Fresh Loaf

For the second year, the Georgia Senate has again passed a Republican-penned proposal to give prosecutors the ability to seek life without parole against murder suspects.

As I explained in a recent article, in many murder cases, Georgia’s DAs now must choose between seeking life with parole or the death penalty. Giving prosecutors the option of going for life without parole is likely to save millions of tax dollars that would otherwise be spent on trying to send killers to Death Row on shaky evidence. As we learned with the Brian Nichols sentence, even a no-brainer capital case can collapse at the finish line.

The sponsor of Senate Bill 13 is Sen. Preston Smith, R-Rome, who sees his measure as a reasonable alternative to lowering the standards for sentencing a killer to death, which is the preferred route of the House. Last year, Smith refused to let a House bill to allow the death penalty to be doled out by non-unanimous juries to be attached to his own legislation – a move that scuttled both bills.

This year, versions of both bills are back in play. We’ll be watching to see which pulls ahead.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Gay-hater Peter LaBarbera

The right-fringe moonbat sector of the Internet got its collective panties in a wad recently over alleged plans by an Atlanta gay sex club to hold an orgy in a Washington D.C. hotel over the recent inauguration weekend.

The details are arguably hilarious but unarguably unsuited for delicate sensibilities, so proceed accordingly.

The group that broke the story calls itself (presumably with a straight face) Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, headed by one Peter LaBarbera, who claims to have stumbled across an e-mail invitation to the shindig:

A source has provided Americans For Truth with a copy of a private e-mail intended only for “sex pigs” – sent out by a group called “Fort Troff” (as in pig troff). The e-mail touts the ultra-promiscuous “pig sex” event at Doubletree … for the purpose of pulling together “hard-core pig players” who want to “[sodomize] our brains out.”
The “pig” orgy is being held in concert with the annual “Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend” in D.C. – a three-day sadomasochistic celebration attended mostly by homosexual “leathermen.”

LaBarbera had discovered one of Atlanta’s better-kept secrets: Fort Troff is, indeed, a private Westside club where men partake in pretty extreme bondage- and military-themed gay sex — or, as LaBarbera terms it, “sodomitic activities.” (FYI, Pete: an animal trough is not spelled with two “f”s.)

LaBarbera then posts the entire contents of the invitation and helpfully provides a glossary of gay sex acts, which he variously describes as a “ghastly perversion,” a “revolting act” and a “horrifyingly vile fetish.”

Is it just me, or do these crusading holy-rollers seem way too interested in documenting and sharing details about behavior they claim to abhor?

Long story short, LaBarbera hounded the hotel management until it apparently got cold feet and canceled the event booking entirely. According to this self-appointed morality enforcer, a lesson was learned: “These repulsive behaviors should not occur in private, much less in conference rooms at a hotel used by the public.” The Taliban would be proud.

Anyway, the story has been picked up and drooled over by such conservative “news” sites as Culture Campaign, Free Republic and World Net Daily. Frankly, though, I’m not sure how a story about a canceled gay hotel orgy can compete with some of their other wingnut headlines: “Abortion to remedy global warming threat,” “Obama ‘friend’: End of Israel ‘within reach’” and “Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Condom Stimulus’ Repels Obama.”

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State Sen. Kasim Reed

State Sen. Kasim Reed, D-Atlanta, just announced he will introduce a bill to allow Atlanta residents to decide for themselves whether to raise property taxes to help fund police and firefighter salaries.

We’d heard that Reed, a leading candidate for Atlanta mayor, had been thinking of a way to get out front on the contentious issue of police cutbacks during an apparent upsurge in violent crime around the city. Reed is a close associate of Shirley Franklin who ran her two successful campaigns, so it’s no big surprise that Reed’s proposed solution to the city’s cop-funding problem is a tax increase; that’s what Franklin wanted to do last summer, but was shot down by the council.

I haven’t seen Reed’s bill yet, so I don’t know the details, but I’m already puzzled by a couple of figures. His press release says:

Sen. Kasim Reed will introduce legislation giving the citizens of Atlanta a choice to levy a 1 mill property tax that will generate more than $21 million dollars solely for police officer and fire fighter’s salaries

But last summer, when the city was facing a $40 million shortfall, Franklin proposed only a .43 mill increase. In other words – and keep in mind I’m no tax expert – it seems that a 1-mill tax hike would generate far more than $21 million. (That is, unless property values have fallen more dramatically than I’d thought, but that’s another story…)

But then again, Reed doesn’t say that the tax would bring in only $21 million; rather, he says that $21 million of the proceeds would be used for police and firefighter salaries. It could be that he expects additional proceeds to flow into the city’s general fund.

He’s holding a press conference at 2 p.m. I should learn the details then.

UPDATE: The Senate Press Office says Senators Nan Orrock, Vincent Fort, and Horacena Tate, all Democrats who represent Atlanta, have signed on as co-sponsors of Reed’s legislation.

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HIT THE BRAKES Beltline faces another obstacle — from GDOT and AMTRAK

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Beltline, the 22-mile loop of parks, trails and transit proposed to circle Atlanta, it’s that surprises are to be expected. And some interesting developments are afoot with the $2.8-billion project.

If you recall, Atlanta Beltline Inc. — the nonprofit agency in charge of planning and implementing the project — finalized its purchase of a 66-acre piece of property in October owned by Gwinnett County developer Wayne Mason and his son Keith, an Atlanta attorney. The Mason property included  land and transit right-of-way. The $66 million purchase riled city watchdogs not only for the ultimate payout to the Masons — more than double what father and son originally paid for the land in 2004 — but also the deal ABI cut with a private partner group it needed to buy out if it wanted to use tax-exempt bonds to finalize the purchase before a Halloween deadline. That’s background, and for all intents and purposes, irrelevant for the moment.

Beltline leaders hoped to complete planning the area, implement transit, and sell off excess land to developers. They would then re-invest the windfall from those sales back into the overall project. But before it could do anything with the property, it first had to abandon the transit right-of-way. That humdrum process is conducted by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board and largely involves just some time for public comment and a shuffling of papers. It was supposed to be a walk in the park.

Looks like that’s not turning out to be the case. An eleventh-hour move by the state Department of Transportation and AMTRAK has potentially thrown a wrench in the Beltline. And why those two odd entities decided to hold hands and insert themselves into the conversation — this late in the party — is making folks scratch their heads.

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Late Saturday night, a Grant Park couple’s home burned for 25 minutes before firefighting crews arrived. Officials are probing why it took the City of Atlanta 911 call center so long to relay the message to fire crews. A computer malfunction has hindered the department’s ability to determine the exact time the 911 call was received.

Below is a video of the fire posted on YouTube by the couple’s neighbor.

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Decatur Metro and its commenters report Decatur’s Trackside Tavern was destroyed by fire this morning. Fifth Earl Market, the restaurant adjacent to Trackside, was damaged as well.

UPDATE: Friend and fellow Decaturite Susan Watkins sent me a link to a Facebook photo album with two dozen grim photos of Trackside. If you’re a fan of Trackside, they will make you sad.

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President-elect Barack Obama today is traveling by train from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. for Tuesday’s inauguration. And “Georgia 300,” the train car carrying Obama and his family, has Georgia roots.

From the Associated Press:

The car was first built by Pullman Standard for the Southern Railway, when the car was known as the General Polk and used by railroad officials.

Georgia Railroad later acquired it in 1954, and [John Heard, the car's current owner], who is president of First Coach Rail Inc., bought it in 1986. It was a prized purchase for a man who recalls seeing the car as a boy in Atlanta.

Heard has made a series of electrical and plumbing upgrades to the car over the years.

“It had deteriorated and I completely rebuilt it,” said Heard, of Fernandina Beach, Fla.

Here are some interior shots of the train car.

(Photo by Tony Bucca used with permission)

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Welcome to the poorhouse.

This past Monday, AJC staffers were informed about the sudden “retirement” of their boss, publisher John Mellott. Perhaps the first question that popped into everyone’s mind was, Who retires at 51?

On Wednesday, during the newspaper’s quarterly staff meeting, employees got to meet the new publisher, one Doug Franklin, who has years of experience as a veteran newspaper executive. (Mellott, by contrast, had previously run another Cox subsidiary, Dent Wizard.)

They were told that the bottom had fallen out of the embattled paper’s revenues sometime around October, which served to confirm the widely held suspicion that Mellott had been pushed out.

Franklin also told the assembled crowd that the AJC is currently losing about $1 million every week.

From what I understand, that little news flash got everybody’s attention.

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To legal mavens and armchair jurists alike, the November verdict in the Brian Nichols trial offered stunning evidence that the death penalty in Georgia is broken.

Courthouse killer Brian Nichols on trial

If a remorseless, mad-dog killer like Nichols is able to escape death row — after boastfully confessing to a day-long murder-and-car-jacking spree — then how can the state rationalize the planned execution of men whose decades-old convictions rest on circumstantial evidence and recanted testimony?

Anne Emanuel, for one, believes it can’t.

“The death penalty is justifiable for certain crimes, but in Georgia we’ve got huge inequities,” says Emanuel, a criminal law professor at Georgia State University who chaired an American Bar Association committee that spent two years studying the death penalty in Georgia.

That committee’s 2006 report recommended that the state suspend executions until it was able to repair cracks in the legal system to ensure that capital punishment is being applied fairly. A subsequent two-year investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution determined that, over the previous decade, the process that produces death sentences in Georgia is largely arbitrary — often resulting in wildly different punishments for similar crimes.

“Getting the death penalty in Georgia is as predictable as a lightning strike,” the newspaper concluded.
Emanuel believes the recent Nichols verdict and the never-ending appeals of longtime death row inmate Troy Davis — whose innocence claims and evidence of faulty eyewitness accounts have attracted international attention — serve to underscore the need to halt executions while the state determines whether it’s even possible to salvage the legal integrity of its death penalty.

There is, however, one major drawback with this approach: It ain’t gonna happen.

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Folks have long talked about the possibility of gambling at Underground Atlanta, often from the standpoint that legalized gaming may be the only way to make the city-subsidized white-elephant finally solvent and to revive lower downtown. Fulton Commissioner Robb Pitts has kept the issue in the public with frequent pro-gambling statements. And, as recently as mid-November, Mayor Shirley Franklin told state lawmakers she would be willing to explore gambling licenses as a way to generate revenue for the city.

Well, it looks as if some developer has finally taken the bait. The AJC reports that Underground operator Dan O’Leary has announced that a company is interested in filling the near-dormant mall with 5,000 video slot machines and building a new high-rise hotel onsite.

The project would cost about $450 million and would be expected to generate $600 million in gross annual revenue, half of which might go to the Georgia Lottery Board. Is it a coincidence that the lottery board would have a large role in deciding whether the proposal goes forward?

Actually, the legal hurdles to installing a casino in Underground are not that high. The site is already designated by state law as Georgia’s only “special entertainment district,” which means that many legal restrictions that apply everywhere else — Sunday alcohol sales, for instance — don’t apply there. The city doesn’t have the authority to license a casino without state approval, but surprisingly few laws would need to be changed to make it happen.

If there’s the will, there’s definitely a way.

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BUDGET BUDDIES Richardson and Perdue at this morning's legislative breakfast.

Tuesday morning, Gov. Sonny Perdue, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle and state House Speaker Glenn Richardson, speaking before a banquet room filled with business heavies, lobbyists and fellow lawmakers, outlined their legislative agendas for the session at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s annual “Eggs and Issues” breakfast at the Georgia World Congress Center.

There, over plates of eggs, sausage, and some hashbrown-stuffed tomato concoction, the elected officials said that, even with the state nearly $2 billion in the red, progress would take place.

After the jump, what Perdue, Cagle and Richardson said, in fancy bulletpoint style, about the upcoming legislative session.

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Jennifer Graves at home

Jennifer Graves, 36, makes her living selling advertising. She has seven kids, ages 5 to 16 — two of them with her husband, a truck driver for a local delivery company whom she met six years ago. They were married in 2006, but have been frequenting swingers’ clubs almost as long as they’ve been together.

I come from a small town and was raised by a single mother in a very religious family where sex was something you didn’t do before marriage, but I’d always wondered what those places [swingers’ clubs] were like.

When I’d been to college and had my first child, I was a little bored. So I decided to ask my husband about it about three months after we first met. I think it surprised him, but he’d already been going as a single guy. He didn’t try to push me into it or anything. His whole thing was, “Let’s just go and see if you feel comfortable or not.”

So two days later, he took me to Club Venus. I was petrified. It was a crowded night and kind of dark and I don’t think a child could’ve held onto its parent crossing the street any tighter than I held onto him. It was interesting and I enjoyed it, but I was still like, “I can’t believe these people are doing this!” I saw the dungeon master in there with a woman doing his thing and I ran and got my husband and said, “Omigod, he’s beating her, he’s beating her. Stop him!”

On our third trip, we went to a private area with another couple. We went out to dinner beforehand and they said, “Try it out and see how you feel,” because a lot of women don’t feel comfortable seeing their significant other with someone else. But it was … I don’t even know how to describe it. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. I didn’t feel like anybody was taking anything away from me or our relationship.
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Rubi Cuautle, at a vigil for slain bartender John Henderson

1. Vigil for murdered Atlanta bartender (Posts about the huge crowd that attended the vigil and the memorial fund set up for victim John Henderson speak to the community’s mobilization after the tragedy.)

2. Don’t Panic: Why is Israel bombing Gaza? (Violence in the Middle East — second in popularity only to violence at home.)

3. Intowners claim crime has become more brazen (Ironically, this post about a perceived uptick in crime was published a few hours before news broke of Henderson’s death.)

4. Lisa Borders’ home burglarized (City Council prez loses flat-screen to thieves — hours after attending a speech in which the mayor claimed crime was down)

5. ‘Real Housewives of Atlanta’ star going to Ga. Supreme Court (In lighter — but still sociologically disturbing — news, Sheree argues her divorce alimony to the state’s highest court.)

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Anita Beaty is right about one thing: City officials would love to shut down her enormous shelter at the corner of Peachtree and Pine streets.

Yesterday morning, the city cut off the water service to the former warehouse building occupied by Beaty’s Task Force for the Homeless. By evening, however, a judge had ordered the water turned back on. But unless Beaty is able to pay off a $160,000 water bill, the shelter may soon be forced to close down for good.

Anita Beaty

“It’s very serious right now,” says former Atlanta Councilwoman Myrtle Davis, who serves on the Task Force’s board of directors. “This is part of a concerted effort by the city to shut us down.”

Arguably so, but that doesn’t change the apparent fact that the Task Force owes $160,000 in outstanding water bills. Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford ordered the shelter to come up with $6,000 by Friday and another $3,000 or so by next Wednesday, and to develop a reasonable plan for paying off the rest of the bill.

“If they miss either payment, the water goes back off,” says Debi Starnes, another former councilwoman who now serves as Mayor Franklin’s Homeless Czarina.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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