Tuesday, April 14, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 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 


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*


Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL



*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*



A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*







Fight for $15

HISTORIC RALLIES ON APRIL 15

San Francisco Labor Council
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
  • We Need YOU There
  • The Fight for $15 Needs YOU There 
  • Low-Wage Workers Need YOU  There

On April 15 Join the Largest Low-Wage Worker Protests in History
Working people and students will stand together for a national day of action to call for higher wages, union rights, and better jobs. We can strengthen the economy for everybody, not just the wealthy.

****Updated Times and Locations!****

East Bay: 9:00 AM ~ Meet at Park Street & Shoreline Dr in Alameda

Berkeley: 3:00 PM - 5:30 PM ~ Meet at the intersection of Telegraph & Bancroft
     
For more information contact Horacio at Horacio.Viveros@seiu1021.org

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*




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/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 

  
Here’s an update for you from the ‘Mumia Abu-Jamal Needs Medical Care NOW!’ team:

We are keeping our “Eyes on Mumia”. Your support has enabled his family see him. On Thursday Mumia's wife Wadiya Jamal visited him. She shared with us that his weakened state continues, and she is deeply concerned that he still has not had the appropriate care and diagnosis--  and in fact has been returned to the environment that allowed his chronic but treatable conditions to nearly kill him. 

We demand that:

1) Mumia’s chosen private physician has immediate regular phone access to Mumia in the infirmary. Phone access is limited in the infirmary, and Mumia and his physician need to be in conversation throughout each week.

2) His doctor be allowed to communicate freely and regularly with the prison infirmary physicians who are currently overseeing Mumia’s care.

3) The PA Department of Corrections (DOC) allow Mumia’s doctor to schedule animmediate Independent Medical Examination in an examination room with a table and medical instruments.

4) The PA DOC develop a diagnostic and treatment plan adequate to understand any underlying conditions that have contributed to his current ongoing crisis, and that consultation with appropriate specialists be arranged in a timely fashion and be used to assist in this effort. We need a mass mobilization of calls and letters to:

Tom Wolf, PA Governor
717-787-2500
governor@PA.gov
508 Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg PA 17120

John Wetzel, PA Department of Corrections
717-728-4109
1920 Technology Pkwy, Mechanicsburg PA 17050

John Kerestes, Superintendent- SCI Mahanoy
570-773-2158 x8102
Fax: 570-783-2008

On Saturday from his wheelchair in the visiting room, Mumia discussed the steps necessary that both he and his outside doctors and supporters have to take for him get the care he needs. His attorney, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center, discussed the ongoing efforts to pursue immediate diagnosis and adequate treatment for his medical conditions.

On Monday Mumia met with Suzanne Ross, again in a wheelchair, in the visiting room and only for an hour to preserve his strength. She noted that although he remained very sick, his mind was sharp and focused.

Please know that it is your calls, faxes, emails, and letters that have literally kept Mumia with us.

The next few weeks are crucial to making sure that he receives appropriate care. Pleasecontinue calling. Continuing rising up. Stay involved. 

_______________________________________________
Mumia-alerts mailing list
Mumia-alerts@mailman.lmi.net
http://mailman.lmi.net/mailman/listinfo/mumia-alerts

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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



*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*




 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*



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




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






3) 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 




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




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




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




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






8) Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure
By





9) Terrorism Case Renews Debate Over Drone Hits
By and
10) States Tighten Conditions for Receiving Food Stamps as the Economy Improves
By




11) Working, but Needing Public Assistance Anyway
By





12) Atlanta School Workers Sentenced in Test Score Cheating Case
By RICHARD FAUSSET




13) With Driver’s License Suspensions, a Cycle of Debt
By




14) Volunteer for Sheriff Is Charged in Killing After Mistaking Handgun for Taser
By and






























































*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) 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.



*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

2) 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.”





*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

3) 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.






*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) 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.






*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

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.




*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

6) 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.



*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7) 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.


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

8) 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.”





*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9) Terrorism Case Renews Debate Over Drone Hits
By and


WASHINGTON — A Texas-born man suspected of being an operative for Al Qaeda stood before a federal judge in Brooklyn this month. Two years earlier, his government debated whether he should be killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.

The denouement in the hunt for the man, Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was arrested last year in Pakistan based on intelligence provided by the United States, came after a yearslong debate inside the government about whether to kill an American citizen overseas without trial — an extraordinary step taken only once before, when the Central Intelligence Agency killed the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.Mr. Farekh’s court appearance also came as the Obama administration was struggling to fashion new guidelines for targeted killings. The decision to use an allied intelligence service to arrest Mr. Farekh has bolstered a case made by some that capturing — rather than killing — militant suspects, even in some of the world’s most remote places, is more feasible than the orders for hundreds of drone strikes might indicate.

“This is an example that capturing can be done,” said Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies counterterrorism strikes.

The Obama administration’s discussions about the fate of Mr. Farekh, who used the nom de guerre Abdullah al-Shami, began in earnest in 2012, and in the months that followed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon ramped up surveillance of his movements around Pakistani tribal areas.

Drones spotted him several times in the early months of 2013, and spy agencies used a warrant issued by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor his communications. The Pentagon nominated Mr. Farekh to be placed on a so-called kill list for terrorism suspects; C.I.A. officials also pushed for the White House to authorize his killing.

But the Justice Department, particularly Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., was skeptical of the intelligence dossier on Mr. Farekh, questioning whether he posed an imminent threat to the United States and whether he was as significant a player in Al Qaeda as the Pentagon and the C.I.A. described. Mr. Holder and his aides also thought it might be possible to capture Mr. Farekh and bring him to trial.

The discussions took place less than two years after the 2011 targeted killing of Mr. Awlaki, and Justice Department officials were sensitive to the criticism leveled against the department for approving that strike.

“Because he was an American citizen, we needed more information,” said one former senior official. “Post-Awlaki, there was a lot of nervousness about this.”

Another complicating factor emerged in May 2013, when the president imposed new rules for targeted killings and announced some of the rules in a speech at National Defense University.

At the time of the speech, the White House also announced that four American citizens had been killed in drone strikes during Mr. Obama’s time in office — but that only Mr. Awlaki had been specifically targeted. The three others had been killed in strikes aimed at others.

In a classified order finalized at the time of Mr. Obama’s speech, the White House directed that the Pentagon, rather than the C.I.A., should conduct lethal strikes against American citizens suspected of terrorism. That provision was designed, at least in theory, to allow government officials to speak more freely about any operation after it had occurred.

But the Pentagon has long been banned from conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, part of a 2004 deal with Pakistan that all such attacks be carried out by the C.I.A. under its authority to take covert action — allowing Pakistan to publicly deny any knowledge of the strikes and American officials to remain silent.

This account is based in part on interviews with more than a half-dozen current and former senior American law enforcement, intelligence, military and counterterrorism officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the pending criminal case. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment, as did Pakistani officials.

Ned Price, a White House spokesman, said: “As a general matter, the administration has made the long arm of American justice clear time and again. And the fact that the accused was successfully detained overseas and brought back to the United States to face trial is a testament to our persistence when it comes to pursuing those who would seek to harm the United States and its interests.”

The debate over what to do about Mr. Farekh stalled, infuriating members of Congress. During a closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee in July 2013, lawmakers grilled military and intelligence officials about why Mr. Farekh had not been killed.

“We’ve never seen a bigger mess,” said Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who was the committee’s chairman at the time, according to one person who attended the meeting.

Mr. Farekh’s eventual arrest has given ammunition to legal experts who say that capturing suspects is a far more preferable option.

Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the secret meetings about whether to kill an American citizen “chilling.” Mr. Jaffer, who has sued the Obama administration to make public the legal arguments underpinning its targeted killing program, said it was “telling” that parts of the government advocated for the killing of Mr. Farekh even though capture turned out to be possible.

“Senior intelligence officials have assured the public that drone killings are a last resort,” Mr. Jaffer said. “But the C.I.A. and Pentagon don’t appear to have internalized that principle.”

But many counterterrorism specialists say capturing terrorism suspects often hinges on unreliable allies. "It’s a gamble to rely on a partner service to pick up the target," said Philip Mudd, a former senior F.B.I. and C.I.A. official.

Mr. Farekh, with a beard and pensive expression, was arraigned in federal court on April 2, but few details about his background are available publicly. American officials said he left Texas with his family when he was a young boy and spent most of his early life in Jordan.

A Justice Department complaint unsealed on the day he appeared in court said he had studied at the University of Manitoba. The complaint said he was radicalized in part by the online sermons of Mr. Awlaki before he and friends departed for Pakistan in March 2007.

Once in Pakistan, Mr. Farekh appears to have worked his way up the ranks of Al Qaeda, his ascent aided by marrying the daughter of a top Qaeda leader.

American officials said he became one of the terrorist network’s planners for operations outside Pakistan, a position that included work on the production and distribution of roadside bombs used against American troops in Afghanistan.

Some published reports have said that Mr. Farekh held the third-highest position in Al Qaeda, but Americans officials said the reports were exaggerated.

His level in the Qaeda hierarchy remains a matter of some dispute. Several American officials said that the criminal complaint against him underplayed his significance inside the terrorist group, but that the complaint — based on the testimony of several cooperating witnesses — was based only on what federal prosecutors believed they could prove during a trial.

Mr. Farekh was arrested late last year by Pakistani security forces acting on intelligence provided by American spy agencies, United States officials said. The location of his capture is unclear, but Pakistani officials held him secretly for months, with American operatives occasionally feeding questions to his Pakistani interrogators.

Eventually, he was handed over to the United States and examined by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a team that questions terrorism suspects. He was then formally charged with conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism.

On the day Mr. Farekh appeared in court, Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney, released a statement saying, “We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to bring such individuals to justice.”

Matt Apuzzo and Scott Shane contributed reporting.


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

10) States Tighten Conditions for Receiving Food Stamps as the Economy Improves
By

BRUNSWICK, Me. — The food pantry here, just off the main drag in this neat college town, gets busiest on Wednesdays, when the parking lot is jammed and clients squeeze into the lobby, flipping through books left on a communal shelf as they wait their turn to select about a week’s worth of food.

The Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program is intended to be a supplemental food pantry, but a growing number of clients here and at pantries around the state have little else to rely on because of a change in state policy this year. That change is part of an adjustment being made by states that will strip food stamp benefits from a million childless, able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on low-income Americans.At its core is a basic question: As the economy improves, should states continue waivers that were enacted during the recession to allow healthy adults who are not working to get food stamps longer than the law’s time limit? Maine is one of the states that say no.

Last year, the administration of Gov. Paul R. LePage, a Republican, decided to reimpose a three-month limit (out of every three-year period) on food stamps for a group often known as Abawds — able-bodied adults without minor dependents — unless they work 20 hours per week, take state job-training courses or volunteer for about six hours per week. Maine, like other states, makes some exceptions.

“You’ve got to incentivize employment, create goals and create time limits on these welfare programs,” said Mary Mayhew, the commissioner of health and human services in Maine. She said the measure was in line with Mr. LePage’s efforts to reform welfare.

The number of Abawds receiving food stamps in Maine has dropped nearly 80 percent since the rule kicked in, to 2,530 from about 12,000. This time limit is an old one, written into the 1996 federal welfare law. But, during the recession, most states took advantage of a provision that allows them to waive it when unemployment is persistently high, which meant poor adults could stay on the program regardless of their work status.Maine is one of eight states that qualified for waivers in 2015 but decided to use them only in parts of the state or not at all. And, as the economy improves, more states will cease to qualify for the waivers, even if they want them. The Agriculture Department estimates that 23 states will cease to qualify for statewide waivers in the 2016 fiscal year.

“It means life gets tougher for those childless adults who face barriers already getting back into work,” said Ed Bolen, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

He said those adults tended to have limited education and faced a postrecession labor market in which many people who want to work still cannot find jobs. According to the federal Agriculture Department, the households of able-bodied adults receiving food stamps in 2013 had average gross incomes of $308 per month — or less than 30 percent of the federal poverty guideline.

The re-emergence of the work requirements has stoked discontent among advocates for the poor and hungry who say the law is unfair because states are not required to offer food stamp recipients a work assignment before cutting them off, and because searching for a job does not necessarily count. The Agriculture Department makes money available to states willing to pledge work assignments to food stamp recipients, but many states do not take advantage of it. Recently the department announced that it had provided $200 million to 10 states for pilot programs that would help people find jobs and move them off food stamps.

“If the job situation in the area is a really a tough situation, this is an incredibly harsh provision,” said Ellen Vollinger, the legal and food stamp director for the Food Research and Action Center. “There’s going to be harm, and it’s going to show up in greater hunger, probably in greater instances of health problems and could show up in greater instances of homelessness.”

Around the country, food pantry directors are girding for an influx of hungry adults as the work requirement re-emerges. In Wisconsin, the time limit kicked in statewide on April 1, and the independent Legislative Fiscal Bureau there has estimated that 31,000 people could lose their food stamps.

“We’re going to run out of food,” said Sherrie Tussler, the executive director of the Hunger Task Force Milwaukee. “It’s going to cause wide-scale hunger here in Milwaukee, and we’re in trouble.”

The staff at the food pantry in Brunswick estimated that 10 clients a week have been losing their food stamps to this provision. It expects that it will see an increase in visits and the amount of food it will need to provide.

Jackie Dulack, 38, picked up bread and pork at the Brunswick pantry, and had no plan for when the food ran out. Ms. Dulack, who said she was unemployed and had no income, received a letter from the state last fall saying she would lose her food stamps if she did not meet the work requirement.

She said that her food stamps had since been cut off and that the general assistance office had told her that she would need to be working to get them back. (The State Department of Health and Human Services would not confirm her benefit status, citing privacy law.)

Ms. Dulack is training to become a personal care aide, but her courses do not count toward the job-training requirement.

“How,” she wondered, “do you expect people to live and feed themselves and survive with nothing?”

Officials have emphasized that people can meet the work requirement by volunteering about six hours a week, and that is happening here: Warren Bailey, 40, has been unable to find work in towing or fast food and so has signed up as a pantry volunteer. But there is concern in the state that there is not enough volunteering or job-training capacity for food stamp recipients who cannot find jobs, especially in rural parts.

“If you’re not lucky like me and found this place, the food pantry, I don’t even know where else I would go,” Mr. Bailey said.

In Kansas, the number of childless, able-bodied adults receiving food stamps dropped by 15,000 in the month after the waiver expired in December 2013, compared with the roughly 3,000 to 4,000 people who had been leaving the program monthly before the change, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

In some states, advocates have sounded the alarm about the administration of the change. After Minnesota became ineligible for a statewide waiver at the end of 2013, Colleen Moriarty of Hunger Solutions was alarmed, she said, when more than twice as many adults as predicted lost food stamps. And legal advocates in Ohio filed a civil rights complaint after the state declined the waiver for 2014 for all but 16 rural counties, noting that cities with large populations of poor minority residents were not in counties that received the waiver.


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11) Working, but Needing Public Assistance Anyway
By

A home health care worker in Durham, N.C.; a McDonald’s cashier in Chicago; a bank teller in New York; an adjunct professor in Mayfield, Ill. They are all evidence of an improving economy, because they are working and not among the steadily declining ranks of the unemployed.

Yet these same people also are on public assistance — relying on food stamps, Medicaid or other stretches of the safety net to help cover basic expenses when their paychecks come up short.

And they are not alone. Nearly three-quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker, according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for employers of low-wage workers, from giants like McDonald’s and Walmart to mom-and-pop businesses.“This is a hidden cost of low-wage work,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Berkeley center and a co-author of the report, which is scheduled for release on Monday.

Taxpayers pick up the difference, he said, between what employers pay and what is required to cover what most Americans consider essential living costs.

The report estimates that state and federal governments spend more than $150 billion a year on four key antipoverty programs used by working families: Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit, which is specifically aimed at working families.

This disparity has helped propel the movement to raise the minimum wage and prompted efforts in a handful of states to recover public funds from employers of low-wage workers. In Connecticut, for example, a legislative proposal calls for large employers to pay a fee to the state for each worker who earns less than $15 an hour. In 2016, California will start publishing the names of employers that have more than 100 employees receiving Medicaid, and how much these companies cost the state in public assistance.

“The low-wage business model practiced by many of the largest and most profitable employers in the country not only leaves many working families unable to afford the basics, but also imposes significant costs on the public as a whole,” Sarah Leberstein, a senior staff lawyer with the National Employment Law Project, testified recently before Connecticut lawmakers.

Other states, as well as several cities, including Washington, D.C., have moved to raise the minimum wage above $10, while local activists in fast food, retailing, home care, airport services and other low-wage industries have organized protests to demand $15 an hour. Organizers of the Fight for 15 movement are planning a nationwide wave of protests and strikes for this Wednesday — April 15.

Adriana Alvarez, a cashier at a McDonald’s in Chicago, is among the people pushing for higher wages. After five years with the fast-food giant, Ms. Alvarez, 22, earns $10.50 an hour, well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Still, she depends on food stamps, Medicaid and a child-care subsidy to help get through the week.

“He eats a lot,” Ms. Alvarez said of her 3-year-old son, Manny, with a laugh. He also drinks a lot of milk, she said — “a half-gallon every two days” — and because he is lactose intolerant, he requires a more expensive brand, using up most of her $80 allotment of food stamps.

Most everyone else she works with — including many 10-year-plus veterans of the franchise — receives food stamps, said Ms. Alvarez, who started working at McDonald’s full time when she was in high school.

She depends on Medicaid for her family’s health care, and receives a subsidy for the day care center where she drops off Manny on her way to work.

With the recovery now well into its sixth year, stagnant wages have increasingly become the central economic issue and a political flash point.

A report issued last week by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland said that labor’s share of overall income had fallen to record lows in recent years while profits have soared.

A handful of powerhouse companies have cited a tightening labor market as the reason behind recent wage increases, including McDonald’s, which recently announced a $1 bump over the local legal minimum for its corporate employees. (The announcement does not apply to the vast majority of McDonald’s employees, who work in franchises.)

Several economists, including the Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, who has written extensively on inequality, credited political rather than competitive pressures for the decision by some larger fast-food and retail employers to raise wages.

William E. Spriggs, chief economist at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the McDonald’s announcement was “a response to worker campaigns to increase the minimum wage and what is going on in legislatures on the state and local levels.”

Denise Rush, a home health care worker in Durham, N.C., often works seven days a week, returning home near midnight after her two teenagers have already gone to bed. At $9.50 an hour, her biweekly paycheck totals just over $700, or the cost of her monthly rent. There is little left for other expenses.

“It’s a crazy dilemma,” she said. “Do I pay the whole bill or do I gas up the car to go to work?”

Despite receiving coverage for her children’s health care from Medicaid as well as about $300 a month in food stamps, Ms. Rush, 41, is still struggling. “We’re talking about basic needs,” she said, including such staples of modern life as a cellphone to keep in touch with work and her children and a home Internet connection to allow her children to do their homework.

Her paycheck also fails to pay for the uniforms and fees for the lacrosse, basketball and soccer teams that Ms. Rush says she believes are essential to keep her son and daughter occupied and out of trouble while she is working. Fortunately, she said, the school has helped pick up that tab.

About 48 percent of home health care workers are on public assistance, the Berkeley researchers found. So are 46 percent of child care workers and 52 percent of fast-food workers.

Even some of the nation’s best-educated workers have turned to taxpayers for support; a quarter of the families of part-time college faculty members are on public assistance, the Berkeley researchers found.

“I’m very proud of my doctorate, it was well-earned, but in terms of the work force, it’s a penalty,” said Wanda Brewer, who lives in Mayfield, a Chicago suburb, and teaches at DeVry and Concordia colleges. She is paid $2,700 for each 15-week course she teaches. She and her 4-year-old daughter are both on Medicaid; they also receive $390 a month in food stamps and a child care subsidy.

She has applied for other jobs at chains like Walmart, Home Depot and Menard’s, but says she can’t even get a call back because such employers consider her overqualified.

“When I apply for anything outside education, they laugh at me,” Ms. Brewer said. “The term professor immediately commands respect. The assumption is you’re making a fair wage, a living wage, but that is not necessarily so.”




*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

12) Atlanta School Workers Sentenced in Test Score Cheating Case
By RICHARD FAUSSET

ATLANTA — Atlanta educators convicted of racketeering in a huge public school cheating scandal who rejected a sentencing deal received prison time during proceedings on Tuesday in a Fulton County court.

One educator who took a sentencing deal negotiated overnight, Donald Bullock, a testing coordinator, was ordered to spend six months of weekends in county jail and five years on probation. He was also fined $5,000 and ordered to do 1,500 hours of community service.

Among those declining deals were three higher-level administrators, Sharon Davis-Williams, Michael Pitts and Tamara Cotman, all regional directors at Atlanta Public Schools. An irate Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court sentenced each of them to 20 years, with seven to be served in prison, and the remainder on probation. Each must also pay a $25,000 file and perform 2,000 hours of community service.

The sentences had been expected on Monday, but after spending most of the day listing to character witnesses — friends and family members — plead for leniency for the educators, Judge Baxter asked prosecutors and defense lawyers to try work out sentencing deals. The judge ordered them back into court Tuesday morning.

A principal, Dana Evans, who also declined a deal, received a five-year sentence — a year in prison and four years probation — and must do 1,000 hours of community service.

The punishments for the other educators are expected to be determined later Tuesday.

The atmosphere in the downtown Atlanta courtroom was highly charged Tuesday morning. In one exchange over the status of appellate bonds, Judge Baxter threatened to put a lawyer in jail if he did not quiet down.

The judge grimaced and bellowed throughout the proceedings, apparently piqued that some of the defendants have declined to take deals. Notably, the sentencing arrangements would have forced the educators to acknowledge their guilt. By refusing the deals, they are able appeal their convictions.

“I think there were hundreds, thousands of children who were harmed in this city,” the judge said. “That’s what gets lost. Everybody starts crying about these educators. There were thousands of students who were harmed by this thing. This was not a victimless crime in this city.”

The educators had been convicted of racketeering, a charge more typically associated with traditional organized crime rings. Prosecutors said they had participated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to artificially inflate student standardized test scores and give a false sense that struggling schools were improving. The motive, the prosecutors said, was to protect their jobs or win bonuses or favor from their superiors.

Prosecutors maintained that some of the most vulnerable students in the struggling system were victims of the scheme, with the false accomplishments ascribed to them obscuring the fact that they actually needed extra help.

The issues came to light more than six years ago as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began publishing articles that questioned the drastic improvements in scores that some schools were reporting on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, a standardized test once given throughout Georgia.

A state investigation completed in 2011 found that nearly 180 school system employees were complicit, in some cases gathering at cheating parties to erase incorrect test answers and fill in the correct ones. A Fulton County grand jury later indicted 35 educators, including the former schools superintendent Beverly L. Hall, who had previously been celebrated for her data-driven management style and the gains she appeared to have made at the school system.

Twenty-one of the educators reached plea agreements. Dr. Hall maintained her innocence but died before she could stand trial, as did one other defendant.

That left a dozen educators who put their fates in the hands of a Fulton County jury. Each defendant faced up to 20 years in prison for the racketeering charge, and some faced other charges, including making false statements.

They were tried together in an often ungainly trial that dragged on for six months and ended April 1, when the jury returned its verdict. One defendant, Dessa Curb, a former elementary schoolteacher, was acquitted. Another former elementary schoolteacher, Shani Robinson, was found guilty, but she delivered a baby over the weekend, according to news reports, and will be sentenced later.

The sentences expected to be handed down to the other 10 defendants are likely to serve as a somber coda to a scandal that has raised questions nationally about the wisdom of what some see as the country’s preoccupation with standardized testing.

Locally, the drama set off a wave of changes in the 50,000-student school system, as well as broader soul-searching in a majority-black city where teachers have historically been a linchpin of the middle class.

For some, the images of the educators, dressed as if for an awards assembly, being led out of a Fulton County courtroom in handcuffs after the verdict were a welcome if bitter end to an embarrassing civic catastrophe. Mayor Kasim Reed spoke of the closing of “one of the darkest periods in the life of our city,” and said that Atlanta could now “move forward with the education and development of our young people.”

Others have been appalled at what they described as unduly harsh treatment for the 10 educators, all of whom have awaited their sentencing in county jail. Some have denounced their treatment as racism. The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is among those who have called for leniency.

“While I agree that conspiring to change test scores is unethical and our laws clearly express that it is a crime, I don’t believe that 15-to-25-year prison sentences align with the crimes that were committed by the ‘APS 11,’ ” Ms. King said in a statement. “There are people who have committed far more egregious offenses that have severely harmed humanity who have not served such lengthy prison sentences.”


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

13) With Driver’s License Suspensions, a Cycle of Debt
By

LEBANON, Tenn. — The last time Kenneth Seay lost his job, at an industrial bakery that offered health insurance and Christmas bonuses, it was because he had been thrown in jail for legal issues stemming from a revoked driver’s license. Same with the three jobs before that.

In fact, Mr. Seay said, when it comes to gainful employment, it is not his criminal record that is holding him back — he did time for dealing drugs — it is the $4,509.22 in fines, court costs and reinstatement fees he must pay to recover his license.

Mr. Seay’s inability to pay those costs has trapped him in a cycle that thousands of other low-income Tennesseans are struggling to escape. Going through the legal system, even for people charged with nonviolent misdemeanors, can be expensive, with fines, litigation taxes, probation fees and other costs running into hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. Many people cannot pay.

As a result, some states have begun suspending drivers’ licenses for unsatisfied debts stemming from any criminal case, from misdemeanors like marijuana possession to felonies in which court costs can reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. In Tennessee, almost 90,000 driver’s licenses have been suspended since their law was enacted in 2011.

Tennessee’s law has become part of a broader debate over criminal justice debt, a national issue since a Department of Justice report faulted Ferguson, Mo., for a law enforcement system that focused aggressively on raising revenue and jailing people who could not pay.

Many drivers who have lost their licenses in Tennessee, too poor to pay what they owe and living in places with limited public transportation, have done what Mr. Seay did. They have driven anyway, resulting in courts so clogged with “driving while suspended” cases that some judges dispatch them 10 at a time.

Each time Mr. Seay got caught, he racked up new fines and fees on top of old. As a repeat offender, he would often be jailed, causing him to lose his job, and placed on probation, which carries an additional fee of $40 a month. More recently, he has been jailed for violating probation because he fell behind on those payments. Except for odd jobs, he has been unemployed for about a year, partly because he finally swore off driving.

“If I could get my license back that would be the most wonderful thing that happened to me in my life,” Mr. Seay, 44, said.

Tennessee is not alone in the practice: Five of the 15 states with the largest prison populations do so, according to Alicia Bannon at the Brennan Center for Justice. Most states also suspend licenses for failure to pay traffic fines, another policy that critics say creates a quicksand of debt. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has complained that suspension should be reserved for dangerous drivers, not indebted ones.

But in recent years, a few states have reconsidered the policy amid concerns that it hurts low-income residents without achieving its intended goals. In 2013, Washington stopped suspending licenses for failure to pay nonmoving violations like expired registrations. Suspensions dropped by half, said Brad Benfield, a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Licensing, and each month, there have been 500 fewer arrests for driving while suspended, saving an estimated 4,500 hours of patrol officers’ time.

And this month, a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would make it easier for people to reinstate their licenses, after a report said that four million California licenses had been suspended for failure to pay or failure to appear in court.

“For many families, a driver’s license suspension is the beginning of a descent into abject poverty for which there is no escape,” the proposed law says.

In Tennessee, court clerks already had the power to pursue unpaid court debts by garnishing wages or turning the cases over to a collection agency. The new law was intended to give them extra leverage. Now, even some of those clerks say they have mixed feelings about the policy.

“Though it does give us some kind of teeth to be able to go after people who don’t pay their court costs,” said Howard Gentry, the Davidson County Criminal Court clerk in Nashville, “it also has some collateral damage to it for those who are unable to pay.”

Typical court costs can vary widely. Asked for an average, a lawyer at the public defender’s office in Nashville picked up some files from her desk and read off the outstanding debts: $598; $1,100; $5,600; $14,872; and $3,800. That does not include a separate license reinstatement fee of $65 per offense. In Mr. Seay’s case, the reinstatement fee alone is $1,822.

Many defendants are forced to choose between paying court debt or essentials like utility bills and child support. Mr. Seay said his tax refund this year went toward child support debt accumulated during his time in prison and periods of unemployment. For even low-level offenders, debt can make a valid license unattainable.

Stephanie Newhouse, a divorced mother of two in Pulaski, Tenn., had her license suspended for a time after a drunken-driving conviction in Georgia. She said that the suspension was fair punishment, but that having to pay hundreds of dollars to reinstate the license was not. Ms. Newhouse has been able to work only part time since the suspension because her hours are contingent on when she can get a ride to work at an insurance office two counties away.

“You really have to have a full-time, really good job to be able to pay it back,” she said.

Though the law was projected to raise more than $20 million a year, it has not come close, according to state agencies. Revenue from litigation taxes, the primary court fee collected by the state, has remained flat, and even declined a bit in 2014, and license reinstatement fees have increased far less than was anticipated.

But since suspensions under the law began in mid-2012, almost 90,000 licenses have been suspended. Over the same period, 170,000 Tennessee licenses were suspended for unpaid traffic tickets. In both categories, more than 40 percent of the suspended drivers were black, compared with 16 percent of state residents.

Still, State Senator Jack Johnson, one of the sponsors of the 2011 law, said it was needed to rein in shirkers. “It’s usually not a tremendous amount of money, it’s just that folks are just blowing it off,” he said.

Mr. Johnson, a Republican from Williamson County, just south of Nashville, pointed out that the law gives people a year to pay and that it allows people to petition for a hardship license to get to work — a provision that some court officials, public defenders and even one judge said they were unfamiliar with.

“Not a single person has approached me about changing this,” Mr. Johnson said. “Every one of these people ending up with these court fines and fees and expenses, it’s as a result of violating the law in some capacity.”

In Nashville, Cathie Sweat, 21, said she went to apply for a license so she could work as a home health care aide, and learned that it had already been suspended , for unpaid fines relating to a minor drug charge and driving without a license. “How do you suspend a person’s license that they never had?” she asked.

The burden of criminal justice debt often falls on family members. Mr. Seay’s wife, Terrica, uses her income from a $12.50-an-hour factory job to pay all the household bills and has provided money time and again to bail her husband out of jail, pay his probation fees and contribute toward the backlog of fines. Asked how much this had added up to, Ms. Seay choked back tears.

“I’m just crying all day at work,” she said, adding that she had recently smoked marijuana to relieve the stress and promptly failed a drug test at work and had to attend counseling. “I got a good job, and I don’t have no money.”

In Tennessee, judges have the discretion to waive court fees and fines for indigent defendants, but they do not have to, and some routinely refuse. Judges also have wide discretion over how much time to allow defendants to pay traffic tickets before suspending a license. The new law on criminal court debt allows defendants one year to keep their license as long as they stay current on a payment plan approved by a judge.

Nashville has also set up an “indigency docket” where the court debt of poor defendants — at least, those who hear about the option — is routinely waived. But they still have to pay a license reinstatement fee to the Department of Safety, based on the number and type of violations.

Other courts do not take the time to examine defendants’ ability to pay. At a recent court session in Robertson County, north of Nashville, Erin McKissick, who said she had been placed on probation, required to pay for drug tests and threatened with losing her children after being convicted of driving while suspended and other counts, filled out an affidavit of indigency, saying she had a part-time cashier job and received $200 a month in food stamps. When Judge Joel W. Perry of General Sessions Court declined to look at it, she crumpled it into a ball.

Even when people finally manage to get their license back, their ordeal may not be over. James Goodwin, whose blended family includes six young children, failed years ago to pay a $35 traffic fine and then was repeatedly caught driving while suspended. After thousands of dollars and seven months in jail, he said, last month he was able to show a judge his new license. The judge dismissed his latest charge of driving while suspended, but assessed him $275 in court costs.

Mr. Goodwin was given 30 days to pay.


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

14) Volunteer for Sheriff Is Charged in Killing After Mistaking Handgun for Taser
By and

Prosecutors in Tulsa, Okla., on Monday filed homicide charges against a 73-year-old Sheriff’s Department volunteer who fatally shot a suspect on April 2, apparently firing his handgun instead of a Taser by accident as other officers were subduing the man on the ground.

The volunteer, Robert C. Bates, was charged with second-degree manslaughter involving culpable negligence, punishable by up to four years in prison.

Mr. Bates, an insurance broker, had been a reserve deputy since 2008. He is among scores of civilian police enthusiasts, including wealthy donors to law enforcement, some of whom effectively act as an armed adjunct to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department.

Sheriff’s officials said he had intended to subdue the fleeing suspect, Eric C. Harris, with a Taser, but mistakenly fired his handgun instead. Mr. Harris was accused of trying to sell an illegal gun to an undercover officer.Video shot by a body camera worn by another deputy showed the suspect being knocked to the ground and commanded to roll on his stomach as officers struggled for a few seconds to subdue him. A voice on the video could be heard saying “Taser, Taser,” as if to warn other deputies to get out of the way of the device.

A moment later, there was a single gunshot, and a voice saying, “Oh, I shot him. I’m sorry.”

Mr. Harris, who is black, could be heard repeatedly shouting “He shot me,” while a deputy knelt on the suspect’s head and others yelled at him to stop struggling. The video showed Mr. Bates, who is white, dropping his pistol. Officials later said he dropped it because he was unprepared for the gun’s recoil, and called it added proof that the shooting was an accident; a Taser has negligible recoil.

Mr. Bates’s lawyer, Charles O. Brewster, said that his client would surrender to the authorities on Tuesday morning and that he intends to plead not guilty.

“Anyone that looked at the facts here would find that there was no crime committed,” Mr. Brewster said. “It was a truly tragic incident.”

Mr. Brewster expressed disappointment with the district attorney’s decision to charge his client.

“I think it’s kind of a response to the national fervor and media concerning police shootings,” he said. “I think he just kind of capitulated to that. This truly is an event that was unintended and what I consider to be a justifiable homicide.”

Mr. Bates was working with sworn officers in an undercover operation into illegal gun sales run by the Sheriff’s Department’s violent crimes task force.

Mr. Bates acted as an unpaid member of the department’s Reserve Deputy Program, in which about 130 volunteers receive training and are deployed part-time throughout the department. A Tulsa police officer for a year in 1964-65, he had received hundreds of hours of advanced training and “can do anything a full-time deputy can do,” The Tulsa World quoted a Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Shannon Clark, as saying.

In 2012, the department named Mr. Bates Reserve Deputy of the Year.

Mr. Clark did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Sheriff Stanley Glanz of Tulsa County told The World that Mr. Bates was an old friend “who made an error.”

Mr. Bates was the chairman of Mr. Glanz’s 2012 re-election campaign and, with a $2,500 contribution, was its biggest donor. In recent years he also donated equipment to the sheriff’s office, including automobiles and technical equipment, according to a list provided by the county clerk to radio station KRMG.

"He made an error," Sheriff Glanz said, according to The World. "How many errors are made in an operating room every week?"

Sheriff Glanz told The World that he had no plans to change the deputy reserve program but that it would be looked at as part of the Sheriff Department’s routine review of operations.

Mr. Brewster, the lawyer for Mr. Bates, said his client was trying to do his duty as a citizen and a reservist. Mr. Bates made a mistake that law enforcement officers have made many times before, Mr. Brewster said, pointing to the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., by a transit police officer, who said that he had mistaken his sidearm for a Taser. Prosecutors charged the transit officer, Johannes Mehserle, with murder, but a jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

“When you look at this man, his life’s work, he’s been nothing more than giving, trusting, and just trying to do the right thing,” Mr. Brewster said.

Ashley Southall contributed reporting.



*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

































































Posted by at

2 comments:

yanmaneee said...

jordans
christian louboutin outlet
supreme clothing
air max 90
nike air max 270
nike air max 270
kobe shoes
louboutin shoes
adidas zx flux
michael kors handbags outlet

6:40 AM
thela said...

replica bags seoul additional hints h3o26x6i19 replica bags aaa quality replica bags wholesale in divisoria replica gucci handbags r2u97p5t39 replica bags wholesale in divisoria replica bags cheap replica hermes handbags u8u91d3n30 replica bags wholesale

7:21 AM

Post a Comment