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Major George Tillery

MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION SEX FOR LIES AND MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY

April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony. These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors. Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters. Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms. In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org. Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence. The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings. This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense. Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new  "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support. Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court. During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison. Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying."  For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners. Major Tillery Needs Your Help: Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence. Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment. Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed. Major Tillery and family HOW YOU CAN HELP Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom. Go to JPay.com; code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner: The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false. Call: 215-686-8000 or Email: justice@phila.gov Write to: Major Tillery AM 9786 SCI Frackville 1111 Altamont Blvd. Frackville, PA 17931 For More Information, Go To:  Call/Write: Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009,  Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009,

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

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Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier

Art by Leonard Peltier

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132 

USP Coleman I 

P.O. Box 1033 

Coleman, FL 33521

Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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1) Billionaire's Fight to Close Path to a California Beach Comes to a Dead End
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose belief in property rights outweighed his affinity for a state access law.
By Nellie Bowles, October 1, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/technology/california-beach-access-khosla.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

"If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I'd be depressed about it," Vinod Khosla has said.

SAN FRANCISCO — It was a happy day for the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla: He lost his battle.

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Khosla's appeal to overturn a ruling that the beach access path cutting through a coastal village he owns near Half Moon Bay, Calif., must stay open. 

Now Mr. Khosla, a billionaire who founded Sun Microsystems and helped lay the foundations of the consumer internet, has to apply for a permit to close the narrow road down to a popular surfing spot known as Martin's Beach. That's it. 

But over nearly a decade in the courts, the battle became deeply symbolic to Mr. Khosla, who has said he was fighting on principle to stop a violation of property rights. So why was he likely to be happy he lost? He has said he never wanted to win.

As the case wound its way up to the Supreme Court, it threatened to gut California's Coastal Act of 1976, which enshrines public access to beaches as a right.

"If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I'd be depressed about it," he told The New York Times this year. "I support the Coastal Act; I don't want to weaken it by winning. But property rights are even more important."

The situation began shortly after 2008 when Mr. Khosla bought a 53-acre hillside on the Northern California coast. It had about 47 cottages on it and was known as Martin's Beach. While the previous owners had largely left the gate to the beach open and charged for parking, Mr. Khosla decided not to do the same. He tried to close the road, immediately sparking a controversy.

Over the years, the battle grew increasingly contentious. At one point, Mr. Khosla, who owns the land through a holding company, hired guards to stand at the top of the road. In 2012, five surfers were arrested and became known as the Martin's Five. 

The Surfrider Foundation, which led the fight to keep the road open, hailed the Supreme Court's decision as one that saves the coast from being slowly privatized by wealthy landowners.

"Whether you have to drive an hour to the coast and picnic or whether you can spend $32 million and buy property adjacent to the coast, the beach belongs to everybody," said Eric Buescher, an attorney working on the case for the Surfrider Foundation. "The Coastal Act survives the whims of a billionaire and continues to protect the people of California."

If the Supreme Court had heard the case and ultimately ruled in favor of Mr. Khosla, the ruling could have not only reshaped the laws that govern 1,100 miles of California shoreline but also affected public access to beaches, lakes and waterways in 22 states, according to the Surfrider Foundation. 

"This case reaffirms that you cannot make a unilateral decision to shut down a beach that has provided generations of families with memories," Lisa Haage, chief of enforcement at the California Coastal Commission, said in a statement.

For Mr. Khosla, this means the state is forcing him to keep open a money-losing business. The beach, he had argued, is not as popular as it used to be, and charging for parking no longer covers the cost of an attendant and maintenance of public facilities. 

"No owner of private business should be forced to obtain a permit from the government before deciding who it wants to invite onto its property," Mr. Khosla's lawyer Dori Yob Kilmer said in a statement. "No business owner should be forced to obtain a permit from the government to shut down a private business, to change prices from those that existed in 1972 (as the state has demanded) or to change hours of operation."

The Supreme Court's action on Monday ends this peculiar saga, which has captivated Silicon Valley. 

Well, it may end it. Mr. Khosla, who referred questions to Ms. Kilmer, must now apply for that permit to close the road to Martin's Beach. 

"If denied," Ms. Kilmer said, "we will start this process over again."

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2) Donald Trump and the Self-Made Sham
Now let’s see your tax returns, Mr. President.
By The Editorial Board, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/opinion/donald-trump-tax-fraud-fred.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

“I built what I built myself.”

This boast has long been at the core of the mythology of Donald Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. As the oft-told story goes, young Mr. Trump accepted a modest $1 million loan from his father, Fred, a moderately successful real estate developer from Queens, and — through smarts, hard work and sheer force of will — parlayed that loan into a multibillion-dollar global empire.

It’s a classic American tale of ambition and self-determination. Not Horatio Alger, exactly, but appealing, and impressive, nonetheless.

Except that, like so much of what Mr. Trump has been selling the American public in recent years, this origin story was a sham — a version of reality so elaborately embellished that it qualifies as fan fiction more than biography. Also, as we’ve come to expect from Mr. Trump, the creation of this myth involved a big dose of ethically sketchy, possibly even illegal activity.

As an in-depth investigation by The Times has revealed, Mr. Trump is only self-made if you don’t count the massive financial rewards he received from his father’s business beginning as a toddler. (By age 3, little Donald was reportedly pulling in an annual income of what today would be $200,000 a year.) These benefits included not only the usual perks of hailing from a rich, well-connected family — the connections, the access to credit, the built-in safety net. For the Trumps, it also involved direct cash gifts and tens of millions in “loans” that never charged interest or had to be repaid. Fred Trump even purchased several properties and business ventures, putting ownership either fully or partly in the names of his children, who reaped the profits.

As Donald Trump emerged as the favorite son, Fred made special deals and arrangements to increase Donald’s fortunes in particular. The Times found that, before Donald had turned 30, he had received close to $9 million from his father. Over the longer haul, he received upward of what, in today’s dollars, would be $413 million.

Along the way, it seems that certain liberties were taken with tax laws. The Times found that concocting elaborate schemes to avoid paying taxes on their father’s estate, including greatly understating the value of the family business, became an important pastime for Fred’s children, with Donald taking an active role in the effort. According to tax experts, the activities in question show a pattern of deception, a deliberate muddying of the financial waters. Asked for comment on The Times’s findings, a lawyer for the president provided a written statement denying any wrongdoing and asserting that, in fact, Mr. Trump had little to do with the dizzying transactions involving his family’s wealth.

Everyone can understand the impulse to polish one’s background in order to make a good impression. For Mr. Trump, whose entire life has been about branding and selling a certain type of gaudy glamour, this image-polishing has been all the more vital to his success. And he has pursued it with a shameless, at times giddy, abandon.

Veterans of New York news media still laugh to recall how Mr. Trump would call them up, pretending to be a publicist named John Barron, or sometimes John Miller, in order to regale them with tales of Mr. Trump’s glamorous personal life — how many models he was dating, which actresses were pursuing him, which celebrities he was hanging out with. As gross and tacky and bizarre as this all seemed, it was aimed squarely at fostering the image of Donald Trump as a master of the universe who, as the cliché goes, women wanted and men wanted to be.

This mythos was burnished and expanded by Mr. Trump’s years on “The Apprentice,” where he played the role of an all-powerful, all-knowing business god who could make or break the fortunes of those who clamored for his favor. Occasionally he could be harsh or even insulting, but it was always in the context of delivering the tough love that the contestants so needed to hear. And who was more qualified to deliver those lessons than Donald Trump? As with all reality TV, it was total bunk. But it promoted precisely the golden image that Mr. Trump — with a multimillion-dollar assist from his father — had carefully cultivated for his entire life.

With this glimpse into the inner workings of the Trump family finances, some of the grimier, ethically suspect aspects of Mr. Trump’s mythmaking begin to emerge — and with them, many questions about all that we still do not know about the man and his business empire. Seeing as how that empire and his role in building it are so central to who Mr. Trump claims to be — the defining feature of his heroic narrative — the American public has a right to some answers. For starters, now would be an excellent time for Mr. Trump to hand over those tax returns on which he has thus far kept a death grip.

In his 1987 memoir “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump famously offered his take on the origins of his success: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

But increasingly, Mr. Trump’s willingness to bend the truth — and the rules — in the service of his myth looks less like innocent exaggeration than malicious deception, with a dollop of corruption tossed in for good measure. It’s not the golden, glittering success story he has been peddling. It’s shaping up to be something far darker.

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3)  A Bad Move That Could End Up Exposing Kids to Chemicals
By Phillip J. Landrigan and Lynn R. Goldman, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/opinion/chemicals-epa-children-health.html

Last week, the leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency took aim at its own Office of Children’s Health Protection by placing its director, Dr. Ruth Etzel, a distinguished pediatrician and epidemiologist, on “administrative leave.”

At first glance, the action might look like mere bureaucratic shuffling, though the agency, while saying she was not facing disciplinary action, offered no explanation for the move. 

But we worry that it signals one of two actions: closing the office, which has argued for tougher regulations on industrial pollutants, or minimizing its role in rule-making. For its part, the E.P.A. says children’s health programs are not in jeopardy. But there is no question that if Dr. Etzel is pushed aside, the chemical industry will benefit and America’s children will be harmed. 

In 1993, the National Academy of Sciences reported that children and especially infants in the womb are profoundly different from adults in how they are harmed by exposure to pesticides and other chemicals. The academy’s Committee on Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children, of which one of us (Dr. Landrigan) was chairman, concluded that children are not merely little adults. They are uniquely sensitive and keeping them healthy requires special protections.

Exposure to even low levels of toxic chemicals during pregnancy and in the first years after birth can damage children’s brains and other developing organs, leading to increased risk of learning disabilities, A.D.H.D., dyslexia, autism and breathing and reproductive problems. Laws and regulations aimed at protecting adult health do not protect children. The academy committee urged that federal pesticide law be fundamentally restructured to shield infants in the womb and young children from chemical harm.

Since then, Congress has passed two laws that contain explicit provisions protecting children’s health. One of them, the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, directed the E.P.A. to impose a child-protective safety benchmark in setting standards for pesticides used on food crops, a requirement that has reduced pesticide applications and led to the banning of several highly toxic chemicals.

The safeguards for children’s health embedded in these laws are much needed in the United States today. Air pollution remains a problem and will worsen if the Trump administration succeeds in increasing coal combustion and relaxing vehicle emission standards. More than 80,000 chemicals are being used in food packaging, clothing, building materials, furniture, carpets, cleaning products, cosmetics, toys and baby bottles. They are also widespread in the environment. Among children aged 1 to 5, for instance, some 500,000 are estimated to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.

Exposure to chemicals is linked to a wide array of pediatric diseases. Lead and mercury can cause brain damage with loss of intelligence. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are linked to reductions in children’s intelligence and alterations in behavior. Baby boys exposed in the womb to phthalates, a chemical used in plastics, are at risk of birth defects in their reproductive organs and behavioral abnormalities. Prenatal exposure to brominated flame retardants, used in electronics and furniture, is linked to I.Q. reduction and shortening of attention span.

Prenatal exposure to the insecticide chlorpyrifos is associated with reduced head circumference at birth, developmental delays and cognitive impairments. The regulatory story of this chemical is particularly instructive about the E.P.A. under President Trump. Last year, Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator at the time, declined to remove chlorpyrifos from the market despite the recommendation of the agency’s own scientists, based on health studies that suggested it was harming children. In August, a federal appeals court ordered the agency to ban the chemical.

To shield children from these hazards, the E.P.A. formed the Office of Children’s Health Protection in 1997, a year after passage of the Food Quality Protection Act. For more than two decades this office has played an outsize role in safeguarding children’s health. It has worked with teachers and school boards to improve air quality in schools. It helped push the E.P.A. to strengthen risk assessments for carcinogens. It educates pediatricians, obstetricians and parents about how to reduce infants’ chemical exposure. 

It has also insisted that the E.P.A.’s plan for enforcing the 2016 Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act protect children’s health. That law requires, among its other mandates, a risk-based review of all chemicals in commerce. In recent months, the office has played a critical role in trying to protect children from atmospheric mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants as the Trump administration reconsiders an Obama-era rule regulating those discharges. 

The Office of Children’s Health Protection plays a vital role in safeguarding America’s children — born and unborn — against toxic environmental hazards. It is a small but highly effective program that protects the health of all Americans by protecting the most vulnerable among us. Dismantling it could do irreparable harm.

Philip J. Landrigan is the director of the Global Public Health Initiative at Boston College. Lynn R. Goldman is the dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University and a former assistant administrator at the E.P.A. for toxic substances.

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4) ‘Better to Drown’: A Greek Refugee Camp’s Epidemic of Misery
By Patrick Kingsley, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/world/europe/greece-lesbos-moria-refugees.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Refugees from Afghanistan at a makeshift camp outside Moria, in Lesbos, Greece. Moria has become the most visible symbol of the hard-line stance European countries have taken on migrants since 2016.

MORIA, Greece — He survived torture in Congo, and a perilous boat journey from Turkey. But Michael Tamba, a former Congolese political prisoner, came closest to death only after he had supposedly found sanctuary at Europe’s biggest refugee camp.

Stuck for months at the camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, Mr. Tamba, 31, tried to end his life by drinking a bottle of bleach. The trigger: Camp Moriaitself.

“Eleven months in Moria, Moria, Moria,” said Mr. Tamba, who survived after being rushed to hospital. “It’s very traumatic.”

Mr. Tamba’s experience has become a common one at Moria, a camp of around 9,000 people living in a space designed for just 3,100, where squalid conditions and an inscrutable asylum process have led to what aid groups describe as a mental health crisis.

The overcrowding is so extreme that asylum seekers spend as much as 12 hours a day waiting in line for food that is sometimes moldy. Last week, there were about 80 people for each shower, and around 70 per toilet, with aid workers complaining about raw sewage leaking into tents where children are living. Sexual assaults, knife attacks and suicide attempts are common.

The conditions have fueled accusations that the camp has been left to fester in order to deter migration and that European Union funds provided to help Greece deal with asylum seekers are being misused. In late September, the European Union’s anti-fraud agency announced an investigation.

At the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015, Moria was merely a way station as tens of thousands of asylum seekers — many fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — poured through the region on their way to northern Europe. Then, the numbers were so great, the migrants were effectively waved through.

Gradually, European Union countries tried to gain control over the situation by closing internal borders and building camps at the bloc’s periphery in places like Lesbos, where so many of the refugees arrived. Now they are stuck here.

Today, Moria is the most visible symbol of the hardening European stance toward migrants — one that has drastically reduced unauthorized migration, but at what critics see as a deep moral and humanitarian cost.

Rulam Heidari, 35, from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, with his eight-month-old daughter, Firish, at their makeshift tent.

Afghan migrants among the makeshift tents just outside Moria. Designed for 3,100 people, the camp’s population has swelled to 9,000. Many live under tarpaulins beyond its fences.

Outside Europe, the European Union has courted authoritarian governments in Turkey, Sudan and Egypt, while Italy has negotiated with warlords in Libya, in a successful effort to stem the flow of migrants toward the Mediterranean.

Inside Europe itself, those who still make it to the Greek islands — about 23,000 have arrived this year, down from 850,000 in 2015 — must now stay at camps like Moria until their cases are settled. It can take as long as two years before the asylum seekers are either sent home or move on.

“I have been in some pretty horrendous camps and situations,” said Louise Roland-Gosselin, who is head of mission in Greece for Doctors Without Borders and spent five years in crisis zones in Congo and South Sudan. “I have to say that Moria is the camp in which I’ve seen the highest level of suffering.”

The group’s lead psychiatrist on Lesbos, Alessandro Barberio, said he had never seen such overwhelming numbers of severe mental health cases. Of the roughly 120 people his team has the capacity to treat, the vast majority have been prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

“Moria has become a trigger for an acute expression of psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder,” Dr. Barberio said.

The International Rescue Committee, an aid group with a smaller presence on the island, said that just under a third of the 126 people its psychosocial workers have assessed at Moria since March have attempted suicide.

The majority of the camp’s residents are Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees, many of whom have suffered wartime traumas that are then exacerbated by the overcrowded and static conditions, which fuel their despair.

As in Mr. Tamba’s case, few suicide attempts result in death, conditions being so crowded that they are usually discovered quickly, aid workers say. But the damage can be lasting — Mr. Tamba’s attempt scarred his stomach, which still pains him.

After finally being identified as a vulnerable case, Mr. Tamba, who was said he was arrested at a political protest in Congo, has been allowed to move to another camp on the Greek mainland. But conditions there are not much better, and Mr. Tamba worries whether he will be able to access medication now that he has been moved.

The Greek government says it plans to move a third of residents to the mainland in the coming weeks. The camp’s population in September was so large that many were living under tarpaulins on a windswept spillover site beyond its fences.

Since 2015, the camp has often relied on smaller overflow encampments, but in five visits over the past three years, I had never seen the spillover extend so far.

A life of lines

Rahmuddin Ashrafi, an Afghan farmer, arrived here in June with his wife, Sohaela, and their three small children. In Afghanistan, Mr. Ashrafi, 34, said their house and land were destroyed in fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan army. At Moria, the five of them now share a small two-person tent.

The family’s typical day begins at 4 a.m., when Mr. Ashrafi joins a line for water and bread that is usually served four hours later at 8 a.m. At around 9:30 a.m., he joins the line again for lunch, which tends to arrive after another four hours of waiting. Two hours later, he joins another four-hour line for dinner.

On the days when he needs to line up for official paperwork, or to visit the doctor — his three-year-old daughter was recently hospitalized with appendicitis — he sometimes has to skip meals altogether, or rely on leftovers from other Afghans.

“Before, I thought that Greece would be one of the best places to live,” Mr. Ashrafi said. “Now I feel it would have been better to drown while crossing the sea.”

Few residents feel safe. In the privacy of his tent, a 25-year-old Iraqi student rolled up his sweatshirt to reveal a recent set of stab wounds. These were the result of an attack by other campers, he said, asking that his name not be published for fear of further reprisals.

Sexual violence is also common. The International Rescue Committee has assessed over 70 people since March who have reported being sexually abused at the camp. Women say they are wary of walking alone through the camp at night.

Compounding these issues, many residents feel trapped in an endlessly bureaucratic asylum application process that they do not fully understand.

Mr. Ashrafi had to miss a scheduled interview because he had to take his daughter to the hospital. Now he must wait months for another appointment.

Those arriving at the camp in the coming weeks can expect to wait until at least March for an interview, said Philip Worthington, managing director of European Lawyers in Lesvos, a legal aid group operating on the island.

Should an applicant be rejected, there are currently no state-sponsored lawyers to assist them with their appeal, in contravention of both Greek and European law, Mr. Worthington said.

There is growing acrimony — and now an investigation — over why the camp is so bad when so much money has been provided by the European Union to help improve the Greek asylum system since migration levels started to rise in 2014.

The European Union has allocated nearly 1.62 billion euros — about $1.9 billion — to the Greek asylum effort over the past half-decade, of which €1.1 billion has already been paid out, according to data supplied to The New York Times by the bloc. Over 20 government departments and nongovernmental organizations have received European Union money, a piecemeal approach in which no institution has complete oversight over how the money is spent.

A spokesman for the Greek migration ministry, Alexis Bouzis, denied any financial misuse on the part of the government, and attributed the situation to a small rise in migration flows over the summer, which led to a backlog.

“No one could have predicted it,” Mr. Bouzis said.

Aid groups have been warning of a need for expanded facilities for several years, however. For some, the failure to improve the camp and hasten the asylum process suggests neglect on the part of the Greek government and the European Union departments that fund it.

This perception was reinforced at a private meeting of Greek and European Union officials and aid workers on Sept. 4. According to two people present, a British official representing the European Commission, the bloc’s civil service, suggested keeping living standards low at Moria in order to deter future migration to Greece.

Asked to comment on this suggestion, a spokeswoman for the commission said that it did not represent the service’s official stance.

“It is in no one’s interest that the conditions in Moria remain as they are,” said Natasha Bertaud, a commission spokeswoman, “which is why the commission is doing everything in its power to help the Greek authorities improve them.”

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5) Chicago Police Officer Defends His Shooting of Laquan McDonald
By Mitch Smith, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/jason-van-dyke-chicago-laquan.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

Jason Van Dyke, a Chicago police officer, testified during his murder trial for the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, 17. [Note: No photo of Laquan in this article who Van Dyke shot 16 times! —BW]

CHICAGO — For two weeks, Jason Van Dyke sat silently in a courtroom here, watching as prosecutors played a video of him jumping out of his Chicago police cruiser and shooting Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, 16 times.

On Tuesday, Officer Van Dyke spoke. Before jurors who will decide whether he is guilty of first-degree murder, he testified that Laquan waved a knife and angled it toward him, stared at him menacingly and tried to get up from the ground after being shot. The video showed none of that.

The case — a rare murder prosecution of a Chicago police officer — may now rest on whether jurors believe the explanations Officer Van Dyke gave for the gaps between what he says happened and what the police video showed.

“That video may not show it, but that wasn’t from my perspective,” Officer Van Dyke said when pressed by prosecutors about his decision to continue shooting after pausing briefly. “I was coming at it from a completely different angle.”

This trial is seen by many here as a referendum on whether police officers can ever be held accountable for taking a life. The death of Laquan, who was 17, led to upheaval at City Hall and within the Police Department over police conduct and officers’ treatment of black residents. Rules for when officers can shoot were tightened. Activists have promised massive protests if Officer Van Dyke, who is white, is acquitted.

But inside Courtroom 500, where this trial has been unfolding for weeks, the focus is on a period of only a few seconds, when Officer Van Dyke and Laquan’s paths crossed on Pulaski Road on Oct. 20, 2014. Prosecutors say Officer Van Dyke acted unreasonably, repeatedly shooting the teenager when he posed no lethal threat and as he was veering away. Defense lawyers say Officer Van Dyke acted as he was trained to do when dealing with someone with a knife.

“I just kept on looking at that knife and I shot at it,” Officer Van Dyke said, referring to his second volley of gunfire, when Laquan had fallen to the street. “I just wanted him to get rid of that knife.”

Across the country, police officers are seldom charged for on-duty shootings and convicted even less. Lawyers advise many defendants against taking the stand in their own cases, but an officer’s words can be seen as essential in a self-defense case, particularly if jurors are trying to reconcile a video of a shooting with what was running through the officer’s mind at the time.

“It is so often the case that they are the main witnesses in a case, sometimes the only witness,” said David A. Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies police accountability.

In many recent, high-profile prosecutions of police shootings, officers testified on their own behalf, though experts said the number of such cases is too low to draw many conclusions. The outcomes, too, have been mixed. Last year, police officers who testified in shooting trials in Minnesota, Missouri and Oklahoma were acquitted. Another officer in Wisconsin was acquitted without testifying. And this summer, an officer in Texas was convicted of murder after taking the witness stand.

Often, police officers have used similar language on the witness stand to defend their actions. In the Minnesota case, Officer Jeronimo Yanez said he “had no choice” but to shoot at Philando Castile, a black motorist. In the Oklahoma case, in which an officer shot Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man, Officer Betty Jo Shelby told jurors that she believed he had a gun. “I meet a gun with a gun,” she said. And in Ohio, where two juries failed to reach a verdict in the fatal shooting of Samuel DuBose, Officer Ray Tensing said last year that he opened fire after “my police instinct kicked in.”

In the Chicago courtroom on Tuesday, Officer Van Dyke described hearing a colleague radio for help after a report of someone breaking into vehicles, and racing to the scene that evening in 2014. He said he became worried after learning that Laquan had popped the tire of a police cruiser, presumably with a three-inch folding knife he was carrying. When Officer Van Dyke arrived at the scene, he said Laquan’s demeanor heightened his concern.

“His face had no expression. His eyes were just bugging out of his head. He had just these huge white eyes just staring right through me,” Officer Van Dyke said. “I was yelling at him, ‘Drop the knife!’”

The police dashboard camera video of the shooting did not capture audio of what took place, and the camera angle, from behind Laquan, did not show Laquan’s facial expressions or the front of his body. Officer Van Dyke began shooting within seconds of pulling up to the scene, the video showed. About 10 other officers on the scene, some of whom had been following Laquan for several blocks, did not fire their guns.

On cross-examination, prosecutors questioned Officer Van Dyke about why he did not wait for a colleague with a Taser to arrive, why he stepped toward Laquan as he was firing and why he said Laquan was approaching him when the video showed the teenager steering away, toward the other side of the street.

“You didn’t even have to get out of the car at that point, did you?” asked Jody Gleason, a prosecutor.

“You could say I also didn’t have to go to work that night,” Officer Van Dyke snapped back.

Officer Van Dyke, who is free on bond and on unpaid leave from the Police Department, has said little in public since he was charged in 2015. His testimony grew emotional at times; he dabbed his face and spoke of pride about not being involved in other shootings.

The trial has featured dueling accounts of the shooting from experts and witnesses. Defense lawyers are expected to rest their case on Wednesday.

Earlier in the trial, Officer Van Dyke’s partner, Joseph Walsh, defended the shooting and acted out a dramatic scene for jurors that he said showed Laquan preparing to attack. The video showed no such movements.

“He was, I believe, parallel to Officer Van Dyke at which time he raised his right arm, knife in hand, swung that up to shoulder level rounding his right shoulder,” Mr. Walsh told jurors. Mr. Walsh is charged separately with lying on official reports about the shooting.

Jose Torres, a bystander who parked nearby and saw the shooting, provided a far different account. He told jurors that Laquan was walking away when the gunshots started and that the gunfire continued for several seconds after the teenager collapsed on the road.

“I said, ‘Why the ‘f’ are they still shooting him when he’s on the ground?’” Mr. Torres testified.

Timothy Williams contributed reporting.

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6)  Homeland Security’s Computers Couldn’t Track Separated Families, Report Finds
By Ron Nixon, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/politics/immigration-family-separation-dhs.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Migrant children at a tent encampment in Tornillo, Tex., in June. Some parents didn’t understand that they would be separated from their children at the border, a report found.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security was so unprepared for the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy that its computer systems were unable to track family members separated at the Mexican border and the agency held migrant children in detention centers far longer than the law allowed, a report released on Tuesday found.

Agency officials also gave inconsistent information to migrant parents arriving at the border, so some did not understand that they would be separated from their children, according to the report by the department’s Office of Inspector General.

The agency’s problems in identifying, tracking and reuniting familiesstemmed from limits in its computer systems, the report said. For example, only one part of Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol, had systems that could send information about migrant children directly to Department of Health and Human Services computers.

But the Office of Field Operations, another part of Customs and Border Protection, could not. Customs officers, who staff ports of entry, had to send their information to Health and Human Services in emails with Microsoft Word documents as attachments. (Under federal law, unaccompanied children may be held for no more than 72 hours before being transferred to the health agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.)

“Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could be lost in the system,” the auditors wrote.

The report also concluded that a database said to be developed jointly by the homeland security and health departments to track the separated families did not exist. The agencies would later admit that there was no “direct electronic interface” between their computer systems.

The Department of Homeland Security also detained migrant children far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law in facilities that were designed only for short-term detention.

The report found that 564 children in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, for example, were kept in these facilities for longer than three days. In the El Paso area, 297 children were detained in the short-term facilities for more than 72 hours, according to the report.

In an emailed statement, Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the department, said the inspector general’s report illustrated the “difficulties in enforcing immigration laws that are broken and poorly written.”

Ms. Waldman also criticized the report for including steps the agency took to address migrants seeking asylum legally at ports with those caught by the Border Patrol trying to cross the border illegally. Asylum seekers who arrived at ports of entry were not subject to the zero-tolerance policy, she said.

“This administration will no longer turn a blind eye to illegal immigration and will continue to refer illegal border crossers for prosecution,” Ms. Waldman said.

The report is the first after-action report issued by the watchdog office about the administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy, announced in April by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Under the policy, prosecutors from the Justice Department on the southwestern border were told to charge every illegal entry offense “to the extent practicable.”

A month later, Mr. Sessions announced that the Department of Homeland Security would refer “100 percent of illegal southwest border crossings” for criminal prosecution — a decision that led to the separation of families at the border.

That decision set off weeks of protests, with Democrats and many Republicans calling on Mr. Trump to end the policy.

Facing international condemnation, Mr. Trump signed an executive order in June ending the policy. Later that month, a federal court ordered the government to begin reunifying children with their families. Many of the children, some younger than 5, had been placed in detention centers thousands of miles from their parents.

On Tuesday, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, called on Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, to resign over what he said were misleading statements she made to Congress over the zero-tolerance policy.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by two groups seeking greater government transparency — the Project on Government Oversight and Open the Government — suggest that Ms. Nielsen signed off on actions that led to children being separated from their families.

But during a May 15 Senate hearing, Ms. Nielsen told Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, “We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents.”

Mr. Durbin disputed that on Tuesday.

“Secretary Nielsen signed off on this family separation policy, falsely claimed that the policy did not exist, and then callously failed to address the policy’s tragic and inevitable fallout,” Mr. Durbin said on Twitter. “In light of this devastating report, she should resign.”

Ms. Waldman, the homeland security spokeswoman, said the document cited by Mr. Durbin was taken out of context.

“The oft-cited quote pulled from the April 23 memo simply states the premise that D.H.S. has the legal authority to take an action — however, it did not direct a policy of family separation for the purposes of deterrence,” she said. “Conflating authority versus actual policy based on a redacted memo provides a disservice to the public and does not show the full picture of considerations presented to the secretary.”

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7) F.D.A. Seizes Documents From Juul Headquarters
By Jan Hoffman, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/health/juul-ecigarettes-fda-raid.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

The F.D.A. inspection at Juul Labs’s headquarters in San Francisco was a follow-up for a request of documents in April.

The Food and Drug Administration conducted a surprise inspection of the headquarters of the e-cigarette maker Juul Labs last Friday, carting away more than a thousand documents it said were related to the company’s sales and marketing practices.

The move, announced on Tuesday, was seen as an attempt to ratchet up pressure on the company, which controls 72 percent of the e-cigarette market in the United States and whose products have become popular in high schools. The F.D.A. said it was particularly interested in whether Juul deliberately targeted minors as consumers.

“The new and highly disturbing data we have on youth use demonstrates plainly that e-cigarettes are creating an epidemic of regular nicotine use among teens,” the F.D.A. said in a statement. “It is vital that we take action to understand and address the particular appeal of, and ease of access to, these products among kids.”

F.D.A. officials described the surprise inspection as a follow-up to a request the agency made for Juul’s research and marketing data in April. Kevin Burns, Juul’s chief executive officer, said the company had already handed over more than 50,000 pages of internal documents to the F.D.A. in response to that request.

“We want to be part of the solution in preventing underage use, and we believe it will take industry and regulators working together to restrict youth access,” he said.

In recent months, the F.D.A. has increasingly expressed alarm over the prevalence of vaping among youths in high school and even middle school, which its commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said had reached “epidemic proportions.”

A high school student with a Juul e-cigarette in Cambridge, Mass. The F.D.A. is particularly concerned that Juul deliberately marketed to teenagers, who are also increasingly using vaping devices for marijuana use.

The number of high-school students who used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days has risen roughly 75 percent since last year to about three million, according to preliminary unpublished data, confirmed by the F.D.A. Dr. Gottlieb has repeatedly noted that the candy-like names and flavors of many vaping liquids seem intended to attract younger users.

A RAND Corporation study of 2,039 Californians from ages 16 to 20 beginning in 2015 through 2017, released Tuesday, offered new evidence for concern about teenage vaping. Published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, the report said that as teenagers who used e-cigarettes grew older, many began smoking traditional cigarettes, which are more dangerous, as well.

By the end of the study period, over half of e-cigarette users were also smoking cigarettes.

In another report released on Tuesday and published in the journal JAMA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted the dominance of Juul in the e-cigarette market. The C.D.C. noted that Juul Labs’ sales soared from 2.2 million devices in 2016 to 16.2 million devices last year. The C.D.C.’s figures only included those from retail stores, not the internet, which is also a major source of sales.

Other recent studies have also pointed out that teenagers are increasingly using vaping devices for marijuana consumption.

Many adult consumers of e-cigarettes say the devices have helped them move away from smoking traditional cigarettes, or quit entirely. But a growing number of teenagers who have never smoked are also turning to e-cigarettes, believing that they are relatively harmless products.

But though e-cigarettes do not have the carcinogens that come from burning tobacco, they, especially Juul, can have strong concentrations of nicotine, which is highly addictive, and detrimental to the developing adolescent brain.

In September the F.D.A. announced a flurry of fines and warning letters that it had sent to convenience stores for selling e-cigarettes to underaged customers. (It is illegal to sell the devices to anyone under 18.) The agency said it would also go after online sales, pointing out that bulk purchases were possible red-light indicators that a buyer might then resell devices to minors.

The agency has given Juul and four other e-cigarette manufacturers a 60-day deadline to produce plans showing how they will limit access to teenagers. Recently, it started its own multimillion-dollar campaign of posters for high school bathrooms and public service announcements on popular websites to warn teens of the dangers of vaping nicotine.

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