Tuesday, September 29, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, THURSDAY, OCTIBER 1, 2015




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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS


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 Hi Nor Cal climate activists,

Here's the broadly vetted final front side of our forthcoming flyer to build November 21. The back side will have all the details – endorsers, sponsors, points of unity, etc. In my humble view, it's a fine example of the perfect blending of art-design with our deeply felt politics and dedication to humanity's cause. Very special thanks to Ragina Johnson for this wonderful effort. 

Thousands of copies will be available at this Thursday's, October 1, 7 pm General Meeting at Berkeley Community College, 2050 Center Street, Berkeley (very close to the downtown BART station at Center St.) Room 311.



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Wednesday, October 7, 2015, 7pm in Berkeley!
Vijay Prashad on Palestine and the Middle East
Wednesday, October 7, 7pm
First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way
(near downtown Berkeley Bart)
Facebook event

Vijay Prashad is a prominent & charismatic scholar and critic of US foreign policy. Two of his 17 books have been named “Books of the Year” by the Village Voice. Currently Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut, he was previously Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut.

In addition to speaking about his new book, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War & Occupation, Vijay Prashad will give an overview of ever-changing events in the Middle East – not to be missed

“WHAT WE DO IS TO CREATE A SHORT-CIRCUIT BETWEEN THE HEART AND THE HEAD.” - Vijay Prashad

TICKETS: $10, $15, $20 sliding scale – available now through Brown Paper Tickets!

$15 Tickets also available in bookstores
East Bay: Books Inc./Berkeley, Moe's, Diesel, Walden Pond
San Francisco: Modern Times.
You can also get tickets directly from MECA (no service charge!) -- call or email Sue or Nawal weekdays, 510-548-0542, susan@mecaforpeace.org

Vijay Prashad edited Letters to Palestine, tracing the “swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring.” For example, after the 2014 Gaza assault, polls revealed that a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel’s actions unjustified.

Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War & Occupation includes contributions by Mumia Abu Jamal, Naomi Shihab Nye, Robin D.G. Kelley, Teju Cole, Junot Diaz (who wrote the Introduction), Noura Erekat, Huwaida Araf, Remi Kanazi, Sarah Schulman, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Alex Lubin, and more! (Note: these writers will not be speaking at this event.)

Read Vijay Prashad's new piece on the Iran deal here

Check out this recent interview in "Red Pepper" with Vijay Prashad about "Letters to Palestine"

Hear Vijay Prashad on Democracy Now!

Benefit for aid to Palestinian children, cosponsored by KPFA, Arab Resource & Organizing Center, Jewish Voice for Peace/Bay Area, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
Wheelchair accessible. ASL interpreted.

For info www.mecaforpeace.org, 510-548-0542.

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Tour organizer: ISM Support Group in Northern California

California Speaking Tour of David Sheen, Oct. 21-29, 2015

The Bullet, the Ballot, and the Boycott: Racism in Israel Today


Oct. 21-29, 2015, independent Canadian-Israeli journalist and filmmaker David Sheen will present the Bullet, the Ballot & the Boycott at venues in California.  He will cover Israeli incitement to racist violence, the focus of his on-the-ground reporting for the past five years.

David will describe how top Israeli political and religious leaders use dehumanizing discourse to inspire vigilante attacks toward Palestinians, Africans and other non-Jews, especially during the 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.  It will include material that Sheen presented at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Brussels, as well as new information never before been made public in English.

David's speaking schedule is as follows.  To make arrangements for David to come to your event or to add the name of your organization as a tour endorser, please call 510-236-4250 or write to us at solidarity@ism-norcal.org.

Wed., Oct. 21
6:00pm
San Jose State University, details to follow
SJSU Students for Justice in Palestine
https://www.facebook.com/sjsusjp

Thu., Oct. 22
TBA
Berkeley, details to follow
Zaytuna University
www.zaytuna.edu

Sun., Oct. 25
2:00pm
Uptown Body & Fender, 401 26th St., Oakland
ISM-NorCal & JVP-Bay Area
510-236-4250, ism-norcal.org
$10 suggested donation


Thu., Oct. 29
TBA
The Markaz, 5998 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles
The Markaz & JVP-LA
www.themarkaz.org 310.657.5511


www.ism-norcal.org
ISM Northern California | Supporting Palestinian-led non...
Northern California branch of the Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods...

View on www.ism-norcal.org
Preview by Yahoo


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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

Sign the Petition:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/petition.php


Urge Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case. Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In 1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In 2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

In solidarity,

James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA

News Updates

  • Death Row Stories
    Kevin Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be aired on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to be viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.
Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up
- from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
 
Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin.  He has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence.  In a dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d 581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:

  The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their bedsides?

  The sole surviving victim of the murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr. Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's not the man who did it."

  Josh Ryen's description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.

  These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.

  The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been discredited…         (Continue reading this document at: http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

     This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

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Free Albert Woodfox!

On June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement. He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party. Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

http://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=35593&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1506EAIAR2&ea.url.id=414689&forwarded=true

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

 

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

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


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


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

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

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



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MUMIA'S FINAL APPEAL FOR HEALTHCARE DENIED!

Last night Mumia got notice that the final appeal of his PA Department of Corrections grievance was denied. Listen to his reaction here.

This denial comes on top of the magistrate Judge’s proposal to deny Mumia's right to treatment last week.

Remember-- one of the reasons the Judge gave was her claim that Mumia had not "exhausted his administrative remedies" or received a final denial of his request for care. Now he has received that denial.

We know that withholding Mumia’s care is immoral and illegal. We are confident that we will win this battle in court- but we can’t do it alone.





We have 3 days left to raise $2,948 to support Mumia’s legal team in securing his right to hepatitis C treatment!

If you have already joined us, we’re inviting you to ask one friend to match your gift. We need about 50 more freedom fighters to join us to reach our goal— and we want you to make that happen with us!

If you haven’t given yet- now is the time to make a contribution for Mumia. Will you join us?

Health care is a human right- for Mumia, and for all prisoners. Let's prove it.‪ #freemumia #fight4mumia

Reply directly to this email to respond to the campaign owner, Prison Radio . Visit the campaign page to view all comments and updates for this project.

Help spread the word about the campaign!
PRISONRADIO.ORG

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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
 
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at work updating the website and developing an even more formidable and dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system, which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence. Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the 20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately, you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be certified in different work.

The month of the hearing has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom, Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

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

 Email: Through JPay using the code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
                                     or
              Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com

Have a wonderful day!
- The Team to Free Lorenzo Johnson


freelorenzojohnson.org

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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/


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."

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COURAGE TO RESIST

 http://couragetoresist.org/

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

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning's clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks' whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning's release from military prison.

It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning's outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.

Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea's clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General

2200 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-2200

Army Clemency and Parole Board

251 18th St, Suite 385

Arlington, VA 22202-3532

Directorate of Inmate Administration

Attn: Boards Branch

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

1301 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning's sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message: "Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning's sentence to time served."  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning's upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning's new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution's—and the trial judge's—misconduct during last year's trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees at this critical stage!


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


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B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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1) Race and Class Collide in a Plan for Two Brooklyn Schools
"P.S. 307’s population is 90 percent black and Hispanic, and 90 percent of the students’ families receive some form of public assistance. Its state test scores, while below the citywide averages, are closer to average for black and Hispanic students, with 20 percent of its students passing the math tests and 12 percent passing the reading tests this past year. At P.S. 8, whose population is 59 percent white, with only 15 percent receiving assistance, scores are considerably above the city averages. Almost two-thirds of its students passed each test."
By

At Public School 8 in Brooklyn Heights, the auditorium’s stage is crowded with music stands that were stored there when the music room had to be turned into a first-grade classroom.

The prekindergarten program was cut because of lack of space. And with the school operating far above capacity, 50 families who live within its zone — which also includes Dumbo and much of another Brooklyn neighborhood, Vinegar Hill — were placed on a waiting list for kindergarten last spring.

To the city, the solution for the overcrowding at P.S. 8 seemed obvious: move those two neighborhoods from P.S. 8’s zone and into that of P.S. 307, which is nearby and has room to spare. The proposal, however, has drawn intense opposition, and not only from the families who would be rezoned from the predominantly white P.S. 8 to the mostly black P.S. 307. Some residents of the housing project served by P.S. 307 also oppose the rezoning, worried about how an influx of wealthy, mostly white families could change their school.

For all its diversity, New York City, by some measures, has one of the most segregated school systems in the country, in part because many elementary schools are effectively closed off to children who live outside their zones. And although the Brooklyn rezoning is mainly a response to crowding, it is becoming a real-life study in the challenges of integrating just one of the city’s schools.

It is also, perhaps, an unavoidable result of the gentrification in its part of Brooklyn. For many years, the area that came to be named Dumbo, for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, was a decaying industrial district with relatively few families.

Shirese Casenave, 51, who grew up in Farragut Houses, a public housing complex that now sends many children to P.S. 307, said she recalled some of her friends being bused to P.S. 8. “They had a choice,” she said.

That has changed, as Dumbo has become a thriving neighborhood where condominiums regularly sell for millions of dollars. Saying that the crowding problem was urgent, the city’s Education Department plans to present its proposal at the end of the month to the District 13 Community Education Council, which represents school parents in the area and has the power to approve rezonings. The department is hoping the council will vote on the proposal in time for the boundaries to take effect next year.

But at two town-hall-style meetings this month, parents on both sides angrily accused the department of withholding information and demanded that the timeline be slowed down. During a meeting at P.S. 307 last week, residents of Farragut Houses expressed fears that their children would no longer be allowed to attend P.S. 307 and would be bused elsewhere. (Students who are already enrolled in P.S. 8 and P.S. 307, even if they do not live in the proposed zones, would not have to leave, according to the department.)

“We fought hard to build this school, and we’re not just going to let people come from outside when we worked so hard and dedicated ourselves,” Dolores Cheatom, a Farragut Houses resident, said at the meeting, holding her 1-year-old daughter on her hip.

She said she had “no problem working with anybody, but I’m not going to let anybody take from my daughter.”

At a meeting at P.S. 8 on Monday, Dumbo residents pointed to P.S. 307’s low test scores and asked what kind of training and extra resources the school’s teachers would receive to make the education there comparable to that at P.S. 8. Some Dumbo parents said they were anxious about their children’s being part of a racial minority in the school, while others worried that their children would not be sufficiently challenged.

“If you’re doubling the classroom size, what are the plans in terms of who are you hiring?” asked Lisa McKeon, a mother of two toddlers in Dumbo. “Who’s going to be training them?

“I need answers, and it’s not because I want to be in P.S. 8.”

A father of a 1-year-old in Dumbo, who declined to give his name, accused the department of playing down the academic challenges at P.S. 307, which he called “severely underperforming.”

“I don’t want to be the bad guy in the room, but no one else wants to talk about it,” he said.

He added, “How does sending all Dumbo and Vinegar Hill children to the school solve P.S. 307’s problems?”

A department official, Jonathan Geis, spoke up to correct him. “We are not seeing problems at 307,” he said. “We are seeing and what we’ve heard from everyone is that it’s a wonderful learning community,” adding that the schools chancellor had said so.

“None of this rezoning is to fix any problems at 307,” Mr. Geis added.

P.S. 307’s population is 90 percent black and Hispanic, and 90 percent of the students’ families receive some form of public assistance. Its state test scores, while below the citywide averages, are closer to average for black and Hispanic students, with 20 percent of its students passing the math tests and 12 percent passing the reading tests this past year. At P.S. 8, whose population is 59 percent white, with only 15 percent receiving assistance, scores are considerably above the city averages. Almost two-thirds of its students passed each test.

Andrew Lee, who lives in Dumbo and has a 4-year-old son and a daughter on the way, said he was not necessarily opposed to the rezoning but wanted to hear more from the department about how it would enhance the offerings at P.S. 307.

“We understand that that school is kind of on the upswing, all things considered,” Mr. Lee said in an interview. “But is it at the level of a P.S. 8 yet? It’s not really clear.”

Research has found that minority students who attend integrated schools perform better academically and go on to earn higher incomes and have better health than minority students who attend segregated schools.

Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, which published a study about school segregation in New York State last year, said it was rare for a school district to take advantage of gentrification to create more integrated schools. “This is exactly the opposite of what New York has been doing for decades,” Dr. Orfield said.

He said the residents who opposed the rezoning “aren’t racists.”

“They aren’t people who don’t want to be with other races and other cultures,” he said. “They just don’t want to be in a ghetto. They don’t want to be in a school where everybody’s poor and their kid is the only white kid or the only Asian kid.”

While redrawing school zones are, logistically, the simplest solutions to crowding and segregation, they are usually the most politically complex and thus are done relatively rarely. A school’s boundary zone can dictate neighborhood real estate values. In another part of Brooklyn, the removal of several blocks from the highly coveted P.S. 321 in Park Slope drew protests a few years ago, though in that case, those students were transferred to a new school.

In Dumbo, the Community Education Council has not said yet whether it will approve the proposal in its current form. If it does not approve a rezoning plan, the lines will stay as drawn, meaning some future kindergartners who live in the P.S. 8 zone will probably have to go elsewhere.

Weeks before a decision could be made, the reluctance that some Dumbo parents have expressed about sending their children to P.S. 307 has already produced some bitter feelings. Toward the end of the meeting on Monday, Benjamin Greene, the second vice president of the Community Education Council and a parent at P.S. 307, challenged the parents in P.S. 8’s zone to visit P.S. 307 to see whether their minds might change.

“We are all parents,” Mr. Greene said. “We need to start talking to one another and stop looking down on one another.”



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2) Los Angeles County Rethinks Deportation of Inmates
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — Federal immigration officials, who had been banished from Los Angeles County jails earlier this year at a time when many cities here were working to protect immigrants from deportation, will be invited back in — with some limits — under a new a policy that will allow them to interview and identify some inmates for deportation.

The change may reflect a broader shift in California, which has been at the forefront of efforts to protect immigrants — even those convicted of minor crimes — from deportation. A 2013 state law called the Trust Act prohibits local governments from turning immigrants who have committed petty crimes over to federal immigration officials, a policy that was seen as a rebuke to the Obama administration’s deportation efforts. Major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have largely stopped cooperating with federal immigration officials in jails, and opposition in the state to the Secure Communities program — an Obama administration initiative that relied on local law enforcement to help with deportment efforts — contributed to that program’s end last year.

But sentiments have been shifting toward stricter enforcement, after two high-profile murders in the state this year for which illegal immigrants with criminal records face charges. One was the gunshot death of Kathryn Steinle at a tourist pier in San Francisco, said to have been committed by an undocumented immigrant who was released from county jail days earlier. The other was the rape and murder of Marilyn Pharis during a housebreak in Santa Maria, a city on the central California coast, for which two men are charged, one of them an illegal immigrant with an arrest record in this country but no felony convictions.

As recently as four months ago, the Los Angeles County government voted to end a plan that offered immigration officials a permanent place in its jails. But that will not end their presence in the jail system: Under the new policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be permitted to interview inmates who have committed serious crimes, as well as all inmates who are being processed for release. In addition, the sheriff’s department will give immigration officials a seven-day notice before some inmates are released.

In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors outlining the program, Jim McDonnell, the county sheriff, noted the need to balance public safety with maintaining the trust of one of the most “immigrant-rich communities in the world.”

The letter said, “Serving the community, reducing crime, and promoting public safety is immeasurably harder if law enforcement fails to maintain relationships with — and the trust of — our community.”

Still, immigrant rights advocates responded in anger Wednesday at what they considered a reversal of course.

“In order for there to be trust, there has to be a firewall between the federal immigration agents and the sheriff’s department,” said Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “Does the sheriff run the jails or does I.C.E.? He’s saying they both do. He’s giving them full access to the jails.”

Ms. Salas said that in some cases, Sheriff McDonnell has constructed a policy that is even more generous than what Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested. For instance, instead of 48-hour notifications before certain inmates are released from custody, the sheriff’s department will give immigration officials a week’s notice.

But the sheriff’s department will also advise inmates who are flagged for the federal agency of their right to legal counsel, something advocacy groups had requested. And federal agents will be able to use the county’s databases.

Ms. Salas and other immigrant rights advocates accused the sheriff of bowing to political pressure from Donald J. Trump and others, who have put a spotlight on immigration this summer. But the murders of Ms. Steinle and Ms. Pharis have helped raise new voices in California — including prominent Democrats like Senator Dianne Feinstein and law enforcement officials like the Santa Maria police chief — in favor of more cooperation with immigration officials to help keep dangerous criminals off the streets.

Los Angeles County supervisors offered mixed responses to the sheriff’s policy. Michael Antonovich, one of the board’s most conservative members, expressed support, while Hilda Solis, who voted in May to remove the federal agency’s office from the jails, said that the plan was cause for concern.


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3) Workers at Alabama Plant Vote to Join the U.A.W.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRES
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4) Israel Acts to Combat Violence in Jerusalem
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Israel’s security cabinet approved a series of measures on Thursday as part of a crackdown on rock throwing and firebombing by Palestinians in Jerusalem, including minimum sentences and greater leeway for the police to open fire — steps that opponents say contravene basic legal principles and may only escalate the violence.

Police officers will now be authorized to use Ruger rifles that fire .22-caliber bullets, which have less impact than other types of live ammunition but can still be lethal or cause serious injury.

Under the new regulations, police have permission to open fire not only when their own lives are threatened, as was the case previously, but also when there is “an immediate and concrete danger” to civilians, according to a government statement.In addition, the government is preparing legislation to impose minimum prison terms of four years — the maximum is 20 years — for adults who throw rocks, homemade firebombs or shoot fireworks directly at people during confrontations. Increased fines will be imposed on convicted minors, ages 14 to 18, and their parents, and child support benefits will be revoked for jailed minors, the statement added.

Despite disagreement over the proposed measures last week, the attorney general approved the cabinet decisions, according to a spokesman for the Justice Ministry. The legislation for minimum sentences will be introduced as a temporary emergency procedure covering the next three years, although the attorney general had wanted it limited to one year, according to rights advocates who have been opposing the changes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the new steps as part of a “fight against those who throw rocks and firebombs and shoot fireworks.”

“We intend to change the norm that has become established here, that the State of Israel allows these deadly and murderous objects to be thrown without response and without being thwarted,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

The government has been under pressure to take action in the face of growing unrest in the predominantly Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem and along the seams between those areas and some predominantly Jewish parts of the city. Rocks and homemade firebombs have been hurled at security forces but also at cars belonging to Israeli civilians and at residential buildings.

The issue took on additional urgency this month when an Israeli man, Alexander Levlovich, 64, was killed during the Rosh Hashana holiday after Palestinians hurling stones at passing cars caused him to lose control and crash into a pole.

Mr. Netanyahu said the new measures would apply “to all citizens and residents of Israel” — a reference that includes the Palestinians of East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the 1967 war in a move that has never been internationally recognized. Most East Jerusalem Palestinians have not applied for Israeli citizenship but do hold permanent residency status.

East Jerusalem has erupted in waves of violence and confrontations with Israeli security forces over the last 15 months, beginning with the kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian youth, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, by Jewish extremists who were acting to avenge the kidnapping and killing of three Jewish youths by Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Israeli authorities. Tensions over a contested Jerusalem holy site have also flared into repeated bouts of violence, including in recent weeks.

The police have increased their presence in East Jerusalem and said that over the past 10 days they had arrested more than 130 Palestinians suspected of throwing rocks and firebombs, 61 of them minors.

Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police, said the .22-caliber bullets fired from Ruger rifles were not meant to be lethal and were “normally used in order to prevent and neutralize the immediate danger” in life-threatening situations. He described it as “a basic, simple means that can be effective in certain ranges.” The government statement said “relevant restrictions” would be applied to the use of live ammunition, without elaborating.

But B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, said that in the West Bank, which is under Israeli military rule, the use of the rifles was not likely to “have the result desired by the government.” Rather than restoring order to Jerusalem, the group said in a statement, it was likely to have lethal results and “exacerbate the cycle of violence.”

In some ways the new regulations blur the distinction Israel has always made between the occupied West Bank, where rights groups frequently accuse Israel of using excessive force, and annexed East Jerusalem, which Israel claims as part of its sovereign capital.

Nadeem Shehadeh, a lawyer for Adalah, an Arab civil rights group, said the proposed legislation for minimum sentences “goes against everything criminal law stands for.”

“Basically,” Mr. Shehadeh said, “you have a bill that says you cannot sentence anybody convicted of throwing stones for less than four years.”

“You take away the discretion of judges,” he added. “They say it is a temporary emergency regulation, but for those convicted it is not going to be temporary.”


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5) Ashley Diamond, Transgender Inmate, Is Out of Prison but Far From Free
By

ROME, Ga. — Right before her unexpected release from prison, Ashley Diamond, a nonviolent offender who had sued Georgia corrections officials for failing to provide her medical treatment and safekeeping, was locked down for 30 days in a windowless single cell. It was dimly lit and eerily silent, and reeked of excrement.

During that solitary confinement, which was ostensibly for her protection, she kept sane — though barely — by singing from dawn to dusk, especially Elton John songs: “Don’t let the sun go down on me,” she crooned to the graffiti-covered walls, even as she thought she would probably die, by her own hand or as a result of violence.A transgender woman, Ms. Diamond, 37, had been housed in male prisons for more than three years, mocked and reprimanded for her gender identity, and deprived until this spring — after she filed suit and the Justice Department supported her case — of the feminizing hormones she had taken since adolescence. She had been sexually assaulted eight times, she alleges, and the contemplation of suicide, which she had attempted while in isolation previously, became a habit.

Ms. Diamond said she was stunned when Georgia freed her, on Aug. 31, months before she became eligible for parole. When her sister, mother and best friend picked her up at the Augusta State Medical Prison, she stiffened as they hugged her, overwhelmed by their ebullience. They stopped for a celebratory lunch, and she anxiously perused a Waffle House menu, asking, like a child, what she would be allowed to order.

“She is not the same Ashley,” said her younger sister, Diana Diamond Wilson. “She’s fearful and jumpy. She gets these blank stares. She can’t hold a decent conversation. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate people; she’s come out more damaged.”

Re-entering society after prison is a documented challenge. For a transgender woman whose imprisonment was traumatic and whose parole plan mandates a return to the conservative Southern hometown where she had repeatedly tangled with the law, the challenge is considerably multiplied.

Two weeks after her release, spending a day with a reporter who had written about her case but had not been permitted to interview her in prison, Ms. Diamond tried to put on a brave, well-made-up face.

She wore knee-high boots, dangly earrings and a black-and-white halter dress, slightly stained; curls danced above her shoulders, her lashes fluttered thick and long, and her lips were glossed. She was the most glamorous Roman in town that day — “like a black Marilyn Monroe,” her brother said admiringly.

But her mood toggled between defiantly upbeat and exhaustedly bitter. A fatalistic outlook is hard to vanquish when you start over with what feels like two hands tied behind your back, under strict, costly supervision and dependent on relatives whose own lives are complicated, she said.

“It’s hard for me not to feel like I’m being set up for failure,” she said.

Broke and jobless — besides a couple of $40 stints cleaning kennels at a friend’s pet shelter — Ms. Diamond cannot afford the fees for her parole and monitoring, for her required mental health treatment or for the psychiatric drugs she was advised to keep taking. (Prison doctors gave her diagnoses of gender dysphoria, post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder.)

She also cannot afford hormones once her prison supply runs out; she has applied for Medicaid, but even if she qualifies for it, Georgia’s program, like that of most states, does not cover transition-related care for transgender people.

Georgia’s parole board said it had made a determination that Ms. Diamond’s release was “compatible with the welfare of society and public safety,” although she had served less than a third of her 12-year sentence for a probation violation on an earlier burglary conviction.

“I think they let me go to escape liability, to rid themselves of my health care and because of the publicity,” Ms. Diamond said.

The New York Times published a lengthy article about her case in April, and she garnered support not only from the Obama administration, which cautioned Georgia that its policy on hormone treatment for prisoners was unconstitutional, but also from transgender celebrities like Laverne Cox, an actress, and from Mr. John, a part-time Atlanta resident.

Ms. Diamond said she suspected that corrections officials were hoping to undermine her lawsuit by letting her go. But on Sept. 14, a federal judge wrote a 57-page order denying the officials’ motions to dismiss her case.

“I needed that,” she said the next day. “I’m trying to turn victim into victory. I’m trying not to give up. I want to do well. But my mind still — suicide still. ...”

In 2012, when Judge Tambra P. Colston of Floyd County Superior Court sent Ms. Diamond to prison, she advised the defendant to settle somewhere “more accepting” of her transgender identity on her release — “somewhere you can get a job and not have to steal and shoplift and forge things to survive.”

But for now, Ms. Diamond is confined to Rome, and specifically to her sister’s cramped two-bedroom home. She has a daily curfew of 4:30 p.m. and cannot go out on weekends, except to church.

Her sister, Ms. Wilson, gave up her bedroom to Ms. Diamond and sleeps on the couch. (The second bedroom belongs to Ms. Wilson’s 6-year-old daughter and her nephews, 8 and 19.

Ms. Wilson, a survivor of ovarian cancer with other health problems, is herself barely scraping by on $731 in monthly disability benefits, and she skipped a car payment to set up Ms. Diamond on parole, she said. It cost her $100 to put in a telephone landline for an electronic monitoring system, and $72 for the first month of monitoring and parole fees, she said.

“I feel so bad because I’m a burden every which way it goes,” Ms. Diamond said, to which her sister responded, emphatically: “As long as I have, you have, Ashley. Don’t let that be a stress of yours.”

Ms. Wilson said she had shut herself in the bathroom without lights to imagine the feeling of being in solitary confinement. She lasted only an hour, she said, but it helped her understand why her sister told her in tearful phone calls that she expected to be coming home “in a box” if she was not released.

“At night,” Ms. Wilson said, “I watch Ashley sleep, and I pray over her. I pray that she stays strong and sees the bigger picture.”

Her childhood friend Nicole Carter said she visited daily to keep up Ms. Diamond’s spirits. “As soon as she is off curfew, we’re going to have a Christian Grey sleepover, ‘Fifty Shades,’ in nighties, with mimosas,” she said, embracing her.

Ms. Diamond made a visible effort to remain in the embrace: “I’m trying to relax after being degraded on a daily basis for several years,” she said. “In prison, I was a toy for the boys and a jester for the staff.”

Another friend, the pet shelter owner, had stopped by with a syringe to inject her with her weekly hormone dose. “I don’t want to have needles around,” Ms. Diamond said. “I don’t want anything that could be taken wrong. The fabric of trust is torn with me and law enforcement officials.”

As a result of Ms. Diamond’s lawsuit, Georgia’s Department of Corrections announced during a hearing — “to the surprise of plaintiff’s counsel and the court,” the judge wrote — that it had changed its policy on giving hormones to transgender prisoners.

But Ms. Diamond’s lawyers, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, argue that Georgia continues to deny some transgender prisoners access to hormones, that Ms. Diamond received only “subtherapeutic” doses for months, and that she was forbidden “female gender expression” in defiance of “medically accepted standards.” (Georgia declines to discuss active lawsuits.)

“People think I’m upset because I was denied a nail polish or a fingernail file, that it was about vanity,” Ms. Diamond said. “But anybody who’s known me my whole life knows this is not a costume I slip in and out of. It’s my identity, and when my outside doesn’t match my soul, I suffer.”

Free to be herself again, or to try to, Ms. Diamond, who during happier times performed in high style at Atlanta’s gay clubs, sought to restock her empty closet during a visit to a Salvation Army thrift store. “Look for the red tags — we’re talking 99 cents,” she instructed her sister and nephew.

She grimaced when her nephew showed her a fake-fur shrug: “Oh my Lord, that’s a little ‘Grinch Stole Christmas’ for me,” she said.

Ms. Wilson was clearly relieved to see her sister enjoying herself. Previous outings had been trying. When Ms. Diamond applied for temporary assistance at the welfare office, she had a panic attack. When she visited a Little Caesars, people gawked and pointed, recognizing her from news reports. (“Transgender Roman out of jail,” a banner headline in the local newspaper had said.) And when she put in a job application at a Burger King, she despaired that she would be perceived solely as “a convicted felon who dresses like a woman.”

She aspires at once to normalcy — “I want to be able to hit a time clock and cash a check like everybody else” — and to fame as a singer-songwriter or a memoirist.

“I know it’s unrealistic to think you can get out of prison and become a pop star or a best-selling author,” she said. “But a girl’s got to dream.”

By then, it was 4:30 p.m., and she had to call in to the parole monitoring system, which is programmed to recognize her voice and asks her to repeat a few series of numbers.

An automated voice answered.

“If you are Ashley Diamond, press 1,” the computer said.

She hesitated, then pressed 1.




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6) Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
By and


KANSAS CITY, Mo. — At the request of his probation officer, Tyrone C. Brown came to a community auditorium here in June and sat alongside about 30 other mostly young black men with criminal records — men who were being watched closely by the police, just as he was.

He expected to hear an admonition from law enforcement officials to help end violence in the community. But Mr. Brown, 29, got more than he had bargained for. A police captain presented a slide show featuring mug shots of people they were cracking down on. Up popped a picture of Mr. Brown linking him to a criminal group that had been implicated in a homicide.

“I was disturbed,” said Mr. Brown, who acknowledges having been involved in crime but denied that he had ever been involved in a killing.

That discomfort was just the reaction the authorities were after.Mr. Brown, whose criminal record includes drug and assault charges, is at the center of an experiment taking place in dozens of police departments across the country, one in which the authorities have turned to complex computer algorithms to try to pinpoint the people most likely to be involved in future violent crimes — as either predator or prey. The goal is to do all they can to prevent the crime from happening.

The strategy, known as predictive policing, combines elements of traditional policing, like increased attention to crime “hot spots” and close monitoring of recent parolees. But it often also uses other data, including information about friendships, social media activity and drug use, to identify “hot people” and aid the authorities in forecasting crime.

The program here has been named the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, or KC NoVA. And the message on that June night to Mr. Brown and the others was simple: The next time they, or anyone in their crews, commit a violent act, the police will come after everyone in the group for whatever offense they can make stick, no matter how petty.

Such was the case for Mario Glenn, a 28-year-old with a criminal history that includes drug trafficking and assault. After he attended a program meeting, called a call-in, last year, he was caught during a police sting to take down a group implicated in several homicides. Mr. Glenn robbed a confidential informer trying to buy a gun from him, the police said. He has been convicted, and prosecutors are now seeking the maximum 30-year prison sentence.

“We have a moral reason to do a better job at addressing violence in this community,” said Jean Peters Baker, the prosecutor for Jackson County, which includes Kansas City. “I don’t know that this will work, but we need to try.”

The use of computer models by local law enforcement agencies to forecast crime is part of a larger trend by governments and corporations that are increasingly turning to predictive analytics and data mining in looking at behaviors. Typically financed by the federal government, the strategy is being used by dozens of police departments — including Los Angeles, Miami and Nashville — and district attorneys’ offices in Manhattan and Philadelphia.

At a time when many police departments are under fire for aggressive tactics, particularly in minority neighborhoods, advocates say predictive policing can help improve police-community relations by focusing on the people most likely to become involved in violent crime.

Civil liberties groups take a dim view of the strategy, questioning its legality and efficacy, and asserting that it may actually worsen the rapport between the police and civilians.

Ezekiel Edwards, the director of the Criminal Law Reform Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said predictive policing tended to legitimize the profiling of racial minorities who live in poor, high-crime neighborhoods, and prompted officers to enforce laws selectively.

“Our concern is guilt by association,” Mr. Edwards said. “Because you live in a certain neighborhood or hang out with certain people, we are now going to be suspicious of you and treat you differently, not because you have committed a crime or because we have information that allows us to arrest you, but because our predictive tool shows us you might commit a crime at some point in the future.”

But researchers working with the police to develop the predictive algorithms say that they can come closer than traditional detective work to figuring out who is most apt to break the law. They say criminals commit violent crimes in fairly distinctive patterns and often have similar attributes. Those include previous arrests; unemployment; an unstable home life; friends and relatives who have been killed, are in prison or have gang ties; and problems with drugs or alcohol.

In Chicago, the police have developed a “heat list” of 400 people who are considered far more likely than the average person to be involved in violent crime. Factors in compiling that list included their criminal records, social circles and gang connections. Also a factor was whether they had been victims of an assault or a shooting.

“These are the people with the highest propensity for violence in the city of Chicago,” said Robert J. Tracy, chief of crime control strategies for the Chicago Police Department.

In the year since its program has been fully in place, Kansas City has had a significant decrease in homicides. The city had averaged 114 homicides a year over a four-and-a-half-decade period through 2013. And the number of murders hovered over 100 in the roughly five years before NoVA’s inception. But murders plummeted to 80 last year, a 20 percent drop from 2013. While assaults with guns also decreased last year, overall assaults increased.

Whether those changes were linked to NoVA is difficult to say, because fluctuations in crime are almost always a result of multiple factors. At the same time, a report released recently by the University of Missouri-Kansas City found that while crime decreased drastically early last year as NoVA was fully in place, the drop tapered off. It is too soon to determine if decreased crime will be a long-term trend, the report said.

In other places, the success of the algorithms has been spotty or difficult to assess.

John S. Hollywood, a senior operations researcher at the RAND Corporation, said that in the limited number of studies undertaken to measure the efficacy of predictive policing, the improvement in forecasting crimes had been only 5 or 10 percent better than regular policing methods.

The Memphis police force, a pioneer in predictive policing, has worked with the University of Memphis for about a decade to forecast crime by noting time and location of episodes and information about victims. Officers then flood those areas with marked and undercover police cars, and also increase traffic stops, the department said.

But violent crime has proved stubborn in Memphis, and the city continues to be one of the most dangerous places in the nation, according to F.B.I. data.

In Kansas City, NoVA officials gather about 30 to 40 patrol officers about once a quarter to discuss and examine intelligence gathered on the street — details not necessarily captured in official documents. The information often comes from informal conversations that officers have with people on the street about things like who is arguing and who might have committed a violent crime.The authorities have identified about 930 people who belong to 57 criminal groups in the city, said Maj. Joe McHale, the project leader for NoVA, who also commands the Police Department’s violent crime division. And there are about 125 people whom the authorities consider central figures in those groups, he said. The Kansas City authorities say they hope that if their zero tolerance for violence message gets through to these influential figures, it will be passed on to others who listen to them.

One of those powerful individuals, according to the police, was Mr. Brown, who said he began selling drugs at 14 because he was raised in poverty by a crack-addicted single mother.

When he was first drawn into the program, said Mr. Brown, who most recently served jail time for robbery, his probation officer told him he had to go to the June meeting, which is known as a call-in.

Call-ins are central to the program. The authorities invite about 120 of the group leaders they have identified (25 to 40 usually show up) to hear from a range of officials, including the local and federal prosecutors, the police chief and the mayor.

During an August call-in, the speakers told the men that this was their last chance. Tammy Dickinson, the United States attorney for the Western District of Missouri, related the story of a man in the program who was given a 15-year prison sentence for being caught with a bullet in his pocket. Another man, she said, got 25 years for having recreational designer drugs known as bath salts and posting a photograph of himself with a gun on Facebook.

A week after the June call-in, a social worker called Mr. Brown into a meeting. He said his heart was thumping when he entered the room and saw several police officers waiting for him.

“We know that you are the head of this and of that,” Mr. Brown recalled the officers telling him. “If we can change you, you can change them.”

People who have gotten in trouble with the law often think they can keep getting away with minor offenses without serious consequences, said Mr. Brown, whose nickname, Bird, slang for a brick of cocaine, came from his drug dealing. But what resonated with him, he said, was the NoVA team saying that harsh penalties will be imposed for even petty slights once warnings have been given.

Mr. Brown has come to see some benefit in the program. NoVA officials have helped him find housing, he said, and pushed him to get a job — he now works as a delivery driver for Back Porch Bar-B-Q. The authorities connected him with a program to help him pay child support — he has four children ranging from 4 months to 7 years. And he works with young people to help keep them out of trouble.

Still, Mr. Brown is hardly in the clear. Domestic assault charges are pending against him after his girlfriend accused him of choking her and hitting her head against a door last year, according to court documents.

Shaking loose from past misdeeds can be challenging, Major McHale said.

“Sometimes you can’t get away from things that you’ve done,” he said, “even though you turned a new leaf.”

John Eligon reported from Kansas City, Mo., and Timothy Williams from New York City.


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7) Guarding the Prison Guards: New York State’s Troubled Disciplinary System
By TOM ROBBINS

A few days after Ramon Fabian arrived at the Ulster Correctional Facility on the southern edge of the Catskill Mountains last year, a guard conducting the morning head count yelled at him to shut up.

Inmates at Ulster, a medium-security New York State prison, are required to stay in place and keep their voices low during the count. Mr. Fabian, who was serving a one-year sentence for a drug conviction, had been talking to another inmate, but he said in a recent interview that he thought he had been following the rules.

After the count was over, the guard escorted him past a set of double doors out of view of other inmates and the prison’s electronic surveillance cameras. Mr. Fabian said the officer, Michael Bukowski, a seven-year veteran, had then ordered him to face the wall and brace himself in the “pat-frisk” position, arms outstretched and legs spread. As he did so, Mr. Fabian recalled, he looked down and saw the toe of a boot swinging up between his legs.

He saw a flash of light, felt a piercing pain and collapsed. “He told me to get up, but all I could do was crawl back to my cube,” Mr. Fabian, who is now 21, told investigators later. He lay on the floor in his cubicle in the prison’s dormitory, groaning and crying, for almost an hour before hobbling to lunch. In the mess hall, a sergeant sent him to the prison’s medical unit. He was soon loaded into a van and driven 80 miles north to a hospital in Albany. Doctors there performed emergency surgery, removing part of his right testicle.

Questioned by an investigator from the state corrections department’s inspector general’s office a few days after the episode on July 22, 2014, Officer Bukowski said he knew nothing about the injury. He said he had “counseled” Mr. Fabian about the importance of keeping quiet during the count. He acknowledged that he had raised his voice, and that when he sent Mr. Fabian back to his cubicle, the inmate was “crying a little.” Corrections officials concluded that the guard had used excessive force and was lying. Officer Bukowksi was suspended without pay on July 31, 2014, and the department soon moved to fire him.

More than a year later, however, Officer Bukowski is still a state employee. His disciplinary case remains unresolved, although he faces a criminal charge of assault. His case, described in court documents and interviews, offers a stark example of the intricate protections that shield New York’s 20,000 corrections officers, even when there is compelling evidence of abuse.

Since 2010, the state has sought to fire 30 prison guards accused of abusing inmates through a convoluted arbitration process that is required under the union contract. Officials have prevailed only eight times, according to records of disciplinary cases released under state Freedom of Information Law requests. Those records show that most abuse allegations never reach the arbitration level: Another 80 cases brought against corrections officers, sergeants and lieutenants since 2010 were settled directly with their unions for penalties other than dismissal, such as suspension.

Officer discipline has taken on special significance as New York faces fresh accusations of brutality in its vast incarceration system of 53,000 inmates. After three guards at Attica Correctional Facility pleaded guilty in March to beating an inmate there, new accusations were leveled against guards at Clinton Correctional Facility, where prisoners said they had been beaten after two inmates escaped, and at Fishkill Correctional Facility, where an inmate died after an altercation with officers. Critics such as the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group that monitors the state’s prisons, say the episodes show that the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has often ignored brutality.

Current and former corrections officials say the union contract deserves part of the blame. “It is tough to get rid of a bad officer, just like it’s tough to get rid of a bad teacher,” said Brian Fischer, a former superintendent at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the state corrections commissioner from 2007 to 2013. “It’s very frustrating.”
‘A Dedicated Correction Officer’

Shortly after the department informed Officer Bukowski that he would be fired, his union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, filed a grievance contesting the charges. When the corrections department declined to settle the case for a lesser penalty, the union moved to put the matter before an impartial arbitrator, a contractual right.

Arbitrators are not chosen at random. Rather, both sides review a list of candidates and rate them based on how favorably inclined they believe they will be toward their arguments. Arbitrators, who earn $1,000 to $1,800 a day, often try to find a middle ground to avoid antagonizing either side, some officials complain.

“We have a culture of arbitrators who engage in ‘split the baby,’ no matter the offense,” said a state corrections official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.

Ann Lesser, a vice president for labor, employment and elections for the American Arbitration Association, disputed that claim. “I don’t believe that is what happens,” she said. “Arbitrators make their decisions based on the facts.”

Under the state’s contract with the union, the arbitrator’s decision is considered final and binding. Even errors of law or fact by the arbitrator are insufficient to overturn a decision, courts have ruled. Decisions can be vacated only if it can be shown that they were somehow irrational or violated public policy.

For the Bukowski case, the parties settled on a veteran arbitrator, Larry Dais, a former assistant vice president of Columbia University who had been hearing labor disputes since 1999. Over three days last fall, Mr. Dais heard testimony and evidence. The union maintained that Officer Bukowski was innocent and described him as “a dedicated correctional officer.” Mr. Dais ruled in November that Officer Bukowski was guilty of using excessive force and lying to investigators. But noting in his five-page decision that this was the officer’s first such infraction, Mr. Dais reduced the penalty from termination to a 120-day, unpaid suspension.

Because corrections officers have the contractual right to pick work assignments based on seniority, the ruling would have allowed Officer Bukowski to return to the Ulster prison after completing his suspension.

In addition to the internal disciplinary proceeding, Officer Bukowski was indicted in Ulster County in March on a charge of misdemeanor assault. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial on Oct. 26. Under the state’s public officers law, a misdemeanor conviction would not automatically bar him from keeping his job.

Officer Bukowski did not respond to requests for comment made through his lawyers, his union and his Facebook account. Reached at his home, Mr. Dais declined to comment. “I would not be comfortable speaking about it until it’s fully resolved,” he said.

The specifics of most officer discipline cases are kept largely out of public view. Under state law, the personnel records of corrections officers, like those of police officers and firefighters, are exempt from outside scrutiny. The records obtained under the Freedom of Information Law provide only some spare details.

In 2013, the corrections department agreed to a 19-day, unpaid suspension for an officer charged with falsely reporting an episode in which he was accused of “unjustified, unauthorized use of force” — striking an inmate on the head. Last year, an officer accused of lying about using “verbal and physical” force on an inmate was allowed to return to work after a 20-day suspension without pay. Another officer, cited for “unauthorized and excessive” use of force on an inmate, settled the charge with an eight-day unpaid suspension.

Corrections department officials declined to comment about disciplinary issues, saying they did not want to aggravate labor relations. After the convictions of the Attica guards, the state’s acting corrections commissioner, Anthony J. Annucci, said he would push for “substantial changes” during contract negotiations next year that would allow him “to appropriately discipline any security staff who commits egregious acts of misconduct.”

In a statement, a spokesman for the union said members “conduct themselves with professionalism and integrity on a daily basis.”

“In the event of a disciplinary process initiated by DOCCS,” the statement continued, referring to the corrections department, “there is an expectation by the union that the process is done fairly and is not biased towards any member.”

In sharp contrast to the corrections department, the State Police have great latitude in disciplinary matters. Charges against troopers are heard by three commissioned officers, two appointed by the state police superintendent and one chosen by the troopers’ union. The panel’s decisions are subject to the superintendent’s final approval. A similar arrangement governs disciplinary actions against New York City officers, with the police commissioner retaining final say.
Obstacles to Enforcing Discipline

Part of the difference in bargaining rights stems from the turbulent labor history of New York’s prison guards. In 1979, corrections officers walked off the job for 16 days in a contract dispute. Gov. Hugh L. Carey responded by calling out the National Guard to run the prisons. The walkout violated the state’s Taylor Law, which bars strikes by public employees, but after paying modest fines, the guards won a new contract with better wages and bargaining conditions. Despite the decline in the number of state prisons to 54 from 67 as the inmate population has fallen, the officers’ union remains a political force upstate thanks to the presence of its sizable membership in the constellation of prisons that dot the northern New York landscape from the Vermont border to Lake Erie.

But union resistance has not been the corrections department’s only obstacle to enforcing discipline. Last year, the head of the agency’s inspector general’s office — the unit that handles internal investigations, including those involving allegations of inmate abuse — abruptly retired amid an inquiry by state investigators into claims of sexual harassment in the office. In January, the unit’s former No. 2 official, James Ferro, was arrested in a case brought by Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on charges of bullying and sexually harassing one of his investigators. The conduct continued, Mr. Schneiderman alleged, even after the victim complained to Mr. Ferro’s supervisor. Mr. Ferro has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial in November in State Supreme Court in Albany.

Department officials say operations within the unit, which was renamed the Office of Special Investigations, were not hampered by the allegations. But after the arrest of Mr. Ferro, officials brought in two outsiders from the state attorney general’s office to take charge. Most of the office’s investigators are corrections officers recruited from within the department’s ranks, officials acknowledge. They are members of the same union as the guards they are investigating, and sometimes return to uniformed jobs. Corrections officials say the unit benefits from insider knowledge, but the overlap has long troubled critics of the agency.

“To me, that is really problematic,” Jack Beck, director of the Prison Visiting Project for the Correctional Association, said. “If you know you are going to come back and work with these guys, what is the incentive for being critical?”

Among prisoners, allegations of staff misconduct have remained high even as the prison population has fallen. According to the corrections department’s most recent annual report on grievances filed by inmates, there were 5,471 complaints lodged against staff members in 2013, an increase of 175 from the previous year. The department does not provide a breakdown of the types of misconduct alleged in the complaints. But the annual report’s language conveys an overall official skepticism about the claims. “The perception among staff is that some of the harassment complaints are filed in an attempt to discredit misbehavior reports” against inmates, the report states.
 
The suspicion that claims of abuse are invented or embellished by inmates lingers throughout New York’s correctional establishment, among both labor and management. Advocates for those behind bars acknowledge that it happens. “Clearly, there can be exaggeration,” Mr. Beck said. “I’ve been doing this for almost 35 years. I don’t believe every story I hear. But when you start putting those stories together, you say, ‘This makes a lot of sense.’”

The skepticism inevitably affects the way inmate testimony is viewed in arbitration proceedings, officials say. That problem played out in 2011 when the department tried to convince an arbitrator to allow it to fire a guard at a medium-security prison in Oneida County who was alleged to have beaten and stomped on a partially disabled prisoner. The inmate said the guard, Michael Wehby, a 24-year corrections department veteran, had first teased him about a protective helmet he wore to avoid injury during seizures. When the inmate objected, he said, Officer Wehby took him to an alcove where he allegedly kicked and beat him with a radio.

Evidence was introduced that showed bruises on the inmate. But after hearing conflicting versions of the episode from other guards, the arbitrator decided against dismissal and sent Officer Wehby back to work. The guard was criminally charged, but a jury found him not guilty of two assault charges and deadlocked on a third charge. Officer Wehby later resigned after a deal was reached that let him retire with a full pension. He did not respond to requests for comment relayed through his union, his lawyer and his Facebook account. Michael Daley, who represented Officer Wehby in the criminal trial, said criminal charges should never have been brought. “The arbitrator had already ruled that he was entitled to have his job back,” Mr. Daley said.

Overruling the Arbitrator

In the Bukowski case, corrections officials decided on a rare course of action: They refused to abide by the arbitrator’s decision. “The feeling was, ‘How can we leave this guy out there unsupervised?’” said the corrections official.

After the department refused to allow Officer Bukowski back to work, union lawyers sued on his behalf. In court papers, they cited longstanding court precedents that had upheld the right of arbitrators to render decisions without judicial interference. In an affidavit countering that argument, Patrick J. Griffin, a corrections department assistant commissioner, wrote that the sanction imposed on Officer Bukowski by Mr. Dais “was grossly disproportionate to the actions” and went against clear public policy on inmate abuse.

In a decision handed down in July, Justice Kimberly A. O’Connor of State Supreme Court in Albany agreed with the corrections department. A 120-day suspension for the kind of assault for which Officer Bukowski had been found guilty, Justice O’Connor wrote, “shocks the judicial conscience and cannot be upheld.” That was true, she added, “especially given the arbitrator’s findings of guilt as to all charges.” She ordered that the case be reheard. The union has appealed her decision.

A union spokesman referred questions to its lawyer, William Golderman, whose firm handles most arbitration hearings for corrections officers. Mr. Golderman declined to comment. “It’s in litigation,” he said. “Let the process take its course.”

Mr. Fabian, who is tall and soft-spoken, got out of prison just before Christmas. On parole, he worked at a grocery near his home in the Inwood section of Manhattan until it closed. He is now trying to go back to school to get his high school equivalency diploma and has retained a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit. Asked recently about what happened to him at Ulster, he lowered his head and shook it back and forth. “I just don’t want to ever go back there,” he said.

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8) Against Odds, Seeking Hope for Mexican Students Who Vanished a Year Ago
By PAULINA VILLEGAS

MEXICO CITY — As a Catholic, Ezequiel Mora was torn over what kind of Mass to offer for his missing 21-year-old son, who vanished a year ago with 42 other college students in southern Mexico.

He could, as some friends suggested, admit that Alexander was dead, as federal prosecutors have said, and offer a Mass for the departed. Or he could preserve the hope that his son is still alive somewhere, and merely pray for his safe return.

“I don’t know what to think,” Mr. Mora said the other day, his face weathered and hair far grayer than a year ago. “I go from feeling despair to feeling hope, from one moment to the next.”

Through it all, the day-to-day reminders of his son’s disappearance keep the loss fresh: no extra hands to repair their old taxi, a fragile grandmother who still does not know that he is gone, a daughter without her closest sibling.Such is the color of grief shared by the families of the missing, who have come here this weekend from their villages to denounce the disappearance of their sons, all students at a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, in rural Guerrero State. Snatched from buses by the police in Iguala, the students were handed to a drug gang and never seen again.

Exactly one year later, the facts are as scattered and unknown as the whereabouts of the victims. Remains of just one of the students have been identified with certainty, those of Alexander Mora. Investigators know neither the location of the remaining 42, nor what happened to them. The case struck a nerve with the Mexican public, a tragic distillation of the tangle of corruption and complicity that governs life in parts of Mexico. In this case, the suspected involvement of local law enforcement and powerful drug gangs tore open the lives of 43 families whose children were studying to become rural teachers.

An outside panel of experts that reviewed the investigation concluded that the night the students disappeared, federal police and army officers were aware of the violence and did not intervene.

On Saturday, at least 50,000 marched through the city to commemorate the tragedy. Bearing banners and chanting antigovernment slogans, the parents of the missing were once more lifted by the voices of others, their cause back at center stage.

Epifanio Alvarez, the father of another missing student, appreciated the “solidarity and support” of the thousands of people who braved the rain and joined the march to demand justice.

“We are not here to cry, nor to cause pity, we are here to demand our sons to be returned alive!” he said.

The initial public anger over the case has given way to a profound cynicism, one that has dragged the president’s poll numbers down to the lowest for any president in two decades. The case in Iguala marked the beginning of a slide in credibility for this government that has continued ever since.

Unrelated embarrassments in the last year have only heightened the cynicism, including the escape of the country’s most notorious drug lord from a maximum-security prison and questionable loans taken by the president’s wife from a state contractor.

“Mexico is not the same after Iguala,” Luis Raúl González, the president of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, said in a statement in July. “The tragedy transcends Guerrero.”

On Thursday, the parents met with President Enrique Peña Nieto, asking him, among other things, to pursue the lines of investigation raised by the outside panel, which said it found no evidence to support the government’s conclusion that the students were killed by the drug gang and their bodies then burned to ashes in a garbage dump.

The president agreed to create a specialized prosecutors’ unit for missing people and reminded the parents that 111 people had been arrested in the case.

“We want the same thing, to know what happened to each of their sons and for there to be justice,” the president said in a Twitter post after the meeting.

On the surface, that is not Mr. Mora’s problem. Experts agree that his son’s DNA matched that from a charred bone fragment found at the garbage dump. But fed by the improbable hope of the other 42 families, Mr. Mora has been pulled between science and faith.

After a first DNA match from an Austrian laboratory eight months ago, Mr. Mora stayed home for weeks in the tiny village of El Pericón, in Guerrero.

He mourned. He drank. He stopped driving his taxi on the dirt roads of the sierra. He halted work on his corn crop. Friends and neighbors tried to comfort him in his two-room cinder-block home, where an altar to Alexander covers one wall.

But the fellow parents of the students began to visit him and urge him to join their cause. The government and others could be wrong about the evidence, they said. He began to believe.

His fellow taxi drivers urged him to be realistic. “ ‘Your son is dead, face it and go back to work,’ is what they used to tell me,” he recalled. “I asked them to understand my need to believe he might still be alive.”

Joining the cause, though, has often seemed futile.

On a recent sunny morning, Mr. Mora stood outside the French Embassy in Mexico City with dozens of other parents chanting: “We are all Ayotzinapa!” and “Alive they took them, alive we want them back!”

He relayed the story of the disappearance to a security guard, who merely looked puzzled. Later that day, Mr. Mora joined the rest of the parents, students and several hundred others for a march along Reforma Avenue, a main thoroughfare in the capital.

It was a long way from the protests a year earlier, when the parents were joined by half a million people. Standing on the sidewalk, Cecilia García, a cook in a nearby restaurant, stopped to watch. “No matter how many protests they do, they are all dead,” said Ms. García, 33, who felt sorry for the parents. “All of this is in vain.”

Despite the mounting cynicism toward the government, Mr. Mora refuses to stop protesting.

As he stood on one of the fanciest avenues in all of Latin America, feeling out of place, he said: “I think sometimes people feel sorry for us, for what happened to us, especially since we are very poor. But only a few of them care.”

Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting.


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9) Four Youths Held in Death of Israeli Man Whose Car Was Hit by Rocks
By DIAA HADID

TEL AVIV — Four Palestinian youths have been detained in the death of an Israeli man who drove his vehicle into a light pole in East Jerusalem two weeks ago after it was hit by rocks, the Israeli police said Saturday.

The man, Alexander Levlovich, 64, died of his injuries after the accident on the first day of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, on Sept. 13.

Luba Samri, a police spokeswoman, said in a statement that a joint investigation by Israeli intelligence officials and the police resulted in the arrest of four youths between the ages of 16 and 19. They are from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher, Ms. Samri said. The neighborhood faces the road where Mr. Levlovich had the accident.

Ms. Samri said the four confessed to throwing rocks toward vehicles on the road. She said one of the youths confessed to throwing the specific rock that hit Mr. Levlovich’s vehicle, which caused him to swerve and crash into the pole.

It was not immediately clear when the youths were arrested and no charges have been filed.The announcement came after Israel’s security cabinet announced on Thursday a series of measures intended to crack down on rock throwing and firebombing by Palestinians in Jerusalem, including a minimum prison sentence of four years for adults convicted of those crimes.

Ms. Samri said the arrests “clarified the importance of imposing harsher punishments on stone throwers.”


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10) Terry Rosenbaum, Teacher Who Was Fired After Defying McCarthy, Dies at 97
By

In 1951, Terry Rosenbaum, a history teacher at Samuel J. Tilden High School in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, finally stepped into one fight too many.

It all began on May 26, when a 26-year-old black man, Henry Fields Jr., sideswiped a parked car in nearby Brownsville and sped off, pursued by a police car, only to stop four blocks later when one of his tires went flat.

Samuel Applebaum, a patrolman, stepped out of the police car, and, as Fields emerged from his car, shouted “Stop!” Then, with at least a dozen witnesses looking on, he fired a single shot. The bullet ricocheted off the car door and struck Fields in the neck, killing him instantly.

Late that night, Mr. Rosenbaum, a well-known community organizer, received a phone call telling him that a crowd of black residents in an ugly mood had gathered outside the local police precinct.

Alarmed, he headed to the precinct to act as a mediator between local black leaders, with whom he had worked on many social-justice campaigns, and the police. In the months that followed, he helped lead a hastily organized group, the Brownsville Citizens Committee of 1,000 for Justice in the Case of Henry Fields, in a failed effort to have Applebaum indicted on criminal charges.

And that is when Mr. Rosenbaum, who died on Sept. 15 at 97, found out that there were many ways to attract the interest of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Not long after the Fields episode, Mr. Rosenbaum was called into the office of the deputy superintendent of schools and asked if he was a member of the Communist Party. He was not, he said. That seemed to be the end of the matter.

But in 1953, McCarthy, as part of his campaign to expose Communist subversion in the government and the military, held hearings in Manhattan to delve into reports of espionage and sabotage at the radar laboratory at Fort Monmouth, N.J., and Mr. Rosenbaum was summoned to attend.

“I haven’t any idea to this day why I was called,” Mr. Rosenbaum told The New York Times in 1954, “and I certainly don’t know anything about Fort Monmouth or espionage.”

At the time, signing a petition for a radical cause, attending a meeting of the Communist Party in college or merely knowing someone who did either of those things was enough to pique the interest of McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The hearing was a lively event. McCarthy badgered. Mr. Rosenbaum, assuming the role of teacher, took every opportunity to give the senator a lesson on the Bill of Rights and the purpose of the Fifth Amendment.

Pressed by McCarthy, he denied engaging in espionage or sabotage, or having ever had access to classified material. But, citing Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, he refused to answer when asked about others, or about his political beliefs. When McCarthy, annoyed, asked Mr. Rosenbaum to explain himself, he said, “I stand with those patriotic Americans who wrote the Bill of Rights as a protection for innocent people against inquisitions of this kind.”

Recalling the incident for Peter Golenbock, the author of “In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World” (2008), Mr. Rosenbaum said, “Before I left the session I had 16 citations for contempt, and it killed me, because I would have liked to have told him off.”

By pleading the Fifth, Mr. Rosenbaum automatically forfeited his job under Section 903 of the City Charter. On April 30, 1954, he received formal notification from the superintendent of schools that he was no longer an employee of the school system.

That was the end of Mr. Rosenbaum’s career as a teacher, and the beginning of a life as a highly successful fund-raiser for the Educational Alliance, the Jewish settlement house on the Lower East Side that grew into a citywide organization, and for Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center (now Long Island Jewish Medical Center).

Mr. Rosenbaum, who changed his name to Theodore in 1954, died at his home in Laguna Woods, Calif., his daughter Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum said.

Terry Rosenbaum was born on Feb. 7, 1918, in Brownsville, where his father, Abraham, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, worked as a baker. After graduating from Tilden High at 15, Terry enrolled in City College. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1937 and a master’s in history from Columbia University two years later.

“My goal was to be a teacher of history in the New York City high schools,” he told Mr. Golenbock. “Which I did. I loved teaching.”

He was initially assigned to a vocational high school, where students calmly explained to him that studying history was pointless to them since they were learning to master a trade. He devised a series of lessons, titled “Why History Is as Important to Me as My Trade,” that explored topics such as wage negotiations and the Depression.

Punctured eardrums kept him out of the Army, and he was assigned to his alma mater, where he taught for the next 11 years. At the same time, he became involved in local organizations campaigning for better social conditions. He joined the American Labor Party, and in 1944 was asked to run for the State Assembly. He balked, he said, “but then it occurred to me that one of the best ways to promote the issues — rent control, price control, discrimination — was to get active in politics, so I agreed to run.”

As expected, he did not win, but he did attract a healthy share of the vote. He later ran, without success, three more times for the Assembly, once for City Council and once for Congress.

It was after the school system fired him that he changed his too-noticeable first name to Theodore, and began going by Ted. He was turned down when he applied for a state license to sell life insurance for a friend’s company. He worked at a brassiere factory and sold the World Book Encyclopedia door to door before being hired as a fund-raiser at Yeshiva University.

At the Educational Alliance, he scored a major coup when, tipped off by a guard, he learned the identity of a mysterious stranger who periodically pulled up in a limousine, went into the building’s auditorium and sat in the back row for hours, silently. It was David Sarnoff, the founder of RCA, the electronics company.

He arranged a meeting, and Sarnoff, in tears, told of his childhood days, when he sold newspapers outside the alliance’s building and, after being invited inside, acted in one of its plays. Sarnoff agreed to take a leading role in raising a half-million dollars to help the alliance renovate and upgrade its main building, which was renamed the David Sarnoff Building in 1970.

At Long Island Jewish Hospital, where he was hired in 1970 as director of capital development, Mr. Rosenbaum led the fund-raising campaign to build a new children’s hospital, which opened in 1983.

In 1972, after the Supreme Court struck down Section 903 as unconstitutional, Mr. Rosenbaum and other teachers fired during the McCarthy era were reinstated as teachers. Four years later he regained the rights to his pension.

In addition to his daughter Lisa, he is survived by his wife, the former Beth Wechsler, a longtime elementary-school teacher, another daughter, Amy Rosenbaum; and three grandchildren.

In 1990, Mr. Rosenbaum retired to Leisure World (now Laguna Woods Village), a retirement community in Orange County, Calif. There, for the next 25 years, he worked as the political coordinator and as the public face of the community’s chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, which campaigns for a single-payer national health system. “This issue turns me on,” he told Mr. Golenbock, “even at age 90-plus.”



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11) California: Number of Starving Birds Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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12) The Prison Problem
By

Pretty much everybody from Barack Obama to Carly Fiorina seems to agree that far too many Americans are stuck behind bars. And pretty much everybody seems to have the same explanation for how this destructive era of mass incarceration came about.

First, the war on drugs got out of control, meaning that many nonviolent people wound up in prison. Second, mandatory-minimum sentencing laws led to a throw-away-the-key culture, with long, cruel and pointlessly destructive prison terms.

It’s true that mass incarceration is a horrific problem. Back in the 1970s the increase in incarceration did help reduce the crime rate, maybe accounting for a third of the drop. But today’s incarceration levels do little to deter crime while they do much to rip up families, increase racial disparities and destroy lives.

The popular explanation for how we got here, however, seems to be largely wrong, and most of the policy responses flowing from it may therefore be inappropriate.

The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90 percent of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17 percent of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.

Moreover, the share of people imprisoned for drug offenses is dropping sharply, down by 22 percent between 2006 and 2011. Writing in Slate, Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.

The war on drugs does not explain the rocketing rates of incarceration, and ending that war, wise or not, will not solve this problem.

The mandatory-minimum theory is also problematic. Experts differ on this, but some of the most sophisticated work with the best data sets has been done by John Pfaff of Fordham Law School. When I spoke with Pfaff on Monday I found him to be wonderfully objective, nonideological and data-driven.

His research suggests that while it’s true that lawmakers passed a lot of measures calling for long prison sentences, if you look at how much time inmates actually served, not much has changed over the past few decades. Roughly half of all prisoners have prison terms in the range of two to three years, and only 10 percent serve more than seven years. The laws look punitive, but the time served hasn’t increased, and so harsh laws are not the main driver behind mass incarceration, either.

So what does explain it? Pfaff’s theory is that it’s the prosecutors. District attorneys and their assistants have gotten a lot more aggressive in bringing felony charges. Twenty years ago they brought felony charges against about one in three arrestees. Now it’s something like two in three. That produces a lot more plea bargains and a lot more prison terms.I asked Pfaff why prosecutors are more aggressive. He’s heard theories. Maybe they are more political and they want to show toughness to raise their profile to impress voters if they run for future office. Maybe the police are bringing stronger cases. Additionally, prosecutors are usually paid by the county but prisons by the state, so prosecutors tend not to have to worry about the financial costs of what they do.

Pfaff says there’s little evidence so far to prove any of these theories, since the prosecutorial world is largely a black box. He also points out that we have a radically decentralized array of prosecutors, with some elected and some appointed. Changing their behavior cannot be done with one quick fix.

Some politicians and activists suggest that solving this problem will be easy — just release the pot smokers and the low-level dealers. In reality, reducing mass incarceration means releasing a lot of once-violent offenders. That may be the right thing to do in individual cases, but it’s a knotty problem.

Two final points. Everybody is railing against the political establishment and experts and experienced politicians. But social problems are invariably more complex than they look. The obvious explanation for most problems is often wrong. It takes experience and craftsmanship to design policies that grapple with the true complexity of reality.

Finally, recategorizing a problem doesn’t solve it. In the 1970s, we let a lot of people out of mental institutions. Over the next decades we put a lot of people into prisons. But the share of people kept out of circulation has been strangely continuous. In the real world, crime, lack of education, mental health issues, family breakdown and economic hopelessness are all intertwined.

Changing prosecutor behavior might be a start. Lifting the spirits of inmates, as described in the outstanding Atlantic online video “Angola for Life,” can also help. But the fundamental situation won’t be altered without a comprehensive surge, unless we flood the zone with economic, familial, psychological and social repair.


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13) At the U.N., Raúl Castro of Cuba Calls for End to U.S. Embargo
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN

President Raúl Castro of Cuba called for an end to the economic embargo of his country on Monday at the United Nations General Assembly, repeating a sentiment offered earlier in the day by President Obama.

“Diplomatic relations have been restored between Cuba and the United States,” Mr. Castro declared, adding: “Now begins the long and complex process” of lifting the 53-year-old embargo.

President Obama, speaking in the U.N. chamber earlier in the day, suggested that the U.S. Congress would eventually do just that.

“I’m confident that our Congress will inevitably lift an embargo that should not be in place anymore,” Mr. Obama said in his own speech.

In addition to lifting the embargo, Mr. Castro also called on the United States to return the land occupied by an American military base in Guantánamo Bay, and end anti-government radio and television broadcasts as well as programs he described as “subversive and destabilizing.”The United States and Cuba re-established full diplomatic relations in July, when the diplomatic missions in each country were upgraded from interest sections to embassies.

Mr. Castro and Mr. Obama met for the first time in April and were expected to meet again on Tuesday.

In his address to the General Assembly, Mr. Castro also declared his solidarity with other left-leaning governments of Latin America including Venezuela and Ecuador.

And he blamed the Western industralized nations of NATO for what he characterized as their destabilizing involvement in the Middle East for the current refugee crisis and said, “Europe should take full responsibility for the human crisis that it helped create.”


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14) Missouri Finds Planned Parenthood Didn’t Mishandle Fetal Tissue
By

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/us/planned-parenthood-fetal-tissue-missouri.html?ref=us

An investigation by the attorney general’s office in Missouri has found no evidence that a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state illegally handled fetal tissue.

The conclusions of the attorney general, Chris Koster, were released a day before the organization called for a nationwide demonstration on Tuesday called “National Pink Out Day” to rally support after recent controversy over undercover videos by abortion opponents.

Mr. Koster’s office said in a report released on Monday that it had been asked by Missouri residents and lawmakers to investigate Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic, the only one in the state licensed to perform surgical abortions.

The request to look into practices at the clinic came after the opponents released videos in July that they said showed that Planned Parenthood nationwide illegally handled and disposed of fetal tissue.Planned Parenthood has repeatedly denied the claims made in the videos, which were made surreptitiously by an anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress and released during the summer.

The Missouri attorney general’s report said that it reviewed more than 3,500 pages of documents and conducted multiple interviews of representatives at the clinic and the pathology laboratory. The 47-page report included copies of lab reports and waste-disposal tracking documents.

It said the investigation covered 317 surgical abortions that took place in June, a month that was chosen because the procedures happened before the release of the videos in July.

“As a result of our investigation, the Office of the Missouri Attorney General has found no evidence that PPSLR has engaged in unlawful disposal of fetal organs and tissue,” the report said, using the abbreviation of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region.

Planned Parenthood, which provides an array of health services, including abortions, through clinics and affiliates nationwide, is under criticism over the use of aborted fetal tissue that it provides for medical research.

Led by Republicans, many in Congress want to cut off all federal funding to the organization, and some lawmakers have threatened to shut down the federal government in order to do so.

The president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, appeared before Congress on Tuesday in her first testimony since the undercover videos emerged. In an opinion piece published in The Huffington Post before her testimony, Ms. Richards said the claims by the activists in the heavily edited videos were “false and discredited.”

On Monday, Planned Parenthood sued Utah’s governor for directing state agencies to discontinue their contracts with the health care provider after the videos were released, Reuters reported.
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15) How Many Deaths Did Volkswagen’s Deception Cause in the U.S.?
"The impact of smog and soot pollution on global health is substantial: A recent paper by Jos Lelieveld, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, and colleagues estimated that air pollution causes some three million premature deaths a year, and that the number of deaths could more than double by 2050. ...The part of the country that has probably experienced the most harm from the Volkswagen fraud is California, which already has the worst air quality in the nation. About 7,200 premature deaths a year are caused by air pollution there, according to the California Air Resources Board, and 73 percent of the state’s population, or 28 million people, live in counties with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution."
By

Volkswagen’s diesel deception unleashed tons of extra pollutants in the United States, pollutants that can harm human health. So while many commentators have been quick to say that the cheating engines are not a highway safety concern, safety — as in health — is still an issue.Unlike the ignition defect in General Motors vehicles that caused at least 124 people to die in car crashes, Volkswagen pollution is harder to link to individual deaths. But it is clear to public health researchers that the air pollutants the cars illegally emitted damage health, and they have formulas for the number of lives lost from excess pollution in general. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency uses its own estimates of the health effects of air pollution to create its regulations of what’s allowed. After consulting with several experts in modeling the health effects of air pollutants, we calculated a death toll in the United States that, at its upper range, isn’t far off from that caused by the G.M. defect.

Volkswagen said last week that it had installed software that deceived emissions tests in 11 million diesel cars, allowing the vehicles to emit far more pollutants than regulations allowed. Our estimates examine only the impact on public health in the United States, but it’s clear the negative effects were probably substantially higher in Europe, where the cars are much more common.

The chemicals that spewed illegally from the Volkswagen diesel cars — known as nitrogen oxides or NOx — have been linked to a host of respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, as well as premature deaths. Nitrogen oxides are a byproduct of burning fossil fuels at high temperature, whether in cars, power plants or other machines like industrial boilers. The chemicals can be harmful to humans, and in warm, sunny conditions, they can also turn into ground-level ozone, or smog, and unhealthy particle pollution.

Nitrogen dioxide and ozone irritate the lungs, increasing airway inflammation, coughing and wheezing, and can lower resistance to respiratory illness like influenza, especially with long-term exposure. The chemicals can also worsen the suffering and risk of serious illness or premature death for those with conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Older people, who are more likely to have these ailments, are particularly vulnerable.

The impact of smog and soot pollution on global health is substantial: A recent paper by Jos Lelieveld, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, and colleagues estimated that air pollution causes some three million premature deaths a year, and that the number of deaths could more than double by 2050.

The American Lung Association estimates that nearly 41 percent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone. And that’s with reductions brought about by national air quality standards and regulation. Between 1980 and 2014, the E.P.A. estimates that nitrogen dioxide levels in the air fell by more than half. The Obama administration has stepped up its regulation of emissions from power plants and tightened standards for vehicles. A still tougher ozone standard is expected next month.

The part of the country that has probably experienced the most harm from the Volkswagen fraud is California, which already has the worst air quality in the nation. About 7,200 premature deaths a year are caused by air pollution there, according to the California Air Resources Board, and 73 percent of the state’s population, or 28 million people, live in counties with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.

California also has the largest number of diesel passenger cars — some 50,000 of them, said Dave Clegern, a spokesman for the state’s air resources board, which regulates air quality in the state. Regulation has helped, Mr. Clegern said, but “we still have a significant problem.” Regulations are developed with automakers at the table, he said, and “in order to do that, you have to have a level of trust.” Regarding the Volkswagen deception, he said, “This kind of thing is, to say the least, absolutely no help.”

The potential damage of technologies like the “defeat device” that allowed Volkswagen to evade pollution rules since late 2008 is substantial. Volkswagen diesel cars represent fewer than 1 percent of cars on the road in the United States. But if every car — gasoline, diesel and electric hybrid — exceeded the legal limits by a similar amount, the consequences for air pollution and human health would be significant.

“Beijing comes to mind,” said Paul Billings, a senior vice president at the American Lung Association.

To estimate the harm in the United States, we used two different scientific models for the effects of nitrogen oxide pollution on human health.

One comes from a sort of natural experiment, when new regulations on power plant pollution caused some counties, but not others, to cut back on nitrogen oxide pollution. The counties subject to regulation reduced their nitrogen oxides emissions by 350 tons a year.

A team of three researchers — Olivier Deschenes, Joseph S. Shapiro and Michael Greenstone — looked at the mortality rates and medical spending before and after the change. In a working paper, they found the reduced pollution was responsible for about five fewer deaths for every 100,000 people in the affected counties each year, as well as for a decrease in spending on prescription drugs. Most of the seemingly excess deaths in the higher pollution regions occurred among older Americans, though other health issues affected the young as well as the old.

The estimated Volkswagen pollution, about 46,000 tons since late 2008, is the equivalent of about 4 percent of the power plant pollution reduction they measured, meaning it could be expected to cause an estimated 106 deaths if it had similar effects.We ran this projection by Mr. Greenstone, a professor of economics and director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, and a contributor to The Upshot. He said it seemed sensible as an estimate, but “the magnifying glass is really close.”

Noelle Eckley Selin, an associate professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at M.I.T., ran the numbers a slightly different way. She looked at the mortality effects of the particulate pollution produced by nitrogen oxides, using the numbers the Environmental Protection Agency uses to make health estimates. Her method brought the effects to about 40 additional deaths over the period, in addition to some other nonfatal health consequences. That probably undercounts the impact, though, since it does not consider the effects of direct nitrogen oxide pollution or smog.

Now for all the caveats. Our estimates for the amount of nitrogen oxide pollution are back-of-the-envelope. We relied on data from Kelley Blue Book on the number of Volkswagen diesel cars registered each year, and we applied a standard number of miles driven by each car, based on a government average, to arrive at a total number of vehicle-miles traveled.

The E.P.A. has said that the vehicles emitted up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides. But earlier research suggests that the pollution levels ranged widely among the vehicles and their driving conditions. We looked at 39 times the legal standard, but that may be a high assumption. (If you want to estimate the effects for emissions at, say, 29 times the legal limit, you can adjust our numbers down accordingly.)

Because smog is worse in the summer, Mr. Greenstone recommended that we look at pollution from five months each year. Ms. Selin’s approach was based on year-round pollution levels.

Of course, modeling the health effects of tailpipe emissions is more complicated than the sort of straight multiplication we have employed in both methods. The harm from nitrogen oxide pollution depends on how close people are to roads, as well as on topography and weather patterns. People who live in large cities, or near major roads, tend to experience disproportionate harm. Other news organizations, including Vox and The Guardian, have calculated slightly different estimates of the amount of pollution and the resulting harm.

Don Anair, deputy director of the vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the precise effect of the Volkswagen fraud would require intense and complex computation.

Still, he cautioned against taking the view that the Volkswagens have reversed the progress with pollution from automobiles. Since the standards went into effect from 2004 to 2009, he said, emissions of nitrogen oxides have been 90 percent lower. “It’s not like this is going to offset the majority of the benefits of these standards,” he said. “But there will be some impact, and we need to get a better handle on it.”


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16) Florida: Officer Killed Man Who Bit Him, Police Say
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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17) New York City Bar Association Urges Reduction of Mass Incarceration in Report
By TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG

The New York City Bar Association released a report on Monday urging federal and state leaders to “make the reduction of mass incarceration a top priority.”

Titled “Mass Incarceration: Seizing the Moment for Reform,” the report offers several recommendations for changing sentencing laws and other policies on the state and federal levels, including repealing or reducing mandatory minimum terms, reducing sentences for nonviolent offenses and providing sentencing alternatives to prison.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who is a member of the City Bar Association’s executive committee, said in an interview on Sunday, “Judges did not make the laws that have led to mass incarceration, but we have had to implement them and we have seen firsthand, therefore, some of the terrible results.”

He added, “We have a role to play in trying to make the public aware of problems in the criminal justice system in our country that we as judges see and participate in every day of our lives.”

Politicians from both major parties, legal scholars and activists have recognized mass incarceration as a critical criminal justice issue, especially after police shootings in Ferguson, Mo., and other places, where protesters have repeatedly made connections between racially concentrated policing, the biases of the criminal justice system and mass incarceration.

Over the years, the number of prison sentences and their lengths have increased for both violent and nonviolent offenses, even as crime rates have dropped. This is largely a result of mandatory minimum terms for certain offenses, such as drug convictions, though there are other contributing factors, the report said.

The report also includes many statistics that point out the cost, both human and economic, of certain criminal justice policies. In the United States, more than two million people are imprisoned, including those in local jails — a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

The report also highlights the racial disparities of incarceration: One in 35 African-American men and one in 88 Latino men are in prison, and African-American men are six times more likely than white men to be behind bars. Since 1970, the report states, the prison population has increased fourfold, costing taxpayers $260 billion every year.

“It is heart-rending to see case after case of young black males who are, because of the severe laws that we have, going to be ripped from their families and often spend some of the most formative years of their lives in prison with devastating effects on them, on their families and on the communities as a whole,” Judge Rakoff said.

The City Bar Association is also creating a task force comprising defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges and others to continue to examine the issue.

The bar association has often weighed in on laws and policies that affect New York State and the city, and Judge Rakoff is among several sitting judges who have offered opinions on mass incarceration.

New York City has also emerged as a leader in the effort to reduce prison populations, mostly through its system of drug courts for dealing with nonviolent offenses that often sends people to rehabilitation programs rather than to prison, Judge Rakoff said. He added that New York is not the only city or municipality with these drug courts.

Though advocates and scholars who study the issue said Judge Rakoff’s stance was symbolic and important, they saw a need for more direct engagement.

Alyssa Aguilera, a political director for VOCAL-NY, an advocacy organization for low-income people affected by H.I.V. and AIDS, the drug war and mass incarceration, said that while it was a positive development to see recognition of the issue at many levels, “ultimately, the way that we are able to see change is through our legislative process and through policy shifts in the city, state and nationwide.”

Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan who studies mass imprisonment and served on the National Academy of Science’s blue ribbon panel on its causes and consequences, said that the focus on sentencing guidelines was important, but that more attention needed to be paid to re-entry programs and addressing the fallout of mass incarceration.

Additionally, she said, Americans should not forget that mass imprisonment is a political product: “Through the politicians we elected, we chose the disastrous policies that led to the crisis of mass incarceration.

“We didn’t need to do it because of historically remarkable crime rates. We chose it, so we must now unchoose it.”


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18) As Banks Retreat, Private Equity Rushes to Buy Troubled Home Mortgages
"Housing advocates and lawyers for borrowers contend that the private equity firms and hedge funds are too quick to push homes into foreclosure and are even less helpful than the banks had been in negotiating loan modifications with borrowers. Federal and state lawmakers are taking up the issue, questioning why federal agencies are selling loans at a discount of as much as 30 percent to such firms."
By

Private equity and hedge fund firms have bought more than 100,000 troubled mortgages at a discount from banks and federal housing agencies, emerging as aggressive liquidators for the remains of the mortgage crisis that erupted nearly a decade ago.

As the housing market nationwide recovers, this is a dark corner from which banks, stung by hefty penalties for bungling mortgage modifications and foreclosures, have retreated. Federal housing officials, for the most part, have welcomed the new financial players as being more nimble and creative than banks with terms for delinquent borrowers.

But the firms are now drawing fire. Housing advocates and lawyers for borrowers contend that the private equity firms and hedge funds are too quick to push homes into foreclosure and are even less helpful than the banks had been in negotiating loan modifications with borrowers. Federal and state lawmakers are taking up the issue, questioning why federal agencies are selling loans at a discount of as much as 30 percent to such firms.

One company has emerged as a lightning rod, criticized by housing advocates and lawyers for borrowers, but admired by investors: Lone Star Funds, a $60 billion private equity firm founded in 1995 by John Grayken. In just a few years, Lone Star’s mortgage servicing firm, Caliber Home Loans, has grown from a bit player to a major force in the market for distressed mortgages.

An examination by The New York Times of housing data and court filings, as well as interviews with borrowers, lawyers and housing advocates, revealed a pattern of complaints that Lone Star was quick to begin foreclosure proceedings, whether the firm had bought a delinquent mortgage at a federal auction or directly from a bank.

Take Charles and Pamela Hubbard of Sacramento. They briefly lost their home when Lone Star’s Caliber subsidiary dealt harshly with their request for a loan modification. The couple said they had submitted the application to reduce their monthly mortgage payments four days before a planned foreclosure sale, but the Lone Star subsidiary said the Hubbards had been late in completing the application and pushed ahead with the sale.

Within a month, the three-bedroom house that the Hubbards had lived in for two decades was auctioned off to another affiliate of Lone Star with the right to resell it later. The foreclosure was rescinded only after the couple went to court.

Caliber declined to comment on individual borrowers, but it said that in general, it was “committed to providing the best possible service to all borrowers, and identifying solutions that allow troubled borrowers to continue to pay their mortgages and stay in their homes is our top priority.” It said it had one of the highest loan modification rates in the industry.

Another window into how Caliber and Lone Star operate can be seen in a rare look into one of Lone Star’s biggest deals — a bundle of 17,000 distressed mortgages that had an unpaid balance of $2.96 billion.

With money from public pension funds, Lone Star bought those mortgages in the summer of 2014 at an auction held by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The loans were originally underwritten before the financial crisis by banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, with insurance guarantees from the Federal Housing Administration.

The list of those mortgages was provided to The Times by the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio, which obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

HUD rules barred Lone Star from foreclosing on most of the mortgages it had acquired until early March. But since then, the firm has picked up the pace of foreclosures, an analysis showed.

As of the end of August, Lone Star and Caliber had foreclosed on at least 1,500 of those formerly F.H.A.-guaranteed mortgages — or 9 percent of the pool, according to an analysis of the home addresses performed by RealtyTrac, a foreclosure tracking service. Many of the foreclosed homes are clustered in Florida, Ohio, New Jersey, California and Texas.

A majority of the homes foreclosed on by Caliber have been bought back by another Lone Star affiliate at either a trustee or sheriff’s auction. The private equity firm is looking to resell the homes, and many can be found on Zillow, an online real estate listing service.

Moving Fast in Ohio

This foreclosure push was felt by John P. Glynn and his wife, Tammy, of Gahanna, Ohio. They were working with JPMorgan Chase on a loan modification when their mortgage was sold to Lone Star in last summer’s HUD auction.

After Caliber took over the handling of the Glynns’ mortgage, the talks that had been going on with JPMorgan over a modification ended. Caliber filed a lawsuit in February seeking to foreclose on the loan.

“I got the impression they didn’t want to work anything out,” said Mr. Glynn, an industrial engineer.

Caliber is now working toward reaching a settlement with the Glynns.

The firm said it had modified or restructured loans for 2,300 delinquent borrowers in the HUD pool. It noted that modifications were outpacing foreclosures and that it expected “the number of successful modifications to continue to increase over time.”

The number of foreclosures can be expected to rise as well.

In February, a HUD report analyzing the status of some of the 79,000 soured mortgages it sold over the last five years — including those bought by Lone Star — reported that 20 percent of the mortgages had been foreclosed, 9 percent had been restructured and 6.4 percent had been resold to other firms or investors. Borrowers remained delinquent on about half the loans.

In addition to Lone Star, other private equity firms have emerged as big buyers of troubled mortgages from federal agencies and banks. They include Bayview Asset Management, an affiliate of Blackstone Group, and Selene Investment Partners.

These firms have swarmed into troubled mortgages because they can squeeze profits from these loans by either restructuring them or by foreclosing on them and then repackaging the distressed loans into bonds that are sold to mutual funds and hedge funds.

Private equity’s push into the distressed mortgage market has produced some benefits. Thousands of homes that were abandoned by borrowers are now back on the market. In the HUD sales, about 10 percent of homes were vacant, according to the February report.

Still, housing advocates argue that federal housing agencies should make it easier for nonprofit organizations to have a better chance to compete for troubled mortgages, believing that these groups would work harder to avoid foreclosures.

Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote this year to Julian Castro, the HUD secretary, expressing concern that nonprofit housing groups were too often losing out to private equity firms in the bidding for distressed mortgages.

In his letter, Mr. Capuano, who singled out Lone Star, said the HUD sales “may turn out to be an efficient new mechanism for increasing evictions.”

The tendency to act quickly on foreclosures is, in part, by design.

The acquisition of distressed mortgages by Lone Star is the engine in a well-oiled securitization machine that assumes that foreclosure and resale of the homes are inevitable components of the process. In these securitizations, many of the soured loans are bundled into bonds that yield up to 4 percent. They are then sold to hedge funds and mutual funds.

The short-term securities generate income for investors from the proceeds derived from foreclosing on the mortgages and then selling the homes on the open market. Last year, Lone Star sold 17 such securitizations, with a combined unpaid loan balance of $10 billion, and the firm is on pace to complete a similar number of deals this year, according to Intex Solutions, a securitization deal tracking service.

A confidential offering document for one of these Lone Star deals — named VOLT 2015 NPL, a transaction backed by 4,895 delinquent mortgages — indicates that the firm considers foreclosure and sale of the homes the most likely outcome for a majority of the loans.

The offering statement, reviewed by The Times, says “payments on the notes are expected to largely come from liquidation and sale proceeds, although there are expected to be collections each month from monthly payments by mortgagors.”

The document notes that about 9 percent of the mortgages were part of the pool of loans purchased from HUD.

Lone Star and other private equity buyers contend that many of the foreclosures involve homes that have been abandoned by borrowers, or loans beyond hope. The private equity firms also maintain that foreclosures are less profitable than modifications because the process is costly and time-consuming, and the homeowners are not making any payments for years at a time.

Federal housing officials reject much of the criticism of their sales of loans to firms like Lone Star, noting that many of the borrowers have not made a mortgage payment in three years. The private buyers, officials say, often represent borrowers’ last, best hope of striking a deal that can keep them in their homes. HUD officials also point out that the loan sales have reduced the obligation of the F.H.A. insurance program to guarantee mortgages against default, saving billions in the process.

In a letter in May responding to the criticism from Mr. Capuano, the Massachusetts congressman, Erika L. Moritsugu, a HUD assistant secretary, said the program was “putting the loans in the hands of purchasers motivated to help a borrower reperform.”

She said the private buyers were expected to reduce the principal owed by a borrower because “that is often the best way to help someone who is multiple years in arrears” and “headed for foreclosure.”

Nonetheless, in response to the criticism, HUD recently increased the period during which a private buyer cannot foreclose on homes to 12 months from six months, and it sought to create smaller pools of loans to give nonprofits a better chance at submitting winning bids.

While HUD has hoped that buyers of its loans will seek to reduce permanently the principal or debt owed by a borrower, Caliber tends not to do so.

In the first half of 2015, Fitch Ratings said of the loans it had reviewed, Caliber had not completed any modifications that included permanent principal reductions.

Instead, Caliber generally offers to modify loans for five years, during which a borrower makes either reduced monthly payments or simply pays interest on the loan. But those modifications revert to their original payment terms in the sixth year, sometimes with any deferred unpaid principal or unpaid interest added to the back end of the loan.

Short-Term Relief

Such deals provide short-term relief to borrowers but do not provide a permanent remedy for homeowners short of cash.

George Velazquez, 51, an auto appraiser who lives on Staten Island with his wife, Evelyn, said there was no room to negotiate with Caliber when it presented him with a five-year interest-only mortgage modification after Lone Star bought their loan from HSBC.

Diane Cipollone, a lawyer and a consultant to the National Fair Housing Alliance, said these kinds of modifications simply delay the inevitable and do not present “good odds for any of these borrowers to keep their homes when the temporary modifications expire.”

Phillip Harris, 62, who has black lung disease, has lived for more than 40 years in a three-story building in San Francisco that doubles as his home and a boardinghouse. Caliber threatened to foreclose on the mortgage a few months after Lone Star bought the loan from Bank of America and scheduled a sale of the property for March 19.

Mr. Harris sent in an application for a loan modification — a move that under California law would stop the foreclosure process. But because the documents were not yet in Caliber’s computer system, the firm said it intended to go ahead with the foreclosure and sale of the house.

About a week before the trustee sale, Mr. Harris and his lawyer, Tiffany Norman, said they called Caliber and spoke with an employee who identified herself only as Katrina. On the recorded call, Mr. Harris and his lawyer repeatedly told the Caliber employee that the application had been submitted.

“We definitely don’t doubt you guys sent that in,” the Caliber employee said during the phone call, a recording of which was produced in litigation. But the employee said there was nothing she could do to stop the sale because it took five to seven days for an application to be “uploaded into” Caliber’s system.

Ms. Norman went to court and got a temporary restraining order against Caliber. A few weeks ago, a Caliber lawyer approached Ms. Norman about a potential settlement.

Formerly known as Vericrest Financial, Caliber has grown rapidly. Today it manages more than 327,465 mortgages with a combined value of just over $71 billion. Some of Caliber’s growth has come from Lone Star’s steering of standard mortgage origination business to the firm by requiring prospective buyers of the foreclosed homes it puts up for sale to be prequalified for a mortgage from Caliber.

As Caliber has grown, so have the customer complaints. More than 1,000 complaints have been lodged with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with complaints running 54 percent higher than a year ago, the agency reports. Caliber said in an email that the modifications it had made had reduced the average borrower’s monthly payments more than 20 percent.

“A collaborative solution that turns a nonperforming loan into a performing loan is not only the best outcome for homeowners, but it is the most attractive economic outcome for the long-term oriented investors who own the mortgages,” Caliber said.

Help From the Court

In the case of the Hubbards, it took court action to get Lone Star and Caliber to work with them.

Lone Star bought the loan on their three-bedroom home in Sacramento from Beneficial Financial, a division of HSBC, in the summer of 2014 for an undisclosed sum.

Soon after buying the mortgage, which had an unpaid balance of $300,000, Caliber and Lone Star moved to foreclose. The sale of the home on Jan. 20 sent the couple running to court. They argued that the sale took place even as Caliber employees said they were trying to “find a way to escalate the submission.”

After the Hubbards sued, Caliber and the couple began negotiating. In May, they agreed to a short-term modification that would reduce the Hubbards’ monthly payments on the mortgage by several hundred dollars, to $1,953 for the next five years.

Caliber filed a formal notice with county officials on May 29 that rescinded the sale of the home to Lone Star.While the matter was resolved, it could have turned out differently if a buyer not affiliated with Lone Star had stepped in to buy the home.

“I don’t know why they went through with it because it just didn’t make any sense,” said Mr. Hubbard, 64, a civilian employee with the Army. “Maybe people who get into these situations are categorized as no good, and they simply don’t want to deal with them.”








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Posted by: bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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