Friday, April 10, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 2015



CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!
Sign the Petition:

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

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

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

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


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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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Fight for $15

HISTORIC RALLIES ON APRIL 15

Boosting pay for working moms and dads helps ALL of us – not just the rich. It's time for $15.


BIG NEWS: On April 15, fast food cooks and cashiers will be STRIKING across the country – and thousands and thousands of Americans will be rallying alongside them.

In just two years, the Fight for $15 has grown from a few dozen striking fast food workers in New York City to a historic international movement.

Thousands of people working in a TON of new industries have joined the fight – from home care workers to gas station attendants, Wal-Mart workers to airport employees.

And now I'm asking: Will you join, too?

YES! I believe every working American deserves fair pay and I pledge to show up at the Fight for $15 rally on April 15.

This is your chance to stand with the striking low wage workers fighting for $15 an hour and union rights at MASSIVE national rallies across the country.

Big companies like McDonald's are making billions – while middle class and working Americans struggle to pay our rent and support our families. Frankly, it's wrong.

That's why, in just two weeks, we're standing up for fair pay for all.

Sign up here to join the rallies for $15 an hour on April 15. Together, we can make history.
When we come together, we win. It's that simple.

Dozens of cities and states across the country have raised the minimum wage since this fight began. In fact, more than 9 million workers have higher wages today – thanks to voter action, collective bargaining and direct public pressure on companies like Wal-Mart.

It's time for McDonald's and poverty-pay companies across the country to guarantee good pay for every hard-working employee. Help send the message loud and clear on April 15.

Thanks for joining the fight.
Beth Schaffer
McDonald's Employee, Charleston, SC
Fight for $15

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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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No Medical Execution Of Mumia! Friday, 4pm, Oakland Federal Bldg
No medical execution of Mumia!

Support the call for an urgent national day of action on Friday, April 10th to save Mumia Abu Jamal from execution by medical neglect.

Friday, April 10th - 4:00 PM
Federal Bldg, 1301 Clay St. Oakland

Join the event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/645589895584877/

No Medical Execution for Mumia
 
Stopped from carrying out the death penalty against Mumia Abu-Jamal by a world-wide movement that spanned three decades, over the past three months the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has been attempting to execute him by medical neglect.

On March 30th Abu-Jamal was rushed, unconscious, to the Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pa. suffering diabetic shock with a dangerously high blood sugar level of 779. After just two days in the hospital’s ICU, Abu-Jamal was returned to the prison infirmary at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pa. into the hands of the same doctors whose medical neglect and mistreatment nearly killed him.

Prison officials initially denied visits by family members, supporters and Abu-Jamal’s attorneys, and only backed down after receiving thousands of calls. Those able to visit Mumia on Apr. 3 and Apr. 6 reported he was extremely weak, had lost 50 pounds, still suffered from skin rashes and still had fluctuating blood sugar levels around 200. The prison continues to feed him meals high in carbohydrates – including cake for breakfast.

The murder of aging political prisoners by denying them adequate health care has happened before. Earlier this year MOVE 9 member Phil Africa died under suspicious circumstances at SCI Dallas. The lack of standard medical treatment impacts all prisoners, particularly those over 55.

The state of Pennsylvania must cease and desist in their attempts to murder political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

 Allow daily visits by Mumia’s family, friends, and attorneys. Their support and protection in this time of vulnerability should not be restricted.

Allow Mumia’s choice of specialist doctors to examine and schedule treatment for him – NOW. There is precedent in Pennsylvania for this. Prisoner, John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, was allowed care by private doctors.

Release Mumia’s medical records to his attorneys.

Mumia is innocent and should never have been incarcerated. We demand his immediate release.

We are calling on everyone concerned to participate in the following actions:

Twitter using the hashtags #mumiamustlive #saveMumia #Blacklivesmatter

DOC Secretary John Wetzel at 717-728-4109; padocsecretary@pa.gov

PA Governor Tom Wolf at 717-787-2500; fax: 717-772-8284;governor@pa.gov

Prison Superintendent John Kerestes at 570-773-2158; contactdoc@pa.gov

On FRIDAY APRIL 10 – Organize a demonstration in your city, on your campus – wherever you can get word out to stop this attempt to murder Mumia. We need to SHUT IT DOWN FOR MUMIA!
_______________________________________________
Mumia-alerts mailing list
Mumia-alerts@mailman.lmi.net
http://mailman.lmi.net/mailman/listinfo/mumia-alerts

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For Immediate Release: March 30, 2015

Attn: News Desk

Prisoners and Advocacy Groups Win Right to a Trial On Constitutionality of the Silencing Act (PA SB508)

This morning, Chief Judge for the federal court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Christopher Conner, will hear the cases Abu-Jamal v. Kane and Prison Legal News v. Kane in a trial that willl determine the constitutionality of PA SB508 "the Silencing Act".  Defendant PA Attorney General Kane will be hard pressed to argue the constitutionality of the Silencing Act, a censorship law targeted at Mumia Abu-Jamal and other currently and formerly incarcerated people.

Defendant Seth Williams was dismissed from the case based on his explicit disavowal of enforcing the act until a court of competent jurisdiction rules on the constitutionality of the statute. His dismissal does not hinder Plaintiffs ability to obtain the relief of invalidating this law, as a favorable ruling on the First Amendment issue against Defendant Kane will achieve the same result. Williams' disavowal of enforcement is a far cry from his political grandstanding in support of this bill's passage in the fall.

The judge has ordered that this trial will include Plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction merged with a trial on the merits, meaning that if we win we will be granted a permanent injunction against the statute, and the statue will be invalidated.

“Silencing prisoners is one more way of dehumanizing them,” said Amistad Law Project Policy Director Nikki Grant. “We need the voices of the marginalized to shed light on injustice.”

The trial is set for this morning March 30 in Harrisburg, PA approximately 5 months since former Governor Corbett signed this ill-fated bill into law.

 The Abolitionist Law Center, Amistad Law Project, and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law filed the lawsuit on Nov. 10th to stop enforcement of the law. The law firms represent Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio, Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall, Robert L. Holbrook, Donnell Palmer, Anthony Chance, and Human Rights Coalition.

The Silencing Act, also known as 18 P.S. § 11.1304, allows the Attorney General, county District Attorneys, and victims of personal injury crimes to bring a lawsuit in civil court against the person convicted of the personal injury crime to enjoin conduct that “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim”. The actions that could prompt a lawsuit include “conduct which causes a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish.”

“This law is unconstitutional,” said David Shapiro of MacArthur Justice Center. “The facts are on our side and the law is on our side. The Silencing Act targets a huge amount of constitutionally protected speech based on who is speaking.”

After a prerecorded commencement speech by journalist and prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was played for graduates at Goddard College in Vermont, the Pennsylvania legislature passed and outgoing Governor Corbett signed into law the Silencing Act on October 21st, 16 days after the commencement speech.

Abu-Jamal has spent 33 years in prison, 29 of which were in solitary confinement on death row after being convicted at a 1982 trial that Amnesty International said “failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.”

Robert L. Holbrook, who is serving a death by incarceration, life without parole, sentence he received as a child, had this to say about the law: “there are people in prison who will stop writing, stop publishing, stop speaking out because of this law.”

Bret Grote       bretgrote@abolitionistlawcenter.org    412-654-9070
Ashley Henderson ashley@amistadlaw.org          215-310-0424
Noelle Hanrahan info@prisonradio.org         415-706-5222
David Shapiro david.shapiro@law.northwestern.edu        312-503-0711

Amistad Law Project is a West Philadelphia-based public interest law center.
Our mission is to fight for the human rights of all people by providing
legal services to people incarcerated in Pennsylvania’s prisons.
www.amistadlaw.org | @amistadlaw | 267-225-5884

The Abolitionist Law Center is a public interest law firm inspired by the struggle of political and politicized prisoners, and organized for the purpose of abolishing class and race based mass incarceration in the United States.   412-654-9070

Prison Radio has recorded Mumia and other political prisoners for over 25 years, and we are pulling out all the stops to keep these voices on the air.   415-706-5222

Please donate today to amplify prisoners' voices far and wide beyond the bars:
     Support Prison Radio: prisonradio.org/donate
     Defeat SB 508: bit.ly/defendfreespeech

Copyright © Prison Radio
www,prisonradio.org 415-706-5222
Our mailing address is:
Prison Radio PO Box 411074, SF CA 94141

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=247585f092e945ff55b9a1bb2&id=e113d0b6d0&e=0107d76ccd

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

$35 is the yearly membership.

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

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

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

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

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

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


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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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Click HERE to view in browser
http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/
       
Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

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

New Court Date on 4 Motions for Rev. Pinkney 

TUES, FEB. 24 1pm Berrien County Court 

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/

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

November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network

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) Private Eyes in the Grocery Aisles
By KAREN STABINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/business/private-eyes-in-the-grocery-aisles.html?ref=us




2) Bronx Teenager Who Fell From Roof While Fleeing the Police Dies
By





3) Transgender Woman Cites Attacks and Abuse in Men’s Prison
By





4) McDonald’s Workers, Vowing a Fight, Say Raises Are Too Little for Too Few
By




5) Boeing and Delta Spend Millions in Fight Over Export-Import Bank’s Existence
By and





6) Food Safety Law’s Funding Is Far Below Estimated Requirement
By





7) South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott
By and




8)  Walter Scott Shooting Video Stopped Case From Being Swept Under Rug, Family Says
By and




9) Disparity Is Seen in California Driver’s License Suspensions
By




10) Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Family of 8 Died in Maryland
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




11) Judge Cites Prison Guard’s Letter in Granting New Trial in Death of Nashville Inmate
By




12) Study Warns of Diet Supplement Dangers Kept Quiet by F.D.A.
By






13) South Carolina Police Shooting Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry
By and
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/south-carolina-police-shooting-seen-as-crime-fighting-gone-awry.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news 




14) For Mentally Ill Inmates, a Cycle of Jail and Hospitals
By and




15) Justices’ Ruling Allows Illinois Man, Jailed at 14, to Reconsider His Future
By




16) Georgia Says It Will Allow Hormones for Transgender Inmates
By




17) Restraint of Pregnant Inmates Is Said to Persist in New York Despite Ban
By






18) Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure
By



























































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1) Private Eyes in the Grocery Aisles
By KAREN STABINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/business/private-eyes-in-the-grocery-aisles.html?ref=us

Mansour Samadpour makes his way through the supermarket like a detective working a crime scene, slow, watchful, up one aisle and down the next. A clerk mistakenly assumes that he needs help, but Mr. Samadpour brushes him off. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

He buys organic raspberries that might test positive for pesticides and a fillet of wild-caught fish that might be neither wild nor the species listed on the label. He buys beef and pork ground fresh at the market. He is disappointed that there is no caviar, which might turn out to be something cheaper than sturgeon roe. That’s an easy case to crack.

Civilian shoppers see food when they go to the market. Mr. Samadpour, the chief executive of IEH Laboratories (short for Institute for Environmental Health), sees mystery, if not downright fraud. On this visit, he is shopping for goods he can test at his labs to demonstrate to a reporter that what you see on market shelves may not be what you get.

While he’s out of the office, he receives a call and dispatches a team on a more pressing expedition: They need to buy various products that contain cumin, because a client just found possible evidence of peanuts, a powerful allergen, in a cumin-based spice mix. The client wants a definitive answer before someone gets sick.

Suppliers, manufacturers and markets depend on Mr. Samadpour’s network of labs to test food for inadvertent contamination and deliberate fraud, or to verify if a product is organic or free of genetically modified organisms. Consumers, the last link in the chain, bet their very health on responsible practices along the way.

The annual cost of food-borne illnesses in the United States is $14.1 billion to $16.3 billion, according to a 2013 analysis by the Agriculture Department. The federal government has called for a shift from reaction, which usually means a large recall after people have fallen ill or died, to prevention, to reduce the number of such episodes. Wary customers want their food to be safe and genuine, and food retailers, who rely on a global array of suppliers, are looking for ways to protect their brands.

Food testing sits at the intersection of those desires. Mr. Samadpour, who opened IEH’s first lab in 2001 with six employees, now employs over 1,500 people at 116 labs in the United States and Europe. He refers to his company, one of the largest of its kind in the country, as “a privately financed public health organization.”

The Promise of DNA Tests

The two low-slung wooden buildings that house IEH’s labs at its base in Seattle feel more like a high school chemistry lab than the center of a national food security network; there’s an acrid smell, and the counters are crammed with vials of various shapes and colors, centrifuge machines and lined notebooks full of data entries.

This is where analysts coax DNA out of a tiny sample of whatever is being tested. For lethal threats, like E. coli 0157 in ground beef, the detection process involves a grim recipe of ground beef and a broth infused with nutrients that E. coli likes to eat, put in a warm place to rest for 10 hours — at which point a single E. coli cell, if it exists, will have spawned one million easy-to-detect siblings. For fraud cases, the process is somewhat simpler; lab technicians run a DNA test or chemical analysis to confirm a sample’s identity.

Cheap technology has made this kind of testing possible. “Ten years ago, it would have taken millions of dollars to sequence a genome,” Mr. Samadpour says. “Now it takes $100. We do thousands a year.”

Business is booming — partly because IEH clients consider testing to be a gatekeeper defense in a multitiered food economy without borders. “We’re a lot more concerned about imports,” Mr. Samadpour says, because of “lack of accountability, lack of infrastructure, lack of a culture of food safety.” He says episodes like the 2008 discovery of the toxic chemical melamine in infant formula from China have contributed to a gradual shift in food manufacturers’ attitudes toward imports.

While the lab focuses primarily on safety issues like the cumin-and-peanut inquiry, there are enough fraud calls to support specialties among the lab technicians, like Kirthi Kutumbaka, referred to by his colleagues as “the emperor of fish” for his work on a seafood identification project. Once a fish is filleted, genetic testing is the only way to confirm its identity, making it a popular category for fraud.

IEH’s clients are primarily vendors who supply retailers and manufacturers, and they generally prefer to remain anonymous for fear of indicating to consumers that they have a specific worry about safety.

Costco is one of the retailers that use IEH’s services, and the company doesn’t mind talking about it.

“We have to inspect what we expect,” says Craig Wilson, the company’s vice president for quality assurance and food safety, meaning that products have to live up to their labels, particularly items in Costco’s own Kirkland Signature line.

Costco has a smaller margin of error than most food retailers; the company stocks only about 3,500 so-called S.K.U.s, or stock keeping units, while most retailers offer as many as 150,000. A single misstep is a far greater percentage of the whole. That’s why, in addition to retaining IEH, it operates its own 20-person testing lab.

“We’re not typical,” Mr. Wilson says. “We have one ketchup, one mayonnaise, one can of olives, Kirkland Signature olive oils and a couple of others.” Since 2003, the United States Department of Agriculture has required the testing of beef used for ground beef, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in cases of E. coli traced to beef consumption. Costco, which processes 600,000 to 700,000 pounds of ground beef daily, does extensive micro-sampling of the meat at its California facility, Mr. Wilson says.

The company expects its suppliers to absorb testing costs and gets no resistance, given the size of the resulting orders. Costco sells 157,000 rotisserie chickens a day. As Mr. Wilson put it: “If vendors get a bill for a couple hundred bucks on a $1 million order, who cares? They don’t.”

The sheer volume also enables Costco to demand action when there is a problem. After a 2006 outbreak of E. coli tied to Earthbound Farm’s ready-to-eat bagged spinach, in which three people died and more than 200 became ill, Mr. Wilson, one of Earthbound’s customers, instituted what he calls a “bag and hold” program for all of Costco’s fresh greens suppliers. He required the suppliers to test their produce and not ship it until they had the results of the tests.

Earthbound responded to the outbreak with a “multihurdle program that places as many barriers to food-borne illness as we can,” says Gary Thomas, the company’s senior vice president for integrated supply chain. Earthbound now conducts 200,000 tests annually on its ready-to-eat greens.

Not everyone was as quick to embrace change; some growers were concerned about losing shelf life while they waited for results. Mr. Wilson was unmoved by that argument. “If you can test and verify microbial safety, what do I care if I lose shelf life?” he says.

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, intended to improve food safety practices, has been mired in missed deadlines, which have been attributed to food-industry concerns about overregulation and to an unrealistic timeline given the scope of the overhaul. The delays led to a lawsuit by the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Environmental Health, two advocacy groups. The F.D.A. and the Office of Management and Budget now operate under a court-ordered schedule that requires regulations to be issued in late 2015 and 2016.

The F.D.A. currently stops short of requiring produce tests, although it conducts its own “surveillance sampling,” according to Juli Putnam, an agency spokeswoman. The agency sees two drawbacks to mandatory tests: “A negative product test result does not necessarily indicate the absence of a hazard,” Ms. Putnam wrote in an email, because contamination might show up in another part of a field, and conducting more tests would increase the costs that are passed on to the consumer.

The agency is focused instead on defining minimum safety standards for “potential sources of microbiological contamination such as agricultural water, worker health and hygiene and animals in the growing area,” she wrote (though some preventive testing is conducted on sprouts).

Mr. Wilson says he uses government guidelines “as a minimum standard, and I always try to go above and beyond that.”

DNATrek, a newcomer to the field, sees opportunity in another aspect of food safety testing: the need to quickly pinpoint the source of a pathogen outbreak, to avoid delays and unnecessarily broad recalls. Anthony Zografos, the company’s chief executive, says it soon plans to introduce a test called DNATrax, which will be able to identify the source of contaminated produce within an hour, narrowing recall efforts “to a specific field or packer or distributor.” The test relies on tracer DNA that is dissolved in the liquid coating applied to many types of produce after harvest or added to prepared foods; it provides a unique genetic fingerprint.

George Farquar, a chemist and Mr. Zografos’s partner in the company, was looking for ways to trace airborne contaminants as part of a national security project financed by the Defense Department when he realized that the work could be applied to food safety. He and Mr. Zografos licensed the technology from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was conducting the research, and it will receive royalties from sales of the test. Mr. Zografos says that DNATrax will offer traceability for most types of field produce at a price of about $1 for 1,000 pounds.

Tracking Down Fraud

Food safety is a yes-or-no proposition — either there is a contaminant or there isn’t. Food fraud, a smaller segment of the universe of problem foods, is harder to detect because it can take so many forms. Fish from a country whose imports have been banned might arrive at the market labeled with a different country of origin, honey might be cut with cheaper extenders, and saffron might not even be saffron.

When asked if fake food has ever crossed the threshold at Costco, Mr. Wilson smiles and says, “I’m going to go with ‘no,’ but you’re not going to believe me entirely. Yes, there have been egregious things, and we’ve taken care of them, and that’s that.”

Olive oil is a popular target for fraud because there are several ways to charge more for less. Compliance with United States Department of Agriculture quality standards for extra-virgin olive oil is voluntary. Unless a supplier pays for testing, passes and puts a U.S.D.A.-certified sticker on the bottle, consumers have no way to know whether they got extra-virgin olive oil. Any grade of olive oil can be doctored with cheap filler oils like canola, because they have no flavor. And the country of origin listed on the label isn’t always where the contents are from.

About five years ago, Mr. Wilson decided it was time to send an employee to Tuscany to collect leaves from Tuscan olive trees. Costco now has an index of DNA information on “all the cultivars of Tuscan olive oil, about 16 different ones,” he says. “When they harvest and press, we do our DNA testing.”

A group of undergraduates at the University of California, Davis, has developed the OliView, a biosensor that can detect rancid or adulterated olive oil. They expect to have the device ready for sale, at $60 to $80, in 18 months to two years. “At the supermarket level, we found that a lot of times the oil was just old and rancid,” says Selina Wang, research director at the U.C. Davis Olive Center and one of the students’ advisers, “but there were also samples labeled extra virgin that were actually a little bit of virgin olive oil mixed with refined olive oil.”

Adulterated oil, more common among imports, can stump even food professionals. Ms. Wang says that at the center, they “have seen samples with as much as 70 percent canola oil.”

DNATrek has also developed a test for products where fraud is a temptation — “high-value stuff, truffles, saffron, premium juices, honey, seafood and olive oil,” Mr. Zografos says.

Mr. Samadpour says that in multi-ingredient products, the source of trickery is usually hidden further down the food chain than the name on the package. “It’s not the top people who get involved in economic adulteration,” he says. “It’s someone lower down who sees a way to save a penny here or there. Maybe it’s 2 or 3 cents, but if you sell a million units, that’s $20,000 to $30,000.”

Consumer Vigilance

As with most expanding technologies, there are believers and skeptics. David Gombas, senior vice president for food safety and technology at the 111-year-old United Fresh Produce Association, echoes the position of the Food and Drug Administration: Testing is not a sufficient answer for his members, who include anyone engaged in the fresh produce industry, “from guys who come up with seeds to growers, shippers, fresh-cut processors, restaurants and grocery stores, everyone from beginning to end,” from small organic farms to Monsanto.

Their common ground, he says, is a commitment to food safety — but members disagree on how to achieve it, including Mr. Gombas and Mr. Samadpour, who are both microbiologists. “Microbiological testing provides a false sense of security,” Mr. Gombas says. “They can find one dead salmonella cell on a watermelon, but what does that tell you about the rest of the watermelon in the field? Nothing.”

Testing has its place, he says, but as backup for “good practices and environmental monitoring,” which includes things as diverse as employee hygiene and site visits. “I’m a fan of testing,” he says, “if something funny’s going on.” Otherwise, he has taken on the role of contrarian. “People think testing means something. When I say it doesn’t, they smile, nod and keep testing.”

Mr. Samadpour says sampling “can reduce the risk tremendously but can never 100 percent eliminate it,” but he will take a tremendous reduction over a food crisis any day. The government’s “indirect” stance, which mandates safety but does not require testing, allows companies to interpret safe practices on “a spectrum,” he says, “from bare minimum to sophisticated programs,” and he worries about safety at the low end of that range.

He says consumer vigilance is the best defense against the selling of groceries under bare minimum standards.

IEH tested the contents of Mr. Samadpour’s grocery cart:

The organic raspberries showed 0.12 parts per million of spinosyn A, an insecticide with a tolerance limit of 0.035 p.p.m. on organic crops and 0.7 p.p.m on nonorganic berries. Mr. Samadpour assumed that was the result of an errant breeze from a nearby nonorganic field.

The beef and pork were cross-contaminated — each had amounts of the other — a common occurrence, he says, when markets grind first one batch of meat and then the other. These were small amounts as well, but their presence could upset a Muslim or Jewish customer who does not eat pork, or a Hindu who does not eat beef. The fish was what the label said it was.

As for the cumin and the peanuts, the F.D.A. posted a handful of product recalls, all of them involving cumin and peanuts, including Kellogg’s MorningStar Farms chipotle black bean burgers, which Mr. Wilson removed from Costco’s shelves.

The recalls continued for weeks, until the F.D.A. issued a blanket statement “advising people who are highly allergic to peanuts to consider avoiding products that contain ground cumin or cumin powder, because some shipments of these products have tested positive for undeclared peanut protein. People who are highly allergic or sensitive to peanuts may be at risk of a serious or life-threatening allergic reaction.”

Inside the labs, reaction was more world-weary than panicked; this was business as usual.

“Other than the label somebody’s written,” Mr. Farquar says, “you really have no idea where your food’s coming from.”

Mr. Samadpour, having been at this far longer, is more philosophical. “I eat street food when I travel,” he says. “One can’t become a microbe-phobe.”




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2) Bronx Teenager Who Fell From Roof While Fleeing the Police Dies
By

A Bronx teenager who fell off the roof of a six-story apartment building on Thursday while fleeing police officers died of his injuries on Saturday at St. Barnabas Hospital, the police said.

Authorities said Hakeem Kuta, 17, was with a group of other teenagers who were smoking marijuana Thursday evening in the lobby of the apartment building at 2685 Valentine Avenue in the Bronx. A man who exited the building complained to four uniformed officers, who then entered the lobby. When Mr. Kuta and several others ran to the roof, two officers chased them.

All but Mr. Kuta and a 14-year-old were able to elude the police. With officers shouting, “please don’t move,” Mr. Kuta tried to step over a short wall at the edge of the building but stumbled, officials said. The 14-year-old grabbed for Mr. Kuta’s vest as he fell, officials said, but he was not able to hang on.The Police Department said that the officers appeared to have acted appropriately. After Mr. Kuta fell, officers raced from the roof to give first aid, officials said. Officer Maria Imburgia applied chest compressions until paramedics arrived.

Officers made no arrests on Thursday evening, though marijuana was found in the lobby.

Marijuana arrests have plummeted since November, when Mayor Bill de Blasio instituted a policy making possession of 25 grams or less punishable with a ticket, not criminal charges. People who are caught smoking marijuana in public, though, still face arrest.

Mr. Kuta had no criminal record, officials said. A relative, Abdallah Dopo, said the teenager had been born in Ghana and had moved to the United States about three or four years ago with his parents and a younger sister.


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3) Transgender Woman Cites Attacks and Abuse in Men’s Prison
By


ROME, Ga. — Before she fell on hard times and got into trouble with the law, Ashley Diamond had a wardrobe of wigs named after her favorite divas. “Darling, hand me Aretha” or Mariah or Madonna, she would say to her younger sister when they glammed up to go out on the town.

Ms. Diamond, 36, had lived openly and outspokenly as a transgender woman since adolescence, much of that time defying the norms in this conservative Southern city.

But on the day she arrived at a Georgia prison intake center in 2012, the deliberate defeminizing of Ms. Diamond began. Ordered to strip alongside male inmates, she froze but ultimately removed her long hair and the Hannah Montana pajamas in which she had been taken into custody, she said. She hugged her rounded breasts protectively.

Looking back, she said, it seemed an apt rite of initiation into what became three years of degrading and abusive treatment, starting with the state’s denial of the hormones she says she had taken for 17 years. But on Friday, Ms. Diamond and, through her, all transgender inmates won the unexpected support of the Justice Department, which intervened on her behalf in the federal lawsuit she filed against Georgia corrections officials in February.

“During intake, I kept saying: ‘Hello? I’m trans? I’m a woman?’ ” Ms. Diamond recounted in a phone conversation from prison a few weeks ago. “But to them I was gay. I was what they called a ‘sissy.’ So finally I was like: ‘O.K., I’m a sissy. Do you have a place where sissies can go and be O.K.?’ ”

They did not provide one, she said. A first-time inmate at 33 whose major offense was burglary, Ms. Diamond was sent to a series of high-security lockups for violent male prisoners. She has been raped at least seven times by inmates, her lawsuit asserts, with a detailed accounting of each. She has been mocked by prison officials as a “he-she thing” and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending to be a woman.” She has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones. And, in desperation, she has tried to castrate and to kill herself several times.

“My biggest concern is that she survives to get out of prison, which I worry about every day,” said Stephen Sloan, a counselor who treated her at Baldwin State Prison and whose pleas that Ms. Diamond be restarted on hormones were ignored.In her lawsuit, Ms. Diamond asks the court to direct prison officials to provide her hormone therapy, to allow her to express her female identity through “grooming, pronoun use and dress,” and to provide her safer housing.

She also seeks broader changes in policy and practice. And the Justice Department, in its support, declared hormone therapy to be necessary medical care, saying Georgia, and other states, must treat “gender dysphoria” like any other health condition and provide “individual assessment and care.”

Georgia’s Department of Corrections has declined to comment about the case. As a matter of policy, it also denied The New York Times’s request to interview Ms. Diamond in person at Georgia State Prison, where she was moved a few weeks ago in apparent retaliation for her lawsuit, she claims. Georgia State had more sexual assaults between 2009 and 2014 than all but one other state prison.

Since her arrival there, Ms. Diamond has survived an attempted rape in a stairwell, dealt with inmates exposing themselves and masturbating in front of her, and faced relentless sexual coercion, she said last week in an emergency motion seeking an immediate transfer to a safer institution.

Though Ms. Diamond believes she is championing a cause larger than herself, she has expressed increasing despair. She sobbed continually during a recent visit from her lawyer, and in the phone interview, she said: “Every day I struggle with trying to stay alive and not wanting to die. Sometimes I think being a martyr would be better than having to live with all this.”

Last year, Ms. Diamond smuggled video snippets out of prison, and a friend posted them on YouTube. In them, her head wrapped in a white turban, she struck a lighter and more defiant tone, hoping that recent television portrayals of transgender characters might generate concern for her plight.

“While it seems like the whole world is obsessed with ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ I’m living it,” she said.

But unlike the transgender woman inmate played by Laverne Cox on “Orange,” the Netflix series, Ms. Diamond is locked up with men, for what could be eight and a half more years, and her reality is grimmer than television fiction.

Her lawyer, Chinyere Ezie of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Ms. Diamond’s case dramatized the “discrimination to incarceration pipeline” that disproportionately lands transgender people, and especially those who are black like Ms. Diamond, behind bars.

Many face rejection by their families, harassment at school and discrimination in the workplace. Black transgender people have inordinately high rates of extreme poverty, homelessness, suicide attempts and imprisonment; nearly half those surveyed for the National Transgender Discrimination Survey had been imprisoned, compared with 16 percent of the study’s 6,450 participants.

And transgender women in male prisons are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than is the general population, with 59 percent reporting sexual assaults, according to a frequently cited California study.

“I wish I could say this is a problem only affecting Ashley,” Ms. Ezie said. “But while Ashley is brilliant and unique, her situation is not.”

‘Different Than Everyone Else’

At her peak, Ms. Diamond was an aspiring singer-songwriter, a drag cabaret performer and a Whitney Houston impersonator whose best friend was, as she put it, a “celebrity interior designer” and whose odyssey was featured on “The Sally Jessy Raphael Show.”

At a low point, she was arrested for foraging through a trash bin for Taco Bell receipts and trying to get refunds, for breaking into that best friend’s apartment and stealing checks, and for violating probation. Even the judge who sent her to prison characterized these as crimes of survival.

“Hopefully, you’ll get all this behind you,” Judge Tambra P. Colston of Floyd County Superior Court said to Ms. Diamond. “When you do, you probably just need to go somewhere where you can get a job and not have to steal and shoplift and forge things to survive. You might be better off if you lived somewhere that was more accepting to the way that you live.”

Ms. Diamond’s quiet hometown, Rome, a former cotton port whose downtown is framed by rivers, lies in the foothills of the Appalachians.

Charles Neal Sumlin, the interior designer friend, who is white, said, “The worst demographic imaginable in a town like Rome is to be a black, gay, transgender drag queen with a tendency to challenge authority.”

“And that was Ashley,” he said.

Her relatives gathered recently on the sun-soaked porch of her mother’s cottage to talk about Ms. Diamond. Her mother, Diane, who worked as an Army warehouse specialist, said she had unwittingly given her “the unisex name of Ashley, which turned out perfect.”

Nicole Carter, a childhood neighbor, said they had been obsessed with a cartoon character and doll named Jem, a rock star “whose main thing was that she transformed from one person to another, which is interesting in terms of Ashley if you look back on it.”

“I always saw her as a girl,” Ms. Carter said. “I would always reference her as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ ”

“She was concerned with how to tell Mama; Ashley was Mama’s pet pea,” Kelly Diamond said. “She should have been concerned with our father. He was very cruel.”

Her younger sister, Diana, said their father “forgave” Ms. Diamond for being transgender before he died. “But when we were younger — one time Daddy hit Ashley, and her nose was bleeding so much it could have filled a gallon jug,” she said.

Ms. Diamond said both her parents had difficulty accepting her. “Oh, my God, my mom used to give me boy lessons,” she said. “I would literally have to walk around and practice grabbing my crotch. She is terribly sorry about it now, but I was, like, ‘Mom, you really tortured me.’ ”

At school, Ms. Diamond was relentlessly harassed. “Children would crowd around her and shove her into lockers and call her ‘faggot’ and different things,” Kelly Diamond said.

At 15, Ms. Diamond attempted suicide. “When I got to the hospital and they brought me back to life, the doctor was able to clarify what I was feeling, that I was trapped in the wrong body,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I had a little bit of hope.”

Given a diagnosis of gender identity disorder, Ms. Diamond was counseled to live as a girl before starting hormone therapy. Her father kicked her out of the house, and she moved in with “a white privileged family” and began exploring the more tolerant world beyond Rome.

In Athens, Ga., a university town, she met Mr. Sumlin, who had moved there to escape anti-gay sentiment in his own hometown.

“We just fell in love, friendship-wise,” Mr. Sumlin said. “Her personality is so beautiful; she’d always light up a room. We would go to Atlanta, and she’d sing Mariah Carey in the car and I’d sing Garth Brooks, and then we’d tear the town up. We also got into this thing, where I was always helping her, because I always had more.”

For a time, Ms. Diamond, performing in Atlanta clubs and developing a network of generous friends, was able to live well and dress stylishly. During that period, she flew to New York twice to tape episodes on transgender people for talk shows.

But she needed a reliable income, and the job market was tough. If she revealed her transgender identity, she was not hired, she said, and if she hid it and was discovered, she got fired. “I don’t want to be bragging, but I blended,” she said. “So people felt deceived. There are some people who want you to say, ‘Hi, I’m Ashley, and by the way I have a penis.’ ”

Mr. Sumlin believes her frustrations robbed her of “the motivation to persevere.”

“She was reduced to things like dressing up like a giant hot dog to flag down cars for a hot-dog stand,” he said. “I have to say, though, she wasn’t much of a worker when I would hire her.”Ms. Diamond said her downfall began with boyfriends, and one in particular, who convinced her nobody could love her but them and led her into drugs and petty criminality. She started being arrested, getting barred from places like Taco Bell and Pawn Mart, and getting sentenced to probation.

In the fall of 2010, Mr. Sumlin returned to his apartment in Atlanta to find the air-conditioning unit askew. Eventually he realized checks were missing and had been cashed. His bank insisted that he call the police, he said, and Ms. Diamond was found to be the culprit. Mr. Sumlin said she stole just under $10,000.

About a year later, sheriff’s deputies with a warrant for her arrest on other charges knocked on the door of her mother’s home. Ms. Diamond was in the bathroom. The next thing she knew, she said, a deputy was climbing through the kitchen window and she was being taken into custody at gunpoint.

What happened next is murky. The deputies claim that Ms. Diamond, with her hands cuffed behind her back, managed to reach out through a crack in the rear window, open the door from the outside and escape. She said they let her out for a cigarette, and enlisted her to find a weapon she had told them was hidden in the woods. Either way, she ran from them; in her version, it was out of fear they were setting her up on additional charges.

With her probation revoked and new convictions on escape, obstruction of justice and theft charges, Ms. Diamond was sent to prison in March 2012, with a maximum release date of November 2023.

“You’d have thought she murdered a small village,” said Mr. Sumlin, who testified at her probation revocation hearing. “But it was their final chance to get her out of Rome, and they did.”

‘Just Words on Paper’

Shortly after Ms. Diamond entered the Georgia prison system in 2012, new federal standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act established special protections for transgender inmates, recognizing them as an especially vulnerable group whose prison placement should be carefully considered and continually reviewed.

Georgia itself committed to evaluate each inmate individually during intake to identify “risk factors associated with sexual assault,” and has declared zero tolerance for sexual assault and misconduct. In Ms. Diamond’s perception, however, “that is just words on paper.”

Though she said she loudly declared herself a transgender woman during intake, she was assigned to a high-security prison for men, where within a month she was brutally attacked — punched, stomped, raped and knocked unconscious — by six gang members, the lawsuit says.

She was then transferred to another high-security prison, Baldwin State, where Dr. Sloan works. In his notes on her case, he describes the atmosphere there as “one of marked homophobia with little support for inmates who are members of sexual minorities.”

By the time Dr. Sloan met her, Ms. Diamond had already gone through an abrupt withdrawal from the hormones she says she had been taking: estrogen, progestin creams, testosterone blockers and anti-androgen medications. As her body transformed, and without access to feminine dress and grooming, her appearance and her gender identity were suddenly and painfully unaligned, she said.

Georgia’s policy, which the Justice Department says is unconstitutional, is to “freeze” treatment at current levels at entry into the system and deny “new” hormone therapy. It is unclear why, then, Ms. Diamond was denied treatment.

“Ashley is actually the first transgendered individual I’ve worked with who really has been outspoken and demanding her rights,” Dr. Sloan said. “What I’ve always done is just document my observations of how the system is hurting her.”

Over the next couple of years, Ms. Diamond repeatedly suffered sexual assaults and harassment, which she says some prison officials told her she had brought on herself while others cautioned her to “guard your booty.” She also attempted suicide several times, and tried to sever her penis with a razor, ending up hospitalized.

For a period, Ms. Diamond was housed with nonviolent offenders and “ceased being a victim of sexual coercion or assault,” her lawsuit says. But when she renewed her push for hormone therapy, she says, she was told to develop better coping skills, placed in solitary confinement, and transferred back to a high-security prison.

In apparent response to her lawsuit, Ms. Diamond was recently given a hormone patch, though the dosage is too low, her lawyer said.

A couple of weeks ago, on her mother’s cottage porch, the phone rang. Her younger sister answered and shrieked: “Ashley! I love you!”

Ms. Diamond had found a few minutes to call before a head count was taken, she said over the speakerphone.

“I’m in a little hell right now,” she said, her voice trembling. The state attorney general had called the prison after her lawyers reported the attempted rape in the stairwell, she said. “The warden came up to me and said: ‘Do I need to lock you down? I’m not going to have this!’ ”

Her sisters wailed, and her mother raised her arms to the skies.

“Don’t cry, everybody,” Ms. Diamond said. “Please, don’t cry.”


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4) McDonald’s Workers, Vowing a Fight, Say Raises Are Too Little for Too Few
By
Julia Andino tried to ignore the insistent humming. It was after midnight and she was curled beneath the blankets alongside her sleeping child. But her cellphone kept vibrating. She tried to shake herself awake.

“Did you hear?” a friend on the line excitedly asked, eager to recount what she had just heard on the radio. “McDonald’s is giving everybody a raise!”

Now Ms. Andino was really awake. A raise? A real raise? Her mind started whirring. Maybe she could pay the money she owed her babysitter and her overdue phone bill. Maybe she could start saving for a place of her own and move out of the single room that she shares with her 3-year-old son.

By Thursday morning, those hopes had deflated. Ms. Andino, who earns $8.75 an hour, the minimum wage in New York State, quickly learned McDonald’s was offering only $1 an hour more than that. And the pay increase was only for employees of company-owned stores, not for employees like Ms. Andino who worked at McDonald’s franchises.

But that did not stop Ms. Andino from feeling encouraged by the news. By 11 a.m. that day, she was demonstrating in Midtown Manhattan with dozens of other fast-food workers for better pay. The employees derided McDonald’s offer as too little money for too few employees, but they hailed the overture as proof that their protests were finally bearing fruit.

“We’re making progress,” said Ms. Andino, 20, who like many other workers continued to press McDonald’s and some retailers to increase wages to $15 an hour. “If we continue fighting, we’re going to end up winning.”

She might just be right. Over the past few months, one big-name company after another has announced pay increases for low-wage employees. The worker protests, coupled with a tighter job market, are changing the national conversation on wages.

In February, Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, announced it would increase the hourly pay for a half-million employees to $9 an hour starting this month and to at least $10 by February. The week after Walmart’s announcement, the owner of TJMaxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods stores promised to increase pay to at least $9 an hour in June. (The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.)

Last month, Target joined the movement, promising at least $9 an hour for its workers. Last week, it was McDonald’s turn.

McDonald’s pledged to increase wages in its company-owned restaurants to at least $1 over local minimum wages across the country to an average of $9.90 an hour by July 1. The average will increase to more than $10 an hour in 2016. The company will also provide paid personal leave for employees who have worked for McDonald’s for more than a year and help pay the cost of college tuition and online classes that count toward high school diplomas. (The tuition assistance will also be offered to workers at McDonald’s franchises.)

Steve Easterbrook, the company’s chief executive, described it as “a comprehensive benefits package” for “the people who bring our brand to life for customers every day.”

But the raises would benefit only the 90,000 workers in the restaurants that McDonald’s owns and operates. The 750,000 employees who work for franchises will see no increase in pay. McDonald’s argues that it is not responsible for pay and other labor practices at its franchises. Last year, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board argued otherwise, accusing McDonald’s of being a “joint employer” of franchise workers.

Even those employees who work for company-owned restaurants may see little change in their paychecks. Consider Ashley Wiley, who works for a company-owned McDonald’s in Queens.She currently earns $9.19 an hour. Under the new plan, her hourly pay will increase by 56 cents.

“It’s not making a difference in my life at all,” said Ms. Wiley, 26, who relies on food stamps and Medicaid to help support her three sons.

That is why she and Ms. Andino plan to join thousands of other fast-food and retail workers on April 15 to push for a $15 hourly wage. Organizers predict that the fast-food strikes and protests, which started in New York City two and a half years ago, will draw more than 60,000 people in 200 cities nationwide.

These workers want real living wages and full-time jobs, which are still hard to come by. The average weekly hours of private-sector employees, which fell sharply during the Great Recession, are still falling in the city, even in the midst of strong economic expansion, according to the Independent Budget Office.

Ms. Andino, who works in the kitchen at a McDonald’s franchise in Brooklyn, would love to work full time. But she is typically scheduled for only 20 to 25 hours a week, which often means less than $200 in take-home pay.

It is not nearly enough to cover the $857 monthly rent for the single room she shares with her son, or to pay for the babysitter, the groceries, the phone bill and her bus pass. So she puts off paying some bills and borrows money from her relatives to pay others.

And she cheers herself with the hope that big changes — and real raises — are on the horizon.

 


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5) Boeing and Delta Spend Millions in Fight Over Export-Import Bank’s Existence
By and

WASHINGTON — Last week, with little notice, a federal judge here tossed out Delta Air Lines’ longstanding claim that the government’s export credit agency — which, among other things, provides loan guarantees to overseas airlines for the purchase of Boeing jets — was helping international competitors at the airline’s expense.

Delta offered only a shrug. Judicial opinions aside, the continued existence of the Export-Import Bank turns more on bare-knuckle politics than on legal niceties.

“We pursued all our options in court, but we’ve known all along this is going to be won or lost in Congress,” said Trebor Banstetter, a Delta spokesman in Atlanta.The public faces of the Ex-Im Bank battle may be mom-and-pop exporters walking the hallways of Capitol Hill in support of the agency, and the ideological spear carriers of the conservative, free-market movement, like Club for Growth and the Heritage Foundation, in opposition. But those message makers mask a behind-the-scenes slugfest between two heavyweights, Boeing and Delta, which have narrower, bottom-line interests and very deep pockets.

The normally obscure Export-Import Bank, whose main job is to help American businesses sell their goods and services abroad, will cease to exist on July 1 if Congress does not renew its authorization. Delta has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying since 2012, at least in part to kill the Ex-Im Bank or greatly diminish loan guarantees for Boeing customers abroad, according to lobby disclosure forms.

Boeing has already put up more than $69 million over that same period on Ex-Im and other interests, according to the documents. “We have been lobbying a lot on this because it’s a very important issue for us,” said Tim Neale, Boeing’s government operations spokesman. “We know our business, and we know there are customers even in times of good credit availability that need a government loan guarantee.”

What is at stake for Boeing is clear. The purchase of Boeing’s big jets can run to the hundreds of millions of dollars, and even wealthy state-run airlines like the Persian Gulf’s Emirates Air might demand a United States government guarantee to help them get private loans that large. Boeing is by far the bank’s biggest beneficiary, a situation that has led critics of the credit agency to deride it as a vehicle for “crony capitalism” and “corporate welfare.”

But Boeing officials say the Ex-Im Bank is crucial in allowing the company to compete against export credit agencies in France and Germany, which are only too happy to offer guarantees for the purchase of jets from Airbus, Boeing’s sole competitor in the wide-body market.

Delta’s stake is somewhat murkier. The airline claims that rivals like Air India and Emirates have used Ex-Im guarantees to lower their borrowing costs, then used the savings to cut ticket prices on international routes that compete with Delta or buy still more new jets. Judge Rudolph Contreras of Federal District Court, in a 72-page ruling that may have ended four years of litigation, scoffed that $12 million in interest savings over 12 years would have that kind of power, calling Delta’s argument “unpersuasive and contrary to the record in this case.”

Delta officials hotly dispute the judge’s math and his conclusions. But its efforts are also multipronged. The death of Ex-Im would raise borrowing costs for competitors. A separate fight to revise “open skies” rules and impose new costs on state-owned Middle Eastern carriers would be another blow. Delta is even opposing efforts to lift a ban on the export of American oil, hoping to keep jet fuel costs in the United States low.

Boeing, which, like Airbus, has supplied Delta with dozens of jetliners, seems to be more collateral damage than target.

In Boeing’s defense, an army has massed. The United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, with Boeing’s help, have organized Exporters for Ex-Im, which has mobilized dozens of Boeing suppliers and other small businesses to knock on Capitol Hill doors, call lawmakers and generally do the public work that the biggest recipients of Ex-Im help — Boeing, General Electric, Caterpillar and Applied Materials — avoid.

Small businessmen like William Schubert, president of a small infrastructure export firm outside Houston, flooded the hallways of Congress in February and confronted usual Republican allies on the other side of the Ex-Im divide. But the so-called fly-in, from hotel reservations to meeting schedules, was coordinated by professionals.

Hamilton Place Strategies, a Washington firm founded by a former Bush White House official, Tony Fratto, is playing quarterback for the campaign. Lobbyists include heavy hitters from both parties, among them former aides to the House speaker, John A. Boehner, and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi; Republican political strategists; former House members; and a senator’s son.

Delta has its own array of lobbyists, including a former top aide of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Steve Elmendorf, a former top Democratic aide in the House and one of Washington’s pre-eminent schmoozers. The Republican lobbying firm Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock was all-in for Delta until one of its chiefs, Mark Isakowitz, joined the staff of Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a crucial vote on the issue.

The renamed Fierce Government Relations soldiers on for Delta, with Kirk Blalock, a senior official in the George W. Bush White House, and Aleix Jarvis, a former aide to Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, leading the charge.

Delta says it could live with the Ex-Im Bank, just as long as loan guarantees for wide-bodied jets are severely curtailed, if not eliminated.

“The bank would need to demonstrate when funds go to these aircraft there were no other options for the airline purchasing them,” Mr. Banstetter said. “We have never said we are against reauthorization, or the bank’s mission, just this general piece of it.”

But the airline’s conservative political allies — the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, Heritage Action, the conservative political action committee Club for Growth, and the Koch Brothers-backed Freedom Partners — do not care much about the nuances of twin-aisle airplanes versus narrow-body fuselages. They just want the bank to die.

“We are glad to be aligned with Delta,” said Marc Short, president of Freedom Partners. “But we are not in this to pick and choose which corporations are beneficiaries of any particular government subsidy. We are trying to get rid of all of them.”

“To us, this is not Delta versus Boeing,” Mr. Short added. “It is a principled matter: If the newly elected Republican majority cannot do the simplest of tasks in repealing this corporate welfare, then how are we going to confront the bigger structural spending problems in Washington?”

On Thursday, Freedom Partners began radio advertising, sharply criticizing the Ex-Im Bank in language that mirrored Delta’s: “Each year, America’s Export-Import Bank sends billions of your taxpayer dollars to foreign corporations that compete unfairly with American jobs,” the narrator says. “That’s billions to countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia.” (Unmentioned is that those foreign corporations are buying United States goods.)

Coordination between Delta and the conservative groups appears to be less extensive than the business alliance on the Boeing side. A senior Delta executive said the groups had called to discuss the particulars of Delta’s case. But it is not regularly holding conference calls that involve the conservative groups, to build a detailed game plan for how to continue to push the cause, which is what often happens in Washington, when different players share a similar legislative goal.

“These two companies care a lot and maybe they started the fire,” said a corporate lobbyist working on the fight, who spoke on the condition he not be named. “But the fire is not in their control anymore.”

Andy Roth, vice president for government affairs at Club for Growth, said that the various free-market groups and Delta were aware of what one another were doing — but that they were not working from a single playbook in their push against the bank.

“There is sort of this spontaneous coordination going on, without any explicit coordination,” he said. “We are all kind of rowing in the same direction and we are all doing it at different speeds.”

And the purity of the groups’ argument against what they see as an unholy alliance of big business and big government is holding sway, at least for now, among powerful Republicans who will decide the bank’s fate.

“We ought to let it expire, just let it go,” Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said as Congress left for a two-week spring break. Mr. Ryan explicitly rejected the argument that without Ex-Im, foreign customers will turn to other countries, like Canada, Japan, China and France, that have their own export credit agencies.

“Why should we say ‘Me, too’ on crony capitalism?” he asked.



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6) Food Safety Law’s Funding Is Far Below Estimated Requirement
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WASHINGTON — After thousands of people were sickened by tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach, Congress passed a sweeping food safety law in 2010 that gave the Food and Drug Administration new powers to prevent additional outbreaks. But lawmakers have not provided enough money for the mission.

The Congressional Budget Office said the F.D.A. would need a total of $580 million from 2011 to 2015 to carry out the changes required by the Food Safety Modernization Act. So far, Congress has appropriated less than half of that amount, even as the agency is moving to issue crucial rules under the law this year.

“I don’t think it’s too much to say that the success” of the overhaul “is on the line,” Michael R. Taylor, the deputy F.D.A. commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. “We have good plans for moving forward. The problem is we don’t have the money.”An estimated 48 million Americans have food-borne illnesses each year, and agency officials say the funding shortfall could undermine Congress’s intent to make the most significant improvements to the food safety system in more than 70 years.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who helped write the law, said the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the F.D.A., shared some of the blame for the shortfall because they had tried to impose user fees on the food industry to help fund the law. The F.D.A. relies on user fees for a number of other programs.

In its previous five budget requests, the F.D.A. proposed user fees that would cover the bulk of the cost for carrying out the food safety law. Last year, for example, it asked for $263 million for the law, with about $229 million coming from fees on food companies.

But lawmakers soundly rejected those proposals after lobbying by the food industry.

Ms. DeLauro helped write a letter last year asking the administration to request the necessary funding through a federal appropriation. “User fees are a nonstarter,” she said in an interview. “They are just not going to get through Congress.”

After receiving an appropriation of $27.5 million for the law in the current fiscal year, the F.D.A. asked Congress to allocate $109.5 million for the coming year. But it remains to be seen if the Republican-led Congress, given the mood for cutting spending, will approve the higher amount. Even if the agency receives it, the figure would be just half of what the budget office says is necessary.

“If we keep shortchanging the F.D.A., it will continue to cost us billions of dollars a year to deal with food-borne illness,” said Ms. DeLauro, a member of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the agency’s funding.

The food safety law puts the burden on food companies to make sure that their products are safe, instead of relying largely on inspectors from the understaffed F.D.A. It requires better record-keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures to prevent the spread of contaminants. It also gives the agency the power to issue recalls, something it could not do previously.

Consumer groups have accused the Obama administration of being slow to move the rules through the regulatory process. They sued in 2012 to force the F.D.A. to accelerate its timetable on issuing final rules. A settlement was reached last year, and the agency will publish some of the final regulations later this year.

Mr. Taylor said that the F.D.A. had been able to issue new rules, including those for produce and processed foods, but that funding shortfalls would make it difficult to modernize its inspection processes and retrain about 2,000 inspectors and other staff members for the new requirements.

He also said that the agency would have problems providing guidance and technical assistance to the states, which conduct inspections under contract with the F.D.A. In addition, he said, it will be difficult for the agency to properly oversee food imports.

“If they don’t have the capacity to enforce it, the law is not going to be worth the paper it’s written on,” said Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food & Water Watch, a consumer group.At a hearing on the F.D.A.’s budget last month, Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said that he was concerned about the size of the agency’s overall budget request and that the request for more than $100 million for the food safety law “will be tough to swallow.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 128,000 people are hospitalized each year with food-related illnesses, and 3,000 die. The cost of treatment and lost income total $15 billion a year or more, according to data from the Agriculture Department.

The food safety law is intended to change the F.D.A.’s inspection system, which critics say provides inadequate oversight of the billions of pounds of food produced and eaten each year. The food safety system is spread out over more than 15 agencies, but the F.D.A. is responsible for the bulk of what Americans eat.

Under the law, the agency is supposed to increase its inspections of foreign food facilities that export to the United States. But a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the agency had not kept up with the pace of inspections mandated by Congress.

Lawmakers required the F.D.A. to inspect 600 foreign food plants in the first year after the measure was passed. In each of the next five years, the agency was supposed to inspect at least twice the number of facilities reviewed the previous year. It should have inspected at least 4,800 facilities in 2014, according to the accountability office, but it inspected only 1,323.

The office also noted that the F.D.A. continued to have problems filling staff positions that were supposed to help with the oversight of foreign food plants.

Despite the funding shortfalls, some food safety advocates say they are optimistic that Congress will ultimately give the agency the money it needs to protect consumers and modernize a food safety system that has been in place for nearly a century.

“Is the funding request enough? No,” said Colin O’Neil, the director of government affairs for the Center for Food Safety, one of the groups that sued the F.D.A. “But it gets us on the way. It’s going to be a long fight. But I think we will get there.”


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7) South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott
By and

WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.

A White House task force has recommended a host of changes to the nation’s police policies, and President Obama sent Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to cities around the country to try to improve police relations with minority neighborhoods.

North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most recent period available.

“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mayor Keith Summey said during the news conference. “And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”

The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.

Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.

But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative body, has begun an inquiry into the shooting. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened a string of civil rights investigations into police departments under Mr. Holder, is also investigating.

The Supreme Court has held that an officer may use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

Officer Slager served in the Coast Guard before joining the force five years ago, his lawyer said. The police chief of North Charleston did not return repeated calls. Because police departments are not required to release data on how often officers use force, it was not immediately clear how often police shootings occurred in North Charleston, a working-class community adjacent to the tourist destination of Charleston.

Mr. Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, according to The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper reported. Mr. Scott’s brother, Anthony, said he believed Mr. Scott had fled from the police on Saturday because he owed child support.

“He has four children; he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest record,” said Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family. “He had a job; he was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.”

Mr. Stewart said the coroner had told him that Mr. Scott was struck five times — three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart. It is not clear whether Mr. Scott died immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The Times.)

Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.

The debate over police use of force has been propelled in part by videos like the one in South Carolina. In January, prosecutors in Albuquerque charged two police officers with murder for shooting a homeless man in a confrontation that was captured by an officer’s body camera. Federal prosecutors are investigating the death of Eric Garner, who died last year in Staten Island after a police officer put him in a chokehold, an episode that a bystander captured on video. A video taken in Cleveland shows the police shooting a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was carrying a fake gun in a park. A White House policing panel recommended that police departments put more video cameras on their officers.

Mr. Scott’s brother said his mother had called him on Saturday, telling him that his brother had been shot by a Taser after a traffic stop. “You may need to go over there and see what’s going on,” he said his mother told him. When he arrived at the scene of the shooting, officers told him that his brother was dead, but he said they had no explanation for why. “This just doesn’t sound right,” he said in an interview. “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”

Anthony Scott said he last saw his brother three weeks ago at a family oyster roast. “We hadn’t hung out like that in such a long time,” Mr. Scott said. “He kept on saying over and over again how great it was.”

At the roast, Mr. Scott got to do two of the things he enjoyed most: tell jokes and dance. When one of Mr. Scott’s favorite songs was played, he got excited. “He jumped up and said, ‘That’s my song,’ and he danced like never before,” his brother said.

Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston, S.C. Kitty Bennett and Sarah Cohen contributed research.





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8)  Walter Scott Shooting Video Stopped Case From Being Swept Under Rug, Family Says
By and

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — One day after a South Carolina police officer was arrested in the shooting death of an unarmed black man, the victim’s family said Wednesday that no charges would have been filed if not for a video of the encounter — which showed the officer firing eight shots at the man as he ran away.

“It would have never come to light. They would have swept it under the rug, like they did with many others,” Walter Scott Sr., the father of the victim, said Wednesday on NBC’s “Today” Show.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, was being held at the Charleston County Jail after a magistrate judge on Tuesday night denied him bond.

During a court appearance conducted by videoconference, Officer Slager, dressed in a jail uniform, appeared nervous and said little beyond disclosing that he was a married father of two stepchildren. He said that he was expecting another child and that he lived near the North Charleston neighborhood where the shooting took place.A makeshift memorial was taking shape on Wednesday in the empty lot behind Mega Pawn on Rivers Avenue, where Walter L. Scott, 50, was shot on Saturday morning. Two small Styrofoam-backed flower wreaths, one with an orange bow and one with white flowers in the shape of a cross, could be seen along with 11 white candles, some lit.

Mr. Scott’s family spoke in a series of nationally televised interviews on Wednesday morning, saying they were glad the truth had come out. They said they were pleased the video had been made public, despite how painful it was to watch.

“When I saw it, I fell to my feet and my heart was broken,” Mr. Scott’s father said.

“The way he was shooting that gun, it looked like he was trying to kill a deer,” Mr. Scott said “I don’t know whether it was racial, or it was something wrong with his head.”

Unlike in many prominent cases involving the use of deadly force by the police, there appeared to be little ambiguity in what took place here. The video showed that Mr. Scott was shot as he ran away from Officer Slager.

The swift action taken by local prosecutors after the video surfaced and the nearly uniform public comments by local politicians condemning the actions of the police officer seem to have helped keep the community calm, even as the incident underscored the tension between the police and minority neighborhoods around the country.

A few dozen people gathered outside City Hall in North Charleston on Wednesday morning to protest police practices in the city, South Carolina’s third largest.

Clutching signs with slogans like “the whole world is watching” and “back turned, don’t shoot,” protesters talked about Mr. Scott’s death and a broader distrust of the authorities here.

”This has been a reality that has been in the North Charleston Police Department for many, many years,” a man said over a loudspeaker. “It just so happens we got a video.”

Demonstrator after demonstrator stepped to the microphones to share accounts of what they said was systemic racism. Some spoke of groundless searches, while others complained about arrests for nonviolent offenses.

The protest was vocal, but peaceful. A few law enforcement officials, dressed in plain clothes, stood nearby, and Sheriff Al Cannon of Charleston County walked through the crowd at one point.

From Ferguson, Mo., to Staten Island, New York, recent fatal confrontations between police officers and black men have set off widespread protests and outrage. President Obama dispatched Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to cities around the country in an effort to improve police relations with minority neighborhoods.

But the death of two police officers in New York City, shot and killed by a mentally disturbed young man who said he was targeting the police to avenge the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, raised concerns that the national discussion had turned into something much darker.

As the video of the shooting in North Charleston played over and over on screens across the nation, there was little debate about whether the use of force was justified.

Instead, the question was what would have happened if not for the video.

Before the video surfaced, immediately after the shooting, the State Law Enforcement Division started an investigation to determine whether the officer’s action was justified.

The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports.

As soon as he stopped the car, the driver, Mr. Scott, fled and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. The officer fired his Taser, a stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.

A video taken by a bystander shows what happened next. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as he tussled with Officer Slager. As Mr. Scott turns to run, something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men.

Officer Slager draws his gun as Mr. Scott is running away. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

The officer then goes back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.

Mr. Scott was shot on an unkempt grassy lot, about the size of a football field. Tall trees with hanging Spanish moss shade most of the lawn.

Even as after Mr. Scott was shot and lay, motionless on the ground, Officer Slager placed his hands behind his back and handcuffed him. It would be several more minutes, according to the video, before an officer with a medical kit arrived to perform first aid.

Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston, S.C., and Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo contributed from Washington. D.C.






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9) Disparity Is Seen in California Driver’s License Suspensions
By

Drivers in California who are unable to pay traffic fines for minor infractions are frequently having their licenses suspended by traffic courts — a policy that has had a disproportionate impact on poor and working-class people, according to a study released Wednesday.

In an Alameda County traffic court case, for example, a $25 ticket given to a motorist who had failed to update the home address on her driver’s license within the state law’s allotted 10 days led a traffic court judge to suspend her license when she was unable to pay the fine.

The accumulation of fees and penalties for late payment increased her fine to $2,900, and the woman — identified in the report only as “Alyssa” — was fired from her job as a bus driver because she no longer possessed a valid driver’s license and is now receiving public assistance, according to the report, which was prepared by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which worked in conjunction with other California civil rights groups.

“These suspensions make it harder for people to get and keep jobs, further impeding their ability to pay their debt,” the report said. “Ultimately, they keep people in long cycles of poverty that are difficult, if not impossible to overcome.”

The report, “Not Just a Ferguson Problem — How Traffic Courts Drive Inequality in California,” found that in California, four million people — 17 percent of adults with licenses in the state — had their licenses suspended as recently as 2013 because they had failed to pay fines or to appear in court.

The issue of aggressive enforcement of traffic violations by police officers and the imposition by courts of substantial financial penalties for late payment has attracted widespread attention recently as state, county and municipal governments across the nation have increased fines, in some cases significantly, to offset budget shortfalls caused by the financial crisis.

A Justice Department report released last month in the aftermath of the fatal police shooting last summer of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, found that the city of Ferguson, Mo., had used its police and courts as de facto moneymaking ventures.

Ferguson’s policies, the Justice Department report said, resulted in a disproportionate number of arrests, citations and traffic stops of African-Americans and was among the factors in the public anger that led to weeks of demonstrations there after Mr. Brown’s death.

In California, a 2012 state analysis unrelated to the new report found that assessments tacked onto tickets by California lawmakers meant that a $500 traffic ticket actually cost $1,953 — even if it was paid on time. A $100 ticket for failure to have proof of auto insurance cost $490 — and increased to $815 if the motorist missed the initial deadline to appear in court or to pay the ticket.

Among the fees included in the cost of a traffic ticket were assessments for court operations, court construction and DNA collection.

Data from police departments in California, including San Diego, showed that African-Americans were far more likely than others to be pulled over for a traffic stop.

Carlos Smith, 45, of Oakland, said he had received two traffic tickets, including one for running a red light in 2007. The original ticket fines totaled about $1,500.

Mr. Smith, a building contractor on disability, was unable to pay, so a traffic court judge suspended his driver’s license and imposed penalties that have increased the cost of the tickets to $3,600. The court has passed his debt to a collection agency.

No longer allowed to drive, Mr. Smith has enrolled in courses at a local junior college. He is unable to appear before a judge to explain his circumstances until he pays his bill in full, which he said might not happen anytime soon.

“I’m tired of being broke,” he said. “And I’m tired of not being able to pay my tickets.”


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10) Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Family of 8 Died in Maryland
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PRINCESS ANNE, Md. — A utility disconnected a stolen meter at the rental home of a kitchen worker and his seven children who were accidentally poisoned in their sleep by carbon monoxide from a gas-powered generator, authorities said Tuesday.

Delmarva Power said it had not cut off the family’s electricity because they were behind on their bills, but rather for their own good. After discovering the illegal connection on March 25, it disconnected it for safety reasons, the utility said.

Rodney Todd, 36, then bought a generator to keep his two sons and five daughters warm, relatives said. They were last seen alive on March 28.

Chief Scott Keller of the Princess Anne Police confirmed their cause of death on Tuesday and said the utility had been subpoenaed to document exactly what it did and when.“I’m just numb. Like it’s a nightmare, but it’s not,” the children’s mother, Tyisha Luneice Chambers, who was divorced from Mr. Todd, said on Tuesday. “If I had known he was without electricity, I would have helped.”

The police found the bodies on Monday inside the one-story wood-frame home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore after school workers, friends and Mr. Todd’s co-workers knocked on the door with no answer.

“The children were all in beds, and it appears as though they were sleeping,” Chief Keller said. “Probably it was bedtime and they decided they needed some light and probably some heat, because toward the end of March, even though it was spring, we were having some pretty chilly nights.”

Why Mr. Todd had a gas-powered generator running inside closed doors was not clear. The chief ruled out foul play and speculated that had it been outside, the noise would have bothered neighbors.

Mr. Todd received some welfare money, but it was not enough, said Sarah Hardy, a close friend.

“How can a man survive off of basically minimum wage with seven kids, and you can’t help him with a utility bill?” Ms. Hardy asked. “This man was working.”

Later on Tuesday, the utility revealed that the rental home had never had legal power while the Todds lived there. It said that the electricity had been disconnected in October and that there had been no request to reconnect it after the family moved there in November.

“Through the use of smart meter technology, Delmarva Power discovered a stolen electric meter was being used at the home on March 25, 2015,” the utility said in a statement. “Delmarva Power disconnected the illegally connected meter for safety reasons and to comply with standard protocol. Delmarva Power did not disconnect electric service at this address for nonpayment.”

It was not clear whether Mr. Todd had made arrangements with the utility or any other authorities or advocates for the poor to restore power after the illegal meter was removed. What is known is that Mr. Todd bought a generator to keep the lights on.

The children were identified by a family member as Tyjuziana, 15; Cameron, 13; Tykeria, 12; Tynijuzia, 10; TyNiah, 9; ZhiHeem, 7; and Tybreyia, 6.

“He’s the man you need to know and the man you want to be,” Bilel Smith, who lives nearby, said of Mr. Todd. “They were their own football team, their own basketball team. This is breaking our hearts.”

Mr. Todd had received assistance with utility bills in the past but did not apply this year, said Tom VanLandingham, who directs the Office of Home Energy Programs in Somerset County.

“We’re all kind of baffled as to why he did not apply this year,” he said. “That’s the million-dollar question.”


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11) Judge Cites Prison Guard’s Letter in Granting New Trial in Death of Nashville Inmate
By

A federal judge in Tennessee has granted a new civil trial in a lawsuit over the 2010 death of an inmate at a prison in Nashville, citing the emergence of new evidence.

The inmate, Charles Jason Toll, 33, died while being forcibly taken out of his cell by corrections officers at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The officers handcuffed and shackled Mr. Toll and carried him to an outdoor yard at the prison, where he died. On a prison video, Mr. Toll could be heard saying, “I can’t breathe,” at least 12 times.

Mr. Toll’s case, and the practice of forcibly removing inmates from their cells, a process known as cell extraction, was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times in July.In a written opinion issued Monday, Judge John T. Nixon of Federal District Court in Nashville said he was basing his ruling on a letter of resignation written by a guard who was present the night Mr. Toll died. The letter was uncovered by The Times, and excerpts from it were published in the article.

“The Court finds clear and convincing evidence that the resignation letter is material, controlling and clearly would have produced a different result if presented before the original judgment,” Judge Nixon wrote in his opinion.

He added, “Unbelievably, the resignation letter never surfaced until Plaintiff read about it in a New York Times article nearly one year after trial.”

The guard, William Amonette, submitted his resignation letter after Mr. Toll’s death. In it, he wrote that he had been treated badly at the prison “ever since I asked questions in your office about the witnesses in the Charles Toll case that were not spoken to by internal affairs.”

“I cannot work somewhere where asking questions or trying to do what is right is punished,” Mr. Amonette wrote.

Lawyers for Mr. Toll’s mother, Jane Luna, who sued prison officials and corrections officers involved in the cell extraction, said in filing their motion for a new trial that the letter had not been turned over to them by the defendants during the discovery process.

Mr. Toll’s death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, who said he had died from suffocation as a result of pressure applied during the forcible removal from his cell.

Jails and prisons routinely use the tactic in response to threatening behavior or disciplinary infractions. Mr. Toll, who was in prison on a parole violation, was accused of splashing an “unknown liquid” at a guard through a doorjamb.

No criminal charges were filed in his death. In 2013, a jury found that three defendants in the lawsuit — James Horton, the captain who had led the cell extraction; Gaelan Doss, a corrections officer; and Ricky J. Bell, the prison’s warden at the time — had no liability in Mr. Toll’s death.

Ms. Luna said on Tuesday that she was “just ecstatic” about the judge’s ruling.

“I just couldn’t believe it, because I fought so hard and it seemed like I finally got some justice,” she said.

David Weissman, the lead lawyer for Ms. Luna, said he was happy for her and that “this information came to light.”

“I think Judge Nixon did a courageous thing,” he said.

Mr. Weissman added that he thought the judge’s opinion was “airtight.”

“Given the way the opinion is written, I would be surprised if they appealed it,” he said, referring to the lawyers in the state attorney general’s office who represented the defendants.

The attorney general’s office said on Tuesday that it was reviewing the judge’s order.



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12) Study Warns of Diet Supplement Dangers Kept Quiet by F.D.A.
By



Popular weight-loss and workout supplements on sale in hundreds of vitamin shops across the nation contain a chemical nearly identical to amphetamine, the powerful stimulant, and pose dangers to the health of those who take them, according to a new study. The Canadian health authorities in December called the chemical, BMPEA, “a serious health risk,” and pulled supplements that contain it from store shelves.

The Food and Drug Administration documented two years ago that nine such supplements contained the same chemical, but never made public the names of the products or the companies that made them. Neither has it recalled the products nor issued a health alert to consumers as it has done with other tainted supplements. The F.D.A. said in a statement that its review of supplements containing the stimulant “does not identify a specific safety concern at this time.”

But public health experts contend that the F.D.A.’s reluctance to act in this case is symptomatic of a broader problem. The agency is not effectively policing the $33 billion-a-year supplements industry in part because top agency regulators themselves come from the industry and have conflicts of interest, they say. In recent years, two of the agency’s top officials overseeing supplements — including one currently on the job — were former leaders of the largest supplement industry trade and lobbying group.

Daniel Fabricant, who ran the agency’s division of dietary supplement programs from 2011 to 2014, had been a senior executive at that trade group, the Natural Products Association, which has spent millions of dollars lobbying to block new laws that would hold supplement makers to stricter standards. He left the F.D.A. last year and returned to the association as its chief executive. His current replacement at the F.D.A.’s supplement division also comes from the trade group.

“To have former officials in the supplement industry become the chief regulators of that industry at the F.D.A. is like the fox guarding the hen house,” said Michael F. Jacobson, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.

Dr. Fabricant disagreed, saying in an interview that having industry officials run the F.D.A.’s supplement division was “an incredible benefit to the agency.” He said that during his tenure, the division worked to get unsafe products off the market and issued a mandatory recall of a supplement involved in a deadly multistate outbreak of liver disease. “I did more there in three and a half years than was done in the 16 years prior,” he said.

The controversy comes at a time when the supplement industry is under increased scrutiny. Last week, 14 state attorneys general, led by Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, called on Congress to provide the F.D.A. with more power to regulate supplements. Mr. Schneiderman’s office in February accused four major retailers of selling contaminated herbal supplements, and one of the companies, GNC, has agreed to extensive new testing and quality control procedures for its store-brand herbal products.

The F.D.A. was the first to begin investigating products that turned out to contain BMPEA. As early as 2013, scientists at the agency said in an article published last year that they noticed many popular supplements listed among their ingredients a little-known plant called acacia rigidula, a shrub native to Mexico and southern Texas.

The plant’s presence in so many supplements was a red flag, said Dr. Pieter A. Cohen, the lead author of the new study published Tuesday and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He said it is not uncommon for companies to spike weight-loss and exercise supplements with amphetamine-like chemicals, then hide them on their labels under the names of obscure plants to give the impression they are natural botanical extracts.

The F.D.A. tested 21 popular supplements that listed acacia rigidula on their labels and found nine of them tested positive for varying amounts of BMPEA, the agency reported last year in The Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. F.D.A. officials did not, however, name the specific products.

Although BMPEA was first synthesized in the 1930s as a replacement for amphetamine, it was never introduced as a pharmaceutical drug and its side effects were never studied in humans.

Under federal law, dietary supplements — with some exceptions — can contain only ingredients that are part of the food supply or that were already on the market before 1994. Dr. Cohen said that BMPEA has never been sold as a food or supplement, and as a result any product that contains it is considered adulterated, which would give the F.D.A. the authority to send warning letters to companies that add it to their supplements.

It was only after trying unsuccessfully to find out from the F.D.A. which supplements contained BMPEA that Dr. Cohen and academics at other universities conducted their own tests, identifying the stimulant in 11 of 21 products. Their findings were published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis.

In December, the Canadian health authorities said they forced a recall of a supplement that lists acacia rigidula as an ingredient — JetFuel Superburn — after the product was found to contain BMPEA and another amphetamine-like stimulant. The Canadian government issued a public health alert about BMPEA to consumers: “Amphetamine stimulants can increase blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature; lead to serious cardiovascular complications (including stroke) at high doses; suppress sleep and appetite, and be addictive.”

As of Tuesday morning, three of the supplements — JetFuel Superburn, JetFuel T-300 and MX-LS7 — found in Dr. Cohen’s study to contain BMPEA were for sale at Vitamin Shoppe, one of the country’s largest retailers of supplements, with hundreds of locations. None list BMPEA as an ingredient. One of the products is the same one that the Canadian health authorities pulled from stores. Vitamin Shoppe did not respond to a request for comment.

The other supplements the study listed as containing BMPEA were Aro Black Series Burn, Black Widow, Dexaprine XR, Fastin-XR, Lipodrene Hardcore, Lipodrene Xtreme, Stimerex-ES and Yellow Scorpion.

But on Tuesday, one of the leading supplement industry trade groups, the Council for Responsible Nutrition, called on the F.D.A. “to enforce the law” and remove products containing BMPEA from the market “before there are serious health consequences.”

Bastiaan Venhuis, a scientist who studies tainted supplements at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, said that the physiological effects of BMPEA are most likely very similar to those of DMAA, an amphetamine-like stimulant that can cause heart attacks and strokes.

Supplements containing DMAA were banned from military bases by the Department of Defense in 2011 after they were implicated in the deaths of two soldiers. The F.D.A. issued a health alert warning consumers about DMAA 16 months later — long after Australia, Britain, Canada and Sweden had banned it.

“I think health authorities should be concerned,” Dr. Venhuis said of BMPEA.

Dr. Cohen said the F.D.A. appeared to be waiting for evidence that BMPEA was harming consumers. “If they wait long enough,” he said, “I suspect they will have that level of evidence to remove it from the market.”

Regulation of the supplements industry has long been contentious. Under a 1994 law, supplements are exempt from the rigorous oversight applied to prescription drugs and medical devices. They do not have to undergo federal reviews of their safety or effectiveness before they are sold to the public, and as a result tainted supplements are usually pulled from the market only after consumers are harmed.

The Natural Products Association played a crucial role in the passage of that law — the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act — which was sponsored by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, where many supplement companies are headquartered. Mr. Hatch has long been a top recipient of campaign contributions from the Natural Products Association, and his son, Scott Hatch, is a founding partner at a Washington firm that lobbies for the organization.

In 2013 and 2014, the Natural Products Association spent nearly $1.5 million lobbying the Food and Drug Administration, members of the House and Senate, and the Federal Trade Commission, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The trade association has lobbied against the Dietary Supplement Labeling Act, a bill that would require supplement labels to carry basic information about side effects and ingredients that could be harmful to children and pregnant women.

Both the F.D.A. officials with industry ties came to the agency from senior positions at the Natural Products Association. Shortly before Dr. Fabricant left the F.D.A. in 2014 to return to the association, the F.D.A. hired another official from the group, Cara Welch. She is now the acting director of the agency’s supplement division. Dr. Cohen, who is also an internist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, said he repeatedly wrote to Dr. Welch asking what the agency was going to do about BMPEA, and that she did not respond.

Dr. Welch declined repeated requests for interviews. In a statement, Juli Putnam, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, said that the agency “has found that hiring experienced leaders with diverse backgrounds in public health, industry, academia, and science enriches the professional environment and leads to the best health policy outcomes for the American public.”

Before joining the F.D.A., Dr. Welch was the vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the Natural Products Association, where she was a staunch defender of the supplement industry. When JAMA, a leading medical journal, raised concerns in a 2011 editorial that the federal law allowed the supplements industry to police itself, Dr. Welch responded that the industry had “an excellent safety record.”

“The industry itself supports and has implemented strong self-regulatory mechanisms,” she said in an industry news release at the time.

Ethicists disagree. “There are just too many other people who could have that job who don’t have these conflicts,” said Arthur L. Caplan, the head of the division of medical ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center.

Public health experts said that the agency has moved too slowly when alerted to dangerous supplements. In February 2013, Dr. Kenneth R. Spaeth, the division chief of occupational and environmental medicine at North Shore University Hospital in New York, reported to the F.D.A. that 20 of his patients developed muscle aches, fatigue and liver damage after using a brand of B vitamins. Some female patients had stopped having their periods and started growing facial hair. He said he told the F.D.A. he suspected the vitamins were contaminated with anabolic steroids.

Dr. Spaeth said he got no response for weeks and called the agency numerous times. He also sent multiple emails to Dr. Fabricant and other F.D.A. officials, pleading with them to get the vitamins off the market.

In response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the F.D.A. said it was “unable to locate” any records of Dr. Spaeth’s communications. Dr. Spaeth provided The New York Times with the emails.

“I am hoping you folks are taking this seriously,” Dr. Spaeth wrote to Dr. Fabricant and other F.D.A. officials in an email on April 17, 2013. “I have 20 very worried patients and I have little to offer them. Particularly about what they’ve been exposed to and the possible long term risks.”

On July 26 of that year — nearly six months after Dr. Spaeth first contacted the F.D.A. — the agency issued a public health alert warning consumers not to take the vitamins and saying it had asked the company that made them, Purity First Health Products, to recall them.

“The bottom line is that I feel the F.D.A. did not do everything they could to protect the health of my patients and anyone else taking these supplements,” Dr. Spaeth said.

Dr. Fabricant said that the agency needed time to build a case against the vitamins because it had a legal burden to prove that they were dangerous before it could seek to have them recalled.

“I understand his frustration,” Dr. Fabricant said of Dr. Spaeth. “But at the same time, I don’t think you can say anything about the agency not taking the case seriously. We acted very swiftly.”





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13) South Carolina Police Shooting Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry
By and

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — It was after dark about five years ago, on a downtrodden strip of this city, when Alicia Delesline stopped trusting the police in the place where she had lived her entire life.

Ms. Delesline, 48, was walking to a store when she did something pedestrians do all the time: She suddenly changed her mind, and turned around to go elsewhere. Her movement caught the attention of a police officer, who stopped her and accused her of changing directions because she had seen the authorities farther ahead.

“They just rolled up and bothered me for no reason and searched me,” she said Thursday. “They serve and protect when they feel like serving and protecting. But when they feel like harassing, they do that.”

Ms. Delesline, who is black, is but one person in this city of 104,000 who has experienced the effects of a police campaign that began as an effort to rid North Charleston of its label as one of the country’s most dangerous cities in 2007.The aggressive tactics by North Charleston’s mostly white police force, including frequent stops of drivers and pedestrians for minor violations and an increased police presence in high-crime, mostly black areas, have led to a decrease in violent crime.But to many here, the strategy came at a high cost and provides a disturbing context to the police shooting here last weekend that has set off outrage throughout South Carolina and across the country. A white police officer was shown on a bystander’s video shooting and killing an unarmed black man after he fled from a traffic stop for a broken taillight on Saturday. The man, Walter L. Scott, 50, was shot in the back by the officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, who has been charged with murder and whose dismissal was announced by city officials on Wednesday.

Aside from the furor over Mr. Scott’s death, North Charleston has been something of a window onto many of the policing issues playing out nationally.

It saw an era of stepped-up enforcement under former Police Chief Jon R. Zumalt, and an effort to improve relations between the police and residents under the current chief, Eddie Driggers. And it has been a reminder of how much improving policing is a matter of personal decisions, rather than just policies, as the victim’s brother experienced at the crime scene Saturday in a moment of compassion from Chief Driggers.

Black residents, merchants and former residents said police officers have been harassing and racially profiling African-Americans in North Charleston for years, though some of their reports could not be independently verified. They accused officers of assaulting them with Taser stun guns for no reason and of using aggressive tactics after stopping them or pulling them over for minor offenses. Rhonda Smith, who runs a bail bonds agency, spoke of twice writing bonds for black defendants arrested for not having horns on their bicycles.

City officials deny allegations of widespread police misconduct and racial profiling, and they have defended their efforts to lower crime. Mr. Zumalt, who retired in 2013 after leading the police force for more than a decade, drew harsh criticism from some black residents. But in a letter to the mayor, he described his work as a success.

“I leave you with a proud and professional police agency that has reduced crime and gained the trust and respect of the people that live and work in your city,” Mr. Zumalt wrote.

A few months before Mr. Zumalt announced his retirement in 2012, Mayor R. Keith Summey told Charleston’s Post & Courier newspaper that it made sense for the police to focus on black communities, because 83 percent of all people arrested were black. “When you look at that, where do you put your major patrols?” Mr. Summey was quoted saying. “The majority doesn’t feel picked on. The majority feels safer.”

And unlike Ferguson, Mo., where a scathing Justice Department report said the police and local courts used the justice system as a way to raise revenue, North Charleston was not focused on gaining more money from fines, records indicate.

Still, at a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Summey, mayor for more than 20 years, said city officials would begin “looking for ways to develop a closer working relationship with the individual communities.”

City records show that Mr. Slager, who joined the Police Department in 2010, was the subject of a complaint over use of force in September 2013. In that episode, according to city records, Mr. Slager was investigating a burglary when he used his Taser device to stun a man who the authorities said did not comply with directions. Mr. Slager was cleared of wrongdoing. Police officials upheld a complaint against Mr. Slager this year, after a woman said he refused to write a report in a harassment case.

Located just up Interstate 26 from Charleston, a haven of tourism and commerce along the South Carolina coast, North Charleston is a city of competing identities. Some neighborhoods are suburban sanctuaries filled with palmetto trees, late-model cars and spotless restaurants. Others are deeply impoverished, where blocks are dominated by pawn shops and convenience stores.

The poverty rate here — more than 23 percent — is 5.3 percentage points higher than the rate statewide. But much of the talk here is about the crime and the policing strategies intended to combat it.

Rashard Brown, 30, said he had been pulled over twice in less than two months, including one instance when an officer trailed him for about three miles. “If I broke down on the side of the road with a flat tire, he’d ride right past like he didn’t even see me,” he said. “But if I look like I’m riding clean and I’ve got a lot of money, next thing you know you’ve pulled me over and you stick your head in the car, smell and see what’s going on and see if you see anything.”

Doris Brown, who lives in Charleston but owns a hair salon in North Charleston, said she, too, was pulled over for a broken taillight but believed she may have been stopped because she was a black woman driving a luxury car. “After I left, my friend went behind and there was nothing wrong with my taillight,” she said. “Everything was working with my car, so I felt as though I was being profiled.”

A police spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Residents said they are reluctant to file formal complaints, although the number of complaints soared after the police crackdown began. In 2008, Brian Knite Yates, an Army sergeant who is black, was driving to his house to pick up his wife and ill daughter when he was pulled over by a white officer.

When Mr. Yates told the officer he did not have his driver’s license with him, the officer asked him to step out of the vehicle and then twisted his arm and told him he was under arrest, according to a lawsuit Mr. Yates filed against the city and the police. Mr. Yates claimed in court documents the officer used a Taser gun on him three times, although Mr. Yates did not put up a struggle. The case is likely to go to trial in federal court within months.

Some residents have credited Chief Driggers with helping to calm tensions, even as others angrily demanded answers from him at a news conference on Wednesday. An Episcopal deacon, Chief Driggers once served as the department’s chaplain.

After the shooting on Saturday, Mr. Scott’s older brother, Anthony Scott, 52, went to the crime scene. He stood taking pictures of his brother’s covered body with his phone when police officers and detectives approached. Three of them surrounded him, telling him to turn over his phone, he said.

“So, are you going to kill me, too, now?” Mr. Scott said he asked them.

He eventually handed them his phone. Hours later, Chief Driggers arrived, returned Mr. Scott’s phone and offered his condolences.

“The chief was very kind, very kind,” Mr. Scott said. “He was very gentlemanly, very different from the way everyone else was acting. Everyone else — it was eerie how they were acting. They were cocky.”

Alan Blinder reported from North Charleston and Manny Fernandez from Houston. Frances Robles and Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston. Andrew W. Lehren contributed research from Washington, and Sarah Cohen from New York.






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14) For Mentally Ill Inmates, a Cycle of Jail and Hospitals
By and

It was not a particularly violent crime that sent Michael Megginson to Rikers Island. He was arrested for stealing a cellphone.

But in jail, Mr. Megginson, who is 25 and has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since the age of 6, quickly deteriorated, becoming one of the most violent inmates on the island.

In his 18 months there, he was constantly involved in some kind of disturbance, his records show. He fought with other inmates and officers; spit and threw urine at them; smashed windows and furniture and once stabbed an officer in the back of the head with a piece of glass.

At least twice, his bones were broken in beatings by guards.

He also repeatedly hurt himself, cutting his body all over, banging his head against walls and tying sheets and clothing around his neck in apparent suicide attempts.There were times he became severely psychotic. He once stripped naked and broke the toilet in his cell, causing a flood. “I’m trying to save everybody from the devil with holy water,” he said, according to jail records.

For years, Rikers has been filling with people like Mr. Megginson, who have complicated psychiatric problems that are little understood and do not get resolved elsewhere: the unwashed man passed out in a public stairwell; the 16-year-old runaway; the drug addict; the belligerent panhandler screaming in a full subway car.

It is a problem that cuts two ways. At the jail, with its harsh conditions and violent culture, the mentally ill can deteriorate, their symptoms worsening in ways Rikers is unequipped to handle. As they get sicker, they strike out at guards and other correction employees, often provoking more violence.

Judges, prosecutors, police officers and correction leaders, as well as elected officials like Mayor Bill de Blasio, have grown increasingly vocal about the damage that incarceration can do to these men and women.

By now, Mr. Megginson’s Legal Aid lawyer had expected him to be freed. But his volatile behavior has kept him behind bars, and recently he was transferred to a state psychiatric prison hospital for violent criminals with no set release date.

The New York Times spent 10 months examining Mr. Megginson’s troubled life, conducting hours of interviews with him as well as his family members, doctors and lawyers. With his permission, The Times also reviewed thousands of pages of medical, disciplinary and legal records from his time at Rikers and in hospitals, community programs and supervised housing.

Though there may be a consensus that Michael Megginson does not belong in jail, there is no agreement about where else he could go. At times, he was just as violent in hospitals. He once jumped over a nurses’ station at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, attacking clinicians; during a stay in St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, he was placed in restraints 11 times.

But unlike jail, psychiatric hospitals treated his behavior as a symptom of illness. If he was out of control, he was often given an injection to knock him out and was placed in a quiet room until he was calm.

In interviews, members of Mr. Megginson’s family said they believed that longer-term hospitalization would be best for him. But that option has all but disappeared. For the last four decades, the push in the mental health field has been to close these hospitals. Since a 1970s Supreme Court ruling that was meant to protect civil liberties, only the very sickest patients can be involuntarily held for an extended period.

Mr. Megginson was repeatedly released from state hospitals against his doctors’ wishes because he did not meet legal requirements for involuntary commitment.

His treatment has cost millions of dollars in public funds. Outside of hospitals, he was enrolled in some of the most successful outpatient and community programs in the mental health field.

He failed out of all of them.

Which raises the question: Is there any place for Michael Megginson?

OVER THE LAST DECADE, the proportion of inmates with diagnosed mental illness has climbed dramatically. Today, they make up nearly 40 percent of the population at Rikers, a total of 4,000 men and women at any given time, more than all the adult patients in New York State psychiatric hospitals combined.

Several have shown that they are more likely than other inmates to be the victims as well as the perpetrators of violence.

In July, The Times documented 129 cases from 2013 in which inmates were beaten so severely during encounters with officers that they required emergency care. Seventy-seven percent of the inmates had a mental health diagnosis.

Mr. Megginson was one of the 129. In October 2013, a nurse found him facedown on a cellblock floor, beaten unconscious. Several bones in his face were broken, and his shoulder was dislocated.

When he returned from Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, he was punished with 127 days in solitary confinement.

National penal experts have been impressed by Mr. de Blasio’s efforts to make Rikers a safer and more humane place. In the last year, the mayor has appropriated tens of millions of dollars to create specialized therapeutic units that reward improvements in behavior. He has also scaled back a punitive system that had kept some inmates locked away in solitary confinement for more than a year.

But individuals like Mr. Megginson burn through resources, requiring services that jails had never been expected to provide. Each Wednesday, the department’s chief, two assistant chiefs and five wardens meet with the jail’s top mental health officials to discuss what to do about a small number of the most disruptive inmates — a group that included Mr. Megginson.

His problems have been a long time in the making. Psychiatrists can’t even agree on what’s wrong with him. He has been confined in psychiatric hospitals at least 20 times and labeled with almost every diagnosis that could be applied to a person with a history of aggressive behavior: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, polysubstance dependence, attention deficit disorder, impulse control disorder, antisocial personality disorder and intermittent explosive disorder.

From the time he was a little boy, growing up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, he had uncontrollable rages. He bit teachers, fought with classmates, urinated on hospital staff and refused to go to school for weeks at a time. At age 6, he spent nearly a month at Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center, a state hospital.

His home life was often unstable. His father, who is also mentally ill, was in and out of prison. In 1990, shortly after his mother gave birth to him at age 16, she moved to Florida, leaving him with his great-grandmother for several years.

Many members of his extended family had mental illness and substance abuse problems. His paternal grandparents were both alcoholics, and his maternal grandfather died after falling out a window — or possibly jumping.

His mother, Shakima Smith-White, acknowledged that she was not always there for her son initially. But she said she re-entered his life full-time when he started school. She has been married now for 20 years, works two jobs and is studying to be a nurse practitioner.

“We weren’t perfect, but we tried with Michael,” she said.

When he was 5, she said, she took him to Miami on her honeymoon, to her husband’s dismay. And when Michael was going through a bad stretch in his late teens, she said, her husband took their two daughters and moved out, worried it was too dangerous to stay. “He pretty much gave me an ultimatum, that it was him or Michael,” she said. “And I chose my son.”

“At the time he needed me more than the girls or my husband,” she said.

When Mr. Megginson was doing well, she said, he was wonderful to be around — calm, affectionate, funny.

“Normally something would happen that would be like a great disappointment,” she said. “Or someone would anger him and he would lash out, and from there he would just spiral downwards.”

In an interview at Rikers, Mr. Megginson said his great-grandmother had been the most important person in his life. When he was 10 and she died, he said, it was devastating. “The way my mental illness led to an outbreak of getting worse was when my great-grandmother passed,” he said. “It tore my insides out and gave me a lot of darkness.”

By age 12, he had been admitted to Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center four times, according to medical records, and in his teens spent time at a Manhattan group home for young people with behavioral problems. Between hospital stays he often lived with his mother, and for a while, she said, she could calm him when he was upset. When he was 19, though, they got into a vicious fight. After he started swearing at her, she said, she struck him. He punched her back, knocking out two teeth, grabbed a knife and tried to stab her, she said.

She called 911 and he was arrested, spending three months at Rikers.

When he was released, she refused to allow him back into the house, insisting that he complete a mental health program first.

For his part, Mr. Megginson said his mother was responsible for many of his problems. He complained that she had not been there for him and blamed her for refusing to put up the $5,000 to bail him out during his most recent incarceration.

“She says a lot of hurtful things, disrespectful things,” he said, “like ‘Oh I wish you wasn’t my son,’ or ‘I wish I got, you know, I almost got an abortion when you was born, I should’ve did it.’ ”

His mother disputed this, saying she was thrilled when she found out she was having a boy.

MR. MEGGINSON CAME OF AGE at a time when the public mental health system in New York was going through a major transformation.

By the 1960s and ’70s, state psychiatric hospitals were widely considered failures, inhumane places where patients were routinely neglected and abused. New medications had been developed that allowed patients to be stabilized and discharged, leading to widespread deinstitutionalization. But as the asylums were closed, the states provided little funding for community housing programs. The discharged patients often ended up homeless and, with their illness untreated, could become a danger to themselves and at times a risk to public safety.

On Jan. 3, 1999, Andrew Goldstein, a 29-year-old man with schizophrenia, was standing on a subway platform when he pushed a young woman, Kendra Webdale, in front of an N train, killing her instantly. When asked why he did it, he told the police, “I felt a sensation like something was entering me.”

Mr. Goldstein knew he was sick. He kept asking for help. But there were long waiting lists for supervised housing and case management services, and often he was only given a slip of paper with a clinic’s address. He is currently at a prison upstate, serving a 23-year sentence for manslaughter.

In the aftermath, legislators passed Kendra’s Law, which allows authorities to order people with a history of violence who have repeatedly rejected treatment to take their medication and report regularly to a state-designated program. The state also appropriated millions of dollars for community mental health services.

While the system still suffers from serious shortages, today there are 40,500 state-funded supervised beds where mentally ill people have regular access to clinicians, twice as many as 15 years ago.

One of the most significant innovations available to Mr. Megginson is the Assertive Community Treatment program, or ACT, which is made up of a team that includes a psychiatrist, nurses, social workers and a substance abuse counselor. It is their job to make sure that even the most troubled individuals stick with their treatment. The idea is to avoid costly hospitalizations while enabling people to live safely in the community.

The state requires an ACT team to have a caseload of no more than 68 people and to see each client at least six times a month. There are 46 such teams in New York City, 82 statewide.

On a recent Tuesday, seven members of an East Harlem-based ACT team, who work for a nonprofit agency called the Bridge, met for several hours to discuss each of their 68 clients. Among their concerns: a man with a history of suicide attempts whose cousin had recently killed himself; three people with addiction problems who needed to provide urine samples; a man who was being lewd; and a new client with a history of assault who was acting belligerent toward staff members. “He might need another mood stabilizer,” said Aneeza Ali, the team leader. “Or an attitude check.”

Starting when he was 18 and after numerous hospitalizations, Mr. Megginson was assigned at least twice to ACT teams including the Bridge program. After he assaulted his mother in 2009, he was mandated under Kendra’s Law to enroll with an ACT team as a condition of his probation.

His mother said her son seemed happier in the program because he could live on his own. “He always wanted to feel normal,” she said, adding, “It gave him a sense of ‘I’m O.K., I’m like everyone else.’ ”

ACT teams get high marks from activists. Susan Garrison, a social worker and a member of the Harlem chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the program had made a big difference in her son’s life. At 45, despite having severe schizophrenia, he has been able to stay out of the hospital, and at times he has even held a job, including recently working seven hours a week at a Rite Aid in Harlem.

But as good as ACT is, Ms. Garrison said, her constant involvement in her son’s life has been crucial. Without an anchor — a parent, a spouse, a sibling — a person will often go off treatment and deteriorate, she said.

By the time Mr. Megginson reached his 20s, he had lost almost all contact with his mother and was mostly alone.

When his father was released from prison, they made an attempt to reconnect.

At one point, the father, also named Michael, found his son a job working for a storefront tax operation in Harlem. For $100 a week, he dressed in a Statue of Liberty costume and handed out fliers.

But in the fall of 2012, the two had a falling out. The son said his father stole his savings and lost it gambling. The father said he had permission to take the money.

Either way, that November, after a heated argument, the son pulled a chicken from the oven and hurled it at his father. He was committed soon after and remained hospitalized for the next five months.

IN RECENT YEARS, as jails and prisons have filled with the mentally ill, academics and clinicians have suggested that long-term hospitalization could be the best option for more individuals.

Observing a person during an extended hospitalization may improve a psychiatrist’s chances of establishing a reliable diagnosis. It can also provide a safe environment, in which a variety of medications and dosages can be calibrated to the patient’s needs.In a hospital, Mr. Megginson would be compelled to take his medication, which would help curtail his aggression. At Rikers, clinicians say, inmates frequently go off their medication until they become uncontrollably violent.

Under state law, patients cannot be held against their will unless they are an immediate danger to themselves or others. During several hospitalizations, Mr. Megginson appeared before judges and successfully challenged his confinement. Though doctors disagreed, they had to release him.

His final hospital stay before Rikers lasted five months and ended on a hopeful note. A psychiatrist wrote that he was taking medication and attending substance abuse programs, that his grooming and hygiene had improved and that he was “free of psychotic features.”

“He was very proud of his accomplishment,” an April 22, 2013, progress note said, “and anxious to move on to independent living.”

But after being discharged to a housing program, Mr. Megginson deteriorated rapidly. He stopped attending treatment sessions, according to medical records, and started drinking heavily and abusing marijuana. On June 12, he hit a counselor in the face with a cellphone charger and was kicked out of the program. Two months later, he stole a woman’s cellphone and was sent to Rikers.

Several prosecutors, judges, police and correction officials said in interviews that they were frustrated by the lack of options for keeping people like Mr. Megginson out of jail.

Karen Friedman Agnifilo, the chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, said she would like to have an alternative to jail for certain convicted offenders who are seriously mentally ill, such as a voluntary confinement that would provide treatment while keeping them off the streets.

“The problem is these individuals have typically been offered every service available,” Ms. Friedman Agnifilo said. “As a result, we have no choice but to continue to cycle them through the system. We wish we could do something else, but we don’t know what that something else is.”

At this point few, if any, alternatives exist for offenders.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has joined several other prosecutors and judges in voicing support for a treatment model being proposed by Francis J. Greenburger, a Manhattan real estate developer whose mentally ill son is currently imprisoned. Under his plan, people with serious mental illness would plead guilty to certain felonies and avoid prison by agreeing to stay in a locked treatment center for up to two years. If at some point they failed to comply, they would be sent to prison.

For the last year and a half, Mr. Greenburger has been trying to get the state to license a pilot project, with limited progress.

AT RIKERS, MR. MEGGINSON became such a problem that at times he was transported in handcuffs and leg irons. He had to wear mittens to prevent him from grabbing things, and because he had a history of spitting at officers, was made to wear a mask.

In his 18 months in jail, he had 70 physical confrontations with officers, according to records, an extraordinary number given that most inmates never have one.

In nearly half the cases, guards used pepper spray to subdue him. Eleven times he was described in records as threatening to kill himself. The trouble often started when he ignored such routine orders from guards as to return to his cell, or to get out of the shower.

In the Rikers interview, he described how enraged it would make him to have no control over his daily life. He said it could turn a minor incident like being denied telephone privileges or getting cold food into a major frustration.

“I just get agitated and, you know, you can’t do anything about it because you behind a magnetically confined door,” Mr. Megginson said. “Mentally ill people should not be confined inside a box; it’s not healthy for the mind.”

“It makes us people we’re not,” he said.

Last year, Mr. Megginson was among a dozen particularly volatile inmates chosen for a new program run by the city’s health department. A case worker visited him three times a week for therapy sessions that included meditation, breathing exercises and conflict resolution strategies.

Martin J. Murphy, the Correction Department’s top uniformed officer, said the time spent working with Mr. Megginson and the inmates like him had resulted in a significant drop in the number of use-of-force cases involving them.

Correction officers, led by union leaders, have long called solitary confinement the most effective punishment for violent inmates. But Chief Murphy said in an interview that the intensive therapy had worked better.

Mr. Megginson spoke fondly of the therapist. He said she had taught him “just to use my thinking instead of using my fists. Like, if I get in an incident with an officer, instead of resolving it in a violent manner, rather just, you know, walk away sometimes. I try to think it out, think what I’m doing first and try to alleviate the situation.”

In the weeks before leaving Rikers, he sounded optimistic, saying he hoped to get a job in building maintenance. “I’m just a one-time felon,” he said, “and my felony is very light. If I had two felonies on my record or three, then it would be rough. I still got a chance. I believe in opportunity.”

Two months ago, Mr. Megginson pleaded guilty to stealing the cellphone as well as to the assaults on the officers. He was given a one-to-three-year prison sentence and, because of his time served at Rikers, was immediately eligible for parole.

On Feb. 18, he was transferred to Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill for what was supposed to be a short stay. He had a parole hearing scheduled for mid-March and his lawyer, Jane Pucher, had started looking for a therapeutic program for him in the city.

But at the prison, he was unable to hold himself together. On Feb. 26, he was disciplined for threatening to cut an officer, according to state prison records. On March 4 and 6, he got into fights with inmates, and on March 7 he was written up for smashing a table against a door.

Then on March 15, according to records, he defecated on his cell floor, smeared his feces on the window as well as a security camera and jumped on the metal bed frame until it broke off the wall. When guards arrived, he threw his feces at them.

A few days later, he was transferred to Central New York Psychiatric Center, a state maximum-security forensic hospital, located in Marcy.

In an interview there on Wednesday, Mr. Megginson said he had lost control in prison because he had stopped receiving his medication. Other inmates repeatedly picked on him, he said.

But in the last three weeks at the hospital, he said, things are going well: He is back on his medication, working out and planning to attend church on Sunday.

He said that this time, when he was released, things would be different.

“I’m not going to do nothing bad or illegal,” Mr. Megginson said.






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15) Justices’ Ruling Allows Illinois Man, Jailed at 14, to Reconsider His Future
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CHICAGO — Adolfo Davis admits he was a swaggering thug by the age of 14 as he roamed and dealt drugs with a South Side gang.

He also describes a childhood of emotional and physical deprivation: a mother fixated on crack, an absent father, a grandmother’s overflowing and chaotic apartment.

From the age of 6 or 7, he often had to buy his own food or go hungry, so he collected cans, pumped gas for tips and shoplifted. At 10, he went to juvenile hall for wresting $3 worth of food stamps and 75 cents from a girl. At 12, he fell in with the Gangster Disciples.

“I loved them, they protected me, they were my family,” Mr. Davis said in a recent interview.

At 14, in 1990, he was out with two gang members when they robbed a rival drug house and shot the occupants, leaving two dead. Now 38, he has spent the last 24 years in prison on a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

But his future will be reconsidered in a new sentencing hearing here on Monday. It is one of the first such proceedings in Illinois to result from the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Miller v. Alabama that juvenile murderers should not be subject to mandatory life without parole.

The exact role of Mr. Davis, then known as Spooncake, is disputed. He said he stood guard at the doorway and did not pull a trigger; prosecutors suggested otherwise but did not prove it. In any case, he shared culpability for what were essentially executions. Tried and convicted as an adult, he received the automatic penalty at the time for a double murder, a term of “natural life without parole.”

In the 2012 case, the Supreme Court did not say life terms were never appropriate. But, building on earlier rulings that “children are different,” and citing research on brain development, the court said sentencing must take account of mitigating factors like the offender’s background and age, and consider the potential for change.

Mr. Davis was one of about 2,500 prisoners across the country at the time who were serving life without parole for juvenile murders, most of them as a result of mandatory sentences that gave judges no leeway, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, an advocacy group.

The 2012 decision did not say whether the new rules should apply retroactively, to cases long closed. Since then, state and lower federal courts have disagreed, creating drastic differences for prisoners depending on where they live.

Ten states, including Illinois, are applying the standard to pre-2012 cases and have started the process of resentencing. Four states — Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, with about 1,130 prisoners who could be affected — have refused to make the ruling retroactive.

The Supreme Court is expected to clarify the issue next fall, when it hears the appeal of a convict in Louisiana.

In Illinois, Mr. Davis’s suit was one of several that led the Illinois Supreme Court to rule in favor of retroactive application to the roughly 80 state prisoners who received mandatory life for crimes committed as juveniles. The state attorney general disagreed and appealed to the federal Supreme Court, but in December, the court declined to take the case.

Here and around the country, victim rights groups have strongly opposed the reopening of past sentences.

“The families of the victims will suffer the most,” said Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, a co-founder and board member of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Murderers.

She became a champion of victim rights 25 years ago when her sister, her sister’s husband and their baby were murdered in Winnetka, Ill., by a 16-year-old who received a mandatory life sentence.

“When I started thinking of the possibility that we’d have to go back to court, I couldn’t sleep for four months,” she said. “Our mother was devastated.”

A new sentencing hearing in that case is scheduled for this month. While Ms. Bishop-Jenkins feels confident that the killer, because of the particulars of his acts, will have a lengthy sentence renewed, she noted that the transcript of his original sentencing hearing was missing and that key witnesses were dead or gone.

Re-creating a fair sentencing process is often impossible in old cases, she said, and there are ample existing ways to pursue what seem to be unwarranted life sentences, such as executive clemency or other petitions.

Mr. Davis’s supporters said they had not been able to locate any relatives of the two murder victims in his case; none have come forward to comment on his resentencing.

In the interview at the Cook County Jail, Mr. Davis spoke of his childhood and what he describes as a profound personal breakthrough that occurred during a four-year stay in a maximum-security prison, sitting in a cell for 23 hours a day.

His story suggests multiple failures: of his family, of the child-welfare system, of the juvenile-justice system and, he admits now, of a boy who valued toughness over empathy.

His life sentence put him in a succession of juvenile and adult prisons where gang rivalries festered. He continued to lash out, getting into fights and committing other violations that led the authorities to send him, in 1998, to the “supermax” prison, now closed, in Tamms, Ill.

Mr. Davis and his supporters in his new appeal, including a priest who has known him for 24 years and a therapist who treated him at Tamms, describe a changed man — a claim that was challenged by Cook County prosecutors when they successfully opposed his clemency bid in 2012.

The solitude at Tamms was almost unbearable, Mr. Davis said. He spent hours playing games of four-handed spades. But the unaccustomed quiet time also led to insight, he said, and his first appreciation of human contact and trust.

“When I got out and got hugs from my family, I cried,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how important that was.”

“I understood why women say they like to cuddle,” he said sheepishly.

As part of his therapy in the supermax, Mr. Davis started to write poetry, much of it, initially, outpourings of rage toward his absent parents. “How could you bring me into this world when you knew you wasn’t ready?” one of his first poems asked.

By 2003, his writings, which circulated in prison magazines, focused more on the daily horrors of prison and offered warnings to others: “Young blood, you think it’s cool,” he wrote, but you’ll end up “dead or in the pen.”

In 2005, he even started to forgive his mother, though she never visited him in prison, writing, “I never felt your pain, because I was dealing with my own pain.”

Before the hearing on Monday, Mr. Davis’s lawyers — Patricia Soung of the Loyola University Law School in Los Angeles and Rachel Steinback, a private lawyer in Chicago — prepared a sentencing memo calling for his release because of his remorse, his growth and his mentoring of others while in prison.

The Cook County prosecutors have not prepared a written statement, but they are expected to argue for a new life sentence. Opposing the 2012 clemency bid, the prosecutors said young Adolfo had been “an active and willing participant in the murders” and “was not simply a naïve child being led astray by older friends.”

Though it was never established in court, the prosecutors said there was evidence that he fired a gun that night and that he did not dispute that he carried one to the scene. They cited his lengthy juvenile record and disputed the claim that he had become an exemplary prisoner, noting that he was caught receiving marijuana from a visitor in 2006. Mr. Davis called that a “stupid decision.”

“Petitioner may have been 14 years of age at the time of the murders but packed a lifetime of experience as a criminal and gang member in that short amount of time,” they wrote.

The two sides will present their cases orally before Judge Angela Petrone of the Cook County Circuit Court. During or after the hearing, the judge could order anything from a new life term to an immediate release for time served.

After emerging from the supermax, Mr. Davis signed up for a correspondence course and earned a high school diploma. He became a teacher’s aide in basic education classes, and started mentoring troubled young men, some in prison and some outside, by telephone, working through Father David Kelly of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, who counsels offenders, victims and families on the South Side.

In a letter to the court, Father Kelly said that of hundreds of youths he has worked with, “Adolfo Davis stands out” for his seeming transformation and desire to help at-risk youths.

If Mr. Davis is released, Father Kelly said, his group will give him a full-time job as a counselor.




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16) Georgia Says It Will Allow Hormones for Transgender Inmates
By

Less than a week after the Justice Department intervened in support of a transgender inmate’s lawsuit against Georgia, the state said Thursday that it had ended its blanket denial of new hormone therapy to transgender inmates and would provide them “constitutionally appropriate medical and mental health treatment.”

The policy change, which occurred Tuesday, was revealed in a federal court hearing on Thursday in Macon in the case of Ashley Diamond, 37, a transgender woman housed in a men’s prison, who said that three years ago Georgia illegally cut off the hormone treatment she had been taking for half her life.

Under Georgia’s “freeze-frame” policy, transgender inmates could not start or expand treatment in prison but could be maintained on medication they were using when they entered the system. This, the Justice Department said, violated prison officials’ obligation to assess and treat gender dysphoria as they would any other condition.

It is unclear why Ms. Diamond was not maintained on hormones; perhaps she could not provide documentation of her treatment, or was not given the opportunity to do so. In any event, Georgia authorities assert that “as of March 2015, inmate Ashley Diamond has been receiving the appropriate treatment.”

Ms. Diamond’s lawyers said Thursday that Ms. Diamond’s hormone dosage appeared to be too low to be therapeutic, but they guardedly welcomed the broader change. “We’re looking forward to evaluating the new policy and are hopeful it will comply with constitutional norms and provide good outcomes for transgender prisoners,” said David Dinielli of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Justice Department commended Georgia for the policy change.

In her lawsuit, filed in February, Ms. Diamond sought not only the hormones and the policy change but also protection from sexual violence, having endured what her lawsuit says were seven rapes. She asserted that the Georgia Department of Corrections was displaying “deliberate indifference to her serious medical needs and her continued vulnerability to sexual assault, which constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.”

Thursday’s hearing was convened after the Justice Department’s intervention and a subsequent profile of Ms. Diamond in The New York Times brought considerable attention to her case. It was meant to address an emergency motion seeking Ms. Diamond’s immediate transfer to a lower-security prison, or better protection at Georgia State Prison, where she is now housed.

That issue was not resolved. Judge Marc T. Treadwell of United States District Court continued the hearing so that he could hear direct testimony from Ms. Diamond, who was not present. A new date has yet to be set.

At the nearly three-hour hearing, corrections officials referred to Ms. Diamond by male pronouns. In their legal filings, the defendants challenged the claim that she was sent to Georgia State a few weeks ago in retaliation for her lawsuit, denied her assertion that she had suffered repeated sexual abuse, harassment and attempted assault there, and said she had been offered but turned down protective custody.

Protective custody is a kind of solitary confinement. While in protective custody at previous prisons, Ms. Diamond suffered psychological deterioration, trying to castrate herself and to kill herself.

“I hope they do not move to lock her down again,” Stephen Sloan, the mental health counselor who treated her at another prison, said last week. Dr. Sloan, who is coordinator for the Prison Rape Elimination Act program at his prison, said, “PREA regulations say only under the worst extreme circumstances and only short-term should you lock down victims.”

The regulations also say that correctional agencies should consider each case individually in deciding where to house a transgender inmate. But almost all have continued their practice of assigning transgender women to men’s prisons and jails, according to Just Detention International, an organization dedicated to ending sexual abuse in detention.



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17) Restraint of Pregnant Inmates Is Said to Persist in New York Despite Ban
By



If you go by the official records of the New York State prison system, Tina Tinen’s account of being shackled right before and immediately after the birth of her son is fiction.

But the real world has never lived just in official records, no more than it dwells only in anecdotes.

First, her story.

Ms. Tinen was doing a year for selling drugs, and had arrived in prison halfway through her pregnancy. On her due date in November 2011, the labor came on so fast that guards called for an ambulance to take her to the hospital from the women’s prison in Bedford Hills.

“Earth-stopping pain,” she said. “The ambulance arrived. I was handcuffed to the gurney.”

At the hospital, she said, she remained cuffed to the gurney as the contractions accelerated. “It was about one minute apart, just blinding pain,” she said. “I remember the clock on the wall of the room. I would see the minute hand, the second hand, and the hand would barely go around the clock and I would be screaming: ‘No! No! No!’ ”

The handcuff was unlocked when she was moved to a hospital bed. Her son, Blake, her only child, was born 19 minutes after she arrived. Later, she said, when she was permitted to go from a locked ward to the nursery, the corrections officers shackled her legs and her wrists. “They said, ‘We’re going to do you a little favor, and put a towel on your wrists,’ ” Ms. Tinen said. She was uncuffed, she said, long enough to give the baby a bottle.

There is no dispute that this kind of restraint is almost never supposed to happen.

In 2009, the State Legislature passed a bill banning the shackling of pregnant women just before, during or after childbirth, and it was signed into law by Gov. David A. Paterson. At the time, the state’s official policy for nine years had forbidden the practice, but so many women had come forward to tell of being shackled and or handcuffed as they were being taken to the hospital from prison or jail to give birth that the Legislature acted.

Yet in a survey done since the ban became law, 23 of the 27 pregnant women who were interviewed reported that they were restrained in violation of its provisions, according to a report issued in February by the Correctional Association of New York, a private organization that has had permission for more than 150 years to inspect the state’s prisons.

The acting commissioner of the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Anthony J. Annucci, said he was astounded by the accounts, which, if true, violated both the law and explicit policy.

“I have not heard one iota of complaint along these lines until that report came out,” Mr. Annucci said. But he wondered how it was possible that no word of such actions had reached him, since female prisoners in Bedford Hills have a broad range of contacts with people not employed by the state — community organizations that provide support and education for new mothers, for instance.

In an interview this week, a second woman, Maria Caraballo, said that she remained handcuffed on Feb. 15, 2010, as she delivered her daughter and the placenta. “It was hard for me to give birth because I couldn’t hardly lift myself up,” she said. “The doctors told the officers to uncuff my hands, I was in labor, I wasn’t going anywhere — they said no.”

Officials in the corrections department said the accounts of Ms. Tinen and Ms. Caraballo were inconsistent with their records. They provided trip itineraries that they said showed it was unlikely the women were restrained. These listed three officers going to the hospital, an extra person to make up for the lack of restraints. “Pregnant,” the form for Ms. Tinen states. “No cuffs. Extra coverage required.”

The form was filled out 20 minutes before the ambulance picked her up. For both women, the forms included “special instructions,” which listed the gear the guards signed out, including: two sets each of handcuffs, leg irons and waist chains.

If the women’s accounts are inconsistent with the records, they are remarkably similar to those of 21 other women interviewed for the report.

“This paperwork does nothing to disprove Tina and Maria’s experiences with being shackled in violation of the law,” said Tamar Kraft-Stolar, who wrote the report for the Correctional Association. “Given the specificity and consistency of the women’s experiences, we’re confident that the law is being violated.”

Determined to ensure that the women were treated humanely and safely, Mr. Annucci said he would investigate. “I don’t want to leave any stone unturned,” he said.


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18) Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure
By

It’s not only what you have, but how you feel.

When it comes to membership in the middle class, earnings and assets are just part of the definition. Nearly nine out of 10 people consider themselves middle class, as a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found, regardless of whether their incomes languish near the poverty line or skim the top stratum of earners.

“Middle income is not necessarily the same thing as middle class,” said Rakesh Kochhar, a senior research associate at Pew. Even as the proportion of households in the middle-income brackets has narrowed, people’s identification with the middle class remains broad.

That’s because the middle-class label is as much about aspirations among Americans as it is about economics. But a perspective that was once characterized by comfort and optimism has increasingly been overlaid with stress and anxiety.

Part of the reason has to do with lost jobs and stagnating incomes. At the same time, the psychological frame — how Americans feel about their security and prospects — and the sociological — how they stack up in relation to their parents, friends, neighbors and colleagues — are just as important as purely economic criteria. And on both these counts, middle-class Americans say they are feeling increasingly vulnerable.

“There is a very big difference between the psychological self-definition of class and anything approaching a useful economic definition of class,” said Richard Reeves, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “Policy in the end will hinge quite importantly on what you mean when you’re talking about the middle class and who you mean.”

And that’s the political challenge for Democrats and Republicans looking to inspire voters with policies to address what President Obama calls “middle-class economics.” Any appeals have to involve both cents and sensibility.

Middle-class anxiety has been driven by several factors: increasing instability in incomes, a sense among many Americans that they are failing to keep up with the gains of previous generations, and an increasing gap between themselves and the very rich.

A recent report from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concluded that “families that are neither rich nor poor may be under more downward economic and financial pressure than common but simplistic rank-based measures of income or wealth would suggest.”

The study, conducted by William R. Emmons and Bryan J. Noeth, found that one reason many Americans viewed themselves as struggling was that their real incomes had not advanced significantly beyond their parents’ even when they reached higher educational levels, while those who matched their parents’ achievements were actually worse off.

As J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, put it: “People who thought they were upwardly mobile are finding themselves with no higher real incomes. And people who thought they were sociologically stable are finding themselves poorer.”

Money, of course, provides the wherewithal for acquiring what are considered the traditional bedrocks of a middle-class life: adequate health care, college for the children and retirement savings, generally with a car and a regular summer vacation thrown in.

Some version of that basket can be bought across a range of incomes, depending on location. It might include a used Pontiac instead of a late-model Lexus, or a small walk-up instead of a house with a backyard. And even though consumption was once a useful shorthand guide to a middle-class lifestyle, it is no longer as reliable in a world where cellphones and flat-screen TVs are staples in a majority of households below the poverty line and retirement savings, even among top earners, are often treated as a luxury.

There isn’t one middle class, but many middle classes. Still, what all of them ultimately require, experts say, is a sense of economic security.

“If there’s no security, there’s no middle class,” said Thomas Hirschl, a sociologist at Cornell and an author of “Chasing the American Dream.”

That feeling of security has been eroded by several factors.

Median per capita income has basically been flat since 2000, adjusted for inflation. The typical American family makes slightly less than a typical family did 15 years ago. And while many goods have become cheaper or better, the price of three of the biggest middle-class expenditures – housing, college and health care – have gone up much faster than the rate of inflation.

Equally important, Mr. Hirschl found a high degree of income volatility among most Americans in the four decades between 1969 and 2011. At some point in their working lives, a full 70 percent earned enough to put them in the top fifth of earners, and as many as 30 percent reached the equivalent of $200,000 in 2009 dollars, or roughly the top 4 percent.

Similarly, nearly 80 percent will at least temporarily plunge into a red zone, where their income drops near or below the poverty line, or they are compelled to gain access to a social safety net program like food stamps or collect unemployment insurance. More than half of Americans ages 25 to 60 will experience at least one year hovering around the poverty line.

For most people, their 20s and 30s have traditionally been the least secure decades, with earning power building to a peak in their 40s and 50s, Mr. Hirschl said. But the recession upended that pattern for many Americans. Older workers experienced an extended bout of unemployment, often followed by a new job at a lower wage.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that four out of 10 Americans said household incomes had hardly recovered from the recession; most everyone else said there had been only a partial recovery.

And compared with the mid-’90s, a smaller share of Americans now say they believe it is possible to start out poor, work hard and get rich, the classic tale captured by the American dream.

Income volatility has given many people both a taste of life in an upper-income bracket and a bracing slap of instability.

“Income fluidity is a double-edged sword, creating opportunity for many, along with insecurity that this opportunity may end sooner than hoped for,” Mr. Hirschl concluded.

What is particularly surprising about the increasing income volatility since the 1970s, said Dan Sichel, an economics professor at Wellesley College, is that it coincided with an unusually stable stint of economic growth that lasted from the mid-1980s until the recession in 2007.“There was a big increase in the number of people who saw big drops in their income,” Mr. Sichel said.

That psychological lens helps explain rising middle-class anxiety. What about the social frame? Here, increasing inequality has helped undermine middle-class security and optimism.

Economists and other researchers have repeatedly found that the satisfaction a paycheck brings is related not only to its size, but how it compares to other people’s. That verity is apparently more pointed for middle-income households than for those at the lower and higher end of the spectrum.

A review of the latest studies on the middle class by the Congressional Research Service concluded that “when those at the upper end of the distribution fare much better than they do, the level of middle-class satisfaction is generally lessened.”

Yet in the last 15 years, nearly all of the gains in income have streamed toward the upper end of the spectrum.

Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University and the author of “The Winner-Take-All Society,” explains that across most white-collar professions — whether dentists or sales supervisors — a very small group at the top is doing spectacularly better even as a great majority is mostly plugging along. “No matter who you are, whatever group you define yourself in terms of, you’re poorer now in relative terms than you were earlier,” he said.

The feeling of comparative deprivation and the ultrarich separating themselves from the rest of society helps explain why only 1 percent of Americans accept the rich or upper-income label. Even most people earning over $250,000 – the top 5 percent of wage earners – identify as middle class. There’s always someone wealthier around.

“The gap between you and them is much bigger than it used to be,” Mr. Frank said. “That’s why people feel more stressed out than they used to.”





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