Susan Champion found her first client in 2009. She was an enthusiastic student at Stanford Law School, and he was serving a life sentence in a California state prison. The crime that put him away for life? Three relatively minor thefts.
High on meth, he used a key hidden under a mat to sneak into his mother’s house and steal her VCR player, wanting to sell it for more drugs. Strike one.
He did his time. Got sober. But soon after he got out of the pen, he relapsed. On the waiting list for a bed at a rehab facility, he was homeless, sleeping outside in the bushes. One day, the police picked him up at a bus stop and found items in his backpack that had been reported missing in a daytime break-in. Strike two.
After being released from prison a second time, he committed a third burglary, stealing beer steins from someone’s commercial storage unit and trying to sell them at a flea market. Strike three.
Under California’s Three Strikes sentencing law, “persistent offenders” at the time had to be incarcerated for 25 years to life if a third felony was preceded by two crimes that were “serious or violent,” even if the last felony didn’t meet those criteria. Because of the stringent rule, this man was sentenced to life in prison without parole, simply for swiping a few mugs.
Champion submitted a habeas corpus petition (a motion asking the courts to review his detention) on her client’s behalf to determine if life for stealing beer glasses counted as cruel and unusual punishment. She won the case, convincing the judge that his sentence had been disproportional to the crime. Since then, she’s stayed on at Stanford to help many more like him through the law school’s Three Strikes Project.
The Three Strikes Project is currently the only legal organization in California working to reverse excessive sentences for minor crimes. Michael Romano, a law school professor and the program’s director, realized the need for services like it while clerking for the Ninth Circuit Court: Since there’s no right to legal counsel for habeas corpus petitions, convicts were sending in handwritten documents to his court, pleading with justices to take another look at their case. Since the project was institutionalized as one of Stanford’s 11 legal clinics in 2006, more than 1,000 inmates have sent letters to the school asking for pro bono assistance. The clinic currently represents 25 individuals and has already freed or reduced prison sentences for dozens more. So far, Champion, Romano and their students haven’t lost a case. Each time, they’ve convinced a judge to immediately release the prisoner or commute the lengthy sentence.
Champion became a lawyer late in life — at age 40 — to fight systemic injustice, like the Three Strikes Law’s misguided “one-size-fits-all” approach or jailing of the mentally ill. After working for years in a hospital that catered to the formerly incarcerated, non-English speakers, mentally ill and others “dealing with incredibly challenging circumstances,” Champion planned to study the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. But after her first year of law school was spent in required classes that focused on contracts and civil procedure, “stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to anything, let alone social justice issues,” Champion wondered if she’d made the right choice.
A job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office while still in school led her to focus directly on sentencing. In preliminary hearings — an early part of a case during which the judge decides if there’s enough evidence for a trial — Champion “saw a parade of poor black people. They were the only people coming in and out. It was just so stark and heartbreaking to see that’s what we’re doing with people who could be leading productive lives.” When California’s Three Strikes law appeared on the ballot, it promised “to keep murderers, rapists and child molesters behind bars, where they belong,” but those were not the people that Champion saw filling the courtroom.
In the early 1990s, the bill that initially proposed Three Strikes languished in Sacramento — until a horrific murder spurred a frantic campaign to crack down on crime. In October 1993, Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old with dimpled cheeks and a fondness for floral-print dresses, was abducted from her home in Petaluma, a small farm town in Sonoma County. Richard Allen Davis, a career criminal whose rap sheet included kidnapping and assault, broke into the three-bedroom home during a slumber party, bound and gagged two other girls and kidnapped Klaas while her mother slept nearby. Two months later, police found Klaas’s body on a trash pile adjacent to a freeway off-ramp, badly decomposed. Before Davis was convicted, legislators passed a slew of tough reforms, including Three Strikes. The measure was approved by a ballot initiative, winning approval from 72 percent of voters.
Since then, California’s Three Strikes Law — the first and harshest mandatory sentencing guideline of its kind — has been responsible for sending 46,000 inmates to prison for 25 years to life within the first decade since it passed in 1994, a government analysis found. Together, these “strikers” made up roughly one-quarter of California’s already overcrowded prison population.
Twenty years later, the need for change was also voiced through popular approval. In collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Romano and Champion helped draft the text of a statewide ballot measure (Proposition 36) to modify the law. The Three Strikes Reform Act captured more than two-thirds of the vote. Surprisingly, voters weren’t persuaded by arguments about the cost of prison as much as the law’s inherent unfairness, Champion says, referencing internal polls. As written, the original law could assign the same harsh penalty to the psychotic kidnapper whose crimes escalated to murders as the guy who faltered by stealing golf clubs, a disparity that seemed particularly unfair to voters, especially when it meant the difference between life in notorious San Quentin versus a few months at the local jail. “They thought an injustice had been done. What they thought they’d voted for in 1994 was not what they’d seen result. In fact, quite a few of our clients’ families voted for Three Strikes and would tell me after they never would have voted for it if they knew it would put someone like their loved one away when they might have just had a drug problem.”
Adding to the law’s insults was the fact that within California’s penal code, certain crimes are classified as “wobblers” meaning that people who commit them can either be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the district attorney’s judgment. Because the third of the three strikes could have been applied to any felony — not merely a serious or violent one — a prosecutor could jail someone for life for a crime that might have been charged as a misdemeanor elsewhere in the state. With the passage of Prop 36, judges regained discretion over sentencing, so that the punishment would fit the crime, not public hysteria or prosecutors’ ambitions. It’s part of the reason why after the reform passed, hundreds of prisoners from “tough-on-crime” strongholds like Orange, San Bernardino and Kern Counties were eligible to have their cases reviewed, while only three from liberal San Francisco qualified.
The spike in crime that opponents of Prop 36 predicted never came to pass. Of 2,000 former lifers released under the reform, only 4.7 percent have re-offended (over an 18-month period, on average) — far below California’s usual recidivism rate of 45.2 percent over a one-year period and 56.9 percent over two years. Additionally, the change in the law made 3,000 second-strikers who’d been incarcerated for a third non-violent, non-serious offense eligible to appeal their sentence to a judge. There are still 700 cases pending (mostly in Los Angeles), Champion says, but those who have been released have largely kept out of trouble. Only one in 20 reoffended, and those were largely for theft or drug charges.
“I hope the enduring lesson is that people are not hopeless recidivists,” Romano tells the New York Times. “Those who remain dangerous should be kept behind bars. But there are many people in prison who are no threat to public safety.”
Champion will tell you her clients are no angels. Unlike the famed Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, Champion says her colleague “Mike [Romano] calls us the Guilty Project. It’s true, we never claim that our clients are innocent, that’s never the basis of our argument,” she says. The prisoners broke the law — three times, at least — but her work is proving that slamming the convicts behind bars isn’t the solution.
They may not be saints, but they’re not monsters either.
Tag: Stanford
This Scorecard Could Help Make College More Affordable for Millions of Americans
When it comes to important decisions in a young person’s life, picking the right college (for both educational and financial reasons) ranks right at the top. So it makes sense to do some research beyond the rankings from the folks at U.S. News & World Report.
That’s where President Barack Obama’s College Scorecard comes in, as he says, to help you discover “where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” The U.S. Department of Education grades universities by alternative criteria like graduation and loan default rates, which are arguably more important than the number of Nobel Prize-winning professors a school employs.
Potential applicants might be interested to know, for example, that Harvard is the best deal for a top-10 school (the average student pays $14,445 annually) or that Columbia University in New York City has the highest loan default rate amongst all the Ivy League schools (2.9 percent, which is still far lower than national average of 14.7 percent).
“We know students and families are often overwhelmed in the college search process, but feel they lack the tools to sort through the information and decide which school is right for them,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says. “The College Scorecard provides a snapshot about an institution’s cost and value to help families make smart decisions about where to enroll.”
The site has drawn some criticism as being overly simplistic — it currently shows only four criteria — in grading something as intangible as the value of a liberal-arts education (although you can measure faculty degrees and student ratios). And others have called for data that would be directly relevant to at-risk students, like demographics and outcomes for racial minority, low-income or first-generation students.
Sure, the scores aren’t perfect, but the scorecard has started a conversation about college and affordability. It’s a start, providing plenty of interesting data. Here’s some findings we gleaned from the site, among the top 50 national universities:
- Georgia Institute of Technology (#35) is offering the best deal on a four-year degree from a national university. The average net price (meaning the cost students pay after scholarships and grants are deducted) is $9,116. Four years at Georgia Tech will get you just one at the country’s most expensive school, New York University (#32), where the average net price is $37,656.
- Harvard (#2) students, as you may expect, are most likely to don a cap and gown. They have the highest graduation rate — 97 percent — among the top colleges. Case Western Reserve University (#36) in Cleveland, on the other hand, has the lowest. Only 77.8 percent earn a diploma within six years.
- Alumni from Duke University (#8), in Durham, N.C., generally have the smallest bill to worry about after graduation. Families typically borrow $8,000 in federal loans, which works out to a repayment schedule of about $92 per month over 10 years. High-priced New York University again bottoms out the list. Families take out an average of $32,090 in federal loans, which means they’ll be paying about $369 a month for a decade.
- Graduates of Stanford University (#4), near Palo Alto, Calif., top the list in their ability to manage student loans. Only 0.7 percent default on their federal student loans within three years of beginning to pay them back. (No surprise, considering that Silicon Valley’s not too far away.) Happy Valley in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as lucrative. Eight percent of students from Penn State’s University Park campus (#48) default on their student loans.
Half a million unique visitors checked out the scorecard last year, but the government thinks it can reach an even wider audience: not just high schoolers and their families, but also nontraditional students older than the age of 25 (a demographic that accounts for half of all college students). Before next fall’s application season begins, the department plans to release long-promised data on employment rates and starting salaries, and there’s talk of eventually tying some of the federal government’s $150 billion in financial aid and state government’s $70 billion for public colleges to school performance.
Now more than ever, as unpaid student loans total an unbelievable $1.16 trillion, it’s a valuable tool to find a degree that’s worth more than just ink on paper.
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These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America
Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.
10. The Great Invisible
BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ
9. If You Build It
Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240
8. The Kill Team
An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.
7. Starfish Throwers
Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.
6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story
A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.
4. True Son
A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”
3. The Hand That Feeds
After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.
2. Rich Hill
Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
1. The Overnighters
Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.
Can Texting Help Improve Childhood Literacy?
Parents often have the best intentions to work with their young kids on the alphabet, rhyming words, and other literacy skills. But with the rush to make dinner and get the kids to bed, it can be difficult to carry through on those intentions.
In an effort to provide assistance, Stanford University researchers have developed a program that sends texts providing literacy-development tips to parents of preschoolers, and now, a new study shows that participating in the program improved the kids test scores. At a cost of less than $1 per parent, it’s an affordable intervention that catches parents at moments during the day when they just might find five minutes to squeeze in reading a book with their kids.
The researchers implemented a pilot program, called READY4K!, during the 2013-2014 school year at 31 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) preschools. These facilities that have long collaborated with Stanford as a sort of learning lab — testing the latest education techniques that the researchers develop. Of the 440 families with four-year-olds that participated in the program, half were sent literacy activity and fact texts three times a week such as, “By saying beginning word sounds, like ‘ttt’ in taco & tomato, you’re preparing your child 4 K,” or “Let your child hold the book. Ask what it is about. Follow the words with your finger as you read,” according to Motoko Rich of the New York Times. The other half received texts with school announcements and other placebo messages.
The results? Parents who received the literacy prompts spent more time engaged in reading-related activities with their kids than those in the control group did. Plus, their kids achieved higher scores on literacy tests than did kids in the control group, and that group of parents engaged with teachers more, too.
Susanna Loeb, the director of Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, tells May Wong of Phys.org, “The barrier to some of these positive parenting practices isn’t knowledge or desire, but it’s the crazy, busy lives. It’s difficult to have the time or focus to make all these choices as parents, and we’re helping parents do what they know they should do and what they want to do.” She also notes, “We know that changing parental behaviors has proven to be very difficult, so to get these positive effects from our texting program was very exciting.”
What might be even more exciting is the fact that this technique works for low-income and minority families, whose children often enter kindergarten with a significant vocabulary gap compared to higher-income peers.
“Parents really are the first teacher that a student has and are the most important teacher at that [early] age,” Loeb tells Wong. “They don’t have to do it the way teachers do it; they just have to work things in with their daily life.”
MORE: A Training Program That Improves Preschoolers’ Attention Spans
In a Battle Between College Students and Coal Companies, Who Do You Think Won?
When it comes to investing in the future, there are considerations that are much more important than money.
A year-long petition from the student-led organization Fossil Free Stanford has led California’s Stanford University to agree to divest its $18.7 billion endowment away from coal-mining companies due to concerns over climate change.
“We are proud that our university is responding to student calls for action on climate by demonstrating leadership,” Fossil Free Stanford said in a statement. “Stanford’s commitment to coal divestment is a major victory for the climate movement and for our generation.”
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Stanford’s trustees have promised to sell off stocks in companies whose primary business is in coal. The university will, however, hold onto their other stocks in fossil fuel — oil and natural gas. “Stanford has a responsibility as a global citizen to promote sustainability for our planet, and we work intensively to do so through our research, our educational programs and our campus operations,” said Stanford President John Hennessy in a statement. “Moving away from coal in the investment context is a small, but constructive, step while work continues, at Stanford and elsewhere, to develop broadly viable sustainable energy solutions for the future.”
Stanford is by far the biggest and most prestigious name to join the growing list of higher education institutions that are cutting ties from fossil fuel companies. As Reuters points out, San Francisco State University and Hampshire College in Massachusetts have also ditched their holdings in coal.
In fact, Stanford’s move could already be influencing colleges elsewhere, including other big-name universities. California Governor Jerry Brown suggested that the state’s UC system should study the possibility of divesting from the coal industry. And Harvard (which has the country’s largest endowment of $32 billion) is also hearing its fair share of student rumblings.
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“Having Stanford come out like this is huge,” Alli Welton, one of the student founders of Divest Harvard told Bloomberg. “The decision by Stanford will become a very powerful tool for other campaigns.”
Let’s hope Stanford’s divestment is just the beginning of this movement.
Read About the Remarkable Scientists Making Corn-Free Ethanol
When we first heard of the sustainable biofuel known as ethanol, it was heralded as a smart, home-grown alternative to our dependence on foreign oil. It turns out, however, that while corn-based fuel has a lot going for it, it’s far from being the most environmentally-friendly type of energy.
There are a whole slew of problems with ethanol — from the amount of land space, natural resources, and startling amount of money it takes to grow so much corn. (It takes, for example, about 800 gallons of water to grow a bushel of corn, which yields just three gallons of ethanol.) The challenge, it seems, is to find a way to reap all the benefits of ethanol without taking a toll on the planet.
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Now, it appears, researchers from Stanford University have developed an eco-friendly alternative to traditional ethanol. The best part? They’ve done it without using any corn or other crops.
As announced in a recent press release, the California-based team has figured out how to produce liquid ethanol from carbon monoxide gas using an electrode made of a form of copper.
Matthew Kanan, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford and co-author of study, told Reuters that the prototype could be ready in two to three years.
“I emphasize that these are just laboratory experiments today. We haven’t built a device,” Kanan said. “But it demonstrates the feasibility of using electricity that you could get from a renewable energy source to power fuel synthesis — in this case ethanol. There are some real advantages to doing that relative to using biomass to produce ethanol.”
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As Fox News puts it lightly, the team has pretty much produced fuel out of thin air. Just think — if this Stanford method were to actually leave the laboratory, it could completely eliminate acres and acres of crops, water and fertilizer needed to produce biofuel. Sounds like smart — not to mention, eco-friendly — move to increase our country’s energy independence.
Can Higher Education Be Free?
What are international would-be college students to do if they can’t afford the rising costs of a college education? Fortunately, for those that want to learn, a new university has just been accredited.
Fittingly called The University of the People, this four-year college is tuition-free and staffed mostly by volunteers from prestigious schools that charge a bit more, including Yale, NYU, and Stanford.
Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef opened the California-based college in 2009. With hopes to expand the curriculum, currently this college offers two- and four-year degrees in computer science and business administration. Students hail from 143 countries, and this month, seven students will become the first University of the People graduates.
Though perhaps you haven’t heard of it, tons of people have. Reshef told The National Journal that the University of the People has 1.2 million followers on Facebook, more than any other U.S. university except Harvard.
To join the college, students need to have a high school diploma, be proficient in English, and have an Internet connection. Even the Internet connectivity requirement is flexible — all lessons and conversations are posted in text form, so students without broadband don’t miss out on audio or video learning. Classes are nine weeks long and involve intensive virtual discussions, daily homework, weekly quizzes graded by international peers, and final exams overseen by a local proctor.
Earlier this year, the University of the People became an accredited university, recognized by the Department of Education. Reshef hopes that the accreditation will lead to more students, and ideally, more funding from philanthropists. By 2016, he hopes to have 5,000 students and raise $5 million.
“We’re building a model because we want to show that there is another way to deliver higher education,” Reshef told The National Journal. “It shouldn’t cost as much as it costs.” In addition to a volunteer base, the school uses open source technology and open education materials to keep costs at a minimum.
Students at the University of the People have the opportunity to meet and collaborate with hundreds of other students from around the globe. This cost-free, virtual education model is a promising way to get diplomas into the hands of some of the poorest students in the world.
Here’s an Insanely Low-Cost Microscope That Could Transform Science and Health Care
Peanut butter and jelly. Sonny and Cher. Black and white. Love and marriage. Science and the microscope.
With all of these, you can’t, as the classic tune declares, have one without the other. And that’s especially true when it comes to investigating and studying the physical and biological world — you simply can’t do it without a microscope. Yet this vital tool is still extremely costly, is cumbersome to transport, and is very fragile.
Until now. Stanford University scientist Manu Prakash has created a paper microscope called the Foldscope, which can magnify things up to 2000 times, be assembled in minutes and costs just 50 cents to produce, according to Geek.com. Durable and waterproof, this new type of microscope can especially come in handy when used by traveling doctors or scientists.
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Perhaps even more exciting? The bioengineer has initiated the “Thousand Micrososcopes” effort, which calls on 10,000 participants to test the Foldscope in a variety of settings to help create a open source biology/microscopy field manual. (Anyone can apply.) As it says on the website, the aim of Foldscope is “democratizing science by developing scientific tools that can scale up to match problems in global health and science education.”
Here’s to hoping the Foldscope (which looks like a toy and folds like origami) stimulates the next generation of budding scientists and inquisitive young minds — or anyone who wants to zoom in a little closer on molecular life.
One Small Tweak Made a World of Difference in This Computer Science Class
Something revolutionary happened last spring at the University of California Berkeley. For the first time ever, as far as digitized records indicate, more women than men enrolled in Professor Dan Garcia’s introductory computer science course, “Beauty and Joy of Computing.” Men have long outnumbered women in computer science majors, earning 81.8% of the bachelor’s degrees according to a 2010 National Science Foundation report, and are far more represented in careers in the field. So professors at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere have retooled their computer science classes, especially introductory ones, with the hopes of attracting more women to them.
Garcia told Kristen V. Brown of the San Francisco Chronicle that he conceived his computer science class for non majors as being more than “just programming,” and he made it “kind of right-brained as well.”
Sumer Mohammed took Garcia’s course without plans to major in computer science, and the class changed her mind. She’s now an electrical engineering and computer science major. In recent years Berkeley and Stanford have about doubled their computer science enrollment among women, who now comprise 21% of the students in this discipline at each school.
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This Is the Brainiest Way to Inspire Young Scientists
When Stanford neurobiology professor William Newsome’s kids were in middle school, he had a smart idea. What better way to get young students interested in science than showing them some real preserved brains? Brain Day has been an annual event for more than twenty years now. On February 3 Stanford neuroscience students Ivan Millan and Sammy Katta packed up some brains at Newsome’s lab and took them to middle schools in Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
From its beginnings as a visit to one school, Brain Day has expanded to serve ten area middle schools. The graduate students ask the middle schoolers to be respectful of the brains that have been donated to science, and then they all get a chance to observe them. They compared human brains to the brains of monkeys, dogs, and sheep, and learned about their functions.
Amy Adams writes for Stanford News Service that one student was so inspired by Brain Day that he went on to study neuroscience in college. The student wrote to teacher Terry Noeth, “After adjusting to the awful smell of the brain slices, all I could think was: Woah. This strip of tissue used to be someone. This piece of brain used to think and love. I was so fascinated that I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to do something, anything, that related to the brain and how it makes us who we are.”
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