“A Visit to the Pro-Brexit Coastal Town of Hartlepool - The New Yorker” plus 3 more

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• A Visit to the Pro-Brexit Coastal Town of Hartlepool - The New Yorker
• How “Rest in Power” Went From Radical Eulogy to Kitschy Twitter Meme - Slate
• Silence or death: Turner finalist Lawrence Abu Hamdan on recreating a horrific Syrian jail - The Guardian
• In Death Penalty Cases, Sotomayor Is Alone in ‘Bearing Witness’ - The New York Times

A Visit to the Pro-Brexit Coastal Town of Hartlepool - The New Yorker Posted: 30 Sep 2019 01:16 PM PDT In the Brexit referendum, in 2016, there were few places in Britain where the margin in favor of leaving the E.U. was as wide as in Hartlepool, a coastal town in the northeast of the country where sixty-nine per cent of voters favored breaking with the European Union. Hartlepool, which has a population of about ninety thousand people, almost all of them white and of British descent, has an ancient history. At the highest point of the oldest part of town, on a promontory known as the Headland, sits the Church of Saint Hilda, a handsome building erected in the twelfth century on the ruins of a Saxon monastery. The church honors Saint Hild, a seventh-century noblewoman and abbess cited for her wisdom and learning by the Venerable Bede, England's first great historian, and the author of the "Ecclesiastical History of the English People." Hartlepool's fortunes have risen and fallen over the centuries that followed, like the tide that beats against its fortified sea walls. After its Saxon heyday, the settlement on the Headland declined, only to be revived under the Normans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when it became a lively trading port. The town languished again in the fourteenth century, beset, like the rest of the country, by civil unrest that followed the Black Death, which eliminated up to half of Britain's population. In the sixteenth century, prosperity gradually returned, and, by the Georgian period, the town was home to wealthy merchants and a thriving shipbuilding industry. In the nineteenth century, the coming of the railways further boosted Hartlepool's fortunes, and its port grew, exporting coal from mines in the region: the town, which is about two hundred and fifty miles north of London, and only about eighty miles south of the Scottish border, flourished for the better part of a century. By the latter decades of the twentieth century, Hartlepool, like many other towns in the northeast of England, saw the dwindling of its manufacturing base, and the shuttering of traditional industries. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher went to Teesside (an area named for the River Tees, which meets the North Sea just south of Hartlepool) for what became known as her "walk in the wilderness." The photographs showed her picking her way in pumps through the weed-grown forecourts of disused factories, handbag in hand—an emblem of the region's demoralization. There has been considerable regeneration in the town: in the nineties, a new marina was built, and an award-winning maritime museum celebrates the glory years of two centuries ago. More recently, a pleasant pedestrianized plaza was constructed around the Hartlepool Art Gallery, and the town's old post office has been refurbished as a loft-like, light-filled hub for startups in the creative industries. Still, the energy of renewal is not felt everywhere. Heavy industry and the factories that, in early generations, guaranteed school-leavers a job, have continued to decline. Under the Conservative government's policy of economic austerity, which was imposed in 2010 after the global financial crisis, local-government spending has been cut by a third. Last week, the government released a report titled "English Indices of Deprivation," measuring access to employment, levels of income, standards of health and education, and the incidence of crime, among other factors. Of three hundred and seventeen local authorities across the country, Hartlepool ranked fifth in terms of income deprivation, with twenty-three per cent of its population—and twenty-eight per cent of its children—living in households with inadequate income. It ranked fourth in employment deprivation: eighteen per cent of its population has insufficient work. Hartlepool has long been a reliably Labour-voting town, but, earlier this month, the town's local council earned national headlines when ten of its members, mostly elected as Independents, defected to join the Brexit Party, forming a majority coalition with three members of the Conservative Party. The move took place within the crucible of small-town politics, with all the predictable personal rivalries and score-settling such a context implies. But it had a larger import, too, as an exemplar of what such cross-party pro-Brexit alliances might accomplish at a national level. The incumbent Labour M.P. for Hartlepool, Mike Hill, voted to remain in the E.U. in the referendum, though he has said he wants to honor the wishes of his constituents by securing a good exit deal. In the past year, Hill has voted repeatedly against the Brexit deal offered by Theresa May; he was among those M.P.s who voted earlier this month to pass a law aimed at preventing the possibility of exiting the E.U. without a deal at all on October 31st. Hill is currently suspended from his party, pending investigation into sexual-harassment charges. (Hill has said that he "completely rejects" the allegations.) When the expected general election is called, the Brexit Party will be fielding as its candidate for Hartlepool a local businessman named Ken Hodcroft, who is also the former chairman of the Hartlepool United football club. The Brexit Party was formed earlier this year, by Nigel Farage, the former leader of the right-wing, Euroskeptic UKIP, on the close to single-issue platform of leaving the E.U. without a deal. If the Party is to gain any representation in Parliament, Hartlepool is the kind of place where it is most likely to succeed. A few days after news broke of the mass defection, Shane Moore, the Hartlepool council leader and one of the newly minted Brexit Party councillors, happened to be in London for an official engagement at the House of Lords. I caught up with him at the café of the National Gallery, on Trafalgar Square: he had studied art in high school and tries to spend a few hours at the museum whenever he comes down south on business. Moore, who is thirty-seven, is tall and slim, with a close-shaven head and geeky glasses. We both ordered English breakfast tea, and he explained his decision to join the Brexit Party. "There was an awful lot of frustration locally from residents about everything that is going on down here," he said. "And there is an awful lot of resentment with our local Labour M.P. Hartlepool was an almost seventy per cent Leave town, and people are just angry." Before signing up with the Brexit Party, Moore was an Independent, though he was elected to the council in 2016 as a member of UKIP, which was led at the time by Farage. Moore grew up in the district he represents, the Headland and Harbour Ward; he first won his seat by a margin of two votes. "My mum and my dad, that's what I put it down to," he told me. He left UKIP in January, 2018, when the Party's xenophobia had become increasingly explicit. His grandmother was an immigrant from Germany, who came to the U.K. after the Second World War, and he does not consider himself a nationalist. "I have no desire to stoke division or hatred with anybody—life's too short," he said. Post-Brexit, he said, he would like Britain to be a more global, outward-looking country. "Brexiteers often get accused of being Little Englanders, but we're not—at least, I'm not," he went on. "The E.U. is a very protectionist, inward-looking market, but actually our place is in the world, and we need to look outward, and I think that is where our destiny lies. Of course, we also need to work with our European neighbors and partners, because we are not going to be able to up anchor and move the British Isles." Moore said that he had appreciated being beholden to no one as an Independent representative on the council, and had hesitated to sign on with the Brexit Party—the platform of which, beyond arguing for a clean break with the E.U., he struggled to recollect, when asked what else the Party stood for. In part, he explained, he had initially joined the ruling coalition in order to get some traction on local issues that he cares about: there are plans to build a playground on the Headland, a development that his five-year-old daughter is particularly excited about. But he had also joined the Brexit Party out of a sense of strategic necessity. "The Remain-backing parties, like the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, and the Labour Party, are now coming together to form almost a Remain alliance, and will do everything they can to block Brexit happening, so it was felt that we could send a clear message that the Brexit Party and the Conservative Party should just swallow their pride and work together," he explained. In fact, the Labour Party has not unambiguously declared it will campaign for Remain in a general election, to the frustration of many of its members. But skepticism about the true motives of Westminster politicians prevails on both sides of the Brexit divide. Moore's perspective on the strategy of Prime Minister Boris Johnson—that, though Johnson insists that he is ready to leave the E.U. without a deal on October 31st, he won't ultimately go through with it—is the mirror image of the belief expressed around many anti-Brexit dinner tables in London: that, though Johnson talks about wanting a deal, what he really wants is to crash out without one. Moore said that, under the circumstances, he thought it in Britain's best interest to leave the E.U. without a deal by the October deadline—although, he added, he would like to see a transition period in which to negotiate a free-trade agreement, workers' rights, and arrangements for foreign students at British universities. He told me that he was not fearful of shortages of food and medicine, as laid out in the government's own Yellowhammer document. He views the report as the sort of risk assessment that any company or council needs to undertake in order to be adequately prepared. "I understand that there is a potential risk there, but the risk has been, in my opinion, mitigated," he said. Despite warnings from the Confederation of British Industry earlier this year that the northeast would suffer disproportionately under a no-deal Brexit, Moore regards as condescending any suggestion that people in his region did not understand the possible consequences of their choice when they voted to leave. He himself comes from five generations of trawlermen, he explained, and had long heard uncles and cousins complaining about E.U. regulations over fishing. "I knew exactly what I was voting for," he said. "David Cameron made it very clear: we have two years to negotiate a deal, and then we leave with or without a deal. The only way we can move forward on this is actually to deliver on it, get it over and done with, and rip the plaster off," he went on, using the British term for a Band-Aid. "And then we can sit down over a cup of tea and sort out our differences after that—because, otherwise, it's just going to continue to hurt." Having finished our own tea, I asked Moore to show me his favorite art work in the museum: a painting by the eighteenth-century British artist Joseph Wright, who lived and worked in Derby, in the Midlands, and who was a master of the technique of chiaroscuro, showing the play of light and shadow. We found it on the wall of a lofty gallery: "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump." Wright's canvas depicted members of a family gathered around a table, where a frock-coated scientist demonstrated the novel use of a vacuum cylinder by extracting the air from a glass vessel, asphyxiating a cockatoo imprisoned within. Wright had shown the very different responses of the individuals around the table at the experiment. The family's three sons were rapt, while candlelight illuminated the upturned face of the youngest child, a girl perhaps a little older than Moore's daughter. She worriedly eyed the dying bird, and grasped the skirt of her big sister, who was shielding her own eyes in horror. "It's quite morbid, really," Moore remarked as we left the gallery, which was closing for the evening. "It is an odd subject, but I have just always been drawn to it. The lighting, and the depth—just everything about it. I have always loved it."

How “Rest in Power” Went From Radical Eulogy to Kitschy Twitter Meme - Slate Posted: 30 Sep 2019 02:45 AM PDT Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Allison Joyce/Getty Images, Scott Olson/Getty Images, and Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Netflix. After news broke this month of the death of the Cars singer Ric Ocasek, many of the micro-eulogies on Twitter and other social media platforms repeated the same refrain. "Rest in power," wrote Lenny Kravitz. "Rest in power, Ric Ocasek," echoed Jerry Horton, the guitarist for Papa Roach. And, in a tweet remembering both Ocasek and fellow '80s rocker Eddie Money: "Rest in power, Ric and Eddie," wrote the official Twitter account for the video game series Rock Band. Advertisement A few years ago, perhaps, the use of this phrase to eulogize seventysomething white musicians not known for their political activism, especially after deaths of natural causes, might have raised more eyebrows, especially when deployed by the company that made Guitar Hero. But in 2019, such uses of rest in power went by with little note, marking that familiar wash-rinse-repeat cycle wherein phrases once associated with black and queer communities enter the mainstream. And as usual, at the end of this co-opting churn, little of the language's history remains. What is that history? While the phrase rest in peace has been common for more than a century in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and for more than a millennium in Latin (resquiescat in pace), the roots of rest in power are much more recent. It's often impossible to definitively determine a phrase's linguistic birthplace, but based on the digging of etymologist Barry Popik, the phrase seems to have originated in the graffiti community of Oakland, California. (The fact that Oakland was also the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a hub for the Black Power movement may or may not be a coincidence.) The first use of this remixed RIP that Popik found was on the newsgroup alt.graffiti on Feb. 18, 2000, to pay respect to local legend Mike "Dream" Francisco. The artist's almost two-decade-long career at the vanguard of the San Francisco Bay Area's graffiti scene was cut short when he was shot and killed during a robbery, and on the alt.graffiti boards, a contributor identified only as "SPANK" ended his remembrance with the words, "REST IN POWER PLAYA." Advertisement Around 2005, the phrase began showing up in print, and in all three examples that Popik dug up, as with "Dream" Francisco, it was used in connection to the Bay Area, graffiti, young victims of violence, or all of the above. The first two instances both appeared in Bay Area newspapers, and both are descriptions of graffiti that emerged after 19-year-old Meleia Willis-Starbuck was shot and killed that year outside her Berkeley apartment. Willis-Starbuck was a student at Dartmouth College, back home for the summer, and in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, a family friend wrote, "I've never seen a tree in Berkeley covered with picture of a 19-year-old girl I knew. … I've never seen 'Rest in Power' written as a substitute for 'Rest in Peace,' " suggesting that even then in the Bay Area, the phrase was still new to many. But by the end of 2005, it had spread beyond Northern California: On Sept. 29, an article in the Canadian newspaper the Ottawa Citizen described a graffiti memorial for teenage Ottawa murder victim Jennifer Teague that portrayed "a smiling Ms. Teague beneath the words, 'Rest in power' " and framed by "two black angels." It wasn't long after Twitter began to gain popularity that "rest in power" started to pop up in tweets, often in connection with hip-hop figures and black musicians, but it wasn't until two more teenage lives were cut short that the phrase entered the national lexicon. 2014 marked the year of two transformative deaths: The first was Michael Brown's in August, and the second was Leelah Alcorn's in December. The origin of Black Lives Matter and the movement built around it is still widely disputed, with some marking Trayvon Martin's death in 2012 as the spark and others citing Brown's in 2014. What is indisputable at this point is that the nationwide unrest that exploded in the aftermath of the six hours that Brown's body lay on the hot Missouri pavement catapulted phrases like black lives matter, rest in power, and stay woke to a national stage. Those six hours and the response to them can not only largely be held responsible for the introduction of rest in power to mainstream white America. They're also fairly illustrative of where rest in power diverges from rest in peace in terms of message and application. And they hint at how strange it is that rest in power has become so ubiquitous. In its initial iteration, rest in power was almost exclusively used in reference to deaths that were unjust, which is perhaps why its strongest association is with the spate of killings of black people at the hands of police or vigilantes that rocked the nation from 2014 to 2017 and gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Trayvon Martin's parents only solidified that association with their 2017 biography of their son, titled Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin, which itself was adapted into the 2018 documentary series Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story. Advertisement In this way, rest in power is not only a prayer for the deceased to enjoy eternal rest but also a call to be heeded by those they left behind, a way to signal that the fight is not over, that an unfair death will give rise to change. What rest in power offers mourners of Dream and Tupac Shakur and Sandra Bland over rest in peace is the chance for a senseless death to matter in a way that a life could not. It is the coda to the refrain of no justice, no peace, a phrase that was similarly vaulted to the national stage in the wake of Ferguson, whose roots also lie in the wake of racially motivated vigilante violence. In fact, the work of "Dream" Francisco was featured in an anti–police brutality show titled "No Justice, No Peace" in 1993 in Oakland. The difference between the use of rest in power in 1993 and 2016 lies less in its employment than in its consumption. Activists watched as the open-air market that is Twitter spread the language they used among themselves to an audience much wider than their own communities. With the suicide of Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender girl, rest in power became indelible in the American consciousness. In the aftermath of her death and the suicide note she wrote on Tumblr where she pleaded that her death "needs to mean something," the Washington Post quoted a tweet wherein a user wrote, "My dear GIRL, baby SISTER #LeelahAlcorn. We will make your voice heard. Rest in power, beautiful." Seemingly after that moment, the phrase became closely associated with Alcorn, appearing in digital eulogies and epitaphs for the teen. Social media indisputably raised the profile of deaths like these, but along with the higher visibility these platforms offered came the threat of the phrase's overuse. Which brings us to our current moment where, in just a week, rest in power was used in digital elegies for everyone from Ocasek to Cokie Roberts to the Notorious B.I.G. to Keith Lamont Scott to Ja'leyah-Jamar. In some ways, the phrase seems to have gone the way of woke and become a shorthand for multiple competing agendas. Rest in power now means that someone has died too soon, but too soon can mean anything from 17 to 75. It can mean that a death was somehow wrongful or unjust, whether in a systematic sense, as with the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of police, or in a more everyday way, as with the loss of someone to heart disease or cancer. It means that someone's legacy will last beyond their own life, either through groundbreaking albums or falling in a too long lineage of murdered black trans women. As tends to happen when slang exits the communities it originated from, rest in power now encompasses much more than it was originally meant to. It can now mean everything, and so ultimately might mean nothing.

Silence or death: Turner finalist Lawrence Abu Hamdan on recreating a horrific Syrian jail - The Guardian Posted: 30 Sep 2019 10:00 PM PDT Three years ago, Lawrence Abu Hamdan spent a week in a room in Istanbul that would transform the way he understood the world. "The things I thought going in and coming out were completely different," he says. "There was a radical shift. That's why I made the works I have made." Abu Hamdan – 34, neatly bearded, fashionably bespectacled – tells me this in Beirut, where he lives with his wife and daughter. It is a few days before he travels to the UK to install his entry in the Turner prize show in Margate, which will feature the work of three other finalists. We are in an office in the echoing, post-industrial Sfeir-Semler gallery, where many of his works, recent and not-so-recent, are on view until January. Turner prize 2019 review: Outrages of our age, in sound, vision and papiermache That week in 2016 he was working on a report for Amnesty International, interviewing six survivors from Saydnaya prison, 25km north of Damascus – a nightmarish black hole of abuse and torture, where 13,000 people are estimated to have been killed by Bashar Al-Assad's regime. Abu Hamdan's expertise is sound: he calls himself a "private ear". He has made work about mishearings that lead to criminal cases, and about lie-detector technology. He was asking the survivors specifically about what they had heard in the prison. "The only way we can access much information about the site is through acoustic memories," he says, "because people were blindfolded when they came in and held in darkness." Abu Hamdan was working alongside Forensic Architecture, an agency that uses architectural skills to investigate human rights abuses. (It was nominated for the Turner prize last year.) Working with an architect, Abu Hamdan used the BBC and Warner Bros sound-effect libraries as prompts to help the witnesses summon up the sounds of, for example, doors shutting, locks turning and water dripping. Reverberations … Lawrence Abu Hamdan's installation at the Turner Contemporary. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA There were more terrible noises to recall, too. When someone was being beaten with a length of pipe, you could hear it, as the sounds reverberated around the building. At the same time, the prisoners were forced into silence on pain of execution: this was silence as a weapon. The inmates' hearing became so acute they could pick out the softest noises: the minute crack of lice being killed was like a sesame seed being crushed, said one witness. Inmates hearing became so acute they could pick out the softest noises: the minute crack of lice being killed Crucially, the sound memories allowed Abu Hamdan and his colleague to build a picture of the prison, which they translated into a piece of 3D imaging that forms the centrepiece of the Amnesty report. "One prisoner had memorised how each lock sounded," says Abu Hamdan. "So he knew how many doors there were. Initially, that was a survival thing: he had to know where the guards were. But it helped us understand how many cells were in use. You could start corroborating it with other information to estimate how many people there were in the prison." The report did much to shed light on this dark and terrible place. But for Abu Hamdan, it did not and could not end there. "It changed the way I thought about memory, about architecture, about testimony, about language and the human voice," he says. Part of the revelation was how prisoners' memories sometimes hovered on the brink of the hallucinogenic, or were obviously distorted. He played various sounds to one witness to try to help him recall the noise of the cell door shutting. "He was saying it was louder, louder, louder, and we're playing these enormous door sounds and I've got the reverb set to the doors of Notre Dame cathedral – that's a 30-metre long nave. It couldn't possibly have sounded like that." Then the witness told Abu Hamdan he'd got it, that was it. But it wasn't the sound of the door shutting, it turned out – it was the sound of the packs of bread being dropped outside the cell doors each morning. What we were measuring … was about the condition of extreme hunger and what it does to the senses. The distortion spoke lucidly about the experience "Of course it can't have sounded like that – not even 50 packs of bread in a three-metre-high ceiling could sound like that. But what we were measuring was nothing to do with the door or the space – it was actually about the condition of extreme hunger and what it does to the senses. The distortion itself was speaking very lucidly about experience." This piece of evidence was unlikely to be useful in any forensic or judicial setting. But it did express a deep truth: metaphorical truth, psychological truth. It is this that Abu Hamdan has excavated, in the three works he's presenting in Margate. The most substantial is a video called Walled Unwalled. Filmed in East Germany's old radio studios in East Berlin, it consists of Abu Hamdan reading a script about the Saydnaya witnesses' experiences, but also touches on other situations in which sounds heard through walls have been of profound importance. The Oscar Pistorius trial, for example, hinged partly on the defendant's claim that he believed he had heard an intruder, rather than his partner Reeva Steenkamp, behind the bathroom wall before he shot her. But witnesses from neighbouring homes heard high-pitched screaming. Earwitness, rather than eyewitness, testimony was crucial. The works on show in Margate are not "about" Saydnaya, or at least not only about it. They are also about the barriers nation states erect at their borders; the apparently boundary-free but highly surveilled world of the internet; how information leaks through the most impermeable-seeming walls; how what we hear is often deceptive and illusory. This is territory in which human experience can be best expressed not in forensic, journalistic or scientific language but in the language of art. "I'm quite romantic in thinking that art is a form of truth production, that a painting can manifest more of an essence of something than the thing itself," he says. Earwitness Inventory … Abu Hamdan's assembled sound-effects kit on show in Beirut. Photograph: Agop Kanledjian/Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg In Beirut, I see some of his new work. It no longer turns so precisely on that fateful week in Istanbul. Abu Hamdan is now interested in reincarnation – a belief of the Druze, the religion of his father's side of the family. One video work, Once Removed, which he completed this year, consists of an interview with a 31-year-old Druze man who understands himself to be a reincarnation of a boy who was killed in combat in 1984, aged 17. To make sense of the memories that he says resurfaced from his previous life, this young man, Bassel Abi Chahine, has constructed a large archive, including photographs, artefacts and interviews with survivors of conflict. After the end of the Lebanese civil war, there was an amnesty, but there has been no truth and reconciliation. The war is not to be spoken of. It is not taught in school. Abi Chahine's actions in gathering material – evidence – is controversial. His inherited memories "already implicate people", says Abu Hamdan. "A child soldier – that is already a crime right there. Coming back and saying you have memories of that does something very strange. He is talking about a war crime, but one that we do not have the legal capacity to deal with." You might call it an embodied manifestation of inherited trauma – the next generation reliving the damage of the last. You might think of it as another type of leakage: not sound through walls, but memories through time. Reincarnation … a scene from the video about Bassel Abi Chahine, who believes he was previously a Druze soldier. Photograph: Agop Kanledjian/Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg The work is not about identity as such, but it's hard for him not to be thinking about his own at this moment. "I feel British," he says, "and I also feel very Arab." Abu Hamdan's father is Lebanese, his mother a Yorkshirewoman. He was born in Amman in Jordan and largely brought up in York. His cultural awareness was forged in the Leeds DIY music scene, before he studied at Middlesex and Goldsmiths in London. Being nominated for the Turner prize, he says, "was a very moving moment for me, because it meant that culture, which was always the thing I had taken most from Britain, was still accepting of me". Unlike the Home Office. Recently, he went through the "humiliating" ordeal of securing a passport for his daughter. "I had to do a 13-month process of interviews and documentation, where I was showing them my wife's ultrasound scans and so on, proving that I wasn't fictionalising the child." It was nothing, he says, compared with what some have endured – those embroiled in the Windrush scandal, for example. But the experience of having his credentials as a Briton scrutinised so relentlessly alienated him from his own sense of Britishness, something he had never questioned before. After all that, he says, "I was just done." It was part of the reason for moving to Beirut – the effort and expense required to secure his wife leave to remain (she is Lebanese) seemed an insuperably exhausting prospect. 'I feel British, and also very Arab' … Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Photograph: Miro Kuzmanović/Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London A week after we meet, I visit Turner Contemporary in Margate and see his work again. It strikes me that, in the end, what brings these works drawn from Saydnaya together is the way language and sound fail to meet each other. We have no precise language to describe sound. We always talk of something sounding "like" something else – we are already in the world of metaphor and poetry. In Walled Unwalled, we learn that one Saydayna witness likened the sound of an inmate being beaten to the sound of a wall being demolished – for him, that was the only adequate description. But what does a wall being demolished sound like? And isn't there something remarkable about a man who was literally walled up using the metaphor of a wall being demolished to describe the sound of torture? This world of sound in Abu Hamdan's art is a world of images that bleed into each other, unresolved – imprecise in a forensic sense, yet desperately telling. Some art makes you see the world differently. Abu Hamdan's makes you hear it, feel it and understand it differently. • The Turner prize exhibition is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 12 January. The winner is announced on 3 December.

In Death Penalty Cases, Sotomayor Is Alone in ‘Bearing Witness’ - The New York Times Posted: 30 Sep 2019 02:00 AM PDT WASHINGTON — The terse Supreme Court rulings arrived in the evening, in time to allow an execution later that night. There were three rulings in the last month or so, at 5:52 p.m., at 7:01 p.m. and at 10:13 p.m. They were bland and formulaic, saying only that the court had denied an "application for stay of execution of sentence of death." The inmates who had filed the applications were put to death within hours. In all three cases, only one member of the court bothered to write an opinion, to give a hint about what was at stake. That was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who maintains a sort of vigil in the capital cases other justices treat as routine. She described shortcomings in the trials the inmates had received and oddities in the laws the courts below had applied. "She's bearing witness," said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. On Wednesday, for instance, she wrote about the trial of Robert Sparks, in Texas in 2008. One of the bailiffs had worn a black tie embroidered with a white syringe, later admitting that he wanted to express his support for the death penalty. "That an officer of the court conducted himself in such a manner is deeply troubling," Justice Sotomayor wrote. But, with seeming reluctance, she said the Supreme Court was right not to intervene in the case. A lower court considering a challenge to Mr. Sparks's death sentence, she wrote, "did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that the jury saw the tie." Still, Justice Sotomayor said the trial judge should have done more. "Presiding judges aware of this kind of behavior would see fit to intervene in future cases by completely removing the offending item or court officer from the jury's presence," she wrote. "Only this will ensure the 'very dignity and decorum of judicial proceedings' they are entrusted to uphold," she wrote, quoting an earlier decision. "The stakes — life in this case, liberty in many others — are too high to allow anything less." There is a precedent for Justice Sotomayor's attention to capital cases, said Jordan M. Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas and an author, with Carol S. Steiker, of "Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment." "Justice Sotomayor is carrying forward the tradition of Justices Brennan and Marshall," Professor Steiker said, referring to Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who came to adopt a practice of dissenting in every death penalty case. Earlier in September, Justice Sotomayor indicated that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, had read a Supreme Court precedent too narrowly in rejecting the possibility that some challenges to death sentences could ever be reopened in light of changes in the law. But she said the appeals court's decision had not turned on that point, and she did not dissent from the Supreme Court's decision not to intervene. Instead, she looked forward. "In an appropriate case," she wrote, "this issue could warrant the court's review." She made a similar point in August, criticizing a "Kafkaesque procedural rule" in Florida. The rule, she wrote, served to thwart a 2014 Supreme Court decision, Hall v. Florida, that struck down as too rigid the I.Q. score cutoff Florida used to decide which intellectually disabled individuals must be spared the death penalty. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the state's highest court had performed a strange two-step in enforcing the Hall decision. "With one hand, the Florida Supreme Court recognized that such intellectually disabled prisoners sentenced before Hall have a right to challenge their executions," she wrote. "With the other hand, however, the Florida Supreme Court has turned away prisoners seeking to vindicate this retroactive constitutional rule for the first time, by requiring them to have brought their Hall claims in 2004 — a full decade before Hall itself was decided." Here, too, though, she stopped short of dissenting. "In an appropriate case, however," she wrote, "I would be prepared to revisit a challenge to Florida's procedural rule." In other capital cases, Justice Sotomayor dissented outright, again writing only for herself. In May, she said the court should have heard a case from Tennessee in which condemned prisoners sought to show that the chemicals the state aimed to use in their executions would cause excruciating pain. The inmates faced two hurdles, Justice Sotomayor wrote. First, the Supreme Court had required them to propose a less painful alternative method of execution. This was, she wrote, "perverse." Second, she wrote, there was "the added perversity of the secrecy laws that Tennessee imposes on death-row prisoners," denying them access to information that could help them make their cases. "Because I continue to believe that the alternative method requirement is fundamentally wrong — and particularly so when compounded by secrecy laws like Tennessee's — I dissent," she wrote. Justice Sotomayor's sustained attention to the capital justice system, Professor Steiker said, was part of an effort to speak to many audiences. "She recognizes the institutional limits of the court in correcting every injustice or every misreading of federal law, yet she wants to communicate the wrongness of those injustices and misreadings despite the court's inability to intervene," Professor Steiker said. "Justice Sotomayor is speaking to institutional actors — judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers — to make clear that the court, or least some portion of it, is keenly aware of problems that it is not presently able to correct.

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