not a
Treatment”
BOP officials knew
their new drug choice would face resistance in court; lawyers have argued that
pentobarbital would flood
prisoners’ lungs with froth and foam, inflicting pain and terror akin to a
death by drowning. BOP worked to fend off those concerns with expert witnesses
who would say the drug was humane.
Finding these
experts was challenging because most doctors consider it unethical to have
anything to do with executions. The American Medical Association and other
professional groups prohibit any participation, including the “rendering of
technical advice.”
“Doctors are
experts in unkilling, we are not experts in killing,” said Dr. Joel Zivot, an
anesthesiologist at Emory University who has testified that lethal injection of
pentobarbital simulates death by drowning. “This is why lethal injection is so
problematic. It impersonates a medical act, but it’s not about medicine at all.
Killing is not a treatment. An execution chamber is not an operating room.”
The Justice
Department would later
claim that “BOP consulted with medical professionals” (plural). That
is not exactly true. BOP engaged two expert witnesses. The first, Craig W.
Lindsley, is a professor of chemistry and pharmacology at Vanderbilt
University. He is not a physician or licensed care provider; he has a Ph.D.,
not an M.D. In May 2017, Lindsley wrote a two-page
report for BOP stating that pentobarbital will take effect so rapidly
the prisoner wouldn’t feel a thing. He concluded, “Of all the available options
and protocols in use today, I believe this protocol to be the most humane.”
Lindsley declined
to be interviewed, citing Justice Department instructions. He did not disclose
his compensation, but he was hired through a contract with
a consulting firm called Elite Medical Experts that the Justice Department paid
$22,000 in the same month as Lindsley’s report. The company’s CEO, Dr. Burton
Bentley II, did not respond to requests for comment.
BOP’s second
expert witness was a medical doctor: retired California anesthesiologist Joseph
F. Antognini. Antognini has
said he personally opposes the death penalty as a Catholic. But he
also said he believes states have a right to his advice, comparing it to
criminal defendants’ right to a lawyer.
Antognini has not
addressed how he squares his testimony supporting executions with his
Hippocratic oath. He did raise ethical considerations when he was asked to
compare lethal injection to poison gas (a comparison between methods, like the
one Lindsley made). “Recommending one method of execution over another, I guess
that’s an ethical issue for me,” he said
in a deposition.
Antognini’s rare
position as a doctor vouching for lethal injection has made him a valuable
witness in capital cases, including a Missouri case that later reached the
Supreme Court. Antognini charges $400
an hour, $2,000 for a deposition, $4,000 per day in court and $2,000 per travel
day.
In a deposition in
the Missouri case, which involved the same lethal injection drug, Antognini
testified that pentobarbital would make the prisoner unconscious within 30
seconds and people can’t suffer while they’re unconscious. “Can you explain to
me how you would have suffering in somebody who is unconscious?”
Antognini said.
“I don’t see how that can happen based on my understanding of how all this
works.”
Yet just a few
minutes earlier Antognini had acknowledged,
“We don’t know how anesthetics work.” Scientists understand how the drugs act
in the brain on a cellular level, he explained, but not how they produce
unconsciousness.
The Supreme Court
accepted Antognini’s pentobarbital testimony. Other courts have been skeptical,
ascribing his views “little
or no weight.”
Reached by phone,
Antognini said he was busy and agreed to talk at a later time. When that time
came, Antognini declined to comment. “I wish you all a very merry Christmas,”
he said, and hung up.
“Some Objective
Factor”
By the summer of
2019, BOP determined that its drug supply was secure and it was ready to
schedule executions. The agency gave Barr a list of 14
prisoners, out of about 60 on death row, who had exhausted their appeals.
The Justice Department has refused to disclose this list. (Court records
include a list
from 2017 with 10 names, but they must not overlap entirely because
two of the prisoners who Barr chose in 2019 were not on the earlier list.)
As deputy attorney
general, Jeffrey Rosen assisted Barr in choosing five prisoners to execute from
a list of 14, according to court records. Rosen is set to become acting
attorney general when Barr steps down Wednesday. (Photo by Olivier
Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)
Barr decided whom
to execute with the help of the then-deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen
(set to become the acting
attorney general), and aides including Paul Perkins and Timothy Shea (who
later became acting U.S. attorney in Washington and now leads the Drug
Enforcement Administration). The officials mulled
executing all 14 but decided to start with five.
They chose the
five, according to Weinsheimer’s
deposition, for the same reason that Barr would publicly
announce on July 25, 2019: They were “convicted of murdering, and in
some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society — children
and the elderly.”
“There was an
effort to find some objective factor in looking at the 14,” Weinsheimer
said. “This was an aggravating factor that seemed to apply.”
In fact, that
wasn’t true. Barr’s summary of the case of Daniel Lee incorrectly said he
“murdered a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl.” The undisputed
evidence was that Lee refused to kill the girl, so his co-defendant
did. The co-defendant was sentenced to life in prison, while Lee was sentenced
to death.
Weinsheimer said
he didn’t know if there were other death row inmates who murdered children or
the elderly. There were, according to a review by ProPublica.
Barr’s
announcement also justified the executions on the basis that “we owe it to the
victims and their families.” This also was not true in Lee’s case: Family
members of Lee’s victims have publicly come
out against executing him (as have the prosecutor and judge). The families
of the four other prisoners’ victims supported the executions. In any event,
the Justice Department didn’t consult victims’ family members when deciding who
to kill, Weinsheimer said
in his deposition.
The Justice
Department also didn’t review
the prisoners’ physical or mental health as part of its selection,
according to Weinsheimer. One of the five, Alfred Bourgeois, had an IQ between
70 and 75, and his lawyers argued he is intellectually
disabled. Another, Wesley Purkey, suffered from schizophrenia, dementia and
Alzheimer’s disease, which his lawyers said made him unable to understand the
reason for his execution.
Weinsheimer said
the Justice Department decided to schedule the executions in the order that the
prisoners were convicted, with the oldest first. However, they were not the
oldest capital convictions, according to ProPublica’s review.
As for the
executions’ timing, Barr’s announcement did not explain why, after a 17-year
hiatus, the first three executions were scheduled within one week of each
other. BOP officials voiced concern that these back-to-back executions would
put more stress on their staff, the agency’s lawyer said in a deposition.
(After a 2014 lethal injection in Oklahoma went gruesomely awry, the state’s
investigation concluded that one contributing factor was having two
executions scheduled that day.) Nevertheless, BOP’s lawyer said the agency
booked three executions in one week because of “guidance from the attorney
general.” Weinsheimer denied that
Barr gave a “direction” on how to schedule the executions.
“Moot”
Even prisoners who
have exhausted their post-conviction appeals can go back to court to try to
stop their execution once a date is set. A federal judge in Washington put the
executions on hold in November 2019. The appeals court disagreed in April. Barr
swiftly rescheduled the executions for Lee, Purkey and Dustin Honken, in a span
of four days in July. In this
announcement, Barr cut two from the original five (Bourgeois and Lezmond
Mitchell), and added a new prisoner, Keith Nelson. The unifying theme, he said,
was “murdering children,” repeating his inaccurate summary of Lee’s crime.
On the day Lee was
supposed to be executed, the judge in Washington ordered a new injunction. The
appeals court declined to intervene, so the Justice Department went to the
Supreme Court.
The Supreme
Court’s conservative majority has been consistently
hostile to last-ditch reprieves in capital cases. “Courts should
police carefully against attempts to use such challenges as tools to interpose
unjustified delay,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2019 case (the Missouri
execution that featured Antognini’s testimony).
The Trump
administration is rushing to approve dozens of eleventh-hour policy changes.
Among them: The Justice Department is fast-tracking a rule that could
reintroduce firing squads and electrocutions to federal executions.
The conservatives
have been equally unsympathetic to objections to lethal injection, considering
that the court never found a constitutional problem with “traditionally accepted
methods” such as hanging, electrocution and firing squad. “The Eighth Amendment
does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death,” Gorsuch wrote in the Missouri
case, “something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including
most victims of capital crimes.”
Early on July 14,
five justices ruled that Lee’s execution could go ahead, saying that he had
“not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention.”
Technically, Lee’s death warrant had expired at midnight, but the government
issued a new same-day
notice and went ahead with the execution around 4 a.m. Lee’s
lawyers protested that
there was still a separate court order that the Supreme Court hadn’t addressed,
so officers left Lee on the gurney while government lawyers worked
to wipe out that last obstacle. “That cautious step, taken to ensure
undoubted compliance with court orders, is irreconcilable with the suggestion
that the department ‘rushed’ the execution or disregarded any law,” Rosen, the
deputy attorney general, wrote
in a July op-ed. Less than an hour after a federal appeals court granted
the government’s request, Lee was dead.
“Today, Lee
finally faced the justice he deserved,” Barr said in a statement.
Later that day, at
a White House press
conference, Trump referred to Lee’s execution as part of his attack on the
Democratic Party platform. “Abolish completely the death penalty,” he said.
“You know what happened today with regard to the death penalty.”
On the day of the
first federal execution in 17 years, Trump attacked Democrats for opposing
capital punishment. “You know what happened today with regard to the death
penalty,” he said at the White House
Trump’s campaign
was more explicit in an email
blast the next day. “President Trump ensured total justice for the
victims of an evil killer,” the campaign told supporters. “With the Trump
administration slated to administer total justice to three more child murderers
and rapists in the coming weeks, Biden should explain why they should be
protected from paying the ultimate price for their evil, horrific crimes.”
That same day,
July 15, Purkey was scheduled to die. Again after 2 a.m., a sharply divided
Supreme Court lifted the outstanding court orders. Purkey’s lawyers rushed to
federal district court for a new emergency stay on the basis that
his Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia left Purkey unable to understand his
sentence. But the Justice Department made clear that it would not wait to let
that petition play out.
In a “courtesy
notice” emailed to one of Purkey’s lawyers at 2:03 a.m. on July 16, a senior
Justice Department official said the execution would go forward at 4 a.m.,
despite the new court filing. “Your colleague asked me whether the govt would
delay the execution to allow the judge … to consider the stay application,”
Hashim Mooppan, counselor to the solicitor general, said in the email. “In light
of the Supreme Court’s orders today and on Tuesday morning, the government will
not delay the execution further. Absent a court order barring the execution,
the govt intends to proceed.”
The judge, in
fact, did say the execution should halt while he considered the motion, but he
swiftly denied it, and chastised Purkey’s lawyers for “procedural
gamesmanship.”
“Despite the risk
of irreparable harm to Mr. Purkey, the balance of equities do not weigh in his
favor,” wrote the
judge, James R. Sweeney II, who was appointed by Trump in 2017. Sweeney’s brief
order did not specify what equities he weighed, but the government had argued that
Purkey’s sentence had already been upheld multiple times.
As Purkey’s
lawyers rushed to appeal, BOP went ahead with placing an IV in Purkey’s arm. He
was dead before the appeals court made its ruling. The court later dismissed
Purkey’s appeal as “moot”
because he was already dead.
Honken died the
next day, the third that week.
“A Personal
Interest”
As prisoners
desperately fought the government’s execution plans in court, they argued that
overdosing on pentobarbital would be so excruciating that even
death by firing squad would be less painful. Justice Department
lawyers chafed at the suggestion. In response, they said firing squads were “more
primitive” than lethal injection, and reintroducing them would be a
“regressive change.”
Two weeks later,
however, the agency took steps to do just that. The Justice Department proposed
a regulatory change to authorize execution methods besides lethal
injection, including firing squads, which remain legal in three states. “This
proposed rule would provide the federal government with greater flexibility to
conduct executions in any manner allowed by federal law,” the agency said. “The
proposed rule would therefore forestall potential future arguments by prisoners
in litigation.”
The proposal made
other tweaks to the department’s regulations to address issues raised in
litigation — not exactly admitting error, but tacitly acknowledging cracks in
the government’s legal foundation.
While the proposal
was formally signed by Barr, its point person was Laurence E. Rothenberg, a
deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy. Though he is a
career employee, Rothenberg’s LinkedIn profile picture
shows him standing proudly with Barr, and he has staked out a public position
supporting the death penalty.
Laurence
Rothenberg was the point person on revising the federal government’s execution
regulations. His profile picture on LinkedIn shows him with Barr holding a
Justice Department award.
In a 2004 law
journal article (also
published by the conservative Federalist Society), Rothenberg
described the death penalty as “intrinsically just.” He also defended executing
juvenile offenders against claims that doing so violates international law.
In another article,
from 2006, Rothenberg and a Justice Department colleague attacked common
critiques of the death penalty. “The extent of racial
disparities in capital cases in the United States has been vastly
exaggerated,” they wrote.
Rothenberg has
said that his criminal justice views are shaped by a family tragedy. “I also
have a personal interest in, and commitment to, this work, as the son of a
murder victim,” he said in 2009 congressional testimony about
a victims rights law. In 1974, Rothenberg’s parents were shot, his father
fatally, on a trip to the Virgin Islands. The shooter was convicted of murder
and sentenced to life in prison.
The
regulation became
final the day after Thanksgiving.
“It Didn’t Go
Well”
For the next round
of executions, Barr’s announcement simply
said that the two prisoners, William LeCroy and Christopher Vialva, were
“convicted of murder.” He gave no other reason or explanation for their
selection.
Earlier this
month, the Justice Department executed Vialva’s co-defendant, Brandon Bernard.
Bernard was 18 at the time and did not pull the trigger. The prosecutor and
five of the nine all-white jurors who convicted Bernard, who is Black, have
since said his life should be spared. The reality star Kim Kardashian tried
unsuccessfully to convince Trump to commute his sentence.
At the federal
death row facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, the inmates are allowed to leave
each other bequests, according to The
New York Times. Alfred Bourgeois received his friend Bernard’s wrist watch
for the single day before it was his turn to die.
Bourgeois was
strapped to a gurney in the middle of a green-tiled room, an IV in his arm. As
the pentobarbital flowed, Bourgeois’ stomach heaved and popped, according to
George Hale, a public radio reporter who witnessed the
execution. The apparent gasping for breath was consistent with how lawyers have
described the drowning sensation that the injection could cause.
Bourgeois’ death
took 28 minutes, almost twice as long as Bernard’s. Hale said, “If Alfred
Bourgeois was suffering that night, he suffered for a long time.”
There are three
more federal executions scheduled in January — eight, six and five days before
Biden’s inauguration.
Update, Dec. 24,
2020: This story was updated to add a Trump campaign email and an email
from a Justice Department official to one of Wesley Purkey’s lawyers.
Lexi Churchill,
Derek Willis, and Lydia DePillis contributed reporting.
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves
Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves
Millions of people living on the islands today inherited genes from the people who made them home before Europeans arrived.
Taíno ceramic vessels from eastern Dominican Republic, circa A.D. 1400.Credit...Kristen Grace
By Carl
Zimmer NY Times
When Dr. Juan Aviles went to school in Puerto Rico, teachers
taught him that the original people of the island, the Taino, vanished soon
after Spain colonized it. Violence, disease and forced labor wiped them out,
destroying their culture and language, the teachers said, and the colonizers
repopulated the island with enslaved people, including Indigenous people from
Central and South America and Africans.
But at home, Dr. Aviles heard another story. His grandmother
would tell him that they were descended from Taino ancestors and that some of
the words they used also descended from the Taino language.
“But, you know, my grandmother had to drop out of school at
second grade, so I didn’t trust her initially,” said Dr. Aviles, now a
physician in Goldsboro, N.C.
Dr. Aviles, who studied genetics in graduate school, has
become active in using it to help connect people in the Caribbean with their
genealogical history. And recent research in the field has led him to recognize
that his grandmother was onto something.
A study
published Wednesday in the journal Nature, for example, shows that
about 14 percent of people in Puerto Rico can trace their ancestry back to the
Taino. Smaller numbers of people in Cuba (4 percent) and the Dominican Republic
(6 percent) can say the same.
These results, and others like them based on DNA found in
ancient Caribbean skeletons, are providing new insights into the history of the
region. They show, for example, that the Caribbean islands were populated in
two distinct waves from the mainland and that the human population of the
islands was also smaller than once believed. But those living on the islands
before colonial contact were not fully extinguished; millions of people living
today inherited their DNA, along with traces of their traditions and languages.
Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies,
archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the
region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly
as hunter-gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also
maintaining small gardens of crops.
Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those
ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a
few tiny bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant
advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire
genomes from ancient skeletons.
“We went from zero full genomes two years ago to over 200
now,” said Maria Nieves-Colón, an anthropological geneticist at the University
of Minnesota who was not involved in the new study.
The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean
link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South
America.
“It’s a Native American population, of course, but it’s a
very distinctive deep lineage,” said David
Reich, a co-author of the study and a geneticist at Harvard Medical
School.
But it’s not yet clear exactly from where on the mainland
those early Indigenous Americans set sail in dugout canoes to reach the
Caribbean islands.
“I don’t think we’re as close as we thought we’d be to an
answer,” said Dr. Nieves-Colón, a co-author of another large-scale genetic study in July.
Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find
ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old. The other
problem is that ancient DNA is still scarce on the Caribbean coast of the
mainland. “There’s a lot we can’t see because we don’t have old DNA,” Dr.
Nieves-Colón said.
About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows,
there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started
living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet
potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For
archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age
and the start of a Ceramic Age.
Dr. Nieves-Colón and other researchers have found that the
DNA of Caribbean islanders also shifted at the same time. The skeletons from
the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to
small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela.
It’s possible that the migrants from the Caribbean coast of
South America brought with them the languages that were still being spoken when
Columbus arrived 2,000 years later. We don’t know a lot about these languages,
although some words have managed to survive. Hurricane, for example, comes
from hurakán, the Taino name for the god of storms.
These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family
of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age
Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers.
In the Ceramic Age record, it becomes hard to find people
with much Archaic ancestry. They seem to have survived in a few places, like
western Cuba, until they vanished about 1,000 years ago. The people bearing
Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no
interbreeding between the two groups.
“It seems like the Archaics were just overwhelmed by the
Ceramics,” said William Keegan, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of
Natural History and a co-author of the new study.
Dr. Keegan, who has been studying Caribbean archaeology for
over three decades, said the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways,
giving him a host of new questions to investigate.
Over the course of the Ceramic Age, for example, strikingly new pottery styles emerged every few centuries. Researchers have long guessed that those shifts reflect the arrival of new groups of people in the islands. The ancient DNA doesn’t support that idea, though. There’s a genetic continuity through those drastic cultural changes. It appears that the same group of people in the Caribbean went through a series of major social changes that archaeologists have yet to explain.
Dr. Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family
ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of
people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA — a sign that
they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long-distance cousins
from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles.
That finding flies in the face of influential theories from
archaeology.
“The original idea was that people start in one place, they
establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where
they came from,” Dr. Keegan said. “But the genetic evidence is suggesting that
these ties were maintained over a long period of time.”
Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other
words, the Caribbean was a busy, long-distance network that people regularly
traveled by dugout canoe. “The water is like a highway,” Dr. Nieves-Colón said.
The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his
colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European
contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain
putting the figure in the millions. The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration:
the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens
of thousands.
Colonization delivered a huge shock to the Caribbean world,
drastically changing its genetic profile. But the Ceramic Age people still
managed to pass on their genes to future generations. And now, with a
population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA
than it did in 1491.
“Now we have this evidence to show that we weren’t extinct,
we just mixed, and we’re still around,” said Dr. Aviles.
His fascination with the research on Caribbean DNA led him
recently to help found the Council of Native Caribbean Heritage. The organization
helps people find their own links to the Caribbean’s distant past. Dr. Aviles
and his colleagues have consulted with Dr. Reich and other researchers, both to
discuss the direction of the research and to use it to understand their own
histories.
Dr. Aviles and his colleagues have uploaded the ancient
Caribbean genomes to a
genealogical database called GEDMatch. With the help of genealogists,
people can compare their own DNA to the ancient genomes. They can see the
matching stretches of genetic material that reveal their relatedness.
Sometimes Dr. Aviles imagines explaining all this to his
late grandmother. “But first I would apologize for not believing her,” he said,
“because she was spot on.”
Friday, December 18, 2020
Recovering Old Age
Recovering Old Age
Covid has laid bare our warehousing attitude toward the elderly. Have we forgotten what aging is for?
Joseph E. Davis and Paul Scherz
The test of a
people is how it behaves toward the old.
– Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel
As the outbreak of
coronavirus spread this past spring, the world of biomedical ethics exploded
with journal articles, consensus statements, and blog posts arguing over the
proper criteria for rationing ventilators and other scarce medical resources.
The flashpoint came from some of the earliest pandemic guidelines, which
appeared to promote discrimination against the elderly — the most likely to die
from the disease.
In a widely cited
statement, published online in the New England Journal of Medicine in late March,
bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues
argued for a strategy for allocating medical resources that would maximize
benefits by both “saving more lives and more years of life.” In practice,
rationing on the basis of life-years strongly favors young people, who have
more years left to live than the elderly and people with disabilities. Given
“limited time and information” in an emergency situation, the authors
suggested, saving the greatest number of patients who have “a reasonable life
expectancy” is more important than improving length of life for those who do
not. The overall effect of this strategy would be “giving priority” to those
“at risk of dying young and not having a full life.”
In response to
proposals like this, and to even more directly discriminatory rationing
strategies that recommended age-based cutoffs for certain treatments, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services published
a bulletin declaring that rationing based on age or disability would
be illegal for any HHS-funded health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.
Similarly, rightly fearing that a focus on maximizing life-years would
reinforce cultural bias that values the lives of the young over the old, many
conservative bioethicists spoke out against age-based criteria. For instance,
according to a joint
statement issued by the Witherspoon Institute, all lives should be
treated equally, for all are of “inherent, equal, and indeed incalculable
value.” A policy preferential to the young would be unethical, and would send
the message that society views the lives of its seniors as less valuable, less
worth living, and would lead to further devaluation and inequity.
But while
allocation issues put elderly people on the Covid-19 bioethical agenda right
from the start, aging itself, as a critical part of the human experience, has
hardly been engaged at all. In a pandemic, “difficult and heart-wrenching
decisions may have to be made,” observes the Witherspoon statement, and
guidance in medical matters will not only reflect the immediate demands of care
for the aged but the “sort of society we want ours to be.” But what sort of
society is it that properly regards the elderly?
Our response to
the pandemic does in fact reveal something critical about our society and how
we understand aging — specifically how we refuse to acknowledge the unique
circumstances of older adults and to grant them true moral agency. In a time of
pandemic and a rapidly aging population, we find ourselves profoundly
impoverished. If we want our society to be one that protects older adults and
treats them as full social members, then we need not only ethical policies but
ethical frameworks in the fullest sense — guides to social practices and family
relations and ways of life — that will cease to exclude the old, and
reestablish our ties with them.
Statistical Lives
and Autonomous Choice
While the debate
over ventilator distribution is no longer urgent (ventilator use has declined
sharply for Covid-19 treatment), it illustrates the limitations of current
ethical approaches, and it remains relevant as shortages of hospital beds or
medications may again arise.
Consider the
limitations of the two approaches above to how we should derive the maximum
benefit in the event of a shortage. Emanuel and colleagues in the NEJM statement
define the greatest benefit in terms of a balancing of lives versus life-years,
whereas the conservative ethicists simply define it in terms of lives; yet
“lives” here, unmarked in any way, verges on a similarly statistical meaning. In
neither model do the ethicists explicitly accord meaningful importance to the
life course. Neither acknowledges old age as a specific stage of life with
particular vulnerabilities and advantages, characteristic shortcomings and
virtues, responsibilities and obligations. Benefit maximization in both models
ultimately hinges on the proper measure for abstraction and equalization,
whether lives per se or lives qualified by life-years. While striking
life-years from the equation avoids bias against the elderly — a just and
laudable correction — it does not account for what is distinctive about their
lives. The equal persons remain generic, defined from the side of caregivers
and bureaucratic calculation. In this framing of the debate, the lives of
care receivers are effectively reduced to moral passivity and an
empty chronicity, unmarked by social or biological rhythms.
For many, the only
quality that marks the aged is their declining capacity to exercise choice.
Emanuel and coauthors encourage patients to choose against ventilator treatment
when it would contravene the “future quality of life” they would find
acceptable. Talk of “quality of life” sounds innocuous, but it is more than a
way to speak about the right of a patient to refuse treatment. It has replaced
the older formulation of “sanctity of life,” and it conveys moral assumptions
about the burden of disability, efficient resource allocation, and the sort of
life that is worth living.
Not unique to the
pandemic, a choice between life and death occurs in many other areas of
contemporary medicine. Most obviously, the choice is presented through the
increasing availability of assisted suicide. Yet, as the anthropologist Sharon
Kaufman has shown in her 2015 book Ordinary Medicine,
everyday practice can also confront older adults with a choice between life and
death. When discussing possible transplants or implantable medical devices with
elderly patients, for instance, Kaufman finds that doctors frequently frame the
decision in terms of added years of life. The surgery, a doctor might say, will
give you three more years. In such cases, the patients seem to be offered a
choice, albeit one fashioned to indicate that the right decision is medical
intervention. Such choices present “improvements in length of life,” to borrow
a phrase from the NEJM statement, as the highest good one could
choose for oneself, as an end in itself. The meaning of health in a well-lived
life is narrowed and replaced with an ad hoc utilitarian calculus of
life-years maximization.
The freedom to
decide about treatment, to have one’s choices honored, is clearly essential.
But without frameworks of ethical reasoning and social practice that can inform
the content of the aging person’s choices, the vaunted autonomy rings hollow,
even coercive. And such frameworks for an ethical life — frameworks that can
speak to the sense of finitude, desire for wholeness, and ultimate concerns of
the aged, as well as address their responsibility and obligations to others, to
the common good, and to the transcendent — have gone missing.
Lost Images of
Aging Well
At other times and
in other places, traditional ways of life, social classification, and
metaphysical order gave shape and coherence to the course of life, providing a
picture of aging well. Each period of life had its activities, duties, and
forms of flourishing.
The periods of
aging, decline, and the approach of death were especially critical. They
involve some of the most complex and unsettling aspects of human experience,
and so the need for a strong community to provide direction and meaning is most
acute. Many social and cultural practices, such as kinship cohorts, rites of
generational transition, filial duties to ancestors, hierarchies that honor
wisdom, social customs that guide in grieving, and arts of suffering and dying,
provided support for this time of life.
Such guidance has
not necessarily meant that old people have been given special respect or honor,
or that old age has been treated as a social category deserving of special
treatment or public concern. Social histories tell an ambiguous and varied
story. But norms and practices of aging and dying did provide direction and
shared expectations about how to live. And while the ideal form of character in
the face of aging and death has varied by time and school of thought, the
social philosophies, religious communities, and civic cultures helped guide
people in a process of preparing for aging and dying “well.” Despite much
variation, the goals were broadly similar.
From antiquity up
through the Renaissance, for instance, the different ages of life, including old
age, possessed characteristic virtues and vices, rights and obligations. The
aged were actively involved in the life of society as responsible agents with
important roles. In these societies, largely agrarian, owners would maintain
control over their property into old age unless physical or mental decline made
it impossible. Even then, they would reside on the property, sometimes within a
relationship of explicit contractual obligation with their heir. This time of
life was not segregated or marginal or culturally unstable; older people were
prepared and knew their obligations and their place in the cycle of
generations.
The Four Seasons
of Life: Old Age, “The Season of Rest” by Charles R. Parsons and Lyman W.
Atwater (1868)
U.S. Library of Congress
In his
treatise On Old Age, Cicero responds to those who lament old age and its
constriction of activities and pleasures. They grieve, he argued, only because
they value the often illusory pleasures enjoyed by youth over those proper to old
age, such as reflection, leisured study, and conversation. And they neglect the
important services to the community provided by the aged, like advising in the
Senate, directing affairs on their farms, and instructing the young in virtue.
In fact, the care for future generations is what most distinctly marks the
moral duties and virtues of the aged. As Cicero remarks,
And if you ask a
farmer, however old, for whom he is planting, he will unhesitatingly reply,
“For the immortal gods, who have willed not only that I should receive these
blessings from my ancestors, but also that I should hand them on to posterity.”
Rituals and
spiritual disciplines that brought the necessity of sorrow, infirmity, and
death into everyday life nurtured the distinct experience of growing old. For
example, the memento mori, the reflection on mortality, has been an
important practice across many cultures. Anthropologist Robert Desjarlais, in
his 2016 book Subject
to Death, describes how children in a Nepalese Buddhist community play at
death, initiating themselves in a preparation for old age and dying that
continues throughout their lives. Greek philosophy in both its Stoic and
Platonic forms took the preparation for death as its main activity, and many
strands of Christian spirituality took up this philosophical meditation on
death, looking to one’s end.
In none of these
traditions did such practices encourage a morbid fascination with death or a
depressing fixation on nothingness. Quite the contrary, remembering death as an
unbending reality raised a sense of generational solidarity and freed people to
accept their contingency and live moral lives in the present without fear of
the future. This consciousness encouraged all, and especially the old, to
eschew fleeting, temporal concerns, like wealth or ambition, for more enduring
goods such as knowledge, virtue, and strong relationships.
The connection of
the elderly to community and the economy would undergo radical changes in the
era of industrialization, from shifts in the occupational system to alterations
of family and kinship structure to the rise of welfare schemes and age-graded
pension plans. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the life course would
become increasingly fixed by chronological boundaries, with the transition to
old age marked by the end of productive work in either the factory or the
household. Increasing geographical mobility began to undermine stable
relationships to place and the integration of grandparents into the daily life
of the extended family. Rather than defining the aged as community members with
agency and social responsibility, social policy increasingly defined them as
persons in need of care. Social science did its part, offering accounts such as
“disengagement
theory,” which defined as natural the increasing marginalization and
sequestration of the old and the need of society to move on without them.
In all these ways
and others, and despite greatly improved economic and medical conditions, those
advanced in years lost the compelling forms of social standing and engagement
that once entailed their duties toward the common good.
Our Deficit
Stories
In our fluid,
shifting culture, common symbols and shared traditions of old age have weakened
or disappeared altogether. One need only consider the many current debates that
frame aging as a problem to be solved — with “successful aging,” anti-aging
interventions, “engineered negligible senescence,” or assisted suicide — to see
our communal and ethical quandary. We have precious few resources for even
thinking about the enduring questions of a good old age, its meaning as a
distinctive stage in life’s journey, and how we might prepare for and embrace
the twilight years of life. For the old, aging has become more private, less externally
oriented, less bound to pre-established ties to others, and less deeply rooted
in a field of ultimate meanings.
What has largely
replaced a shared narrative of the life cycle is an autonomous individualism
that blurs all age distinctions. While our dominant image of persons as free
and unencumbered agents, as masters of choice, is inadequate at every stage of
life, it is especially detrimental in the last. Much of what we mean by
“autonomy” is to live so as to repress and deny many features of the human
condition, such as our dependence on the care of others and the vulnerability
of our bodies. Fostered by an illusion of control, we imagine that we are
independent of those who sustain us. We recoil from terms that express
boundaries, limitations, frailty, or the need for help as “ageist,” and we
reject virtually all criteria to inform our choices beyond individual beliefs
and preferences. We trap ourselves in a conception of the good and a mode of
self-fulfillment that works against any positive conception of living in older
age.
Reflecting the
cultural valuation of autonomy as the preeminent good, old age is typically
depicted in either of two contrasting deficit stories. The first is a
deprecating and frightening story of growing old, of our steady deterioration,
loss of control and dignity, and then ending, virtually imprisoned, with a
medicalized death. A good example is provided by the same Ezekiel
Emanuel, writing
in the Atlantic in 2014. He wants to die at seventy-five, he
says, because the “simple truth” is that “living too long is also a loss.” Old
age, he explains,
renders many of
us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining…. It robs us of our
creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms
how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We
are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual,
even pathetic.
The evening of
life is a shameful defeat, alien to our creative and productive selves and
antithetical to the way we want to be related to and remembered. There is
reason to believe that this common story, in light of both an aging population
and proliferating anti-aging interventions, has intensified and increased
negative stereotypes of old age over time.
Exhausted by
“science says”?
The second story
is an upbeat account of an ageless adulthood characterized by a continuation of
self-reliance, productivity, and good health throughout old age, followed by a
brief decline and death. This story about “successful aging,” told in both
the popular
press and in academic
papers, is often contrasted with the decline story and presented as a
liberating debunking of its negative and stereotypical myths of helplessness
and decay. It is appealing because it accurately reproduces what the psychologist
Erik Erikson called our “world-image” of “a one-way street to never
ending progress,” such that “our lives are to be one-way streets to success —
and sudden oblivion.” But far from being anti-ageist, this story of perpetual
middle age also devalues the later years as an unfortunate time of life,
without value in itself and much inferior to youth. It, too, confuses physical
infirmity with moral failing, offers no positive guidance for engaging
dependence or vulnerability, and retains the same cultural antagonism to the
aging body and approaching death.
These two stories
do not exhaust the possibilities, and there have been many important efforts in
recent years to envision and live a more authentic and affirming old age. On
the scholarly level, the prodigious work of Harry Moody, Thomas R. Cole, and
Martha Holstein comes first to mind, but the contributions in literature, film,
spiritual texts, and other areas is significant and growing. Yet the deficit
stories remain culturally and commercially dominant and dovetail with
far-reaching social and economic changes that have destabilized the practices
of preparing people for old age — once a central cultural and philosophical
task.
A Social Ethics of
Aging
In our moment, we
urgently need an ethics of aging that centers on the question of what a good
life in its later years looks like — an old age that is lived well and that
goes well. Toward this ethics there are currently only scattered contributions.
Much of the bioethics literature might best be described as ethical reflections
on issues that predominantly involve older people. As with the issue of
rationing ventilators and other medical resources, this is an abstract ethics
focused on patient rights, caregiver duties, and decision-making in the context
of formal institutions. However necessary at times, it is not an ethics of
everyday life for those navigating their twilight years. A substantive,
normative ethics of aging must address old persons in all their complexity. It
must go beyond a concern with autonomy, non-exploitation, and even caregiving.
It must also consider the obligations and reciprocal responsibilities of the
elderly.
While speaking of
the responsibilities of the aged might seem inappropriate and even callous, it
is in fact essential. We can make no real progress until we do. In a 1985 paper
on “The
Virtues and Vices of the Elderly” — still one of the few contributions on
the subject — the distinguished ethicist William F. May provided the reason
why. Excusing the elderly from moral responsibility or judgment, he wrote, “may
subtly remove them from the human race” by treating them “condescendingly” and,
in effect, as “moral nonentities.” A crucial “step toward reentry into
community with the aged,” he observed, will therefore be taken “when we are
willing to attend to them seriously enough as moral beings to approve and
reprove their behavior” — when we are willing, in other words, to relate to
them with genuine respect. Any worthy ethics requires a “positive conception of
the soul,” to quote
Iris Murdoch, “the purification and reorientation of which must be the task
of morals.” We can’t talk about that process, about being good, about the
cultivation of virtue unless we also acknowledge the characteristic ways in
which the aged might fall short, beginning with the frequently self-defeating
attitude of the old to being old.
Moral agency,
community integration, and an ethics of mutual obligation are just what the
older traditions sought to foster and maintain. They are what we so desperately
need now. Again, the pandemic sheds a glaring light on our flawed orientation
to the elderly and their complete marginalization. Our failure to care,
protect, and serve those in nursing homes and other residential care facilities,
where about one percent of the U.S. population lives, has been widely documented and
discussed. Covid has raced through such facilities, claiming, by a recent
estimate, some 40 percent of all those who have died so far from the disease.
Additionally, over the course of the pandemic, tens of thousands of older
adults have and will die not from the coronavirus itself, but from the
consequences of our response to it. Those suffering from Alzheimer’s and
dementia have been particularly
hard hit. They often depend on consistent routines and close care from
family members, and the disruptions from the unprecedented stay-at-home orders
and the visitor restrictions have had devastating — and entirely foreseeable —
consequences.
This recent damage
from lockdowns only scratches the surface. Social isolation and loneliness are
common in the older population and contribute substantially to poor health
outcomes and mental distress. A survey of nursing facilities in 2017
found that some 40 percent of residents reported depressive symptoms.
In the face of this silent pain, exhortations ring out to build strong
connections and find community. Then, in the name of health and safety, the
very sources of resilience and the connections that for many make life worth
living were severed. Through these disease-prevention efforts we have been
bringing about our seniors’ worst fears — not a fear of death but a fear
of dying alone; and before that, of spending their final months languishing
in near-complete social isolation. Great numbers, far beyond the
institutionalized, have been denied the support and consolation of loved ones
and the small comforts of everyday routine.
In our unilateral
actions we see the profound limits of “autonomy” and the radically deficient
understanding of the social nature of the person. Did it ever occur to
officials to consult the elderly about their situation, or when “listening to
the science” to seek the views of gerontologists and care professionals? With
older adults sequestered, consigned to the past, and excluded from
responsibility for the common good, we returned with a vengeance to the strong
paternalism that the autonomy principle was supposed to abolish. Our actions
revealed that autonomy only applies to very particular decisions surrounding
life and death and does not extend to the institutional control to which the
person must submit. Persons living in care facilities are already confined,
already suffer multiple losses, are already often shelved and neglected. “What
we owe the old is reverence,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us in a
famous address, “but all they ask for is consideration, attention, not to be
discarded and forgotten.” Not to be abandoned, as the Psalmist puts
it, “when my strength fails.” To foster a genuine interdependence,
procedural ethics and autonomy won’t help us. We need an ethics with moral
content, one from which the common good has not been jettisoned.
On the one hand,
such an ethics, rooted in our shared potentiality and vulnerability, and
buttressed by a robust set of cultural concepts and practices, might once again
center on the care of future generations. Already in the pandemic, older
persons have volunteered to forgo scare resources. Early in the crisis, for
instance, popular
news stories reported cases like that of the ninety-year-old Belgian
woman who died after refusing a ventilator for the sake of access by younger
patients. The authors of the joint Witherspoon statement recommend such
generosity, that “some patients should themselves consider — not out of legal
or even strict moral duty, but rather as [an] … act of generosity — giving up
access to something to which they are entitled so that someone else might have
it.” However, in the absence of a larger ethical framework of aging, this
recommendation appears as little more than an appeal to personal altruism.
Within a renewed framework of generational care, by contrast, the courageous
forgoing of treatment could reflect an acceptance of mortality, a recognition
of gifts received, a readiness to make sacrifices for the common good.
On the other hand,
and critically, such an ethics requires that younger generations again become
present to and reincorporate those who are in the evening of life. The
exclusion of the old has deep roots in our social and economic practices and is
becoming ever more untenable as the population ages. Progress will begin with a
broader, deeper recognition of our own mortality, dependence on others, and
bodily vulnerability, a recognition that would begin to free the young from the
fear that drives so many away from engaging with and making a place for the
old. The Buddhist and Christian practices of meditation on mortality mentioned
above both envisioned aging and dying as social processes requiring the
assistance and prayers of family and friends. Being with the elderly is an
essential part of one’s own preparation for moving through the life course and
for learning the virtues essential to reckoning with the ordeals and finding
the joys of old age. At its best, being with the old teaches us about being
ready for the unexpected, for the importance of our attachments, and for the
value of presence even when it might increase a risk to health.
Such would be an
ethics in which care extends from the young to the old and from the old to the
young. It would be an ethics framed not in terms of some controlling principle
or single model, but in an approach to life in old age that recognizes it as a
specific state of life, embraces its distinctive features, and weaves it back
into the social fabric from which it has been torn. Anything else, however
unintentionally, leads to abandonment.
Joseph E. Davis is
research professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the director
of the Picturing the Human project at the university’s Institute for Advanced
Studies in Culture. He is the author of Chemically
Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for
Self-Mastery (Chicago, 2020) and the co-editor with Paul Scherz
of The
Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well (Notre Dame,
2020). Paul
Scherz is an associate professor of moral theology and ethics at the
Catholic University of America and a visiting fellow at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of Science
and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2019).