Monday, January 26, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 2015



SAY NO TO THE #HOODIEBANBILL

To: The OKLAHOMA STATE SENATE 

http://iam.colorofchange.org/petitions/say-no-to-the-hoodiebanbill-1 


Oklahoma State Senators: Reject SB 13, which would make it illegal to wear 
hooded-clothing in public places.

Why is this important?

SB 13 is problematic for several reasons:

1) It further criminalizes Black youth by targeting what they wear

2) It intensifies a culture of hostility between law enforcement and 
Black communities, whereby Black folks are disproportionately targeted, 
harmed, and killed by police violence

3) It curtails constitutionally-protected free expression rights

4) Lastly, it doesn't include political protest as one of its exceptions

At Million Hoodies, we use hoodies strategically for protest around the 
country. This #HoodieBanBill would not only make it more difficult for 
us to carry out such protests in the future, but it also reinforces 
a culture of hostility and discrimination by unjustly targeting 
harmless fashions associated with Black folks.

Join us in demanding that the Oklahoma Senate reject this harmful 
and unjust #HoodieBanBill!

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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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TODAY: Monday, January 26 , 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Living Graveyard


Oakland Federal Building
1301 Clay Street
two blocks from 12th Street BART

Covered with sheets to represent the dead of wars, people lie down on the city sidewalk in front of the Federal Building, This is legal, non-violent witness.  People stop, look and think.

Participants lie at least three feet apart and do not block entry to the building.The names of some of the Californians who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan and the names of some of the Iraqi dead will be read. A gong is sounded after each name.   People will hand out flyers.

Please bring a white sheet to cover yourself with.  A pad to lie on is recommended.

sponsors include:
Berkeley Women in Black • East Bay Coalition to Support Self-Rule for Iraqis

Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice • Peace & Freedom Party

BFUU Social Justice Committee • Gray Panthers • Mustardseed Affinity Group

Father Bill Social Justice Committee, St Joseph Church • Middle East Children’s Alliance

Trinity United Methodist Church • East Bay Peace Action

Southern Alameda County Peace & Justice Coalition

Ecumenical Peace Institute, www.epicalc.org, (510) 990-0374   


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SHUT DOWN CREECH!

Mass Mobilization to Stop Drone Wars!

A Convergence For Peace in the Nevada Desert

Join us March 4-6, 2015 at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada, for a national mobilization of nonviolent resistance to shut down killer drone operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan,Yemen, Somalia, and everywhere. Sponsored by CODEPINK: Women for Peace, Nevada Desert Experience , Veterans For Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. CODEPINK will also hold vigils daily on March 2nd and 3rd, prior to the official beginning of this Creech Convergence For Peace, and welcomes everyone to join them.


In 2005, Creech Air Force Base secretly became the first U.S. base in the country to carry out illegal, remotely controlled assassinations using the MQ-1 Predator drones, and in 2006, the more advanced Reaper drones were added to its arsenal.  Creech drone personnel sit behind computers in the desert north of Las Vegas and kill "suspects" thousands of miles away.  Recent independent research indicates that the identity of only one out of 28 victims of U.S. drone strikes is known beforehand. Though officials deny it, the majority of those killed by drones are civilians. In 2014, it was leaked that the CIA's criminal drone assassination program, officially a separate operation from the Air Force's, has been piloted all along by Creech's super-secret Squadron 17. 


Since 2009 dozens of activists have been arrested for allegedly trespassing at Creech, in attempts to stop the indiscriminate killing and burning of innocent people by drones.  At the trial of the "Creech 14," the first Americans prosecuted for trespass at a drone base, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified that "to have a baby burn to death because of a 'no trespass'  sign would be poor public policy, to put it mildly."  In a time of burning children, the "no trespass" signs attached to the fences that protect the crimes perpetrated with drones are not legitimate, and they do not command our obedience.  After all, it is the U.S. military that is guilty of lethal trespassing.


The US drone program is rapidly proliferating as air bases are being converted to drone bases across the U.S. and abroad, but Creech remains the primary air base in U.S. state-sponsored global terrorism. Creech is where the killer drone program started--it is where we shall end it.


We must put an end to this desecration of our Mother Earth and all creatures who inhabit it.

We must put an end to the dehumanization of lives from Ferguson to Palestine to Pakistan.

We must close all foreign U.S. military bases.  Money for human needs. 

We must put an end to drone warfare, drone surveillance, and global militarization.

We must...
SHUT CREECH DOWN! 
More details to come soon!

Sign up on facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/1525740921010540/?context=create&previousaction=create&source=49&sid_create=3742154553#

Or contact:

Toby Blomé of Code Pink, 510-215-5974 (h)

Brian Terrell of VCNV and NDE,   773-853-1886

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Justice for Rasmea: All out for March 12!
Letters for Leniency requested by Feb. 4.

On March 12, Rasmea is set to appear once again in the Detroit courtroom of Judge Gershwin Drain, this time for a sentencing hearing. We are seeking letters to the judge requesting leniency.

For this round of letters, we are NOT looking for a mountain of individual statements, but rather letters from prominent individuals who represent broader constituencies. We need you to work with leaders of faith-based, labor, and community organizations, as well as student governments, student organizations (national), prominent professors, and legislators in your area to draft and submit letters.

Below you will find an outline you can use to draft these letters, but it is important for the authors to write them in their own voices. Letters should be submitted by February 4 to justice4rasmea@uspcn.org.

Stay tuned! Keep sharing Rasmea’s story and organizing fundraisers. Watch for calls for your support as we prepare for sentencing and appeal. Our organizing is key to winning #Justice4Rasmea.

* * * SAMPLE LETTER TEMPLATE * * *


Honorable Judge Gershwin Drain,

I am writing to request leniency from you in the March 12 sentencing of Rasmea Odeh, who I know as .

-In November 2014, Rasmea was convicted of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization. Compassion in her sentencing will serve justice in this case. She was detained for a month immediately following the verdict, including almost 3 weeks in solitary confinement, which was extremely difficult for her.
As a survivor of torture, engagement for the betterment of her community in Chicago is critical to her emotional health; the isolation she endured while incarcerated was a great hardship and may have retriggered her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

-As a 67-year old woman, her health suffered under the cold, damp, and uncomfortable conditions in the St. Clair County Jail, as they surely would in any facility lacking medical services and accommodations to provide for senior citizens.

-If Rasmea loses her appeal, she will likely lose her citizenship and face deportation. This will end life as she knows it, cutting all her ties with family and community in Chicago. This punishment alone is so devastating, it should not be compounded by adding a prison term.

-Since there is a possibility of her conviction being overturned on appeal, keeping her out of prison would allow her to continue as a contributing and productive person, doing the work that is so critical to hundreds of immigrant and refugee women in Chicago’s Arab and Muslim community.

-Rasmea is an award-winning leader of Chicago’s immigrant community who has dedicated 50 years of her life to serving refugees wherever she has lived. In Chicago, she built the Arab Women’s Committee, with some 600 members. Because of Rasmea’s work, immigrant and refugee women who came to the US from countries facing war and political crises – like Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and beyond – now have a place to seek support, gain empowerment and community, and call their home.

Respectfully yours,


 follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright © 2015 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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Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015


UNAC is the major national antiwar coalition in the U.S. today.  The existence of a United National Antiwar Coalition is vital and we need your financial support to continue our work and to expand.

With U.S. wars today accelerating and expanding globally in various forms – from drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan, never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support to neo-fascists in Ukraine, and proliferating Africom forces to threats of war for regime change in Syria – we have an obligation to do whatever is possible to educate the public and to take action to stop the carnage.

The wars abroad are connected to global warming with most wars fought over energy resources with the U.S. war machine as the largest polluter.

At home, we see hugely growing income inequality, a militarized and racist police force, mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, and a massive police state apparatus that includes global surveillance and laws to quell dissent.

In spite of the trillions spent by the U.S. corporate war government and its controlled media propaganda machine to keep us in check, the people are fighting back.  We’ve been inspired and strengthened by the hundreds of thousands of new activists taking to the streets of this country to stop police brutality, to build Occupy encampments, to fight for decent wages, to demand full rights for immigrants, to win marriage equality, to end global warming, to demonstrate solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, and to protest unending U.S. wars.

UNAC has played an active, often leadership role, in all of the antiwar and social justice movements of our time.  While most activists are focused on their particular issues, the most vital role we can play is to connect the issues to their source.  All of the injustices and crimes we protest, stem from the imperialist insatiable drive for expanding profit and control – and the U.S. is the largest imperialist power militarily and economically.  When there should be plenty for all, only the obscenely wealthy benefit while the rest of the 99% struggle just to survive.

Some of our recent major accomplishments:
·       Initiated protest against NATO and 15,000 marched in Chicago in 2012.
·        Called for immediate actions against threats of war and coups directed at Libya, Iran, No. Korea, Africa, Latin America,    Ukraine, and maintaining the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
·        Organized a national tour for Afghan leader Malalai Joya.
·        Sent representatives to international NATO protests and conferences.
·        Serve on the Board of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms to act against Islamophobia , racist attacks on Muslims, and attacks on our civil liberties.
·        Participated in national efforts to organize anti-drone actions.
·        Campaigned to defend victims of government repression who speak out and expose Washington’s crimes, including Rasmea Odeh, Mumia abu Jamal, Lynne Stewart, Chelsea Manning, and the Midwest activists targeted by the FBI.
·        Produced national educational conference calls featuring experts on topics such as U.S. intervention in Africa, the destruction of Libya, the developing wars in Syria, and others.
·        Built an antiwar contingent in the massive New York City Climate Change march and built Climate Change action in other cities around the country.
·        Helped organize protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza
·        Helped organize protests against the murder of Blacks by white police and the militarization of the police forces in the U.S.

UNAC has a history of bringing hundreds of activists together at large national conferences to learn about the issues of the day, to discuss the way forward and to vote on an Action Program for the coming period.

The UNAC conference next May will bring activists from all the movements in motion to cross-fertilize these struggles.  We are particularly dedicated to bringing young activists together to support and learn from each other.  For this, we need your help to offer subsidies to leaders from Ferguson, from the border wars in the southwest, from the Native Americans who are fighting against the pipelines ruining their lands, from the Students for Justice in Palestine, and many others.

Please give generously so that we can continue our work to bring harmony and justice to the peoples of this earth.

You can send a check to UNAC at PO Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054 or click the button below to contribute on-line with your credit or debit card.

 https://www.unacpeace.org/

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On Behalf of Wadiya Jamal and
Mumia Abu-Jamal,
A Contribution Request

The message following is a forward from:
Rachel Wolkenstein
Sister, Advocate and Friend of the Extended Family

Samiya “Goldii” Abdullah, a daughter of Wadiya Jamal and Mumia Abu-Jamal died on December 17, 2014 after years of battle with breast cancer. Samiya would have been 37 this January 9 and is survived by two young daughters, Aiyanah and Aaiyah, affectionately known as Dolly and Puddy, ages eleven and four.

Samiya was a remarkable woman. She was accomplished as a musician, an activist and rapper on social justice, particularly in the struggle for Mumia’s freedom. She devoured books and education. During her long, often debilitating illness, Samiya finished her Masters Degree in School and Mental Health Counseling from the University of Pennsylvania with honors. She was dedicated to her young daughters and wanted them to grow up loving each other as much as she did her brothers and sisters. And she wanted her daughters to see Mumia (called “Pop Pop” by them) walk out of prison and home with their grandmother, Wadiya.

Samiya's active fight for Mumia's freedom, began at the young age of four. Mumia wrote about this in “The Visit” printed in Live from Death Row in 1994. This was recreated in the movie "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary."

"My father is still considered to be a dangerous individual … his mind is what they fear, there is over- whelming evidence that would exonerate him of his conviction.
"He is an innocent man and the commonwealth has always known this, but being too Black, too smart, and too strong … The government will silence anyone that possesses the power to open the minds of the people."   
                     —Goldii

Samiya’s strength, character and spirit were nurtured by Wadiya and Mumia and are being passed on to her daughters.

On behalf of Wadiya Jamal and Mumia Abu-Jamal, this is a request for funds to assist Wadiya for care of her granddaughters, Dolly and Puddy.

A financial contribution of any amount will be greatly appreciated.

Please send checks or money orders, made payable to Wadiya Jamal:

Wadiya Jamal
P.O. Box 19404
Kingsessing Postal Station
Philadelphia, PA 19143-9998

In loving memory of Samiya and in tribute to her fierce fight for life,

Rachel Wolkenstein
Sister, Advocate and Friend of the Extended Family


Hear Mumia’s Words (and Song) played before the Janazah for Samiya on December 20, 2014: “Samiya Abdullah Makes Transition”:

http://prisonradio.org/sites/default/files/audio/uploads/SamiyaAbdullahMakesTransition12-19-2.mp3?download=1

 - This fwd message is from:
The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610. www.laboractionmumia.org

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Keith Cook, Mumia’s Brother, Addresses the
“Cops vs Free Speech” Meeting in the Bay Area 
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio, and Oakland Teachers for Mumia held a public meeting on December 5th of last year titled "Cops vs Free Speech," to discuss and protest violations of free speech, which were initiated by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). The meeting focussed on Pennsylvania’s new “gag” law, which criminalized Mumia, other convicts, and anyone who disseminates the speech or writings of convicts; and the suppression of the Urban Dreams web site by the Oakland School Board, an act which also targeted Mumia. (While the Oakland School Board has now restored the Urban Dreams site, the struggle against the “gag” law in PA continues.)

Speakers included Cephus Johnson, Oscar Grant’s “Uncle Bobby”; Eliot Grossman, former lawyer for Mumia; and Keith Cook, brother of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Funds were raised to support the struggle against the Pennsylvania “gag” law.
•  •  •  •  •

Note: While the initial campaign to support the lawsuit against the Pennsylvania “gag” law has now been successfully concluded, your help is still needed with the on-going legal action against this anti-free speech law, as well as for the work of Prison Radio, the publishers of Mumia’s commentaries. If you haven’t already, please donate now at…

  https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/PrisonRadio

•  •  •  •  •

The following are the remarks of speaker Keith Cook, brother of Mumia, on December 5th, 2014. (Brother Keith’s remarks, seen here, were first published by the SF Bay View, at: http://sfbayview.com/2015/01/cops-vs-the-first-amendment/):

 
Cops vs the First Amendment

by Keith CookThank you for inviting me again to be a part of this essential, timely discussion that we should be having across our nation. Free speech – for most of us who are activists, what does the Fraternal Order of Police, commonly known as the FOP, have to do with it? Thus the name of this forum, “Cops vs. Free Speech.”

As most of you know, back on Oct. 5 this year, Pennsylvania passed a law that allows judges to prohibit and punish those who amplify Mumia’s voice. This new law was written in direct response to the pre-recorded commencement address at his alma mater, Goddard College in Vermont. This law is another example of the long standing vendetta by the state of Pennsylvania and the FOP against Mumia.

You all here know something about free speech because the Free Speech Movement was started here during the 1964-65 academic year on the campus of UC at Berkeley. It was a student protest that was unprecedented in scope. This is the 50th anniversary of the protest.

So, my friends, if you do nothing during this time in history, eventually, if you are an activist or a person of color, they are going to come after you in some way. Now we are at this place where we must stand up. We are only at the beginning of where the FOP bad cops are trying to take away the right to free speech and dissent, the right to assemble, the right to protect yourself, even take away your camera and threaten you. There is a breakdown in trust and the rights of every American.

Since when did the United States of America change the rules – change to the point where free speech, freedom to disagree, freedom to think differently become a violation of the Constitution of the United States? When did America change?

The FOP has only 325,000 members spread out over 2,100 chapters. Who gave them the power to change America? It has been changing over time because we have blindly given the federal government, state government, police departments and the FOP carte blanche to keep us feeling safe “by any means necessary.”

Because it didn’t harm you at the time, we accept even the militarization of our police and drones to “help” watch over us. So now we are where we are, a very scared, divided, paranoid country with no trust. We don’t even believe that our children will have a better life than we do.

Back on Oct. 5 this year, Pennsylvania passed a law that allows judges to prohibit and punish those who amplify Mumia’s voice. This law is another example of the long standing vendetta by the state of Pennsylvania and the FOP against Mumia.We are not going to allow these people, the real hoodlums, the police, peace officers, the FOP to destroy the foundation of America just because they carry a gun and take rights they don’t have. The hoodlums are indeed the rogue cops who are out there pulling political strings of certain elected officials.

The hoodlums are the rogue cops who are hiding behind their shields their true racist passion. The hoodlums are the cops who use chokeholds, on camera, and get away with it. The hoodlums are the police who bully and throw 70-year-old women to the ground. The hoodlums are the cops who set my brother Mumia up in the first place.

Why are we so adamant about fighting this? You have to stand for something. We all do. The First Amendment clearly states it prohibits the making of any law that disallows freedom of speech.

Stand up with us. We have a right to protest.
You see, there is a delusion of power. The cops believe they have all power – so much power that they believe they can take away your freedom of speech. That they can violate the Constitution or even rewrite it the way they want it to be read.

Every one of the key persons on the prosecution team who were involved in Mumia’s case was controlled by the FOP, got promoted and in some cases still are there. Every DA in Philadelphia since 1981 was elected with the help of the FOP and ran openly on the platform that if elected they would murder Mumia.
The First Amendment clearly states it prohibits the making of any law that disallows freedom of speech. Stand up with us. We have a right to protest.

One of the big problems is that there is not an independent body policing the cops. They investigate themselves. It is nearly impossible to indict a policeman. It is a clear conflict of interest to allow them to investigate themselves.

The relationship between the prosecutors and the police is too cozy. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. We have to break up some of these relationships. We need independent reviews, independent grand juries. The DA has too much control of the outcomes. We need the government to represent the people, all the people.
Be clear. This isn’t only about Mumia or offenders. This is about you. This is about what your child can read in school. This is about Urban Dreams, the curriculum that the Oakland School District just reinstated.

This is about protests we see around the country led by Black Lives Matter and other small groups around the country like in New York and Ferguson. There was a protest in 140 cities last week in support of Mike Brown. This is about Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice – only 12 years old – all disenfranchised people, Black, White and Brown people; it is about all of us.
Be clear. This isn’t only about Mumia or offenders. This is about you.Don’t be totally discouraged. We are seeing some progress, some wins. The FOP did not get the NFL to penalize the St. Louis Rams players who put their “hands up, don’t shoot” as they entered the field. An infuriated spokesman for the St. Louis Police Officers Association told the NFL and the Rams: “I know that there are those who say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well, I got news for people who think that way. Cops have First Amendment rights, too, and we plan to exercise ours.”

This man is a former cop and a current member of the Missouri state House of Representatives. Did that sound vaguely like a threatening tone? Here it is. It’s a governmental agent who seeks to punish someone for expressing certain views. Arrogance. It is also clear he did not understand what the First Amendment says.

The FOP did not get Goddard College staff and students to cancel Mumia’s planned commencement speech. The Oakland School district is reinstating the Urban Dreams curriculum over the objections of the FOP. Thank goodness for Oakland Teachers for Mumia, the unions and others. They said NO and didn’t let it go until it was reversed.

In discussing the recent protests about the killing of Black men and boys across the U.S., Congressmen Jeffries said: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a rallying cry of people across America who are fed up with police violence.” President Obama called it “unfair policies that violate my belief in what America can be.” Lastly, Rep. Green from Texas said it was a John Carlos moment because this has become a new symbol, a new statement where people around the country now are calling to the attention of those who don’t quite understand that this is a movement – a movement that will get stronger as more people join in.

The nation has seen the murder of Eric Garner, the nation has seen the police roll up on Tamir Rice, age 12, with a toy pistol and within seconds shoot him dead. We and they did not have to take the police’s word of what happened; we saw. So the question becomes, “How many more lies have they told and we believed?”
Congressmen Jeffries said: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a rallying cry of people across America who are fed up with police violence.”
Just maybe we need to ask more questions, which open up this large can of worms. Just look at how many lies the police have been caught at in the last couple of weeks. There is a better chance now that the larger community can believe the possibility Mumia was framed and innocent as we do.

In closing, I am asking you to do three things:

1) Educate yourself and five other people about the injustices that we are speaking about tonight.
2) Stand up where you are – in your neighborhood, in your city, in Sacramento, on social media, everywhere you can – to let your voices be heard to stop this madness
3) And work with other like-minded organizations who want the same thing. Whether it is the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia, Stop the Death Penalty, Veterans for Peace or Stop Mass Incarceration.


My friends, what I am asking you to do is to understand that you have to have the power, because there are more of you than there are members of the FOP. There are more of you than the staff at Fox News. It is a matter of your desire to stick together until we get the change we are asking for.

My brother Mumia said in response to the Mumia Gag Law:

“I welcome Gov. Corbett’s signature on an unconstitutional bill that is proof that the executive and the legislative don’t give one whit about their own Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or the United States Constitution. I welcome that as proof that they are the outlaws.”

Hands up, don’t shoot!

Free Mumia and all political prisoners!

Keith Cook delivered this speech on Dec. 5 at “Cops vs. Free Speech,” a public forum organized by the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia, Prison Radio, and Oakland Teachers for Mumia, and held at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. He can be reached at: kdc52@aol.com

This message has been sent to you by:
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA  •  510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org

Donate Now
to fight the “gag” law!
go to:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air

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Support Prison Radio

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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


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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

Lorenzo Speaks Concerning Prosecution's Brief:
JANUARY 1, 2015—The prosecutor has run away from (almost) every issue raised in my PCRA by begging the Court to dismiss everything as “untimely”. When they don’t do this, they suggest that me and my lawyers were “defamatory” towards either my former prosecutor Christopher Abruzzo or Detective Kevin Duffin, in our claims they withheld, misused or hid evidence of my Innocence, in order to secure an unjust conviction in this case. If I charged, a year ago, that about a dozen AGs (attorneys general) were involved in circulating porno via their office computers, people would’ve laughed at me, and seen me as crazy.

But, guess what? During 2014, we learned that this was the truth. How can it be defamatory to speak the truth? Notice the OAG (Office of Attorney General), never said the obvious: That AG Abruzzo didn’t inform the Defense about the relationship between his Motive Witness and his head detective (Victoria Doubs and Det. Duffin); that Det. Duffin doesn’t deny Doubs was his god-sister, and that she lived in his family home, or that he assisted her whenever she got into trouble.

Why not? Because it is true. How can you defame someone who defames himself? Mr. Christopher Abruzzo, Esq., when a member of the higher ranks of the OAG, sent and/or received copious amounts of porno to other attorneys general and beyond. What does this say about his sense of judgment? He thought enough about his behavior to resign from his post in the Governor’s Cabinet. If he thought that his behavior was okay, he’d still be sitting in the Governor’s cabinet, right? The OAG cannot honestly oppose anything we’ve argued, but they try by seeking to get the Court to do their dirty work, how? By denying an Evidentiary Hearing to prove every point we’ve claimed.

The prosecution is trying desperately to avoid dealing with the substance of my claims in Com. v. Lorenzo Johnson. So, they slander my Legal Team and blame them for defaming the good AG’s and Cops involved with this case. They try to do what is undeniable, to deny that they hid evidence from the Defense for years. They blamed me for daring to protest the hidden evidence of their malfeasance and other acts to sabotage the defense. They claim that they had an “Open File” policy with my trial counsel. But “Open File” is more than letting an attorney read something in their office. If it’s a search for the truth it must include what is turned over to the attorney, for how do we really know what was shown to her?

They say it is inconceivable that an attorney would read a file, beginning on page nine (9), and not ask for the preceding eight (8) pages. Yet, it is conceivable if trial counsel was ineffective for not demanding the record of the first eight pages. Pages that identify the State’s only witness as a “SUSPECT” in the murder for which her client was charged! How could such an attorney fail to recognize the relevance of such an issue, barring their sheer Ineffectiveness and frankly, Incompetence.

By seeking to avoid an evidentiary hearing, the prosecution seeks to avoid evidence of their wrongdoing being made plain, for all to see. If they believe I’m wrong, why not prove it? They can’t. So they shout I filed my appeal untimely, as if there can ever justly be a rule that precludes an innocent from proving his innocence! Not to mention the fact that the prosecution has failed to even mention the positive finger prints that ay my trial they said none existed. Don’t try to hide it with a lame argument about time. When isn’t there a time for truth? The prosecution should be ashamed of itself for taking this road. It is unworthy of an office that claims to seek justice.

After the trial verdict The Patriot-News (March 18, 1997) reported, “Deputy Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo admitted there were some serious concerns about the strength of the evidence against Johnson and praised the jury for doing a thorough job.” I guess he forgot to mention all of the evidence he left out to show Innocence.

Now, more than ever, Lorenzo Johnson needs your support.
Publicize his case; bring it to your friends, clubs, religious
and social organizations. 


SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/sign-the-petition.html

CONTRIBUTE TO LORENZO'S CAMPAIGN FOR FREEDOM!
http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/how-can-i-help.html


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

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC



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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!



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

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) Noam Chomsky Slams West's Charlie Hebdo Outrage: 'Many Journalists Were Killed by Israel in Gaza Too'
Chomsky claims that "terrorist" attacks perpetrated by the West did not spark outrage such as the Hebdo attack.
By Noam Chomsky / Noam Chomsky's Official Site
January 19, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/media/noam-chomsky-slams-wests-charlie-hebdo-outrage-many-journalists-were-killed-israel-gaza-too




2) In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One
By and




3) Gross Incompetence Cited in Rikers Island Death
By and





4) Justices to Hear Case Over Drugs Used in Executions
By and




5) North Carolina: DNA Evidence Brings Freedom for Man in Prison Since 1976
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS





6) In Taking Up Execution Drugs Case, Justices Highlight Importance of a Single Vote
By




7) Protester Is Killed as Egyptian Police Attack Marchers Carrying Flowers to Tahrir Square
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/middleeast/egypt-woman-is-killed-in-peaceful-cairo-protest.html?ref=world 





8) Millions of GMO Insects Could Be Released in Florida Keys
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




9) A Year After Suing Their Landlord, Brooklyn Tenants Still Lack Heat
By





10) Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint
Charles Blow: At Yale, the Police Detained My Son
January 26, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/opinion/charles-blow-at-yale-the-police-detained-my-son.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region




11) Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
By and

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/business/economy/middle-class-shrinks-further-as-more-fall-out-instead-of-climbing-up.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news




12) To Collect Debts, Nursing Homes Are Seizing Control Over Patients
By







 




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1) Noam Chomsky Slams West's Charlie Hebdo Outrage: 'Many Journalists Were Killed by Israel in Gaza Too'
Chomsky claims that "terrorist" attacks perpetrated by the West did not spark outrage such as the Hebdo attack.
By Noam Chomsky / Noam Chomsky's Official Site
January 19, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/media/noam-chomsky-slams-wests-charlie-hebdo-outrage-many-journalists-were-killed-israel-gaza-too

After the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12 people including the editor and four other cartoonists, and the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket shortly after, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared "a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity."

Millions of people demonstrated in condemnation of the atrocities, amplified by a chorus of horror under the banner "I am Charlie." There were eloquent pronouncements of outrage, captured well by the head of Israel's Labor Party and the main challenger for the upcoming elections, Isaac Herzog, who declared that "Terrorism is terrorism. There's no two ways about it," and that "All the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge" from brutal violence.

The crimes also elicited a flood of commentary, inquiring into the roots of these shocking assaults in Islamic culture and exploring ways to counter the murderous wave of Islamic terrorism without sacrificing our values. The New York Times described the assault as a "clash of civilizations," but was corrected by Times columnist Anand Giridharadas, who tweeted that it was "Not & never a war of civilizations or between them. But a war FOR civilization against groups on the other side of that line. #CharlieHebdo."

The scene in Paris was described vividly in the New York Times by veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger: "a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris."

Erlanger also quoted a surviving journalist who said that "Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare." Another reported a "huge detonation, and everything went completely dark." The scene, Erlanger reported, "was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation."These last quotes, however -- as independent journalist David Peterson reminds us -- are not from January 2015. Rather, they are from a report by Erlanger on April 24 1999, which received far less attention. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO "missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters" that "knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air," killing 16 journalists.

"NATO and American officials defended the attack," Erlanger reported, "as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia." Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that "Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic's murder machine as his military is," hence a legitimate target of attack.

There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of "We are RTV," no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as "an enormously important and, I think, positive development," a sentiment echoed by others.

There are many other events that call for no inquiry into western culture and history -- for example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in Europe in recent years, in July 2011, when Anders Breivik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers.

Also ignored in the "war against terrorism" is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times -- Barack Obama's global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.

One person was indeed punished in connection with the NATO attack on RTV -- Dragoljub Milanović, the general manager of the station, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. TheInternational Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia considered the NATO attack, concluding that it was not a crime, and although civilian casualties were "unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate."

The comparison between these cases helps us understand the condemnation of the New York Times by civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, famous for his forceful defense of freedom of expression. "There are times for self-restraint,"Abrams wrote, "but in the immediate wake of the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory, [the Times editors] would have served the cause of free expression best by engaging in it" by publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons ridiculing Mohammed that elicited the assault.

Abrams is right in describing the Charlie Hebdo attack as "the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory." The reason has to do with the concept "living memory," a category carefully constructed to include Theircrimes against us while scrupulously excluding Our crimes against them -- the latter not crimes but noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.

This is not the place to inquire into just what was being "defended" when RTV was attacked, but such an inquiry is quite informative (see my A New Generation Draws the Line).

There are many other illustrations of the interesting category "living memory." One is provided by the Marine assault against Fallujah in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq.

The assault opened with occupation of Fallujah General Hospital, a major war crime quite apart from how it was carried out. The crime was reported prominently on the front page of the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting how "Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." The occupation of the hospital was considered meritorious and justified: it "shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties."

Evidently, this is no assault on free expression, and does not qualify for entry into "living memory."

There are other questions. One would naturally ask how France upholds freedom of expression and the sacred principles of "fraternity, freedom, solidarity." For example, is it through the Gayssot Law, repeatedly implemented, which effectively grants the state the right to determine Historical Truth and punish deviation from its edicts? By expelling miserable descendants of Holocaust survivors (Roma) to bitter persecution in Eastern Europe? By the deplorable treatment of North African immigrants in the banlieues of Paris where the Charlie Hebdo terrorists became jihadis? When the courageous journal Charlie Hebdo fired the cartoonist Siné on grounds that a comment of his was deemed to have anti-Semitic connotations? Many more questions quickly arise.

Anyone with eyes open will quickly notice other rather striking omissions. Thus, prominent among those who face an "enormous challenge" from brutal violence are Palestinians, once again during Israel's vicious assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which many journalists were murdered, sometimes in well-marked press cars, along with thousands of others, while the Israeli-run outdoor prison was again reduced to rubble on pretexts that collapse instantly on examination.

Also ignored was the assassination of three more journalists in Latin America in December, bringing the number for the year to 31. There have been more than a dozen journalists killed in Honduras alone since the military coup of 2009 that was effectively recognized by the U.S. (but few others), probably according post-coup Honduras the per capita championship for murder of journalists. But again, not an assault on freedom of press within living memory.

It is not difficult to elaborate. These few examples illustrate a very general principle that is observed with impressive dedication and consistency: The more we can blame some crimes on enemies, the greater the outrage; the greater our responsibility for crimes -- and hence the more we can do to end them -- the less the concern, tending to oblivion or even denial.

Contrary to the eloquent pronouncements, it is not the case that "Terrorism is terrorism. There's no two ways about it." There definitely are two ways about it: theirs versus ours. And not just terrorism.

 


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2) In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One
By and

CLEVELAND — It began with a swap: one boy’s cellphone for another’s replica of a Colt pistol.

One of the boys went to play in a nearby park, striking poses with the lifelike, airsoft-style gun, which fired plastic pellets. He threw a snowball, settled down at a picnic table and flopped his head onto his arms in a perfect assertion of preteen ennui, a grainy security video shows.

Then, with the gun tucked away, he walked to the edge of the gazebo. He might have been wandering aimlessly, or he might have been attracted by the sight of a squad car barreling across the lawn.

Seconds later, the boy lay dying from a police officer’s bullet. “Shots fired, male down,” one of the officers in the car called across his radio. “Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him. Send E.M.S. this way, and a roadblock.”But the boy, Tamir Rice, was only 12. Now, with the county sheriff’s office reviewing the shooting, interviews and recently released video and police records show how a series of miscommunications, tactical errors and institutional failures by the Cleveland police cascaded into one irreversible mistake.

And in death last November, Tamir joined Michael Brown, a teenager fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after being placed in a chokehold by an officer, as touchstones for protests of police violence against unarmed black people across the nation. Their names were chanted by demonstrators again on Monday in Martin Luther King Jr. Day marches.

Because of multiple layers in Cleveland’s 911 system, crucial information from the initial call about “a guy in here with a pistol” was never relayed to the responding police officers, including the caller’s caveats that the gun was “probably fake” and that the wielder was “probably a juvenile.”

What the officers, Frank Garmback and his rookie partner, Tim Loehmann, did hear from a dispatcher was, “We have a Code 1,” the department’s highest level of urgency.

When the officers raced into action, they took a shortcut that pointed their squad car straight into the park, pulling up so close to Tamir that it made it difficult to take cover, or to use verbal persuasion or other tactics suggested by the department’s use-of-force policy.

Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.

And when Tamir’s 14-year-old sister came running up minutes later, the officers, who are white, tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs, intensifying later public outrage about the boy’s death. When his distraught mother arrived, the officers also threatened to arrest her unless she calmed down, the mother, Samaria Rice, said.

Officers Garmback and Loehmann did not check Tamir’s vital signs or perform first aid in the minutes after he was shot. But Officer Garmback frantically requested an emergency medical team at least seven times, urging the dispatcher to “step it up” and to send medical workers from a fire station a block away. It would be eight minutes before they arrived.

The shooting fit into a broader history of dysfunction at the Cleveland Division of Police. Two weeks after Tamir’s death, the Justice Department released a scathing report accusing the department of a pattern of excessive force for which officers were rarely disciplined, and pressed the department to accept a federal monitor. Just a year before, in 2013, an investigation by the state attorney general found “systemic failure” in the department.

It also highlighted shortcomings in the department’s vetting process for recruits. Police records show that Officer Loehmann was hired without a review of his file at a previous department, where he resigned after suffering a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training.

The Cleveland police department and mayor’s office declined to comment for this article.

For Cleveland residents, the shooting highlighted another longstanding problem: The department’s community policing programs had been whittled down to a token effort, a result of cuts a decade earlier that might well have made a life-or-death difference to Tamir. A sign on a telephone pole yards from where he was shot down still advertises a police mini-station in the nearby recreation center where he played basketball. The station is long gone.

“If there was one there,” Councilman Jeffrey Johnson said, “he would have known Tamir, because Tamir was a regular, and he would have heard the call and gone out there and said, ‘Tamir, what are you doing?’”A Real-Looking Toy

Before leaving his mother’s apartment on that gray Saturday, Nov. 22, Tamir went through one of her drawers to find a plaything: her cellphone.

He was known as a boisterous, friendly boy. At school, where he had a good attendance record, Tamir was often in trouble, classmates said, mainly for his pranks: He was deft with a whoopee cushion and liked to reseal his empty milk carton to tempt the unsuspecting.

“He was bad, but like in a funny way,” said Deovaunté Hotstetter, a 10-year-old schoolmate. “I can’t remember what was so funny, but there was cussing in it.”

Deonte Goldsby, 21, a relative, said Tamir, the youngest of four, would take care of his smaller cousins at family gatherings, chasing them or playing with their action figures and dolls. With adults, he was well-mannered, using ma’am and sir and offering to fetch sodas from the refrigerator.

Cudell Commons, where Tamir was shot, was the geographic center of his daily life. The park is flanked on one side by the recreation center where Tamir, who stood 5-foot-7, played basketball, boasting, “You can’t check me!” when he scored. On the other side stood his school, Marion C. Seltzer Elementary, where the calendar is printed in five languages and the bulletin boards teach children to distinguish stereotypes from reality.

An older friend told Tamir that he could take the cellphone, whose service was locked, to a store and make it work, Tamir’s mother said. Tamir asked if he could hold the friend’s airsoft pistol while he was gone. He seemed delighted in the novelty of the replica.

“His mother didn’t allow him around guns whatsoever, toy guns, water guns,” Mr. Goldsby said. “She knows about things like this. She knows that somebody would mistake it for a real gun.”

In this case, the replica was a few years old, and the orange safety tip, intended to distinguish it from a pistol that fired real bullets, had been removed or had fallen off. Just as his mother had worried, Tamir wound up in the park waving what looked very much like a real weapon.

A Lifelong Police Interest

The 911 caller was calm, pausing to exchange pleasantries with the dispatcher before getting to the point: A male in Cudell Commons was pointing a pistol at people and scaring them. The gun was “probably fake,” he said twice before signing off, and its wielder was “probably a juvenile.”

Officer Garmback, 46, who had joined the force in 2008, was at a nearby church when the call came. With him was his partner, Officer Loehmann, 26, hired just eight months before.

Officer Loehmann had grown up in Parma, a largely white suburb of Cleveland, but he commuted 30 minutes to an all-male, Roman Catholic high school on the city’s east side, Benedictine, where many of the students were minorities.

People who knew Officer Loehmann there recalled him as quiet and serious, active in the band and the German Club. The Rev. Gerard Gonda, the school’s president, said Mr. Loehmann had a solid record at Benedictine, where as a junior he was in Father Gonda’s theology class. “He had a very low-key personality, and I would say kind of a gentle personality,” Father Gonda said.

The Rev. Anselm Zupka, who taught Officer Loehmann at Benedictine and was also his confirmation sponsor at his local parish, said “Timmy” had embraced his Catholicism to an extent that Father Zupka suggested to him that he might want to enter the monastery.

But the teenager had other ideas. “He was always interested in police work, because that’s what his father did,” Father Gonda said.

Officer Loehmann had long wanted to emulate his father, Frederic, who served in the New York Police Department for 20 years before becoming a federal marshal. So in 2011, he earned a bachelor’s degree in criminology and sociology from Cleveland State University, according to his personnel file, and the next year, he went to work for the police in Independence, Ohio.

But there, according to police records, he had emotional problems related to a girlfriend. At a shooting range, he was “distracted and weepy,” a supervisor said. One of his supervisors concluded that Officer Loehmann “would not be able to substantially cope, or make good decisions,” during stressful situations. After six months, the department allowed him to resign.

Officer Loehmann stayed in the Cleveland area, where he took private security jobs. He continued to apply for local law enforcement jobs but was not hired until the Cleveland police gave him a chance, in March 2014. The department never reviewed his Independence personnel file.

Officer Loehmann did well, graduating from the Cleveland Police Academy with a score of 98.8. He was assigned to a district on Cleveland’s west side, which included the poor, blighted neighborhood around Cudell Commons.

Episodes of Abuse

By the time Officer Loehmann was hired, the department was already struggling with a host of problems that had begun at least a decade before.

In 2004, city leaders laid off 250 officers to help close a budget gap. That trimmed the force 15 percent, to about 1,500 officers, seriously hurting community policing and closing mini-stations.Over the next two years, the city’s violent crime rate leapt by double digits. It has since declined from that peak, but the city is still more violent than it was in 2004, according to F.B.I. data, even as violent crime has continued to drop across Ohio and the country.

As the police department was shrinking, it came under increasing criticism for excessive use of force. The Justice Department began an investigation prompted by police shootings that led to an agreement in 2004 calling for the city to tighten its guidelines for the use of force and to improve its documentation of those incidents. But many reforms were not maintained, according to the recent Justice Department report.

Episodes of abuse continued to surface. In 2011, a helicopter video captured police officers kicking Edward Henderson in the head even though he was spread-eagled on the ground. None of the officers admitted to wrongdoing, and none were fired, though the video showed them “kicking his head like a football,” said David Malik, a prominent civil rights lawyer who won a $600,000 settlement for Mr. Henderson, who suffered a broken facial bone.

Mr. Malik said the city’s discipline and arbitration system heavily favored officers, making it difficult to punish misconduct. “It’s a culture of no consequences,” said Mr. Malik, who has filed or investigated potential lawsuits against the Cleveland police on more than 100 occasions.

Nearly two years after the assault on Mr. Henderson, more than 60 police cruisers and one-third of the city’s on-duty force engaged in a high-speed chase after officers mistook a car’s backfiring for gunfire. It ended when officers killed the two unarmed occupants by firing 137 rounds into their vehicle.

The episode prompted an investigation by the state’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, a Republican, that found systemic breakdowns in communication and supervision in the department.

“When everybody violates the rules,” Mr. DeWine said in an interview, “the cops are not the problem. You’ve got a culture problem, you’ve got a command-and-control problem, you’ve got a management problem, which goes way past those guys.”

The deadly chase also spurred calls for a new Justice Department investigation. Released in December, that study found a pattern of excessive force, suggesting that the police were often hostile with residents and were rarely held accountable for misconduct.

“Officers use excessive force against individuals who are in mental health crisis or who may be unable to understand or comply with officers’ commands, including when the individual is not suspected of having committed any crime at all,” the report said.

Cleveland and the Justice Department have agreed to work toward a consent decree that would tighten use-of-force policies and subject the department to oversight by a monitor.

Critics of the force cite hiring standards that require only a high school diploma or equivalent at a time when many big-city departments require some college, and its failure to adequately analyze use-of-force and arrest data in ways that have become standard at many departments.

Detective Steve Loomis, the president of the largest local police union, disputed the idea that the system for resolving complaints against officers favored the police. But he acknowledged problems in the department, including what he said was understaffing and low compensation that forced many officers to take second jobs to make ends meet.

Waiting for Answers

In the weeks since Tamir’s death, the city and its police department have come under mounting pressure to explain not only the shooting, but also its aftermath, with the officers failing to provide first aid as Tamir lay bleeding. Not until an F.B.I. agent who happened to be nearby arrived four minutes after the shooting did anyone tend to the boy.

Though the department’s use-of-force policy requires officers to “obtain necessary medical assistance” for injured people, it does not explicitly call for them to perform first aid. Walter Madison, a lawyer for Tamir’s mother, said it would be ludicrous to believe that officers would not immediately perform first aid on a wounded comrade.

Henry Hilow, a lawyer representing Officer Loehmann, said the officers had followed protocol by calling for E.M.S., saying, “They were doing the best they could to get medical attention” for Tamir. He also defended the officers’ tactics in the moments before the shooting, saying they had positioned their cruiser to prevent Tamir from running into the recreation center, where they thought he might endanger people. They tried to stop farther away, but the car skidded, Mr. Hilow said.

Echoing the defense of the police department after the shooting, Mr. Hilow also said the officers had seen Tamir pull the pellet gun out of his waistband moments before Officer Loehmann shot him, an account that is difficult to verify with the low-quality security video. He said the officers had shouted at Tamir to drop the gun and show his hands before their squad car came to a stop.

The department has begun taking some steps to address its problems. It says it will review personnel files of all new hires. A city inquiry may also examine the dispatch system, in which, Detective Loomis said, the person who took the 911 call did not relay the caller’s caveats to the dispatcher.

Yet Mayor Frank G. Jackson, a Democrat in his third term, has insisted there is no “systemic failure” in the department, and has steadfastly resisted calls for the resignation of two top advisers who oversaw the department during the period studied by both the state and the Justice Department.

Ms. Rice, 38, is awaiting explanations, and an apology. “Nobody has come to knock on my door and told me what happened,” she said. “Somebody has to be held accountable.”






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3) Gross Incompetence Cited in Rikers Island Death
By and

A New York State watchdog agency overseeing jails and prisons has found that gross incompetence by medical personnel and correction officers at Rikers Island led to the death of a mentally ill inmate who was found naked and covered in feces after being locked in a cell for six days.

In a report, the agency, the New York State Commission of Correction, called for the Justice Department to investigate possible civil rights violations, saying the details of the inmate’s death “shock the conscience.” It is not clear, though, whether anyone received significant punishment.

The inmate, Bradley Ballard, died on Sept. 11, 2013, after he was deprived of insulin for diabetes and locked in his cell without food or running water for nearly a week. Though correction officers, doctors and inmates were visibly repulsed by the stench coming from his cell, none of them entered or sought help.The commission’s report, which is dated Dec. 16, and was obtained by The New York Times, though not released publicly, describes how a warden, an assistant deputy warden, guards, doctors, mental health clinicians, nurses and others made at least 57 visits to Mr. Ballard’s cell as he slowly deteriorated over a six-day period but did nothing to assist him.

The commission’s report makes clear that blame for the death lies squarely with the city’s correction and health agencies, as well as the private jail health contractor, Corizon Inc.

Mr. Ballard was locked “in his cell for six days prior to his death,” the report said, “and was denied access to his life supporting prescribed medications, denied access to medical and psychiatric care, denied access to essential mandated services such as showers and exercise periods and denied running water for his cell.”

Joseph Ponte, the correction commissioner, would not say whether any officers were fired or disciplined. “We continue to investigate and have adjusted our practices to ensure that a similar tragedy does not happen again,” he said in a statement.

Dr. Sonia Angell, a deputy commissioner for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the Corizon mental health unit chief was transferred to a smaller jail with fewer responsibilities.

Susan Morgenstern, a Corizon Health spokeswoman, said the contractor conducted an investigation, but could not “comment further because of legal reasons.”

The Justice Department plans to review the report, a representative said.

From the time Mr. Ballard entered Rikers for a parole violation in June 2013 until his death, medical staff failed to adequately care for his diabetes, the report said. At one point he went 11 days without insulin, it stated.

This failure resulted in increasingly erratic behavior, the report said. After making a lewd gesture at a female guard, he was locked in his cell and never emerged again.

Mr. Ballard was observed on surveillance video banging on his cell door. At one point he wrapped what the report described as a ligature around his testicles five times, cutting off circulation. The smell became so bad that an officer sprayed a deodorizer outside, but never went in.

At 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 10, an officer wrote in a logbook that Mr. Ballard was lying in his cell naked and having difficulty breathing. The officer told another guard to notify the clinic.

A doctor and a nurse did not arrive on the scene until 10:56 p.m. Neither they nor correction officers entered his cell and instead at 11:01 p.m. directed two inmates to carry him out and put him on a gurney.

At 11:29 p.m., Mr. Ballard went into cardiac arrest at a jail clinic. He was transferred to Elmhurst Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m.


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4) Justices to Hear Case Over Drugs Used in Executions
By and


WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide a case on the constitutionality of the new combinations of drugs that some states are using to execute prisoners and that critics say cause intense suffering.

The court will hear a challenge to Oklahoma’s choice of drugs even though the justices declined last week to stop an execution there that used the contested chemicals.

With the addition of this case, the court’s term seems likely to end with three major decisions — on same-sex marriage, on the fate of the Affordable Care Act and, now, on the administration of capital punishment.

In April, Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton D. Lockett, who appeared to moan and struggle after the drugs were administered, then died in the execution chamber 43 minutes after the injections had begun.

That led the state to suspend lethal injections and try to improve its procedures. Oklahoma decided to continue using the sedative now under legal challenge, but at a higher dosage.The case will provide the Supreme Court’s first evaluation of lethal injections during a time when the customary drugs have become scarce and states have tried new combinations and refused to identify the sources of the lethal chemicals.

“Lethal injections are a subject on which everyone deserves clarity, but the law has been thoroughly chaotic for the last seven years,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University. “The court’s decision to address the confusion at last is welcome.”

The case the court agreed on Friday to hear, Glossip v. Gross, No. 14-7955, involves three inmates who said Oklahoma’s three-chemical procedure violated the Eighth Amendment because it posed a significant risk of terrible suffering.

The case originally included a fourth inmate, Charles F. Warner. He was executed on Jan. 15 after the Supreme Court denied his request for a stay by a 5-to-4 vote. Journalists who witnessed the 18-minute execution said that Mr. Warner did not seem to suffer great pain and that he appeared to lose consciousness quickly.

Mr. Warner, 47, was sentenced to death for sexually assaulting and murdering an 11-month-old girl in 1997.

It takes the vote of five justices to stay an execution, but only four to agree to hear a case.

“We’re excited that the court took the case,” said Dale Baich, a lawyer for the condemned prisoners.

Another Oklahoma prisoner and plaintiff in the case, Richard Glossip, who was convicted of a 1997 contract murder, is scheduled for execution on Thursday.

“Our immediate concern now is to try to get a stay for Mr. Glossip,” Mr. Baich said. “The argument will be that since the court has decided it will hear the case, that’s a new circumstance that would warrant a stay.”

“The time is right for the court to take a careful look at this important issue, particularly given the bungled executions that have occurred since states started using these novel and experimental drugs protocols,” Mr. Baich said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the denial of a stay for Mr. Warner, saying the case presented two questions worthy of the court’s consideration.

The first, she said, was whether the inmates should be required to specify an alternative method of execution, as courts have demanded in Oklahoma and elsewhere, before challenging the method to be used by the state.

“It would be odd if the constitutionality of being burned alive, for example, turned on a challenger’s ability to point to an available guillotine,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

The second issue, she wrote, was whether the state should be using midazolam, a sedative, as its first chemical. Medical experts testifying on behalf of the inmates at an evidentiary hearing said the effects of high doses of midazolam, which Oklahoma adopted, were too unpredictable to justify its use.Midazolam was also involved in prolonged, possibly painful executions last year in Ohio and Arizona. The drug has also been used by Florida in a dozen executions at the start of a three-drug combination, similar to that used in Oklahoma. The sedative is intended to render the prisoner unconscious before injection of a paralytic and then a caustic heart-stopping agent. If it does not do so, medical experts say, the inmate will suffer excruciating pain, which could go undetected because the prisoner would be paralyzed and unable to communicate.

Those states have switched to midazolam because companies making the traditional barbiturates, which have a longer track record and deeper anesthetic properties, have refused to provide them for executions.

In the Supreme Court brief defending Oklahoma’s drug protocol, state officials said, “Oklahoma chose midazolam because the state has a sacred duty to enforce its criminal judgments, and the protocol pioneered by Florida represents the best available mechanism to carry out these judgments.”

An expert witness for the state had defended the chemical, but Justice Sotomayor wrote that his testimony was open to question. He “cited no studies,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “but instead appeared to rely primarily on the web site www.drugs.com.”

She expressed surprise that a Federal District Court judge had ruled for the state, allowing executions to proceed.

“It is true that we give deference to the district courts,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “But at some point we must question their findings of fact, unless we are to abdicate our role of ensuring that no clear error has been committed.”

“We should review such findings with added care when what is at issue is the risk of the needless infliction of severe pain,” she added. “Here, given the evidence before the district court, I struggle to see how its decision to credit the testimony of a single purported expert can be supported given the substantial body of conflicting empirical and anecdotal evidence.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the dissent on the denied stay last week.

In its order on Friday, the Supreme Court offered no explanation for agreeing to review the issue.

The Supreme Court last considered lethal injection protocols in 2008 in Baze v. Rees, which upheld Kentucky’s use of what was then the three-drug mixture used in most executions.

Adam Liptak reported from Washington, and Erik Eckholm from New York.




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5) North Carolina: DNA Evidence Brings Freedom for Man in Prison Since 1976
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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6) In Taking Up Execution Drugs Case, Justices Highlight Importance of a Single Vote
By

WASHINGTON — There are nine justices on the Supreme Court. It takes four votes to hear a case, but it takes five to stay an execution. That can leave a lethal gap.

A death penalty case can be important enough to claim a spot on the court’s docket of perhaps 75 cases a year. But the prisoner who brought it may not live to see the decision.

In agreeing on Friday to hear a challenge to the chemicals Oklahoma uses to execute condemned prisoners, the court brought fresh attention to the life-or-death importance of a single vote.

The lead petitioner in Friday’s case, Charles F. Warner, was already dead. He was executed eight days earlier, after the Supreme Court refused to stay his execution. The vote was 5 to 4.“What happened to Charles Warner was not an isolated glitch,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and the author of a new article on the court’s voting procedures in capital cases. “It was a typical, if high-visibility, example of a systemic flaw in the machinery of justice that has gone unrepaired for far too long.”

The case the court agreed to hear used to be called Warner v. Gross, No. 14-7955. On Friday, taking account of Mr. Warner’s death, the court changed the caption to Glossip v. Gross, No. 14-7955.

It may change again. The new lead petitioner, Richard Glossip, is scheduled to be executed on Thursday.

The other two petitioners in the case also have execution dates in coming weeks, all of them well before the court is expected to hear arguments in the case, in late April.

The Supreme Court did not say on Friday whether it would stay the other three executions. In a statement, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, made a pointed reference to the fact that it took only four votes to grant review. He seemed to indicate that the state was prepared to proceed with the executions.

The petitioners’ lawyers will doubtless seek stays. In Mr. Glossip’s case, they will have to act quickly.

How the court responds will illuminate the current vitality of its fitful commitment to a procedure it sometimes uses to bridge the voting gap: the “courtesy fifth” vote to stay executions. Such votes are said to be available once the court makes a formal decision to grant review of a condemned prisoner’s case.

Justice Lewis F. Powell explained his reluctant decision to cast such a courtesy vote in a 1985 concurrence. The inmate’s case had “no merit whatever,” he wrote. “But in view of the unusual situation in which four justices have voted” to hear it, he wrote, “and in view of the fact that this is a capital case with petitioner’s life at stake, and further in view of the fact that the justices are scattered geographically and unable to meet for a conference, I feel obligated to join in granting the application for a stay.”

But such a fifth vote is not always forthcoming. In the late 1980s, the question of when courtesy votes were warranted was a source of tension on the court, and by 1990 the consensus broke down entirely.

“For the first time in recent memory,” Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in a dissent that year, “a man will be executed after the court has decided to hear his claim.”

Thomas C. Goldstein, the publisher of Scotusblog, has written that a courtesy fifth has been uniformly available since the later part of the tenure of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who served from 1986 to 2005. If there are four votes formally to grant review, Mr. Goldstein wrote, a courtesy fifth vote for a stay will always materialize.

But “Supreme Court Practice,” the leading manual on Supreme Court procedure, is agnostic. Mr. Goldstein’s observation “may well be true,” its authors wrote.

“On the other hand,” they added, “no statute or Supreme Court rule requires such a practice, no judicial opinion states that this is the current internal voting procedure of the court, votes on certiorari are generally kept confidential, and the experience of the 1980s reveals that such a practice can break down under pressure.”

The courtesy fifth is, then, a convention rather than a rule, and one that requires an actual vote from an actual justice whose inclinations are necessarily to the contrary. And it seems to apply only after a formal vote to grant review.

In other settings, the gap persists. At least four inmates have been put to death since August over the objections of four justices.

“The court’s willingness to allow executions to go forward with four justices voting for a stay seems coldblooded to me,” said Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, a lawyer for Leon Taylor, one of the inmates.

At the confirmation hearing of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2005, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, asked him to commit to providing a fifth vote.

“How do you feel if you were chief, if you had four other justices now voting for a stay of execution?” Mr. Leahy asked. “Do you feel, as chief, you should do the courtesy of the rule of five and kick in the fifth one?”

The nominee seemed receptive, if a little tentative.

“I don’t want to commit to pursue a particular practice,” he said. “But it obviously makes great sense.”

In his new article, to be published in The Hofstra Law Review, Professor Freedman considered the history of the court’s practices in this area and made a recommendation. “I propose that in any capital case, regardless of its procedural posture, an execution will be stayed if four justices so desire,” he wrote.

“The justices deserve time to think,” he said. “A statement by four of them that they want that time should suffice to postpone a potentially fatal deadline.”

Whatever it does, he wrote, “the court should address the problem in a reasoned and public way.”

 




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7) Protester Is Killed as Egyptian Police Attack Marchers Carrying Flowers to Tahrir Square
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/middleeast/egypt-woman-is-killed-in-peaceful-cairo-protest.html?ref=world 

A woman was killed on Saturday in Cairo after the police fired shotgun pellets at a handful of socialist activists marching to Tahrir Square with flowers to commemorate the hundreds of demonstrators killed there during the revolution that began on Jan. 25, 2011, witnesses said.

The protester, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, was shot at close range and died a short time later, according to a statement from the organizers of the march reported by Aswat Masriya, a local news site supported by the Thomson Reuters foundation.

Egyptian activists shared graphic images of Ms. Sabbagh’s last moments on social networks, including local news photographs and witness video posted on YouTube by the state-owned Middle East News Agency.

Photographs and video recorded before the police moved in seemed to show the protesters, including Ms. Sabbagh, standing peacefully outside the Air France-KLM office in Talaat Harb Square, near Tahrir. As officers charged at the protesters, guns drawn, shots rang out and Ms. Sabbagh fell to the pavement.

News photographs of the march showed the protesters holding a wreath of flowers and a banner that read: “The fourth anniversary of the martyrs who died during the January 25 revolution.”

A spokesman for the Health Ministry, Hossam Abdel Ghaffar, confirmed the young woman’s death to Mada Masr, an independent news site, but suggested that Ms. Sabbagh had been killed during “clashes” between protesters and security forces.

The killing of an unarmed woman, last seen peacefully holding a sign on a sidewalk in downtown Cairo, outraged activists and reminded some of images of the fatal shooting of a young Iranian protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, in 2009.

The interior ministry denied that the police had shot Ms. Sabbagh, initially in a statement reported by Ahram Online, a state-owned news site, and warned Egyptians not to attend unsanctioned rallies that “terrorist groups” could infiltrate. A ministry spokesman, Hany Abdel Latif, insisted during a television interview late Saturday that the police had not fired any shots and the authorities had video of protesters carrying rifles.

Those denials angered many opposition activists, who reminded their followers on social medianetworks that the initial focus of the 2011 protests, timed to coincide with the annual Police Day holiday on Jan. 25, was the impunity of the security forces.



 


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8) Millions of GMO Insects Could Be Released in Florida Keys
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KEY WEST, Fla. — Millions of genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the Florida Keys if British researchers win approval to use the bugs against two extremely painful viral diseases.

Never before have insects with modified DNA come so close to being set loose in a residential U.S. neighborhood.

"This is essentially using a mosquito as a drug to cure disease," said Michael Doyle, executive director of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, which is waiting to hear if the Food and Drug Administration will allow the experiment.

Dengue and chikungunya are growing threats in the U.S., but some people are more frightened at the thought of being bitten by a genetically modified organism. More than 130,000 people signed a Change.org petition against the experiment.

Even potential boosters say those responsible must do more to show that benefits outweigh the risks of breeding modified insects that could bite people.

"I think the science is fine, they definitely can kill mosquitoes, but the GMO issue still sticks as something of a thorny issue for the general public," said Phil Lounibos, who studies mosquito control at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory.

Mosquito controllers say they're running out of options. With climate change and globalization spreading tropical diseases farther from the equator, storm winds, cargo ships and humans carry these viruses to places like Key West, the southernmost U.S. city.

There are no vaccines or cures for dengue, known as "break-bone fever," or chikungunya, so painful it causes contortions. U.S. cases remain rare.

Insecticides are sprayed year-round in the Keys' charming and crowded neighborhoods. But Aedes aegypti, whose biting females spread these diseases, have evolved to resist four of the six insecticides used to kill them.

Enter Oxitec, a British biotech firm that patented a method of breeding Aedes aegypti with fragments of genes from the herpes simplex virus and E. coli bacteria as well as coral and cabbage. This synthetic DNA is commonly used in laboratory science and is thought to pose no significant risks to other animals, but it kills mosquito larvae.

Oxitec's lab workers manually remove modified females, aiming to release only males, which don't bite for blood like females do. The modified males then mate with wild females whose offspring die, reducing the population.

Oxitec has built a breeding lab in Marathon and hopes to release its mosquitoes in a Key West neighborhood this spring.

FDA spokeswoman Theresa Eisenman said no field tests will be allowed until the agency has "thoroughly reviewed all the necessary information."

Company spokeswoman Chris Creese said the test will be similar in size to Oxitec's 2012 experiment in the Cayman Islands, where 3.3 million modified mosquitoes were released over six months, suppressing 96 percent of the targeted bugs. Oxitec says a later test in Brazil also was successful, and both countries now want larger-scale projects.

But critics accused Oxitec of failing to obtain informed consent in the Caymans, saying residents weren't told they could be bitten by a few stray females overlooked in the lab.

Instead, Oxitec said only non-biting males would be released, and that even if humans were somehow bitten, no genetically modified DNA would enter their bloodstream.

Neither claim is entirely true, outside observers say.

"I'm on their side, in that consequences are highly unlikely. But to say that there's no genetically modified DNA that might get into a human, that's kind of a gray matter," said Lounibos.

Creese says Oxitec has now released 70 million of its mosquitoes in several countries and received no reports of human impacts caused by bites or from the synthetic DNA, despite regulatory oversight that encourages people to report any problems. "We are confident of the safety of our mosquito, as there's no mechanism for any adverse effect on human health. The proteins are non-toxic and non-allergenic," she said.

Oxitec should still do more to show that the synthetic DNA causes no harm when transferred into humans by its mosquitoes, said Guy Reeves, a molecular geneticist at Germany's Max Planck Institute.

Key West resident Marilyn Smith wasn't persuaded after Oxitec's presentation at a public meeting. She says neither disease has had a major outbreak yet in Florida, so "why are we being used as the experiment, the guinea pigs, just to see what happens?"


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9) A Year After Suing Their Landlord, Brooklyn Tenants Still Lack Heat
By

Two weeks ago, a city housing inspector visited an apartment on the fourth floor of 940 Prospect Place in Brooklyn and issued a violation to the landlord for inadequate heat. The visit was nothing new — since December 2013, residents of 940 and the adjoining building at 930 Prospect Place have made more than 100 complaints about lack of heat or hot water.

One year ago, when the polar vortex brought record low temperatures to the city, I reported on conditions in the two buildings, including a frigid bedroom where a 6-year-old girl with severe respiratory problems breathed through a ventilator. At the time, the tenants had some hope for respite: They had a lawyer and a date in Housing Court the following week. Surely a resolution was at hand.

Twelve months later, the case is continuing and conditions have not improved, according to residents.“My question is, why hasn’t anyone from H.P.D. come in and made sure we have heat?” said Vernaline McFarlane, 46, using the initials for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. “All we are asking for is heat.”

Court dates have been adjourned, motions argued, testimony given, new violations documented. In the clogged, forlorn courthouse on 141 Livingston Street in Downtown Brooklyn, full-day sessions have sometimes lasted less than three hours. Afternoons have evaporated as lawyers pondered questions like whether a city-certified master plumber was qualified to testify about the pipes in a steam heat system.

One thing lawyers on both sides agree on: Compared with other cases in Housing Court, this one is moving quickly.

“It’s really upsetting, because there is a court system set up to make this happen in an expeditious manner, and everyone agrees it’s not working,” said Paris R. Baldacci, director of the housing rights clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Mr. Baldacci, who is not a party in the 930-940 Prospect Place case, said there was no reason the court could not resolve cases like it in a couple of days.

“The inspector comes in once a month and finds there’s no heat,” he said. “That’s a relatively easy issue to resolve. But it’s for the most part almost on sleeping pills. There’s a culture that’s developed that slows it all down and misses the seriousness of it. It’s crazy and unfair.”

How does a simple heat complaint, confirmed by city housing inspectors, take more than a year to resolve?

For many tenants stuck in cold apartments, Housing Court is, on paper at least, the place where they can meet their landlord on equal footing. In practice, tenants and lawyers say, it can feel more like a black hole where complaints languish, city agencies lack enforcement powers and delay seems to be the rule.

“Sometimes cases go on and on, and everyone has a bit of a hand in why,” said Justice Fern A. Fisher, the deputy chief administrative judge for New York’s courts. “The system is a complicated system; we don’t disavow that. We don’t want any case to take long. But sometimes factors make it go on.”

One way to view Housing Court is from the sidewalk outside, where on a January morning after a long holiday weekend, a restive line of several hundred people snaked around the block, waiting to get in the front door. From there they waited to pass through metal detectors, then on to a bottleneck at the elevators.

The State Legislature created Housing Court in 1972 as a quick and efficient vehicle to enforce housing codes. But almost from the start, the court was overrun by lawsuits brought by landlords to remove tenants. In each borough, only one judge hears cases against landlords; the other judges — in Brooklyn, about a dozen — hear cases for eviction.

In Room 409 in Brooklyn, where Judge Marina Cora Mundy heard the Prospect Place case, 30 to 40 cases compete for time on her docket every day. Tenants in eviction cases clogged the hall outside.

“Brooklyn Housing Court is the worst building,” said Luis Henriquez, a supervising attorney at Make the Road New York, a group that works on immigrants’ issues, including housing. “It’s not designed to be a court. The elevators are awful. All these obstacles exacerbate the imbalance between landlords and tenants.”

The courthouse’s owner has appeared on the public advocate’s watch list of worst landlords for violations in buildings he owns in Flatbush.

The owner of the Prospect Place buildings, Seth Miller, is on the list, too, for two buildings his companies own in the Bronx.

The Prospect Place tenants sued on Dec. 17, 2013, asking the court to order Mr. Miller, who bought the two buildings out of a bankruptcy proceeding in 2012, to make repairs and pay civil penalties.

The housing department filed separate suits against him, seeking $250 per day that any heat violations remained open.

On Jan. 14 of last year, four weeks after the tenants brought their suit, Mr. Miller agreed to provide essential services, including heat and hot water, and Judge Mundy adjourned the case.

To appearances, justice had been served, swiftly and voluntarily. Residents received a flier under their doors telling them that the heating system was functioning well, “despite the vocal efforts of a few occupants to try to distract attention from their legal issues in Housing Court.”

But nothing changed. Within a week, tenants called 311 with more heat complaints, and on Jan. 22 a housing inspector issued a violation for inadequate heat in a first-floor apartment in 940 Prospect Place. The next day, the tenants’ lawyers filed a motion to hold Mr. Miller in contempt for not complying with the court-ordered stipulation to provide heat.

The contempt motion added new hurdles and more delays. The court denied the motion; tenants moved to reargue, based on continued violations. On April 25, the judge granted their motion and scheduled testimony to begin June 3, nearly six months after the original heat suit was filed.

The winter had come and gone without a resolution. So had part of the summer, as the June 3 court date slid to July 23.

New Yorkers made 120,136 complaints for inadequate heat and hot water last fiscal year, up 10 percent from the previous year.

When a resident calls 311 with a heat complaint, the call goes to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which automatically notifies the landlord. Two or three days later, the agency is supposed to send an inspector to the apartment that called in the complaint. If the resident is at home when the inspector arrives, and if the apartment is cold at the time, the inspector can issue a violation, giving the landlord 24 hours to repair the condition. The agency issued 12,352 violations for heat and hot water in fiscal year 2014, roughly one for every 10 complaints.

Violations alone do not mean penalties. Unlike city agencies that regulate parking or sanitation, the housing department cannot directly assess fines; instead, it must seek them in Housing Court. Even then, Mr. Henriquez of Make the Road said, civil penalties are usually reduced in negotiations between the landlord and the agency. “When landlords know that,” he said, “that incentivizes a culture of noncompliance.”

Last winter, the department brought 4,333 heat and hot water suits, collecting $3,244,041 in fines, an average of $749 per case (or $27 per complaint).

A 2003 study by a tenant advocacy group called the City Wide Task Force on Housing Court (now Housing Court Answers) found that in cases initiated by tenants, only 2 percent in the study resulted in fines for the landlord.

On a rainy morning in mid-December, lawyers for both sides of the Prospect Place suit were scheduled to appear before Judge Mundy at 9:30 a.m. for a full day of testimony. The court session began at 10:32 and broke before noon. When the parties reconvened at 2:30 p.m., the landlord’s lawyer announced that his witness was not present, so court adjourned.

The next date was scheduled for three weeks later. That date, too, would be adjourned. As would the next.

At a Dunkin’ Donuts near Housing Court, Stephanie Rudolph, one of the lawyers representing the tenants for the nonprofit Urban Justice Center, shook off the dreary weather and pace of the court case. “Time definitely isn’t on the tenants’ side in a case like this,” she said.

“It’s very frustrating,” Ms. Rudolph said. “Whatever is supposed to deter the landlord is not forthcoming, and it may be spring before there’s a ruling.”

If the tenants eventually prevail, any fines will go to the housing department, not the residents.

Mr. Miller’s lawyer, Todd Rothenberg, said that although the case might seem to be on a slow track, this was true of many legal proceedings. “Thirteen months as legal cases go is not a long time,” he said.

Ms. McFarlane was one of several residents who spent time in court during the trial, chafing at the slow progress.

“Why should we have to take him to court?” she asked during a break in testimony. “This is H.P.D.’s job. Why should we have to take time off from our jobs to be here?”

The frustration of a year in court ran through the lobby of 930 Prospect Place, where residents met with a tenant organizer from the Pratt Area Community Council. The colonial revival-style building and its identical twin dot a neat block near the Brooklyn Children’s Museum that has seen an influx of students and young professionals.

To the tenants in the suit, most of whom pay below-market rents, the case is about not just heat, but also gentrification. Mr. Miller has brought suits to remove residents from nearly one-third of the buildings’ 32 apartments, challenging their leases’ validity or claiming other grounds.

In a first-floor apartment, Max Mecklenburg and Sara Duvisac paid $1,750 in rent — two or three times as much as their neighbors. When Mr. Mecklenburg, who is part of the suit, complained about the cold, Mr. Miller installed an electric heater for which the building provided electricity. He told Mr. Mecklenburg in an email, “To be quite frank, I would appreciate it if you would stop making complaints to H.P.D. or tenant organizers.”

Other tenants got no such relief. Malaika Quashie, 27, said she was back to using the oven to warm her apartment, even though she knew it posed a fire risk.

Last winter, she said, her employer suspended her for missing too many days when her 1-year-old daughter got recurrent colds.

“It’s been going on so long, it’s like he knows nothing is happening,” Ms. Quashie said of Mr. Miller. “So he’s just gonna continue until he gets penalized for what he’s doing.”

“He knows most people won’t stay in the cold,” she added. “Right now, he don’t expect us to continue fighting him. We pay $536 for a one-bedroom. He said, ‘I can get $1,350 for the apartment; I’m gonna get you out,’ and he left. It’s just stressful. All we want is to be in our apartment, with heat, peacefully.”

Elizabeth Darius, who has lived in the building 34 years, said she used a space heater every day, even though it drove up her electric bills.

Mr. Miller, in an email, denied that he withheld heat to get residents to move out, saying the heat complaints were retaliation against him for bringing eviction cases.

“If tenants do not have the right under the law to occupy an apartment, of course we want them to move,” he wrote. “In such circumstances we take legal action, not illegal action. Any implication that we withhold services to accomplish these ends is simply untrue.”

In court, Mr. Miller and several witnesses testified to extensive repairs to the buildings, which had hundreds of violations when he bought them.

Ms. Rudolph, the tenants’ lawyer, called his lawsuits frivolous, brought to harass tenants. “They have to go to court, and he doesn’t show up,” she said. Yet her firm did not have the manpower to sue for harassment, Ms. Rudolph said. Most newer tenants did not join the suit, Ms. Rudolph added, because they did not plan to settle in the building and did not want to be branded as troublemakers.

At the meeting, tenants described the same heating pattern they had a year earlier: The radiators warmed the apartments for a few minutes in the morning, then again briefly at night, with no heat in between. Weekends were sometimes without heat altogether.

“I know when the heat comes on because there’s a leak in the radiator upstairs, and it drips into my apartment,” said Ella-Mae Maurice-LaCroix, 48, an Army logistics officer. “Yesterday it came on at 7 in the evening, 2 in the morning and 9:45, for five minutes each time.”

The pace of the court case was “unsettling,” she said. “You don’t know from one day to the next what’s going to happen,” Ms. Maurice-LaCroix said. “My 75-year-old mother can’t visit. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. We’re always going back to court, and some judge could see his side of it.”

Thirteen days of testimony stretched from July until this week. Days were short and infrequent, falling into a numbing rhythm.

June 3: adjourned for a scheduling conflict (no testimony).

July 23: one witness (95 minutes of testimony).

July 24: one witness (41 minutes).

Aug. 25: no testimony.

Sept. 15: one witness (65 minutes).

Oct. 9: one witness (79 minutes).

On Jan. 12, as testimony neared an end, Mr. Rothenberg, the landlord’s lawyer, added yet another turn: The past months of testimony, he argued, applied only to the contempt motion, not to the tenant’s original complaint or to the housing department’s suit. Those, he said, would have to be argued from the top after Judge Mundy decided the contempt case — the same facts, the same witnesses.

Was he right? After so long in court, no one quite knew the answer.

Judge Mundy said she would review the record and rule on Mr. Rothenberg’s contention in February. Then she would decide whatever case was at issue.

Vito Mustaciuolo, deputy housing commissioner for enforcement and neighborhood services, said the case lacked the urgency of others on the docket because it was about past contempt, not a nonfunctioning boiler or another condition in need of immediate action. “Civil penalties are effective, but our primary focus is on compliance,” he said.

On Jan. 18 and 19, tenants called 311 with more heat complaints.

During his testimony, Mr. Miller said that his company erred on the side of providing excess heat, but that tenants left air-conditioners in windows, or opened windows before the housing inspectors came.

To tenants, this was just the latest insult.

“He’s making a mockery of the judicial system,” Ms. Maurice-LaCroix said. “He knows how long a housing case can take.”








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10) Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint
Charles Blow: At Yale, the Police Detained My Son
January 26, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/opinion/charles-blow-at-yale-the-police-detained-my-son.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college — he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!

This is how my son remembers it:

He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check the status of a book he had requested. The book hadn’t arrived yet, but since he was there he put in a request for some multimedia equipment for a project he was working on.

Then he left to walk back to his dorm room. He says he saw an officer “jogging” toward the entrance of another building across the grounds from the building he’d just left.

Then this:

“I did not pay him any mind, and continued to walk back towards my room. I looked behind me, and noticed that the police officer was following me. He spoke into his shoulder-mounted radio and said, ‘I got him.’

“I faced forward again, presuming that the officer was not talking to me. I then heard him say, ‘Hey, turn around!’ — which I did.“The officer raised his gun at me, and told me to get on the ground.

“At this point, I stopped looking directly at the officer, and looked down towards the pavement. I dropped to my knees first, with my hands raised, then laid down on my stomach.

“The officer asked me what my name was. I gave him my name.

“The officer asked me what school I went to. I told him Yale University.

“At this point, the officer told me to get up.”

The officer gave his name, then asked my son to “give him a call the next day.”

My son continued:

“I got up slowly, and continued to walk back to my room. I was scared. My legs were shaking slightly. After a few more paces, the officer said, ‘Hey, my man. Can you step off to the side?’ I did.”

The officer asked him to turn around so he could see the back of his jacket. He asked his name again, then, finally, asked to see my son’s ID. My son produced his school ID from his wallet.

The officer asked more questions, and my son answered. All the while the officer was relaying this information to someone over his radio.

My son heard someone on the radio say back to the officer “something to the effect of: ‘Keep him there until we get this sorted out.’ ” The officer told my son that an incident report would be filed, and then he walked away.

A female officer approached. My son recalled, “I told her that an officer had just stopped me and pointed his gun at me, and that I wanted to know what this was all about.” She explained students had called about a burglary suspect who fit my son’s description.

That suspect was apparently later arrested in the area.When I spoke to my son, he was shaken up. I, however, was fuming.

Now, don’t get me wrong: If indeed my son matched the description of a suspect, I would have had no problem with him being questioned appropriately. School is his community, his home away from home, and he would have appreciated reasonable efforts to keep it safe. The stop is not the problem; the method of the stop is the problem.

Why was a gun drawn first? Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first?

What if my son had panicked under the stress, having never had a gun pointed at him before, and made what the officer considered a “suspicious” movement? Had I come close to losing him? Triggers cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot be called back.

My son was unarmed, possessed no plunder, obeyed all instructions, answered all questions, did not attempt to flee or resist in any way.

This is the scenario I have always dreaded: my son at the wrong end of a gun barrel, face down on the concrete. I had always dreaded the moment that we would share stories about encounters with the police in which our lives hung in the balance, intergenerational stories of joining the inglorious “club.”

When that moment came, I was exceedingly happy I had talked to him about how to conduct himself if a situation like this ever occurred. Yet I was brewing with sadness and anger that he had to use that advice.

I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out — earn your way out — of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you’ve done matters less than how you look.

There is no amount of respectability that can bend a gun’s barrel. All of our boys are bound together.

The dean of Yale College and the campus police chief have apologized and promised an internal investigation, and I appreciate that. But the scars cannot be unmade. My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him.


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11) Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
By and

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/business/economy/middle-class-shrinks-further-as-more-fall-out-instead-of-climbing-up.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.

In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.

But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.

This social upheaval helps explain why the president focused on reviving the middle class, offering a raft of proposals squarely aimed at concerns like paying for a college education, taking parental leave, affording child care and buying a home.

“Middle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change,” Mr. Obama told Congress and the public on Tuesday.

Still, regardless of their income, most Americans identify as middle class. The term itself is so amorphous that politicians often cite the group in introducing proposals to engender wide appeal.

The definition here starts at $35,000 — which is about 50 percent higher than the official poverty level for a family of four — and ends at the six-figure mark. Although many Americans in households making more than $100,000 consider themselves middle class, particularly those living in expensive regions like the Northeast and Pacific Coast, they have substantially more money than most people.

However the lines are drawn, it is clear that millions are struggling to hang on to accouterments that most experts consider essential to a middle-class life.

“I would consider middle class to be people who can live comfortably on what they earn, can pay their bills, can set aside something to save for retirement and for kids in college and can have vacations and entertainment,” said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a left-leaning research and advocacy group.

Lisa Land, 49, is one of those who have dropped through the hatch. She gets by on her father’s $1,300 monthly Social Security checks and by having her adult daughter pitch in for groceries.

Her circumstances are a stark change from just a few years ago, when she considered herself firmly in the middle class. Despite a relatively modest salary, her pay and other resources went a long way in tiny Eden, N.C., where she worked for 13 years in customer service at a textile factory.

In 2008, however, Ms. Land was laid off. Faced with ailing parents and a recession that tore up the region’s economy, she moved in with her father to offer full-time care.

“We wouldn’t have a lot of money, but we had everything that we needed,” she said. “Now, there’s really no extra for anything. No vacation. No dining out. No stuff like that.”

Even as the American middle class has shrunk, it has gone through a transformation. The 53 million households that remain in the middle class — about 43 percent of all households — look considerably different from their middle-class predecessors of a previous generation, according to a New York Times analysis of census data.

In recent years, the fastest-growing component of the new middle class has been households headed by people 65 and older. Today’s seniors have better retirement benefits than previous generations. Also, older Americans are increasingly working past traditional retirement age. More than eight million, or 19 percent, were in the labor force in 2013, nearly twice as many as in 2000.

As a result, while median household income, on average, has fallen 9 percent since the turn of the century, it has jumped 14 percent among households headed by older adults.

The growing prominence of older people in the middle class reflects, in part, the way Social Security and Medicare — originally set up as safety nets to protect seniors from falling into poverty after retirement — have provided a substantial cushion for them against hard times.

Married couples with children — who make up a category that is shrinking over all — are diminishing even faster as a share of the middle class. In the late 1960s, about 45 percent of all households included married adults and their offspring. But among middle-class households, more than 60 percent had that traditional family arrangement.

Today, married couples with children at home make up just a quarter of households. But even as they diminished as a share of the population, these families surged up the economic ladder as more married women went to work in the paid labor force. By 2000, 42 percent earned more than $100,000 in today’s dollars.

The most recent recession put a halt to the advances of even that generally successful group. Its share in the middle class has fallen by three percentage points and the share earning less than $35,000 has increased.

“In the Great Recession, we lost a lot of middle-income jobs and we gained a lot of low-paying jobs,” said Michael R. Strain, resident scholar at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. “That’s a slower-burning thing, but it increased in ferocity during the recession, and people are feeling it.”

For more than two decades, John D’Amanda, 54, earned about $30,000 a year running a window-washing service in Oakland, Calif. He had a car and an apartment. Then, in 2009, the calls stopped coming in. His customers no longer had the luxury of paying for someone to wash their windows.

Mr. D’Amanda got a job at a McDonald’s, where he has worked ever since, now earning 25 cents above the state’s new minimum wage of $9. He pays $350 a month in rent to share a small bedroom with a roommate.

“I’m barely able to afford that,” he said.

These days, most middle-class adults reached their status through higher education. As recently as 1992, half of all middle-class households were headed by someone with a high school education or less, according to the Times analysis. Today, only 37 percent of the middle class has not been to college.

Geography also matters. The biggest declines in middle-class households during the previous half-century occurred in the Northeast — states like Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey — where industrial economies gave way to mass suburbanization and increased affluence.

According to a New York Times poll in December, 60 percent of people who call themselves middle class think that if they work hard they will get rich. But the evidence suggests that goal is increasingly out of reach. When middle class people look up, they see the rich getting richer while they spin their wheels.

“The middle has basically stayed the same; it hasn’t improved,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “You’ve got an iPhone now and a better TV, but your median income hasn’t changed. What’s really changed is the penthouse has become supernice.”

Still, there are some recent signs of hope for the middle class. The economy is improving and more jobs are being created, many of them in better-paying categories like professional services, health care and even a reviving manufacturing sector.

Jason Pappas’s prospects, for example, are looking up. Mr. Pappas, 32, from Muncie, Ind., was earning about $42 an hour as an iron worker in the mid-2000s, but building projects dried up during the recession, pushing him onto the unemployment rolls for a year and a half.

He eventually found a job as a truck driver. Today, he earns just over half the hourly wage he made as an iron worker, but he is happy to have a steady job.

“It pays the bills,” he said, “and I have medical insurance.”

Moreover, Mr. Pappas just learned that he was being promoted to supervisor. Soon, with overtime, he’ll be earning $80,000 a year.

He is feeling a lot better about his future. “Hard work pays off,” Mr. Pappas said.


Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.






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12) To Collect Debts, Nursing Homes Are Seizing Control Over Patients
By

Lillian Palermo tried to prepare for the worst possibilities of aging. An insurance executive with a Ph.D. in psychology and a love of ballroom dancing, she arranged for her power of attorney and health care proxy to go to her husband, Dino, eight years her junior, if she became incapacitated. And in her 80s, she did.

Mr. Palermo, who was the lead singer in a Midtown nightclub in the 1960s when her elegant tango first caught his eye, now regularly rolls his wife’s wheelchair to the piano at the Catholic nursing home in Manhattan where she ended up in 2010 as dementia, falls and surgical complications took their toll. He sings her favorite songs, feeds her home-cooked Italian food, and pays a private aide to be there when he cannot.But one day last summer, after he disputed nursing home bills that had suddenly doubled Mrs. Palermo’s copays, and complained about inexperienced employees who dropped his wife on the floor, Mr. Palermo was shocked to find a six-page legal document waiting on her bed.

It was a guardianship petition filed by the nursing home, Mary Manning Walsh, asking the court to give a stranger full legal power over Mrs. Palermo, now 90, and complete control of her money.

Few people are aware that a nursing home can take such a step. Guardianship cases are difficult to gain access to and poorly tracked by New York State courts; cases are often closed from public view for confidentiality. But the Palermo case is no aberration. Interviews with veterans of the system and a review of guardianship court data conducted by researchers at Hunter College at the request of The New York Times show the practice has become routine, underscoring the growing power nursing homes wield over residents and families amid changes in the financing of long-term care.

In a random, anonymized sample of 700 guardianship cases filed in Manhattan over a decade, Hunter College researchers found more than 12 percent were brought by nursing homes. Some of these may have been prompted by family feuds, suspected embezzlement or just the absence of relatives to help secure Medicaid coverage. But lawyers and others versed in the guardianship process agree that nursing homes primarily use such petitions as a means of bill collection — a purpose never intended by the Legislature when it enacted the guardianship statute in 1993.

At least one judge has ruled that the tactic by nursing homes is an abuse of the law, but the petitions, even if they are ultimately unsuccessful, force families into costly legal ordeals.

“It’s a strategic move to intimidate,” said Ginalisa Monterroso, who handled patient Medicaid accounts at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home until 2012, and is now chief executive of Medicaid Advisory Group, an elder care counseling business that was representing Mr. Palermo in his billing dispute. “Nursing homes do it just to bring money.”

“It’s so cruel,” she added. “Mr. Palermo loves his wife, he’s there every single day, and they just threw him to the courts.”

Brett D. Nussbaum, a lawyer who represents Mary Manning Walsh and many other nursing homes, said Mr. Palermo’s devotion to his wife was irrelevant to the decision to seek a court-appointed guardian in July, when the billing dispute over his wife’s care reached a stalemate, with an outstanding balance approaching $68,000.

“The Palermo case is no different than any other nursing home bill that they had difficulty collecting,” Mr. Nussbaum said, estimating that he had brought 5,000 guardianship cases himself in 21 years of practice. “When you have families that do not cooperate and an incapacitated person, guardianship is a legitimate means to get the nursing home paid.”

Guardianship transfers a person’s legal rights to make some or all decisions to someone appointed by the court — usually a lawyer paid with the ward’s money. It is aimed at protecting people unable to manage their affairs because of incapacity, and who lack effective help without court action. Legally, it can supplant a power of attorney and a health care proxy.

Although it is a drastic measure, nursing home lawyers argue that using guardianship to secure payment for care is better than suing an incapacitated resident who cannot respond.

Mr. Palermo, 82, was devastated by the petition, brought in the name of Sister Sean William, the Carmelite nun who is the executive director of Mary Manning Walsh. “It’s like a hell,” he said last fall, speaking in the cadences of the southern Italian village where he grew up in poverty in a family of eight. “Never in my life I was sued for anything. I just want to take care of my wife.”

A court evaluator eventually reported that Mr. Palermo was the appropriate guardian, and questioned why the petition had been filed. But the matter still dragged on, and Mr. Palermo, who had promised to pay any arrears once Medicaid completed a recalculation of the bill, grew distraught as his expenses fighting the case reached $10,000.

In the end, Medicaid’s recalculation put his wife’s monthly copay at $4,558.54, almost $600 less than the nursing home had claimed, but still far more than the $2,642 Mr. Palermo had been paying under an earlier Medicaid calculation. As soon as the nursing home cashed his check for the outstanding balance, it withdrew the guardianship petition.

“They chose to use a strong-arm method, asking for somebody to be appointed to take over her funds, hoping for a rubber stamp to do their wishes,” said Elliott Polland, Mr. Palermo’s lawyer.

Many judges go along with such petitions, according to lawyers and others involved in the process. One judge who has not is Alexander W. Hunter Jr., a longtime State Supreme Court justice in the Bronx and Manhattan. In guardianship cases in 2006 and 2007, Justice Hunter ordered the nursing homes to bear the legal costs, ruling they had brought the petitions solely for the purpose of being paid and stating that this was not the Legislature’s intent when it enacted the statute, known as Article 81 of the Mental Hygiene Law.

Last year Justice Hunter did appoint a guardian in response to a petition by Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale, but in his scathing 11-page decision, he directed the guardian to investigate and to consider referring the case for criminal prosecution of financial exploitation.

The decision describes a 94-year-old resident with a bank balance of $240,000 who had been unable to go home after rehabilitative treatment because of a fire in her co-op apartment; her only regular visitors were real estate agents who wanted her to sell. After Hebrew Home’s own doctor evaluated her as incapable of making financial decisions, the decision says, the nursing home collected a $50,000 check from her; it sued her when she refused to continue writing checks, then filed for guardianship.

“It would be an understatement to declare that this court is outraged by the behavior exhibited by the interested parties — parties who were supposed to protect the person, but who have all unabashedly demonstrated through their actions in connection with the person that they are only interested in getting paid,” he wrote.

Jennifer Cona, a lawyer for the nursing home, called the decision “grossly unfair to Hebrew Home,” but said she could not discuss details because the record was sealed.Many cases in which judges grant nursing homes’ guardianship petitions never come to light. But one that challenges the legal propriety of such petitions for bill collection is now pending before the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court. Without explanation, that record, too, is sealed from public scrutiny.

“There is no transparency in the whole process,” said Alexandra Siskopoulos, a lawyer who represents a relative of the nursing home resident in the appellate case — a relative who had wanted to take the resident home. “Unfortunately, people’s eyes are not opened until it’s their family member, and at that point, it’s too late.”

Throughout the country, data is lacking on the most basic facts about guardianships, even how many there are. In New York State, with different rules in 62 counties and no centralized database, it has taken a team of researchers more than two years to collect information from a fraction of case files in 14 counties, said Jean Callahan, the director of the Brookdale Center on Healthy Aging at Hunter College.

Preliminary findings of the center’s study are not expected until later this year, but at the request of The Times, the researchers undertook a breakdown of the petitioners in a sample of the 3,302 guardianship cases filed in Manhattan from 2002 to 2012. More frequent petitioners than nursing homes (12.4 percent) were hospitals (16.1 percent), friends and family (25.3 percent) and Adult Protective Services (40.1 percent).

New York’s guardianship statute was part of a national movement to limit guardianships to the least restrictive alternatives necessary to prevent harm. A petition is supposed to be brought only by someone with the person’s welfare at heart, and guardianship is to be tailored to individual needs, taking into account the person’s wishes.

Instead, Ms. Callahan said, “it has become a system that’s very focused on finances.”

One afternoon, Mrs. Palermo dozed in her wheelchair while her husband described their careful preparations for old age, and the shock of discovering that papers drawn up by an elder law specialist were insufficient protection.

He recalled the fear and anger he felt when he first read the nursing home’s petition, on his bus ride back to a rent-stabilized apartment on East 36th Street filled with mementos of their happy marriage. They have no children. “Who better than me, the husband for 47 years, that she gave power of attorney?” he asked.

As his voice grew anguished, Mrs. Palermo began to moan and cry out incoherently. “Are you O.K., baby?” he asked, jumping up to embrace her. “Now, don’t do that. Come on, give me a hug.”

He soothed her in Italian, speaking of the polenta he had made for her that morning. He wheeled her to the dining room. Later, he would serenade her.

But in the night, again he could not sleep for worry. He fingered drafts of his own petitions, hand-lettered pages that he debated sending to nursing home administrators. One was addressed “To God and to whom it may concern.”

“I’m trapped in a web of people and lawyers that will exhaust my 50 years of sacrifices and savings,” he wrote. “Please, dear God, grant me strength and wisdom to take care of my wife.”



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