Saturday, September 05, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2015


Planning for Paris 2015
​
Join the Northern California Climate Mobilization

Join us to plan for a mass march and rally leading up to the Paris COP21* UN climate talks.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

7 pm – 9 pm at the Berkeley Unitarian Church

(Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists)

Connie Barbour Room, 1606 Bonita in Berkeley

(at Cedar and Bonita, between MLK, Jr and Shattuck)

Please join us for our next planning meeting aimed to coordinate a mass march and rally in Oakland from the Lake Merritt Amphitheater to Oakland City Hall on November 21st as a lead up to the Paris UN COP21 climate meeting (Nov 30 – Dec 11).  We are a network that has grown and expanded from the groups  who organized the Northern California People's Climate Rally in Oakland on September 21, 2014, in solidarity with the People's Climate March in New York.   Our point of unity are on the reverse side.   We need activists to join our committees:  outreach, media/messaging, and logistics.   And please reach out to your networks and invite other groups to this meeting to help build for climate action.

Contact us at info@norcalclimatemob.net and visit our website: www.norcalclimatemob.net

*COP21 is the 21st "Conference of the Parties" held by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world.

Challenging climate catastrophe the Northern California Climate Mobilization demands:

-A global agreement to implement dramatic and rapid reduction in global warming pollution

-Keep fossil fuels in the ground!

-100 percent clean, safe, renewable energy!

-End all fracking, tar sands mining and pipelines, offshore drilling, arctic drilling.

-Stop expansion of the extractive  economy. Wind, solar, geothermal power now.

-No coal exports or crude-by-rail bomb trains in Northern California.

            These conditions are necessary to create:

●      A world united to repair the ravages of climate change

Industrial countries and polluting corporations of the global north need to pay their ecological debt to society and to the global south by providing funding for developing countries and vulnerable communities worldwide to adapt to the impacts of climate change and convert to sustainable economies.

●      A world with an economy that works for people and the planet

Billions of dollars for energy efficiency and conservation. We need a just transition to a sustainable, demilitarized economy based on renewable energy, clean transportation, and jobs for all at union wages. Convert water-wasting, polluting factory farms to sustainable organic agriculture. End corporate personhood; end "money equals free speech"; end billionaire purchase of elections.

●      A demilitarized world with peace and social justice for everyone; where Black Lives Matter; where good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities belong to all

End all forms of oppression and discrimination. No to environmental racism and pollution of indigenous, low income, and frontline nations and communities. Respect all indigenous lands. No militarized police. No wars. No nuclear weapons or power.   A true ecological approach must integrate questions of justice to protect biodiversity, honor all life on earth and lift all people out of poverty.

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Starting this September, Rising Tide North America is calling for mass actions to shut down the economic and political systems threatening our survival.

Already, hundreds of thousands are streaming into the streets to fight back against climate chaos, capitalism and white supremacy.

This wave of resistance couldn't be more urgent. To stop climate chaos we need a phenomenal escalation in organizing, participation and tactical courage. We need a profound social transformation to uproot the institutions of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, the systems that created the climate crisis. And we need to link arms with allies fighting for migrant justice, dignified work and pay, and an end to the criminalization and brutal policing of black and brown bodies.

We need to #FloodTheSystem.

In the lead up to the United Nations climate talks in Paris, in December, we will escalate local and regional resistance against systems that threaten our collective survival. Together, we will open alternative paths to the failing negotiations of political elites.

This is not another protest. It is a call for a massive economic and political intervention. It is a call to build the relationships needed to sustain our struggles for the long haul. To build popular power along the intersections of race, class, gender and ability. To collectively unleash our power and change everything.

The Story So Far

Over the past year, hundreds of thousands of people have flowed into the streets to fight back.

Fast food workers in over a hundred cities went on strike, with thousands arrested demanding $15 an hour and a union. Young people in Ferguson, protesting the murder of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, showed us the power of sustained action as they fought back against state violence for weeks, reinvigorating a national movement for Black liberation. Hundreds of thousands of climate activists marched at the People's Climate March in New York, and the next day Flood Wall Street shut down the heart of New York's financial district.

Across the country, and the world, powerful movements are using nonviolent direct action to to disrupt business as usual and demand lasting systemic change.

These moments show that broad mobilization and disruption are ways that we can transform our society. It is time we move beyond conventional strategies. Its time we connect across movements and #FloodTheSystem.

Rising Tide North America and its allies call on communities, networks, affinity groups and organizations across the continent to join together this Fall to rapidly escalate the pace and scale of the anti-capitalist climate justice movements.

We need to wash away the root causes of climate change -- capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism. These systems enable the domination of people and Earth. They place gains for the elite before the well being of our communities.

To build the scale of movements necessary to take on this challenge, we need everyone. Using sustained, coordinated direct action we can bring more people into a movement for radical social transformation than ever before.

The upcoming United Nations meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP 21) at the end of the year provide us with an opportunity. Framed as climate negotiations they are really about capitalism and the corporate elites. We have an opportunity to focus the debate on capitalism itself as negotiators wedded to and benefiting from the status quo refuse to discuss the systems that drive the crisis. This is a natural moment to preemptively highlight community resistance and radical alternatives in advance of another colossal failure of international leadership. Through our combined action we can turn the failure of these critical talks into a moment in which the systemic nature of the crisis moves to the center and in which our movements begin to connect and collaborate.

In the past, the climate movement has repeatedly tried days of action and one-day marches. While these have built important relationships, they have not created the sustained movement swells we need. To lay the groundwork for exponential movement growth we are asking groups to convene Action Councils, like those forming in the Pacific Northwest, California, Montana, Northeast and elsewhere, with the intention of coming together to organize sustained actions beginning in late Summer, continuing through November and beyond.

With luck, waves of mobilizations breaking across the continent and world will build off each other to create a flood of resistance to fossil fuel extraction, capitalism and colonialism.

Vision

#FloodTheSystem invites the Rising Tide network, the larger climate justice movements, and other non-climate focused groups to create a flood of massive economic and political disruption of the systems that allow the climate and economic crisis to continue to escalate. This is not a simple call to action or day of action, it's a long-term process. We want to organize a series of actions that would:
  • Build a more robust anti-capitalist movement that clearly defines climate change as a symptom of capitalism. Specifically, we hope to support and catalyze regional organizing networks and relationships to challenge extreme energy infrastructure and the systems of oppression that enable it.
  • Build long term local, regional and continental networks that can continue to coordinate, build connections between movements, and escalate these fights in 2016 and beyond.
  • Begin to work closely with other movements through the analysis of where our struggles intersect and through a commitment to anti-oppressive organizing practices.
  • Share, implement and gain experience in innovative models of horizontal movement structures and mass democracy in organizing that will serve radical forces for the long haul.
  • Create a flood of energy within regions that inspires others to join in with organic, spontaneous actions and organizing. Regional blocks of escalating action are already planned that will lead into, and play off, each other. More emerge everyday.
  • Preemptively highlight community resistance and real alternatives to the fossil fuel economy ahead of the inevitable colossal failure by global elites at the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris.

Principles

#FloodTheSystem will organize and act according to the following principles.
  • Anti-capitalism/colonialism/racism/patriarchy - We see the climate crisis as a symptom of hierarchical social systems based upon domination and exploitation of lands, and predominately people of color. Addressing the crisis at its roots means joining with and supporting those who are fighting for liberation from these and other oppressive systems, and for their replacement with relations based upon equity, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship.
  • Grassroots Led, NGOs in Support Role - Non-profits and NGOs often function to co-opt and defuse resistance into reform-based avenues which are amenable to the social systems we are ultimately seeking to dismantle and replace. The priorities of this mobilization should be driven by groups grounded in and accountable to the communities most impacted by white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, with NGOs in a support role -- not the other way around.
  • Community-Based Alternatives - Corporations, nation-states, and multilateral institutions like the United Nations are integral pillars upholding global capitalism and colonialism. We see alternatives to extreme energy and the climate crisis arising out of social struggles which challenge and seek to replace these institutions and their logics. However, we recognize that there may be important defensive struggles within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, such as fighting the expansion of carbon markets or advancing state recognition of Indigenous land rights.


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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

Sign the Petition:
https://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=40574&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_DeathPenalty~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1507EADP1&ea.url.id=432762&forwarded=true

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

Amn3.pngMayor 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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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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Action Alert!

Stand with Major Tillery


Dear Bonnie,

Listen to Mumia tell this story. Major Tillery stood up to the prison administration: he confronted them in no uncertain terms, noting that Mumia must get to the hospital in time- before he dies. SCI Mahanory Superintendent Kerestes told Major to mind his own business, to which Major replied 'Mumia is my business'.

Please join us in standing in solidarity with Major Tillery, who has been transferred and put in solitary confinement as punishment for demanding that Mumia receive medical care.

"Major is in the hole, not because of drugs, but because of something prison administrators hate and fear among all things: prisoner unity, prisoner solidarity."

- Mumia Abu-Jamal

1. Call prison officials to demand that Major Tillery be released from solitary confinement!

Superintendent Brenda Tritt, SCI Frackville
(570) 874-4516

Dept. Of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel
(717) 728-4109
 
  • State that you are calling about Major Tillery #AM9786, to demand he be released from the RHU and placed back in general population.
  • Inform them that you aware that he is in the hole and being denied medication in retaliation for speaking up for another prisoner.

2. Write Major a letter of solidarity:

Dear Major Tillery,

We honor your brave act of solidarity on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. You urged him to seek medical care and challenged the Prison Superintendent to protect his life. You helped save the life of a fellow prisoner and for that act of solidarity they are trying to bury you in the bowels of SCI Frackville under false charges. No matter how hard they try they cannot hide you under the weight of lies and intimidation. The power of the truth must come to light. Thank you Major Tillery for your courageous service. We salute you!
 
Major George Tillery
AM 9786 
SCI Frackville, 1111 Altamont Blvd, 
Frackville, PA 17931
 

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -Frederick Douglass

Mumia continues to transcend the prison walls, reaching out to us with his profound commentaries. Prison Radio is committed to amplifying Mumia's voice, getting him the medical care he needs to survive, and winning his freedom.


Mumia Abu-Jamal Has Hepatitis C:
Demand Treatment Now!



Mumia Abu-Jamal has Hepatitis C-- and the prison is refusing treatment. We are going back to court to demand critical care, and we can't do it without you. Will you support Mumia getting immediate treatment by giving $250, $100 or even $25 today? Every gift and action makes the difference for Mumia getting the care he needs. Thank you, Noelle.

The time to act is now.

Five months after being rushed to the hospital, new medical tests show that Mumia has active Hepatitis C. But prison officials are refusing to treat him for it.

With your help, that changes- today.

Mumia Abu-Jamal remains weak, ill, and in the prison infirmary.

Five months after being admitted to the hospital with lethal blood sugar levels and in renal failure, he continues to have a debilitating skin rashes, open wounds and swelling across his lower extremities. Because of our relentless demands for medical testing and treatment, we finally know the likely cause of his severe ailments: Hepatitis C.

But what is news to us is not news to his jailers. Prison officials have known that Mumia was Hep. C positive since 2012-- and have done nothing.

Even now that prison doctors know that Mumia's Hep. C is active -from testing they performed solely because we demanded it- they are refusing to provide treatment.

Today, we are going back to court to demand justice for our brother. 

Mumia's legal team (Bret Grote of Abolitionist Law Center and Robert Boyle of New York) is filing an amended lawsuit today, 'Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes', to include medical neglect and demand immediate treatment.

Meanwhile, Prison Radio is working tirelessly to make sure Mumia's legal and medical team have the necessary resources to get Mumia the critical care he needs.

And we can't do it without you.

We need your help today to ensure that the prison treats Mumia's Hepatitis C now!

The world came together for Mumia when he fell unconscious five months ago. Because of our international outcry for justice and the critical steps we took, Mumia is alive today.

Now, we need your help to get Mumia a treatment plan. Can you fight for Mumia's right to medical care by giving $100, $25 or $250 today?

Your donation will:
File an amended lawsuit 'Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes' to include medical neglect
Get Mumia a full Hepatitis C work up and treatment plan

Grant Mumia's consulting physicians access to directly examine Mumia 

Fuel a public campaign to bring Mumia back to health

Support the demand for treatment of Hepatitis C for all Pennsylvania prisoners
Please join us in demanding immediate medical treatment by giving $25, $100 or even $1,000 now. Every gift and action matters.

bit.ly/fight4mumia
I Demand Treatment NOW!
Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,
Noelle Hanrahan
Director, Prison Radio
To give by check:
PO Box 411074
San Francisco, CA
94141
Stock or legacy gifts:
Noelle Hanrahan
(415) 706 - 5222


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

Please donate today to amplify prisoners' voices far and wide beyond the bars:

     Support Prison Radio: prisonradio.org/donate
     Defeat SB 508: bit.ly/defendfreespeech


Copyright © Prison Radio

www,prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Our mailing address is:

Prison Radio PO Box 411074, SF CA 94141

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

Donate Now

$35 is the yearly membership.

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

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

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

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

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

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


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The  Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Mobilizes Support Internationally:
No Execution by Medical Neglect!

International Unions Demand Decent Medical Treatment for Mumia Abu-Jamal

June 2, 2015

Mumia Abu-Jamal was recently sent back to prison after having been hospitalized for the second time. There are some reports that his health is improving. He said to Suzanne Ross of the International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal that "if there had not been an international outcry about the lack of appropriate treatment, in fact AGAINST the 'treatment' that was bringing him so close to death, he was sure he would not be alive today".

In some good news, he was also told by the prison doctor that his biopsy results came back negative.
However, neither Mumia nor his wife, lawyers or consulting doctors have been seen the actual medical reports detailing his condition. The Department of Corrections refuses to hand over his medical records, claiming that they don't have to hand them over because there is litigation to have them released! Denying Mumia and his family his medical records is an outrage!
We would like to inform you about some recent actions taken by unions around the world on behalf of Mumia.

- Unite, the largest union in the UK, representing over 1.4 million members, wrote letters to Governor Tom Wolf, Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel and Legal Counsel Theron Perez protesting Mumia's treatment.

- The International Dockworkers Council, representing 90,000 dockworkers from affiliated unions around the world, wrote an appeal to the labor movement calling for action on behalf of Mumia.
- The Inlandboatmen's Union of the Pacific sent a protest letter to Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel.

We hope that you will continue to take action on behalf of Mumia. Please call and email Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel and demand the following:

1) Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! He should be freed immediatel
2) Confirm what Mumia's medical condition is. Release his medical records to his family and lawyers!

3) Allow Mumia to be given medical treatment from a doctor of his choice. His doctor should be allowed to conduct an on-site medical examination, to communicate by phone with Mumia, and to communicate freely with prison medical staff.

4) Allow Mumia daily visits from his family, friends and lawyers!

5) Conduct an independent investigation of healthcare treatment inside the Pennsylvania prison system!DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, SECRETARY JOHN WETZEL 717 728 4109

We are also attaching a sample union resolution for you to use as a template. Please consider submitting it to your union and asking them to take action on behalf of Mumia. We would also be happy to work with you and make a presentation to your union or community group about his condition.

The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jam


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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) California Death Penalty, Struck Down Over Delays, Faces Next Test
By

Whether California’s application of the death penalty is so drawn out and arbitrary that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment will be argued on Monday before a federal appeals court in Pasadena.

If the lawyers for a condemned man are victorious, the case could bring a reprieve to more than 740 prisoners now on death row at San Quentin State Prison and send legal ripples across the country. Either way, legal experts say, it raises issues about the administration of capital punishment that are likely to reach the Supreme Court over time.

In Monday’s hearing before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, California officials will seek to overturn a surprise ruling last year by a lower federal court, which declared the state’s “death penalty system” to be unconstitutional.Hailed by death penalty opponents as a breakthrough and attacked by others as unwise and legally out of line, the decision was issued on July 16, 2014, by Judge Cormac J. Carney of Federal District Court in Santa Ana. It focused not on disparities in the meting out of death sentences in the first place — the more familiar charge — but on the decades of tangled and prolonged reviews that follow and the rarity of actual executions.

In a scathing account of what he called a dysfunctional system, Judge Carney noted that of the more than 900 people who had been sentenced to death in California since 1978, when the current legal structure was established, only 13 had been executed.

Citing growing delays in a judicial review process that can take 25 years or more, far above the national norm, Judge Carney said death sentences had been transformed, in effect, into “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

The “random few” who are put to death, he said, “will have languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary.”

Judge Carney ruled on the appeal of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned to die in 1995 for a murder and rape and made a last-ditch plea to a federal court after his appeals to the California Supreme Court had been denied. The judge vacated Mr. Jones’s death sentence as he declared California’s capital-punishment process to be generally unconstitutional.

The decision was a stunning one, and California officials have sharply challenged it on both procedure and substance. They say it was illegitimate because Mr. Jones’s arguments about the arbitrariness of the review system — issues going beyond the long delays alone — had not first been considered in the California courts, as required.

Beyond that, according to the brief from the state’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, a Democrat, the delays and rarity of executions do not reflect random quirks. Rather, it says, they are a product of California’s effort to be scrupulously fair, ensuring that condemned prisoners have high-quality lawyers and every opportunity to question the legality of their sentences.

California legislators have required such exhaustive reviews and procedures as “an important safeguard against arbitrariness and caprice,” the state holds, quoting from a 1976 Supreme Court decision.

In a plebiscite in 2012, California voters affirmed the death penalty by a narrow margin, with 52 percent voting to keep it and 48 percent voting to replace it with life in prison without parole.

California inmates normally wait three to five years just for the appointment of a qualified defense lawyer, a delay that may be repeated as convicts pursue two successive state appeals and then a federal one. Beyond the prolonged process of reviewing death sentences, California has had a de facto moratorium on executions since 2006 because of disputes over the method of lethal injection.

The questions of arbitrariness and extreme delay that are raised by the Jones case are important and may well gain purchase in the courts, said Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law and death penalty expert at Hofstra University.

“But that does not necessarily mean that this particular litigation will be the vehicle by which the courts resolve these issues,” he added, noting that procedural or other questions could lead the appeals panel to overrule the Jones decision.

The arguments made by Mr. Jones’s lawyers — and echoed by Judge Carney — are similar in part to those made in June by Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court. In a sweeping dissent, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer went beyond the lethal-injection issue at hand to ask whether the death penalty was so marred by unreliable decisions, arbitrary application and delays that it should be abolished.

But conservative justices responded that death penalty opponents, in their zeal to erect obstacles to executions, were responsible for inordinate delays and unpredictability.

If the Ninth Circuit and even the Supreme Court should uphold Judge Carney’s ruling, this would not necessarily cause the death penalty to unravel nationwide, said Douglas A. Berman, an expert on criminal law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

Judge Carney’s decision turned on details specific to California, and with its high number of condemned prisoners and very low pace of executions, the state is in a class by itself, Mr. Berman said. Still, he added, a similar critique might succeed in a few other states, including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Given the deep divisions within California over the death penalty, Mr. Berman added, the state may, in an odd way that has nothing to do with constitutional principles, be well served by the status quo.

“Voters, and perhaps the executive branch, too, are not that troubled with a system that has lots of death sentences and few executions,” Mr. Berman said.


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2) Three Children Among Migrants Found Crammed in Van Are Hospitalized in Austria
By

VIENNA — Three small children found crammed into a small van with 23 other migrants were hospitalized with severe dehydration in northern Austria, narrowly averting another fatal tragedy for refugees fleeing the Middle East and risking their lives with smugglers, the police said Saturday.

The police found the children around 4 a.m. Friday after a chase of a suspicious vehicle spotted near the Austrian-German border near Braunau.

The discovery came less than 24 hours after the Austrian police found 71 decomposing bodies in a truck southeast of Vienna.

The driver of the vehicle intercepted Friday initially ignored the police appeals to stop, said the police spokesman, David Furtner. Eventually, the driver stopped, and the police found the 26 refugees.

Five-year-old twin girls and a 6-year-old boy, all from Syria, were in life-threatening condition and taken immediately to the hospital in Braunau, Mr. Furtner said. Their conditions have since improved, he said.The driver, a 29-year-old Romanian, has been arrested, Mr. Furtner said.

The grisly discovery of bodies near Vienna has drawn international attention to the trafficking business behind the migration of tens of thousands of people fleeing war and despair in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

On Saturday, three Bulgarians and one Afghan who are suspects in that fatal smuggling case appeared in court in Kecskemet, Hungary, and were ordered to remain in detention pending trial on charges of human trafficking involving torture and financial gain. Officials would not release their identities, and provided few details, but said the suspects had picked up the 71 migrants on the Serbian border.

Ferenc Bicskei, president of the Kecskemet regional court said in a news conference that the local courts had lately been seeing 25 to 30 human smuggling cases each month, and that in response sentences would be more severe.

During the past day, the Hungarian police said, they had detained 2,822 people who crossed the border illegally and started criminal proceedings against 13 smugglers who had tried to drive migrants, crammed in trucks, through the country.

The migrants found on Friday in the van were from Syria, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, the Braunau spokesman added. All have declined to apply for asylum in Austria, saying they want to continue to Germany. This will most likely mean that they will be sent back to Hungary under European Union rules that state that migrants should be registered in the first member state they are proved to have entered.

Palko Karasz contributed reporting from London.


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3) Al Jazeera Journalists Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison in Egypt
By


CAIRO — An Egyptian judge on Saturday handed down an unexpectedly harsh verdict in the trial of three journalists from the Al Jazeera English news channel, sentencing them to three years in prison on charges that legal experts said were unfounded and politically motivated.

The verdict was especially stunning because Egyptian officials had repeatedly signaled that they viewed the trial as a nuisance that had brought unwanted scrutiny of the government. The families of the journalists, Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste, said they had expected that the men would either be exonerated or sentenced to time already served.

But instead, the judge, Hassan Farid, upheld what human rights advocates said was among many baseless accusations leveled during the journalists’ long legal odyssey: that they had “broadcast false news” about Egypt on Al Jazeera.The judge also said that the men, who had all previously worked for other international news organizations, were not journalists because they lacked the necessary credentials.

Prosecutors had accused them of plotting with the Muslim Brotherhood to produce false news reports, but had offered no evidence of either collaboration with the Brotherhood or of any erroneous broadcasts.

The verdict appeared to reinforce a growing conviction among analysts and diplomats that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who rules without a legislature, does not command full obedience from Egypt’s fractious bureaucracy, including its courts. Mr. Sisi has said in the past that he would have deported the journalists rather than try them.

At the same time, the verdict suggested enthusiasm in Egypt’s ruling circles for restricting free speech, even two years after the military takeover that brought Mr. Sisi to power.

“I’m completely shocked,” said Adel Fahmy, Mr. Fahmy’s brother, after the verdict was read. “Everything was pointing towards exoneration today. They keep on disappointing us with this unbelievable judicial system.”

Mr. Fahmy and Mr. Mohamed, who had been free on bail, were remanded into custody after the hearing on Saturday. Mr. Greste, an Australian citizen, was deported in February under a presidential decree that allows the expulsion of foreigners convicted of crimes.

Mr. Fahmy, who holds Canadian citizenship, could still be deported under the same decree, but Mr. Mohamed, an Egyptian citizen, would not be eligible. Their families and lawyers said they would appeal the sentence.

Amal Clooney, a lawyer for Mr. Fahmy, told journalists after the hearing that she would ask Mr. Sisi to pardon her client and his colleagues. “What just happened in that courtroom was an outrage,” Ms. Clooney said.

The State Department said in a statement that the United States was “deeply disappointed and concerned” by the verdict, which “undermines the very freedom of expression necessary for stability and development.”

The three men were arrested in December 2013. Their arrests were among thousands carried out by the government after the military ouster in July 2013 of Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader and Egypt’s first fairly elected president.

The decision to prosecute the journalists was seen as part of a broader attempt by the military-backed government to stifle the news media and free expression. This summer, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that at least 18 journalists were imprisoned in Egypt — the highest number since the group began keeping records in 1990.

Analysts have said that journalists were also primarily victims of the damaged relations between Egypt and the government of Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera and is a strong supporter of the Brotherhood.

The journalists were convicted after a first trial that human rights advocates said showcased Egypt’s frequently slapdash prosecutions and capricious court judgments. In that trial, Ms. Clooney noted, the journalists were found by the judge to have been “in a plot with Satan.”

In January, Egypt’s highest appeals court ordered a retrial.

Mr. Mohamed, who appeared most likely to serve his sentence, was given an additional six months by the judge on Saturday — apparently for possessing a spent bullet casing at the time of his arrest that he had picked up one day at a protest.


David D. Kirkpatrick and Merna Thomas contributed reporting.


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4) No Retrial for North Carolina Officer Who Killed Unarmed Man
By JONATHAN M. KATZ


DURHAM, N.C. — North Carolina will not retry a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man who had just survived a car crash, state officials said Friday. The officer’s trial ended in a hung jury.

Officer Randall Kerrick killed 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell at 2:45 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2013, shooting at him 12 times and hitting him 10 times on a dark street in a Charlotte subdivision. Officer Kerrick was charged with voluntary manslaughter. His trial ended this month in a mistrial, with four jurors wanting to convict and eight to acquit.

“In consideration of the jurors’ comments, the evidence available to the state and our background in criminal trials, it is our prosecutors’ unanimous belief a retrial will not yield a different result,” a North Carolina senior deputy attorney general, Robert C. Montgomery, wrote to the district attorney for Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

Mr. Montgomery said that the charges against Officer Kerrick would be dismissed.Mr. Ferrell’s mother, Georgia, said by telephone from her home in Tallahassee, Fla., that state prosecutors had called her around 9:30 a.m. on Friday to tell her they doubted they could win a second trial.

“I think it’s just an excuse because they don’t want to try him anymore,” Ms. Ferrell said. “I think that the fact that he’s a cop killing a black man is just another random thing. They feel they have done enough. It’s not their child. It’s just a black child.”

Mr. Ferrell was driving his fiancée’s car home when he ran off the road. The airbag deployed and he lost his cellphone. He walked barefoot to a nearby home and knocked on the door. But the homeowner, Sarah McCartney, who is white, feared he was a robber, set off her burglar alarm and called 911.

On encountering Mr. Ferrell, one of the three police officers who responded to the scene immediately aimed his Taser, a dashboard camera video showed. Mr. Ferrell began to run as the Taser fired.

Officer Kerrick, who turned off his own dashboard camera upon arriving at the scene, cannot be seen in the video. He testified that he had had no choice and had shot in self-defense, believing that Mr. Ferrell wanted to take his gun.

The defense characterized Mr. Ferrell, who had no criminal record, as a would-be burglar who had tried to break down Ms. McCartney’s door and was looking for another house to rob when the police arrived. Mr. Ferrell’s family members were furious over that portrayal and are frustrated with prosecutors who, they said, did not do an adequate job.

After the hung jury was announced, a small group of protesters staged a “die-in” protest, lying down in the street next to the courthouse, then walked to the courthouse door chanting, “Stop killing us!” and “Black lives matter!”

Later that night, demonstrators were met with a heavy response by police officers in riot gear outside the city’s minor-league baseball stadium. Two of the protesters were arrested and accused of throwing rocks at the police.

At a news conference on Friday, the state attorney general, Roy Cooper, tried to address both the criticism that his office had not done enough to secure a conviction and lingering anger from conservatives and police advocates over the decision to prosecute Officer Kerrick at all.

“It was the right thing to bring this case before the jury and seek a conviction,” Mr. Cooper said. “But now we need to listen to what the jury said.”

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement Friday afternoon that it would conduct an internal investigation to “determine if all department policies and procedures were followed by Randall Kerrick.” It noted that such an investigation was standard procedure.

Officer Kerrick remained on unpaid administrative leave, the department’s spokesman, Robert Tufano, added.

The Ferrell family has already won a $2.25 million settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city, which they say they have used to pay expenses to travel from Florida to attend the trial. They also say they will use the money to establish a foundation in Mr. Ferrell’s name.

Family members said they would continue to fight for Officer Kerrick to be held accountable. Ms. Ferrell said she would go “on top of the White House — wherever I have to go to scream until someone understands my loss, our loss.”

“We can do everything in our power to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she said. “And we are not going to stop trying to get a retrial.”


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5) Sixty Years Later, Echoes of Emmett Till’s Killing
By Charles M. Blow

Friday was the 60th anniversary of the savage killing of Emmett Till.

Till was a black 14-year-old Chicago boy who was visiting his great-uncle in Mississippi during the summer of 1955.

It is said that the boy said something to, and whistled at, a white woman.

This was a line not crossed in those parts in this country. As I wrote in June when Dylann Roof killed nine black people in a Charleston, S.C., church after complaining that black people are “raping our women”:

“There is the thread of couching his cowardice as chivalry, framing his selfish hatred as noble altruism in defense of white femininity from the black brute. So much black blood has been spilled and so many black necks noosed in the name of protecting white femininity, and by extension, white purity.”

That thread seems altered but unbroken from Emmett’s time to ours.In the wee hours of the night, two white men kidnapped Emmett from his family’s home, mercilessly beat him, took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River and shot him in the head, then tied the metal fan of a cotton gin around his neck with barbed wire and pushed him in.

When Emmett’s body was fished from the river three days later, it had already begun to decompose. He was unrecognizable. His body was identified because he was wearing a ring that had belonged to his father.

His body was sent back to Chicago for burial. His mother, Mamie, collapsed at the sight of the coffin, just two weeks after she kissed her son goodbye.His mother insisted that the coffin be opened so that she could see her son. As she recalled: “I saw that his tongue was choked out. I noticed that the right eye was lying on midway his cheek. I noticed that his nose had been broken like somebody took a meat chopper and chopped his nose in several places. As I kept looking, I saw a hole, which I presumed was a bullet hole, and I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side. And I wondered: Was it necessary to shoot him?”

His mother insisted on an open coffin so that everyone could see what had been done to her baby.

According to Devery S. Anderson’s book about Emmett published this month, the night of the wake alone, “between 10,000 and 50,000 people” filed past Emmett’s glass-covered coffin to gaze at what was left of his face.

A little over two weeks after Emmett was buried, the men who killed him were acquitted, after only 67 minutes of jury deliberations. One juror is said to have told a reporter that the deliberations wouldn’t have taken that long if the jurors hadn’t taken a break to drink a pop.

After the acquittal the killers kissed their wives, lit cigars and posed for pictures.Burnham and Margaret M. Russell wrote in The Times last week, there are hundreds of “disappeared” black people in this country “who were victims of racial violence from 1930 to 1960.”

But Emmett became the most pivotal. His death was immeasurable in its effect on young black people at the time. It activated and mobilized them. That is not so dissimilar from today.

Jesse Jackson is credited with calling Emmett’s murder the “Big Bang” of the civil rights movement.

But in an interview published earlier this month, a University of Illinois professor, Christopher Benson, co-author of the 2003 book “Death of Innocence” about the case, made a more direct comparison:

“Before Trayvon Martin, before Michael Brown, before Tamir Rice, there was Emmett Till. This was the first ‘Black Lives Matter’ story. It is no wonder, then, that each time we read about another young unarmed black male being shot down in the street — unjustly — by an authority figure, there is the mention of Emmett’s name. What we come to see with the loss of Emmett is just what racism has cost us in this country. What it costs us still, in the loss of so many bright, gifted kids. Partly through untimely deaths. But also in the limited opportunities many have to excel, because of mass incarceration or even unwarranted tracking in schools.”

Benson continued:

“When we begin to see the Emmett Till story in this context, we realize that we all lose something to racism. And we see that we all have something to gain by overcoming the obstacles to full participation that still exist. So, Emmett Till is a vital American story.”

Yes, Emmett’s story is a vital American story, and it feels like an all-too-present one as we see this cycle repeating itself: young lives are lost, the body itself is desecrated or neglected, killers are acquitted or not even brought to trial, and the effects of the feelings of terror and injustice galvanize a generation of young people who have taken as much as they plan to take.


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6) Organizing, Not Activism: Chicago's Dyett HS Hunger Strikers Mark 11th Day Resisting Closing & Privatization of Their School
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Black Agenda Report, August 27, 2015
http://blackagendareport.com/dyett-hunger-strike-20150827

The years long struggle on the part of parents and students and community members around Dyett High school on Chicago's historic south side is a stellar example of long-term community building and organizing, which differs greatly from the mere activism some currently herald as “the movement.”

Black Agenda Report's Bruce Dixon interviewed Jitu Brown, a member of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School on August 26, 2015, the tenth day of a hunger strike staged by parents and community residents resisting the closing and privatization of their neighborhood high school and the intransigence of Chicago's City Hall apparently determined to disperse and destroy their community and rebuild it for someone else.

Why are parents and community people on hunger strike at Dyett School? What's at stake for your families and communities?

“We're on this hunger strike because we've done everything else above and beyond what we should have had to do. Since 2009 we've come up with a detailed vision and plan not just to revamp Dyett High School, but to create a K through 12 educational system that makes sense for our families and communities. The official response has been ignoring us, lying about us, our demands and our community, hiring paid protestors to discredit us, just years of unbelievable behavior on the part of officials.

“We're not just seeing school closings here, we've seen the closings of hospitals and trauma centers, the elimination of grocery stores and more. We're looking at a systematic disinvestment in our families, our youth, our elders, our communities. The struggle over Dyett school is the latest unfolding chapter in a decades-long effort to remove our people from those neighborhoods the gentrifiers, the privatizers and the profiteers now covet, and that our mayors and public officials want to give them.

Our response back in 2009 was to come up with the Bronzeville Global Achievement Plan, partnering Dyett High School with 6 local feeder schools, implementing restorative justice and other innovations that resulted in the largest increase in college bound high school graduates anywhere in the city of Chicago, and the biggest decrease in suspensions. Dyett High School beat out 400 schools nationwide to qualify for the 2011 ESPN Rise Up Award which got us $4 million dollars but the children never got to take advantage of it because the city ordered the school closed the next year. Students remaining in the school had to take their AP and phys ed classes online.

“Since then we've had scores of public and private meetings with officials and actions, a sit-in at the mayor's office. We took the framework we'd developed and expanded it, we brought in allies from around the city, like Teachers for Social Justice, Blacks and Greens, the Chicago Botanic Gardens, and in April we submitted our plan for the Walter Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology Academy to the school board.

“But instead of working with us, they issued an RFP (request for proposals) and invited in school privatizers, private charter school operators with political connections and histories of running mediocre schools, rather than working with parents and students and communities with a solid track record of steady improvements.

“At a June 17 public meeting we turned out 250 people. There should have been a follow-up meeting on August 10, but city officials stopped returning our calls and giving direct answers when and where it would be. On August 7 they issued a press release on their web site canceling that meeting. An August 26 vote on the matter was also canceled as was another hearing scheduled for September 15. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

“The city has no problem working with other neighborhoods that stand up and say no to the charter operators, but not us. We're forced to conclude that City Hall, which calls the absolute shots for Chicago's public schools, is determined to deny us our high school because they want to further fragment, disconnect, break up and destroy the community which has been in this part of the south side of Chicago for almost a hundred years now.

“Our elected alderman Will Burns, who does whatever the mayor tells him has overseen the closure of several elementary schools and another high school during his time in office. One of them was nearby Overton School named after a progressive back businessman of the early 20th century. Our elected officials sold the building for a mere $300,000 to a privatizer who's making artist lofts out of it.

“Our alderman, along with our representative in the state legislature have recognized our efforts by calling our funders, getting us audited, and more. Chicago Public Schools and City Hall have simply refused to work with us because of who we are, because of what community this is, and because they've already decided to break it up, to supplant to move us out and develop this part of the city for some other people and some other purposes.

“Our parents and families have decided that they are not gonna take one for the team, that we are tired of the runaround. We have jumped through every hoop, we have met with every bureaucrat. We are demanding our school back. The charter operators say they want to put an arts and entertainment school, and a sports school where Dyett is now, as if that's all we can do. We sit right across the street from historic Provident Hospital, the first black operated hospital in the US and all we're good for is sports, arts and entertainment? We will not sit back and allow our high school to be handed over to mediocre charter school operators with political connections.

“Passing Dyett High School out of existence and handing the property off to some privatizer is negating, it's erasing almost a century of our people's history on the south side. Dyett High School was named after Capt Walter Dyett, a south side Chicago musician and educator who taught at Wendell Phillips and DuSable high schools. Dyett was an inspired teacher and a ferocious disciplinarian who taught Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Von Freeman, Gene Ammons, Redd Foxx, Eddie Harris and many more.

“Our vision of Dyett as a Green Global Leadership Academy is worthy of that history, and our children are worthy of that opportunity. That's why we're here.”

How has the struggle over several years around your specific demands for a Green and sustainable high school served to build leadership capacity among parents, students and members of your community?

“We come from the Ella Baker school of organizing, not the charismatic school of leadership. We know that brilliance is already there among our people. As organizers we understand our job is to create spaces where people who've been told they cannot win can become leaders. In that process the organizers are educated by those they help organize... It's a model we've pursued for years now...

“We think it's time to stop being activists and start being organizers. Activists might move an issue to the forefront, but activists are responsible to nobody but themselves. Activists can be here today and gone tomorrow. Organizers bring people together to make and adjust and execute long term plans, organizers empower and train and raise up new leaders from among the people. Organizers and the leaders they help create are responsible to the people responsible to communities. We expect to be holding organizing institutes beginning later this year, to show how to confront money power with people power...

“Our efforts have raised up local leaders like Jeanette Taylor, who's been a local school council member for 20 years, out here in front of the school every day at 7:30AM greeting students and parents and teachers as they come in. We've got leaders like Irene Robonson, a mother and grandmother who was hospitalized the 8th day of the strike, but we cannot keep her out of the effort...

“Myself, I come out of KOCO, the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, one of the city's oldest and most successful black led organizing group. We've been fighting for affordable housing and winning, fighting school closures and winning, and we are forced as well to fight the officials elected to represent us.

“There are organizing lessons in many places. DC's Marion Berry, for instance, was a masterful organizer who in his time raised up dozens of able local leaders. Berry only became corrupted when he moved away from the people he organized...

“We're optimistic and we're out here every day at 555 E. 51st Street. On this 10th day of our hunger strike, we're not wanting for local support. Hundreds of people come by to see how we're doing every day. Those that bring juices, we ask that they be commercially packaged and sealed for health reasons, no homemade stuff.”

How can people around the country support you?
“Call the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel at 312-744-3300. Tell him the whole world is watching. Chicago's mayor controls the school board. He can decide this afternoon to give us our high school back and have the building keys put in our hand tonight.

“Call Alderman Will Burns at 773-536-8103 with the same message. “

“You can read, tweet and retweet news about the ongoing hunger strike at #FightForDyett”

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7) Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and All Too Common
By

If mass incarceration is one of modern America’s deepest pathologies, solitary confinement is the concentrated version of it: far too many people locked up for far too long for no good reason, at no clear benefit to anyone.

The practice “literally drives men mad,” Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court said in an appearance before Congress last March, highlighting the case of a California man isolated for 25 years. In July, President Obama became the first president to denounce the use of solitary. Locking people up alone for years or decades, he said, “is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger. And if those individuals are ultimately released, how are they ever going to adapt?”

These remarks are notable only because they come from the highest levels of government. Many Americans have been aware of the horror of indefinite solitary confinement for years.

On Tuesday, the slow push for meaningful reform got a big shove in the right direction. In a sweeping, unprecedented class-action settlement, California officials agreed to a drastic overhaul of the state’s solitary confinement system, the largest, most indiscriminate and most brutal in the country.

The settlement — which ends a lawsuit brought on behalf of a number of long-serving inmates — will mean the immediate release of more than 1,000 isolated inmates back into the general prison population. When the suit was filed in 2012, 500 of these inmates had been held for more than 10 years in tiny, windowless cells with virtually no human contact. At most, they had 90 minutes a day to take a shower or stand alone in a concrete “yard.” (A 2011 United Nations report said that stays longer than 15 days could amount to torture.)

The offenses that landed them in solitary? Most often, it was evidence that they were “affiliated” with a prison gang, whether or not they had broken any rules. The risk they posed to other inmates was rarely a factor. Still, they had to wait six years for a chance at review. Any evidence of continuing gang ties meant at least six more years.

Since 2011, tens of thousands of California inmates have gone on hunger strikes to protest the state’s use of solitary confinement. Under the settlement — negotiated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the inmates — California will end indefinite solitary sentences. In all, the reforms are expected to reduce the state’s solitary population, which is now over 2,800, by more than half.The reduction will come from two groups. Prisoners who have been held for 10 or more years will be moved to a special restricted unit with other inmates, where they can take educational courses and have normal human contact as they prepare to return to the general population.

And all those held in solitary because of gang connections will be released immediately to the general population, unless they have recently committed a serious offense — like assault, possessing a weapon, or selling drugs. Even in those cases, there is a clear, time-limited path for inmates to work their way out of solitary.

The national problem remains. Despite important reform efforts by officials in states like Colorado, Washington and Ohio, on any given day at least 80,000 people are held in some version of solitary. And despite overwhelming evidence of the psychological damage solitary confinement inflicts on inmates, no court has yet ruled that it violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. (A concurring opinion by Justice Kennedy in June hinted strongly that he would be open to such a claim.)

Therein lies the importance of California’s settlement: If a state with the worst record can do something to reduce its reliance on solitary, broad reform is surely possible around the country. Obviously prison officials need flexibility in managing truly dangerous or vulnerable inmates. But as those officials themselves have begun to agree, locking people in near-total isolation for years is not the answer.


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8) Ratcheting Up the Rhetoric
By Charles M. Blow

Last week, Deputy Darren H. Goforth of the Harris County, Tex., Sheriff’s Department was executed at a gas station in a Houston suburb. It was a horrific scene.

As The New York Times reported, prosecutors said that a gunman approached Goforth from behind and “emptied his 15-round handgun into the back and the back of the head of the deputy, as witnesses watched in horror and surveillance cameras captured the shooting.”

Goforth was simply pumping gas.

His killing was shocking in its brazenness. Your heart sank for this man and his family. You wanted to make sense of something that seemed to make no sense. How could someone be so callous in the taking of a life?

And yet, there were no answers to be had.

The Harris County sheriff, Ron Hickman, admitted as much in a news conference: “We have not been able to extract any details regarding a motive at this point.”

But Hickman departed from proof and protocol to deliver a dangerous, unsupported political statement.

Hickman suggested that Goforth “was a target because he wore a uniform,” but offered no evidence of this.

Hickman said further: “At any point when the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, coldblooded assassinations of police officers happen, this rhetoric has gotten out of control. We’ve heard ‘black lives matter.’ All lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter, too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and just say ‘lives matter,’ and take that to the bank.” Hickman offered no evidence that the shooting was connected to Black Lives Matter protesters.

The Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said at the same news conference: “There are a few bad apples in every profession. That does not mean that there should be open warfare declared on law enforcement.”

Again, no evidence was offered that the killing was part of any “warfare” on law enforcement.

When a motive is discovered, the sheriff and district attorney may well be proved right, but you don’t make statements and then hope the facts support those statements. That’s operating in the inverse.

At this point, the “war on police” rhetoric is not only unsupported, it’s dangerous and reckless.

On one level, one might be able to understand the overheated language from these officials. A coworker had just lost his life in a brutal fashion. Emotions were high. The loss was still raw.

Furthermore, there was a protest over the weekend — which apparently took place after Goforth was shot — by a group of Black Lives Matter protesters at the Minnesota state fair in which some protesters were captured on video chanting, “Pigs in a blanket; fry ’em like bacon.” An organizer of that demonstration, Trahern Crews, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that the chant was chanted in a “playful” context as they joked back and forth with an officer monitoring the march.

That context is not at all apparent from the video. How you view this movement will inform how plausible you find the “playful” explanation. But whatever the context, I think we can all agree that at the very least, chants like that are ill advised in protests against police brutality. Many people took the chant literally, as a terrorist threat. And one can hardly blame them.

But many in the media who are hostile to the movement went even further, using the chant and Goforth’s tragic death as tools to support and promote a narrative that Black Lives Matter itself is a hate group that has declared war on the police, even though, at this point, there is no evidence whatsoever that the suspect, Shannon J. Miles, was affiliated with or influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.

(We do know that Miles “spent four months in a mental hospital in 2012 after being declared incompetent to stand trial in an aggravated assault case,” according to The Houston Chronicle.)

The thing that many people have criticized the protesters for — exploiting a tragedy, rushing to judgment, putting narrative ahead of facts — was precisely what they did.

Over the weekend, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro asked her guest, Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. of Milwaukee County: “Is it open season on law enforcement in this country?”

Clarke responded, in part: “I said last December that war had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one of them coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United States Department of Justice. And it’s open season right now. There’s no doubt about it.”On Sunday, Harry Houck, Jr., a CNN law enforcement analyst and retired New York Police Department detective, said on the network that “of course there’s anti-police rhetoric out there, you know, based on lies and assumptions, helping to promote the assassination of police officers out there.” He cited the chant by the Minnesota protesters, then continued, “I put them on the same — on the same line as I would the Ku Klux Klan or Black Liberation Army.”

On Monday morning, a co-host of “Fox and Friends,” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, asked the conservative commentator Kevin Jackson:

“Kevin, why has the Black Lives Matter movement not been classified as a hate group? How much more has to go in this direction before someone actually labels it as such?”

The Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said on his show on Monday that Black Lives Matter was a hate group and declared: “I’m going to put them out of business.”

There seems to be a concerted effort to defame and damage Black Lives Matter, and one has to wonder why.

It is impossible to credibly make the case that Black Lives Matter as a movement is a hate group or that it advocates violence. Demanding police fairness, oversight and accountability isn’t the same as promoting police hatred or harm.

I actually believe that you have to peel back the vitriol to expose the fundamental, but unarticulated truth at the core of the opposition to this movement: It centers blackness in a country that “others” blackness. It elevates blackness in a country that devalues it. It prioritizes blackness in a country that marginalizes it.

It demands fairness from a society rife with — and built on! — inequity. It forces America to confront its flaws rather than wishing them away. It drags the racial caste system this country created out of the shadows and into the light.

Black Lives Matter makes America uncomfortable because it refuses to let America continue to lie to itself. It targets police brutality, but the police are simply agents of the state and the state is representative of the totality of America.

Discomfort with Black Lives Matter, is, on some level and to some degree, a discomfort with blackness itself. It’s not only about the merits of individual cases, it is also about the collective, ingrained sins of the system committed disproportionately, and by design, against people of color. The movement convicts this country of its crimes.

America has been engaged since its inception in a most gruesome enterprise: Like the mythological Cronus, it has been eating its children, the darker ones, and this movement demands — at least in one area, at least in one moment — that it atone for that abomination.


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9) Unicef Warns of Lost Generation of War Children Out of School
By

War and upheaval across parts of the Middle East and North Africa in recent years have driven more than 13 million children from school — 40 percent of the affected area’s school-age population, the United Nations said Wednesday.

A report by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, cast a sobering new light on the subtle long-term destructive consequences of violent conflicts that have convulsed a region encompassing all or portions of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and the Palestinian territories, particularly Gaza.

In some countries — particularly Syria, which once had one of the world’s highest literacy rates — many children who ordinarily would be third or fourth graders by now have rarely if ever been inside a classroom.

“Attacks on schools and education infrastructure — sometimes deliberate — are one key reason many children do not attend classes,” Unicef said in a summary of the report.In Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya alone, it said, nearly 9,000 schools are out of use because they have been “damaged, destroyed, are being used to shelter displaced families or have been taken over by parties to the conflict.”

Other reasons, the summary said, include “the fear that drives thousands of teachers to abandon their posts, or keeps parents from sending their children to school because of what might happen to them along the way — or at school itself.”

Dr. Peter Salama, the Unicef regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said the report was based on calculations from the combined data for each individual population that have been compiled by the agency over the years.

“We’ve had country-specific numbers in the past, but not the aggregate of major trends in the region,” Dr. Salama said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan. “For us, it’s actually quite staggering when you aggregate the numbers across these countries.”

Five or 10 years ago, he said, it was unusual to have even 10 percent of the school-age populations in the region out of school. “Now it’s 40 percent,” he said.

“Their educational achievements are going to be quite low,” he said. “These are the future professionals in these societies.”

While death, mayhem, hunger and disease are among the most obvious risks to civilians in these conflict zones, the collapse in primary education is another compelling reason for families with young children to flee. This partly explains the increasing surge of migrants into Europe, Dr. Salama said.

“Seventy to 80 percent of asylum seekers have been from Syria,” he said. “It’s not coincidental.”

In Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where millions of Syrians have fled since the war in their homeland began in 2011, more than 700,000 refugee children are unable to attend school because the education systems in those countries cannot cope with the extra load, the report said.

Dr. Salama said the report highlighted what he called another alarming issue: If children are not in school, they are often working, and exploited in hazardous jobs.

A parallel trend, he said, is increased recruitment of children into military and paramilitary organizations.

“In the past there was child recruitment, but it tended to be older boys in noncombat roles,” Dr. Salama said. “That has really changed in the last year or two.”

He said, “We are on the verge of a lost generation of kids.”


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10) Baltimore Judge Lets Officers’ Charges Stand and Refuses to Remove Prosecutor
By

BALTIMORE — A circuit court judge ruled on Wednesday that six police officers facing criminal charges in the death of Freddie Gray will be tried separately, and denied a request by defense lawyers who wanted Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, removed from the case on grounds of conflict of interest and prosecutorial misconduct.

Judge Barry G. Williams refused to dismiss charges against the officers, rejecting arguments from the defense that Ms. Mosby had made prejudicial comments at a news conference in May. While the judge said that he found some of her remarks — in particular her acknowledgment that some of the accused officers were cooperating in the case — “troubling,” he concluded that they “do not rise to the level where the defendants’ rights to a fair trial have been violated.”Wednesday’s hearing was the first of two pretrial sessions that will determine how the case goes forward; on Sept. 10, Judge Williams will consider a request for the officers to be tried outside Baltimore. But as the proceedings began in his wood-paneled courtroom, it often seemed as if Ms. Mosby, who sat impassively behind her deputies as they argued before the judge, were the one on trial.

The death of Mr. Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained a spinal cord injury in police custody, set off the worst unrest this city has had since 1968 and thrust Ms. Mosby, who is also African-American, into the spotlight amid the national debate over police mistreatment of black men and women. On May 1, with the city on edge after a night of looting and arson, she announced the charges against the officers and made a plea for calm.

“To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America, I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace,’ ” she said. “Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.”

Ms. Mosby’s remarks, dissected in the courtroom on Wednesday, became a cornerstone of the defense argument that the prosecution had prevented the officers from getting a fair trial. Andrew Graham, a lawyer for Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., who faces murder charges, accused her of staging “a pep rally,” adding, “The state’s attorney basically accepted and encouraged the public’s cry of ‘no justice, no peace.’ ”

But the judge rejected that contention. Defense lawyers also argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Mosby and her entire office should be disqualified because of what the lawyers called conflicts of interest, including Ms. Mosby’s marriage to Nick Mosby, a Baltimore city councilman, who said this week that he was “seriously considering” a run for mayor. The judge made clear he was offended by that suggestion.

“Why? Is the implication that she can’t think for herself?” Judge Williams asked. “Frankly, I do find that assertion troubling and condescending.”

Mr. Gray’s death opened a deep wound in Baltimore, a majority-black city with a long history of tensions between black residents and the police. Ms. Mosby has asserted that police officers arrested Mr. Gray on April 12 without legal grounds and then, after shackling him, flouted police rules and standards of decency by loading him into a police van without required safety restraints and ignoring his pleas for help during the ride. He died a week later of the spinal cord injury, which Ms. Mosby said occurred during the ride. After Wednesday’s hearing, she declined to comment.

As the hearing began, dozens of protesters converged peacefully outside the downtown courthouse, chanting, “We want justice, we want peace, jail killer police.” Some marched toward Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area, where one man was arrested.

“Ms. Mosby stood up to these officers, and that’s the kind of prosecutor we need, being tough and not overlooking police malfeasance,” said Dave Eberhardt, 74, who worked 33 years as a social worker at the Baltimore City Jail before retiring. He and others said they were elated by the judge’s decision to keep her on the case.

None of the officers were in the courtroom Wednesday. Officer Goodson, the driver of the police van, faces the most serious charge, second-degree depraved-heart murder — in essence, murder with willful disregard for human life. Sgt. Alicia D. White, Lt. Brian Rice and Officer William G. Porter are charged with involuntary manslaughter. Officers Edward M. Nero and Garrett E. Miller face lesser charges, including second-degree assault.

Prosecutors sought to have three of them — Officer Goodson, Officer Nero and Sergeant White — tried together, drawing vigorous protests from defense lawyers, who complained that such a trial would require the introduction of evidence that was not necessarily relevant to all three. Judge Williams agreed, saying a joint trial was “not in the best interest of justice.”

Gary Gately contributed reporting.





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11) Low-Income Workers See Biggest Drop in Paychecks
By

Despite steady gains in hiring, a falling unemployment rate and other signs of an improving economy, take-home pay for many American workers has effectively fallen since the economic recovery began in 2009, according to a new study by an advocacy group that is to be released on Thursday.

The declines were greatest for the lowest-paid workers in sectors where hiring has been strong — home health care, food preparation and retailing — even though wages were already below average to begin with in those service industries.

“Stagnant wages are a problem for everyone at this point, but the imbalance in the economy has become more pronounced since the recession,” said Irene Tung, a senior policy researcher at the National Employment Law Project and co-author of the study.

Jasmin Almodovar, a home health care aide in Cleveland, knows all about that.She has worked for the same health care agency since 2003, and for the first four years she received an annual wage increase of 25 cents an hour. But since 2007, her hourly pay has been stuck at $9.50 an hour.

“I’ve asked for raises several times and each time I get the runaround,” said Ms. Almodovar, who is licensed by Ohio as a nurse’s assistant. Bills for natural gas, electricity, food and other necessities have gone up since her last raise, she noted, leaving little extra money for her and her 12-year-old son.

In many ways, Ms. Almodovar’s predicament encapsulates the contradictions evident each month when the government reports the latest figures on hiring and unemployment.

And the report by NELP, a left-leaning research and advocacy group, underscores why so many Americans are still angry about the state of the economy and with what they see as the inability of Democratic and Republican leaders alike in Washington to do anything to improve living standards for many ordinary workers.

One explanation may lie in the findings of another study released on Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, also a liberal research group. Its report showed that even as labor productivity has improved steadily since 2000, the benefits from improved efficiency have nearly all gone to companies, shareholders and top executives, rather than rank-and-file employees.Labor Department data released on Wednesday indicated that productivity in the American economy in the second quarter rose at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, the biggest quarterly gain since late 2013 and much better than first estimated.

The Labor Department’s next batch of data on hiring and unemployment, for the month of August, is due out on Friday. Economists are looking for a gain of roughly 220,000 jobs, and for the unemployment rate to dip slightly to 5.2 percent.

Friday’s jobs report is especially significant because it is the last one before Federal Reserve policy makers meet in mid-September to decide whether to go ahead with or delay their long-telegraphed move to raise short-term interest rates from near zero.

The fall in the unemployment rate from a postrecession high of 10 percent is certainly good news, Ms. Tung said, but NELP’s analysis showed that once inflation was taken into account, median wages across all occupations fell by 4 percent between 2009 and 2014.

Wage declines in the lowest-paid occupations were much worse, dropping 8.9 percent for restaurant cooks and 6.2 percent for home health aides.

Along with stagnant or falling wages, one of the most persistent complaints about the current economic expansion is that many of the jobs created so far have been low-paying ones. That has changed recently, with more hiring in better-paying fields like business and professional services.

An earlier NELP study was criticized by economists for exaggerating the extent of the so-called low-wage recovery. Ms. Tung said the analysis in the report to be released on Thursday was different from the earlier report, focusing on actual wage trends within occupations, not the proportion of jobs created in different fields.

NELP’s findings come at a time when income inequality and the failure of many workers to gain ground during the recovery are coming to the political fore. Candidates from both parties have sought to address the worries of middle-income Americans, while trying not to be too closely identified with Wall Street and other symbols of corporate America.

The past year has been the best for the job market since the end of the recession. Employers have added, on average, 243,000 people to their payrolls each month. That would normally constitute a “hot” job market, said Torsten Slok, chief international economist for Deutsche Bank Securities in New York.

“When you see all those jobs being added per month, you think, ‘Come on, how can this be bad?,’ ” Mr. Slok said. “But there has been a lot of pain and suffering, and people have been losing their skills or have not been able to re-skill.”The roots of wage stagnation are deep, according to Mr. Slok.

Some of it is linked to what he calls the “glacial changes” wrought by macroeconomic forces like automation, demographics and globalization.

Other factors are specific to the American economy, including the real estate boom and bust, consumer debt levels and continuing slack in the labor market because of relatively low demand compared with the still-large numbers of people who are looking for work or would return to the labor force if they had a better chance of finding a worthwhile job.

For Ms. Almodovar, 36, acquiring new credentials and skills is a big obstacle.

When she talked with her employer’s human resources department about how to increase her long-frozen salary, their advice was to go back to school. Although Ms. Almodovar took the G.E.D. test and earned the equivalent of a high school diploma in her late 20s, taking classes would be a tough proposition now.

“I’m living with roommates, and if I don’t go to work, I don’t get paid,” she said. “Even one day makes a big difference.”

Many other workers in some low-paid sectors are worse off than they were a couple of decades ago.

While attending high school in the mid-1990s, Derrell Odom worked at KFC, earning $5.50 an hour. That’s the equivalent of $8.61 today.

After two years of college, two military tours in Iraq and other jobs, he is back working as a cook at an Atlanta location of the fried chicken chain. Two decades after his first stint at KFC, his hourly pay now is only $7.25 an hour.

That is barely enough to support himself, let alone his fiancée and two sons. “I have leadership skills and led missions in Iraq,” Mr. Odom said. “Right now, I’m trying to survive.”



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12) Treatment of Migrants Evokes Memories of Europe’s Darkest Hour
By

BUDAPEST — In Hungary, hundreds of migrants surrounded by armed police officers were tricked into boarding a train with promises of freedom, only to be taken to a “reception” camp. In the Czech Republic, the police hustled more than 200 migrants off a train and wrote identification numbers on their hands with indelible markers, stopping only when someone pointed out that this was more than a little like the tattoos the Nazis put on concentration camp inmates.

Razor-wire fences rise along national borders in Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and France. Many political leaders stoke rising nationalism by portraying the migrants as dangerous outsiders whose foreign cultures and Muslim religion could overwhelm cherished traditional ways.“It was horrifying when I saw those images of police putting numbers on people’s arms,” said Robert Frolich, the chief rabbi of Hungary. “It reminded me of Auschwitz. And then putting people on a train with armed guards to take them to a camp where they are closed in? Of course there are echoes of the Holocaust.”

Europeans are facing one of the Continent’s worst humanitarian crises since World War II, yet many seem blind to images that recall that blackest time in their history.

This migrant crisis is no genocide. The issue throughout the Continent is how to register, house, resettle or repatriate hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, a daunting logistical challenge. But perhaps not since the Jews were rounded up by Nazi Germany have there been as many images coming out of Europe of people locked into trains, babies handed over barbed wire, men in military gear herding large crowds of bedraggled men, women and children.

At the same time, the images may reveal a deeper truth about Europe and its seeming unpreparedness for a crisis so long in the making: While extolling the virtues of human rights and humanism, it remains, in many parts, a place resistant to immigration and diversity.

As a result, some here are reacting in ways that recall some of the Continent’s darkest impulses.

“They must be oblivious because who would do that if they had any historical memory whatsoever,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “It’s amazing, really. Certainly those images of the trains can’t help but conjure up nightmares of the Holocaust.”

Rabbi Frolich was especially struck by the lies used to manipulate the migrants.

“They tell them that the train was going to Austria and then take them to a camp instead,” the rabbi said. “I don’t think the police got instructions from the government to do it this way, but it is very similar to what happened to Jews in the 1940s.”

Jan Munk, chairman of the Jewish Community of Prague, was inclined to be generous in his interpretation of the episode.

“I understand the reasons why the police marked migrants with numbers,” he said. “They are under a lot of pressure and stress and simply did not realize the connotations it would have. It was indeed tasteless and reminded me of the numbers at Auschwitz, but I know it was not done on purpose.”

But for others, the fact that it was not done on purpose was even more frightening, showing a puzzling historical disconnect in many of the very places that the Holocaust caused the deepest devastation.

“It may be correct that they didn’t know, but the insensitivity and the ignorance of the imagery their actions evoked is stunning; it’s just sickening,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in New York.

It is not that the Holocaust has been forgotten or ignored. There are memorials in nearly every major city on the Continent. Just this summer, Romania’s president signed into law a bill making it illegal to deny the Holocaust or to display fascist symbols.

One of the most revered memorials in Budapest is a series of shoes perched along the Danube riverfront. They refer to the World War II massacre of Jews by fascists who forced them to take off their shoes and shot them, letting their bodies fall into the river.

“And this memorial, that you cannot walk past without pausing to contemplate, this beautiful memorial, is in the same city where many of these other things are happening now,” said Babar Baloch, regional spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “It’s mind-boggling.”

The historical parallels are sometimes inescapable.

The migrant-crowded train station in Szeged, the southern Hungarian city nearest the Serbian border, contains a decades-old memorial to the victims of the Second World War. It shows a series of railroad cars with pleading and helpless arms protruding from the windows.

In Budapest, at the Keleti train station, whose periphery has been turned into a squalid migrant camp, the first train that came to take away desperate migrants on Thursday — ostensibly for the Austrian border, actually for a detention camp — chugged into the station behind a locomotive bearing the slogan “1989 Europe Without Borders.”

And there may be more to come.

On Friday, the Hungarian Parliament passed the first half of a set of revisions to refugee laws that would, among other things, allow the creation of so-called transit zones along the Serbian border. Newly arrived migrants would be confined to these zones, which must be within 60 meters of the border (about 200 feet), until their cases are resolved, and those cases would have to be decided within eight days, with just three more for possible appeals.

If it is determined that they had already passed through a country deemed “safe” on their route to Hungary, as they almost certainly would have, they would be sent back under the law.

But with migrants arriving at a rate of about 3,000 a day, in just 10 days the population of the camps could be approaching 30,000.

“I cannot call them anything other than concentration camps,” said Gabor Gyulai, refugee program coordinator for the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Budapest. “These refugees arrive, in horrible condition, and then you put them in this concentration camp?”

Parliament is expected to pass a second raft of refugee laws by next week, giving greater authority to the police and the military, including the right to enter any home to search for migrants who might be hiding there.

For many migrant advocates, what is so puzzling about this historical amnesia is that the countries taking the hardest line are among those that suffered the most during World War II and produced the most refugees in the war’s aftermath.

“In Europe, we benefited from humanitarian assistance and the acceptance of refugees after the disaster that was World War II,” Mr. Roth said. “It’s as if there is such a short memory that there is no sense that Europe, now that it is healthy and successful, owes anything to any other people in need.”

Mr. Gyulai pointed out that the first major operation that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees undertook after its founding was dealing with the 200,000 refugees displaced when the Soviet Union crushed the 1956 rebellion in Hungary.

“It’s hard to understand how people lose their sense of history so quickly,” said Andrew Stroehlein, European media director for Human Rights Watch. “We all say we have learned the lessons of history, but to be turning away these desperate people who are fleeing a horrific situation suggests that we haven’t learned the lessons at all.”

Palko Karasz contributed reporting from Budapest, and Hana de Goeij from Prague.






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13) A Surreptitious Courtroom Video Prompts Changes in a Georgia Town
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An explosion of cellphone videos has brought renewed attention to police practices, provoking criticism, indictments and talk of criminal justice overhaul. Courtroom videos of judges in action, however, are far rarer.

But one surreptitious video in a small-town Georgia court has led to an overhaul of court practices there. The video showed the judge threatening to jail traffic violators who could not come up with an immediate payment toward their fines.

“You can pay what you have, you can call whoever you need to call, go to an A.T.M. if you need to, do what you need to do,” Judge Richard A. Diment of Bowdon Municipal Court said to one defendant. “Call friends, call family, call your employer. But until you get $300 here tonight, you won’t be able to leave.” The defendant said she had recently begun working at a supermarket and had $150 with her.

To another defendant, a man who said he had been unemployed for two years and received food stamps, Judge Diment said: “You’re going to have to figure out a way to get this paid, do you understand me? Or you’re going to go to jail. One or the other. You understand?”

Neither defendant had a lawyer.

The United States Supreme Court has held that people cannot be jailed for failing to make a payment if they are unable to pay, but advocates for indigent defendants say that in many jurisdictions, meaningful assessments of ability to pay are rare. In Georgia, poor defendants are supposed to have access to a court-appointed lawyer if they face jail or probation.

Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based group that has been fighting what it calls “debtors’ prison” cases throughout Georgia, said Bowdon was unique only in that Judge Diment’s practices were caught on video.

“The practice that we see here is one that happens in courts around the state, and it shows an overzealousness to collect fines and fees at the expense of basic fairness,” she said.

The center sent observers to Judge Diment’s monthly court sessions this summer after it was alerted to the video, taken in February 2014 and later posted on YouTube. This June, the observers said in a complaint letter to the city, Judge Diment demanded immediate payments ranging from $20 to more than $1,000. One woman, on probation for driving with a suspended license, had already spent a month in jail but was ordered to remain incarcerated until she made a $500 payment, the letter said.

In July, a man who said he worked only a few days every other week asked to convert his court debt to community service. Judge Diment refused, the letter said, on the grounds that the man might find a better job.

In response to the complaint, the city agreed to a host of changes set out in an order signed by Judge Diment, including advising defendants of their right to counsel before they enter a plea and abolishing the practice of requiring an immediate payment under threat of jail. If violators do not eventually pay fines, the court must establish that the failure is willful, and not a result of poverty, before jailing them. The city also agreed to stop requiring defendants to ask friends and family to pay their fines.

Judge Diment, who in private practice is a real estate lawyer in nearby Carrollton, did not respond to a request for comment.

A lawyer for the city, C. David Mecklin Jr., wrote in a letter to the center last week that “it is the specific intent of the city to comply not only with the letter, but the spirit, of the policies set forth in Judge Diment’s order.”

Reached by phone, Mr. Mecklin said the changes were also in response to a new state law designed to encourage better assessment of people’s ability to pay and to curb fees charged to violators by private probation companies. The new law went into effect on July 1.Aggressive levying of fines and fees, backed up by the threat of incarceration, was identified as a source of the frustration that led to days of unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after a white police officer killed an unarmed black man last year. Ferguson relied on court fines and fees to supply a fifth of its budget.

By contrast, Bowdon, a city of about 2,000 near the Alabama border, relied on court fines and fees for 3.8 percent of its revenue in 2013, the most recent data made public by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. That is well below the average, 11.5 percent, for Georgia cities of similar size.

But the woman who shot the video, Mila Hentzien, 31, said she was appalled by what she saw in court, where she had gone to contest citations for, among other things, keeping a miniature pony in her yard. “I had noticed that they had inmates there that they were asking for money,” she said in a phone interview. “How can you be incarcerated and have any money?”

“I knew something was illegal about it, you know?” she said.

She added that she had seen a woman with a small child threatened with being sent immediately to jail unless she paid $320. “I almost pulled the money out of my pocket to give it to her — that’s how bad it was,” she said.

After she posted the initial video, Ms. Hentzien said, she and her daughter were caught videotaping at another court date, and their phones were taken and the new videos were deleted on the spot.

Ms. Hentzien said she had been recording the proceedings in part because the court had not responded to her repeated requests for transcripts. The Southern Center for Human Rights was also unable to obtain court recordings or transcripts, though the court is required by law to keep them. Under the new order, the court agreed to keep records of its proceedings.

Videos of court proceedings are rare because they are either expressly prohibited, or cellphone use is barred in courtrooms. In July, the Georgia Council of Superior Court Judges adopted a new rule, pending approval by the state Supreme Court, barring anyone from recording court proceedings without requesting permission 24 hours in advance.



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