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David v. Goliath
Students and faculty at the Death Penalty Clinic believed they had clear evidence that the Texas district attorney's office had a deliberate policy of excluding African Americans from juries in the years leading up to Miller-El's trial in 1986. Law professors Elisabeth Semel and Charles Weisselberg helped students write two amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs, which they submitted to the Supreme Court. Students presented evidence such as this 1963 memo from the district attorney's office in Dallas County, Texas: "Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated." By the time of Miller-El's trial, the language had been toned down, but the message was the same. "What to look for in a jury: you are not looking for any member of a minority group," said one prosecutor's training manual. At Miller-El's trial, 91 percent of eligible black jurors were removed by peremptory strikes versus just 13 percent of eligible white jurors. The first amicus brief persuaded the Court to agree to a full review of Miller-El's case. This was an achievement in itself because the Court selects only 100 or so of the 7,000 cases that come before it each year. The second brief helped seal the deal, convincing eight of the nine judges that Miller-El should be granted an appeal, overturning the decision of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. Jim Marcus, Miller-El's attorney, is grateful for the clinic’s support: "The assistance and support of the Death Penalty Clinic was critical to the favorable outcome in this case," he says. "Without the efforts of the clinic, the Court might not have ever focused its attention on Mr. Miller-El's case in the first place." Boalt's Death Penalty Clinic was launched in August 2001 in order to give students hands-on experience assisting death row inmates in need of legal counsel. Miller-El's was one of the first cases it took on. Tax attack Twenty Berkeley economists joined more than 400 others to take out a full-page advertisement in the February 11 New York Times expressing their strong opposition to President Bush's proposed tax plan. One of the signatories, Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof, went so far as to call the plan "horrendous." Entitled "Ten Nobel Laureates Say the Bush Tax Cuts Are the Wrong Approach," the ad was also signed by Nobel laureate Daniel McFadden and prominent Berkeley economists Janet Yellen (former economic adviser to President Clinton) and Laura D'Andrea Tyson (former dean of the Haas School of Business). Paid for by the Economic Policy Institute, the advertisement argued that, far from being a stimulus plan, the proposed tax cuts would "worsen the long-term budget outlook, adding to the nation's projected chronic deficits." Akerlof hoped the ad would help persuade members of Congress to vote against the plan. "With these tax cuts, the revenue shortfall isn't just serious, it's extraordinarily serious," he says. "Most of these tax cuts, are envisaged as being permanent. That means a shortfall of tax revenues as far as the eye can see into the future." Akerlof also worries that these large deficits will drive up interest rates, worsening an already bad situation. "It’s very likely that instead of being a stimulus, they will act as a damper on the economy," he said. The Nobel laureate was also critical of the way the tax cuts will benefit the rich, rather than the poor, and suggests that a short-term, one-time-only decrease in payroll tax would be better for people on lower incomes as well as for the economy. The day after the advertisement was published, the White House issued its own list of 250 economists who support the plan, including one Nobel laureate. Dancing again: Cal's men's basketball team finished third in the Pac 10 (behind Arizona and Stanford) with a 13-5 record, losing at Haas only once (to Arizona), and then were invited for the third straight year to the "big dance," the NCAA tournament. The
Closest encounter
Since 1999, four million people have downloaded the SETI@home program, which runs when their computers are idle to analyze data from Arecibo and check for signals that might have been sent by a distant civilization. The best candidates are signals that are particularly strong, that have been observed in the same spot in the sky, or that are close to a star--particularly one that is known to have planets. Werthimer will collect new data from the 150 most likely sources, but he remains cautious: "I give it about a one in 10,000 chance that one of our candidate signals turns out to be from ET," he says. The SETI@home software was developed by Werthimer and Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson. It was the first experiment in wide-scale distributed computing--harnessing the cumulative computer power of millions of PCs by way of the Internet--and the project represents the largest computation ever done.
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