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Major George Tillery

MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION SEX FOR LIES AND MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY

April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony. These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors. Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters. Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms. In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org. Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence. The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings. This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense. Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new  "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support. Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court. During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison. Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying."  For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners. Major Tillery Needs Your Help: Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence. Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment. Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed. Major Tillery and family HOW YOU CAN HELP Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom. Go to JPay.com; code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner: The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false. Call: 215-686-8000 or Email: justice@phila.gov Write to: Major Tillery AM 9786 SCI Frackville 1111 Altamont Blvd. Frackville, PA 17931 For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org Call/Write: Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

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Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier

Art by Leonard Peltier

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132 

USP Coleman I 

P.O. Box 1033 

Coleman, FL 33521

Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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1) Brooklyn Diocese Is Part of $27.5 Million Settlement in 4 Sex Abuse Cases
By Sharon Otterman, September 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/nyregion/catholic-church-sex-abuse-settlement-brooklyn.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Some of the abuse committed against the four children occurred inside St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's Church in Brooklyn, as well as in an apartment in the old schoolhouse behind the church.

Four men who were repeatedly sexually abused as children by a religion teacher at a Roman Catholic church reached a $27.5 million settlement with the Diocese of Brooklyn and a local after-school program on Tuesday, in one of the largest settlements ever awarded to individual victims of abuse within the church.

The victims were repeatedly abused by Angelo Serrano, 67, who taught catechism classes and helped organize the religious education programs at St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's Church, in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The abuse occurred inside the church, in Mr. Serrano's apartment located in an old schoolhouse behind the church and at the affiliated after-school program, lawyers for the victims said.

The settlement comes amid a flurry of investigations — including a New York State civil investigation — and disclosures of sex abuse within the Catholic Church that have led to mounting pressure on Pope Francis to take action against bishops and cardinals for their role in the abuse crisis.

The sexual assaults in Brooklyn took place between 2003 and 2009, the lawyers said, when the boys were between the ages of 8 and 12.

One of the boys reported the abuse to his mother, who contacted the police. Mr. Serrano was arrested in September 2009, and pleaded guilty two years later to first-degree sexual conduct charges; he is serving a 15-year sentence at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.

Seeking punitive damages from the diocese, two of the victims filed a lawsuit in 2013, and the other two victims later brought lawsuits as well. The pastors at the church during the time the abuse occurred, the Rev. Stephen P. Lynch and the Rev. Frank Shannon, were named as co-defendants.

In fighting the idea that they should be held responsible for the abuse, the Diocese of Brooklyn argued that Mr. Serrano was a church volunteer, not a diocesan employee. The diocese also disputed that the abuse took place on church grounds, arguing that abuse in Mr. Serrano's apartment was not its legal responsibility.

But lawyers for the victims pointed out that Mr. Serrano received a stipend from the church and had a desk on church property.

A Brooklyn judge sided with the victims, finding that clear warning signs that Mr. Serrano was abusing the children were ignored by parish workers and priests and not reported.

"The record is clear that Lynch and Shannon had knowledge that for years Serrano often had several boys, including plaintiff, sleep over at his apartment," Justice Loren Baily-Schiffman of Kings County Supreme Court wrote in her 2017 order dismissing the church's motion for summary judgment of the case. "In fact, both Lynch and Shannon testified that they visited Serrano on numerous occasions when young boys were present."

In a deposition, Father Lynch testified that he saw Mr. Serrano kiss an 8- or 9-year-old boy on the mouth and inappropriately embrace the boy.

A church secretary, Beatrice Ponnelle, who shared an office with Mr. Serrano, also testified about questionable behavior. She said that although the church had a rule that children were not allowed to be left alone in the office with a staff member, boys as young as 7 or 8 would come into the office to do their homework while sitting on Mr. Serrano's lap. When she left for the day, he would be the only adult in the office with the boys, Justice Baily-Schiffman wrote.

Despite Mr. Serrano's position as a religious educator — with Mr. Serrano at the church nearly every day between 1997 and 2009, volunteering at the summer camp, and getting keys to the church and rectory — no records were kept regarding him or his employment history at the church, the judge wrote.

With the case set for trial, the Diocese of Brooklyn agreed to settle. But in a statement released on Tuesday, the diocese still seemed to minimize its role in allowing the abuse.

"The diocese and another defendant have settled these lawsuits brought by the four claimants who were sexually abused by Angelo Serrano at his private apartment many years ago," the statement said. "Mr. Serrano was a volunteer worker at a local parish; he was not clergy or an employee of the diocese or parish."

The statement added that for three of the claimants, "another defendant" would be contributing "a significant portion of the settlement." A spokeswoman for the diocese said that the Dorothy Bennett Mercy Center, a local after-school program based next to the church in Clinton Hill, had agreed to pay about one-third of the total settlement.

The spokeswoman, Adriana Rodriguez, did not address whether Father Shannon and Father Lynch were punished for failing to report signs of abuse.

In all, each of the four victims will receive $6,875,000, the lawyers said, sharing an email with the diocese's lawyer confirming the settlement amount. The note indicated that the diocese would confer with its insurers regarding how the settlement would be paid.

The largest previous individual settlement to an abuse victim in the Catholic Church is believed to be in 2007, when two victims of a lay music minister in the Rockville Centre diocese collected a total of $11,450,000, or $5.725 million each, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy sexual abuse cases. The lawyers for the Brooklyn victims said they believed this was a record settlement to individuals for sex abuse in the Catholic Church in this country.

The victims, who are now between the ages of 19 and 21, have requested that their identities be withheld.

"These were boys who were abused in second grade through sixth grade, for years for some of them," said Ben Rubinowitz, another lawyer for the victims. "The egregious nature of the conduct is the reason that the church paid what they did."

The Brooklyn diocese, which includes Queens, is already in the process of settling hundreds of older abuse cases where the victims can no longer sue because of the statute of limitations.

Like many dioceses, the Brooklyn diocese has confronted waves of parish mergers and closures as the number of parishioners has shrunk. St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's parish was itself the result of a merger of parishes in the 1970s because of dwindling attendance. In 2010, the diocese announced that the church would be shuttered in another wave of parish closings.

In a lengthy article by The New York Times about the struggling parishpublished in 2004, Mr. Serrano appears as a "raspy-voiced pastoral assistant" who took phone calls, promising one woman he would help her find her lease so she could avoid eviction. He calmly counseled another caller who was in a psychiatric ward, feeling desperate.

"Suicide is not an option," he told her, dropping his gruff demeanor. "Pray to St. Jude, the patron of the impossible."

"Mr. Serrano can identify with her," the story reported then, five years before his arrest. "He has struggled with depression. So far, he is winning. But, he admitted, this year would be hard. Very hard. He was talking about spending Christmas alone this year."

Since June 2017, 474 victims in Brooklyn have applied for settlements through the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program; 374 of those cases have so far been settled, the program said. In all, six dioceses in the state are running similar programs. The Brooklyn diocese took out a loan to pay for the millions required to cover those settlements, which generally amount to less than $500,000 each.

The settlement to the four victims comes after an extraordinary grand jury report in Pennsylvania detailing the abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests over decades.

"This is an extremely large settlement, and the size of the settlement has to be an indication of the severity of the abuse, and also of the pressure that the Catholic Church is under due to all the developments that are happening," said Terry McKiernan, co-director and president of BishopAccountability.org.

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2)  Why Sexual Assault Memories Stick
Christine Blasey Ford says she has a vivid memory of an attack that took place when she was 15. That makes sense.
"...alcohol does not create violent sexual impulses so much as it unleashes or magnifies pre-existing ones. And second, a sexual assault in which Brett Kavanaugh put his hand over a girl's mouth to silence her would be in a far different category from a dumb but not character-revealing prank like shoplifting cigarettes."
By Richard A. Friedman, September 19, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/opinion/kavanaugh-christine-ford-sexual-assault.html

Memories formed under the influence of intense emotion are indelible in a way that routine memories are not.

As a psychiatrist I know something about how memory works. Neuroscience research tells us that memories formed under the influence of intense emotion — such as the feelings that accompany a sexual assault — are indelible in the way that memories of a routine day are not.

That's why it's credible that Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers, has a vivid recollection of the alleged long-ago event. 

"I thought he might inadvertently kill me," she told The Washington Post in a recent interview. "He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing."

Judge Kavanaugh has vigorously denied the charges, leading to a public debate about whether Dr. Blasey's story is true. Her lawyers say she wants the F.B.I. to investigate before she agrees to testify before the Senate. If and when she does testify, you can bet that Republican senators will try to undermine her explosive claim on the basis that the memory of an event that occurred 36 years ago must be unreliable because it happened in the distant past. If she does not testify, some of her critics will undoubtedly argue that the time that's passed is reason to doubt her recollection. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reason has to do with the way memories are encoded when a person is experiencing intense emotions. When people are assaulted, for example, they experience a surge of norepinephrine, a stress hormone that is a relative of adrenaline. 

The role of norepinephrine in the enhancement of memory was demonstrated by a 1994 study in which researchers randomly gave subjects either propranolol, a drug that blocks the effect of norepinephrine, or a placebo just before they heard either an emotionally arousing story or a neutral one. Then they tested subjects' memories of both stories a week later and found that propranolol selectively impaired recall of the emotionally arousing story but not the neutral story. The clear implication of this study is that emotion raises norepinephrine, which then strengthens memory.

That is why you can easily forget where you put your smartphone or what you had for dinner last night or last year. But you will almost never forget who raped you, whether it happened yesterday — or 36 years ago. There's very little chance that you are, as some senators suggest Dr. Blasey is, "mixed up" or "confused."

It is also important to note that what Dr. Blasey is describing in her report of sexual assault by Judge Kavanaugh is not a so-called recovered memory— one that a person believes he has recalled after having suppressed it for many years. Quite the opposite: It is a traumatic memory that she's been unable to forget. 

In the interview with The Post she said the assault "derailed me substantially for four or five years," and had caused anxiety for years after that. Indeed, her therapist's notes reflect that, in a 2012 session, she described an attack by students at an "elitist boys' school" (Judge Kavanaugh attended a Georgetown prep school) who went on to become "highly respected and high-ranking members of society."

Some commentators don't dispute Dr. Blasey's veracity. Instead, they deem an assault as described by Dr. Blasey as irrelevant to Judge Kavanaugh's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court because he would have been just 17 years old and drunk at the time. We all know that teenagers are notoriously impulsive and should be forgiven for doing things like that, right?

Wrong. Sexual assault cannot be easily dismissed as youthful indiscretion or the product of alcoholic intoxication. First, alcohol does not create violent sexual impulses so much as it unleashes or magnifies pre-existing ones. And second, a sexual assault in which Brett Kavanaugh put his hand over a girl's mouth to silence her would be in a far different category from a dumb but not character-revealing prank like shoplifting cigarettes. Teenagers are notorious risk-takers because, in part, the reward circuit of the brain develops long before the prefrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning and control. But that doesn't mean they have no sense of right or wrong or that they are hard-wired to violate the rights of others.

Some are saying that Dr. Blasey's accusation, even if true, is just one ancient example of admittedly egregious behavior in an otherwise upstanding person who, as President Trump attests, "never had even a little blemish on his record."

Since teenagers change so much, these people say, bad behavior then isn't necessarily predictive of adult behavior. Sure, but why take the risk for someone who will have so much power? Dr. Blasey's accusation is credible and deserves a full investigation.

Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and a contributing opinion writer. 

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3)  Inside Italy's Shadow Economy
Within a distressed labor market, thousands of low-paid home workers create luxury garments without contracts or insurance.
By Elizabeth Paton and Milena Lazazzera, September 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/fashion/italy-luxury-shadow-economy.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

A seamstress working for luxury brands in her home kitchen in Puglia, Italy.

BARI PROVINCE, Italy — In a second-floor apartment in the southern Italian town of Santeramo in Colle, a middle-aged woman sat in a black-padded chair this summer, hard at work at her kitchen table. She stitched carefully at a sophisticated woolen coat, the sort of style that will sell for 800 to 2,000 euros ($935 to $2,340) when it arrives in stores this month as part of the fall and winter collection of MaxMara, the Italian luxury fashion brand. 

But the woman, who asked not to be named for fear that she could lose her livelihood, receives just €1 from the factory that employs her for each meter of fabric she completes.

"It takes me about one hour to sew one meter, so about four to five hours to complete an entire coat," said the woman, who works without a contract, or insurance, and is paid in cash on a monthly basis. "I try to do two coats per day."

The unregulated work she completes in her apartment is outsourced to her from a local factory that also manufactures outerwear for some of the best-known names in the luxury business, including Louis Vuitton and Fendi. The most she has ever earned, she said, was €24 for an entire coat.

Home work — working from home or a small workshop as opposed to in a factory — is a cornerstone of the fast-fashion supply chain. It is particularly prevalent in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, where millions of low-paid and predominantly female home workers are some of the most unprotected in the industry, because of their irregular employment status, isolation and lack of legal recourse.

That similar conditions exist in Italy, however, and facilitate the production of some of the most expensive wardrobe items money can buy, may shock those who see the "Made in Italy" label as a byword for sophisticated craftsmanship. 

Increased pressure from globalization and growing competition at all levels of the market mean that the assumption implicit in the luxury promise — that part of the value of such a good is that it is made in the best conditions, by highly skilled workers, who are paid fairly — is at times put under threat.

Though they are not exposed to what most people would consider sweatshop conditions, the homeworkers are allotted what might seem close to sweatshop wages. Italy does not have a national minimum wage, but roughly €5-7 per hour is considered an appropriate standard by many unions and consulting firms. In extremely rare cases, a highly skilled worker can earn as much as €8-10 an hour. But the homeworkers earn significantly less, regardless of whether they are involved in leatherwork, embroidery or another artisanal task.

In Ginosa, another town in Puglia, Maria Colamita, 53, said that a decade ago, when her two children were younger, she had worked from home on wedding dresses produced by local factories, embroidering gowns with pearl paillettes and appliqués for €1.50 to €2 per hour.

Each gown took 10 to 50 hours to complete, and Ms. Colamita said she worked 16 to 18 hours a day; she was paid only when a garment was complete.

"I would only take breaks to take care of my children and my family members — that was it," she said, adding that she currently works as a cleaner and earns €7 per hour. "Now my children have grown up, I can take on a job where I can earn a real wage."

Sewing thread used by home workers for some of the spring fashion collections.

Both women said they knew at least 15 other seamstresses in their area who produced luxury fashion garments on a piece-rate basis for local factories from their homes. All live in Puglia, the rural heel of Italy's boot that combines whitewashed fishing villages and crystal clear waters beloved by tourists with one of the country's biggest manufacturing hubs.

Few were willing to risk their livelihoods to tell their tales, because for them the flexibility and opportunity to care for their families while working was worth the meager pay and lack of protections.

"I know I am not paid what I deserve, but salaries are very low here in Puglia and ultimately I love what I do," said another seamstress, from the attic workshop in her apartment. "I have done it all my life and couldn't do anything else."

Although she had a factory job that paid her €5 per hour, she worked an additional three hours per day off the books from home, largely on high-quality sample garments for Italian designers at roughly €50 apiece.

"We all accept that this is how it is," the woman said from her sewing machine, surrounded by cloth rolls and tape measures.

'Made in Italy,' but at What Cost?

Built upon the myriad small- and medium-size export-oriented manufacturing businesses that make up the backbone of Europe's fourth largest economy, the centuries-old foundations of the "Made in Italy" legend have shaken in recent years under the weight of bureaucracy, rising costs and soaring unemployment.

Businesses in the north, where there are generally more job opportunities and higher wages, have suffered less than those in the south, which were hit hard by the boom in cheap foreign labor that lured many companies into moving production operations abroad.

Few sectors are as reliant on the country's manufacturing cachet as the luxury trade, long a linchpin of Italy's economic growth. It is responsible for 5 percent of Italian gross domestic product, and an estimated 500,000 people were employed directly and indirectly by the luxury goods sector in Italy in 2017, according to data from a report from the University of Bocconi and Altagamma, an Italian luxury trade organization. 

Those numbers have been bolstered by the rosy fortunes of the global luxury market, expected by Bain & Company to grow by 6 to 8 percent, to €276 to €281 billion in 2018, driven in part by the appetite for "Made in Italy" goods from established and emerging markets.

But the alleged efforts by some luxury brands and lead suppliers to lower costs without undermining quality have taken a toll on those on those operating at the very bottom of the industry. Just how many are affected is difficult to quantify.

According to data from Istat (the Italian National Institute of Statistics), 3.7 million workers across all sectors worked without contracts in Italy in 2015. More recently, in 2017, Istat counted 7,216 home workers, 3,647 in the manufacturing sector, operating with regular contracts. 

However, there is no official data on those operating with irregular contracts, and no one has attempted to quantify the group for decades. In 1973, the economist Sebastiano Brusco estimated that Italy had one million contracted home workers in apparel production, with a roughly equal figure working without contracts. Few comprehensive efforts have been made to examine the numbers since.

This New York Times investigation collected evidence of about 60 women in the Puglia region alone working from home without a regular contract in the apparel sector. Tania Toffanin, the author of "Fabbriche Invisibili," a book on the history of home working in Italy, estimated that currently there are 2,000 to 4,000 irregular home workers in apparel production.

"The deeper down we go in the supply chain, the greater the abuse," said Deborah Lucchetti, of Abiti Puliti, the Italian arm of Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group. According to Ms. Lucchetti, the fragmented structure of the global manufacturing sector, made up of thousands of medium to small, often family-owned, businesses, is a key reason that practices like unregulated home working can remain prevalent even in a first world nation like Italy.

Plenty of Puglian factory managers stressed they adhered to union regulations, treated workers fairly and paid them a living wage. Many factory owners added that almost all luxury names — like Gucci, owned by Kering, for example, or Louis Vuitton, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton — regularly sent staff to check on working conditions and quality standards.

When contacted, LVMH declined to comment for this story. A spokesman for MaxMara emailed the following statement: "MaxMara considers an ethical supply chain a key component of the company's core values reflected in our business practice." 

He added that the company was unaware of specific allegations of its suppliers using home workers, but had started an investigation this week. 

According to Ms. Lucchetti, the fact that many Italian luxury brands outsource the bulk of manufacturing, rather than use their own factories, has created a status quo where exploitation can easily fester — especially for those out of union or brand sightlines. A large portion of brands hire a local supplier in a region, who will then negotiate contracts with factories in the area on their behalf.

"Brands commission first lead contractors at the head of the supply chain, which then commission to sub-suppliers, which in turn shift part of the production to smaller factories under the pressure of reduced lead time and squeezed prices," Ms. Lucchetti said. "That makes it very hard for there to be sufficient transparency or accountability. We know home working exists. But it is so hidden that there will be brands that have no idea orders are being made by irregular workers outside the contracted factories."

However, she also called these problems common knowledge, and said, "some brands must know they might be complicit."

The 'Salento Method'

Certainly that is the view of Eugenio Romano, a former union lawyer who has spent the last five years representing Carla Ventura, a bankrupt factory owner of Keope Srl (formerly CRI), suing the Italian shoe luxury behemoth Tod's and Euroshoes, a company that Tod's used as a lead supplier for its Puglian footwear production. 

Initially, in 2011, Ms. Ventura began legal proceedings against only Euroshoes, saying that consistently late payments, shrinking fee rates for orders and outstanding bills owed to her by that company were making it impossible to maintain a profitable factory and pay her workers a fair wage. A local court ruled in her favor, and ordered Euroshoes to pay the debts, which, after appealing unsuccessfully, the company did.

Orders dried up in the wake of those legal proceedings. Eventually, in 2014, Keope went bankrupt. Now, in a second trial, which has stretched on for years without a significant ruling, Ms. Ventura has brought another action against Euroshoes, and Tod's, which she says had direct knowledge of Euroshoes' unlawful business practices. (Tod's has said it played no role in nor had any knowledge of Euroshoes' contract issues with Keope. A lawyer for Euroshoes declined to comment for this article.)

"Part of the problem down here is that employees agree to forgo their rights in order to work," Mr. Romano said from his office in the town of Casarano, ahead of the next court hearing, scheduled for Sept. 26. 

He spoke of the "Salento method," a well-known local phrase that means, essentially: "Be flexible, use your methods, you know how to do it down here." 

The region of Salento has a high unemployment rate, which makes its work force vulnerable. And although brands would never officially suggest taking advantage of employees, some factory owners have told Mr. Romano that there is an underlying message to use a range of means, including underpaying employees and paying them to work at home.

The area has long been a hub of third-party shoemakers for luxury brands including Gucci, Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo and Tod's. In 2008, Ms. Ventura entered into an exclusive agreement with Euroshoes to become a sub-supplier of shoe uppers destined for Tod's. 

According to Ms. Ventura's lawsuit, she then became subject to consistently late payments, as well as an unexplained reduction in prices per unit from €13.48 to €10.73 per shoe upper from 2009 to 2012.

While many local factories cut corners, including having employees work from home, Ms. Ventura said she still paid full salaries and provided national insurance. Because the contract required exclusivity, other potential manufacturing deals with rival brands including Armani and Gucci, which could have balanced the books, could not be made. 

Production costs were no longer covered, and promises of an increased number of orders from Tod's via Euroshoes never came, according to the legal papers filed in Ms. Ventura's case.

In 2012, orders from Tod's via Euroshoes stopped completely, one year after Ms. Ventura first took Euroshoes to court for her unpaid bills. Ms. Ventura said that eventually put Keope on the road to bankruptcy, according to legal documents. Ms. Ventura was declared insolvent in 2014.

When asked for comment, a Tod's spokeswoman said in a statement: 

"Keope filed a lawsuit against one of our suppliers, Euroshoes, and Tod's, to recover damages related to the alleged actions or omissions of Euroshoes. Tod's has nothing to do with the facts alleged in the case and never had a direct commercial relationship with Keope. Keope is a subcontractor of Euroshoes, and Tod's is completely extraneous to their relationship."

The statement also said that Tod's had paid Euroshoes for all the amounts billed in a timely and regular manner, and was not responsible if Euroshoes failed to pay a subcontractor. Tod's said it insisted all suppliers perform their services in line with the law, and that the same standard be applied to subcontractors. 

"Tod's reserves the right to defend its reputation against the libelous attempt of Keope to involve it in issues that do not concern Tod's," the spokeswoman said.

Indeed, a report by Abiti Puliti that included an investigation by Il Tacco D'Italia, a local newspaper, into Ms. Ventura's case found that other companies in the region sewing uppers by hand had women do the work irregularly from their homes. That pay would be 70 to 90 euro cents a pair, meaning that in 12 hours a worker would earn 7 to 9 euros. 

'Invisible' Labor

Home working textile jobs that are labor intensive or require skilled handiwork are not new to Italy. But many industry observers believe that the lack of a government-set national minimum wage has made it easier for many home workers to still be paid a pittance.

Wages are generally negotiated for workers by union representatives, which vary by sector and by union. According to the Studio Rota Porta, an Italian labor consultancy, the minimum wage in the textile industry should be roughly €7.08 per hour, lower than those for other sectors including food (€8.70), construction (€8) and finance (€11.51).

But workers who aren't members of unions operate outside the system and are vulnerable to exploitation, a source of frustration for many union representatives.

"We do know about seamstresses working without contracts from home in Puglia, especially those that specialize in sewing appliqué, but none of them want to approach us to talk about their conditions, and the subcontracting keeps them largely invisible," said Pietro Fiorella, a representative of the CGIL, or Italian General Confederation of Labour, the country's largest national union. 

Many of them are retired, Mr. Fiorella said, or want the flexibility of part-time work to care for family members or want to supplement their income, and are fearful of losing the additional money. While unemployment rates in Puglia recently dropped to 19.5 percent in the first quarter of 2018 from nearly 21.5 percent in the same period a year ago, jobs remain difficult to come by.

A fellow union representative, Giordano Fumarola, pointed to another reason that garment and textile wages in this stretch of southern Italy have stayed so low for so long: the offshoring of production to Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades, which intensified local competition for fewer orders and forced factory owners to drive down prices. 

In recent years, some luxury companies have started to bring production back to Puglia, Mr. Fumarola said. But he believed that power is still firmly in the hands of the brands, not suppliers already operating on wafer-thin margins. The temptation for factory owners to then use sub-suppliers or home workers, or save money by defrauding their workers or the government, was hard to resist.

Add to that a longstanding antipathy for regulation, high instances of irregular unemployment and fragmented systems of employment protection, and the fact that nonstandard employment has been significantly liberalized by successive labor market reforms since the mid-1990s, and the result is further isolation for those working on the margins.

A national election in March swept a new populist government to power in Italy, placing power in the hands of two parties — the Five Star Movement and the League — and a proposed "dignity decree" aims to limit the prevalence of short-term job contracts and of firms shifting jobs abroad while simplifying some fiscal rules. For now, however, legislation around a minimum wage does not appear to be on the agenda.

Indeed, for women like the unnamed seamstress in Santeramo in Colle, working away on yet another coat at her kitchen table, reform of any sort feels a long way off. 

Not that she really minded. She would be devastated to lose this additional income, she said, and the work allowed her to spend time with her children. 

"What do you want me to say?" she said with a sigh, closing her eyes and raising the palms of her hands. "It is what it is. This is Italy."

Elizabeth Paton is a reporter for the Styles section, covering the fashion and luxury sectors in Europe. Before joining The Times in 2015, she was a reporter at the Financial Times both in London and New York. 

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4)  How Golf Digest and College Students Helped Free a Man Convicted of Murder
By Jacey Fortin, September 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/nyregion/Valentino-Dixon-golf-digest-exonerated.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

Valentino Dixon on Wednesday after Erie County Court vacated a murder conviction that had kept him in prison for more than 26 years.

There were dozens of witnesses when a gunfight broke out on a street corner in Buffalo on Aug. 10, 1991. At least three people were injured, and Torriano Jackson, 17, was killed.

Valentino Dixon, then 21, was at the scene. Hours later, he was arrested. And in 1992, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to almost 40 years to life in prison, with no chance of parole until 2030.

For years, Mr. Dixon fought that conviction from behind bars, insisting on his innocence. No physical evidence had ever connected him to the murder, and another man had confessed to it more than once.

After nearly three decades and a couple of unusual twists — including a Golf Digest profile that featured his detailed drawings of golf courses — his murder conviction was vacated on Wednesday, and Mr. Dixon, 48, walked free.

"I felt like I was in some type of dream," he said in a phone interview from a Red Lobster restaurant, where he was surrounded by friends, relatives and lawyers, and about to eat lobster for the first time.

As he struggled to get his conviction overturned, Mr. Dixon got help from a varied cast of characters. They included journalists at Golf Digest, a new district attorney in Erie County, witnesses whose accounts were never presented at trial, a dogged team of undergraduate students at Georgetown University, and one man who had direct experience with long incarcerations: Martin Tankleff, who was imprisoned for 17 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering his parents and was released in 2007.

In the beginning, Mr. Dixon's case was covered mostly by The Buffalo News. But it gained more widespread attention in 2012 because of Mr. Dixon's art. In prison, for hours a day, he liked to draw detailed landscapes in colored pencil. Golf courses were a frequent subject. That caught the interest of journalists at Golf Digest, and the magazine profiled Mr. Dixon.

In 2017, a new district attorney, John Flynn, took office in Erie County and established a conviction integrity unit to investigate cases that might merit review.

Mr. Dixon, at the Attica Correctional Facility in 2013, become known for his art while he was incarcerated for a murder he said he did not commit.

And in 2018, a course called Prison Reform Project was offered for the first time at Georgetown University, led by the director of the university's Prisons and Justice Initiative, Marc M. Howard. Dr. Howard has known Mr. Tankleff since they attended the same preschool, and they taught the course together, with Mr. Tankleff flying to Washington from his home on Long Island to serve as an adjunct professor once a week.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Tankleff said he had never heard of an undergraduate class like this one. "This is not a course about make-believe cases," he said. "These are real people, real lives, real-world implications."

With several cases to choose from, three students chose Mr. Dixon's case and gathered evidence. They tracked down witnesses, pored over documents, called Mr. Dixon on the phone several times a week and visited him in prison. Eventually, they were convinced that he was telling the truth, and they made a short documentary on the subject.

Their work helped Donald M. Thompson, a lawyer for Mr. Dixon, make his case to the district attorney's office. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Flynn, the district attorney, said the newly discovered evidence from various witnesses attesting to Mr. Dixon's innocence was deemed credible.

That evidence included confessions from Lamarr Scott, who has said several times that he killed Torriano Jackson, although he did once recant a confession in front of a grand jury. On Wednesday, Mr. Scott, who is in prison for an unrelated shooting, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in connection with Mr. Jackson's killing.

Mr. Dixon said he crossed paths with Mr. Scott when both were incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility. They were cordial, he said, but did not speak much.

Mr. Thompson said Mr. Scott used Mr. Dixon's gun in the killing. A weapons charge against Mr. Dixon was not dropped.

Not everyone believes that Mr. Dixon is innocent. Aaron Jackson, who was injured in the shooting that killed his brother Torriano, has argued consistently and vehemently that he saw Mr. Dixon commit the murder. Mr. Jackson could not be reached on Wednesday night, but he told WGRZ, a local television news outlet, that he was sure Mr. Dixon was guilty.

"He's not innocent, and he wasn't tried and convicted in a kangaroo court," Mr. Jackson said. "I don't think he should ever be free."

Mr. Dixon said he wants to cook for his family, take his children fishing and visit a golf course.

Though Mr. Flynn ultimately concluded otherwise, he said he understood Mr. Jackson's concerns. "Valentino Dixon walked out of jail today," he said. "The true victim here is Torriano Jackson, who, unfortunately, is not getting out of the grave."

Dr. Howard called Mr. Dixon's 1992 conviction "mind-boggling," adding that during Mr. Dixon's trial, the prosecution's witnesses were unreliable and the defense did not present witnesses at all. "And it's not like the students just took something that was at a dead end," he added. "There was a lot of momentum building, and there was a tremendous amount of interest generated by the golf angle."

On Wednesday, two of those students returned to New York to see Mr. Dixon leave the Erie County courtroom. Ellie Goonetillake flew from England, and Julie Fragonas from France. Both have finished their undergraduate work and begun postgraduate studies in law.

Ms. Goonetillake, 23, said the class was unlike anything she had taken before. "It was definitely the most immersive, the most challenging and most demanding course I've ever done in my life," she said. "But it all pays off today."

Ms. Fragonas, 21, said it was draining to watch Mr. Dixon and his family members struggle during his incarceration. "But it has also been such a rewarding experience," she said. "When we saw him get out of the courtroom, it was really the best feeling."

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Dixon was joined by his grandmother, several cousins, a few aunts, his mother, two of his three daughters and three of his six grandchildren. They had to book an entire room at the Red Lobster.

His daughter Valentina Dixon, 27, was only a few months old when her father went to prison. She, too, has been working for years to get him released. "He would tell me we were going to get through this, and we just had to stay strong in our fight," she said. "His encouragement and his enthusiasm and his endurance pushed us to be where we are today."

Now, Mr. Dixon has plans. He said he wanted to cook breakfast — and then lunch, and then dinner — for his mother and his grandmother on Thursday. He wanted to visit a golf course (he has never played the game) and take his children fishing at Sodus Point, N.Y.

And then he wants to work on criminal justice reform, with a focus on his home state of New York. "I'm going to dedicate my life to fighting mass incarceration," he said.

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5)  We Are Not the Resistance 
Donald Trump is the one who is pushing back against the new nation that's struggling to be born.
By Michelle Alexander, September 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/sunday/resistance-kavanaugh-trump-protest.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The resistance has once again sprung to action, this time around Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. Even before we learned of the allegation that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl during high school, progressive and liberal forces mobilized to resist his elevation to the highest court in the land, asking people to call their members of Congress, to register their opposition.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, it seems there has been a new crisis roiling our nation nearly every day — a new jaw-dropping allegation of corruption, a new wave of repression at the border, another nod to white nationalism or blatant misogyny, another attack on basic civil rights, freedom of the press or truth itself. Invariably, these disturbing events are punctuated by Trump's predictable yet repugnant Twitter rants.

Often the battle lines are clearly drawn and blatantly partisan, as is the case with Kavanaugh's nomination. Other times it's less clear where "the resistance" begins and ends. What began as a viral hashtag immediately after Trump's election has evolved into something that's increasingly difficult to define. The defiant, boisterous marches that eclipsed Trump's inauguration helped to inspire a wave of courageous activism, such as the spontaneous protests at airports in the wake of the Muslim ban and the demonstrations against proposed cuts to Medicaid led by disability activists. At the same time, we've also seen a broader, bipartisan idea of "resistance" take hold, one that seems to include everyone from establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelosi to the civil rights legend John Lewis to democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to James Comey, who has spent most of his adult life as a registered Republican.

Unlike the Tea Party, which was born after President Barack Obama's inauguration and which spawned a proliferation of well-funded, loosely affiliated right-wing groups determined to hijack the Republican Party and push it farther to the right, the only common denominator for "the resistance" today is a commitment to resisting Donald Trump — the man, not necessarily his mission.

Even members of Trump's own inner circle are joining the ranks. A senior official used an anonymous Op-Ed article in this newspaper to declare himself or herself part of "the resistance inside the Trump administration." The writer was quick to clarify that he or she was not part of the "'resistance' of the left." Quite to the contrary, the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the expansion of the military-industrial complex and, by extension, the slashing of vital social services were not only fine by him or her but a cause for celebration.

One might argue that the big tent of "the resistance" is its greatest strength: A massive united front becomes possible when the barrier to entry is so low. If you're revolted by Trump's tweets and feel terrified by his access to the nuclear codes, you too can join the resistance.

There is power in numbers, to be sure, but I've begun to wonder whether the downsides to "the resistance" frame outweigh the benefits. At first, I thought the question wasn't worth entertaining because #Resist is a hashtag, nothing more. To the extent "the resistance" is an organized political force, it's doing quite well. The rising number of progressive candidates and the promising midterm election map are testament to the power of the resistance, however it's defined.

But the time may have come to take the downsides more seriously. Resistance is a reactive state of mind. While it can be necessary for survival and to prevent catastrophic harm, it can also tempt us to set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle, leading us to forget our ultimate purpose and place in history.

The disorienting nature of Trump's presidency has already managed to obscure what should be an obvious fact: Viewed from the broad sweep of history, Donald Trump is the resistance. We are not.

Those of us who are committed to the radical evolution of American democracy are not merely resisting an unwanted reality. To the contrary, the struggle for human freedom and dignity extends back centuries and is likely to continue for generations to come. In the words of Vincent Harding, one of the great yet lesser-known heroes of the black freedom struggle, the long, continuous yearning and reaching toward freedom flows throughout history "like a river, sometimes powerful, tumultuous, and roiling with life; at other times meandering and turgid, covered with the ice and snow of seemingly endless winters, all too often streaked and running with blood."

Harding was speaking about black movements for liberation in America, but the metaphor applies equally well to the global struggle for human dignity and freedom.

The Guatemalan mother desperately fleeing poverty and violence in her home country stands at the border, young child in her arms, yearning for freedom no less than the American mother hundreds of miles away who puts her hands to the plexiglass in a prison visiting room, desperate to hug her child who sits quietly on the other side. The movements that have arisen to honor the dignity of both women — movements to end mass incarceration and mass deportation — are separate streams feeding the same river.

Donald Trump's election represents a surge of resistance to this rapidly swelling river, an effort to build not just a wall but a dam. A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters. In recent years, we've seen glimpses of this new nation at Standing Rock, in the streets of Ferguson, in the eyes of the Dreamers, in the voices of teenagers from Parkland and Chicago, as well as at L.G.B.T. pride celebrations, the Women's March and the camps of Occupy Wall Street. Confederate statues are coming down as new memorials and statutes are going up in Montgomery, Ala., and beyond, honoring victims of lynching as well as the courageous souls who fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of Jim Crow. 

For many, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency symbolized the imminent birth of this new America, and many whites feared their privileged status, identity and way of life would die in the transition. The reaction was swift and fierce. It shouldn't have been surprising.

As the historian Carol Anderson documented in "White Rage," every single advance toward racial justice in this country has been met with virulent, often violent, resistance. But the 2016 election was not about only race or gender. That perfect storm had been brewing for a long time, drawing strength from many political and economic forces and gathering speed as the pace of change accelerated.

If we pause long enough and consider where we stand in relationship to the centuries-long quest to create a truly equitable democracy, we may be able to see that the revolutionary river that brought us this far just might be the only thing that could possibly carry us to a place where we all belong.

Every leap forward for American democracy — from slavery's abolition to women's suffrage to minimum-wage laws to the Civil Rights Acts to gay marriage — has been traceable to the revolutionary river, not the resistance. In fact, the whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all and those who resisted.

One might wonder whether it matters, in the end, whether we consider ourselves members of the resistance or part of the revolutionary river. Can't we be both?

The answer, I think, is yes and no. Yes, of course, we can and must resist the horrors of the current administration — thousands of lives depend on us doing what we can to mitigate the harm to our fellow humans and the planet we share. But the mind-set of "the resistance" is slippery and dangerous. There's a reason marchers in the black freedom struggle sang "We Shall Overcome" rather than chanting "We Shall Resist." Their goal was to overcome a racial caste system — to end it — and to create a new nation, a Beloved Community. Similarly, those who opposed slavery didn't view themselves as resisters; they were abolitionists.

Today, many of us in the movements to end mass deportation and mass incarceration do not want to simply resist those systems. We aim to end them and reimagine the meaning of justice in America. By the same token, many of those who are battling climate change and building movements for economic justice understand that merely tinkering with our political and economic systems will not end poverty or avert climate disaster, nor will mere resistance to the status quo. As the saying goes, "What you resist persists." Another world is possible, but we can't achieve it through resistance alone.

Michelle Alexander became a New York Times columnist in 2018. She is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

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6) Florence's Floodwaters Breach Defenses at Power Plant, Prompting Shutdown
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, September 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/florences-floodwaters-breach-defenses-at-power-plant-prompting-shutdown.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Water from the swollen Cape Fear River spilled over an earthen dike Thursday at the L.V. Sutton power plant.

Duke Energy shut down a power plant in Wilmington, N.C., on Friday after a dam at the site breached, potentially spilling coal ash into the nearby Cape Fear River, the company said. 

The Environmental Protection Agency links the substances in coal ash — including heavy metals like arsenic and lead — to nervous-system problems, reproductive issues and cancer.

The operation that was closed, Duke's L.V. Sutton plant, has been a growing concern since last week, when rains associated with Hurricane Florence caused a coal ash landfill at the site to erode, spilling ash onto a roadway. 

Duke Energy said that last week's spill released 2,000 cubic yards of ash.

This latest release concerns the two unlined coal ash ponds on site, which contain a combined 2.1 million cubic yards of coal ash, according to a report prepared for Duke Energy this year. That amount of coal ash would fill the Houston Astrodome 1.3 times.

Coal ash is the hazardous powdery substance that remains after burning coal. It has received increased scrutiny since 2008, when the Kingston Fossil Plant in Harriman, Tenn., spilled 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash into the surrounding environment, triggering a cleanup that cost more than 1 billion dollars. 

In 2014 Duke Energy's Dan River plant in Eden, N.C., spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River, prompting the state to require Duke to close all of its coal ash ponds, a process that is not yet complete.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science.

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7) Sunrise Melodies and Tearful Reflections: Puerto Rico a Year After Maria
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní, September 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/hurricane-maria-anniversary-puerto-rico.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Alberto Carrión performed "Amanecer borincano," a popular Puerto Rican song, on Thursday, at the exact hour that Hurricane Maria made landfall one year ago in Yabucoa.

YABUCOA, P.R. — The morning on Thursday was quieter than it was a year ago in this small farming town on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico.

The sound of waves crashing against the cliffs filled the air. The distinctive mating call of coquís, the native mountain frogs of the island, whistled in the trees as the sun rose and fused the Caribbean horizon with hues of orange and purple.

Then, at 6:15 a.m., a sonorous voice rose above the morning hum:

"I am the light of the morning

that shines new paths, 

that floods the mountains,

and the peasant trails …"

The singer, Alberto Carrión, intoned Spanish verses from a seaside cliff at exactly the same time and in the same town where Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico a year ago, on Sept. 20. Instead of the howling winds of last year, Puerto Ricans woke to the heartening lyrics of "Amanecer borincano" — "Puerto Rican Sunrise" — in a performance that was televised and live-streamed across the island to commemorate the anniversary.

"It talks about a new sunrise in Puerto Rico and about having hope," said Mr. Carrión, a popular Puerto Rican songwriter who was joined by a choir of students from the University of Puerto Rico. "Maria hit us hard, but we're even stronger and we'll overcome this."

The oceanside tribute was the beginning of an emotional day for Puerto Ricans a year after the most destructive hurricane in generations threw the island into months of calamity, destroying most of the power grid, sweeping away thousands of homes and claiming the lives of about 3,000 people.

It was an especially teary-eyed day in Yabucoa, whose 30,000 residents were the first to feel the fury of Hurricane Maria. Many households here were without power for 10 months. And blue roof tarps are still a common sight in the mountain and coastal neighborhoods.

In a rural town deep in recovery, the anniversary surfaced the emotional scars many residents still bear as they spent the day reliving the storm, counting their losses and reflecting on life after Maria.

For Darlene Rivera, 43, that meant remembering her mother, Astrid Roldán, who died almost three months after the storm. Ms. Roldán was 70 and had diabetes, and struggled to keep her insulin cool after losing power. The public housing complex where she lived did not allow residents to have a generator in their apartments, Ms. Rivera said.

"The desperation those days, without electricity, without water, without communication, deteriorated her health over months and it led to her heart attack," Ms. Rivera said.

Ms. Rivera said that President Trump's remarks denying the official death toll on the island were especially hurtful and lacked "human sensibility," especially in light of her mother's fate.

"There is no reason for my mother not to be here today," she said.

For Carmen Cruz and her husband, it has been a long 12 months since Hurricane Maria's galloping 155-mile-an-hour winds blew away the couple's wooden home in a matter of hours.

"It was a little house, two bedrooms," said Ms. Cruz, 54, breaking into tears. "But for me it was a castle."

The couple and their two daughters slept in cots at a neighbor's house for three months after the hurricane before moving into the home of a deceased family member. The family is still wrangling with the federal government over money to rebuild their home. The generosity and the solidarity among neighbors was the only positive remnant of the storm, Ms. Cruz said.

"We need to continue being united," she said. "Our strength is in our union."

Volunteers from the mainland who have spent months in Yabucoa helping residents rebuild their homes echoed similar sentiments.

"Resilience and grace from people — that's what I've found here," said L.B. Cook, who traveled from Mississippi as a coordinator for All Hands and Hearts — Smart Response, a volunteer group.

Ms. Cook, who has been repairing roofs in Yabucoa since January, said volunteers fixed their 200th roof on Thursday. Her team identified another 800 homes that still need repairs.

As principal of the vocational high school in Yabucoa, José Andino was quick to quantify his losses: 100. That's the number of his students who left Puerto Rico after the hurricane, which ravaged the school's campus, forcing it to close for two months.

"Every day the school was closed I knew we were losing one student," Mr. Andino said from his office. "This is a catastrophic event we could have never imagined."

Mr. Andino, 40, said that about a fourth of the 387 students who stayed had a significant decline in their grades last year — many had lost their homes, some lost family members. The hurricane also damaged seven of the 10 workshop buildings where students study trades, including carpentry, electrical wiring and culinary arts.

"We're not operating at 100 percent," Mr. Andino said. "There's just no way."

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8) Trump Says if Attack on Kavanaugh Accuser Was 'as Bad as She Says,' Charges Would Have Been Filed

By Eileen Sullivan, September 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/politics/trump-kavanaugh-blasey-attack.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

President Trump had avoided attacking the woman who accused his Supreme Court nominee of assault, but broke that practice on Friday morning.

WASHINGTON — President Trump directly questioned for the first time on Friday the veracity of the accusations levied by a woman who has said Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were both teenagers.

Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post that if the alleged attack "was as bad as she says," charges would have been filed by the woman, Christine Blasey Ford, or her parents.

He asked her to produce contemporaneous law enforcement reports "so that we can learn date, time, and place!"

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

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I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!

6:14 AM - 21 Sep 2018

Many women are reluctant to come forward and report sexual assaults to authorities, in part because they fear they will not be believed.

In suggesting that Dr. Blasey's version of events from a high school party in the early 1980s lacked credibility, Mr. Trump ended his dayslong restraint from commenting on the accusations — a move that aides have feared could further complicate the confirmation process just weeks before the midterm elections.

Questioning the credibility of a woman who says she was sexually assaulted could jeopardize the support of key Republican senators for Judge Kavanaugh's nomination. It could also further energize female voters in the midterms who are opposed to Mr. Trump.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, assured an audience of conservative Christians on Friday that Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation would go through.

"Keep the faith. Don't get rattled by all of this. We're gonna plow right through it and do our job," Mr. McConnell said at the Values Voter Summit. "In the very near future, Judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court."

Until Friday, the president's public comments about the matter had been limited to praise for Judge Kavanaugh and blame lobbed at Democrats for slowing the judge's Supreme Court confirmation process.

At the time of the incident, Dr. Blasey was about 15 years old. She said she was at a small gathering of teenagers in suburban Maryland when Mr. Kavanaugh assaulted her. She said he and a friend pushed her into a bedroom, and Mr. Kavanaugh pushed her onto a bed. She said he jumped on her, groped her and tried to take off her clothes while covering her mouth with his hand to keep her from crying for help.

Dr. Blasey has not been able to recall the date of the party where she says Mr. Kavanaugh assaulted her. He has denied the accusations. Both have said they are willing to provide sworn testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

[Experts say long delays in reporting or a foggy recall are hallmarks of sexual assault.]

Previously, Mr. Trump, who has been the subject of more than a dozen sexual misconduct allegations, had said he felt terribly for Judge Kavanaugh and encouraged senators to hear from both parties before they vote on the judge's confirmation.

Some of the president's aides had implored Mr. Trump not to publicly attack Dr. Blasey, reminding him how important it was to the Republican Party that the judge's confirmation go through.

For days, Mr. Trump had shown uncharacteristic restraint and even acknowledged in a Twitter post how important this vote was for his party.

"The Supreme Court is one of the main reasons I got elected President," Mr. Trump said on Tuesday.

Democrats were quick to criticize Mr. Trump for questioning Dr. Blasey.

"This is EXACTLY why Dr. Ford didn't want to come forward," Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, said in a tweet.

Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, called Mr. Trump's comments "unacceptable and beneath the presidency of the United States."

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said the president should call for the F.B.I. to investigate if he wants to "get to the bottom" of Dr. Blasey's account.

The president and his aides have criticized the Democrats for waiting so long to raise the issue of Dr. Blasey's accusation. Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, learned of Dr. Blasey's allegations in July, but said she did not raise the issue sooner because she was respecting Dr. Blasey's wish to remain anonymous.

"I hope this woman is not being used by the Democrats," Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said in an interview with CNN on Friday.

The Senate had planned to vote on Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation on Sept. 20, but the Judiciary Committee agreed to delay the decision until Dr. Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh could testify.

Dr. Blasey declined an invitation to testify on Monday, but through her lawyer, said she was open to testifying later under several conditions. She said she would be willing to speak with senators on the committee later next week as long as she is questioned by lawmakers — not outside counsel — and as long as Judge Kavanaugh is not in the hearing room while she speaks. She also asked for steps to be taken to ensure her safety — she has received death threats.

Ms. Conway called her requests a "laundry list of demands."

Dr. Blasey will be meeting with the F.B.I. in San Francisco this afternoon about the online and phone death threats against her, according to her lawyer, Lisa Banks.

Ms. Banks declined to address Mr. Trump's tweets, or the negotiations over Dr. Blasey's offer to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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9) On Ecstasy, Octopuses Reached Out for a Hug
By dosing the tentacled creatures with MDMA, researchers found they share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors with humans.
By JoAnna Klein, September 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/science/octopus-ecstasy-mdma.html

An octopus on its way to an underwater EDM festival.

Octopuses are smart. They open jars, steal fish and high-five each other.

Though interactive, they’re generally asocial, and temperamental, with unique behavior patterns, like those shown by Otto, who caused blackouts at a German aquarium and Inky, who famously escaped a tank in New Zealand. They learn through experience and observation, forming lasting memories with brain-like bundles of hundreds of millions of neurons in each arm and a centralized bundle in the middle.

A desire to understand the evolutionary underpinnings of this brain power led scientists to give octopuses ecstasy. Yes, ecstasy — molly, E, MDMA, the party drug, which in humans reduces fear and inhibition, induces feelings of empathy, distorts time and helps people dance to electronic music all night.

And under the influence of MDMA, the researchers report in a paper published Thursday in Current Biology, asocial octopuses seemed to become more social.

“Even though octopuses look like they come from outer space, they’re actually not that different from us,” said Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the study with Eric Edsinger, an octopus researcher at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.

They also found that humans and octopuses share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors, one enhanced by the presence of MDMA in both animals. These shared lineages may have been conserved to reduce fear and enable social behaviors. And although preliminary, the authors think octopuses present a promising model for studying MDMA’s effects on the human brain, treating PTSD and better understanding how the brain evolved to conjure social behaviors.

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MDMA helps release, among other chemicals, serotonin. That ancient molecule is involved in regulating mood and social behaviors in invertebrates like locusts as well as vertebrates, like fish, dogs and humans.

For Dr. Dölen, who is interested in evolution of social behavior, the octopus offered an interesting test of MDMA and serotonin, because it is separated by 500 million years of evolution from humans, but also has complex behavior.

Octopuses suspend their aggression for a few minutes to mate, perhaps accessing an otherwise switched-off neural signaling system — potentially similar to the one that helps humans behave socially, she reasoned. And any similarities in octopus and human genetic code related to this system could help her understand how the brain — down to its tiniest bits — evolved to govern social behaviors.

Like a wedge in Pac-Man’s mouth, MDMA fits inside a protein that moves serotonin in and out of neurons. The drug eventually causes a flood of serotonin between synapses, increasing its signals. When the researchers compared the genome of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) to those of other animals, they discovered humans and octopuses could both make this protein, and it was nearly 100 percent similar at that special Pac-Man spot.

But would that protein on ecstasy also make octopuses social?

They put the octopuses in the center of a three-chambered tank where they could explore a Star Wars figurine on one side or another octopus on the other (it was contained beneath an overturned orchid pot with holes, in case the MDMA hadn’t worked and violence ensued).

Undosed, octopuses of either sex spent more time with the toy than the other octopus (if it was a male; they seemed less concerned when it was female).

But after soaking in low-dose MDMA-laced baths, the octopuses seemed to relax. They spent more time with the male octopuses on the other side of the tank.

They also hugged the pot with several arms, showing off their ventral ends, or mouths, almost like how the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus, the only known social octopus species, mates beak to beak in an eight-armed hug.

Though they tested only a few octopuses and MDMA likely acts on more molecules than serotonin, Charles Nichols, a pharmacologist at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine, was impressed: “I’ve been giving psychedelics to fruit flies for years in my lab, but had yet to have seen one given to an octopus.”

And David Nichols, his father who pioneered studies of MDMA for therapy, wonders how the drug might help untangle the fear circuitry in octopuses: “Connecting the dots in the octopus may lead to scientists being able to connect the dots, so to speak, in other species, including man,” Dr. David Nichols said.

Though just beginning, Dr. Dölen is hopeful: “We need to be taking full advantage of these compounds to see what they’re doing to the brain,” she said.

She added that when the octopuses came down from their serotonin highs, they acted completely normal — for an octopus

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10)  Coming of Age in American Detention
As 17-year-olds they were asylum seekers. On their 18th birthdays they became criminals.
By The Editorial Board, September 22, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/22/opinion/sunday/immigration-children-detention.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

In the fall of 2017, Wilmer Ramirez had reason to be hopeful. After he trekked from Guatemala and spent several months in a youth migrant shelter in Arizona, his application for “special immigrant juvenile status,” a designation that would make him eligible for lawful permanent residency, was pending. What’s more, a family in Pennsylvania had agreed to sponsor him, meaning they would submit themselves to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for approval and take him in once they were approved. The only thing between him and freedom, then, was a little more paperwork.

But when he turned 18, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials came to the shelter, placed him in handcuffs, and carted him off to a nearby jail.

He hadn’t done anything wrong. The officials were just following the rules. When children become adults, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, turns them over to the Department of Homeland Security, which places them in “adult detention,” a term that usually means county jail. Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but roughly 1,000 18-year-olds were sent to such detentions in 2017, according to Mr. Ramirez’s lawyers, who have filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the practice. 

The transfer from shelter to jail can be abrupt; it often happens at midnight on detainees’ 18th birthday and typically cuts them off from any relationships they might have established, including with caseworkers and counselors.

There are many things wrong with this policy. There is no dark magic that turns teenagers into criminals on their 18th birthday, even if they were born outside the United States. Given the damage that incarceration can do to young adults, every alternative should be pursued before turning teenage asylum seekers over to adult detention. And, as the Ramirez lawsuit indicates, the procedure itself may be illegal. Federal law requires ICE to place children and teenagers in the least restrictive setting possible, even after they turn 18. 

Critics say the number of migrant children who face jail as they “age out” of youth shelters is climbing, and it’s easy to see why. The number of detained migrant children has already quintupled since last year, largely because children are being held in shelters longer. The average length of stay has increased from 34 days in 2015 to almost 60 days now, and many children are kept much longer. Yearlong stays are not uncommon, and cases of 500 days or more have been reported. As those numbers grow, the entire shelter system (some 100 facilities scattered across the country) is nearing capacity.

The best of those shelters may feel like havens to children who fled extreme poverty or violence, and faced incredible risks to make it across the border. The worst shelters are dens of abuse and neglect. At either end of the spectrum, the children themselves face tedium, a lack of freedom and profound uncertainty, especially when their 18th birthday approaches. “It’s a really anxiety-inducing period,” says one of Mr. Ramirez’s lawyers, Kate Melloy Goettel. “We try to prepare them for it, but it can be hard to grasp.” 

Health and Human Services officials have said that the longer stays are an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of improved safety precautions: It takes time to verify that prospective sponsors are who they claim to be, and to ensure that these already vulnerable and traumatized minors won’t be subjected to abuse once they leave the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. As proof of the necessity of their diligence, they point to a handful of children who were unwittingly placed with human traffickers in 2014.

That argument withers under scrutiny. Yes, the threat of trafficking is real, and protections are needed to guard against it. But it’s difficult to see how incarcerating teenagers for the crime of turning 18 protects them more than, say, releasing them to a willing sponsor who has cleared a basic but thorough background check. Stricter requirements have succeeded in scaring off prospective sponsors, many of whom are undocumented themselves or who have undocumented relatives. But their fear does not necessarily speak to their fitness as guardians.

There are other options, in any case: Immigration advocates, including Mr. Ramirez's lawyers, have proposed releasing teenagers like Mr. Ramirez to sponsors, with ankle monitors if need be, or to group homes or shelters for young adults. 

Instead, the Department of Health and Human Services is doubling down on current practices. As Yahoo News reported, the department is planning to take some $260 million from its other programs, including ones for public preschool and cancer research, to expand the capacity of shelters for detained migrant children, including at a tent city in Tornillo, Tex., that was supposed to be temporary and will now grow from 400 beds to 3,800. Officials are also angling to pull out of a longstanding judicial agreement that prohibits the indefinite detention of migrant children. And, rather than consider or sensibly settle the class-action lawsuit brought by Mr. Ramirez (who has since been released) and other 18-year-olds over their incarceration, federal lawyers have sought, unsuccessfully, to have the case thrown out of court.

More than 200,000 migrant children have entered the United States in the past six years, according to a recent Senate report; too many of them have been misplaced, or mistreated, or deported without a fair hearing.

Mr. Ramirez was just 17 when he crossed the American border, and he had already spent nearly a decade working under slave-like conditions in the coffee fields of his native Guatemala. But if he and others like him assumed the burdens of adulthood long before they arrived in Texas or California or Arizona, they are still teenagers. They deserve as much protection and support as teenagers born in this country — or in any other. We have the ways and means to provide that protection and support. We just need the will and the decency.

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11) [GOOD NEWS FOR A CHANGE...BW]

As Economy Roars, Army Falls Thousands Short of Recruiting Goals

BY DAVE PHILLPPS, SEPTEMBER 21, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/army-recruiting-shortage.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

An Army recruiting station in Frankfort, Ky. The Army failed to meet its recruitment goal this year.

COLORADO SPRINGS — The Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals this year, the first time it has done so since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago.

The shortfall is due in part to a hot job market that has lured away many recruits at a time that President Trump and Congress seek to expand the military, and have raised the number the Army needs to meet.

The Army hoped to bring in about 76,500 new soldiers this year. But with the fiscal year ending this month, it is still 6,500 troops short, even after spending an extra $200 million on bonuses and lowering standards to let in more troops with conduct or health issues.

On top of having to compete with a robust economy, with an unemployment rate below 4 percent, the Army must pick from what it says is a shrinking pool of eligible recruits. More than two-thirds of young adults do not qualify for military service because of poor physical fitness or other issues such as drug use, according to the Army.

“You have fewer people who can serve, they have more opportunities in the job market, that makes it very hard on the Army,” said Beth Asch, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation who studies military recruiting.

The shortfall will not leave the Army paralyzed, representing only about 1 percent of the force. But it is a sign of growing cultural and economic changes that, if not addressed, could hollow out the Army from within.

The Army has invested in more recruiters and advertising, Dr. Asch said, and sweetened the deal for perspective soldiers with bonuses and other benefits. It has also had to soften admissions. This year it gave hundreds more waivers for past drug use than it did a few years ago.

In a statement, the Army said the shortfall was evidence that it was not settling for lower-quality recruits, but was instead trying to “raise the quality of our recruits despite the tough recruiting environment.”

“As we look to 2019 and beyond, we have laid the foundation to improve recruiting for the Army while maintaining an emphasis on quality over quantity,” Lt. Col. Emanuel L. Ortiz said. “Our leaders remain confident we will achieve the Army Vision of growing the regular Army above 500,000 soldiers.”

For years, the military had been heading the other way. Mandatory budget cuts caused the Army to shed more than 100,000 troops from 2010 to 2016. The Army was not only recruiting fewer soldiers, but was forcing troops out. It was on course to shrink to 450,000 soldiers in 2017 when Mr. Trump did an about-face. Fulfilling a campaign promise to stop the drawdown, he signed a bill that expanded the Army to 476,000. This year it was supposed to grow to 483,500, but actual numbers remained flat.

The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps met their recruiting goals for 2018, but the Army, which is by far the biggest branch of the military, had to recruit more than twice as many troops as other branches. Initially, the Army planned to recruit 80,000 soldiers in 2018, but lowered its goal to 76,500 in April because it was able to retain more soldiers already in the force. That still left a much larger-than-normal task for Army recruiters amid a roaring economy.

At an urgent care center in the suburbs of Denver on Friday, Josh Griffin, a high school senior, had just finished taking a drug test for a new job at a discount tire company down the road. He said that recruiters had talked to him in high school, and that the military sounded appealing at first: money for college, a steady job and a way to give back to his country.

But now he sees better options, he said, adding, “I don’t have any doubt in my mind about finding a job.”

The military’s promise of college tuition and other benefits has less of a draw, said Sgt. First Class Michael T. Peppers, the commander of a strip mall recruiting station next to a Subway and a Tasty Tacos in Urbandale, Iowa.

“We’re competing with other businesses offering the same things,” he said, noting that even McDonald’s has a program to help employees pay tuition.

The military also says it has to pick from young adults who are increasingly unqualified to serve because of mental health issues, criminal convictions or obesity.

“That’s our biggest obstacle,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Snow, who until recently was the head of Army recruiting, said in November. He said natural disasters that led to the closing of several recruiting stations, including in the reliably rich recruiting ground of Puerto Rico, also contributed to shortfalls.

The Army faced a similar predicament in 1999, during the dot-com boom. That year, according to a Government Accountability Office report, the Army fell short by about 6,000 recruits. It responded by doubling its recruiting budget, adding enlistment bonuses up to $20,000, and allowing enlistees it would have turned away in the past, such as those who had no high school diploma, but still scored well on Army aptitude tests.

Similar measures are in effect today, Dr. Asch, the RAND economist, said. Troops who cannot pass a body-mass test may still get in on a strength test. Troops without a diploma are more likely to get a second chance if they do well on an Army aptitude test. And those with criminal convictions or other misconduct in their past can get waivers if they can show they have overcome past troubles.

Dr. Asch said the Army was still well within Defense Department benchmarks, and nowhere near the dismal levels reached in the years after the Vietnam War, when recruiting collapsed. In 1979, six of 10 Army divisions stationed in the United States were considered “not combat ready.” In 1980, only half of recruits had graduated from high school (it is now 90 percent), and drug use, crime and unauthorized absences were so rampant that 40 percent of new recruits were expelled.

The Army’s shortfall this year comes as it has sidelined more than 1,100 high-quality recruits, many with graduate degrees and top-tier physical fitness scores, because they are legal immigrants but lack green cards. These recruits were part of a special program called Military Accessions Vital to National Interests, or Mavni, but have been in limbo for years because they have not passed strict security vetting imposed after they enlisted. The Army is now trying to discharge them.

Jackson Barnett contributed reporting from Westminster, Colo., and Ann Klein from Urbandale, Iowa.

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12) City Officials Fear Mass Bailout at Rikers Could Endanger Crime Victims
By Jeffery C. Mays, September 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/nyregion/mass-bailout-rikers.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

City officials and prosecutors have raised objections to a plan to bail out 500 women and teenagers from Rikers Island, suggesting that it could endanger crime victims and witnesses.

City officials are scrambling to prepare for a human rights organization’s mass effort to bail out 500 women and teenagers from the Rikers Island jail complex, despite strong resistance from the police and prosecutors.

Across the city, prosecutors are identifying cases that might be affected by the bailout, and calling hundreds of crime victims and witnesses in those cases to let them know that defendants who they thought were in custody might soon be released on bail.

Prosecutors in the Bronx said they were working to safeguard as many people who might be vulnerable through measures like orders of protection.

“We are doing all we can to protect our victims and witnesses in the event the defendants accused of violence against them are released from jail,” Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney, said in a statement.

The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group is raising up to $5 million for the bailout, and will enlist 200 volunteers to help identify and free female prisoners at the Rose M. Singer Center, and 16- and 17-year-olds at the Robert N. Davoren Complex, starting Oct. 1.

Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, says the plan, which organizers believe could be one of the largest so-called mass bailouts in the country, will move forward despite the city’s concerns.

The bailout is designed to support an end to cash bail, which activists say discriminates against minorities and the poor, and to push the city to close the dangerous Rikers jail complex more quickly than the current 10-year timeline. Approximately 87 percent of the jail population is black and Latino.

“What they’re really saying is they are concerned about poor people accused of crimes because there are no rich people currently accused of crimes caged on Rikers Island,” Ms. Kennedy said in an interview. “Just look how the system treats people like Harvey Weinstein. Eighty women said they were attacked by one guy, and he got bail and he never spent a second on Rikers.”

The plan may expand to include prisoners who turned 18 while on Rikers, according to the group. The organization will also connect those who are bailed out with appropriate social services.

The purpose of bail, according to New York State law, is to ensure a defendant’s return to court. Judges can, under limited circumstances, remand defendants without bail. Judges are supposed to consider a defendant’s ability to pay bail in their decision but that seldom happens, according to criminal defense lawyers.

Roughly 80 percent of the Rikers population is awaiting trial; more than 75 percent of them are eventually released without being sentenced to prison.

“I don’t think anyone should be locked up solely because they can’t afford to buy their freedom but that’s what happens to blacks and Latinos living in certain communities while the privileged, often charged with far worse crimes, are walking free,” said Scott Hechinger, senior staff attorney and the director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, which represents more than 30,000 people arrested each year in Brooklyn.

Mr. Hechinger cited a client represented by Brooklyn Defender Services who has been held since June on $750 bail for allegedly stealing multiple pairs of shoes. Because the woman was accused of entering the vestibule of an apartment building to steal the shoes, the crime she is charged with is technically considered a violent felony.

A 2017 study from the Vera Institute of Justice tracked 99 cases in which unsecured bail or partially secured bond was granted, and 54 percent of cases included defendants charged with a felony. The study found that 88 percent of defendants returned to court; only 8 percent were arrested pretrial on another felony charge.

“There is this misconception that people who are on Rikers need to be there because if they are let out, the streets will run with blood,” Mr. Hechinger said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and some district attorneys say they favor bail reform, but believe the mass bailout should only be for people charged with low-level offenses. Kennedy officials said they will consider all bail-eligible women and teenagers regardless of the crime they are charged with.

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney of Manhattan, said “there are certain individuals detained on Manhattan cases who, if released without a court-reviewed, predetermined supervised release and safety plan, are flight risks and may pose a public safety risk to the community.”

Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill said he was concerned about witness intimidation and retaliation.

Some City Council members called the positions of Mr. de Blasio and the city’s law enforcement officials hypocritical. Rory I. Lancman, a Queens councilman, said because there are protocols in place that allow judges to keep those who are a danger to others in custody, the bailout “is brilliantly exposing the fallacy of our bail system.”

Ritchie Torres, a Bronx councilman, said the debate reminds him of the fear of a crime wave that took place when activists began calling for an end to the police practice of stop and frisk.

“Allowing people who have neither been tried or convicted to languish in jail violates the spirit of the Constitution,” Mr. Torres said. “Pretrial incarceration has become the penalty for poverty, for mental illness and for blackness.”

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