Tuesday, October 13, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, TUESDAY, OCTIBER 13, 2015






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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS


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Support Rasmea Odeh in court Oct. 14 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

This is a critical moment in legal process.


Stand with Rasmea and fill the appeals courthouse in Cincinnati! We will organize a support rally in front of the courthouse at 8 AM EDT on Wednesday, October 14, 2015, and then fill the courtroom immediately thereafter, as Rasmea's defense and the prosecution each present their oral arguments to a three-judge panel.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015, at 8 a.m. EDT (appeal starts at 9 a.m. EDT)
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit
540 Potter Stewart U.S. Courthouse, 100 E. 5th Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Register here to join us in Cincinnati on October 14. Visit www.justice4rasmea.org and www.StopFBI.net. Please email justice4rasmea@uspcn.org with any questions.

Explanation:
The Rasmea Defense Committee contends that Judge Gershwin Drain did not allow for a full and fair trial, and believes that is why Rasmea was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison and deportation. We are confident that she has solid arguments on appeal, and wrote in late July that the "defense argues conclusively that the government 'never really addresses the basic constitutional deprivations asserted in Ms. Odeh’s opening appellate brief,' and that Rasmea is 'entitled to present her complete defense to the jury,' which can only happen in a new trial."

After the three appellate judges hear oral arguments on October 14, a decision will be made between two and six months later. If the court agrees with the defense and overturns the conviction and the sentencing, the case gets sent back to the prosecution to possibly re-file charges, whereupon the entire trial process begins anew. But this time, evidence of torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), etc., would be allowed into the courtroom.

If the court upholds the conviction but disagrees with the sentence, the appellate judges send new sentencing guidelines back to Drain for re-sentencing. In the worst possible scenario, her conviction and sentencing would be upheld, meaning that she would have to serve 18 months in prison and then be deported. If this happens, the defense could ask that all of the 6th Circuit appellate court judges, not just the three panelists, review the case, as a last ditch effort to win the appeal.

We are fundraising, organizing public events, and pitching Rasmea's story to media across the country and the world.

This is a critical moment - support Rasmea Odeh in court!
Register here to join us in Cincinnati on October 14. For more information email justice4rasmea@uspcn.org with any questions.

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California Speaking Tour of David Sheen, Oct. 21-29, 2015

The Bullet, the Ballot, and the Boycott: Racism in Israel Today


Oct. 21-29, 2015, independent Canadian-Israeli journalist and filmmaker David Sheen will present the Bullet, the Ballot & the Boycott at venues in California.  He will cover Israeli incitement to racist violence, the focus of his on-the-ground reporting for the past five years.

David will describe how top Israeli political and religious leaders use dehumanizing discourse to inspire vigilante attacks toward Palestinians, Africans and other non-Jews, especially during the 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.  It will include material that Sheen presented at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Brussels, as well as new information never before been made public in English.

David's speaking schedule is as follows.  To make arrangements for David to come to your event or to add the name of your organization as a tour endorser, please call 510-236-4250 or write to us at solidarity@ism-norcal.org.

Wed., Oct. 21
6:00pm
San Jose State University, details to follow
SJSU Students for Justice in Palestine
https://www.facebook.com/sjsusjp

Thu., Oct. 22
TBA
Berkeley, details to follow
Zaytuna University
www.zaytuna.edu

Sun., Oct. 25
2:00pm
Uptown Body & Fender, 401 26th St., Oakland
ISM-NorCal & JVP-Bay Area
510-236-4250, ism-norcal.org
$10 suggested donation


Thu., Oct. 29
TBA
The Markaz, 5998 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles
The Markaz & JVP-LA
www.themarkaz.org 310.657.5511


www.ism-norcal.org
ISM Northern California | Supporting Palestinian-led non...
Northern California branch of the Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods...

View on www.ism-norcal.org
Tour organizer: ISM Support Group in Northern California


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International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity

AN EVENING OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE CUBAN PEOPLE

Featuring Kenia Serrano Puig, President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)  

Friday November 13, 7:30pm

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts

339 11th Street, Richmond CA 94801-3105

Doors Open 6:30pm

$10-20 Donation at the Door

(nobody turned away for lack of funds)

Students and children free admission


This will be a unique opportunity to hear from the Cuban perspective about the new stage of U.S.-Cuba relations and the role that the U.S. Cuba solidarity movement can play in ending the U.S. blockade.

PROGRAM:

Keynote Speaker, Kenia Serrano Puig, President of ICAP

Welcome by Gayle McLaughlin, Richmond City Council Member
Dr. Laura Gomez, recently graduated from the Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM)
Leima Martinez, ICAP North America Division
Walter Turner, KPFA Host of Africa Today 

Musical performance by a local group

ICAP is a social organization founded on December 30, 1960 for the purpose of promoting and explaining to the peoples of the world the relations of solidarity that sparked the Cuban Revolution. ICAP is the vehicle to reach around the globe to people who are in solidarity with Cuba. ICAP is that interface that strengthens the network of solidarity, while representing the Cuban people, and delivering a strong message that solidarity not only benefits Cuba but the peoples of the world who are aspiring to promote the idea that a better world is possible for all.

Initiated by the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity

Co-sponsors: Global Exchange, Richmond-Regla Sister City Association, Berkeley-Palma Soriano Sister City Association.


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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

Sign the Petition:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/petition.php


Urge Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case. Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In 1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In 2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

In solidarity,

James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA

News Updates

  • Death Row Stories
    Kevin Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be aired on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to be viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.
Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up
- from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
 
Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin.  He has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence.  In a dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d 581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:

  The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their bedsides?

  The sole surviving victim of the murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr. Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's not the man who did it."

  Josh Ryen's description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.

  These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.

  The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been discredited…         (Continue reading this document at: http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

     This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

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Free Albert Woodfox!

On June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement. He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party. Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

http://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=35593&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1506EAIAR2&ea.url.id=414689&forwarded=true

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

 

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families



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MUMIA'S FINAL APPEAL FOR HEALTHCARE DENIED!

Last night Mumia got notice that the final appeal of his PA Department of Corrections grievance was denied. Listen to his reaction here.

This denial comes on top of the magistrate Judge’s proposal to deny Mumia's right to treatment last week.

Remember-- one of the reasons the Judge gave was her claim that Mumia had not "exhausted his administrative remedies" or received a final denial of his request for care. Now he has received that denial.

We know that withholding Mumia’s care is immoral and illegal. We are confident that we will win this battle in court- but we can’t do it alone.





We have 3 days left to raise $2,948 to support Mumia’s legal team in securing his right to hepatitis C treatment!

If you have already joined us, we’re inviting you to ask one friend to match your gift. We need about 50 more freedom fighters to join us to reach our goal— and we want you to make that happen with us!

If you haven’t given yet- now is the time to make a contribution for Mumia. Will you join us?

Health care is a human right- for Mumia, and for all prisoners. Let's prove it.‪ #freemumia #fight4mumia

Reply directly to this email to respond to the campaign owner, Prison Radio . Visit the campaign page to view all comments and updates for this project.

Help spread the word about the campaign!
PRISONRADIO.ORG

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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
 
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at work updating the website and developing an even more formidable and dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system, which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence. Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the 20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately, you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be certified in different work.

The month of the hearing has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom, Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

Write: Lorenzo Johnson
            DF 1036
            SCI Mahanoy
            301 Morea Rd.
            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Through JPay using the code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
                                     or
              Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com

Have a wonderful day!
- The Team to Free Lorenzo Johnson


freelorenzojohnson.org

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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/


On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge's approval, repeatedly told the jury "you don't need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney." And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE 'ALTERED' PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney's appeal.

Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney.  Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search "Pinkney").

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist."

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an "Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers' Association of America]" demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

Contributions for Rev. Pinkney's defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.

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COURAGE TO RESIST

 http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action--write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning's clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks' whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning's release from military prison.

It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning's outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.

Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea's clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General

2200 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-2200

Army Clemency and Parole Board

251 18th St, Suite 385

Arlington, VA 22202-3532

Directorate of Inmate Administration

Attn: Boards Branch

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

1301 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning's sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message: "Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning's sentence to time served."  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning's upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning's new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution's—and the trial judge's—misconduct during last year's trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees at this critical stage!


Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org


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B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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1) Arkansas: Judge Delays Executions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


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2) Two Outside Reviews Say Cleveland Officer Acted Reasonably in Shooting Tamir Rice, 12
By

Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.

Those opinions, reached separately by a Colorado prosecutor and a former F.B.I. supervisory special agent, were released Saturday night by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, whose office will ultimately present evidence in the case to a grand jury to decide on possible criminal charges.

“The question is not whether every officer would have reacted the same way,” Kimberly A. Crawford, the retired F.B.I. agent, wrote in her report, which noted that Officer Loehmann had no way of knowing Tamir’s gun was fake. “Rather, the relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer, confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary.”The reports, which were commissioned by the prosecutor’s office, come almost 11 months after the shooting outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014. Footage of the shooting was captured on a surveillance camera, and Tamir’s name quickly became among the most prominent in a series of black men and boys whose deaths at the hands of the police were memorialized in Twitter hashtags and protest chants.

Both Ms. Crawford and S. Lamar Sims, the prosecutor from Colorado, said in their reports that they were evaluating Officer Loehmann’s actions under the United States Constitution, not Ohio state law.

“There can be no doubt that Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking,” Mr. Sims wrote. But he added that “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.”

Tamir’s death resulted in a lengthy series of investigations that have frustrated some activists, who see the shooting as a clear case of police overreach and have called for the arrests of Officer Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, who drove his police cruiser to within feet of Tamir but who did not fire his weapon. Some have criticized Officer Garmback for parking his cruiser so close.

“To suggest that Officer Garmback should have stopped the car at another location is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid,” Mr. Sims wrote.

Mr. McGinty said in a statement that his office continued to investigate the case and had invited the Rice family’s lawyers to submit their own expert reports.

“We are not reaching any conclusions from these reports,” Mr. McGinty said. “The gathering of evidence continues and the grand jury will evaluate it all.”

Tamir’s age added to the outrage of many activists, though the police on the scene said in interviews that they thought he was several years older. In her report, Ms. Crawford said Tamir’s age was not relevant in determining whether Officer Loehmann acted reasonably.

“When he exited the police car, the officer was likely focused on Rice’s hands as they moved to his waist and lifted his jacket, and not on Rice’s age,” Ms. Crawford wrote. “Even if Officer Loehmann was aware of Rice’s age, it would not have made his use of force unreasonable. A 12-year-old with a gun, unquestionably old enough to pull a trigger, poses a threat equal to that of a full-grown adult in a similar situation.”

Mr. Sims noted that the officers did not know Tamir’s age. A dispatcher did not pass on the 911 caller’s statements that the gun was “probably fake” and that the person holding it was “probably a juvenile.”

Jonathan S. Abady, a Rice family lawyer, said in a statement that “we now have grave concerns that there will be no criminal prosecution.”

“Prosecutors exercise substantial influence over the grand jury process and whether an indictment will issue or not,” he said. “The video footage and other evidence readily available from the outset made clear that this was a completely unreasonable use of deadly force against Tamir.”

Mr. McGinty provided no timeline of when a grand jury would decide on charges, but said more reports had been commissioned by his office and would be released as they were finished.




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3) Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinian Officials Say
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — An Israeli retaliatory airstrike against a Hamas military target in Gaza resulted in the deaths of a pregnant Palestinian woman and a toddler on Sunday, according to Palestinian officials. And a Palestinian woman and a police officer were injured by a blast after the woman tried to ignite a gas balloon in her car, according to Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.

After more than a week of bloodshed that spread from the West Bank and Jerusalem to cities across Israel, the violence appeared to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.

The woman and child killed at dawn Sunday appeared to be the first Palestinian civilian casualties of an Israeli airstrike since a cease-fire ended 50 days of fierce fighting in Gaza in the summer of 2014. The Israeli military said the strikes were in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip overnight.Together with Israeli forces’ fatal shooting of a total of nine Palestinians during violent protests along the Gaza border over the weekend, the latest events added an increasingly volatile and unpredictable dimension to the latest wave of violence, despite the beginning of an international effort to calm the atmosphere.

The mounting death toll in Gaza seemed to contradict the Israeli Army’s stated goal of limiting civilian casualties in order to avoid further inflaming the situation.

Amos Harel, the military affairs analyst at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, described it as “a problematic turning point,” writing on Sunday that the army needed to investigate what had happened along the border and what orders the forces deployed there had been given.

Later Sunday morning, shots were fired from Gaza at an Israeli construction vehicle working with the army along the border, but no injuries were reported, according to the military.

So far this month, four Israelis have been killed in Palestinian gun and knife attacks in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and several more have been injured in about 10 copycat stabbings. Israeli forces have fatally shot at least 20 Palestinians, many of them teenagers, according to data compiled by the Palestinian health ministry and Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group. Some of the Palestinians were killed after carrying out attacks; others in clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and along the border with Gaza. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been reported injured.

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke by telephone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority over the weekend, and a delegation of emissaries from the so-called quartet of Middle East peacemakers — the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union — were expected to arrive in the region on Tuesday.

Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Kerry that Israel expected the Palestinian Authority to stop what he called “its wild and mendacious incitement, which is causing the current wave of terrorism,” according to a statement from Mr. Netanyahu’s office.

Recently, Palestinian anger has focused on a contested holy site in the Old City of Jerusalem revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock now stand. Palestinian officials, including Mr. Abbas, have accused Israel of plotting to divide the sacred compound, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s repeated denials. Mr. Netanyahu’s office said Mr. Kerry had clarified in the phone call that “the United States is aware of the fact that it is Israel’s policy to maintain the status quo and not change it.”

At the start of his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel for inciting the violence. After a weekend of stormy demonstrations by Arab citizens of Israel, as well as counterdemonstrations by right-wing Israeli Jews, Mr. Netanyahu said he had approved a call-up of 16 reserve companies of border police officers in order to restore security and order.

“It is preferable to call up a massive force in advance to deal with possible developments than to call them up after the event,” he said.

Hatem Abdul Qader, an official in Mr. Abbas’s mainstream Fatah party in Jerusalem, told the official Palestinian radio station, “Even if he summons NATO, the issue is that we are resisting occupation.”

The Israeli military said its warplanes had struck two Hamas weapons manufacturing facilities in the Gaza Strip overnight in retaliation for rocket fire against Israel. Al Resalah, a news site run by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that dominates Gaza, said that at least two missiles had struck a site of the group’s military wing.

Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesman for the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave, said that the blast had caused a house to collapse, killing a pregnant woman, Noor Hassan, 30, and a relative, Rahaf Hassan, 2, who was found under the rubble. According to other reports, the child was Ms. Hassan’s daughter.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the army was looking into the reports of civilian deaths in Gaza. In an earlier statement, the military said it held Hamas responsible for any acts of aggression from Gaza. “This weekend, we have seen clear incitement encouraging the breach of Israel’s sovereignty,” it added, pointing to violent confrontations that it said threatened residents of southern Israel.

A rocket fired from Gaza late Saturday was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system south of the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, according to the military.

The rocket fire came after the deadly protests along the Gaza border. On Saturday, two Palestinian boys — Khalil Othman, 15, and Marwan Breikh, 13 — were fatally shot by Israeli forces near Abassan, east of Khan Younis, according to Gaza health officials, and a third Palestinian, Jihad Obeid, 22, died of wounds sustained on Friday in similar protests. Hamas said that Mr. Obeid had been a member of its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, and praised him for taking “the path of jihad and resistance.”

The Israeli military said it was trying to quell crowds that had hurled rocks, rolled burning tires and tried to breach the fence separating Gaza from Israel. In one case, dozens of Palestinians managed to enter Israeli territory. Five were caught and detained for questioning, and the rest retreated back to Gaza, according to the military.

The circumstances of the blast in the car remained unclear. The police said in a statement that an officer had pulled over a person driving in a suspicious manner near the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, northeast of Jerusalem, and that the driver had shouted “Allahu akbar” and set off an explosion.

Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the police, wrote on Twitter that police officers had prevented a “female terrorist from making her way to Jerusalem this morning.”

But the independent Palestinian news agency Maan quoted an unnamed witness as saying that an electrical problem had ignited a small fire inside the woman’s car, and that she had panicked and started to scream.

The police identified the woman as a 31-year-old who lived in the West Bank city of Jericho and in East Jerusalem.

Majd Al Waheidi contributed reporting from Gaza.


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4) Refugees, Stuck in Grinding U.S. Process, Wait and Hope
By and


UNITED NATIONS — A hushed room of diplomats listened intently as a man who called himself Adnan described his escape from Mosul, Iraq, when the Islamic State laid siege to the city in 2014: As a gay man, he told them via videolink from Lebanon, he knew he would be killed, and that even members of his family would not be sorry.

Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, who organized the meeting, hailed his testimony as part of her government’s efforts to raise the plight of gays and lesbians at the Security Council. But even as she did so, Adnan’s hopes for a new life in the United States came in for a rude awakening. Case workers vetting his refugee claim told him that although he was an ideal candidate for resettlement in the United States — a gay man at high risk of persecution — he would have to wait for at least a year.The reason: American immigration officials had stopped coming to Lebanon to interview potential refugees from Iraq and Syria, because the United States Embassy compound outside Beirut was being renovated, and they considered no other location safe enough to house immigration officials for the night.

The paradox did not escape him. “I am eligible to speak at the Security Council and not eligible to travel to the U.S.A.,” Adnan said in an interview in Lebanon a few weeks later. He uses a pseudonym because he does not feel safe in Lebanon.

Adnan’s predicament highlights the many bureaucratic hurdles and security concerns that make refugee admissions to the United States so tortuously slow, even as pressure mounts on the Obama administration to increase the number of refugees it accepts from the world’s widening war zones.

The Obama administration has promised a gradual increase in the total refugees it resettles — from a current ceiling of 70,000 each year to 85,000 next year and 100,000 in 2017. That falls far short of what refugee advocates are demanding, but American officials say even the current goals will not be easy to pull off.

“It’s a stretch,” said Anne C. Richard, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. “It’s going to take lot of effort, a lot of cooperation.”

It is United States policy to accept the most vulnerable of those fleeing war and persecution abroad — torture victims, widows with children, and religious or sexual minorities, like Adnan, who face heightened risks. But the White House is under intense scrutiny to ensure that terrorists do not slip in with refugees, so the process for vetting and admitting refugees takes up to two years, requiring several rounds of background checks across a network of intelligence agencies, plus a face-to-face interview to check if an applicant has a valid refugee claim.

At least 18,000 Syrians and 55,000 Iraqis are in the pipeline, having been vetted by the United Nations and now waiting to have their cases examined by the United States — Adnan among them. About half are children.

They are part of what the United Nations calls a historic global displacement, with nearly 60 million people forced to flee their homes because of war and persecution. Hundreds of thousands, including Syrians and Iraqis, have poured into Europe in recent months in the Continent’s worst refugee crisis in decades. Germany alone has pledged to accept 800,000 refugees.

Ms. Richard said she sympathized with calls to take more, but found those unrealistic. “My heart is completely with them,” she said of refugee advocates, adding that the Obama administration was looking at how to streamline the process “and move it faster without cutting corners on security.”

In Lebanon alone, there are more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria; by local law, they are unable to work, and most are slipping into poverty.

For those waiting to come to the United States, the delays in Lebanon are compounded by a Department of Homeland Security rule. Because of what a department official vaguely described as “the security situation in Lebanon,” visiting immigration officers can stay and work only inside the United States Embassy compound, which is undergoing a major face-lift. Those are the most stringent security restrictions in Lebanon, where other Western governments allow their diplomats to live in apartments in Beirut.

Because of the renovations, the last time Homeland Security officers conducted interviews in Lebanon was in September 2014, the official said.

“They will resume in the near future,” Ms. Richard said by phone from Washington, “but I don’t know exactly when.”

Among those waiting is the family of Ara Agop Baljian, Armenian Christians from Syria who fled Aleppo in September 2012 when their neighborhood suddenly became a front line in the war between government and rebel forces.

“Fighters and soldiers were all around our neighborhood,” his wife, Karloine Aywabian, 31, said. “We had to leave because of the risk of getting killed by a random gunshot or during one of the exchanges of shelling.”

The couple, their three children and Mr. Baljian’s mother found shelter in a Beirut neighborhood with other Armenians. They were told they were ideal candidates for resettlement in the United States: It was hard to imagine that, as members of a religious minority, they could go home to Aleppo anytime soon, and they had relatives in Southern California who were willing to help them adjust.

Still, it took two years for American officials to process their paperwork. The final hurdle remains the coveted face-to-face interview. They have waited for one since December 2014. It has grown harder and harder, the couple said, to make ends meet on the under-the-table wages that Mr. Baljian earns as a jeweler’s assistant.

“A few days ago, a man called saying they will call soon,” he said in late September. “But nothing yet.”

The United Nations refugee agency in Lebanon has stopped making resettlement referrals to the United States, because it does not want people to wait indefinitely for an American official to come to Beirut to conduct an interview.

Refugee advocates say the delays also explain why some people risk their lives and pay smugglers to help them sail to Europe. “Nothing happens with their case for two years, and then they get on a boat,” said Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which helped Adnan file his papers for resettlement in the United States.

“It’s hard to advise people against that,” Ms. Heller said.

So far, fewer than 2,000 Syrians have been resettled in the United States. By comparison, nearly 20,000 Iraqis have come to the United States over the last year, in part because a special category of refugee slots has been reserved for those who have worked with American government or aid agencies in Iraq.

Adnan is a former medical student, and he speaks perfect English. In Mosul, an Islamic State recruiter came for him last year. He knew that Adnan was gay and told him that he could either join the group’s ranks or die. Adnan refused.

Home was no longer safe. His father did not know of his sexuality until the Islamic State outed him, and was so incensed that he threatened to hand Adnan to the group himself.

Adnan escaped to Lebanon in August 2014. He waited eight months to receive a certificate from the United Nations refugee agency qualifying him as a candidate for resettlement abroad. He has not received any relief in months — funding cuts have forced the United Nations to slash benefits in recent months — and he has been working odd jobs, sometimes as a waiter, other times as a medical assistant. He blogs about gay rights under the pseudonym Taim. He has grown increasingly worried about his safety in the conservative community where he is living and waiting.

“They are thinking about us as numbers, cases, statistics,” he said. “Each one of us is an individual with his own life, his own feelings. We lost everything, and we are wasting days of waiting for the unknown. Wasting our youth.”

Somini Sengupta reported from the United Nations, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Maher Samaan contributed reporting from Beirut.


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5) Million Man March, 20 Years On
By Charles M. Blow

WASHINGTON — Saturday morning, with the crispness of fall in the air and wispy clouds overhead, an impressive throng of black bodies — and a smattering of other colored ones — gathered on the Mall, facing the steps of the Capitol.

They had gathered for the “Justice or Else” rally convened by the Nation of Islam’s controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, to mark the 20th anniversary of the group’s historic Million Man March. And that’s the rub.

The question is, as it was in 1995: Can you separate the march from the messenger, the lightning rod 82-year-old Farrakhan? The answer: Not exactly.

The rally was in a way a pageant for Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam — their power and prowess, their ability to organize and attract allies, their beliefs and customs — and it centered on Farrakhan as the celebrity father figure.

This is not unlike 1995 when the march was conceived as a “day of atonement,” focusing on personal responsibility, with black nationalist overtones. As the writer Salim Muwakkil told The Times then: “Historically, black people have always turned to black nationalism during hostile racial times.”

Although the Million Man March was undoubtedly successful as a convening, criticism of Farrakhan was blistering.

A release by the American Jewish Congress called Farrakhan “one of the country’s most prominent and unrepentant public bigots.”

A New York Times editorial at the time blasted Farrakhan and his fellow organizer Benjamin Chavis Jr., comparing them to “white racists of the previous generation” and saying “they want to prolong and exploit the nation’s racial divisions” while promoting “the twisted Farrakhan ideology.”

Men in the black gay community were conflicted about whether to come, both because of homophobic statements made by supporters of the march and by Farrakhan himself, who wrote in his 1993 book “A Torchlight for America,” “We must change homosexual behavior and get rid of the circumstances that bring it about.”

The exclusion of women was also debated. Adolph Reed, a black professor of political science, who was then at Northwestern University and is now at the University of Pennsylvania, said then, “The message of Farrakhan’s march is fundamentally conservative and blatantly sexist.”

This time, Farrakhan seemed acutely aware of his critics, and seemed to want to pre-emptively address them. But even his efforts to exalt women and include queer-identifying people while continuing to honor and affirm men was framed in tones of patriarchy.

There was the inordinate amount of time spent talking about women’s “wombs” as a rationale for honor, the presentation of how women should dress to “earn respect,” the mention that “a woman who’s beautiful and can’t cook is a killer in the kitchen.”

Even as he said to L.G.B.T.Q. people, “We are not your judges,” he framed queerness in the sinful negative, invoking the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman to whom Jesus said, “Go, and sin no more.”

Indeed, Farrakhan’s speech was more sermon and proselytization than social justice call to action. He didn’t spend much time on the enigmatic mantra “justice or else,” which raises more questions than it answered.Justice for what? Anything and everything, apparently.

The word justice has a broadness and blankness that any pain can be projected onto it and reflected off it. The event’s website says, “We want equal justice under the law,” but under the heading “The Demand,” there is a list of groups for whom justice is sought, but not the injustices themselves. The only quasi-specific demands are “an immediate end to police brutality and mob attacks” and “We want land.”

And then, “or else” what? The answer seemed to vary with the broad coalition of speakers on Saturday, but as for Farrakhan’s two-hour speech, there seemed to be a religious allusion: Grant justice, America, or be subject to the divine judgment of God.

But, during an interview on TV One, he had suggested “or else” meant the withholding of economic participation by the aggrieved.

More disturbingly, this summer, in what the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, The Final Call, called a “trip South to promote the ‘Justice or Else!’ gathering,” Farrakhan said at a Florida church: “If the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us, stalk them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling.”

Farrakhan and rally organizers took pains to include overtures to Black Lives Matter, the predominant black movement of this moment. Some people from the movement even spoke at the rally. Many attendees were no doubt spurred by the events elevated by the movement. But this is an alliance of which that movement should be wary, specifically at a time that many conservatives are trying to paint it as a hate group.

In 1995, Ronald Walters, a political science professor, told The Times, “For most blacks, this is about pain.” He continued, “The discussion of Farrakhan is a side issue for us.” Maybe that sensibility still stands.



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6) Relatives of Black Man Shot by Off-Duty Officer in Texas Question Police Actions
By

HOUSTON — For 15 minutes, a man shot by an off-duty officer here lay bleeding from two gunshots in his abdomen as the responding officers stood by without providing first aid. At one point, as the victim, a 53-year-old black man, raised his head, an officer used his foot to keep the man’s face on the pavement, according to a dashboard camera video supplied to The New York Times recently by the man’s relatives.

From the time the episode was first reported, at 2:17 a.m. on July 9, 2014, and including the time the man, Charles K. Goodridge, lay unaided on the ground, it took more than an hour for him to arrive at an emergency room. An hour after his arrival at the hospital in an ambulance, he was dead.

The length of time Mr. Goodridge was left unassisted has angered his relatives and has been criticized by two witnesses to the episode and by law enforcement officials. And like the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Walter L. Scott in North Charleston, S.C., the Goodridge case has raised racially charged questions, not only about what led to the shooting but the actions of the police officers in the aftermath.

“He was shot twice, bleeding, and nobody did anything,” said Mr. Goodridge’s mother, Lucille, 75. “I don’t think that if he was white they would have just left him like that. A dog would have gotten more attention than he did.”

It is unclear if Mr. Goodridge, a former computer programmer, would have survived if the officers had rendered aid before the paramedics arrived. But experts on police procedure and law enforcement officials who examined the video said the off-duty officer and his colleagues should have done more to assist Mr. Goodridge.

He was shot by an off-duty Harris County deputy constable after getting into a confrontation with the officer at an apartment complex northwest of Houston. The video shows Mr. Goodridge sprawled in a parking lot before an ambulance arrives, as officers put up crime scene tape and put him in handcuffs. They talk to him and walk by him, but at other times they leave him alone, bleeding, and are not in view of the camera.

“They didn’t care that the suspect needed attention,” said Timothy T. Williams Jr., a retired Los Angeles detective and an expert on police practices. “There was a callousness as it relates to his injuries. It was almost like, ‘We’ll get to you when we get to you.’ ”

The treatment of Mr. Goodridge illustrates complicated issues of policing, compassion and medical care on which there is little consensus on proper police procedure.

Some police agencies require officers who use force to perform first aid to injured suspects. For instance, the Police Department in Greenville, N.C., has a policy stating that “the involved officer will render first aid to the individual until the arrival of E.M.S. unit.” But many departments do not explicitly require first aid, and officers follow more general protocols by simply ensuring paramedics arrive.

The Houston officers seen in the video work for the Precinct 4 constable’s office. Its top official, Constable Mark Herman, did not respond to requests for comment. At the time of the shooting, the department was led by Ron Hickman, who has since been appointed the Harris County sheriff. A spokesman for Sheriff Hickman referred questions to Constable Herman.

In Texas, constables and their deputies are state-licensed officers who perform duties similar to those of police officers, but who also serve eviction notices. It was unclear if the actions of the officers were being investigated by prosecutors. A spokesman for the Harris County district attorney, Jeff McShan, said the office does not disclose “what we are or are not investigating.”

A spokesman for the ambulance service, Cypress Creek E.M.S., declined to comment. Its response time of 10 minutes did not exceed the median response time for Harris County, which is 12 minutes. However, the overall delay of more than an hour in getting Mr. Goodridge to the hospital was called excessive by experts. Several factors contributed to the length of time, including a 30-mile trip to Ben Taub Hospital in Houston. In addition, dispatchers in the constable’s office initially contacted an ambulance service that did not serve that area. and then sent Cypress Creek E.M.S. to the wrong address, according to audio recordings of dispatch communications.

The officers appeared to be unaware of the problems getting an ambulance to the scene and put the responsibility of tending to Mr. Goodridge’s injuries on the paramedics, according to the dispatch communications. During the wait for the ambulance, the two officers seen most prominently in the video — Sgt. John M. Walton, who is white, and Deputy Constable Andres Rosas, who is Hispanic — asked dispatchers if paramedics were on their way and urged them to get E.M.S. there. Sergeant Walton, whose patrol car supplied the video, was asked if deputies needed additional assistance, but he told dispatchers that they did not.

“All we need to do is get this guy on an ambulance,” he added in the audio recordings.

Dr. Michael M. Baden, a forensic pathologist and the former chief medical examiner for New York City, reviewed the autopsy report and said that Mr. Goodridge could have survived if he had arrived at the hospital sooner.“They watched while he was bleeding to death, and that bleeding could have been stopped because it didn’t hit any major organs,” he said. “The fact that they didn’t do any CPR in this instance probably didn’t matter much. The thing that had to be done in this case is stop the internal bleeding, and you can’t do that from the outside. You’ve got to do it in the operating room.”

A Harris County grand jury in June declined to indict Deputy Constable Francisco J. Ruiz, the officer who shot Mr. Goodridge. The shooting unfolded at the Village in the Woods, an apartment complex in Cypress. Mr. Goodridge had moved to Houston from the Boston area and had struggled after suing his employer, Hewlett-Packard, in 2007 and 2008 for racial discrimination and nonpayment of overtime, according to court documents. The case was settled in 2009, but he lost his job as part of the settlement and lost touch with relatives.

He was evicted from his apartment at the Village in the Woods, but continued to return to the complex and had been given a trespass warning, the authorities said. Deputy Ruiz also lived there and worked while off duty as a security guard at the complex. That morning, Deputy Ruiz was patrolling the complex at about 2 a.m. and spotted Mr. Goodridge in the fitness center.

Deputy Ruiz, who is Hispanic, told prosecutors that he went to get his gun and his badge and entered the fitness center to tell Mr. Goodridge that he was not supposed to be on the property. He tried to handcuff Mr. Goodridge, but Mr. Goodridge pulled away, and Deputy Ruiz followed him to the parking lot, where Mr. Goodridge attacked him, according to the deputy’s version of events.

The deputy “became fearful that Goodridge was going to take his gun and kill him with it, so when he gained some distance from Goodridge, Ruiz pulled the gun and shot Goodridge twice,” Mr. McShan said, summarizing what the officer told prosecutors.

Mr. Goodridge’s brother, Gary, is skeptical of that description. “He had never been in a fight,” he said of his brother. “To think that for the first time in his life he’s going to go after someone who’s a policeman and has a gun is absolutely unbelievable.”

As Mr. Goodridge lay in the parking lot, two people who lived in the complex said they heard the officers tell him to “stop talking” and “stop moving.” One of the witnesses, a woman who did not want her name used out of fear of retribution from the authorities, said she could hear Mr. Goodridge moaning.

“There was no sense of urgency,” she said. “It was not only just a long period of time. There were long times in between anybody even acknowledging he was on the ground.”




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7) Two Reviews of Tamir Rice Shooting in Cleveland Are Seen as Shielding Police
By

For almost a year, activists in Cleveland have pushed for the arrest of Officer Tim Loehmann, the rookie patrolman who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice near a recreation center in November.

Protesters have marched through Cleveland, shared their outrage on Twitter and even used a little-known section of Ohio law to directly ask a judge to issue arrest warrants. But Officer Loehmann has remained free, and a pair of outside reports released Saturday concluded that he was “reasonable” in deciding to shoot Tamir, who was carrying a replica gun that looked much like the real thing.

Though the investigation will continue, and a grand jury will ultimately decide on charges, some believe that those reports, which were commissioned and released by the prosecutor’s office in Cuyahoga County, signal that an indictment is unlikely.“It will be read, understandably, as a tragic foreshadowing of where the case may be headed: no arrest, no charges, no indictments,” said Rhonda Y. Williams, the director of the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Dr. Williams was among several activists who, using an obscure Ohio statute, have signed affidavits seeking the arrests of Officer Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback. Officer Garmback drove their patrol car within feet of Tamir but did not fire his gun. Though a judge found probable cause on some possible charges, no arrest warrants have been issued.

The reports released Saturday night — one written by a retired supervisory special agent with the F.B.I., the other by a Colorado prosecutor — examined the shooting’s legality under the United States Constitution, not Ohio law. But each reviewer found that Officer Loehmann had been placed in a volatile situation with minimal information and had acted reasonably in shooting Tamir. Though a 911 caller who saw Tamir near the recreation center had cautioned that he was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun was “probably fake,” the officers were not told that information.

David Blake, a retired California police officer who serves as an expert witness on use of force by the police, said the reports appeared “sound” when he looked them over. Mr. Blake said the decision to pull the cruiser so close to Tamir and the dispatcher’s failure to relay some of the caller’s caveats were worthy of further review and were potentially relevant in civil court, but should have no effect on the evaluation of whether Officer Loehmann was criminally culpable for shooting.

“I don’t think the criminal application of those precursors are relevant,” Mr. Blake said, “because Loehmann, he was put in that position. That’s who is going to be looked at as the person involved in the incident. That’s who the reasonableness standard is going to be placed on.”

But Craig B. Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago, criticized the reports’ “laser focus” on the shooting itself and said the reviewers should have placed more weight on the events leading up to the shots.

“There’s strong evidence to believe, in the aggregate, the actions were unreasonable,” said Professor Futterman, who founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the university.

Professor Futterman said it was a “tough call” whether Officer Loehmann had been unreasonable as an individual in deciding to shoot. The professor also said he wished the widely circulated surveillance footage of the shooting included audio so he could hear what, if anything, the officer said before firing.

Since Tamir was shot on Nov. 22, his name has been chanted at protests across the country that called attention to the deaths of black people at the hands of the police. Many activists see Tamir’s shooting as a clear case of police overreach: a black boy, not even a teenager, playing in a park who was fatally shot within seconds of the officers’ arrival.

In Cleveland — where the police department now operates under a consent decree with the Justice Department and where an officer was acquitted this year of manslaughter charges in another on-duty shooting — there has been growing frustration with the lengthy investigation of Tamir’s death. Lawyers for the Rice family have criticized the most recent reports and questioned the motives of the county prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty.

“These hired guns — all pro-police — dodge the simple fact that the officers rushed Tamir and shot him immediately without assessing the situation in the least,” Subodh Chandra, one of the family’s lawyers, said in an emailed statement. “Reasonable jurors in a criminal trial could find that conduct unreasonable. But they will never get the chance, because the prosecutor is working diligently to ensure that there is no indictment and no accountability.”

Jonathan S. Abady, another lawyer for the Rice family, dismissed the findings of the two reports as "totally speculative" and said in a statement that it would be "highly suspicious" if prosecutors submitted the findings to grand jurors.

Mr. McGinty said that the decision to release the reports was part of an effort to be transparent about a difficult case and that his office was “not reaching any conclusions” based on those two opinions. The Rice family has also been offered the chance to provide information to grand jurors, he said.

Officer Loehmann and Officer Garmback have not spoken to investigators about their conduct. Mr. McGinty criticized the police union for encouraging that choice, saying the silence made it “more challenging to find answers” and was “needlessly delaying the process of justice.” Stephen Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, the union for rank-and-file officers, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

As the first anniversary of Tamir’s death approaches, there is no indication of when a grand jury will decide whether to issue charges. Mr. McGinty said his office had commissioned more reports, which will be released after they are finished.

Rachelle Smith, 34, a Cleveland resident who signed the affidavits seeking the officers’ arrests, questioned some of the findings in the expert reports. Ms. Smith said she had “no confidence” that there would be an indictment but was “cautiously holding hope.”

“I think that a failure to indict or a failure to convict would just be another blow to a city and a community that is beat down,” Ms. Smith said. “An indictment would provide hope for justice. It might signal a shift towards transforming the criminal justice system. Either way, it’s just a step.”

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8) Income Inequality Grows With Age and Shapes Later Years
By Paula Span

A tale of two seniors.

Susan McNeely left college after a year to marry and have children. She worked all her life — as a waitress, school bus driver, commercial fisherwoman, bank teller, property manager — but “it was a struggle, hand-to-mouth all the time,” she said.

Now 67, divorced and living in Proctorsville, Vt., she burned through her savings when the recession doomed a bar and restaurant she had opened nearby. Emphysema has left her reliant on supplemental oxygen around the clock.

A small Social Security check, state heating assistance and $183 a month in food stamps represent her only income. Life might be easier if Mrs. McNeely moved to Connecticut, near her daughter, but she can’t afford rents there. Still, with help from friends, she gardens, joins book groups and patronizes $5 movies. Decades of living on a low income have probably helped, she said, because “I know how to stretch a dollar.”Carol Rosen also grew up in a frugal household, but earned a college degree, married a surgeon, and worked as a designer of museum exhibitions and as a volunteer. She inherited money from her mother and later from her husband, who died two years ago. Now 81 and recovering from that loss, she lives in affluent Mountain Lakes, N.J.; walks 45 minutes a day; enjoys concerts in New York City; and plans vacations that involve hiking and camping.

Mrs. Rosen recognizes that she has been fortunate. “I can go out to dinner and maintain my Philharmonic tickets and go to Belize,” where she canoed and stayed (alone) in a thatched hut last winter. Her mother and other relatives lived into their 90s, and Mrs. Rosen, who has survived breast cancer, hopes she can, too, “because there’s still a lot I’d like to do.”

Old people contend with lots of common ordeals: struggles with health and mobility, thinning social networks, dismissal by a youth-besotted culture.

“But people face these challenges on an uneven playing field,” said Corey Abramson, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. “The inequality that shapes our lives from birth onward doesn’t end with the first Social Security check.”

Socioeconomic inequality, he noted, helps determine who gets to grow old.

Dr. Abramson’s book “The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years,” and a report from the National Academy of Sciences last month on the growing life expectancy gap, underscore the effect of income and education on old age.

Ronald Lee, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-chairman of the committee that studied the gap, told me he was staggered by its findings.

Dividing the population into lifetime earning levels, the committee found that men born in 1930 who reached age 50 had a life expectancy of another 26.6 years if they were in the lowest income bracket and 31.7 years in the highest bracket. But projections for men born in 1960 showed no improvement for the lowest earners — and an additional seven years for the highest. In three decades, the life expectancy gap had widened from about five years to more than 12 — “shockingly large,” Dr. Lee said.

The longevity gains we’ve all heard (and written) so much about, in other words, are going to the men atop the economic ladder.

And, even more strikingly, to the women at the top. Lower-earning women actually have declining life expectancies in simulations that compared the 1960 cohort with those born in 1930. “That’s largely explained by differences in starting and quitting smoking,” Dr. Lee said. But those in the top earnings bracket who reach 50 can now expect, on average, another 41.9 years. The gap by income has surged from four years to more than 13.

Those widening gaps mean that the rich get richer when it comes to federal benefits — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In the 1930 birth cohort, lifetime benefits for low- and high-earning men were about the same. Among those born in 1960, however, men in the highest earning bracket will receive $132,000 more on average than those in the lowest; the highest-earning women will receive $28,000 more.

“The increasing gap in life expectancy means even more inequality over a lifetime,” said Peter Orszag, co-chairman of the committee and former director of the federal Office of Management and Budget.

In an ethnographic study conducted over several years, Dr. Abramson saw how inequality played out in daily life as he visited senior centers, senior housing and nursing homes in middle-class and poor neighborhoods in the Bay Area in California, observing and interviewing (and occasionally driving someone to a doctor’s appointment). “It structures people’s lives in profound ways,” he said.

Middle-class neighborhoods, for instance, had more transportation options, more and better-funded volunteer and social service organizations, more markets within walking distance, better hospitals.Subsidized senior housing in those areas resembled upscale condominiums. In poor neighborhoods, “it looked much like the stereotype of housing projects,” Dr. Abramson said. “The physical environment, everything from sidewalks to housing, tended to be more poorly maintained.” Higher crime rates made aging adults fearful about venturing out.

Health care varies, too. The fact that virtually all older Americans rely on Medicare or Medicaid, or both, hardly erases the cumulative effects of a lifetime of unequal access.

Carol Rosen has never lacked health insurance, for example, and buys supplemental insurance to cover much of what Medicare doesn’t. Susan McNeely can’t afford the premiums for a Medigap policy. After spending a week in the hospital with an emphysema exacerbation last spring, she’s still “sporadically” paying noncovered medical bills. She skimps on dental care, too, because Medicare doesn’t cover it.

Inequality affects even the benefits of social networks. “I’ve lost quite a few people who were very important to me, and those that are left spend a lot of time in Florida,” Mrs. Rosen said. She’s looking forward to volunteering for Democratic candidates next year, a source of not only psychic rewards but social connections.

Almost every older person attends too many funerals. But Mrs. McNeely relies on good friends and neighbors for many kinds of direct assistance: snow shoveling, pharmacy runs, care when she’s sick. “I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without them,” she said. People with more money miss lost friends, but they can also hire help.

Such inequality in life spans, in physical environments, in health care and in public benefits means that policy makers and legislators, who are often enthusiastic about cutting “entitlement programs,” should proceed cautiously, the National Academy committee chairmen warned.

Their report analyzed several proposed reforms, including raising the age at which people can draw on Social Security, reducing cost-of-living increases and increasing the eligibility age for Medicare. Some tactics would only slightly narrow the gap between high and low earners; others would actually worsen inequality.

“Any policy argument based on an average is going to be misleading; it ignores that the average masks very different trends,” Dr. Orszag said.

Inequality at older ages, moreover, offers a powerful case for cross-generational responses. Generational conflict — older voters opposing school bonds, younger workers chafing at Social Security taxes — has never made much sense, given that the young, if they’re lucky, eventually become the old.

“If we fail to invest at younger ages, the impact can show up at older ages,” Dr. Orszag said, arguing for an all-in-it-together approach. “There are lots of opportunities for expanding access to health care and education for younger people, and that has lifelong effects.”



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9) London Police End 24-Hour Watch at Embassy Housing Julian Assange
By

LONDON — Citing the strain on resources, the London police said on Monday that they were ending their round-the-clock monitoring of the Ecuadorean Embassy here, where Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has been holed up since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden.

In a diplomatic and legal battle of wills, Mr. Assange, who faces an accusation of rape in Sweden and an order that he be extradited there to face questioning, sought asylum at the embassy. He has refused to go to Sweden, saying that he fears he could then be extradited to the United States to face prosecution related to the publication of leaked State Department diplomatic cables. Mr. Assange, a native of Australia, has strenuously denied the rape allegations, originally made in 2010, and no formal charges have been filed against him.

The police have been keeping a 24-hour watch outside the embassy, in the exclusive Knightsbridge district, poised to arrest Mr. Assange if he tried to leave. (Diplomatic protocol prevents them from entering the building.)

The constant surveillance had, as of the end of April, cost British taxpayers 11.1 million pounds, or $17 million, according to the police. It has also prompted an outcry by local politicians, who have called the operation a misuse of public resources, even as government officials have said that Britain has a legal duty to enforce the extradition request by the Swedish authorities.

The Metropolitan Police Service in London, also known as Scotland Yard, said on Monday that while it remained committed to executing the arrest warrant, “it is no longer proportionate to commit officers to a permanent presence.”

The police said the decision “has not been taken lightly.” It was made, they said, only after consultation with the Home Office, which is responsible for Britain’s internal security, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

“A significant amount of time has passed since Julian Assange entered the embassy, and despite the efforts of many people there is no imminent prospect of a diplomatic or legal resolution to this issue,” the police service said.

“The M.P.S. has to balance the interests of justice in this case with the ongoing risks to the safety of Londoners and all those we protect, investigating crime and arresting offenders wanted for serious offenses, in deciding what a proportionate response is.”

The British news media has reported that the Ecuadorean Embassy has considered different plots to help Mr. Assange escape, including smuggling him out in a disguise, having him leap across rooftops to get to a nearby helipad, or having him escape and then camouflage himself among the throngs of shoppers at the nearby Harrods department store.

Citing documents leaked from the embassy, news reports have also suggested that he could be whisked into a car or be smuggled out of the embassy in a bag. Another idea apparently circulating was that he would be appointed as Ecuador’s official representative to the United Nations, under the assumption that he could travel to Ecuador by invoking diplomatic immunity.

In October, Swedish prosecutors dropped several cases against Mr. Assange of lesser sexual misconduct, saying that the time allowed under Swedish law to pursue the cases had expired. Under Swedish law, the rape allegation can be pursued until August 2020.



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10) Confrontation With Black Partygoers Leads to Gang Charges for White Group
By RICHARD FAUSSET


DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — In an unusual legal maneuver, the district attorney in this suburb of Atlanta said Monday that he had won indictments against 15 supporters of the Confederate battle flag, accusing them of violating the state’s anti-street-gang statute during a confrontation with black partygoers in July.

Prosecutors say that members of the group, which calls itself Respect the Flag, threatened a group of blacks attending an outdoor birthday party on July 25. A cellphone video of part of the episode shows several white men driving away from the party in a convoy of pickup trucks with the Confederate battle flag and other banners, including American flags, fluttering from the truck beds.

The partygoers contend that members of the flag group yelled racial slurs and displayed a crowbar, a knife and either a rifle or a shotgun, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group in Montgomery, Ala., that is representing some of the accusers.The Douglas County district attorney, Brian Fortner, a white Republican elected to the office in 2014, announced the indictments in a news conference Monday morning. Each of the 15 was indicted on one count of making terroristic threats and a second count of unlawfully participating in “criminal gang activity.”

Mr. Fortner, whose county has transformed from predominantly white to decidedly mixed over the past two decades, said that the Georgia statute upon which the second charge is based, the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, was “worded very broadly to deal with any type of activity that occurs with a group that’s organized that commits a crime.”

None of the accused had been arraigned as of Monday, and it was not clear if they had lawyers representing them. By Monday afternoon, none of them had applied for representation with the county public defenders’ office. But a member of the group told a local newspaper that the black partygoers started the confrontation.

Several criminal lawyers and legal scholars said Monday that they could not recall other instances in which a state anti-gang statute had been used to prosecute a Confederate heritage group in the Deep South. The first version of Georgia’s anti-gang law was passed in 1992 at the behest of Atlanta’s police chief at the time, Eldrin Bell.

The state’s General Assembly, in the law’s statement of intent, noted that citizens retained their rights to freedom of expression and association. But it also declared that Georgia was in a “state of crisis which has been caused by violent criminal street gangs whose members threaten, terrorize and commit a multitude of crimes against the peaceful citizens of their neighborhoods.”

Pickup trucks flying Confederate-themed flags have become a regular sight in many parts of the South since June, when a white gunman, apparently influenced by racist doctrine, massacred nine black worshipers at a Charleston, S.C., church. A subsequent effort by some elected officials in the region to remove Confederate symbols from public spaces has provoked a strong negative reaction from some white Southerners, who argue that the symbols are a part of their history and heritage.

The indictments were handed up Friday by a grand jury in Douglas County, a fast-growing county a few miles west of Atlanta that is about 52 percent white and 44 percent black. Suburban sprawl and the steady migration of blacks out of the city’s core have caused striking social and demographic change here: In 1990, blacks made up only about 8 percent of the population, according to census figures.

The anti-gang law defines a “criminal street gang” as “any organization, association or group of three or more persons associated in fact, whether formal or informal,” that engages in or conspires to commit a defined set of serious criminal acts. The law gives prosecutors numerous ways to define the existence of a gang, including sharing signs, symbols, tattoos, graffiti or “common activities.”

Critics challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, but it was upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court in 2009. Ronald L. Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said that Georgia’s law was generally “in line” with other state anti-gang statutes around the country.

But Mr. Carlson also said that he expected lawyers for the defendants to file pretrial motions to dismiss the counts and argue that the identification of their clients as gang members was a stretch.

LeeAnne Lynch, a public defender in DeKalb County, Ga., who was among the lawyers who unsuccessfully challenged the law’s constitutionality, said Monday that she continued to believe that the law was overly broad. She said small groups of people could be defined as a gang just because they were “wearing certain types of clothes or have a group motto that they share.”

Ms. Lynch said that the law had been used to prosecute members of rap groups who have some affiliation with criminal gangs, but are not gang members themselves. Prosecutors, she said, often use the statute to “load up” charges on defendants to pressure them to agree to a plea deal.

Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its chief trial lawyer, could not recall seeing an anti-gang statute used against this kind of group in the past. But he said it was “a very good use” of the statute. “I don’t know why it hasn’t been used before,” he said.

Mr. Fortner said that some of the men involved in the episode had been arrested, and others would be arrested soon. In a July 27 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a member of the group who was named in the indictments, Levi Bush, said that the partygoers yelled at some members of his group as they drove by. Partygoers then threw rocks at his truck, he said.

Mr. Bush, in a brief phone interview on Monday, denied that he had broken the law. “I speak for me and everybody else — we are not guilty in these charges,” he said. He declined to elaborate.

Two members of the group, Joe Eric Hood and Thomas Summers, were each also indicted on an unrelated count of battery stemming from an episode at a gas station called the Corn Crib. Mr. Fortner said the accuser was white, but declined to comment further.

The party occurred on a Saturday at the home of Melissa Alford, 44. On Monday, Ms. Alford showed the side street where, she said, the trucks had pulled over and begun to harass her guests. She said she saw one of them with a rifle or shotgun, and heard one racial epithet used. She said that none of her guests threw rocks.

Ms. Alford said that she worked with at-risk youth as part of a nonprofit she founded. Some of them, she said, have been identified by the authorities as gang members. She said the men in the trucks deserved the same treatment.

“Just like the Crips,” she said, “if they’re out there doing some foolishness like this, they’re going to get charged.”


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11) For-Profit Colleges Accused of Fraud Still Receive U.S. Funds
By

When the Obama administration agreed this summer to erase the federal loan debt of some former students at Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit school that filed for bankruptcy in the face of charges of widespread fraud, education officials promised to “protect students from abusive colleges and safeguard the interests of taxpayers.”

But the Education Department, despite a crackdown against what it calls “bad actors,” continues to hand over tens of millions of dollars every month to other for-profit schools that have been accused of predatory behavior, substandard practices or illegal activity by its own officials or state attorneys general across the country.Consider the Education Management Corporation, which runs 110 schools in the United States for chefs, artists and other trades. It has been investigated or sued in recent years by prosecutors in at least 12 states. The Justice Department has accused the company of illegally using incentives to pay its recruiters. And last year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, contending that the company engaged in deceptive enrollment practices and manipulated federal student loan and grant programs.

Education Management nonetheless received more than $1.25 billion in federal money over the last school year.

The career training and for-profit college industry has been accused in recent years of preying on the poor, veterans and minorities by charging exorbitant fees for degrees that mostly fail to deliver promised skills and jobs.

Despite stepped-up scrutiny, hundreds of schools that have failed regulatory standards or been accused of violating legal statutes are still hauling in billions of dollars of government funds. They include tiny beauty schools with staggering loan default rates and online law schools with dismal graduation records and no bar association accreditation. Without government funds, which account for the overwhelming bulk of revenue, few of these institutions could attract students or stay in business.

The continuing flow of money illustrates the quandary facing federal education officials. On one hand, they have moved forcefully to try to protect taxpayer funds and prevent students from falling deeply into debt without anything to show for it. On the other, they must avoid running roughshod over private for-profit schools that have not been found guilty of wrongdoing. Agency officials point out that they cannot withhold money based on accusations, but must have proof of misconduct.

For example, Education Management, which says it is cooperating with prosecutors, says it “strongly disagrees” with the Justice Department allegations.

Regulators are caught between an industry that says it is being unfairly demonized by opponents and critics who complain not enough is being done to prevent fraud and abuse of vulnerable students.

A Quandary

“For-profits successfully serve a lot of students, and the department has been very sensitive to having all students suffer for what may only affect some students in some programs,” said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor who studies for-profit colleges at the State University of New York at Albany. “So they are reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water.”

Mr. Kinser pointed out that the Education Department had little flexibility under the law when it came to cutting off federal student loan and grant money to potential abusers. “There are individual triggers in place for financial viability, institutional integrity, et cetera,” he said, “but no three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule.”

Education officials say they have clamped down on many for-profit schools, restricting their ability to expand their programs or the number of campuses, capping the number of students eligible for student loans, or requiring schools like Education Management to post a letter of credit to gain access to federal student loans and grants. The letter is meant to protect students and taxpayers if the company is unable to cover federal student-aid liabilities.

“What’s clear to all of us is that the best way to solve this problem is at the front end and not to let bad schools operate,” said Ted Mitchell, the under secretary of education. The agency’s “more aggressive stance,” he said, helped contribute to an 18 percent drop in enrollment at for-profits from 2011 to 2013.

Still, critics say that even schools with egregious violations have become adept at exploiting loopholes, sidestepping rules or taking advantage of yearslong appeals processes. Companies with several campuses can pool graduation, financial, enrollment, staffing and other statistics to mask weak performers, experts say.

“Bright-line standards are good, but they can also be managed,” said Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research and advocacy group. “It’s why almost nobody gets caught. The big schools know how to work the numbers to avoid failing.”

For example, the government can withhold student loan payments when a college’s default rate surpasses 30 percent three years in row — a signal that a school has a high dropout rate or that its students are not making sufficient income to pay back their loans. But several schools have figured out how to lower their rates by getting students temporary deferments or forbearances so they fall outside the three-year window.

Nearly 100 schools have a student loan default rate that exceeds 30 percent. Last year, they received $116 million in federal aid from the Education Department.

A new study by Adam Looney, of the Treasury Department, and Constantine Yannelis at Stanford University, found that since 2000, “most of the increase in default is associated with the rise in the number of borrowers at for-profit schools.” For-profit schools enroll about 12 percent of the nation’s college students, yet they account for nearly half of student loan defaults.

Finding Problems

ITT Educational Services, which has about 138 campuses and 47,000 students, has been investigated or sued by 19 states, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Justice Department. Two of its campuses also failed to meet the Education Department’s standards for financial responsibility.

Nonetheless, campuses flagged for problems by the department received more than $592 million in the 12-month period that ended June 30.

In an email, Nicole Elam, a spokeswoman for ITT, wrote: “To date, not a single lawsuit has been filed by the multistate group of attorneys general naming ITT Tech.” In addition, ITT has called the S.E.C.’s charges “unfounded” and the consumer protection bureau’s case “unjustified.”

“ITT Tech does help prospective students make informed decisions about enrollment through the disclosure of program cost, graduation and job placement rates, graduate salaries and loan debt,” Ms. Elam said.

In recent years, more than two dozen companies that run for-profit colleges have been investigated or sued by state prosecutors. To handle the load, 37 state attorneys general have teamed up to form a working group. Together, the 152 schools under investigation received about $8.1 billion in federal student loan and grant payments last fiscal year, according to a detailed analysis by Mr. Miller for The New York Times, using data provided by the Education Department.

One of those is Alta Colleges, partly owned by the Boston private equity firm Housatonic Partners. Alta, which operates campuses and an online division in several states, is being sued by the Illinois attorney general, who claims the colleges engaged in “deceptive, unfair and abusive practices in the marketing and selling of their criminal justice program,” a three-year degree that costs $75,000, according to the complaint.

Students were promised they would be primed for careers as police officers, sheriffs, corrections officers and FBI agents, but only 3.8 percent of graduates were actually employed as sworn law enforcement officers or correctional officers, the lawsuit states. The two most common jobs for graduates of the criminal justice program were as security guards or in retailing, positions that typically require only a high school or equivalency diploma. Alta schools received more than $104 million in federal aid in the last school year.

Alta filed papers in court denying the allegations. The company did not return several phone calls seeking comment.

Other schools under investigation complain they are the target of a witch hunt.

Chris Hardman, senior vice president for communications at Education Management, said that the company was cooperating with prosecutors but that many of the investigations related to past recruiting practices.

“We are dedicated to providing the opportunity for an education that, were it not for schools like ours, many of our students might never achieve,” Mr. Hardman said.

Other schools, including Lincoln Technical Institute and Kaplan Career Institute in Massachusetts, have negotiated settlements with state prosecutors.

Kaplan, which no longer runs any schools in Massachusetts, paid nearly $1.4 million, mostly used to pay down student loans, after being accused of misleading students with false information about its program and job placement and using “harassing sales tactics.”

The parent company, Kaplan Higher Education settled another suit this year with the Justice Department, for $1.3 million, after being accused of employing unqualified instructors to teach its medical assistant courses in Texas.

Neither Kaplan nor Lincoln admitted any wrongdoing.Kaplan’s schools, including its online California law school, where only one in five students graduates, received $776.3 million worth of federal student loans and grants last year. Because it lacks bar association accreditation, most graduates outside California are not allowed to take a bar exam.

“These schools exist on the back of U.S. taxpayers,” Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, said. “It’s time to turn off the spigot of federal student loan that are flowing into these for-profit colleges.”

“They absolutely have the authority today” to cut off funds, Ms. Healey said, arguing that the federal government could rely on findings by the state attorneys general, among other evidence of abuse.

So far more than 3,000 former Corinthian students have successfully petitioned the Education Department to erase their college loan debt because their school closed. Thousands more from Corinthian have asked for relief.

Education officials met with advocates at the White House last month, to discuss whether the agency could act more quickly to cut off access to federal funds when there were warning signs of bad behavior, according to a participant.

The Defense Department recently barred the University of Phoenix, one of the largest for-profit schools, from participating in its tuition assistance program for active-duty troops or from recruiting on military bases. The Pentagon cited investigations begun by the Federal Trade Commission and the California attorney general.

Although for-profit schools are prohibited from receiving more than 90 percent of their revenue from the federal government, military benefits such as the Pentagon’s tuition-assistance program and the G.I. Bill are not counted toward that sum, a loophole that has infuriated critics.

David Halperin, a Washington lawyer who tracks investigations against for-profits, has taken federal officials to task for not moving more aggressively against schools with long records of complaints.

“The Department of Education has declared Corinthian Colleges a disaster area in need of a big taxpayer bailout, yet the department continues to send billions of dollars to other for-profit colleges that are deceiving and abusing students in the same ways Corinthian did,” he said.

Warning Signs

A formal investigation is only one of the serious warning signs that a college may be engaging in abusive practices or financial shenanigans, prosecutors, officials and advocates say.

There are 98 for-profit schools on the Education Department’s financial responsibility watch list, which Mr. Mitchell, the under secretary, has described as a “caution light.” They received roughly $600 million in the last year.

And 35 for-profit schools have been subjected to the department’s most stringent financial sanctions, which limit access to federal money in advance. Inclusion on this list can be another signal that there are regulatory problems, sometimes serious, relating to accreditation, financial statements and audits, liabilities or denial of certifications. Last year, these schools received more than $15 million.

Education advocates have also accused the Education Department of not more aggressively policing for-profit schools that convert to nonprofits as a way of sidestepping federal regulations. A report released last week by The Century Foundation concluded: “The owners of some for-profit institutions have sought to switch their schools to nonprofit status, freeing them from the regulatory burdens of for-profit colleges, while continuing to reap the personal financial benefits of for-profit ownership.”

Mr. Mitchell said that a new regulation that went into effect this summer would add a powerful weapon to the agency’s arsenal of sanctions. Known as the gainful employment rule, it measures whether graduates of for-profit vocational programs as well as nondegree programs at community colleges earn enough to pay off student loans.

The Obama administration, which sent officials on the road last month to promote his plan for free community college, has estimated that 99 percent of the 1,400 programs likely to fail under the new rules are run by for-profit schools. The industry has fiercely fought this new regulation; Democrats and Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation to roll it back.

Mr. Mitchell also criticized state accreditation agencies for not more aggressively monitoring substandard institutions.

“The fact that Corinthian was accredited through the day of its bankruptcy,” Mr. Mitchell said, “shows that there’s a lot of work to do through quality assurance.”



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Posted by: bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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