Thursday, November 27, 2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2014




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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL



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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



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Benefit Concert

at El Rio Bar

with important update on

MARISSA ALEXANDER'S CASE

(3158 Mission St., at Precita St.)

Tues., December 2nd, 8-11pm

 Who is Marissa Alexander?
On August 1, 2010, just nine days after giving birth to her daughter, Marissa Alexander was attacked by her abusive, estranged husband, at their shared home. As Marissa explained, “In an unprovoked jealous rage, my husband violently confronted me while using the restroom. He assaulted me, shoving, strangling and holding me against my will, preventing me from fleeing all while I begged for him to leave.” Marissa retrieved her lawfully registered gun and fired a warning shot upwards into a wall to prevent him from beating her. No one was injured by her warning shot.

Even though Marissa was acting in self-defense, she was arrested by Jacksonville police and charged with aggravated assault. She rejected a three year plea bargain in order to maintain her innocence and the right to defend her life. After only 12 minutes of deliberation, a jury of six convicted Marissa of three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with no intent to harm. Her sentence was set at 20 years.

Recent plea deal.

On Monday, Nov. 25, Marissa Alexander accepted a plea deal in Florida court that will allow her to return home after serving 65 more days, in addition to a period of monitoring at home after her release. She will be freed from prison in January 2015.

We in WORD and Marissa's supporters in Florida and across the U.S. have demanded her complete exoneration. She was acting in self-defense but the Florida prosecutor Angela Corey was aggressively pursuing up to a 60-year sentence if Marissa were to be found guilty in a new trial.

Given the possibility of an unjust conviction and lengthy sentence, Marissa's choice to accept a plea bargain is completely understandable. Most importantly, we stand with our sister and her decision that will allow her to return to her life and family.

Get involved. The struggle continues!

And yet, her case is not over. There is still the possibility the judge could impose a 5-year sentence for a second charge of aggravated assault.

All along this struggle for justice, it has taken the mobilizations, education and legal fight on Marissa Alexander's behalf that overturned her original conviction, won her a new trial and allowed her to accept a much lower sentence, even if unfair.

Let's not stop here! Come to the El Rio fundraiser and help us raise funds to send to Marissa Alexander's support campaign in Florida. She will need our solidarity until she is home free.

El Rio bar is at 3158 Mission. We'll enjoy the music of Heart of Orion, Vixen Noir, and Rebel Allianz  as we socialize and raise a glass to Marissa Alexander and WORD's work!

See you there!

WORD SF
Women Organized to Resist and Defend

Follow us on Facebook    Follow us on Twitter
www.DefendWomensRights.org
info@DefendWomensRights.org

Chicago: 773-828-9205 or chicago@defendwomensrights.org
Connecticut: 203-787-8232 or ct@defendwomensrights.org
Los Angeles: 323-394-3611 or la@DefendWomensRights.org
New York: 347-292-WORD (9673) or nyc@defendwomensrights.org
San Francisco: 415-375-9502 or sf@DefendWomensRights.org

If this message was forwarded to you, subscribe to receive future email updates.

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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/

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

November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
mchugh_md
Secretary of the Army John McHugh
President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.
Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.
It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.
Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:
Secretary of the Army John McHugh
101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101
The Judge Advocate General
2200 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-2200
Army Clemency and Parole Board
251 18th St, Suite 385
Arlington, VA 22202-3532
Directorate of Inmate Administration
Attn: Boards Branch
U.S. Disciplinary Barracks
1301 N. Warehouse Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304
Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:
  • The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help
  • A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.”  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.
  • Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).
  • A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above
This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.
Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!
> > > Please donate today! < < <


War resister Sara Beining court martial set for Dec. 9 at Fort Carson, Colorado

sara beiningClick here to contribute to Sara Beining’s legal defense and prison fund
November 11, 2014. Courage to Resist and the Nuclear Resister
Facing a lengthy prison sentence, Army war resister Sara Beining is scheduled to be court martialed at Fort Carson, Colorado at 9am, December 9th, on two counts of desertion.
Supporters are encouraged to attend the trial, contribute to her legal and prison fund, and send her letters letter of support to: Sara Beining, A0305918 / Criminal Justice Center / 2739 E. Las Vegas St / Colorado Springs, CO 80906
Sara is a single mother and Iraq war veteran. She is being held in the civilian county jail prior to her military trial. Sara went AWOL a second time last summer after a nearly year-long delay in resolving the original charge that resulted when she left her unit at Ft. Hood in January, 2007.
Just over one year ago, September 14, 2013, Beining was stopped for a traffic offense and held on an outstanding military warrant, more than six years after she and her newlywed husband had together walked away from war service. She was briefly jailed, then given a plane ticket and orders to report back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where, she said, “I tried for another year to play the game” and be quietly processed out of the army as many other recent military refusers have been. But in her absence without leave, Beining had given birth to a daughter in September, 2008 and become an outspoken opponent of war.


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

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Rasmea Defense Committee statement

Without a full and fair trial,
Rasmea found guilty

In a travesty of justice, Rasmea Odeh today was found guilty of one count of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization. For over a year, Rasmea, her supporters, and her legal team have been battling this unjust government prosecution, saying from the start that the immigration charge was nothing but a pretext to attack this icon of the Palestine liberation movement. And although there is real anger and disappointment in the jury’s verdict, it was known as early as October 27th that she would not get a full and fair trial.

On that day, Judge Gershwin Drain made a number of rulings that made her defense virtually impossible. The government’s indictment stated that she had unlawfully gained U.S. citizenship because she had allegedly answered a number of questions falsely on her visa application in 1995 and her naturalization application in 2004. She had been in this country as a lawful permanent resident for almost 20 years, and a citizen for over nine, when she was arrested on October 22nd, 2013.

The main basis for the arrest a year ago was that she had allegedly falsely answered “No” to a question asking whether she had ever been arrested or imprisoned. The government claimed that she failed to disclose that she had been convicted by the Israelis of participating in bombings in 1969. This conviction in a military court was the result of a false confession made after she was viciously tortured and raped by Israeli military authorities for weeks. There is no due process in Israeli military courts, which “convict” over 99% of Palestinians who come before them, and “evidence” from these should not be accepted in a court in the U.S.

But Judge Drain did allow the conviction in Israel to be entered into evidence; and even though he suggested that Rasmea’s assertion that she faced torture and sexual abuse at the hands of her Israeli captors was “credible,” he still ruled that it could not be brought up in the course of her trial. So her attorneys had to scrap plans to call to the stand an expert witness, clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Fabri, who has decades of experience working with torture survivors, to testify that the allegedly false answers on the immigration forms were the result of Rasmea’s chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The judge also rejected Rasmea’s selective prosecution motion, even though it was clear that the case against her grew out of the investigation of 23 anti-war and Palestinian community organizers in Chicago and Minneapolis, who were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in 2010. Make no mistake. Rasmea came under attack by the U.S. government because she is Palestinian, and because for decades, she has organized for Palestinian liberation and self-determination, the Right of Return, and an end to U.S. funding of Israeli occupation. Palestine support work, especially the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, has made a number of recent gains, and the long arm of federal law enforcement has attempted to crack down on it, like it has on all effective and impactful movements for social justice in the history of this country. The crackdown reached Rasmea.

More than 200 people from across the Midwest, especially from Chicago, traveled to stand with her throughout the trial. They bore silent witness to her incredible testimony, for despite the judge’s rulings, she and her defense team did put the crimes of Israel on record. Her story of being exiled from the village of her birth, Lifta, in 1948; of being exiled again during the 1967 war; of experiencing the death of her sister after the raid on her home in 1969; and of being a political prisoner, one of the most famous in the history of the Palestine liberation movement—all these are stories of the crimes of apartheid Israel, crimes that continue today in the racist settler and military assaults we have seen in the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, 1948 Palestine, and the West Bank. Israel’s terrorism, and the U.S. government’s complicity, were exposed for all the world to see.

Rasmea’s honesty in the face of cross-examination from Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Tukel was thoroughly convincing as well. She said clearly that she thought the questions on the immigration forms were being asked about her time in the U.S., because she said she had nothing to hide and did not need to lie. She had testified about her torture at the United Nations when she was released in 1979, and as her lead attorney, Michael Deutsch, said, “It was well known that she was convicted, and traded [in a prisoner exchange]. The U.S. Embassy knew it, the State Department knew it, and Immigration should have known it.” So although the government had to prove that she “knowingly lied,” it never met that burden, regardless of what the verdict says.

For over a year, the Rasmea Defense Committee has been organizing educational events, rallies, protests, and call-in days to demand that U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade and Tukel drop the charges against her. We now have more work ahead of us. Rasmea’s brilliant legal team—Deutsch, Jim Fennerty, Bill Goodman, and Dennis Cunningham—will undoubtedly file an appeal, and have strong grounds to do so, based on Judge Drain’s unjust decisions. And we will continue to support their work with our political organizing and mobilizations.

Just like our people in Palestine and across the world will never rest until every inch of historical Palestine is free, we will never rest in our defense and support of Rasmea as she moves forward to challenge this conviction. As Deutsch said in his closing statement to the jury, “It has been one of the great privileges of my long legal career to represent this extraordinary woman of great passion and dignity.” Rasmea’s story is the story of millions of Palestinians, and of millions of freedom-loving defenders of justice everywhere. Her eventual victory will be a victory for Palestine and for all the people’s movements across the world.

Today, we thank everyone who stood with Rasmea this past year, and ask you to continue fighting with us until we achieve that victory.

www.uspcn.org and www.stopfbi.net
Donate to Rasmea! today

http://www.stopfbi.net/events/11-10-14/be-detroit-nov-10-rasmea-odeh-and-final-verdict

 follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright © 2014 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414



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Urban Dreams Restored!

A Victory, but More Struggle Ahead

20 November 2014 — In an unexpected announcement, the new Superintendent of Oakland Schools, Antwan Wilson, announced yesterday that the Urban Dreams website, taken down in April of this year by Oakland School officials, would be restored. This teacher-generated, social issues site had been singled out by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and Fox News as a target, because it included a curriculum which focussed on a comparison between Martin Luther King and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia has been a target of the FOP ever since police and prosecutors framed him up for the shooting death of a police officer in 1981 in Philadelphia.

The Oakland School Board could have defied this police attack on free speech and academic freedom months ago, but chose instead to capitulate under a Fox News onslaught without a whimper. Now, let’s make sure they stick to their word to restore the site!

The main credit for this victory goes to Oakland Teachers for Mumia, who have worked tirelessly for this restoration, and to Johanna Fernandez of Educators For Mumia, who valiantly combatted Fox News in an on-air interview on this subject earlier this year. It also goes to Pulitzer Prize-wining author Alice Walker, who wrote a firm letter to the School Board opposing the censorship of Urban Dreams. (We send out her letter again, reproduced below.)

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal is ecstatic that this victory has been achieved, and we salute all those involved in this struggle. But we remind everyone that we need to see the actual restoration without censorship of the Urban Dreams site (promised for the “next week or so”), and we need to keep struggling to combat the other attacks of cops against free speech, chiefly the new “gag” law just passed in Pennsylvania.

PA Gag Law Punishes Prisoners for Speech

Although Mumia Abu-Jamal has been shown to be innocent, having been victimized by (now discredited) “witness” allegations and other prosecutorial fabrications, the FOP, having failed to get him executed, continues to seek to “shut him up.”  This is precisely the purpose of a new law, just passed and signed in Pennsylvania, which punishes any felony convict for speech which causes “mental anguish” to the crime victim(s). Clearly unconstitutional, this law threatens not just prisoners, but non-profit organizations which distribute their speech and writings, such as Prison Radio and the Pacifica Radio Network, both of which publish and air Mumia’s prolific commentaries.

Save the Date — 05 December

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, together with Prison Radio and Oakland Teachers for Mumia, will hold a public forum, Cops vs Free Speech, on December 5th at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley.  Please join us for this important event!

Cops vs Free Speech

How police are threatening the right
of free speech of convicts, dissidents,
and All of Us!

Speakers: Keith Cook (Mumia’s brother),
Cephus “Uncle Bobby” Johnson,
Mumia’s recorded comments,
and other Speakers.

Film showing: “Manufacturing Guilt,”
an expose of the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal

7 pm Friday Dec. 5th 2014
La Pena Cultural Center
3105 Shattuck Av. Berkeley CA

$5 - $!0 sliding scale
All donations benefit the
defense suit against the PA Gag Law

- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA  •  510.763.2347
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _

       PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ALICE WALKER OPPOSES POLICE CENSORSHIP OF OAKLAND SCHOOLS CURRICULUM

November 8, 2014

I am dismayed to learn that the Oakland School Board has dismantled a website of Social Justice lesson plans because the police objected to it.  The Board has a duty to defend students’ right to learn against police interference.  I am asking the Oakland School District to repost the Urban Dreams website.

The police attack on Urban Dreams is part of a long campaign to injure and defame political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a brilliant journalist and author who is innocent of all charges against him.  In October the police obtained a state gag law in Pennsylvania specifically intended to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal.  One lesson on the Urban Dreams website in Oakland asked students to compare media suppression of Mumia’s writings with suppression of the radical thoughts of Martin Luther King, and the police call for censorship was meant to shut out the words of both these defenders of freedom.

I hope that the educators of the Oakland School Board will defend free speech and academic freedom by restoring the Urban Dreams website.

In Peace,
Alice Walker

CC:  Antwan Wilson, Superintendent
David Kakishiba, School Board President
Oakland Teachers for Mumia
Oakland Tribune
San Francisco Chronicle

— This message is from: Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA 94610  •   510 763-2347
18 November 2014


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First Amendment Lawsuit

"Abu-Jamal v. Kane" filed 11/10 in Federal Court!

Dear Friends,

Today the Abolitionist Law Center, Amistad Law Project, and the
Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center are filing a historic lawsuit in Federal Court on behalf of Prison Radio, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Educators for Mumia, and other plaintiffs. We seek to overturn a new PA Law designed to allow the state to silence targeted prisoners by preventing their speech.

What is at stake is your right to hear Mumia and other prisoners, journalists right to record, and prisoners right to speak.  As a puppet for the agenda of the Fraternal Order of Police, and to add to his poll numbers, PA Governor Tom Corbett signed SB508 into law on 10/21, (effective immediately), and specifically targeting Mumia Abu-Jamal's right to free speech.

The law puts Prison Radio, our correspondents, and our listeners in jeopardy. So in response we have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the middle district of PA (Harrisburg).

We will win this lawsuit.
We will continue to record Mumia.
We can uphold all prisoners’ rights to speak their truth.
But we need your help to do it.

DONATE:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air


Defeat Pennsylvania’s Prisoner Gag Law!

Free Speech Under Threat from Police & Politicians!

Mumia is the Immediate Target, but We’re All in the Cross-Hairs!

How You Can Help… see below…

07 November 2014 — An outrageous new law threatening the free speech of convicts has been passed in Pennsylvania in a lightning fast process. The chief target of this law?  Innocent political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, and others like him. The perpetrators of this law?  The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and their lap-dog friends in the state legislature and governor’s mansion of PA. The victims of this law? Convicts like Mumia; non-profits that distribute the writings and speech of convicts; and ultimately the working class and all who oppose this racist, capitalist system.

The new law, the “Re-victimization Relief Act,” enables crime victims—as well as local authorities and the state, using taxpayer funds—to sue any imprisoned convict whose conduct “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim,” ie, causes “mental anguish.” This broad and subjective definition could mean anything!

PA Governor: Convicts Have No Rights

This law was hashed together, and quickly passed and signed in reaction to a pre-recorded commencement address to a Goddard College graduating class by Mumia Abu-Jamal, himself a graduate of Goddard College.  Mumia’s inspiring address at Goddard said absolutely nothing about his case, yet cops protested at the college entrance; and days later the law was signed by PA Governor Corbett in a ceremony at 13th and Locust in Philadelphia, the spot where Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot to death—by someone other than Mumia—in 1981. Corbett said that “convicted felons in prison have abused and surrendered their rights,” a blatantly false assertion.

Protestors shouted “free Mumia,” and “one-term Tom” at the Governor, which is what he turned out to be after losing his seat in the recent mid-term elections. But the threatening law he signed continues to menace convicts.

“Mumia Bill” Designed to “Shut Him Up”

This new law is just the latest manifestation of the blatant targeting of Mumia, by the very cops, courts and politicians who put him away for a crime he didn’t commit in the first place. Called the “Mumia Bill,” this act was designed to “shut him up” (Philly.com, 07.Oct.2014). It follows a long line of “Mumia rules,” in which courts have literally changed precedent when considering Mumia’s case, only to change back again on other cases later. Will this blatantly unconstitutional law get overturned, or will it be allowed to stand as yet another “Mumia rule,” in defiance of all precedent? We cannot take that chance!

Mumia’s case is just the immediate pretext for this legal atrocity. The danger here is that this blatantly unconstitutional law could have far-reaching effects, even if it does eventually get overturned. What about radio stations such as the Pacifica Network, and non-profit organizations such as Prison Radio, which promote the defense cases, and distribute the writings of Mumia and other convicts, wrongfully convicted or otherwise?  They all have the right of free speech!

Lawyers with the Abolitionist Law Center and the Amistad Law Project have joined with Prison Radio (publishers of Mumia’s commentaries) to mount an aggressive defense against this vindictive, so-called “legal” challenge to the right of free speech. These folks need you help!

— Donate Now To Defeat PA’s Prisoner Gag Law —

Go to: http://bit.ly/defendfreespeech

Mumia has been definitively shown to be innocent of the 1981 crime for which he was convicted. He was the victim of an orchestrated frame-up by cops and prosecutors, who were not only targeting a known leftist and former Black Panther, and not only covering up their own rampant corruption in Philadelphia’s inner city; but they were also covering their probable complicity in the execution of one of their own, who was talking to the Feds about the corruption at the time.

The system has chickened out of trying to execute Mumia, since the evidence of his innocence is so overwhelming. But they’ve confined him to state prison for life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). Our job remains unchanged: Mumia is Innocent! For labor action to free Mumia!

Defeat Pennsylvania’s Prisoner Gag Law!

http://bit.ly/defendfreespeech

This message brought to you by:

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610 • www.laboractionmumia.org • 510.762.2347

November 2014



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Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,” which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment, unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508) to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives, analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers, or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact information at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne  (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams  (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi  (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf


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 Medical Care Needed for Chelsea Manning!

 ACLU files lawsuit against Army demanding medical care for Manning

 By the Chelsea Manning Support Network

Yesterday, the ACLU and Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit against the Army demanding the necessary medical treatment for Manning’s previously diagnosed gender dysphoria.

By continuing to deny Manning treatment, the Army is directly violating Chelsea’s constitutional rights under the 8th amendment. Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case, notes “such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Due to a full year of neglecting Manning’s medical care, the ACLU had previously announced a Sept 4th deadline for the Army to provide treatment. After continued failure to provide treatment, the ACLU filed a lawsuit yesterday and released the following statement:

ACLU Demands Government Provide Chelsea Manning Necessary Medical Care

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 23, 2014

CONTACT: Crystal Cooper, ACLU National, 212-549-2666; media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON—Today, Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia against Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and other Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of the Army officials for their failure to provide necessary medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition with which she was originally diagnosed by Army doctors more than four years ago.

The complaint is accompanied by a motion for preliminary injunction demanding that Ms. Manning be provided hormone therapy, permission to follow female grooming standards, and access to treatment by a medical provider qualified to treat her condition. Ms. Manning is currently serving a thirty-five year prison sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, and though the military recognizes that she has gender dysphoria requiring treatment, critical care has been withheld without any medical basis.

“The government continues to deny Ms. Manning’s access to necessary medical treatment for gender dysphoria, without which she will continue to suffer severe psychological harms,” said Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case. “Such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Ms. Manning is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, the ACLU of Kansas and civilian defense counsel David E. Coombs. Last month, Ms. Manning’s legal team sent a letter to the DOD and Army officials demanding that she receive treatment for gender dysphoria in accordance with medical standards of care, including hormone therapy and permission to follow female grooming standards. Her treatment needs have continued to be unmet and her distress has escalated.

“I am proud to be standing with the ACLU behind Chelsea on this very important issue.” said David E. Coombs, “It is my hope that through this action, Chelsea will receive the medical care that she needs without having to suffer any further anguish.”

Gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition that requires hormone therapy and changes to gender expression, like growing hair, to live consistently with one’s gender identity as part of accepted standards of care.

Without necessary treatment, gender dysphoria can cause severe psychological distress, anxiety, and suicidality. For this reason, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Psychological Association have issued policy statements that support providing treatment to prisoners diagnosed with the condition in accordance with established standards of care, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and many state corrections agencies are already doing.

A copy of the complaint is available at:

aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-complaint-declaratory-and-injunctive-relief

The motion for preliminary injunction is available at:

aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-plaintiffs-motion-preliminary-injunction

This press release is available at:

aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/aclu-demands-government-provide-chelsea-manning-necessary-medical-care

—Free Chelsea Manning, September 24, 2014

http://www.chelseamanning.org/press/aclu-files-lawsuit-against-army-demands-medical-care-for-manning

Write to Chelsea Manning:

Mail must be addressed exactly as follows:

CHELSEA E. MANNING     89289

1300 NORTH WAREHOUSE ROAD

FORT LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS 66027-2304



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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) Brooklyn Man Fatally Shot by Police Was Unarmed, Bratton Says
By and




2) University of California to Raise Tuition Despite Protests
By




3) Virginia Death Row Inmates Seek More Privileges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NOV. 21, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/11/21/us/ap-us-death-penalty-virginia.html?ref=us




4) Falling Wages at Factories Squeeze the Middle Class
By and





5)  Police Union Official: Darren Wilson Doesn't Expect to Be Charged
By CBS News
November 21, 2014
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/345-justice/27080-police-union-official-darren-wilson-doesnt-expect-to-be-charged




6) Four Decades of Solitary in Louisiana
By





7) Student protest over tuition fees ends in scuffles with police
Organisers say 10,000 joined march, which saw NUS offices daubed with paint after it refused to back protest
By Matthew Taylor
November 19, 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/19/student-protest-tuition-fees-scuffles-police




8) In Ferguson, Preparation and Anticipation as Grand Jury Decision Nears
By and




9) Boy, 12, Shot and Wounded by Cleveland Police Officer
By ASHLEY SOUTHALL





10) Community Leaders Criticize Police Over Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Brooklyn Man
By BENJAMIN MUELLER and





11) Will Texas Kill an Insane Man?
By




12)  A Quiet Wedding for Darren Wilson







13) Woman Cleared in Death Caused by G.M.’s Faulty Ignition Switch
By REBECCA R. RUIZ




14) In Brooklyn, 2 Young Men, a Dark Stairwell and a Gunshot
By





15) More Troops Ordered to Ferguson After Night of Chaos
By and




16) Ferguson Grand Jury Faced Mass of Evidence, Much of It Conflicting
By , , and





17) Fury After Ferguson





18) Mass Imprisonment and Public Health
By
19) Video Shows Cleveland Officer Shot Boy in 2 Seconds
By
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1) Brooklyn Man Fatally Shot by Police Was Unarmed, Bratton Says
By and

A rookie New York City police officer shot and killed an unarmed 28-year-old man in a darkened stairwell in Brooklyn late Thursday night, according to the police.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the shooting appeared to be unprovoked.

“We don’t know enough yet, but it does appear to be an accident,” the mayor said at a news conference on Friday. “This is a tragedy.”

The victim was identified as Akai Gurley, and the officer, Peter Liang, has been placed on modified assignment and was relieved of both his badge and gun.

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton called the shooting “an unfortunate accident.”

Mr. Gurley “was a total innocent,” Mr. Bratton said. He was not engaged in any activity other than trying to walk down the stairs, Mr. Bratton said.

Officer Liang, who was on the job less than 18 months, and his partner were patrolling the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York when they encountered Mr. Gurley inside a nearly pitch-black stairwell shortly before midnight, Mr. Bratton said.

Officer Liang drew his flashlight and his gun as he entered the stairwell on the eighth floor.

At the same time, Mr. Gurley and his girlfriend had just entered the stairwell on the seventh floor.

“One officer discharged one round from his service weapon, striking the male in the chest,” according to a statement from the police.

Mr. Gurley was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Janice Butler, whose sister was with Mr. Gurley at the time of the shooting, said that the victim had been in an apartment on the eighth floor getting his hair braided for several hours Thursday night.

Mr. Gurley did not live in the building and left the apartment with his girlfriend shortly after 11 p.m. The two initially went to the elevator but it was taking too long, so they decided to take the stairs.

The girlfriend entered the stairwell first and heard a door open nearby. The next sound she heard was a shot echoing through the stairwell. Then she saw her boyfriend, shot in the chest, staggering down two flights of stairs.

Ms. Butler said that, according to her sister, the police did not identify themselves, or give any commands.

“The cop didn’t present himself, he just shot him in the chest,” Ms. Butler said. “They didn’t see their face or nothing.”

She added, “They didn’t say anything.”

Ms. Butler, whose cheeks were streaked with tears, said her sister was in the building and grieving and was unable to speak to reporters.

The stairwell at the housing projects is so dark at night that anyone standing in it appears as a silhouette, according to residents.

The stairwells are fitted with fluorescent lights, they said, but the burned out bulbs are seldom replaced, and the few that work are dim.

Mattie Dubose, a resident, yelled at the building superintendent Friday morning, as employees of the New York City Housing Authority furiously worked on the stairwells.

“You see how dark our staircases are? This is ridiculous,” she said. “The staircases from eight down are dark. If you want to walk in them, you need an escort.”

The Police Department is still dealing with the fallout over the death of Eric Garner, who died after a confrontation with the police on Staten Island in July.

Mr. Garner, who was unarmed and being arrested on charges of illegally selling cigarettes on a street corner, died after being placed in a chokehold by a police officer trying to wrestle him to the ground.

A grand jury on Staten Island is deciding whether or not charges should be brought against any of the officers involved.

But the episode has raised questions about the use of force by the police and led the commissioner to call for sweeping reforms.

About a month after Mr. Garner’s death, the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., sparked violent protests and prompted a national discussion over police tactics. With a grand jury expected to decide in coming days whether to indict the officer in that shooting, residents there remain on edge, so much so that the National Guard has already been called in to quell any unrest.

“I think when people see a tragedy, of course it pains them and it reminds us that we have a lot of work to do,” Mr. de Blasio said. Still, he said each of the recent deaths involving the police, from Staten Island to Ferguson, had its own dynamics and he warned against linking them all together.

The shooting on Thursday in Brooklyn, he said, appeared to be a “tragic mistake.”

Charles Barron, a former New York City councilman who was recently elected to the State Assembly, arrived at the Brooklyn building Friday morning to speak with residents, and said it would take more than apology to ease the concerns of the community.

“People are outraged, this is happening all over the country, people have no respect for black life,” he said. “I want to hear the justification for this one. We’re going to fight for justice with this one just like they are in Ferguson.”



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2) University of California to Raise Tuition Despite Protests
By

SAN FRANCISCO — As students with sleeping bags staged a sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley, and the police stood by watchfully, the Board of Regents of the University of California gave final approval on Thursday to a contentious plan to raise tuition steadily over five years, which students across the state protested as unaffordable.

The university’s Board of Regents voted, 14-7, to approve tuition increases of up to 5 percent in each of the next five years, a compounded increase of as much as 27.6 percent. The elected officials on the board, led by Gov. Jerry Brown, opposed the plan, which had been proposed and championed by Janet Napolitano, the president of the university system.

The regents who favor the tuition increases and the state lawmakers who oppose them have cast blame on each other, each side insisting that it is defending the quality and affordability of one of the world’s great public universities. Ms. Napolitano and her supporters, pointing to significant budget cuts in recent years, say that reduced state support for the university forced the tuition increases, while Mr. Brown and his allies contend that the university needs to find more savings through profound changes in the way it operates.

On Wednesday, a lengthy debate and a crucial committee vote showed that the proposal had the votes to pass, making Thursday’s session anticlimactic. There was no discussion by the board before the final vote, but students made a round of angry and emotional appeals.

“You should be crying, you should be praying, you should be trying to figure out what you are going to do to fix this,” said Amelia Itnyre, a student at the Davis campus, her voice breaking.

At the conference center on the San Francisco campus where the regents met there were far fewer protesters than on Wednesday, when some students tried to block access to the building and scuffled with people trying to enter.

Instead, the protesters’ focus shifted to campuses, particularly the one in Berkeley, across San Francisco Bay. Starting on Wednesday, students gathered for an overnight protest at Wheeler Hall, a favorite spot for activists dating to the free speech movement of the 1960s. Students occupied the building’s entrance on Wednesday night and, with supplies like bottled water, peanut butter and fruit, stayed through the night and into Thursday, vowing to remain until the tuition increase was reversed.

The protesters, who at times numbered in the hundreds, voted Thursday not to block access to the building, averting a possible confrontation with the campus police, who watched but took no action.

Because of financial aid, most California resident students pay no tuition at the University of California — though their room and board costs can be steep — and the regents said that would remain so. So the tuition increases will fall primarily on families with above-average incomes and on out-of-state students.

Protesters said they understood that distinction but still objected. “A lot of people’s incomes, it looks pretty good on paper, but it’s still really hard to come up with thousands of dollars for college,” said Jasmine McGee, a third-year student at Berkeley who was one of those sitting in Wheeler Hall.

The university’s undergraduate tuition and fees are $12,192 a year for in-state students and $35,070 for out-of-staters, well above the national averages for public universities. Those figures could rise over the next five years to as much as $15,560 and $44,759. In addition, individual campuses charge several hundred dollars in added fees, and many students pay room and board, typically about $14,000.



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3) Virginia Death Row Inmates Seek More Privileges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NOV. 21, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/11/21/us/ap-us-death-penalty-virginia.html?ref=us

RICHMOND, Va. — Five Virginia death row inmates have filed a lawsuit challenging their solitary confinement.

The plaintiffs want the same expanded privileges won by another death row inmate who successfully challenged his solitary confinement on due process grounds. The new complaint says that inmate Alfredo Prieto is allowed to exercise in the prison gymnasium and have contact visits with members of his immediate family and that other death row inmates are entitled to the same treatment.

The state has appealed the ruling in Prieto's case. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond heard oral arguments last month.

A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Herring, said that after officials receive the lawsuit, they will review it with their clients and respond appropriately.


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4) Falling Wages at Factories Squeeze the Middle Class
By and

For nearly 20 years, Darrell Eberhardt worked in an Ohio factory putting together wheelchairs, earning $18.50 an hour, enough to gain a toehold in the middle class and feel respected at work.

He is still working with his hands, assembling seats for Chevrolet Cruze cars at the Camaco auto parts factory in Lorain, Ohio, but now he makes $10.50 an hour and is barely hanging on. “I’d like to earn more,” said Mr. Eberhardt, who is 49 and went back to school a few years ago to earn an associate’s degree. “But the chances of finding something like I used to have are slim to none.”

Even as the White House and leaders on Capitol Hill and in Fortune 500 boardrooms all agree that expanding the country’s manufacturing base is a key to prosperity, evidence is growing that the pay of many blue-collar jobs is shrinking to the point where they can no longer support a middle-class life.

A new study by the National Employment Law Project, to be released on Friday, reveals that many factory jobs nowadays pay far less than what workers in almost identical positions earned in the past.

Perhaps even more significant, while the typical production job in the manufacturing sector paid more than the private sector average in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, that relationship flipped in 2007, and line work in factories now pays less than the typical private sector job. That gap has been widening — in 2013, production jobs paid an average of $19.29 an hour, compared with $20.13 for all private sector positions.

Pressured by temporary hiring practices and a sharp decrease in salaries in the auto parts sector, real wages for manufacturing workers fell by 4.4 percent from 2003 to 2013, NELP researchers found, nearly three times the decline for workers as a whole.

Despite that widening gap, Washington still paints the manufacturing sector as a gateway to the middle class, even if the gate is closing.

The White House earmarked $100 million in grants last month to encourage manufacturing innovation, part of President Obama’s goal of adding one million American manufacturing jobs by the end of his second term.

After losing more than six million factory jobs from 2000 to 2010, the sector has rebounded a bit in recent years, with more than 700,000 positions created since early 2010. A total of 12.2 million Americans work in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.She argued that if federal, state and local governments continued to promote manufacturing jobs with tax breaks and credits, employers should be encouraged to pay higher starting salaries and provide good benefits. “If you are getting a tax break or a subsidy, we should make sure those jobs are good jobs,” Ms. Ruckelshaus said.

Based in New York, NELP is a research and advocacy group for low-wage and unemployed workers. It receives some financial support from organized labor, including unions like the United Steelworkers and the United Food and Commercial Workers, as well as the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The data in the study were drawn mostly from government sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, and independent experts confirm many of the trends NELP cites in the report.

“We are not going to back to Detroit in the 1950s or Akron in the 1900s,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “There still are many manufacturing jobs that are high-paying, but they tend to be more senior or require a lot more education than entry-level jobs do. And their numbers are shrinking, too.”

Even if it does not continue to be a mass employer or a ticket to the middle class, Mr. Katz said, manufacturing remains vital to the economy because it spurs innovation and leads to higher-paying, value-added jobs like design, marketing and other support services. It is also a major source of productivity gains, as well as a generator of profits and exports for American companies.

But most of those gains are not going to the workers on the factory floor. One major factor in the downward pressure on overall manufacturing wages has been a particularly sharp fall in hourly pay earned by workers like Mr. Eberhardt who make parts that supply the big automakers. Parts workers make about one-third less than assembly-line workers who put together cars and trucks, but parts jobs account for 72 percent of all auto sector employment. From 2003 to 2013, median wages for parts workers fell to $15.83 an hour from $18.35.The auto industry in the United States, both parts makers and large auto companies like General Motors, have staged an impressive recovery since G.M. filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and required a federal bailout. Lower salaries and efficiency gains, along with less debt, have helped make Detroit more globally competitive.

At the same time, one of the most important reasons for lower pay is the increased use of temporary workers. Some manufacturers have turned to staffing agencies for hiring rather than employing workers directly on their own payroll. For the first half of 2014, these agencies supplied one out of seven workers employed by auto parts manufacturers.

The increased use of these lower-paid workers, particularly on the assembly line, not only eats into the number of industry jobs available, but also has a ripple effect on full-time, regular workers.

Even veteran full-time auto parts workers who have managed to work their way up the assembly-line chain of command have eked out only modest gains.

When Timothy Shelly first started working at the Faurecia Automotive Seating plant in Cleveland, Miss., he was earning $8 an hour. Nearly 10 years later, with a promotion that moved him up to managing three other workers, he earns $12.72, not much more than the rise in the cost of living over the same period.

“The work is very strenuous. It’ll wear you down,” said Mr. Shelly, who loads 35-pound tubs of parts on pushcarts and then walks miles every day delivering them.

Mr. Shelly can supplement his paychecks with overtime, which pays 50 percent more, but, he said, “it’s not easy at all to get those extra shifts.” Instead, according to Mr. Shelly, his plant regularly uses a service to hire temp workers who are paid $7.50 an hour and do not receive health insurance or other benefits.

In Ohio, Mr. Eberhardt, who works a 10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. shift, is due for a raise of 50 cents an hour, having just completed his first year in the job. “Once in a while we get a Saturday or a Sunday shift, and that helps,” he said. “It’s time and a half.”


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5)  Police Union Official: Darren Wilson Doesn't Expect to Be Charged
By CBS News
November 21, 2014
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/345-justice/27080-police-union-official-darren-wilson-doesnt-expect-to-be-charged

he suburban St. Louis police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown does not appear to expect criminal charges from a Missouri grand jury that has been investigating the case for several months, a police union official said Thursday.

Jeff Roorda, business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers' Association, said he met Thursday with Ferguson officer Darren Wilson, who has remained secluded from the public eye since the Aug. 9 shooting that sparked tense and occasionally violent protests and drew national attention.

Wilson has been under a lot of pressure and stress but appeared confident in the outcome of the grand jury investigation, Roorda said.

"It's fair to say that neither he nor his defense team expect an indictment," Roorda said, offering his impression of the situation based on the meeting with Wilson.

Roorda later told the AP in a text message that he was only speaking for himself.

"Wilson seems confident that justice will be served, but neither he nor his attorneys shared any expectations with me," he said in the text.

One of Wilson's attorneys, who also attended Thursday's meeting, said there was no specific discussion of expectations.

"We have absolutely no idea - no more than anyone else - what may or may not happen," attorney Neil Bruntrager said. "The only expectation that we would have is that the grand jury would be thorough and fair."

If he is indicted, Wilson will immediately turn himself in to authorities, Bruntrager said.

Wilson has been on paid administrative leave since the shooting.

A 12-person St. Louis County grand jury has been hearing evidence in the case as it weighs whether to issue charges against the white officer for the black 18-year-old's death. A decision could come soon, though authorities have not publicized any specific date for an announcement.

Roorda said St. Louis city police have been notified that they are switching to 12-hour shifts starting Saturday, a preparation for a potential uptick in protests.

The St. Louis County Police Department has not yet decided whether to switch to longer work shifts, spokesman Brian Schellman said.

For weeks, local and state police have been preparing for a grand jury announcement in anticipation that it will result in renewed protests. Earlier this week, Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard to help with security.

Authorities have said Wilson shot Brown, who was unarmed, following some sort of physical confrontation that occurred after Wilson told Brown and a friend to stop walking down the center of a street.

Wilson told authorities that the shooting happened after Brown struggled with him for his gun, according to reports by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Times that cited unnamed sources. But some witnesses have said Brown had his arms raised - as if to surrender - when the fatal shot was fired.

Riots and looting occurred a day after the shooting, and protesters filled the streets for weeks. Police responded by firing tear gas and smoke canisters into crowds of demonstrators after some people threw rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Protests have been nearly constant since the shooting. The vast majority of protesters want to see the officer charged with murder. Many are also pushing for changes in the way police and the courts interact with minorities. A handful of demonstrations have been in support of Wilson.

Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for Brown's family, described the investigation as an "emotional roller-coaster" for his clients. Even if Wilson is indicted, there's no guarantee of a conviction. And if he isn't charged, Crump said Thursday, "they get no chance of justice for their child."

Crump said he had no insight into the timing of the grand jury's decision, but that he expected to be notified ahead of any public announcement.

Wilson has incurred significant legal, medical and relocation expenses, and a police charity has raised close to $500,000 for him, Roorda said.



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6) Four Decades of Solitary in Louisiana
By

Richard Nixon was president when Albert Woodfox landed in solitary confinement, along with another inmate, both convicted of the 1972 murder of a Louisiana prison guard named Brent Miller.

Mr. Woodfox is still there.

Now 67 years old, he has maintained his innocence of the murder from the start. He has been held in isolation longer than any prisoner in the United States, and perhaps in the nation’s history.

For 23 hours a day — 23 hours and 45 minutes on weekends — he sits by himself in a closet-size, windowless cell. He eats all his meals alone. He has no access to the prison’s educational or religious activities. His contact with visitors is extremely limited.

Over the past year, he has endured visual body cavity searches up to six times a day, even though he is under constant supervision and is shackled and accompanied by guards whenever he is removed.

Mr. Woodfox, who was serving a sentence for armed robbery at the time of the murder, would most likely have been released from solitary many years ago if he had pleaded guilty to the murder. But he has consistently denied any involvement, believing that he was targeted because of his political activism as a member of the Black Panther Party.

The facts of the case were on his side: There was no physical evidence linking him or his co-defendant, Herman Wallace, to the murder, and prosecutors did not reveal that their main witness had been bribed to testify against the men. Mr. Woodfox, by all accounts, has been a model prisoner, and under Louisiana prison policy this should have earned him his exit from solitary confinement years ago.

Finally, on Thursday, a federal appeals court panel in New Orleans unanimously voted to overturn Mr. Woodfox’s murder conviction because his 1998 retrial was tainted by racial bias in the grand jury selection process. (His original, 1973 conviction was overturned because of his lawyer’s ineffectiveness. In 2008, a federal judge overturned his second conviction on grounds of bad lawyering, but that ruling was reversed because of a federal law that dramatically restricts review of state court decisions.)Mr. Woodfox is the last incarcerated member of what became known as the Angola 3 — three prisoners who each spent decades in solitary, mostly at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Robert King, who was put into isolation also in 1972, was released in 2001. Mr. Wallace was released last year, and he died of liver cancer days later.

In 2005, a federal magistrate judge wrote in a report that the amount of time the men had spent in solitary was “so far beyond the pale” that she could not find “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.” Yet in 2008, 36 years after the guard’s killing, the Louisiana attorney general was still calling Mr. Woodfox “the most dangerous person on the planet.”

State officials insist their case is solid and have already said they intend to retry him, though the prison guard’s widow believes he is innocent of the killing and most of the potential witnesses in the case are dead.

Even comparatively brief solitary confinement can cause severe mental and emotional trauma; a United Nations expert has said that more than 15 days may amount to torture. When it is imposed for more than 40 years, it is barbaric beyond measure.


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7) Student protest over tuition fees ends in scuffles with police
Organisers say 10,000 joined march, which saw NUS offices daubed with paint after it refused to back protest
By Matthew Taylor
November 19, 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/19/student-protest-tuition-fees-scuffles-police

A student protest that attracted thousands of people on to the streets of London has ended with a series of scuffles and accusations of police violence.

Organisers said the demonstration against tuition fees and wider cuts to education was the biggest mobilisation of students since 2010 when demonstrators occupied Tory party offices at Millbank.

Wednesday’s protest saw the National Union of Students (NUS) headquarters in London daubed with paint after it decided not to back the demonstration due to “an unacceptable level of risk” to its members. That provoked anger among those who took part in the march. “We did not organise what happened at the NUS but we do know students are very angry about being let down by the NUS,” said Beth Redmond from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, one of the groups that organised the demonstration. “When you see the numbers here today, they are in danger of becoming an irrelevance.”

Organisers claimed that up to 10,000 protesters took part in the march with university students joining those from further education colleges and sixth forms.

The protest passed off peacefully until demonstrators arrived at Parliament Square. A breakaway group of several hundred, including many who were wearing masks, pulled down fences blocking off the square, provoking minor scuffles with the police.

They then occupied the area in front of parliament as the main body of the march continued to the final rally point.

For the next two hours smaller groups of a few hundred protesters played cat and mouse with police, staging impromptu protests outside government departments, high street chains accused of not paying their tax and Conservative party headquarters, where at least one arrest was made.

Police officers tried to keep up with the fluid groups of demonstrators as they wound their way through backstreets between Westminster and Victoria. Paint bombs were thrown at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and a nearby Starbucks. Later police “snatch squads” picked out people in the crowd and made several arrests, provoking an angry reaction from the crowd.

At one point a protester was wrestled to the ground and dragged away. His friends said he was a Turkish Kurdish student in his late 20s studying at Birkbeck University.

“He was just walking outside John Lewis and they attacked him,” said a fellow student who did not want to be named. “He hadn’t done anything. We were just here to protest … It was really violent and he looked like he was unconscious for a while.”

The Metropolitan police said three officers had suffered minor injuries and 11 arrests were made.

“Various missiles were thrown at the officers and protesters pulled down protective fencing around the grass area in Parliament Square,” the force said in a statement.

Students from as far afield as Glasgow and Cornwall travelled to London for the demonstration, which organisers hope will kickstart a wider campaign in favour of free education.

Jacob Furedi, a student at University College London, said: “We’re marching for free education. We think it’s unreasonable to pay for something which is a right. The atmosphere is buzzing. I’ve been speaking to people from Aberdeen and Stirling – it’s not just London students but students from all around the UK.”

Aaron Kiely, from the Student Assembly Against Austerity and a member of the NUS national executive, said their message was very simple: a return to free education and an alternative to tuition fees.

He added: “We want to end the lifetime of debt which is a massive burden for students.

“Students are really angry because we go to university and then at the end of it we get an average of £40,000-worth of debt. That puts you in a hell of a difficult position when you start to think about a mortgage and a family. We need an alternative.”

Student organisers said the protest marked the start of a wave of action that will run up to next year’s general election.

Deborah Hermanns, from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, said organisers were delighted with the scale of Wednesday’s demonstration. “I really do think today was the start of a wider movement calling for free education rather than against something. There were lots of people here on their first demonstration and I think they were inspired and will be back.”


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8) In Ferguson, Preparation and Anticipation as Grand Jury Decision Nears
By and

FERGUSON, Mo. — The grand jury weighing charges against a white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager has not reached a decision and will continue considering the case, people with knowledge of it said Saturday. It is possible that the grand jury will not meet again until Monday.

The grand jury did not meet on Saturday. Yet with scant information emerging from its closed-door meetings inside the St. Louis County courthouse on Friday and in the weeks earlier, anticipation about the grand jury’s decision — and the timing of it — continued to mount here.With widespread indications that a decision could be imminent, protests that have gone on nearly nightly since the shooting on Aug. 9 appeared to be growing recently. Education officials were on alert, and one district, Jennings, closed schools in advance of the scheduled Thanksgiving holiday as a precaution. Parents of children in other districts were checking school websites over the weekend, looking for the possibility of more closures.

On Saturday morning, workers in Clayton erected barriers around the St. Louis County Police Headquarters and prepared to change traffic patterns near the courthouse where the grand jurors meet. The moves were among a long list of measures law enforcement officials have undertaken for the possibility that jurors will decide not to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, in the death of Michael Brown, 18, and that civil unrest may follow.

“We will keep these traffic restrictions in place as long as they seem prudent,” a statement posted Saturday on the city of Clayton’s website said, offering no timeline on how long traffic will be restricted — or when the grand jury might finish its work.

Since August, the grand jury has been meeting to hear evidence and testimony in the case that drew hundreds of angry protesters into the streets of Ferguson, where they clashed, at points, with the police in riot gear. All along, though the legal proceedings have been taking place in secret, they have been unusual and held up to an especially high level of scrutiny.

After critics argued that Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, should recuse himself in the case, Mr. McCulloch’s office said it would take the rare step of bringing “absolutely everything” — all the evidence and witnesses — before this grand jury of 12. In many cases, prosecutors offer grand juries far more narrowly guided cases, with merely a witness or a few witnesses to provide just enough evidence for jurors to find “probable cause” to bring a charge.

Legal experts said the vast amount of evidence and testimony, including some from Officer Wilson himself, and an array of possible charges in this case, from intentional murder to criminally negligent manslaughter, would most likely require added time for grand jury members to consider.

Yet as indications from boarded-up businesses to barriers at police stations continued to appear here, speculation swirled on Saturday: Why is the grand jury taking so long? Perhaps it is unable to reach a conclusion in the case? Are jurors arguing?

The experts, though, said that the period of time — more than three months — during which the grand jurors have been meeting on the case was unusual, but not unheard-of. Though the prosecutor’s office has suggested that a mid- to late-November decision was possible, much about where the grand jurors are in the case is unknown, including whether they have completed all testimony or have even begun their deliberations.

“This is a unique grand jury to begin with,” Mark O’Mara, the criminal defense lawyer who represented George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, said in a telephone interview. “Most grand juries don’t last this long. There’s no limit on how long they decide or deliberate. Like any trial jury, the longer they deliberate the more questions there are.”

“If they’re taking a long time,” Mr. O’Mara continued, “they’re probably wading through all the evidence trying to figure out whether Wilson was justified. And if he was not justified, they’re figuring out what to charge him with.”

The possibility of deadlock in a grand jury is remote, some experts said. Unlike regular juries deciding criminal cases, a grand jury here need not be unanimous. A vote by nine of the 12 grand jurors for a particular charge would bring an indictment. Still, some experts said, grand juries sometimes wish to discuss a case and reach some consensus before even taking a vote.

“In some cases, they themselves might be saying, ‘We want to strive to be unanimous or as close to unanimous as possible,’ ” said Peter A. Joy, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

In general, a grand jury has broad latitude in its deliberations, which take place alone, outside of the presence of a prosecutor. And delays, the experts said, can crop up. A grand jury may bring questions or requests to re-examine a piece of evidence, for instance, as they contemplate their votes.

Reporting was contributed by Manny Fernandez, Alan Blinder and John Eligon from Ferguson, Mitch Smith from Clayton, Mo., and Matt Apuzzo from Washington.




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9) Boy, 12, Shot and Wounded by Cleveland Police Officer
By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

A Cleveland police officer shot and wounded a 12-year-old boy who was carrying what turned out to be a fake pistol outside a recreation center on Saturday after witnesses said the boy had brandished the gun on a playground, the authorities said.

Two police officers responded to the scene and ordered the boy to raise his hands, but he refused and reached for a gun in his waistband, the Cleveland Division of Police said in a statement.

An officer fired two shots, striking the boy once in the abdomen, police and emergency medical services officials said. He was taken to a hospital in serious condition and underwent surgery. His mother told a local news station that her son’s condition had deteriorated to critical on Saturday night.

At an evening press conference, Deputy Chief Ed Tomba of the Cleveland police said the boy did not threaten the officers or point the weapon at them. "There was no verbal or no confrontation,” he said.

The police learned that the gun was fake after the shooting, said Jennifer Ciaccia, a spokeswoman for the Division of Police. Investigators recovered a replica gun resembling a semiautomatic pistol, the police said. “It looks really, really real, and it’s huge,” Ms. Ciaccia said.

Following protocol, both police officers involved in the shooting were placed on administrative leave during the investigation, the police said.

The police said one of the officers had been treated for an ankle injury.

The shooting happened around 3:30 p.m. at the Cudell Recreation Center on the city’s west side. Witnesses said that the boy had waved a gun and pointed it at people on the playground, according to the police.

In a telephone interview with 19 Action News from MetroHealth Medical Center, the boy’s mother, Samaria Rice, said her son had gone to the recreation center with his friends and older sister, who told her that her son had been shot. She said the family lived across the street.

A woman who answered the phone at the recreation center on Saturday said it was closed and referred further questions to the police.

The shooting fell within a 24-hour period in which seven people were killed by gunfire on Cleveland’s east side.

Early Saturday morning, the police found two men dead from gunshot wounds in a car that had crashed into a fence.

On Friday evening, five people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn son, were killed in an execution-style shooting at a home in the Glenville neighborhood, the police said. The woman’s 9-year-old daughter was wounded in the shooting and taken to a local hospital for treatment.

No arrests have been made in those shootings.


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10) Community Leaders Criticize Police Over Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Brooklyn Man
By BENJAMIN MUELLER and

Two days after an unarmed black man was shot and killed by a police officer in a darkened stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, community leaders expressed exasperation with the pace of change at the New York Police Department.

Speaking on Saturday at his National Action Network headquarters in Harlem, the Rev. Al Sharpton said the circumstances surrounding the shooting, which police officials have described as an accident, required a more complete inquiry.

“They are saying it was an accident,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We are saying, ‘How do we know until there is a thorough investigation?’ ”

The victim, Akai Gurley, 28, had just entered a stairwell at the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, when he was shot by Officer Peter Liang, 27, a probationary officer with less than 18 months on the job.Commissioner William J. Bratton on Friday said that Officer Liang’s gun had discharged inadvertently as he was opening a door a flight above Mr. Gurley.


Mr. Gurley’s domestic partner, Kimberly Michelle Ballinger, and the couple’s 2-year-old daughter sat on stage behind Mr. Sharpton on Saturday. Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner — a Staten Island man who died in July after a confrontation with the police — sat beside her.

The deaths of Mr. Garner and Mr. Gurley have increased scrutiny of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to reshape the Police Department.

At the time of the shooting, Officer Liang was conducting what is known as a vertical patrol, an inspection of the building’s stairwells, with Shaun Landau, 27, another probationary officer. Mr. Landau did not draw his gun, the department said.

Mr. Sharpton likened the patrols to the stop-and-frisk tactics that drew withering criticism from Mr. de Blasio during his mayoral campaign last year.

Other speakers conveyed frustration with the state of public housing buildings, including the dimly lit stairwell where Mr. Gurley was shot.

“Why didn’t an electrician make a vertical patrol?” asked Councilman Jumaane D. Williams of Brooklyn.

Speaking on Saturday, a firearms expert said stress can trump the training officers receive.

“There are certain things you train officers to do in almost all situations, and that’s not to have their finger on the trigger,” said John C. Cerar, a retired New York deputy inspector who was the commander of the department’s firearms training. But, he said, the fear that can come with patrolling the stairwells can overwhelm the protocol.

According to a high-ranking police official, Officer Liang was trying to open the door that leads to the stairwell while holding his gun and a flashlight. In turning the knob and pushing the door open, he may have rotated the gun’s barrel down and accidentally fired, said the official, who added that the account of events could change.

The audience on Saturday became animated as speakers noted that the officer had drawn his gun in the absence of a clear threat. Mr. Bratton has said that officers have discretion to draw a weapon while on patrol.

Mr. Williams said that drawing a gun, with a finger on the trigger, without provocation “sounds like criminal negligence.”

Hours later, Mr. Gurley’s sister, Akisha Pringle described him as “very giving, very kind.”

“All he is, is an innocent guy walking down the stairs who was killed for no apparent reason at all,” she said.

Moments after she left the stage, she, Ms. Ballinger and Mr. Sharpton brought Mr. Gurley’s daughter, Akaila, to the microphone. The group went quiet.

“She told us she wanted to say she loves her daddy,” Mr. Sharpton said.



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11) Will Texas Kill an Insane Man?
By

On Dec. 3, Texas plans to execute an inmate named Scott Panetti, who was convicted in 1995 for murdering his in-laws with a hunting rifle. There is no question that Mr. Panetti committed the murders. There is also no question that he is severely mentally ill, and has been for decades.

During his capital murder trial, at which he was inexplicably allowed to represent himself, Mr. Panetti dressed in a cowboy suit and attempted to subpoena, among others, John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ. A standby lawyer said his behavior was “scary” and “trance-like,” and called the trial “a judicial farce.”

It was not an act. Mr. Panetti, now 56, was first diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 20, and in the years before the murders he was hospitalized several times for delusions and psychotic episodes.

In this respect, he is no different from the estimated 350,000 inmates around the country with mental illness — 10 times the number of people in state psychiatric hospitals. But Mr. Panetti is not just another insane prisoner; his name is synonymous with the Supreme Court’s modern jurisprudence about mental illness on death row. In Panetti v. Quarterman, decided in 2007, the justices held that it is not enough for a defendant simply to be aware that he is going to be executed and why — the previous standard the court had used in permitting the execution of the mentally ill. Rather, he must have a “rational understanding” of why the state plans to kill him.

Noting Mr. Panetti’s “well-documented history of mental illness,” the court held that capital punishment serves no retributive purpose when the defendant’s understanding of crime and punishment is so distorted that it “has little or no relation to the understanding of those concepts shared by the community as a whole.”

For example, Mr. Panetti understood that the state claimed the reason for his death sentence was the murder of his in-laws, but he believed the real reason was “spiritual warfare” between “the demons and the forces of the darkness and God and the angels and the forces of light.”

But the justices refused to set precise guidelines for determining whether someone is competent enough to be executed, and they did not overturn Mr. Panetti’s sentence. Instead, they sent the case back to the lower courts for a fuller reconsideration of his current mental state.By any reasonable standard — not to mention the findings of multiple mental-health experts over the years — Mr. Panetti is mentally incompetent. But Texas, along with several other stubborn states, has a long history of finding the loopholes in Supreme Court rulings restricting the death penalty. The state has continued to argue that Mr. Panetti is exaggerating the extent of his illness, and that he understands enough to be put to death — a position a federal appeals court accepted last year, even though it agreed that he was “seriously mentally ill.”

Mr. Panetti has not had a mental-health evaluation since 2007. In a motion hastily filed this month, his volunteer lawyers requested that his execution be stayed, that a lawyer be appointed for him, and that he receive funding for a new mental-health assessment, saying his functioning has only gotten worse. For instance, he now claims that a prison dentist implanted a transmitter in his tooth.

The lawyers would have made this motion weeks earlier, immediately after a Texas judge set Mr. Panetti’s execution date. But since no one — not the judge, not the district attorney, not the attorney general — notified them (or even Mr. Panetti himself), they had no idea their client was scheduled to be killed until they read about it in a newspaper. State officials explained that the law did not require them to provide notification.

On Nov. 19, a Texas court denied the lawyers’ motion. A civilized society should not be in the business of executing anybody. But it certainly cannot pretend to be adhering to any morally acceptable standard of culpability if it kills someone like Scott Panetti.


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12)  A Quiet Wedding for Darren Wilson




FERGUSON, Mo. — Darren Wilson, the officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in August, has been out of public sight ever since. Yet last month, he stepped into a St. Louis County office building, gave his name and applied for a marriage license.

Several days later, Officer Wilson married Barbara Spradling, a fellow officer in the Ferguson Police Department, public records show.

The couple obtained their marriage license in Clayton, Mo., outside St. Louis, in the recorder of deeds office on the fourth floor of the Lawrence K. Roos administrative building, steps away from the courthouse where the grand jury has been meeting.

While security guards question people going in and out of the building, the deeds office itself is a blandly bureaucratic place where clerks sit in open cubicles. A clerk at the marriage license desk said on Monday that she was surprised that Officer Wilson went there, as opposed to another county or state — possibly Las Vegas, she said — where he could have filled out paperwork with a greater guarantee of privacy.

Records show that Officer Wilson, 28, and Officer Spradling, 37, were married on Oct. 24. One of the two witnesses at the ceremony was Greg Kloeppel, one of Officer Wilson’s lawyers. Christopher B. Graville, a municipal judge in Oakland, Mo., performed the ceremony.

Officer Wilson has been on paid administrative leave from the police department since August, when he fatally shot Mr. Brown on a Ferguson street, setting off months of angry demonstrations. A grand jury is currently meeting to determine whether there is probable cause that Officer Wilson committed a crime when he killed Mr. Brown. A decision from the grand jury is expected any day.

Both Officer Wilson and Officer Spradling were previously married, public records indicate. His divorce was finalized on Nov. 10, 2013.

Officer Wilson and Officer Spradling own a home together on Manda Lane in Crestwood, Mo., a St. Louis suburb about a half-hour drive from Ferguson.

They have scarcely been seen there since Mr. Brown was killed on Aug. 9. Neighbors said that within a few days of the shooting, Officer Wilson and Officer Spradling abruptly left their home.

Officer Spradling received a medal of valor award in 2012 for her work as a police officer. Officer Wilson received a commendation earlier this year for his arrest of a suspect in a drug case.



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13) Woman Cleared in Death Caused by G.M.’s Faulty Ignition Switch
By REBECCA R. RUIZ

Ten years since her boyfriend’s death in a defective Saturn Ion, a Texas woman has been cleared of the criminal record she had carried as a result of it.

Candice Anderson was held responsible for the death of Gene Mikale Erickson, 25, when he was killed on Nov. 15, 2004, riding as a front-seat passenger in her beige Ion. Ms. Anderson crashed the car into a tree on a bright afternoon while driving along a country road in Ben Wheeler, Tex.

In May, The New York Times reported that General Motors considered Mr. Erickson a victim of its faulty ignition switch, which has led to the recall of 2.6 million cars, including the Ion, this year and engulfed the automaker in the gravest safety crisis in its history. The defect, which can cause a loss of power, disabling power brakes, power steering and airbags, has been linked to at least 35 deaths.On Monday, 10 years and nine days since the accident, a judge in Van Zandt County, Tex., overturned Ms. Anderson’s guilty plea and cleared her record. Ms. Anderson’s parents and Mr. Erickson’s mother were in the courtroom, the same one in which Ms. Anderson had been indicted by a grand jury years earlier.

“It’s overwhelming; it’s a range of emotions,” Ms. Anderson said. “I’m elated. Things are upside down. Or, really, right-side up.”

The district attorney who prosecuted Ms. Anderson submitted a statement in support of her vindication. That district attorney, Leslie Poynter Dixon, and the police trooper who investigated Ms. Anderson’s accident, whose report strongly suggested that Ms. Anderson’s driving had been influenced by intoxication, had both said that if the ignition-switch defect had been publicly known at the time of the crash, certain details of the accident — like the seemingly inexplicable lack of skid marks or evasive action — would have been seen differently.

“At the time, unbeknownst to Ms. Anderson or my office, there were issues regarding her 2004 Saturn Ion,” Ms. Poynter Dixon wrote in a letter in support of Ms. Anderson in July. “Had I known at the time that G.M. knew of these issues and has since admitted to such, I do not believe the grand jury would have indicted her for intoxication manslaughter.”

On Monday, General Motors, in a statement, for the first time publicly linked Mr. Erickson’s death to the defect.

Ms. Anderson, 21 at the time of the crash, suffered serious injuries, including a lacerated liver. But the guilt surrounding her own survival and her boyfriend’s death, for which she was prosecuted on an intoxicated manslaughter charge, because of the trace amount of Xanax in her system, caused her more enduring pain, she said.

Until this year, she wrestled with questions about her role in Mr. Erickson’s death. The police trooper who investigated the accident had deduced that Ms. Anderson was intoxicated before her drug test results came back. His police report referred to the seemingly inexplicable circumstances of the accident, her history of recreational drug use, “witness testimony and Anderson’s behavior at the scene,” which was disoriented and emotional.

She pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in October 2007, five months after G.M. had conducted an internal review of the case and quietly ruled its car was to blame. She served five years probation and paid more than $10,000 in fines and restitution.

G.M. did not disclose its culpability when federal safety regulators asked about the cause of the crash in a so-called death inquiry. Instead, in June 2007, the automaker wrote to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it had not assessed the cause of the crash when, in fact, it had: A G.M. engineer had ruled just a month earlier that power to the vehicle had most likely shut off.

After her story was first reported in the spring, Ms. Anderson’s attorney, Robert Hilliard, and federal lawmakers had called on Mary T. Barra, G.M.'s chief executive, to support a pardon.

At a congressional hearing in July, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called Ms. Anderson’s indictment “a perversion of the justice process,” adding that “G.M. allowed an innocent person to be convicted of a crime.”

He asked Ms. Barra and Michael P. Millikin, G.M.'s top lawyer, to contact Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to urge a pardon for Ms. Anderson. Both declined; Ms. Barra indicated that she could submit “evidence to support” Ms. Anderson’s exoneration, but she did not think it appropriate to advocate for it.

Ms. Anderson said she still had not heard from G.M. directly.

“I don’t expect I ever will,” she said. Ms. Anderson said would accept a payment from the automaker’s victim compensation program run by Kenneth R. Feinberg. “My plan is to take the compensation and take this clearing of my record and move on with my life.”

On Monday, James R. Cain, a spokesman for G.M., defended the automaker’s long silence on the matter. “We have taken a neutral position on Ms. Anderson’s case,” he said. “It is appropriate for the court to determine the legal status of Ms. Anderson.”

He noted that Mr. Feinberg’s compensation program “is set up to evaluate claims without consideration of contributory negligence.”

Having long worked as a home health aide and currently in pursuit of a nursing degree, Ms. Anderson said she had suffered professionally from being a convicted criminal. To be accepted to nursing school, she had to petition the Texas Board of Nursing and pay for a psychiatric examination to prove her mental stability. With her criminal record, she would have been barred from at-home caregiving and hospice work, and she had been worried about finding full-time work after graduation.

“Who wants someone taking care of their mother if they have homicide on their record?” she said.

Beyond its practical effects on her work, Ms. Anderson said her cleared record would significantly affect her life in other ways.

“This will change so many things,” she said, noting that she would someday be grateful to tell the story of her exoneration to her daughters, now 4 and 6. “My heart is going to be a lot lighter to be able to tell them ‘this is what happened, this horrible thing. And it wasn’t Mommy’s fault.'”



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14) In Brooklyn, 2 Young Men, a Dark Stairwell and a Gunshot
By

For two flights down a darkened Brooklyn stairwell, Akai Gurley descended, mortally wounded by gunfire but apparently unaware that the single shot had come from a police officer’s 9 millimeter weapon.

A few paces down and fleeing the boom of gunfire, his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, turned when she no longer heard him behind her, according to an account provided by a senior police official who was briefed by investigators. Retracing her steps, she found Mr. Gurley, 28, near the fifth-floor landing and rushed to a family friend on the fourth floor of the housing project to call 911.

“My neighbor says her boyfriend has been shot,” the friend told the dispatcher, according to the police official, who had viewed the call logs. “Call the cops.”

Upstairs, two officers already knew who had fired the shot. A gun in the hand of one young officer, Peter Liang, had gone off one time, the round flying — and possibly ricocheting — down the dark, cinder-block stairway.Within hours of the shooting late Thursday night, the Police Department had conceded a grave error. The mayor and William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, visited the family home on Friday to apologize. The following day, protesters assembled outside the 75th Precinct station house in the East New York. And community leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, drew parallels to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Missouri, and the killing of Eric Garner by police on Staten Island.

The shooting focused scrutiny on everyday tactics used by officers in housing projects, where rooting out entrenched violence has been a departmental priority, even as basic questions about the death remained unanswered: Had Officer Liang, surprised by a figure in the shadows below, reflexively squeezed the trigger, or had he merely lost his grip as he opened the door to the stairs?

“The cop who was standing behind Officer Liang doesn’t know what happened; the girlfriend doesn’t know what happened,” said the official. “There is a distinct possibility that Officer Liang doesn’t quite understand what happened.”

From different corners of Brooklyn, the lives of Mr. Gurley and Officer Liang, two young men separated in age by a single year, collided amid the faint shadows of the stairwell inside 2724 Linden Blvd., one of the buildings in the vast the Louis H. Pink housing project.

For Mr. Gurley, the stairs, even in their sorry state, offered the best alternative to chronically malfunctioning project elevators. For Officer Liang, their darkness presented a threat.

The fatal shooting, described as accidental by Commissioner Bratton, is the subject of investigations by the Police Department and the Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson. Officer Liang has not been interviewed yet by the police, which is standard in cases that could be presented to a grand jury.

Without talking to the officer involved, police officials said they could offer only theories as to what occurred in the stairwell.

What is known, police officials said, is that Officer Liang took out his service weapon before entering the unlit stairwell, a not-uncommon practice by officers patrolling inside the city’s housing projects. He held a flashlight. He opened the eighth-floor door, followed by his partner, also a relatively new officer and whose name has not been released. The gun went off as Mr. Gurley entered the landing one floor below, trailing his girlfriend.

Before the shooting, Mr. Gurley, had been on his way up in life, friends said. Childhood hopes of a music career were behind him, his good looks brought modeling work, and his determination had recently landed him something more steady after several months of searching: a job offer from the city housing authority.

He told friends that he was relieved to have a reliable paycheck to help provide for his 2-year-old daughter, Akaila, and her mother, Kimberly Michelle Ballinger.

“He was happy that he was about to go to work, he was relieved,” said Mr. Dente Crosby, 28, a friend of several years.

He was a familiar face around the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn where he lived with his daughter and her mother. Rose Quintana, 48, who lived in Mr. Gurley’s building there for six years, said she was on good terms with the mother of his daughter.

She added that a few years ago, the building was filthy and home to delinquents whom she worked with housing authority officials to oust. Though she did not know Mr. Gurley well, she appreciated him for never causing trouble.

“The problems that we had in this building was never that young man,” she said of Mr. Gurley.

Still, his life took him between two of New York City’s more dangerous pockets: his home in the Red Hook Houses and the Pink Houses in East New York where Ms. Butler lived. Mr. Gurley, known by his nickname “Bless,” had in recent years shied away from the streets, acquaintances said.

“He was getting it all together,” said a woman who knew Mr. Gurley but requested anonymity because she did not want to be connected to the case. “He was becoming an actor, he was going to school for modeling and he was going to work for the city,” she said.

The sort of patrol being conducted by Officer Liang and a partner, a so-called vertical patrol starts from the roof of a building and descends through its stairways, is considered essential to policing the projects. But they are seen by officers on daily patrol as among the most perilous assignments. Before starting one, officers radio special codes — 10-75V or 10-75I — to alert dispatchers in case anything happens.

The patrols became increasingly common over the summer as Commissioner Bratton flooded public housing with officers — many, like Mr. Liang, on overtime — to stem a rise in shootings. In the Pink Houses in East New York, recent gun violence, including two homicides, has drawn more officers.

Often the department’s least experienced officers are sent.

“This is a result of poor in-street field training; you literally had the blind leading the blind out there,” said another high-ranking police official.

Both police officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the shooting investigation is still unfolding.

Early in his tenure, Commissioner Bratton promised to provide better guidance for rookie officers in high-crime neighborhoods, though the new program is not expected to start until January. Better training would not stop officers from drawing their weapons, the officials said, nor could it entirely prevent them from firing accidentally. In most years, the department logs about two dozen inadvertent gunshots, most during weapons maintenance. In 2012, a Bronx man died from what the police said was an accidental shooting after he collided with an officer responding to a robbery with his gun drawn.

On Sunday, a patrol car sat outside Officer Liang’s home in Bensonhurst. A neighbor who spoke to his family said Mr. Liang, 27, who lives with his parents, had barely left his room since the shooting. The neighbor, Fred Chan, 58, said his wife spoke to Mr. Liang’s mother late Saturday. She told him that Mr. Liang had barely eaten since the shooting. “Peter can’t stop thinking about what happens,” Mr. Chan said, relaying what he had been told about the conversation in Cantonese. “He would just say, ‘It was so dark. I was so scared.' ”

Yuri Castillo, 19, heard the shot from the stairwell, and minutes later heard Mr. Gurley’s girlfriend, Ms. Butler, weeping in the fourth floor stairwell.


Reporting was contributed by Nate Schweber, Nikita Stewart, Benjamin Mueller and Jeffrey E. Singer.




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15) More Troops Ordered to Ferguson After Night of Chaos
By and

FERGUSON, Mo. — After a chaotic night of demonstrations that erupted in many fires, frequent bursts of gunshots, looting and waves of tear gas, Gov. Jay Nixon said early Tuesday that he would send additional National Guard troops to help quell the worst violence this battered St. Louis suburb has seen since a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in August.

The hours of unrest followed the announcement on Monday evening that a grand jury had chosen not to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, for the death of Michael Brown. St. Louis County reported that 61 people had been arrested.

“I really don’t have any hesitation in telling you that I didn’t see a lot of peaceful protest out there tonight, and I’m disappointed about that,” Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief, said early Tuesday at a news conference. “I’m not saying there weren’t folks out there that were out there for the right reason — I’m not saying that wasn’t the case — but I am saying that, unfortunately, this spun out of control.”

Chief Belmar said demonstrators had set fire to at least a dozen buildings in and around Ferguson, and estimated that he had heard about 150 gunshots. The police, he said, did not fire any live ammunition.

Asked whether he would call the unrest that unfolded in Ferguson a riot, the chief replied, “Oh yeah, this fits.”

Fires continued to burn into Tuesday, and some of the flames and smoke on West Florissant Avenue, a main thoroughfare that was an epicenter of violence in August, lapped over the fence lines behind the storefronts, swooping perilously close to homes.

“It’s horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible,” said Tammy Ruffin, 54, standing in stinging smoke that swept over her house Tuesday morning. “I knew this was going to happen.”

Although she said that she, too, was upset that Officer Wilson had not been indicted, “It’s the wrong reaction,” she said.

The outbreak of violence played out even as President Obama spoke from the White House and pleaded for calm and restraint from both the police and the protesters.

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law,” Mr. Obama said. “And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make.”

Speaking at a news conference in Clayton, Mo., Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, described the series of events that led to the shooting, as well as the evidence presented to the 12-member grand jury. He detailed an altercation inside Officer Wilson’s vehicle, after which Officer Wilson had Mr. Brown’s blood on his weapon, shirt and pants, the prosecutor said, as well as swelling and redness on his face.

But the words spoken by Mr. Obama and Mr. McCulloch seemed distant here on a night when screams and gunshots echoed through the streets, demonstrators looted stores and set vehicles ablaze, and officers were pelted with rocks and bricks. Demonstrations also played out across the country, including in Atlanta; Los Angeles; New York; Oakland, Calif.; and Philadelphia. The demonstrations were largely peaceful.

In Ferguson, the unrest that began outside the police station quickly spread through other parts of the city and region, as people braved chilly temperatures to take to the streets. In St. Louis, protesters shuttered Interstate 44 and marched along Grand Boulevard in the southern part of the city.

Disorder broke out moments after Mr. McCulloch announced that Mr. Wilson would not face charges for the Aug. 9 shooting.

Mr. Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, and stepfather, Louis Head, stood with protesters outside the barricaded Ferguson police station as Mr. McCulloch made the decision public. As Ms. McSpadden cried, Mr. Head turned and yelled, with an expletive injected, “Burn this down!”

The crowd began to roar, and some demonstrators rushed toward a fence near which police officers had assembled.

“You need to disperse,” a voice over the loudspeaker of an armored police vehicle said after protesters threw rocks at officers, vandalized buildings and set fire to a police squad car. “Leave the area immediately.”

Almost on cue, right after Mr. McCulloch said that Officer Wilson would not be charged, cars began flooding what was an empty West Florissant Avenue. Outraged pedestrians foretold the volatility that ensued.

As the unrest began in some parts of Ferguson, the police initially held back. On West Florissant, demonstrators shattered windows at a McDonald’s restaurant and a wireless phone store, and they removed wooden boards that were intended to protect a liquor store.

But the police eventually returned to the streets with significant force. As the authorities regained control of most of West Florissant, they formed a line with armored vehicles to restrict access and threatened to arrest those who remained on the street.

“You need to stop destroying the city of Ferguson,” an officer said over a loudspeaker.

Chief Belmar said the initial, hands-off tactics by the police were intended to allow protesters to stage peaceful demonstrations, but he said that the situation ultimately grew so unstable that it required a more forceful approach.

But Rev. Waltrina Middleton, who traveled here from Chicago to help maintain peace, blamed the police for aggression. “I think they’re going over the top,” she said. “A lot of what you see is a response to the aggressive nature of the police.”

A variety of businesses in the Ferguson area, including nail shops, a Walgreens and a public storage facility, went up in flames. Firefighters, the police said, could not easily reach burning businesses because the conditions were too dangerous.

Gunfire rang out frequently throughout the night — sometimes sounding like it came from an automatic weapon — forcing protesters and reporters along the strip to rush for cover.

The scenes of fire and smoke throughout the city were both intimidating and captivating to residents of the area. Mike Jones, 30, who lives on the north side of St. Louis, said he was watching the events unfold from his home but then raced out to assess the situation in person. He had mixed feelings about what he saw. The black community needed to take a stand, he said, but the looting and fires only take money away from people.

“People, they’re only able to express themselves so many ways,” said Mr. Jones, who is black. “It’s never a win-win situation.”

In a terse statement issued just after 1 a.m., the office of Mr. Nixon, who visited Ferguson hours before the grand jury’s announcement, said the governor had ordered more members of the National Guard into the city, but did not specify how many.

“The Guard is providing security at the Ferguson Police Department, which will allow additional law enforcement officers to protect the public,” the statement said.On Monday night, National Guard soldiers had been assigned to protect, among other locations, a police command post and an electrical substation.

That approach, though, frustrated Ferguson’s mayor, James Knowles III, as the unrest spread.

“They’re here in the area,” Mr. Knowles said, “I don’t know why they’re not deploying.”

It remained unclear what other steps the authorities would take to manage protests that were expected to continue. Earlier this year, Mr. Nixon briefly imposed a midnight curfew in Ferguson.

Captain Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, one of the commanders overseeing the police response, deflected a question about whether Missouri officials might reinstate a curfew.

“A curfew wouldn’t have made a difference tonight,” he said.

Just up the street from Ferguson’s besieged police station, several patrons, most of them white, drank and socialized in Marley’s Bar and Grill. The television showed scenes of fire and chaos, and outside police officers with riot gear stood toe-to-toe with agitated crowds. Inside, there was an air of relaxation.

Chief Belmar described the night as an especially treacherous one for police officers, and officials displayed a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol they seized from a protester who was stopped for failing to disperse on South Florissant Road.

The night’s events clearly unnerved Captain Johnson, who grew up in the area.

“Our community’s got to take responsibility for what happened tonight, what happened tonight as far as tearing our community apart,” he said. “We definitely have done something here that is going to impact our community for a long time.”

Manny Fernandez, Mitch Smith and Monica Davey contributed reporting from Ferguson, and Julie Bosman from Clayton.




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16) Ferguson Grand Jury Faced Mass of Evidence, Much of It Conflicting
By , , and

FERGUSON, Mo. — Michael Brown became so angry when he was stopped by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive here on Aug. 9, his face looked “like a demon,'’ the officer would later tell a grand jury.

He testified that when Mr. Brown reached into the officer’s vehicle and fought him for his gun, Mr. Brown was so physically overpowering that the officer “felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.”

And when Mr. Brown ran away and then turned to face Officer Wilson, the officer recalled, he did not raise his hands in a gesture of retreat, as many neighbors have said – he made “a grunting, like aggravated sound,” clenched his left hand into a fist, tucked his right hand under his shirt toward his waistband and began running at the officer, who shot him dead.

That account, a vivid and vastly different version from what many people believe happened on Aug. 9, was given by Officer Wilson when he testified before a St. Louis County grand jury in September.The officer’s recollections of that day, told over several hours, was part of a trove of thousands of pages of documents released to the public on Monday after the county prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, announced that the grand jury had decided to bring no criminal charges in the case.

Officer Wilson’s version of events was just one part of a vast catalog of testimony and other evidence that the grand jurors absorbed during the three months that they heard the case. Yet it appeared to have helped convince the jurors, a group of nine whites and three African-Americans, that the officer had committed no crime when he killed Mr. Brown. On Monday, the announcement that there was no indictment set off violent protests, burning and looting throughout the beleaguered St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

Most grand jury proceedings are swift and simple: a few witnesses are called, the prosecutor makes the case for an indictment and the jurors vote.

But the grand jury in the Wilson case met for an extraordinarily long session, hearing what the prosecutor said was “absolutely everything” that could be considered testimony or evidence in the case. While what happens in the grand jury room is almost always kept secret, Mr. McCulloch insisted on making the transcripts of the proceedings available to the public immediately after the session concluded. Unlike most defendants, Officer Wilson testified before the grand jury.

The grand jurors in the Wilson case met in a St. Louis County courthouse on 25 separate days. They heard 70 hours of testimony from roughly 60 witnesses. And they confronted a jumble of forensics reports, police radio logs, medical documents and tapes of F. B. I interviews with bystanders.

After three months of hearing evidence, the grand jury began its deliberations last Friday at 3:04 p.m. By midday on Monday, they were finished.

Though the encounter between Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown took place in a matter of minutes, eyewitness testimony revealed an infinite array of subtle but crucial variations. Witness after witness took the stand to describe the same two minutes and agreeing on the broadest strokes: how it began with the struggle at the window and the first shots, and ended with Dorian Johnson, who had been walking with Mr. Brown, shouting “they killed him” and crowds descending on the scene.

Many witnesses first began to pay attention while the two were wrestling at the car window, though they often said they could not see enough to know what was going on. But even when the confrontation broke out into the open, the accounts diverged.

“I see the officer running behind shooting,” said one witness.

“When he gets out the car he immediately starts to shoot,” said another.

“Let me stop you,” still another said. “He did not take off running after Michael.”

Testimony about the critical final moments – when Mr. Brown stopped running, turned and moved back toward Officer Wilson – lay along a spectrum.

Some hewed closer to Officer Wilson’s recollection. “I could say for sure he never put his hands up,” said one witness, a man who was working in the area and did not live there, and whose recollection most strongly bolstered Officer Wilson’s case. “He ran to the officer full charge.”

Others spoke just as confidently that events unfolded in a completely different way.

“Yes I personally saw him on his knees with his hands in the air,” one witness said in a recorded interview with federal officials that was played for the grand jury before he testified. The prosecutor questioning that witness did not hide her skepticism of his story, highlighting contradictions in his various accounts.

“Basically just about everything that you said on Aug. 13, and much of what you said today isn’t consistent with the physical evidence that we have in this case, O.K.,” she said to him.

Prosecutors did not seem to shy from pointing out discrepancies between multiple interviews of a single witness, or even at some points exploring the past criminal history of some witnesses, including Mr. Johnson, Mr. Brown’s friend. Several witnesses were asked if they felt pressure to conform to a certain story line, or if they felt fear if their recollections differed from the popular narrative. Some did acknowledge such fears, with one talking of losing 15 pounds from stress.

An older man in the nearby housing complex was blunt about what he saw happening.

“You have to understand the mentality of some of these young guys,” he said, describing those who flocked to the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “They have nothing to do. If they can latch onto something, they embellish it because they want something to do.”

That man dismissed the notion that Mr. Brown had raised his hands to the sky in a gesture that turned into a symbol for the protest movement in Ferguson. He was also adamant, however, that Mr. Brown had never charged at Officer Wilson but had staggered, wounded, his arms outstretched in a gesture of surrender.

“He had his hands up, palm facing the officer like, ‘O.K., you got me,’ ” the man recalled, adding at a later point that he himself had once been shot so he knew what it was like. The prosecutor pointed out that the distance Mr. Brown covered after turning was farther than the witness remembered, and a grand juror questioned whether he could really judge how menacing Mr. Brown appeared to Officer Wilson.

Still this man’s testimony was like that of several others, in that it neither matched up perfectly with Officer Wilson’s account nor with the accounts of those most sympathetic to Mr. Brown. Many witnesses expressed puzzlement at the moment when Mr. Brown stopped and turned — "That is something I wrestle with to this day,” one said. Some recalled shouting out to him at that moment or turning to their family members in horror. When Mr. Brown moved toward Officer Wilson, one witness said, he “just went forward like his body was just going down.”

As the weeks went by, the grand jury studied the brief encounter between Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown from seemingly every possible angle, hearing forensic testimony on one day, on another going as a group to examine a police vehicle similar to Officer Wilson’s. On Nov. 11, the prosecutors questioned a former superior of Officer Wilson’s in another police force, asking about his relationship with the African-American community as well as the standard police practices governing the use of deadly force (the witness had nothing but positive things to say about Officer Wilson).

Much of the forensic evidence, along with public and private autopsy reports, supported the narrative that Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown had struggled inside the police car.

A crime scene investigator described swabbing Wilson’s gun with a Q-tip; the subsequent D.N.A. report found Mr. Brown’s genetic material on Officer Wilson’s Sig Sauer pistol. Similarly, D.N.A. from Mr. Brown was also found on the officer’s uniform pants and shirt.In his own testimony, Officer Wilson told jurors that Mr. Brown had grabbed the gun while the two scuffled at the car. The gun went off twice, once striking Mr. Brown in the hand and leaving blood splattered inside the vehicle.

The medical examiner who performed the initial autopsy showed the grand jury close to 100 gruesome photos of the wounds from every angle, giving exhaustive descriptions and lessons in the physics of gunshot wounds.

He described the soot, or unburned gunpowder, on a graze wound on Brown’s hand, proof that it was shot at a range of 6 to 9 inches.

Over the months, the grand jurors seemed to focus intently on the final movement Mr. Brown may have made toward Officer Wilson. The prosecutor asked witness after witness if it looked as if Mr. Brown were reaching for a weapon, though few said they saw anything like that.

Grand jurors asked if Mr. Brown, when he was moving toward Officer Wilson, seemed to have “any kind of expression, a blank look, aggressive look or anything”? They also had seemingly come to memorize the distances and challenged witnesses on their memories of the geography of the confrontation.

Forensic evidence was also presented that supported Officer Wilson’s statement that Mr. Brown was moving toward him as he opened fire outside the car, and continued to approach the officer after being hit by an initial volley of bullets.

The distance from the front wheel of the officer’s SUV to Mr. Brown’s body was 153 feet, 9 inches, an investigator said. Farther away from the car, the investigator showed with photographs, were two blood-spatter patterns – evidence showing that Mr. Brown was moving toward the officer, and the car, when he was killed in the second flurry of shots.

The medical examiner described the succession of bullet wounds to the chest and face that, in his view, would not have immediately incapacitated Mr. Brown. The prosecutors repeatedly questioned the doctor about this, driving home that Mr. Brown could have still been mobile after the initial several shots.

They seemed intent on emphasizing this point, which supports Officer Wilson’s description of Brown lunging toward him despite serious wounds.

A final shot through the top of Mr. Brown’s head, the medical experts all agreed, brought him down almost instantly.

After the shooting, Officer Wilson was taken to an area hospital, where a doctor found that he had a “facial contusion,” the medical term for a bruise. He was given a prescription for an anti-inflammatory drug.

Since they were not sequestered the way trial jury sometimes are, the grand jurors were also aware of the outside pressure to reach a decision.

“I know Mr. McCulloch before has said there is a process and this is the process we have to follow,” one juror said in late September. “Is the NAACP, or these other, you know, coalitions, are they confirming what he is saying to the people of Ferguson?”

Last Friday afternoon, the jurors indicated that they were ready to begin deliberating. The two assistant St. Louis County prosecutors who had presented the case gave them information on the charges that they could possibly bring against Officer Wilson: murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter.

“We were trying to give you a balanced presentation of the evidence,” said Sheila Whirley, one of the prosecutors, according to the transcripts. “So you might see us go back and forth because we were trying to keep it balanced for you, and get to the truth and hopefully that was accomplished. And I think you are going to make the right decision.”

Monica Davey contributed reporting.





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17) Fury After Ferguson


The reaction to the failure of the grand jury to indict in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, touched something deep and ancient and anguished in the black community.

Yes, on one level, the reaction was about the particulars of this case.

It was about whether Wilson’s use of force was appropriate or excessive that summer day when he fired a shot through Brown’s head and ended his life.

It was about whether police officers’ attitudes towards the people they serve are tainted. Why was Wilson’s description of Brown in his testimony so laced with dehumanizing rhetoric, the superhuman predator and subhuman evil, “Hulk Hogan” and the “demon”?

It was about whether the prosecutor performed his role well or woefully inadequately in pursuit of an indictment. Why did he take this course of action? Why didn’t he aggressively question Wilson when Wilson presented testimony before the grand jury? Why did he sound eerily like a defense attorney when announcing the results?

And yet the reaction was also about more than Wilson and Brown. It was about faith in fundamental fairness. It was about whether a population of people with an already tenuous relationship with the justice system — a system not established to recognize them, a system used for generations to deny and subjugate them, a system still rife with imbalances toward them — would have their fragile and fraying faith in that system further shredded.

As President Obama put it: “The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.”

He continued, “There are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”

No, they are not. An October analysis by ProPublica of police shootings from 2010 to 2012 found that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police officers than their white counterparts.

And yet, people like the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani want to blame the victims. On “Meet the Press,” he dodged the issue of white police forces policing black populations, and raised another: intra-racial murder statistics in the black community. After proclaiming that “93 percent of blacks are killed by other blacks,” he asked a fellow panelist, Michael Eric Dyson, a black Georgetown University professor, “why don’t you cut it down so so many white police officers don’t have to be in black areas?”

Classic blame-the-victims deflection and context-free spouting of facts. What Giuliani failed to mention, what most people who pay attention to murder statistics understand, is that murder is for the most part a crime of intimacy. People kill people close to them. Most blacks are killed by other blacks, and most whites are killed by other whites.

In fact, it is so intimate that one study has found that people likely to be involved in murder cases can be predicted by their social networks. A Yale study last year examining “police and gun homicide records from 2006 to 2011 for residents living within a six-square-mile area that had some of the highest rates for homicide in Chicago” found that “6% of the population was involved in 70% of the murders, and that nearly all of those in the 6% already had some contact with the criminal justice or public health systems.”

As a co-author of the study put it, the relationship among killers and those killed was like a virus: “It’s not unlike needle sharing or unprotected sex in the spread of H.I.V.”

So, what are we saying to the vast majority that are not involved: that they must accept the unconscionable racial imbalance in the police shooting numbers as some sort of collateral damage in a war on crime? No!

It’s an unfathomable, utterly immoral argument, and let’s not give Giuliani a pass for making it. After all, New York’s obscenely race-biased stop-and-frisk program was introduced under Giuliani, and some of the most notorious police violations of black men in recent history happened on his watch. As The New York Times recounted in a lengthy 2001 profile:

“In the summer of 1997, a police officer brutalized a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima in a bathroom of a Brooklyn station house. In the winter of 1999, four members of the Police Department’s Street Crime Unit, searching the Bronx streets for a rapist, shot and killed an unarmed African immigrant named Amadou Diallo; they had mistaken his wallet for a gun. And in the winter of 2000, just as Mr. Giuliani was gearing up his candidacy for the United States Senate, an undercover officer shot and killed an unarmed black security guard named Patrick Dorismond after a brief struggle in Midtown; the victim had been offended by the undercover officer’s inquiries about buying some drugs.”

Also, race is not the best lens through which to consider criminality. Concentrated poverty may be a better lens. According to a July Brookings report:

“Poor individuals and families are not evenly distributed across communities or throughout the country. Instead, they tend to live near one another, clustering in certain neighborhoods and regions. This concentration of poverty results in higher crime rates, underperforming public schools, poor housing and health conditions, as well as limited access to private services and job opportunities.”If we are serious about fighting crime, we must seriously consider the reason— on both an individual and systemic level — these pockets of concentrated poverty developed, are maintained, and have in fact grown and spread.

But this is not about Giuliani and the police aggression apologists. This is about whether black boys and men, as well as the people who love them, must fear both the criminal and the cop.

Sadly, for many, the Ferguson case reaffirmed a most unsettling sense that they are under siege from all sides.

So people took to the streets. Who could really blame them?

Some simply saw protests marred by senseless violence. I saw that, to be sure, and my heart hurt seeing it. But I also saw decades, generations, centuries of pain and frustration erupting once more into view. I saw hearts crying and souls demanding to be heard, to be seen, to be valued.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” King, a great champion of nonviolence, wasn’t advocating rioting, but rather honoring hearing.

Even long-suffering people will not suffer forever. Patience expires. The heart can be broken only so many times before peace is broken. And the absence of peace doesn’t predicate the presence of violence. It does, however, demand the troubling of the comfortable. When the voice goes unheard, sometimes it must be raised. Sometimes when calls for justice go unmet, feet must meet pavement. Sometimes when you are unseen, you can no longer remain seated. Sometimes you must stand and make a stand.

No one of good character and conscience condones rioting or looting or any destruction of property. Those enterprises aren’t only criminal, they’re fruitless and counterproductive and rob one’s own neighborhood of needed services and facilities and unfairly punish the people who saw fit to follow a dream and an entrepreneurial spirit, and invest in themselves and those communities in the first place.

But people absolutely have a right to their feelings — including anger and frustration. Only the energies must be channeled into productive efforts aimed at delivering the changes desired. That is the hard work. That is where stamina is required. That is where the long game is played.

As the old Negro spiritual proclaims: “Walk together children/Don’t you get weary/Oh, talk together children/Don’t you get weary.”

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18) Mass Imprisonment and Public Health
By


When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.

But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon — mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of Justice.

For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or nonexistent.

The experience of being locked up — which often involves dangerous overcrowding and inconsistent or inadequate health care — exacerbates these problems, or creates new ones. Worse, the criminal justice system has to absorb more of the mentally ill and the addicted. The collapse of institutional psychiatric care and the surge of punitive drug laws have sent millions of people to prison, where they rarely if ever get the care they need. Severe mental illness is two to four times as common in prison as on the outside, while more than two-thirds of inmates have a substance abuse problem, compared with about 9 percent of the general public.

Common prison-management tactics can also turn even relatively healthy inmates against themselves. Studies have found that people held in solitary confinement are up to seven times more likely than other inmates to harm themselves or attempt suicide.

The report also highlights the “contagious” health effects of incarceration on the already unstable communities most of the 700,000 inmates released each year will return to. When swaths of young, mostly minority men are put behind bars, families are ripped apart, children grow up fatherless, and poverty and homelessness increase. Today 2.7 million children have a parent in prison, which increases their own risk of incarceration down the road.

If this epidemic is going to be stopped, the report finds, public health and criminal justice systems must communicate effectively with one another. That requires comprehensive electronic health records that can be shared among agencies, increasing the likelihood that those who leave prison with health problems will not fall through the cracks.

Better health outcomes also depend on giving newly released inmates a real chance to find jobs and housing. The report calls for the end of laws that keep punishing people after they have been released from prison, like denying public housing and food stamps to those with drug felony convictions.

Finally, the Affordable Care Act — which provides more coverage for mental illness and substance abuse, and expanded Medicaid for childless adults — is a big step in the right direction.

Like any epidemic, mass incarceration must be tackled at many different levels. It is an opportune time for such an approach, as states around the country are thinking more broadly, pulling back on harsh sentencing laws and focusing more on alternatives to incarceration. But the moment may not last long. Public health professionals should seize a unique opportunity to help guide criminal justice reform while they have the chance.


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19) Video Shows Cleveland Officer Shot Boy in 2 Seconds
By

A police officer who shot and killed a 12-year-old boy outside a Cleveland recreation center fired within two seconds after the patrol car he was riding in pulled up next to the boy, a video released on Wednesday by the Cleveland police showed.

The video, which was made public at the request of the boy’s family, showed the boy, Tamir Rice, walking in the park pointing what resembled a weapon on Saturday before the officer fatally shot him. The police said the officer yelled at Tamir three times to show his hands, but the boy instead reached to his waistband for the object, which turned out to be a fake gun.The death of Tamir came two days before a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict a white officer in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. People have rallied in Cleveland to protest both Tamir’s shooting and the grand jury’s decision. At a news conference, the police released the grainy video from a security camera at the recreation center and audio from a dispatch call asking the police to respond to the park. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office will present evidence from the police to a grand jury, which will decide whether to bring charges against the officer.

“This is not an effort to exonerate,” Deputy Chief Edward Tomba of the Cleveland Police Department said of the video at a news conference on Wednesday. “It’s not an effort to show the public that anybody did anything wrong. This is an obvious tragic event where a young member of our community lost their life. We’ve got two officers that were out there protecting the public that just had to, you know, do something that nobody wants to do.”

The police also released the names of the two officers involved in the shooting, who have been placed on administrative leave. Timothy Loehmann, 26, the officer who shot the boy, was appointed to the force in March. The officer who was driving the police car, Frank Garmback, 46, had been with the department since 2008.

The boy’s parents, Samaria Rice and Leonard Warner, said they believed the video showed that the situation could have been avoided and that “Tamir should still be here with us.” “The video shows one thing distinctly: the police officers reacted quickly,” they said. They asked for residents to protest “peacefully and responsibly” and asked the police and prosecutors to thoroughly examine the shooting.

In a 911 call released by the police, the caller says that “a guy” who appeared to be a juvenile was pointing a pistol at people and scaring them, noting twice that the gun was “probably fake.” On Wednesday, the police released dispatch calls showing that the officers were not told that the gun might not be real. The police later identified it as an “airsoft” replica gun resembling a semiautomatic pistol.

 


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