Cop Blog

Cops Gone Wild; Are Seattle police today really more violent, or just likelier to be caught on camera?

2011-02-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

By Rick Anderson

Malaika Brooks was driving her 12-year-old son Jahrod to the African American Academy on Beacon Hill one morning in 2004 when a Seattle cop pulled her over. It was the beginning of a traffic infraction that has so far cost city taxpayers $345,000 in legal fees, and which left the then-pregnant Brooks with Taser scars and the determination to pursue an alleged police-brutality case for what appears to be a record seven years and counting.

Officer Juan Ornelas, who'd caught Brooks on radar, came to her window and said she'd been doing 32 in a 20-mph school zone. Brooks denied it, explaining he must have mistaken her vehicle for the black Honda that had been racing along in front of her. Brooks, then 34, handed her license to Ornelas as her son got out and walked on to school. Ornelas wrote the ticket and handed it to Brooks for her signature. She declined. Signing it, she mistakenly thought, would be an admission of guilt. Ornelas told her that if she didn't sign the traffic ticket, he would issue a criminal citation for refusing. She could then be arrested and taken to jail.

Brooks said she wasn't signing anything, but would accept the ticket otherwise. Ornelas then called Sgt. Steve Daman to the scene. Officer Donald Jones also showed up. When Brooks told the sergeant she wouldn't sign, Daman told Ornelas and Jones to "book her." Brooks was asked to step from the car. She refused. Jones then displayed a Taser stun gun and asked if she knew what it could do to her. Brooks told the officers she was pregnant. "How pregnant?" one asked. Her baby was due in two months, she said. She refused to step out.

After a discussion among the officers, Ornelas opened the driver's door, reached in and grabbed Brooks by the left arm as Jones put the device to Brooks' thigh in touch-stun mode and shocked her with 50,000 volts. She began honking her horn, screaming for help as she resisted. Jones quickly administered another shock to Brooks' arm, and she stopped blowing the horn. Then he shocked her a third time, in the neck, and Brooks fell over, unable to move. She was pulled out and held face-down on the street while being handcuffed. After an examination by fire-department medics, she was jailed for resisting arrest. The charges ultimately were dismissed.

Brooks, who two months later gave birth to a healthy baby girl, has been in court ever since, contending that the police used excessive force. Her case worked its way up to a federal appeals panel last year, where two of three judges ruled that the police had acted within the law and used proper force. But after another appeal, Brooks' attorney Eric Zubel was allowed to appear before the full 11-member court at a session in Pasadena, Calif., in December to re-argue the case. A decision is due soon.

Ted Buck, of law firm Stafford Frey Cooper, which has been contracting with the city for 40 years to defend Seattle police officers in court, says Brooks was Tasered not because she was speeding, "but because she committed two separate crimes," resisting and refusing to sign the criminal citation.

"If the police had done their job right," counters Zubel, "this never would have happened."

This debate might have ended long ago with the presence of video footage. But there was none. Seattle police began to install dashboard cameras in 2002, equipping just 16 of 220 vehicles. They have been adding them since, and now 275 vehicles sport the $5,000 cameras. The city is also contemplating equipping each officer with a lapel camera. But the police cruiser in Brooks' case was not outfitted with video, nor were any security cameras or witnesses with video-capable cell-phone cameras nearby to catch police face-planting a pregnant woman. Imagine that on TV.

"The problems we are addressing today have been around for a long time," says Zubel, an attorney for 37 years. "Had there been videotape of her arrest, there would have been a much better chance of settling the case. Tape is probably the biggest difference in these cases today."

Seattle Police Officers' Guild President Rich O'Neill says that of the 1,250 officers in the Seattle Police Department, 85 percent have never had a complaint filed against them, and only five had three or more complaints leveled against them in 2009. Use-of-force incidents have declined three years in a row, he says, which SPD confirms, dropping Seattle's force use to 20 percent less than the national average.

But that doesn't seem to be the public's perception of Seattle cops today, and that may have a lot to do with videotape. Nine out of 12 use-of-force cases occurring from 2008 through 2010—most of them still under police or court review—include video taken by car and security cameras or witnesses. Most of the current high-profile cases likely wouldn't be known to the public had it not been for the video revolution.

One of the first 2010 videotape cases—footage that some SPD officials attempted to keep from being aired on local TV—shows a prone 21-year-old Martin Monetti being kicked in the head last April by SPD officer Shandy Cobane. He told Monetti— mistakenly detained as a robbery suspect—that if he moved, "I'm going to beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you, homey."

Photographed by freelancer Jud Morris, the video eventually went viral, also showing officer Mary Woollum stepping on the legs of another suspect. But that was after KCPQ-TV, which works closely with local officers on its Washington's Most Wanted series, sat on the footage at the urging of police, according to Morris. He took the video to KIRO-TV, which ran it a few days later. KCPQ then ran its clip. Steve Kraycik, the station's news director, denied suppressing the film, then resigned.

The shooting death of 50-year-old John T. Williams, a Native American wood-carver, was only partly caught on videotape, but the audio was key, revealing the officer's commands and the timing of his shots. Williams was slain last August when confronted by Officer Ian Birk at the corner of Boren Avenue and Howell Street. Birk, 27, a cop just two years, told the inebriated Williams to drop the knife he carried, then, in four seconds, made his decision to shoot, firing four rounds. Though an SPD Firearms Review Board found Birk acted without justification, and only one of an eight-member inquest jury found Williams posed a threat to Birk, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, facing the legal hurdle of trying to prove the officer acted with malice, chose not to file charges last week. Hours later, Birk submitted his resignation.

Those and other videotaped incidents prompted the Department of Justice in January to announce a preliminary civil-rights investigation of SPD operations and procedures. The review, requested by the ACLU, the NAACP, and other community groups, began last week and includes FBI interviews with citizens, police, and City Hall officials. It is somewhat similar to the DOJ probe of the King County Jail in 2006, which led to a settlement and the ongoing monitoring of the jail to ensure prisoners' rights.

The Guild's O'Neill, among others, thinks the feds will not seek drastic changes, just recommend a course correction. But without pictures, would the DOJ even be here? And would the TV- and Internet-viewing public be reacting as angrily as it is in protests, online comments, and public hearings, some demanding the chief of police's head?

Clearly some are empowered by what they've seen on their screens. After Satterberg's no-charges announcement, family and supporters of Williams showed up at a press conference held by Mayor Mike McGinn, urging him to speak out. "Do you feel any shame?" asked one, any "outrage?"

"I'm not going to sit here and yell and scream about it," replied McGinn. But others have, including demonstrators who marched noisily through downtown that night, chanting "Lock 'em up, throw 'em in jail, killer cops get no bail!"

They and others think the videos amount to Cops Gone Wild. Which raises the question: Has there been an increase in the number of use-of-force incidents, or just in the number of incidents caught on camera? And are those videos giving a clear picture of what's happening between cops and citizens on Seattle's streets?

SPD's internal investigations unit, the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA), hasn't yet released its 2010 annual report. But police attorney Buck, whose firm is representing a number of videotaped officers, including Birk, says, "I have seen no evidence that there has been any significant change in the number of suspect/police encounters in the past several years." (SPD statistics show 124 force complaints in 2007, 112 in 2008, and 79 in 2009.)

Yet there is a perception of an epidemic of sorts, he concedes. "First is the increase in the interactions caught on video, which brings such encounters more acutely to the mind of the average citizen. It's easier to skip over a written version of an event than it is to overlook video footage. Second, average citizens are not used to seeing real-life confrontations. We all try to avoid that sort of thing when possible, and most people simply never see actual physical fights or struggles."

The images are thus typically shocking, he says, and with a dozen SPD videos—nine of them involving minority suspects—available on the web, it's difficult not to perceive a streak of cop vigilantism in the Emerald City.

Jake K. Baijot-Clary, for example, was arrested for assault outside a Ballard bar last December. Clary, 21, was face down on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind him, when SPD officer Garth Haynes put a foot on Clary's head, bouncing his face off the sidewalk. A cruiser videotape also shows another officer quickly pulling Haynes off to the side. Police are reviewing the case, and Haynes has been reassigned.

Then there's 47-year-old Daniel Macio Saunders. The Seattle man is suing the department after three officers used a Taser and allegedly beat him in 2009 with fists, batons, and flashlights at an SPD evidence facility after he was mistakenly released from jail. But was it a beating or a subduing? A video shows Saunders resisting arrest, suggesting he was punched and clubbed in response. Likewise, teenager Joseph (Joey) Wilson, a special-ed student, is suing SPD after suffering a broken nose and a concussion he says were caused by cops after a 2009 jaywalking incident. Police said Wilson was combative and refused to get out of the street, and video taken by a neighbor shows he struggled and resisted. The officers were later exonerated.

And was the case of 49-year-old John Kita brutality or necessary force? He claims in a federal case that he was beaten and kneed by officer Kevin Oshikawa-Clay after the officer discovered Kita fighting with a woman under I-5 in Seattle, an incident recorded on police video in February 2008. The officer, who was administratively exonerated, said Kita resisted and fought him and he had been required to use "minimal" force to take him down.

One of the most memorable recent videos shows 19-year-old Marilyn Ellen Levias after she was stopped for jaywalking in Rainier Valley last June by officer Ian Walsh. A friend, Angel L. Rosenthal, 17, then intervened, pushing the officer. Walsh responded by punching her in the face. The impression was that Walsh was the evildoer, yet Rosenthal later pled guilty to assault and apologized to the officer, who was cleared of wrongdoing.

Also among the video pantheon, Yvette Gaston, 42, then a county juvenile probation officer, was physically restrained by police in 2008 while trying to help a juvenile who'd been stopped by police. The city, which has cop-car video footage of the incident, claims officers were surrounded by an "unruly" crowd and that Gaston interfered. Charged with assault and obstruction, she was exonerated in municipal court, and has filed a federal lawsuit.

Additionally, 28-year-old Demetrius James claims in a federal lawsuit that he was Tasered and shot in 2009 after police approached him while he tried to drive out of a parking lot on South Jackson Street. An officer who felt James was trying to run him down fired his handgun five times, with one bullet striking James in the wrist. James jumped from the car and ran, but was ultimately apprehended. A video captured some of the events. James was charged with assault, and after two mistrials and 14 months in jail, pleaded down to a lesser charge.

Though some of the recent footage seems to favor the arrestees' claims, Buck's firm encourages cops to use video as much as possible. "Where videos are used extensively, the result has been overwhelmingly positive for line officers," he says. "The great majority of suspect complaints about officer conduct are at least embellished, if not outright fabricated. Video can reveal such claims for the phooey they often are."

But Jennifer Shaw, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Seattle chapter, says the recent clips are damning, showing a pattern of "repeat incidents of people of color ending up on the ground with a police officer over them . . . caught on videotape." Some are unquestionably brutality, she claims. "The easy ones are the ones that are caught on videotape. Those are the ones that are hard to deny. You have it before your eyes and we can't really be asked to distrust what we're seeing."

O'Neill, the guild leader, thinks that's overblown. "With the exception of the John T. Williams incident, not one of the individuals involved in the different video incidents sustained any serious injury," he says. "Does that not show that officers are using some form of restraint when applying force?"

He thinks too many people, including top cops and politicians, misinterpret the video snippets. Greg Nickels' administration had more experience dealing with the media, he says, while Mayor Mike McGinn's people "come out right away with a statement before they even bother to look at the situation in the proper context."

The press, he adds, "is also not blameless here. Why do they keep using the term 'stomp' or 'stomping' without detailing that the individual involved was not injured? If I truly stomped you, would you not expect to be injured?"

Former police chief Andrew J. Scott, now a Florida-based expert police consultant, says the increase in videotape is a good thing for law enforcement and the public at large. "There is no downside to having an in-court video," he says. "But one thing I also caution the public is that what they see is a snapshot, not the entire encounter," i.e., events such as the crime being committed, a foot or car chase, or other adrenalin-stoking prelims. "The public does not understand to any degree the appropriate application of the use of force. I get calls almost weekly where someone has been apparently hit or Tased, and some cases are valid, others are not."

Though most police work is routinely peaceful, use-of-force incidents, like fights at a hockey game, get viewers' attention. It's what the producers of the TV show Cops go looking for, says Scott, "and I would never have my law enforcement agency photographed by Cops. It scares the hell out of me. It always looks like excessive use of force. The public's view is skewed because they don't know what the law allows an officer to do, and what the full circumstances were."

When confronted during an arrest by a suspect attempting to flee or fight, police are advised to gain the upper hand quickly by meeting force with superior force—moving quickly and powerfully, shouting commands to subdue the subject. In a one-on-one event, such as the Williams shooting, officers are advised to call for backup and stay a safe distance from the subject. (Officer Birk was faulted for failing to do either: "We found very little to show he was within training and policy" rules, says Deputy Chief Clark Kimerer).

Even when done appropriately, arrests often result in complaints against police (the department is currently handling 500 complaints against its officers, dating back a year). And as the more recent footage of incidents shows, some officers, despite O'Neill's claims, inarguably used unnecessary force. An October incident, in which a teen with his hands up was kicked three times in the body and head by plainclothes officer James Lee, has resulted in a $450,000 lawsuit against Lee and the department. Lee has since admitted that he falsely claimed in his report to have first "struggled" with the youth before kicking him in self-defense.

Underscoring the problem, observers note, is SPD's fielding of green officers. One-third of the force has fewer than three years' experience (besides Birk, that group includes several other cops involved in the video incidents). About 250 veteran SPD officers are facing retirement, meaning more new recruits will be on duty soon.

Police consultant Ed Mamet, a retired New York City police captain, thinks that inexperience reflects a stature issue in Seattle, as elsewhere. "What I have observed in my work is that the quality of police officers today is not that of my generation," he tells us. "Many of these new officers lack the discipline and work ethic that those of my generation had, and these deficiencies manifest themselves in the way they treat members of the public."

Mike McGinn and Wes Uhlman have met twice now, sitting in the mayor's expansive offices on the seventh floor of City Hall and chatting about police turmoil, an issue they have in common. When Uhlman, now 75, was elected in 1969 as the youngest mayor (age 34) in Seattle history, SPD was in chaos as two grand juries began to investigate a police-payoff system that grew out of City Hall's quarter-century tolerance of vice. A corrupt departmental leadership was being marched off to court, and Uhlman began to bring in a series of visiting police chiefs, six in a year, to clean house.

McGinn, who took office in 2010, a year highlighted by a half-dozen incidents of alleged police brutality and preceded by another half-dozen incidents from 2008–2009 under Nickels and then–Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, wanted to know Uhlman's secrets. McGinn had picked a new chief from within, 30-year SPD veteran John Diaz, in the middle of a growing uproar. By January, when the two mayors first met, the DOJ was preparing to review SPD's practices as more incidents emerged, and it was probably going to get worse before it got better.

At McGinn's invitation, Uhlman—an attorney, as is McGinn—gave the new mayor a candid assessment. "I didn't use the words 'trigger-happy,' " Uhlman says of his talk with McGinn, "but I said the department's procedure on use of deadly force is in serious question."

Uhlman described for McGinn a contextual scenario of the events, noting they had been preceded by the Halloween 2009 murder of Seattle police officer Tim Brenton, followed a month later by Maurice Clemmons' bloody-Sunday massacre of four officers in Lakewood. "Cops face death on a daily basis. It's part of the job to be apprehensive," Uhlman says. "But I said the issue, which has to be dealt with in training, is restraint. In these incidents, some of the actions are just inexcusable."

The two politicians also discussed how to finesse change at the department. "There will be difficult personnel decisions that have to be made, which will not be readily accepted by the department at first. But Mike has political cover with this investigation," Uhlman says, alluding to the federal review. "It's fresh and new, and the FBI will probably come out with some incisive kinds of suggestions and findings, and that might be the best time for him to make any difficult moves in the department."

After their meetings, McGinn announced this month at a public forum on police accountability that the department was undertaking a complete review of its training practices, then cited his sessions with Uhlman. "Any time I speak to Wes," McGinn said, "I feel a lot better."

McGinn tells people he worries about a departmental "culture" that tolerates excessive force, and, if it does exist, he's determined to root it out. "Cultures take time to build up and they take time to break down," he says. Meanwhile, City Council member Tim Burgess, a former cop, has no easy answer for what fosters "a police culture of 'us versus them,' " he says, and believes it's a mistake to think "a few tweaks or new rules and training changes will resolve all the public's concerns."

Some of the crowd attending a recent police-accountability forum made that discontent clear, jeering and interrupting panel speakers, one exclaiming of the video incidents, "These were not fucking accidents!" Two demonstrators were asked to leave.

The guild's O'Neill says the problem in large part lies with those who resist arrest. Instead, they should "obey the command" even if the cops are wrong. In other words, don't get mad, get even. "What is the alternative?" he asks. "To be allowed to disobey the order, actively resist, and then when the situation is escalated, absolve the subject completely for any part in causing the situation to escalate? I hope that is never the situation we put our officers in."

But Nicole Gaines, president of the Loren Miller Bar Association for people of color, thinks that is asking less of cops and more of citizens. Officers, she says, "are expected to act and respond in a manner that is higher than those they are necessarily protecting. To ask the public to always take the high road when dealing with the officers, when it's the officer's responsibility to be the professional, is absolutely unacceptable."

It's ironic that, in the midst of more video exposure, one of the complaints about SPD is that it lacks transparency. Gaines, for one, thinks police disciplinary reports should be as accessible as, say, attorney disciplinary reports. "As an attorney," she says, "if I do something wrong, you can go on the bar's website and see everything I did." The City Council is given access to police disciplinary reports, she adds, so why shouldn't the public be?

According to the OPA, of 198 complaint investigations completed in 2009, only 12 percent were sustained. But what, really, is known about the process and facts of those cases? Onetime deputy mayor Ann Levinson, a civilian outside auditor of the OPA—which replaced the even more secretive Internal Investigations unit in 1999—agrees that access to reports is difficult (there are monthly summaries on OPA's website), and concedes the unit does not "do a very good job of communicating to the public." They're working to change that, she adds.

This blue-wall mentality concerns former Seattle U.S. Attorney Mike McKay, long a police ally. Now in private practice with his brother John, also an ex–U.S. Attorney, McKay says he's been stonewalled by SPD in attempts to pry records from the department in a case of alleged brutality. "Despite what the [state] Open Records Act requires, SPD simply refuses to hand over some records," he says. "They cite 'privacy issues.' They force you to sue them. Most people just shrug and walk away; they can't afford a lawsuit. I see this as an institutional effort to protect officers. I would hope the DOJ will be looking into the department's efforts at a cover-up in these cases."

The department has also been caught failing to turn over its videos to defendants in criminal trials. Seattle artist Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes received a $185,000 settlement in 2007 from the department after filing a federal civil-rights lawsuit over his 2005 arrest. He was badly beaten, and photos of his bloodied, swollen, puffed-up face made him a poster boy for police brutality. Dash-cam audio/video of the incident in a Capitol Hill alley revealed blows being struck and a woman saying "Oh, my God!" while Alley-Barnes pleads with officers to "please stop kicking me!"

Police withheld the video until three days into Alley-Barnes' municipal court trial, leading to dismissal of the case. Then–Chief Kerlikowske, now President Obama's drug czar, refused to discipline any of the officers even though punishment had been recommended by an internal investigator.

Seattle cyber-security expert Eric Rachner also sued police last year for withholding video of his arrest during a drunken game of street golf. Rachner refused to show an officer identification and was arrested for obstruction; police said they no longer had a video of the incident when Rachner asked about it. But after charges were dropped, he learned the video was still in SPD possession, and he and the department settled a lawsuit out of court in October.

Video, like electronic and paper reports, falls under the public-records act, and McKay thinks "Seattle is one of the worst" U.S. cities for wrongly withholding such evidence. He recently got into it with the mayor's office, claiming Chief Diaz was engaged in a "full-blown cover-up" within the department. In the wake of media reports, mayoral attorney Carl Marquardt responded in an e-mail that McKay's charges were flimsy: "John Diaz is an honorable guy. You called him a liar on the front page of the paper, and you've got nothing?"

McKay represents 19-year-old Evan Sargent, who claims he was threatened by an armed off-duty police officer, Don Waters, 46, in a 2009 road-rage incident. The two met in an alley near the West Seattle Junction that Waters was using as a shortcut, but was obstructed by Sargent's parked pickup. An upset Waters allegedly smashed Sargent's side mirror with his fist, and a frightened Sargent grabbed a baseball bat to fend him off. Waters got a handgun from his car and pointed it at Sargent, finally identifying himself as a police officer. Sargent was then arrested for investigation of assault on a police officer.

In a letter to one of his successors, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan, McKay cited the case as another reason why the DOJ should be investigating Seattle police. Durkan, whose office says she took the letter under advisement, worked with McKay to help set guidelines for the OPA in 1999. McKay says SPD improperly tried to protect Waters by attempting to falsely charge Sargent with a felony—lending credibility to Waters' claims—but prosecutors declined. Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes wouldn't file misdemeanor charges either.

McKay says Waters lied about the run-in, and that police dismissed evidence showing Waters was the aggressor. That Diaz may have approved of this was "outrageous," McKay wrote to Durkan. "If the unlawful actions of ranking SPD officers following Sargent's unlawful arrest serve as an example," he continued, "SPD may have acted to conceal other civil-rights violations to shield officers from consequences for their wrongdoing."

Mayoral attorney Marquardt explains, "It looks like [the cop and civilian] both behaved badly. He [Sargent] admitted he took checked swings, and the city attorney couldn't file against either one. The police auditors took a look at it, civilians reviewed it, and the complaint was not sustained. It's not like someone had a finger on the scale." Marquardt wouldn't comment on a rumor that McGinn's office mulled over filing a bar complaint against McKay for his "cover-up" comments, but a mayoral source who requested anonymity said "McKay would have more credibility if he wasn't trying to roll us for a couple hundred thousand for his client." Says McKay: "I don't think they're happy that we're pressing this case, not walking away like so many people do because they can't get the records."

Of course, McKay wishes he had some videotape to work with. He agrees with Zubel, Malaika Brooks' attorney, who says it can make or break a case. "Police accountability," says Zubel, "has certainly improved with the advent of tape. And the public is able to see more of how their police department is functioning."

Scott, the consultant who represents both police and defendants in court, says that while video can be helpful, SPD has "an obligation to educate the public about their procedures, to explain that they did everything right, or wrong. They're competing with these videos. An agency has to be extremely transparent with the community. There can't be doubts. I don't think that's the case today, or we likely wouldn't be having this discussion."

And, as the video hits seem to keep on coming, it's far from over.

Atlanta Settles Cell Phone Video Lawsuit

2011-02-25T10:01:00.000-08:00

Marlon Kautz said he was trying to record Atlanta police doing their
jobs when they started yelling at him and snatched his camera. Its
something he'd done before for his group, CopWatch of East Atlanta.

"I was pretty scared," said Kautz. "I was trying to remain calm
because I know in a situation like this, the police are blatantly
breaking the law and violating my rights."

In April of 2010, Kautz saw police dogs searching for drugs at a
store in Little Five Points, so he got out his cell phone and pressed
record. But this time he got a confrontation he wasn't expecting.

"They told me that I wasn't allowed to record them and that I needed
to stop," said Kautz. "One officer took his hand and physically
grabbed the camera."

The video survived on the cell phone, but Kautz said it's terribly
corrupted because police almost ruined the video when they tried to erase it.

"If there hadn't been the video it would have been another case of my
word against a police officer," said Kautz.

So, Kautz sued and he won a $40,000 judgment from the city of Atlanta
. He said he hopes police will learn from their mistake.

"If you see police messing with someone on the street, take out your
phone and record what's going on. That really sends a message to
police that the people are paying attention to the work they are
doing and we want them to be on their best behavior and not violating
people's rights," said Kautz.

Atlanta police wouldn't go on camera to discuss the lawsuit but
released a statement to CBS Atlanta News.

"This matter was referred to our Office of Professional Standards for
investigation and all three officers were disciplined. Two of the
officers received oral admonishments for failing to take the
appropriate actions, and a third for failure to supervise. Commanders
have made it clear that Atlanta police officers in the field should
not interfere with a citizen's right to film them while they work in
public areas," said police spokeswoman Kimberly Maggart.

Kautz plans to spend some of his award on new camera equipment for
his CopWatch program.

City Settles Suit in Death of an Inmate

2011-02-11T07:57:00.001-08:00

By DANIEL EDWARD ROSEN
Published: February 9, 2011

The City of New York has agreed to pay over half a million dollars to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a South Carolina man who was killed while in custody on Rikers Island in 2009.

The man, Clarence Mobley, 60, was found dead in a cell at the Anna M. Kross Center; his death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner’s office.

Rudy Velez, a lawyer for Mr. Mobley’s family, said the $525,000 settlement, which was finalized in Bronx County Surrogate’s Court last month, had brought little solace to relatives.

“In no uncertain terms,” Mr. Velez said, “they felt the officers murdered Mr. Mobley.”

No criminal charges have been filed against the correction officers implicated in the lawsuit, which had sought $10 million, said Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney’s office. The status of the investigation into the death was unclear on Wednesday.

Mr. Mobley’s family accused correction officers of failing to provide Mr. Mobley immediate medical attention after he was restrained by three officers.

Correction officials at the time said Mr. Mobley, 60, had been awaiting transfer to Bellevue Hospital Center for psychiatric treatment when he hit an officer in the face with a meal tray. He was in custody on attempted burglary charges.

After Mr. Mobley, who was 5-foot-7 and 115 pounds, was subdued, he was moved to a separate holding cell; he did not receive medical attention, Mr. Velez said. Forty-five minutes later, he was found unresponsive by another inmate who had been mopping the floor. Mr. Mobley was pronounced dead at the scene.

The cause of death, the medical examiner’s office said, was a liver laceration caused by blunt trauma to the torso.

Mr. Mobley’s daughter, Ayanna Castro, said: “I think my father’s case was brushed underneath the rug and it wasn’t handled properly at all. I think that the city didn’t do a thorough investigation and they allowed these correction officers to kill my father.”

“The settlement doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Castro, 39, added. “What matters is that these guys are walking around and are going home to their families every night and my girls don’t have their grandfather. The settlement doesn’t mean anything.”

An inmate should receive medical attention after an altercation with another inmate or a correction officer, said Stephen J. Morello, a spokesman for the Department of Correction. He would not specify the time frame in which assistance was supposed to be provided.

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Mobley’s death have been puzzling for his family.

Mr. Mobley left South Carolina for New York City on April 25, 2009, to attend a family funeral with his son and daughter. But he seemed to have disappeared; relatives learned of his death in a newspaper article.

Review cases of tortured suspects

2011-02-07T11:13:00.000-08:00

We’d like to say the sorry saga of Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his torture crew is behind us, but it’s not.

While some men who were tortured have been freed, 19 others remain behind bars though they say that Burge and his associates coerced their confessions. And there may be even more tortured inmates whose cases have yet to come to light.

We can’t say exactly what should be done about this, but we know it cannot be ignored. By means of evidentiary hearings or some other judicial undertaking, each of these cases must be re-examined. We can’t take the chance that even one innocent man remains behind bars simply because incriminating statements were beaten out of him.

Last June, a federal jury found Burge guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying when he denied that he had tortured suspects at Area 2 Police headquarters or had seen others commit torture. That verdict — and the voluminous evidence that emerged in the long legal battle leading up to it — established beyond doubt that suspects were subjected to such outrages as electric shocks to the genitals, suffocation and loaded guns to the head to get them to say what the police wanted to hear.

If only for the sake of the integrity of our criminal justice system, we can’t allow such extracted confessions to be the last word in any case.

Four men who had been tortured testified against Burge at his trial. Others have been granted new hearings. But still others who long have said they were tortured into confessing remain behind, unable to get their stories told before a judge.

It’s important to note that these are not opportunists who suddenly came forward after Burge was convicted. They complained to authorities or their lawyers or raised the issue in court many years ago.

Normally, it would be too late to review some of these complaints. Filing deadlines and other requirements are built into the system to prevent interminable appeals. But wise judges and prosecutors could agree to sweep away these obstacles so that justice can proceed.

We say this knowing how difficult it may be to sort out the truth in each instance.

In some cases, police officers may plead the Fifth Amendment, for fear of incriminating themselves, rather than testify as to the circumstances surrounding the confessions. In others, a judge may be left with no evidence other than the unrebutted claims of the defendant.

And in those cases where a new trial looks justified, witnesses and evidence may long ago have disappeared.

These are serious concerns. If in fact some of the inmates are guilty, as seems likely, nobody wants to see them set loose. But the whole record of recent wrongful convictions in Illinois suggests that others might well be innocent, and every effort must be made to ensure they get their day in court.

The legal concept of “harmless error” holds that a conviction may be upheld even if mistakes were made, provided the rest of the evidence is sufficient. But a confession extracted through torture is never a harmless error, and a conviction based even in part on such a confession cannot be allowed to stand.

Madigan sues to stop Burge pension

2011-02-07T11:11:00.000-08:00

By FRANK MAIN Staff Reporter / fmain@suntimes.com

Former Chicago Police Department detective and commander Jon Burge leaves his sentencing hearing at the Federal Building on Thursday, January 20. 2011. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed suit Monday to immediately strip convicted former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge of his $3,000-a-month pension.

Madigan said a police pension board was wrong to let Burge keep it in light of his conviction and sentencing for lying about the torture of crime suspects.

Burge was sentenced last month to 4 1/2 years in prison after being convicted in June of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying in his testimony in a civil lawsuit that he never participated in or witnessed the physical abuse of crime suspects while a Chicago cop.

The Retirement Board of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago considered taking away Burge’s pension. But that effort failed on a 4-4 vote. spurring protests by police-torture victims and others.

Burge’s supporters on the pension board argued that his felony conviction involved his testimony after he retired, so it wasn’t, as state law specificies, directly “relating to, arising out of or in connection” with his official duties.

They were wrong, Madigan argues in the lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court against Burge and the police pension board.

In addition to halting Burge’s pension, she’s asking a judge to order Burge to repay any pension benefits he’s been paid since his Jan. 21 sentencing.

“Jon Burge forfeited his right to a public pension when he lied about his knowledge of and participation in the torture and physical abuse of suspects,” Madigan said. “It’s this type of criminal conduct by a public servant that our pension forfeiture laws were designed to discourage. The public should never have to pay for the retirement of a corrupt public official.”

EFF Uncovers Widespread FBI Intelligence Violations

2011-02-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

News Update by Mark Rumold

EFF has uncovered widespread violations stemming from FBI intelligence investigations from 2001 - 2008. In a report released today, EFF documents alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices, suggesting that FBI intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.

Using documents obtained through EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the report finds:

• Evidence of delays of 2.5 years, on average, between the occurrence of a violation and its eventual reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board

• Reports of serious misconduct by FBI agents including lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant

• Indications that the FBI may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the 9 years since 9/11

EFF's report stems from analysis of nearly 2,500 pages of FBI documents, consisting of reports of FBI intelligence violations made to the Intelligence Oversight Board — an independent, civilian intelligence-monitoring board that reports to the President on the legality of foreign and domestic intelligence operations. The documents constitute the most complete picture of post-9/11 FBI intelligence abuses available to the public. Our earlier analysis of the documents showed the FBI's arbitrary disclosure practices.

EFF's report underscores the need for greater transparency and oversight in the intelligence community. As part of our ongoing effort to inform the public and elected officials about abusive intelligence investigations, we are distributing copies of the report to members of Congress.

Antioch to pay $750,000 to settle civil rights lawsuit with ex-S.F. officer

2011-02-03T09:53:00.000-08:00

By Paul Burgarino

Contra Costa Times

ANTIOCH -- The city has agreed to pay a former San Francisco police inspector $750,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit.

Marvetia Lynn Richardson sued Antioch in U.S. District Court in July 2008, saying Antioch officers illegally broke into her house on Mokelumne Drive in June 2007, shocked her with a Taser after a dispute with a tenant she was evicting, and took her to jail on suspicion of resisting arrest.

Antioch has denied any wrongdoing, saying the police department had probable cause to enter Richardson's house and did not use excessive force in making an arrest.

The lawsuit also contended that the incident was part of efforts by Antioch police to harass African-American residents and drive them out of certain neighborhoods, a charge the city also denies.

Attorneys for Richardson and Antioch declined to comment on the settlement, which prohibits them from discussing the terms.

The decision to settle a case is often made by joint risk pools for public agencies rather than by the defendant itself -- particularly when significant attorneys' fees are included, City Attorney Lynn Tracy Nerland said in a written statement.

"Such settlements reflect economic realities rather than any change of position or belief on the part of the defendant," she said.

Police were called to Richardson's home after midnight on June 7, 2007, by Bridget Reed, who was renting rooms for herself and teenage daughter and was in the

process of being evicted. Reed had called 911 to complain about noise; Richardson was at home entertaining two female friends and their children.

After talking to Richardson inside the house, the officers were outside when they heard screams and loud sounds indicating a struggle or fight, according to court documents. Reed and her daughter ran outside, saying that the teen daughter of one of Richardson's guests had threatened to shoot them.

Richardson says officers broke down her front door, and confronted her as she stood in her bedroom doorway. She was calmly answering officers' questions when she was suddenly shocked with a Taser, according to the lawsuit.

Charges against Richardson were dismissed in 2008 after a Contra Costa County judge ruled that police entered the house illegally, according to the lawsuit.

Richardson is scheduled to be in Contra Costa Superior Court in Pittsburg at 8 a.m. Feb. 7 to petition the court to find that she was factually innocent.

"She wants it erased so it's as if it never happened. She is and has been the victim," said Matt Fregi, Richardson's criminal attorney who did not represent her in the lawsuit.

A lawsuit by Richardson in San Francisco County Superior Court alleging she was wrongfully fired -- in part because of the Antioch incident -- is ongoing.

Staff writer Malaika Fraley contributed to this story. Contact Paul Burgarino at 925-779-7164.

Minorities Bear The Brunt Of Illinois' War On Drugs

2011-02-02T17:18:00.000-08:00

A new report confirms that nonwhite residents in Illinois bear the brunt of the war on drugs, from arrests to sentencing.

From arrests to sentencing, the war on drugs in Illinois hammers minority communities especially hard, a new analysis called the "Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study" shows.

One of the top -- and most distressing findings -- in the report is that nonwhites were arrested for drug-related offenses at rates that outstrip their share of the population in 62 out the state's 102 counties. Nearly three-quarters of the arrests were related to drug possession.

The trend was especially pronounced in "jurisdictions with smaller populations of nonwhite residents," according to the study. In downstate Iroquois County, for example, nonwhites made up 5 percent of the population in 2008 but represented 36 percent of those arrested on drug charges in 2005.

The problem exists in urban areas as well: while 46 percent Cook County's more than 5.2 million residents in '08 were nonwhite, they comprised 76 percent of drug arrestees three years earlier.

The study shows that disparities in who is arrested for drug-related crime extend into court systems, as well.

While cautioning that some of the data is incomplete, the report nonetheless found that statewide, African American defendants facing a Class 4 drug possession charge were sentenced to jail at a rate nearly five times greater than whites arrested for the same offense. Class 4 possession is the least severe of Illinois' felony drug charges.

"The disproportionate odds of nonwhites moving from the arrest stage to later stages in the process (specifically, prosecuting and sentencing to prison) are only partially explained by the racial imbalances at arrest and remain after statistically accounting for the selection bias at each stage," the report states. The arrest patterns then make it more likely that nonwhites go to jail, as they are stuck with a criminal history. "These unequal outcomes in the court system compound the disparities at arrest in a vicious cycle inasmuch as the probability of arrest increases with the presence of a criminal record."

Other new findings in the study include:

In 2005 in Cook County, home of the largest population of black residents in the state, African-Americans who were arrested only for a Class 4 felony drug possession charge were eight times more likely to go to prison than their white counterparts;
The proportion of nonwhites arrested for Class 4 drug possession more than doubled their representation in Illinois' general population, at 66 percent to 27 percent, in 2005;
The Cook County criminal court system is "inundated" with low-level drug cases, with 72 percent of defendants in a sample of cases from 2005 having a drug charge;
The study is primarily based on information about all 42,297 drug arrests in 2005 that researchers obtained from the Illinois State Police. Information about Cook County drug sentencing is based on a random sample of 5,000 drug and non-drug criminal cases adjudicated in its courts that same year.

In spite of arrest and sentencing disparities, major racial and ethnic groups use drugs at roughly the same rates. "[W]ithin racial/ethnic categories, the percentages of illicit drug use in the past year are highly comparable for whites, African Americans, and Latinos in Illinois: 2 percent, 1 percent, and 1 percent, respectively (illicit drugs without marijuana) and 4 percent, 5 percent, and 2 percent, respectively (illicit drugs with marijuana)," according to the report.

The findings in the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study confirm a disturbing reality about drug-related arrests and incarcerations that a number of other reviews have also found over the years.

In Illinois and other states, the consequences of mass drug-related incarceration are well documented, and include poorer health, a lack of marriageable men, and a loss of economic opportunities, among other social strains, in minority communities.

Ten recommendations are included in the report.

Members of the general assembly, the report says, should be able to attach a "Racial & Ethnic Impact Statement" to criminal justice-related bills and policies; a new task force to collect better data is called for; and "drug-free zone laws" must reviewed to gauge their effectiveness in protecting children from drugs.

Other recommendations would help those arrested but not convicted for drug crimes and ex-offenders who have left the prison system.

The State of Illinois should prohibit including "drug-related arrests that do not result in conviction in criminal histories collected for employment-related purposes," one of the recommendations states. And some arrestees should have their records automatically expunged and sealed for Class 4 felony possession charges or convictions.

In terms of the state's fiscal policy toward incarceration, the state needs to "establish budget policy and priorities to promote full utilization of existing diversion programs or alternatives to incarceration," including a program called Adult Redeploy. To quote at length from the discussion in the study about this final point:

"[The recommendation] reflects a philosophical shift toward prioritizing limited state resources to addressing the causes of criminal behavior and the attendant disproportionate impacts on minority communities, and away from paying for the results of not addressing that behavior. This shift has been adopted by 14 states currently pursuing a strategy known as Justice Reinvestment, wherein external consultants work closely with state policymakers to advance fiscally sound, data-driven criminal justice policies to break the cycle of recidivism, avert prison expenditures, and make communities safer.
Malcolm Young, a criminal justice researcher at Northwestern University who did not participate in putting the disproportionate justice study together, called its findings important and unfortunate, but not surprising. He said that more needs to be done at the front-end to keep drug users out of the criminal justice system.

That isn't an issue for wealthier people. Users from high-income communities have multiple -- "10 or 15 or 20" -- opportunities to pay for private drug treatment programs and then fall off the wagon, Young said. Their financial asset allow them to get help then relapse without involving the police or the courts. Poor users, often minorities, don't have those options.

A court like Cook County's drug court might extend a few chances for a low-income user the police arrest to seek public treatment, Young said, but if there are multiple relapses his or her problem then becomes criminalized. "The response system very quickly becomes the criminal justice system," he said.

75-Year Prison Sentence for Taping the Police? The Absurd Laws That Criminalize Audio and Video Recording in America

2011-01-31T07:03:00.000-08:00

By Lauren Kelley

Last January, Michael Allison, a 41-year-old mechanic from Bridgeport, Illinois, went to court to protest what he saw as unfair treatment from local police officers. Allison is an auto enthusiast who likes to tinker with cars, several of which he keeps on his mother's property in the neighboring town of Robinson. Because both towns have "eyesore," or abandoned property, rules that require inoperable cars to be either registered or kept in a garage (which neither house had, and which Allison could not afford to build), Allison's cars were repeatedly impounded by local officials.

Allison sued the city of Bridgeport in 2007, arguing that the eyesore law violated his civil rights and that the city was merely trying to bilk revenues from impound fees. This apparently enraged the local police, who, Allison alleges, began harassing him at home and threatening arrest when Allison refused to get rid of his cars.

Shortly before his January 2010 court date, Allison requested a court reporter for the hearing, making it clear to the county clerk that if one was not present he would record the proceedings himself.

With the request for a court reporter denied, Allison made good on his promise to bring his own audio recorder with him to the courthouse. Here's what happened next, as reported by Radley Bilko in the latest issue of Reason magazine:

Just after he walked through the courthouse door the next day, Allison says Crawford County Circuit Court Judge Kimbara Harrell asked him whether he had a tape recorder in his pocket. He said yes. Harrell then asked him if it was turned on. Allison said it was. Harrell then informed the defendant that he was in violation of the Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it a Class 1 felony to record someone without his consent. “You violated my right to privacy,” the judge said.

Allison responded that he had no idea it was illegal to record public officials during the course of their work, that there was no sign or notice barring tape recorders in the courtroom, and that he brought one only because his request for a court reporter had been denied. No matter: After Harrell found him guilty of violating the car ordinance, Allison, who had no prior criminal record, was hit with five counts of wiretapping, each punishable by four to 15 years in prison. Harrell threw him in jail, setting bail at $35,000.

That's up to 75 years in prison for breaking a law Allison did not know existed, and which he violated in the name of protecting himself from what he saw as an injustice.

As Bilko points out, Allison's case may be extreme, but he is hardly alone in facing outsized punishment for efforts to combat police wrongdoing. Take Christopher Drew and Tiawanda Moore, two Chicagoans highlighted in the New York Times last week. Drew, a 60-year-old artist, faces up to 15 years in prison for using a digital video recorder during his December 2009 arrest for selling art without a permit. Drew had planned on getting arrested in protest of the permit law, which he saw as a violation of artists' rights. He was unaware that filming the ordeal was illegal.

Likewise, Moore, a 20-year-old Southside resident, did not know it was illegal to record a conversation she had with two police officers last August, and she too faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years for doing so. Moore's case is especially troubling because she was in the process of filing a complaint with the two officers about a third officer, who Moore alleges sexually harassed her in her home. She told the Times that she "was only trying to make sure no other women suffered at the hands of the officer" by making the recording. Presumably, she was also trying to protect herself in case she faced another lewd advance. Instead, the officers tried to talk her out of filing her complaint and then slapped her with eavesdropping charges when they found out her Blackberry was recording.

These stories all highlight Illinois' draconian eavesdropping laws, which, ever since a privacy provision was overturned in 1994, have made it illegal to record audio of an individual without his or her consent. Carrying a sentence of between four and 15 years, the laws in the state are some of the harshest in the nation.

Illinois isn't the only state waging a war on citizens with recording devices. Across the country, the growing accessibility of recording devices (like smart phones) and media-sharing sites (like YouTube) is prompting officials to dredge up dusty old eavesdropping and wiretapping laws, leading to "a legal mess of outdated, loosely interpreted statutes and piecemeal court opinions that leave both cops and citizens unsure of when recording becomes a crime," according to Bilko.

The good news is that few people have actually been convicted under these laws for documenting police wrongdoing; neither Michael Allison nor Christopher Drew nor Tiawanda Moore are likely to go to prison for the recordings they made. The bad news, though, is that these laws are being used to intimidate the nation's citizens, making them afraid to stand up against police officers and other officials who are acting illegally and/or immorally. As long as no one is convicted, the law goes unchallenged, notes Adam Schwartz, senior staff counsel for the ACLU of Illinois.

The intimidation techniques extend to still photographers as well, as documented by Carlos Miller on the blog Photography is Not a Crime, which catalogs rights violations against people with cameras and teaches citizens about their legal rights to photograph people and places. (Things that can almost always be photographed from a public place, "despite popular opinion," according to Miller's Web site: criminal activities, law enforcement officers, industrial facilities.) Miller himself has been illegally arrested and had his photos deleted for taking pictures of police officers.

Although he's always beaten his cases in court, Miller recognizes that coming out on top after the fact isn't good enough. "There’s this idea that just because charges are dropped, there’s no harm,” Miller told Reason. “But that isn’t right. There’s definitely harm when someone is illegally arrested and has to spend a night or more in jail. Your life is disrupted. You now have legal bills to deal with. There’s also harm when a cop wrongly tells someone they can’t photograph or record. He’s intimidating them into giving up their rights.”

Some of the most widely viewed posts on Miller's blog -- "St. Louis Cop Beats Man Down in Youtube Video," "Surveillance video once again shines light on Philadelphia PD corruption" -- are testament to why citizens need the explicit legal right to document officers' wrongdoings. Without the recordings of these events (and many, many others like them), justice probably never would have been realized, and the truth never brought to light. Unless we overturn the nation's most over-the-top eavesdropping laws, our legal system will continue to obstruct, rather than promote, justice.

Family of victim killed by since-fired LAPD officer awarded $1.7 million

2011-01-28T14:13:00.000-08:00

After deciding this week that a former Los Angeles police officer fired for dishonesty was liable for killing a man, a federal jury Wednesday awarded the victim's family $1.7 million.

Joseph Cruz killed Mohammad Usman Chaudhry early on a March morning in 2008, when Cruz and his partner encountered the 21-year-old autistic man lying in the bushes alongside a Hollywood apartment building.

Since the killing, Cruz has insisted that Chaudhry tried to attack him with a knife and that he fired his gun in self-defense. On Monday, however, after four days of testimony, the jury rejected Cruz’s account when it returned a unanimous verdict finding that the ex-officer had used excessive force and acted in “a reckless, oppressive or malicious manner” when he shot Chaudhry.

During the trial, lawyers for the Chaudhry family presented evidence aimed at putting doubt in the minds of the jurors over Cruz’s account. Testing on the knife that Cruz said Chaudhry had used, for example, found one person’s DNA profile on the handle and blade but showed that the DNA was not Chaudhry’s.
Also, after Cruz claimed he had never met Chaudhry before the shooting, a man testified that he had been present on multiple occasions when Cruz confronted Chaudhry and called him by name.

After the verdict, the jury was asked to decide how much money, if any, to award Chaudhry’s parents. Attorneys representing Cruz and the city of Los Angeles had tried to limit the size of the award by arguing that Chaudhry had had a frayed relationship with his parents that lessened their suffering.

Lawyers for the family countered that the parents cared deeply for their son, despite the strain on the relationship caused by his autism.

“We’re very pleased. I think the jury saw the truth in this case,” said Olu Orange, an attorney for the family. “This was about restoring the honor of this family’s son.”

Orange called on the city, and specifically Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to forgo an appeal.

“In light of the findings of the jury on the facts of this case, I hope Mayor Villaraigosa would apologize to the Chaudhry family on behalf of the city, accept the verdict and not put the family through further trauma over the loss of their son," he said. "If the city doesn’t, they’ll just be spending more taxpayer money to defend a dishonest cop.”

John Franklin, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, declined to comment on the verdict or whether the city would appeal. Peter J. Ferguson, who represented Cruz, could not be reached immediately for comment.

The award punctuates the awkward role the city played in the case. After the shooting, the LAPD fired Cruz for dishonesty in an unrelated case. At the time, lawyers for the city argued that Cruz had destroyed his credibility.

During the trial, however, the LAPD and city attorney’s office tried to persuade the jury that Cruz was, in fact, credible and that his account of the shooting should be believed.

No First Amendment Right to Tape Cops in Public?

2011-01-27T06:55:00.001-08:00

In Illinois, police may audio record any conversation in a public place, but no one else may record their conversations—among themselves or with citizens they interact with, no matter how audibly—in a public place; to do so is a felony. A federal judge last week dismissed a First Amendment challenge to this law brought by the ACLU.

She found no constitutional right to record conversations loud enough to be heard in public areas. CorrespondingCalifornia law appears to protect such recording.

Radley Balko reports for Reason.com.

Federal District Court Judge Suzanne Conlon has dismissed (PDF) an ACLU challenge to the Illinois law that makes recording someone in a public space without their permission a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. As I've reported here, the law is used almost exclusively against people who attempt to record on-duty police officers. The ACLU was seeking declarative and injunctive relief to prevent the police from arresting workers and volunteers who planned to record police at an anti-war protest this spring.

As I wrote in my feature story, "The War on Cameras", there's a strong argument that this is a newsgathering function protected by the First Amendment. But Conlon doesn't agree.

The ACLU has not alleged a cognizable First Amendment injury. The ACLU cites neither Supreme Court nor Seventh Circuit authority that the First Amendment includes a right to audio record. Cf. Potts v. City of Lafayette, Indiana, 121 F.3d 1106, 1111 (7th Cir.1997) (“there is nothing in the Constitution which guarantees the right to record a public event” ’). Amendment would therefore be futile....

The ACLU intends to audio record police officers speaking with one another or police officers speaking with civilians. The ACLU’s program only implicates conversations with police officers. The ACLU does not intend to seek the consent of either police officers or civilians interacting with police officers. Police officers and civilians may be willing speakers with one another, but the ACLU does not allege this willingness of the speakers extends to the ACLU, an independent third party audio recording conversations without the consent of the participants. The ACLU has not met its burden of showing standing to assert a First Amendment right or injury....

Amendment would be futile. The ACLU has not alleged a constitutional right or injury under the First Amendment. Rather, the ACLU proposes an unprecedented expansion of the First Amendment . . .

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, commenter "Jeff" makes a good point:

Why don’t we look at the issue from the other side? Is it within the state’s power to prohibit a citizen from recording a law enforcement officer in this way?

I know we tend to think of rational basis review as a rubber stamp, but these laws seem to be a stretch under any standard. Of course, it’s almost impossible to argue that this isn’t rationally related to some asserted purpose, but one could argue that the asserted purpose is merely pretextual, and that the real purpose is impermissible.

The government can certainly provide a rational basis for forbidding the recording of private conversations without the consent of all parties. But it would be interesting to hear the state's rationality for requiring the consent of anyone whose voice might be picked up before making recording in a public space. What interest does that law serve? Certainly not privacy, given that there's no expectation of privacy in public spaces.

I suspect we'll be seeing more from this case, as well as more challenges to the Illinois law, particularly if/when Christopher Drew and Michael Allison become the first people convicted under it. To this point, the law has been used primarily to harass and arrest people who record police in public. The charges are inevitably dropped or downgraded to misdemeanors before the case gets to trial.

MORE: Just to clarify, the Illinois law only applies to audio recording. So security cameras, which generally don't include audio, aren't in violation of the law. If you used an application on your smart phone that only recorded video, you could also presumably record police without being arrested under this law, although they could always arrest you for interfering with a police officer or some other catch-all charge. The Illinois law also includes an exception for law enforcement, so police recordings without permission of the person being recorded are permissible.

U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Ohio woman assaulted by prison guard

2011-01-26T06:45:00.000-08:00

Washington -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday in support of an Elyria woman who was sexually assaulted twice by an Ohio prison guard, then punished for reporting the attacks.

Michelle Ortiz considers this a moral victory, not only for herself but for all women who have been assaulted or punished by the people paid by the public to protect them. Ortiz was sexually assaulted in prison while serving a 12-month sentence in a domestic violence case in which she fought off her physically abusive husband with a knife.

"If this helps one woman that this has ever happened to or that it could ever happen to, then I am just so happy," she said. "Not for the money, but for the verdict."

The ruling reversed a decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, that would have denied Ortiz her verdict and a $625,000 judgment. The high court decision was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and has implications for how government attorneys handle lawsuits filed against public employees.

But the case has only narrow ramifications for the general public, despite the compelling story behind it, according to attorneys for the state of Ohio as well as outside legal experts.

"The Supreme Court case was solely about a procedural issue; it involved which procedures to use to challenge certain categories of legal rulings," Lisa Peterson Hackley, spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general's office, said in an e-mail statement. "While we're disappointed in the outcome, it's always good when courts clear up unclear rules."

Andrew Pollis, a visiting assistant law professor at Case Western Reserve University who assisted Ortiz's lead attorney, David Mills, in the case, agreed that the case could be interpreted to have a limited impact.

"To be honest, this is a narrow procedural issue, so it isn't some new ruling about the way prison officials must treat inmates, although you could tell from the way Justice Ginsburg wrote the ruling that she was displeased with the way prison officials treated Michelle Ortiz," Pollis said.

Ortiz was in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in November 2002 when she reported that a male guard fondled her breasts and warned, "I'll get you tomorrow, watch." He did, returning when Ortiz was asleep to molest her again.

When Ortiz told other inmates about the attack, she was shackled and sent to solitary confinement. The state said this was for her own protection, as well as for the sake of preserving the integrity of their investigation while they looked into Ortiz's claims.

Ortiz sued, and the prison's case manager and an institutional investigator claimed they were just doing their jobs. They said they should be considered immune from the lawsuit unless Ortiz could establish that their conduct violated her clearly established rights.

A trial judge, however, refused to grant their motion for dismissal, or summary judgment, at that point, and the case went to trial. Ortiz won.

That's when the two state employees, Paula Jordan and Rebecca Bright, filed an appeal. The appeals court ruled in a 2-1 vote that the pre-trial motion for dismissal should have been granted.

Ortiz appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. Mills argued on her behalf that if the two employees were intent on claiming immunity, they should have kept on arguing it after their motion for summary judgment was dismissed, using procedures available during the trial and immediately after the verdict was read.

The Supreme Court agreed.

In a concurring opinion, Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas agreed that the appeals court made a mistake, but they would have sent the case back to that court to consider other issues.

Since the attacks, "Ohio has instituted significant reforms to prevent this type of activity" and, if it occurs, to address it quickly, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

Before Monday's ruling, various federal and state courts disagreed on the rules for challenging government-employee immunity if it is rejected before trial. The ruling will send a clear signal about how to proceed, said Alan Chen, director of the constitutional rights and remedies program at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law.

Chicago artist's protest backfires as he faces 15 years in jail... because he recorded his own arrest on video

2011-01-24T07:54:00.000-08:00

By Daily Mail Reporter

An artist who used a video camera to record being arrested by police is facing up to 15 years in prison.

Chris Drew has been charged with Class 1 felony under the Eavesdropping Act in Chicago, Illinois.

The bemused activist said he did not know anything about the law when he was protesting about restrictions on where artists can sell their work.

He has resorted to civil disobedience in his fight against rules he regards as draconian – and got a friend to record his arrest on an Olympus camera.

Mr Drew expected police to take him into custody before releasing him over the misdemeanour – but now he’s facing up to 15 years in jail.

He will go on trial on April 4 charged with using a digital recorder to capture his arrest on December 2, 2009.

He was selling silk-screened patches for $1 when he was stopped by police.

Footage of the incident has been posted on YouTube.

Three officers surround him in the tape before he is led away across the road and put into a vehicle.

The suspect told the Chicago News Cooperative: ‘I expected to be charged with a misdemeanour.

‘I didn’t know about the eavesdropping law. But when you fight for your rights, you have to expect anything. I have a ’60s bent to me. I won’t back down. I won’t be intimidated.

‘From the moment I comprehended these charges, I knew we had to change this law.’

Mr Drew, the founder of the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, had set out to get himself arrested for selling items in the street three times before he was finally stopped by police.

Under the Eavesdropping Act, which applies in 12 states, all parties must consent to a recording being made.

Maryland, Illinois and Massachusetts are the only states where it is illegal to record conversations with the police.

In Illinois police are currently prosecuting nine people for alleged breaches of the law.

The maximum penalty is only three years behind bars for the first time the law is broken and five years if it is done again,

But anyone recording a judge, attorney general, state attorney or police officer can be sent to jail for up to 15 years.

Burge sentence – justice still delayed and denied

2011-01-22T16:03:00.001-08:00

by Ted Pearson

So Jon Burge has been sentenced to 54 months in prison by U. S. District Court Judge Joan H. Lefkow. That’s four and a half years. That’s twice the sentence suggested in the federal guidelines for perjury. In sentencing Burge Judge Lefkow noted the total lack of remorse by Burge for his crimes and his continued denial that he did anything wrong. She expressed shock that Burge’s attorneys justified what Burge did because the people he tortured were members of gangs and had been convicted of crimes, even though many were wrongfully convicted. She excoriated the City of Chicago and Cook County for what she called a failure of leadership, observing that had Burge’s supervisors and the Cook County State’s Attorney taken steps to stop Burge early in the saga of his crimes, “we would not have come to this point.” The State’s Attorney at the time was Chicago’s outgoing Mayor of 22 years, Richard M. Daley. Lefkow’s statement in issuing the sentence against Burge was an indictment of the city’s leadership.

But let’s keep some perspective on this. Burge’s 54 month sentence equates to 1643 days in prison. That’s 15 days for each man Burge and his detectives tortured.

Twenty four of these men are still in prison. The average prison sentence meted out to his victims is difficult to calculate, since 12 were sentenced to death (saved only by former Gov. George Ryan), or to life in prison without parole. Sixteen of his victims have been exonerated. The average, to date, of the number of years spent behind bars by his victims, is on the order of 25. Burge’s sentence is about fourteen hours for each year his victims have spent so far in prison. One year in prison for a Black or Latino man equals fourteen hours in prison for the white detective, Jon Burge. Such is the nature of our criminal justice system.

Not included, however, are the hundreds of men, all Black or Latino, who were tortured by Burge’s detectives AFTER he was removed from his position in 1991. These men have said at their trials that they falsely confessed and were convicted of crimes they did not commit. Many others make credible claims that they were framed by corrupt police simply to “clear their books,” to settle old scores, or in plea bargains with other criminals. The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression has received scores of letters from such men.

There will be much discussion about the degree to which Burge’s sentence and Judge Lefkow’s statement were victories over police torture. Victims of his tortures who have been exonerated or released, and who were present in the courtroom when the sentence was delivered, were near unanimous in voicing their anger that he received such a light sentence, when so many of them have suffered decades of false imprisonment. U. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said that “the investigation continues” into police torture in Chicago, but he did not say whether indictments against any of Burge’s partners in crime would be sought. Fitzgerald did not even hint that the U. S. Justice Department would take any steps to intervene on behalf of Burge’s victims who remain incarcerated. He did not suggest any effort to seek compensation for the victims of Burge’s crew, some of who are now homeless and living on the streets.

But lest it be lost in the discussion let’s remember this one simple fact: dozens of Black and Latino men who have alleged from the beginning that they gave false confessions under physical duress at the hands of police remain in prison, or face continued unemployment and ostracism because of false felony records. No matter how many years Jon Burge is in prison, his imprisonment will not free a single person. No matter how many of the police torturers may ultimately be brought before the bar of justice, it will not compensate a single torture victim for the loss of their freedom, the disruption and stress on their families, the psychological torment, or the physical damage to their persons.

Each of these torture survivors has lost part of their human potential, their ability to support their families. This, along with other everyday acts of racism and injustice, serves to as a constant reminder that the lives, hopes and dreams of people who are neither white nor rich, are expendable. Yet, the torture survivors have not lost their dignity due to this racist, inhumane treatment. They bravely share their stories, courageously testify, march, protest and keep fighting for justice. They inspire all who care about humanity, especially their attorneys, to step up and do the same, if not more to eliminate structural inequality, especially in the criminal justice system.

These men are imprisoned, or carry serious felony records, as a result of police crimes. They are crime victims in every sense of the word, and victims of crimes committed under color of law. Chicagoans who believe that all men and women are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can not rest until these men are all free and have been compensated for the suffering they and their families have endured. The jailing of Jon Burge and the prosecution of his gang of torturers will not satisfy this demand. Only the restoration of these men to freedom and full citizenship can accomplish that.

In post-apartheid South Africa the Rev. Desmond Tutu led a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at which the torturers of Black African freedom fighters faced their victims and accepted responsibility for their crimes. In Illinois there needs to be such a process. There is no legal precedent for it in the U. S. that I know of, but a first step would be for U. S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to immediately create special units to investigate these claims of wrongful conviction and torture, and take steps to have the victims set free and compensated when the evidence supports their claims. Dallas County Texas District Attorney Craig Watkins has taken such an initiative utilizing DNA evidence, and 25 men in Dallas County have been freed in four years. We in Cook County can do no less.

#

Ted Pearson is Co-Chairperson of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, with offices at 1325 S. Wabash Av. Suite 105, Chicago IL 60605, 312-939-2750, http://www.naarpr.org.

Burge witness: Torture charges 'unprecedented'

2011-01-21T06:47:00.000-08:00

By Annie Sweeney

The sentencing hearing for former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge recessed for the day after a University of Chicago professor testified that torture allegations against Burge are unlike any other police misconduct in the city's history.

“This is an unprecedented instance,’’ said Adam Green, who specializes in African-American history. “What happened at Area 2 is really a singular chapter.’’

Green said abuse by police strikes at entire communities, but a sense of worth and respect can be restored if the misconduct is addressed.

Earlier today, one of Burge's alleged victims took the stand and asked Burge, “Why would you do this? … You were supposed to be the law.”

Before a packed courtroom, Anthony Holmes told how he still dreams he is inside the now infamous room at the Area 2 station on the South Side where Burge allegedly used electric shock and suffocation to coerce confessions from suspects.

Holmes, saying it was difficult for him to testify about the abuse, took a deep breath before he started. He said his wrongful imprisonment shattered family relationships and caused constant fear of police and re-arrest.

Reading prepared remarks in a low voice, Holmes recounted what Burge allegedly did to him.

“Jon Burge shocked me and he suffocated me and forced me to confess,’’ he said. “ … He tried to kill me and it leaves a growing, hurting feeling.’’

A community activist and a former detective who worked in the same detective division where Burge is alleged to have abused and tortured suspects also testified.

Burge, wearing a dark blue suit, was slightly animated during testimony from Sammy Lacey, the former detective.

Lacey, who is African-American, talked of being passed over for homicide assignments and said he had heard “scuttlebutt’’ about the tactics Burge and others on a midnight shift used against suspects.

Lacey said they were referred to as the “A team.’’ When asked why, he replied, “They were the a-kicking team.’’

Burge’s sentencing hearing began at 10 a.m. with some 80 people lined up outside in the hallway hoping to get for a seat in U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow’s courtroom. An overflow room was set up to accommodate the crowd.

On Friday, Burge’s attorneys are expected to present testimony on his behalf and U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow could impose sentence after that.

Family to get $1.8 million in dad's jailing, teen's false sex-assault interrogation

2011-01-12T14:45:00.001-08:00

By JOHN WISELY and L.L. BRASIER
Free Press Staff Writers

A West Bloomfield Township family will get $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit against the police department, after the father was prosecuted and jailed after being accused of sexually assaulting his severely autistic daughter — a prosecution that eventually imploded..

The charges against Julian Wendrow were dropped for lack of evidence in March 2008, after he had spent 80 days in the Oakland County jail. His wife, Thal Wendrow, was also jailed, and the girl, 14, and her brother, 13, were placed in foster care for months.

The settlement was made public in district court filings today.

The Oakland County prosecutor’s case was based almost solely on statements the daughter reportedly made using facilitated communication, a widely discredited method in which the child typed on a keyboard with the assistance of a school aid. The girl, who does not speak and functions on the level of a two-year-old, reportedly typed that her father had been raping her since age seven. Prosecutors pursued the case, even though a physical exam showed no sign of assault.

The family sued in federal court in 2008, alleging 38 counts of false imprisonment, wrongful prosecution and other misdeeds.

The Wendrows named the police department as a defendant in part because of a two-hour interrogation a detective conducted with the 13-year-old boy, shortly after his parents arrests, wrongly telling him they had videotapes of both the boy and his father sexually assaulting the girl. The boy had no adult representative present for the interview.

Joseph Brusseau, the detective who remains on the police force, later admitted in depositions that was untrue. The boy, who suffers from Asperger's, a milder form of autism, can be seen in a video rocking and crying during the interview and insisting that neither he or his father had assaulted anyone.

The Free Press obtained a copy of the video of the interview and the parents said they had no objections to putting it on Freep.com.

“They pushed this thing in spite of literally having no evidence of any kind of abuse, other than this Faciliated Communication nonsense, which is in effect a Ouija board,” said Bloomfield Hills attorney Deborah Gordon, who represents the Wendrows. “What the police department did was unbelievably horrific.”

William Hampton, the attorney representing the police department, said the settlement was “nothing more than a business decision by the insurance company, with no admission of wrongdoing or of any liability.”

And he said the department would investigate the case the same way again, including the interrogation of the boy and the jailing of the father.

“We’ll assess everything, but really, right off hand, I can’t think of anything they would do differently because we really don’t think they did anything wrong.”

Facilitated communication has been widely dismissed by experts worldwide because studies show it is the aide who is actually doing the typing. Nevertheless, the Wendrows had pushed the school district to use it, hoping their daughter might be able to succeed in school work.

Oakland County prosecutors, who are also named in the suit, admit in depositions that they did not investigate the method prior to charging the Wendrows, and could not find anyone to support the method as reliable, despite calls nationwide after their arrests. They pursued the prosecution nevertheless. The charges were dropped in March when the girl was unable to type a single answer to questions posed to her in district court.

The Wendrows will be in federal court Thursday, where the prosecutors, and two other defendants, Walled Lake Consolidated School District and the Michigan Department of Human Services will argue to have the case dismissed because of governmental immunity.

Diabetic Says Cops Tasered & Beat Him

2010-12-23T20:34:00.001-08:00

By KEVIN KOENINGER

CINCINNATI (CN) - A diabetic suffering "a medical emergency caused by dangerously low sugar levels" was pulled over by Hamilton County Sheriff's officers, Tasered repeatedly, "violently dragged from the vehicle, thrown on the ground, kicked in the head by a boot, and stomped mercilessly while lying on his back," the man claims in Federal Court. Plaintiff John Harmon, who is black, says he was driving through a white area at the time.
Harmon and his wife sued the county, the sheriff and his department, four patrol officers and a sergeant for the beating he got in October 2009.
Sheriff's officers pulled him over after seeing his vehicle weaving, according to the complaint. Defendant Patrol Officer Ryan Wolf then "approached Harmon's vehicle with his gun drawn along with a second patrol officer, Matthew Wissel," the complaint states. "Without giving Harmon an opportunity to comply with any order, if, in fact, any order was given, Wolf shattered the driver's side window of Harmon's vehicle, spraying Harmon's face and body with broken glass. As this was occurring, a third patrol officer, defendant [John] Haynes, arrived at the scene.
"Almost immediately, Harmon was Tased by defendant Wissel. The officers attempted to remove Harmon from his vehicle by violently pulling on his neck. Harmon was then Tased again. They were unable to remove Harmon because Harmon was caught in his seatbelt. Defendant Wissel cut Harmon's seatbelt in order to remove him from the vehicle.
"Harmon was then violently dragged from the vehicle, thrown on the ground, kicked in the head by a boot, and stomped mercilessly while lying on his back. In the process, Harmon suffered numerous injuries, including a severely dislocated elbow and trauma to his shoulder and thumb. During the course of these events, which lasted approximately two minutes and twenty seconds, he was Tased seven times."
Three more officers arrived during the beating, and one of them "located a diabetic kit on the floorboard of Harmon's vehicle. At one point, Harmon was asked by the officers if he is diabetic, to which Harmon responded, 'Yes.' Paramedics were called to the scene, and it was confirmed that Harmon's blood sugar level was extremely low."
Harmon was taken to a hospital, where Patrol Officer Shawn Cox refused to let him use the bathroom. This "eventually resulted in Harmon being deeply humiliated and embarrassed when he urinated on himself," according to the complaint.
Harmon was charged with "(1) failure to comply with an order or signal of a police officer; (2) resisting arrest; (3) operating his vehicle with only one headlight; and (4) failure to drive in a marked lane." All charges were dropped 2 weeks later.
The complaint states: "The actions taken by the defendants against Harmon ... were due to the fact that Harmon was a large African-American male driving a sport utility vehicle at a late hour through a primarily white area of Hamilton County," Anderson Township.
Officers Wolf, Wissel, Cox and Haynes are named as defendants, along with Hamilton County, the Hamilton County Board of Commissioners, Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis Jr., and Sgt. Barbara Stuckey.
Harmon and his wife seek punitive damages for excessive force and other civil rights violations, malicious prosecution, false arrest, constitutional violations, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. They are represented by Timothy Burke with Manley Burke.

Ending era of racism

2010-12-14T10:26:00.001-08:00

By Adrian Walker

Frank G. Cousins Jr. freely admits that he has a hard time talking about the entrenched problems involving race and gender in his department.
That isn’t an easy admission for any sheriff. But then again, Cousins might be the only law enforcement boss to file a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination against a group of his own subordinates. For creating a workplace that was hostile — toward him.

The Essex County sheriff won an important measure of vindication a few days ago, when a Superior Court judge ruled in his favor against two employees Cousins had fired for their role in running an often racist and sexist union website. The ruling, by Judge David A. Lowy, overturned an arbitrators’ ruling that would have reinstated them.

Cousins, a former state representative from Newburyport, was appointed sheriff by Governor William F. Weld in 1996. Some employees quickly showed their displeasure with having a black boss. Problems escalated in 1998, when the Essex County Corrections Officers Association was formed.

A union website became home to often anonymous attacks and slurs against minorities and women in the department, including, frequently, Cousins.

“You hear a lot about the culture of law enforcement,’’ Cousins said yesterday. “The culture here has been very difficult.’’

Black male employees were called pimps; females were accused of winning promotions by sleeping with superiors. One person posted a list of ways to commit suicide, and suggested it would be a good idea for “sell-outs — and Frank.’’

The poster was later identified as Lieutenant Scott Thompson, who was successfully prosecuted for making threats against the sheriff. Thompson left the department. The operative posting: In a passage critical of Cousins’s management, one employee asked if there was anyone who could help the situation. “Yeah, there was someone who can help, but James Earl Ray is dead!’’ Thompson responded, alluding to the man convicted of killing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

That was when Cousins finally became concerned for his own safety. He filed a complaint against the union with the MCAD, which has issued a preliminary finding in his favor. He got a driver. He began watching his back.

“I’ve been around a long time and I have a tough skin, but that was a bad chapter,’’ Cousins said. “What was hard was that you had people who knew who was doing these things and they never came forward.’’

The latest ruling involves Lieutenant Jerry Enos and Sergeant K. Ricky Thompson, who were fired in 2007 over their roles as webmasters for the site. But an arbitrator bought their arguments they were not fired in a timely fashion and were not aware that their actions could cost them their jobs. But the judge roundly rejected that thinking.

“Enos and Thompson’s conduct disrupted the operation of the department, violated multiple rules and regulations of the department, and endangered the safety of their co-workers and those in the custody of the department,’’ Lowy wrote. “Although arbitrator’s decisions are given great deference, they are not sacrosanct.’’

Cousins believes that this ruling, though likely to be appealed, will be a turning point for the department. He said a new union president has brought a more mature and inclusive attitude. He thinks that finally, after 14 years on the job, employees have finally gotten accustomed to the presence of a black boss.

“I’m not naïve,’’ Cousins said. “Change is very difficult. I felt when I went there that we would have to work through some of these issues, but I didn’t expect it to rise to the level that it did.’’

Cousins has just easily won another six-year term, and said he is excited about the prospect of working on issues like recidivism and prisoner reentry without the distraction of racial and gender strife.

“There are a lot of good people here,’’ he said. “At this point, everyone just wants to move forward.’’

The 6 Most Shocking Cases of Police Stun-Gun Abuse

2010-12-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

By Lauren Kelley

Take a police force that’s notorious for its use of excessive force, add a massive arsenal of tasers, put those weapons in the hands of low-level patrol officers, and what do you get?

If you guessed “an awful mess of civil rights abuses and safety concerns,” then, unfortunately, you’re correct. A new report from the City of Chicago Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police misconduct cases in the city, has found that incidences of taser use by Chicago police officers increased by nearly 350% over the past year in the wake of the department’s decision to more than double its taser arsenal in the name of “increasing officer safety” and “defusing trouble.”

Here are the numbers: In March, the department decided to increase its supply of tasers from 280 to 660 and began putting them in every patrol officer’s squad car. (Previously, only sergeants and field training officers were allowed to carry tasers.) As a direct result, Chicago officers used tasers a whopping 683 times in the 12-month period ending September 30, compared to 197 times in 2009 and 163 in 2008.

The problem with the increase is that tasers are far too often used inappropriately – on innocent citizens and minors, for instance – and they’ve been proven to be unsafe, causing dozens of heart problems and even deaths. To make matters worse, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority has said it will no longer investigate every case of police taser use, arguing that the growing caseload is overwhelming the short-staffed office. Instead, it will only investigate taser use “if allegations of misconduct are made, serious injury or death resulted, or a minor or senior citizen was targeted.”

Chicago’s unchecked use of tasers is setting a dangerous example for the rest of the country to follow, as it opens the door to rampant abuses of power. There are myriad stories of taser-happy police officers wreaking havoc on people’s lives that should give us pause on that matter. Below are some of the most egregious examples of taser abuse by police in Chicago and elsewhere in the country, illustrating why the willy-nilly increase of taser use is terrible for citizens.

1. Man having diabetic seizure tasered 11 times: In April 2009, Prospero Lassi suffered a diabetes-induced seizure at his home in the Chicago suburb of LaGrange Park. Lassi’s roommate called 911, and both EMTs and police responded. When the EMTs asked police officers to help move Lassi, who had been unable to move his body, one of Lassi’s arms flailed uncontrollably, striking one of the officers. According to Lassi, he was then tasered an incredible 11 times, for nearly a minute, as he lay immobilized. The attack was so severe that Lassi was hospitalized for five days and out of work for three months due to the injuries he sustained that day.

2. Officers taser 14-year-old boy, sending him into cardiac arrest: In February 2005, Chicago police were called on a young teenager living in a state group home who was reportedly acting out. According to Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris, the boy had calmed down and was sitting on a couch when the police arrived. Nevertheless, officers said the boy lunged at them, so they tasered him, sending him into cardiac arrest.

3. Officers repeatedly taser, threaten to sodomize foster children: Elsewhere in Illinois, at the Southern Thirty Adolescent Center in Mt. Vernon, two officers lashed out unprovoked at several foster youth in July 2008, repeatedly using a taser on them. One of the officers also threatened to sodomize a young man, causing the boy to soil himself. Both the county sheriff and the Illinois State Police determined that the officers had done nothing wrong. A lawsuit brought against the officers was settled for $750,000.

Black teen who filmed an LAUSD campus cop hitting a student faces bizarre charges and years in prison

2010-12-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

By KATHARINE RUSS

On Dec. 2, Jeremy Marks, a Verdugo Hills High School special education student, was offered a new plea offer by the L.A. County District Attorney: If he pled guilty to charges of obstructing an officer, resisting arrest, criminal threats and "attempted lynching," he'd serve only 32 months in prison. That actually was an improvement from the previous offer made to the young, black high schooler - seven years in prison. The D.A. then handed Angela Berry-Jacoby, Mark's lawyer, a stack of 130 documents, and the message within those thick files was clear: She says District Attorney Steve Cooley's prosecution team plans to try to discredit Marks, and several other Verdugo Hills High School students on the witness stand, by dragging out misbehavior incidents from their school records over the years. Marks, 18, has been sitting in Peter Pitchess Detention Center, a tough adult jail, since May 10. Bail was set at $155,000, which his working-class parents can't pay to free their son for Christmas. His mother is a part-time clerk at a city swimming pool, his father is a lab tech. The first thing to understand is that Jeremy Marks touched no one during his "attempted lynching" of LAUSD campus police officer Erin Robles. The second is that Marks' weapon was the camera in his cell phone. The third is that Officer Robles' own actions helped turn an exceedingly minor wrongdoing - a student smoking at a bus stop - into a state prison case. The altercation that has ruined Marks' life occurred in early May at a Metro bus stop on a city street a few blocks from Verdugo Hills High School as about 30 kids were waiting to board a bus. Witness accounts say campus police officer Robles challenged an unnamed 15-year-old for allegedly smoking - it's unclear whether he was smoking or just holding what has been variously reported to be a cigar, cigarette or joint. When the 15-year-old resisted, Robles grabbed and shoved him, according to eyewitnesses. In Robles' sworn statement, she says she pulled the resisting boy to the ground as other students shouted "Fuck you!" and Marks called out the name of the gang Piru Bloods. Robles testified that the minor who allegedly was smoking "is screaming, 'Hit me, fucking bitch, hit me, you stupid bitch, hit me, you dyke!'" When that boy turned his body and possibly elbowed her, Robles says, "That is when I did strike him," with her expanded baton, "about three times in the left leg." She further stated that she sprayed him with pepper spray. The kid then hit her hand, she dropped her pepper spray can, and another student grabbed it off the ground. Students and Berry-Jacobs allege to L.A. Weekly that Robles then slammed the student's head against the bus window - a violation of numerous police policies. After that, several stunned students got out their cell phone cameras to record what was unfolding. Robles struck the 15-year-old's head on the window so hard, eyewitnesses tell the Weekly, that the window was forced out of its rubberized casement and broken. Robles has changed her story in documents obtained by the Weekly, as she describes which student allegedly called out, "Kick her ass!" - the phrase at the heart of Cooley's case against Marks, and the basis of the "attempted lynching" charge against him. But student videos of Marks doing his own cell phone taping tell a different story. Two YouTube videos show Marks in a grayish shirt, getting out his cell phone as he stands in the background of the scene near a student in a white shirt. [View the student videos here: Video 1 and Video 2] Marks tapes the final minutes of the MTA bus stop altercation as several students - not including Marks - loudly and repeatedly taunt Robles. The videos appear to show that Robles had little ability or training to handle razzing from angry high schoolers. She holds the 15-year-old against the MTA bus as he repeatedly tries to slap and push her hands off, and she never appears to have him fully under control. She turns several times to look behind her at rowdy students, several feet away on a low wall, who jump around and cheer for the student Robles is grasping. The videos show the loudest and angriest student in a black shirt and sweatpants rushing a few feet toward Robles more than once, and another student in a striped shirt moving toward her - but not Jeremy Marks. In the videos, Marks, in his grayish shirt, can be seen speaking once. He never joins the extended taunting or picks anything up off the ground. [View the student videos here: Video 1 and Video 2] Testifying at a preliminary hearing over the summer, Robles acknowledges she doesn't know who grabbed for her fallen pepper spray, or even why fellow Officer Gilbert Rea decided to pin it on Marks in the incident report submitted by campus police, which Robles did not write. Her preliminary hearing testimony also reveals the chaos during which Robles now claims she is certain it was Marks - who student videos show standing out of her line of sight most of the time - who yelled, "Kick her ass." "I was very scared," Robles testified. "I got my O.C. spray to control (the 15-year-old student) that was facing me, and went to spray him. Sprayed him for about one, maybe two seconds. He had hit the pepper spray out of my hands and it landed in between the bus and the sidewalk in the gutter. It was starting almost a riot. "It was getting very, very wild. There was screaming, people were walking behind me. There were individuals trying to reach for my O.C. spray that had fallen on the ground. I was screaming for help on my radio. I could not leave that weapon there for all the juveniles and a few adults, as well, in the area. So after the O.C. had fallen out of my hands, I used my right hand and got my baton out next. "There is a subject by the name of 'Victor' that went after my O.C. spray, a minor as well. And also - defendant (Jeremy Marks) wasn't necessarily going to grab it, but he was walking around me - made me believe that he was. I believe when I told (Officer Gilbert) Rea that (Jeremy Marks) was in the area - I don't know what conclusions (Officer Rea) formed when he was writing the [incident report], or this Arrest Report." One student waiting for the bus last May described the incident to the Weekly as being driven by Robles' repeated overreactions after coming down on a kid for smoking: "The officer (Erin Robles), initially, confronted the student over a cigar." After the student yelled at and grappled with Robles, "She slammed the student into a wall, threw him on the ground, took out her pepper spray, slammed him into the bus, broke the window out of the bus with his head, sprayed him in the face and slammed him into the bus some more." Marks' mother, Rochelle Pittman, has barely been able to sleep since the campus cops and Los Angeles County prosecutors began to single out her son as the bad actor that day. Yet he had no physical contact with anyone during the bus incident, was shown on video to be among the quieter students watching the altercation, and spent much of the time taking pictures of it with his cell phone. The family recently hired two new criminal defense attorneys, Mark Ravis and Karen Travis, to defend him. Pittman tells the Weekly that Los Angeles School Police Officer George Sandoval told her on the day her son was arrested that Marks was being charged with a serious crime for saying, "Kick her ass!" Several Verdugo Hills students and parents have questioned whether the alleged words spoken by Marks even rise to the severe criminal charges of "attempted lynching," which means trying to "incite a riot during an attempt to free a suspect from police custody." All the other students initially detained by police, including the student who shoved and fought with Robles, were released May 11. But more and more charges were piled onto Marks. Cooley's team claims Marks "resisted arrest" at the McDonalds where he was arrested after he watched the bus incident. Pittman says her son and two of his friends walked to McDonalds after the excitement was over. At McDonalds, "Police cars came flying from everywhere, jumped out on my son with their guns pointed right at him, yelling and screaming for him to get on the ground," she says. Pittman says Marks did not resist arrest, doing everything he was asked. His own mom might be expected to say that. But for many present at the bus incident, something doesn't add up. Student eyewitnesses told the Weekly that Marks is not the student who laughingly told the teenager being struck by Robles to "kick her ass!" But they are terrified of repercussions against them on campus if they speak out against LAUSD's school police. Pittman expects the grandmother of the student struck by Robles to sue the L.A. School Police Department. Attorney Berry-Jacoby says she has a copy of an invoice that shows an order to replace the MTA bus window. The campus police, now blaming Marks for grabbing the pepper spray can after Robles dropped it, have dropped all interest in the "Victor" identified by Robles in her sworn testimony. Says Berry-Jacoby: "In Officer Rea's report of what Officer Robles allegedly told him, Jeremy tried to take her pepper spray after it was knocked out of her hand. In her testimony in court she stated that 'Victor' tried to take her pepper spray but that Jeremy was walking around behind her." The Weekly has contacted Cooley's office four times for an explanation of the changing stories by school police officers. Its calls have not been returned. Lydia Grant, an LAUSD student safety activist and community liaison, says she's disgusted by the piling-on of accusations against a student observer with a cell phone camera, and the severe charges that could send him to a California prison. "In my opinion, the district is responsible for the beating of a youth and the entire bus-stop incident, including the false imprisonment of a special education student for seven months," Grant says. "The officer involved failed to write a police report, and the LASPD has failed on two occasions to appear in court, under subpoena, to turn over any evidence." Coincidentally, six days before the bus incident, Grant says she reported two officers to school authorities, Erin Robles and Angelica Kegayan, "and asked for their removal," after Grant got complaints from students and parents that the two were harassing them. L.A. School District Police Department deputy chief Tim Anderson stands by the case against Marks, saying, "When someone is arrested, we obviously have to know everything from reasonable suspicion, probable cause, the elements of the crime, etc." Berry-Jacoby says Robles met with deputy District Attorney Ed Green for nearly three hours and told Green she saw a video taken by a "kid" inside the bus that would substantiate her claim that Marks urged the 15-year-old to attack her. Berry-Jacoby says she has asked the D.A. for a copy of the video, as is her right as a member of the defense team. But, she tells the Weekly, she was appalled to learn from Deputy D.A. Chuck Stodel that Officer Robles never viewed the video purportedly taken from inside the bus - and the student on the bus no longer has the phone that purportedly contained the footage. Cooley's office has not responded to the Weekly's request for an explanation, nor has the "kid" from inside the bus been identified by prosecutors as a witness. School police chief Anderson says, in defense of the stiff bail hike that is keeping Marks in the rough adult Peter Pitchess jail for months, "I don't know him personally or have any other information about him. However, one of the unique things about our department is that we are on or around these two campuses every day, and we get to know the students, the staff, the community, etc., very well." But in fact, L.A. Weekly investigated the tiny, and controversial, school police agency in 2009 in its cover story "LAUSD's Finest: How an Oblivious School Board Lets a Tiny, Scandal-Ridden Campus Police Force Endanger L.A. Kids" (Sept. 4-10, 2009) and found a different situation. The Weekly found the tiny police force is a little-watched and highly isolated organization, heavily armed and given extremely broad policing powers on Los Angeles city streets - not merely on school campuses. Its officers and brass are subjected to very little oversight or accountability, and two extensive, secret 2007 audits obtained by the Weekly called for a radical remaking of the police force. Unlike virtually every other police department in California and in the West, the LAUSD's campus cops and their top brass have undergone no serious, modern-day reforms. Most important, the Weekly found, the Los Angeles School Police Department's internal affairs division "sat on 16 investigations of police wrongdoing for so long that the officers can't be punished, even though all were ultimately found guilty of misconduct." As the story reported, "Its top brass have failed to heed sharp private warnings against letting its woefully undersupervised cops patrol L.A.'s streets far beyond school boundaries."It may be that Jeremy Marks was a kid unlucky enough to have been in trouble with the LAUSD school police in years past. Before his parents requested his transfer to Verdugo Hills High School in 2009, Marks was involved in fights at Kennedy High School, had been given "truancy tickets" by campus police and was arrested once for robbery. Hoping to get their son a better academic and social grounding, his parents transferred him to Verdugo. Since last year he has been attending school regularly, passing his courses and trying to stay out of trouble, his mother says. Grant, the parent activist and liaison, lashes out at the school police department and its persecution of Marks. Grant alleges the school police now are harassing outspoken students and even parent advocates like her. "Now the witnesses, including myself, are being watched and harassed," Grant says. "They are putting us in danger." Grant says she was unnerved when she spotted Officer Erin Robles outside the L.A. Superior Courthouse one day, watching as she, Marks' attorney Berry-Jacoby and six eyewitnesses visited the building. When Berry-Jacoby asked Deputy D.A. Green if he had subpoenaed Robles to be at court that day, she says, Green told her he had not. Marks' case is attracting interest from the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality of California, which is calling for donations to help Marks pay for a rigorous defense. Celes King IV, CORE's vice chairman, learned of the case recently and wrote a letter to Cooley stating, "After looking at the video, it became quite apparent that this prosecution is not only without merit, it could very well be considered a libelous abuse of power under color of law." King believes "pressure is being placed on this 18-year-old special education student to plead to some minor offense to shield the actions of the school police and justify the cost of prosecution and incarceration." In particular, King notes, "Only Robles' testimony is used to substantiate a course of events that no one person could keep track of alone while involved with the original detainee. The arrest of Jeremy was effected several blocks away at the McDonalds, based solely on the misinformation given by Officer Robles." Jeremy Marks, after turning his grades around, may not graduate with his Verdugo Hills High School class in 2011. He has lost seven months of his life. King finished his letter by questioning the mission statement of the Los Angeles schools' police department, declaring, "The idea of preying upon school students by those who are supposed to protect them is alarming and unacceptable." Contact the writer at katharine.russ@charter.net.

Jury Convicts 3 Officers in Post-Katrina Death

2010-12-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — More than five years after a man named Henry Glover was shot and his body burned here by police officers in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a jury has weighed in on the circumstances of his death. Three police officers were found guilty Thursday night on nine federal counts in an emotionally charged case that painted a grim portrait of the city’s troubled Police Department.

David Warren, a former police officer, was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting of Mr. Glover; Officer Gregory McRae was convicted of obstructing justice and other charges for burning Mr. Glover’s body; and Lt. Travis McCabe was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice for drawing up a false police report.

Two other police officers were found not guilty on various counts. The mixed verdict, returned by the jury after nearly three days of deliberation, left relatives and friends of Mr. Glover with an incomplete sense of vindication.

“All of them should have been found guilty,” said Rebecca Glover, Mr. Glover’s aunt, as she left the courtroom. “They all participated in this. How are you going to let them go free?”

This was the first trial of an untold number of New Orleans officers being investigated by the federal authorities. There are at least eight other such investigations into actions by the city Police Department, including one into shootings on the Danziger Bridge on Sept 4, 2005, that left two civilians dead and six wounded.

Six police officers who were indicted in that case face trial, four of them charged in connection with the deaths. Five other officers have pleaded guilty. One of them, Michael Hunter, was sentenced to eight years in prison last week.

The horrific nature of some of the actions being investigated, as well as the city’s stubborn crime rate, led the Justice Department to begin conducting a full scale review of the department in May.

Few of the criminal cases contain such grisly details as the one involving Mr. Glover, which remained uninvestigated for years despite repeated inquiries by his family. In late 2008, an article about the killing was published by The Nation, in a joint investigative project with ProPublica. Federal investigators began looking into the case shortly afterward.

Preparing to leave the city, Mr. Glover, 31, and a friend drove in a stolen truck to a strip mall in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. They had come to pick up suitcases that had been looted from the mall but left behind earlier, prosecutors said.

Mr. Warren, who was patrolling the strip mall — which was being used as a detective bureau — shot Mr. Glover, who was unarmed. Mr. Warren claimed at trial that he had fired in self-defense, and that he had perceived something in Mr. Glover’s hand. His partner testified that he shot him in the back. Mr. Glover, his shirt covered in blood, was picked up by a stranger, William Tanner, who drove him, his brother and a friend to an elementary school that was being used as headquarters for a police special operations division.

There, Mr. Tanner says, he was beaten by Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer McRae, though they were both found not guilty on this count. Officer McRae did not deny taking Mr. Tanner’s car, with Mr. Glover’s body inside, and driving it to a levee behind a police substation. There, Mr. McRae used flares to set afire the car and the body.

The other two defendants, Robert Italiano, a retired lieutenant, and Lieutenant McCabe, were charged with creating a false report to cover up the killing. Lieutenant Italiano was found not guilty.

All of the testimony was haunted by the specter of Hurricane Katrina, and a debate about the nature of law and order within catastrophe.

“When you take into account reasonable versus unreasonable,” Rick Simmons, who represents Mr. Warren, said in his closing arguments, “you have to take into consideration the conditions under which he was living.”

But prosecutors, who described Mr. Warren as zealously looking for an opportunity to use his expensive personal assault rifle, said that even under the harrowing conditions after the hurricane, the rule of law was never abandoned.

“Hurricane Katrina didn’t turn petty theft into a capital offense,” said Jared Fishman, a federal prosecutor in his closing arguments.

OC Deputy Charged In On-Duty Sexual Assault Of Teen

2010-12-09T13:01:00.001-08:00

SANTA ANA (CBS) — An Orange County sheriff’s deputy was charged Thursday with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl while on duty.

Scott Cole, 41, of Hesperia, could face up to three years in prison if convicted of a felony count of sexual penetration by a foreign object of a minor, said Deputy District Attorney Robert Mestman.

Cole made his initial appearance this afternoon before an Orange County judge, who postponed the defendant’s arraignment until tomorrow morning and released him on his own recognizance.

The teen’s mother called sheriff’s deputies on June 23 to report that some of her jewelry was stolen from her residence in unincorporated Orange County near Tustin, Mestman said.

Cole, who responded to the call, first spoke to the girl’s mother and sister in the living room and later allegedly told the 17-year-old, who was in her bedroom, to take off her clothes, Mestman said.

He left the bedroom to speak again to the mother and her other daughter for a few minutes before he returned to the girl’s bedroom and closed the door, the prosecutor alleged.

While in the bedroom, Cole is accused of digitally penetrating the girl, Mestman said.

“She was in shock when it happened,” he said.

The mother and sister “thought it was suspicious he was in there alone with the door closed,” the prosecutor said.

Once Cole left, the girl told her mother what allegedly happened.

Cole, who has been on paid administrative leave since June, has been with the department for 14 years, according to John McDonald, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Atlanta Pays $1M to Gay Bar to Settle Suit Against Police

2010-12-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

By Ernie Suggs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta's long battle with the Atlanta Eagle club is finally over, and the city is $1 million poorer for it.

On Monday, the Atlanta City Council passed a resolution to settle a lawsuit in its dispute with the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar in Midtown that was the location of a botched police raid in September 2009.

The council voted 14-0 to make the payment of $1,002,500 in the case of Calhoun v. Pennington, but it reserved deep discussion on the matter to executive session. Geoff Calhoun was a patron of the bar, and Richard Pennington was the city's police chief at the time of the raid.

After going into executive session to address Councilman Howard Shook's question on how the final figure was determined, the council returned and voted. As part of the settlement, the city will also oversee reforms within the Atlanta Police Department.

The settlement must now go back to a federal judge for final approval. At this point, the money will go into an escrow account controlled by the nonprofit legal group Lambda Legal.

On behalf of 19 patrons of the nightclub, attorney Dan Grossman filed the lawsuit in November 2009 alleging that the APD violated the federal and state constitutional rights of the people at the bar by illegally detaining them. It also said officers did not present a search warrant and used anti-gay slurs during the raid on Sept. 10, 2009.

Following a court-mandated gag order by federal Magistrate Judge Alan J. Baverman, neither Calhoun nor Grossman would comment on the ruling. But immediately after the council's vote, Calhoun walked out of the chambers wiping tears from his eyes. Grossman followed and hugged him.

In the widely reported raid, dozens of police officers swarmed into the Ponce de Leon nightclub after undercover vice officers reported that they had witnessed men having sex while other patrons watched. The department also received complaints alleging drug sales on the premises. During the raid, 62 patrons were forced to lie down on the bar's floor. No search warrant was served, and no charges were ever filed against any of them. Police did arrest eight Eagle employees on permit violations.

Man Alleges Sodomy by NYPD Police Officers

2010-12-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

By TOM HAYS and LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press

A Wall Street financial worker says New York City police officers responding to a noisy domestic dispute in 2004 sodomized him with a baton, allegations that recall the more notorious cases of a Brooklyn tattoo parlor employee in 2008 and Haitian immigrant Abner Louima a decade earlier.

Those past accusations grabbed headlines and raise concerns about excessive force, but Ralph Johnson's civil case has unfolded largely unnoticed in federal court in Manhattan.

Johnson is seeking unspecified damages from the city and the New York Police Department at his ongoing trial. In recent testimony, he told a jury that the officers violated him with a metal baton and sought to cover up the assault.

"When I was face down ... my legs were held and I felt a sharp jabbing pain into my rectum," Johnson testified.

A doctor who examined Johnson testified that he saw abrasions and oozing blood that were "consistent with what he said happened to him."

Johnson's ex-girlfriend also has taken the witness stand. She said that after officers hauled him off in handcuffs, one made a curious query about their Bronx apartment: "He asked me if there was any reason a video camera would be set up (there)."

There was no video. But Johnson's lawyers have introduced as evidence a pair of Johnson's jeans with a hole torn through the seat and lab results confirming his DNA was on a skinny, retractable police baton - the same type of instrument central to the 2008 Brooklyn case involving Michael Mineo.

Mineo said he was assaulted during his arrest on a subway platform. The allegations resulted in news conferences arranged by his lawyers, criminal charges against three patrolmen and comparisons to Louima, whose attack by a broomstick-wielding officer in a police station bathroom in 1997 ranks among the worst scandals in NYPD history.

The officers in the Mineo case were acquitted, but he has pursued a lawsuit against one in a civil case now on trial in Brooklyn.

The largest settlement ever in a police brutality case in New York resulted in 2001 when the city and police union agreed to pay $8.7 million to resolve a lawsuit Louima brought for the severe internal injuries he suffered. One officer is serving 30 years for the attack, while another served a five-year term for perjury.

By contrast, Johnson's case was obscured partly because of his reluctance to go public with his allegations. He also had to beat what he says were trumped-up criminal charges stemming from the encounter.

The city and the NYPD have defended the officers, claiming the girlfriend was in distress and Johnson was uncooperative. They also cite a taped interview with NYPD internal affairs in which Johnson says he wasn't sure how he was injured.

Johnson has conceded he can't identify the officer who allegedly used the baton on him. In his opening statement, city attorney Sumit Sud accused the plaintiff of trying "to cast an illusion on the facts of this case."

The lawyer argued that Johnson's internal injuries were so minor that they could have been caused by constipation. The tear in the jeans also was misleading, he said.

"He was wearing underwear and, low and behold, the underwear has no hole in it," he said.

An NYPD sergeant who took the stand briefly last week resumed testimony Monday, saying he punched Johnson in the face twice at one point when he thought he was going to reach for a glass object he could use as a weapon.

U.S. District Judge Kevin P. Castel seemed to be urging a settlement Monday when, with the jury out of the room, he predicted that the panel's verdict might lead the losing side to conclude it made a "serious miscalculation." He also said the case had legal issues that were complex enough to ensure appeals and continued litigation.

Johnson, 40, told jurors that he's employed at a financial consulting firm and is a partner in a precious metals venture. He was working at an investment banking firm in the summer of 2004 when a night out drinking with his live-in girlfriend spiraled out of control.

The girlfriend, teacher Alison Bongo, blew up because he spoke to another woman at a Manhattan nightspot. Once back at their apartment, the argument escalated. She confronted with a bank statement with an unexplained charge for a hotel room.

"I tried to talk to him about it and he wouldn't listen," she said.

Even when she began throwing things around and breaking windows, she said, he sat silent.

"It made me even angrier," she said.

She said he finally responded by carrying her to the doorstep and locking her out. She banged on the door and yelled at the top of her lungs.

That's when the 911 calls from neighbors began - six in all. "A woman is screaming like crazy," one caller said.

Bongo testified that about a half dozen officers showed up shortly after midnight on Aug. 27. She told the officers she wanted to get some clothes and leave, and offered her keys for them to let themselves in.

She testified that the officers had trouble unlocking the door, and decided to break it down. Johnson said he was sitting on a couch, clueless about the commotion outside, when they burst in.

"I didn't know what to do," he said. "I just froze."

He continued: "They were kicking and punching me. They threw me on the ground, face first." After feeling the pain in his rectum, he said he "screamed out" for his girlfriend before being dragged out of the home.

The officers tell a different story: They say Johnson knew they were outside but refused to let them in. He also ignored repeated orders to show his hands and stand, and resisted when they tried to pull him up, they say. The retractable baton was used only to pry his arms into position to be handcuffed, the officers say.

At the police station, Johnson told an officer that he had been assaulted and asked for medical attention. He claimed he recanted on the internal affairs tape because of investigators' intimidation.

He said one warned him "that the last time this was true was Abner Louima and you're not Louima." Also, "We're going to prosecute you for a felony if you're lying."

Johnson said he feared police "would put me on the news. They would contact my employer and all my clients. They would interview family and friends."

Bongo refused to press domestic violence charges against Johnson, but prosecutors still pursued a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest. He said he rejected a plea deal that would have required him sign a statement saying "there was no brutality or sodomy." He was acquitted at trial.

Paul Browne, the police department's top spokesman, said the Internal Affairs Bureau found Johnson's allegation to be unfounded after he recanted and after no physical evidence of a sexual assault was found. He noted that the Bronx district attorney had declined to prosecute the officers.

At the current trial, Bongo coolly recounted how the arrest was the beginning of the end for the couple.

"Do you have any interest in testifying on behalf of Mr. Johnson or helping Mr. Johnson?" his lawyer asked.

"No," she replied, without hesitation.

The ex-girlfriend testified she didn't see the arrest because police had her sequestered in a bedroom. But she claimed she was coerced into falsely signing a statement saying, "I was scared and that I was going to get hurt" that night.

In truth, she said her ex was never violent toward her. If he had been, "I would have left."

The Crime of Punishment

2010-12-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California’s prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” in the Supreme Court’s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.
These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.
Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”
Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”
Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.
The case will most likely be resolved by a vote of 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote decisive. At the oral argument, he said that “at some point,” the court must say “overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it’s now time for a remedy.” After 20 years of litigation and 70 court orders, that point has come.
At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.
Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.
America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure — the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.

In Post-Katrina Killing, NOPD Cop Testifies Why He Shot Man, Another Explains Why He Burned the Body

2010-12-01T08:43:00.000-08:00

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica

In the ongoing trial of five police officers charged with killing a New Orleans man in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, two of those charged have taken the stand in their own defense.

In testimony yesterday and this morning, New Orleans police officer Greg McRae explained his decision to burn the body of 31-year-old Henry Glover, who had been shot by police officer David Warren earlier that day.

"I had seen enough bodies," McRae said. "I had seen enough rot."

McRae testified that he did not know, at the time, that Glover had been shot by a police officer. He said he was motivated by exhaustion, the trauma of the storm, and the need to get the body away from the makeshift police station where he was based.

Glover's death was first detailed by ProPublica nearly two years ago, in an investigative partnership with the Nation Institute and the Nation magazine.

In June, the Justice Department indicted five officers in connection with the case. Warren has been charged with shooting Glover; McRae and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann have been charged with beating three men who tried to help Glover, and then burning Glover's remains; and former Lt. Robert Italiano and Lt. Travis McCabe are charged with covering it up.

Last week, in the first day of testimony from the defense, Warren told the jury that he believed his life was in danger when he shot Glover on Sept. 2, 2005. Warren said that Glover was running toward him at the time, and that from the second floor balcony where Warren stood, it appeared that Glover was holding a weapon.

His partner that day, NOPD officer Linda Howard, testified earlier in the trial that Glover was actually running away from the strip mall where they stood -- not towards it -- when Glover was shot.

In testimony on Monday, Alan Baxter, an expert for the defense, testified that Warren's shooting was justified, and that Warren met the standard for firing his weapon, which requires the reasonable belief that his or someone else's life was in danger.

As our partners at the Times-Picayune explain, Baxter himself appeared to be on trial at times, as the prosecution picked apart his qualifications, noting that he has never published any articles about police procedure. Baxter says he is a former executive-level police commander with the United Nations, yet the U.N. has no record of his employment, the prosecution said.

A quick look at Baxter's background (PDF) shows that he's not an attorney, but was formerly a member of the Canadian Bar Association as well as two trial lawyers' groups in Washington State.

He's listed as a current member of the National Association of Police Chiefs, the American Correctional Association and the American College of Forensics. We called to confirm he's still a member, and learned that his membership in the first two expired earlier this year. The American College of Forensics doesn't give out information on its members, but says that anyone can join, as long as they pay the fees.

Baxter's testimony was based on a two-hour interview with Warren, he said. He did not speak with any other witnesses of the event.

In addition to saying that Warren's shooting of Glover was justified, Baxter also said that Warren was acting legally when he fired a warning shot at a man earlier in the day.

The NOPD's use of force guidelines, explicitly says, "Police Officers shall not fire warning shots." (We have posted the guidelines.)

Baxter testified that the guidelines were essentially suggestions rather than rules.

The trial is expected to continue at least through the end of the week. Check out nola.com for continued coverage.

Broken Beyond Repair

2010-11-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 29, 2010

You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you’re 90 years old.

In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional.

As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,’ had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”

The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.

Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.

Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories.

Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.

I remember reporting on a study several years ago by the Texas Defender Service, which represented indigent death row inmates. It mentioned a Dallas defense lawyer, who, reminiscing in 2000, said: “At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses.” A judge, looking back on his days as a prosecutor in the 1950s, recalled being told by an angry boss: “If you ever put another nigger on a jury, you’re fired.”

Prosecutors cleaned up their language somewhat over the years, but the discrimination has persisted, along with the pernicious idea that white lives are inherently more valuable than black ones. Patricia Lemay, a white juror in a Georgia death penalty case that resulted in an execution, told me in an interview in 2002 that she had been nauseated by the vile racial comments made by other jurors during the deliberations.

Justice Harry Blackmun was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer support the imposition of the death penalty. “The problem,” he said, “is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.”

Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”

In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: “When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery.”

Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us. It is still an abomination. Illinois has tried mightily to deal with a system of capital punishment that had, as The Chicago Tribune described it, “one of the worst records of wrongful capital convictions in the country.”

The sentences of 167 condemned inmates were commuted in 2003. Four others were pardoned and a moratorium on the death penalty has been in effect since 2000. But prosecutors continue mindlessly to seek the death penalty. And the system for trying murder cases remains a mess. As The Tribune wrote in an editorial just last week:

“Lawmakers still haven’t taken adequate steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across the state, or to guard against wrongful convictions based on errant identifications of witnesses or mistakes at forensic labs. False confessions and prosecutorial missteps are still alarmingly common.”

In the paper’s view, “Illinois must abolish the death penalty.”

And so must the United States.

The Peelice

2010-11-24T13:47:00.000-08:00

New York City Police Photograph Irises of Suspects

2010-11-24T13:41:00.000-08:00

By RAY RIVERA and AL BAKER

The New York Police Department has begun photographing the irises of people who are arrested in an effort to prevent escapes as suspects move through the court system, a police official said Monday.

The program was instituted after two embarrassing episodes early this year in which prisoners arrested on serious charges tricked the authorities into freeing them by posing at arraignment as suspects facing minor cases. The occurrences exposed weaknesses in the city’s handling of suspects as they move from police custody into the maze of court systems in the five boroughs.

With the new system, the authorities are using a hand-held scanning device that can check a prisoner’s identity in seconds when the suspect is presented in court, said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman.

Officials began photographing the irises of suspects arrested for any reason on Monday at Manhattan Central Booking and expect to expand the program to all five boroughs by early December, Mr. Browne said.

The department has been working on the program for months, Mr. Browne said. But the effort caught many in the city’s legal circles by surprise as news of it began trickling out late last week. It is raising concerns among civil libertarians and privacy advocates, who say the authorities’ cataloging of the new data could put innocent people under permanent suspicion.

“It’s really distressing that the Police Department is once again undertaking a new regime of personal data collection without any public discourse,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “and we don’t know the reason for it, whether this is a necessary program, whether it’s effective to address the concerns that it’s designed to address, and whether in this day and age it’s even cost-effective, not to mention whether there are any protections in place against the misuse of the data that’s collected.”

Steven Banks, attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, said his office learned about the program on Friday in a phone call from the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator.

“This is an unnecessary process,” Mr. Banks said. “It’s unauthorized by the statutes and of questionable legality at best. The statutes specifically authorize collecting fingerprints. There has been great legislative debate about the extent to which DNA evidence can be collected, and it is limited to certain types of cases. So the idea that the Police Department can forge ahead and use a totally new technology without any statutory authorization is certainly suspect.”

Mr. Browne said a legal review by the department had concluded that legislative authorization was not necessary.

“Our legal review determined that these are photographs and should be treated the same as mug shots, which are destroyed when arrests are sealed,” he said.

The technology uses high-resolution images to identify unique patterns in the iris, the colored part of the eye. It is considered less intrusive than retinal scanning, which looks at patterns in the blood vessels in the back of the eye and can reveal information about a person’s health, raising privacy concerns.

The department’s collection and use of electronic data have long been controversial. A new state law forced the department to halt electronic storage of the names and addresses of people stopped under the stop-and-frisk program but not charged or arrested.

The iris database has other implications as well, potentially providing the department with a tool in the fight against terrorism. The military has been using similar biometric technology in Iraq and Afghanistan to develop a database of potential insurgents, though Mr. Browne said that the Police Department’s data was not intended for that use and that there had been no coordination with the Defense Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the program.

Other police agencies and correctional facilities across the country also use iris recognition, though it was unclear on Monday how widespread the practice is.

Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which focuses on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues, said that law and policy had developed over time on the collection of fingerprints, and more recently DNA, in the criminal justice system, and that iris scans fell somewhere in between.

“It’s a more accurate form of identification,” Mr. Rotenberg said of the scans, “but at the same time doesn’t raise the same privacy concerns that DNA data has.”

The program will cost the city $500,000 to implement and is being paid for through a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Browne said.

In March, a suspect charged in a string of robberies, who had served time in prison for attempted murder, claimed to be another man, who was facing a charge of marijuana possession, as they were about to be arraigned on Staten Island. The ruse worked and the suspect, Freddie Thompson, was released and remained free for 56 hours before he was recaptured. Another suspect, Michael Bautista, who was facing charges of assault and criminal mischief in the Bronx, escaped in the same manner in February and remains at large.

Mr. Browne said he had no statistics on how often suspects had escaped in this manner, but he said the problem was not widespread.

William K. Rashbaum and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

POLI-MIGRA (ICE) Practices In COOK COUNTY CONTINUE

2010-11-24T06:15:00.000-08:00

Village of South Holland Police enforces Immigration Laws and leaves a 2 year old Orphan

COOK COUNTY, IL-Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission/Justice Mission received a phone call in regards to a woman, Susana Chichilla age 24, who was stopped by the South Holland Police on her way to the Walgreen’s pharmacy store to purchase medicine for her 2 year old U.S. Citizen son who is very ill and in need of daily medication.

“Officer P. Williams star#102, who works on the morning shift, is the arresting officer of Susana Chichilla and the cause of the break up of this innocent family. Because of his decision to call Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) against Susana Chichilla, a 2 year old Citizen child is about to become orphan” said Father Landaverde, “This U.S. Citizen child is suffering tremendously for this unjust and inhumane action that this local police officer took, we can not tolerate racial profiling and this kind of attacks to our immigrant families any longer, we denounce as unjust and inhumane the acts of South Holland Police and any law enforcement agency and individuals that collaborate with ICE and tries to enforce unjust and inhumane laws like the ones from our broken immigration system, we will bring our voices and community power to the door steps of the Village of South Holland if there's not an immediate release from custody of Susana Chichilla ” concluded Father Landaverde.

Jose Herrera, organizer for the Immigrant Youth Justice League and the Justice Mission, said “The welcoming message of South Holland made by Mayor, Don A. De Graff, states that the Village was founded by early Dutch settlers and that their history has included a heritage of faith in God with an important emphasis on unity in the family, if this last part is true then why do they take this kind of action against Susana Chichilla? We must lift our voices and denounce all of this. The Village of South Holland is located in the county of cook. County of Cook does not participate in any of the ICE programs, like the Secure Communities or 287(g) programs, which make legal the collaboration of ICE and local law enforcement agencies, WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF SUSANA CHICHILLA” concluded Jose Herrera.

Judge who did time peddling prison survival skills

2010-11-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

BY DAVID OVALLE

Former Miami-Dade County Judge Harvey Shenberg returns to Miami this week to promote his new consulting business, Prison Planning, which helps inmates prepare and cope with their new lives in prison.
For newcomers to the federal pen, mistakes are easy to make: cutting in the chow line, arguing about what's on television, befriending the wrong inmates.

In his shell-shocked early days behind bars, former Miami-Dade County Judge Harvey Shenberg angered a fellow inmate when he casually looked into his cell while walking down the hall. He saw nothing -- but wasn't spared some angry words of advice.

``You might see somebody raping someone, you may see someone getting killed,'' Shenberg said. ``So now you're in the middle of it and witnessed something you didn't want to witness.''

After nearly 11 years in federal prison for his role in the notorious Miami-Dade judicial corruption scandal dubbed Operation Court Broom, Shenberg, 67, is hoping to parlay his mistakes and successes behind bars into a new career as an advice guru and social worker of sorts for inmates and their families.

Shenberg returned to Miami-Dade County last week to start promoting his new consulting business, Prison Planning, and meet with two clients soon headed to prison and a third awaiting trial.

It's the latest twist for someone who staked his career on law and order, first as a Dade prosecutor, then as a 19-year defense attorney, and finally as a county court judge.

But that life came crashed down in embarrassing fashion.

BUSTED

In 1991, federal agents videotaped Shenberg accepting cash for giving a defense attorney the name of a confidential informant who had been marked for murder. Shenberg -- who earned about $90,000 a year and later lost his state pension -- famously told a fellow judge he needed the money to put his son through college.

The investigation netted several other Miami-Dade judges and lawyers. After a 10 ½-month trial, Shenberg was convicted of racketeering conspiracy and extortion.

Today, Shenberg admits: ``I was a crummy criminal.''

But he doesn't shy away from his past. On his new website -- PrisonPlanning.com -- he even displays his prison ID card and a lengthy description of his time in the pen.

Released from a Miami halfway house in February 2008, and having just completed court supervision earlier this year, the idea for the consulting firm came from Shenberg's volunteer work helping inmates with the Aleph Institute, a nonprofit that supports Jewish prisoners.

``I wish I had had someone like me before I went in -- and that's with 20-something years in the criminal justice system. Prison is a whole other world,'' he said.

DIPLOMACY, SMARTS

Shenberg says he survived through a mix of diplomacy and savvy in a ``world inside a world'' segregated by race and internal prison class, where outcast groups like ``cooperators'' and child molesters stuck together.

Mostly, he says, he learned humility.

``All of a sudden you go from being in control of your life to someone controlling your life,'' he recalled. ``You go from telling people what to do to begging people on the outside to send you a magazine, or to help your family out.''

His company, run with his wife from their Arizona condo, is one of a handful of for-profit consulting companies nationwide aimed at walking prisoners and their families through the experience.

Herbert J. Hoelter, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, said Shenberg's effort will be positive for clients, though probably not too lucrative.

``I think it's helpful. To me, it's not a big for-profit money-maker thing,'' Hoelter said. ``But people need assistance, whether they can afford it or not. Prison is a searing experience.''

For business, Shenberg -- whose mother still lives in Miami -- is soliciting lawyers in Miami-Dade. He says he doesn't expect to rake in the money, but wants to help.

``There is use for his services. A lot of attorneys are ill-equipped to give out the type of information he is giving, or don't have the inclination or the time,'' said Miami defense attorney Jose Quiñon, who represented co-defendant Alfonso Sepe, a Circuit Court judge.

``Maybe [Shenberg] can help some people, and at the same time put some food on the table. He's paid his debt to society.''

POTENTIAL CLIENTS

Shenberg's target clientele: white-collar convicts who will likely be allowed to surrender, rather than being thrown in the slammer straight from the courtroom.

Shenberg offers advice on free videos, but he stresses the benefits of dialogue that books and Web pages can't provide. That may run a couple of hundred bucks for a telephone consultation, or up to $1,500 for a face-to-face meeting.

The advice starts with the practical: Before surrender, get your teeth deep-cleaned by a dentist, make copies of your medical records and, if needed, pack two pairs of glasses. Lockdowns are inevitable, so stock extra food and books in your cell.

There's also the philosophical: Prison isn't fair. Stay under the radar. Don't gripe. Accept that some guards live to make your life hell.

Shenberg thinks he's earned credibility. He spent time at nine facilities, including in Miami and Mississippi, and two short but hellacious stints at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was locked up 23 out of 24 hours.

When Shenberg first arrived at Miami's federal prison, one inmate marked him for stabbing because he mistakingly thought he was the judge who had sentenced him. The plot fell apart when the inmate learned Shenberg was in fact not his judge.

``Three weeks later, we had a great relationship,'' Shenberg said.

In the Miami penitentiary, Shenberg refused extra protection or to be placed in special housing -- even when a newspaper article about Operation Court Broom circulated among prisoners.

Just as he didn't cooperate with federal agents in Court Broom, he chose not to complain to guards, lest he end up in special housing alienated from the prison populace.

And while some inmates hustled by gambling or washing laundry for food, he was lucky to have family replenishing his commissary account. So he worked resodding sports fields and handing out sports equipment and ceramics supplies. And, as he got closer to release, he began to work on a plan for his new business -- something he hopes his clients will be able to emulate.

``We want people to get something beneficial out of a terrible situation,'' he said.

TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine

2010-11-21T08:20:00.000-08:00

By Harriet Baskas

A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.

Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”

Before starting the enhanced pat-down procedure, a security officer did tell him what they were going to do and how they were going to it, but Sawyer said it wasn’t until they asked him to remove his sweatshirt and saw his urostomy bag that they asked any questions about his medical condition.

“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”

The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”

Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.

“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.

Sawyer completed his trip and had no problems with the security procedures at the Orlando International Airport on his journey back home. He said he plans to file a formal complaint with the TSA.

When he does, said TSA spokesperson Dwayne Baird, “We will review the matter and take appropriate action if necessary.” In the meantime, Baird encourages anyone with a medical condition to read the TSA’s website section on assistive devices and mobility aids.

The website says that travelers with disabilities and medical conditions have “the option of requesting a private screening” and that security officers “will not ask nor require you to remove your prosthetic device, cast, or support brace.”

Sawyer said he's written to his senators, state representatives and the president of the United States. He’s also shared details of the incident online with members of the nonprofit Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, many of whom have offered support and shared their travel experiences.

“I am a good American and I want safety for all passengers as much as the next person," Sawyer said. "But if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”

Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network executive director Claire Saxton said that there are hundreds of thousands of people living with ostomies in the United States. “TSA agents need to be trained to listen when someone tells them have a health issue and trained in knowing what an ostomy is. No one living with an ostomy should be afraid of flying because they’re afraid of being humiliated at the checkpoint.”

Eric Lipp, executive director of Open Doors Association, which works with businesses and the disability community, called what happened to Sawyer “unfortunate.”

“But enhanced pat-downs are not a new issue for people with disabilities who travel," Lipp said. "They've always had trouble getting through the security checkpoint."

Still, Lipp said the TSA knows there’s a problem. “This came up during a recent meeting of the agency’s disability advisory board and I expect to see a procedure coming in place shortly that will directly address the pat-down procedures for people with disabilities.”

Prosecutors: Burge should spend decades in prison

2010-11-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

By Andy Grimm, Tribune reporter
Federal prosecutors will seek at least 24 years in prison for disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge, saying his torture of criminal suspects decades ago shook public confidence in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
Such a stiff sentence for Burge's conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice is sure to stir debate at his sentencing Jan. 20. The probation office has recommended that Burge face 15 to 21 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, while his lawyers have said they would seek probation, noting that when Burge was convicted when he was 62 and had prostate cancer.
In court papers filed last week, prosecutors disputed the probation office's findings, saying Burge deserved a sentence of about 24 to 30 years under the sentencing guidelines. The government cited the "stain" that Burge's torture of suspects left on the department and the more than $30 million the city has spent on lawyers and payouts to Burge's victims as a result of many lawsuits.
"Defendant's criminal acts have tainted and prejudiced the thousands of hard-working dedicated police officers who have followed in Burge's polluted wake," Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Weisman and April Perry wrote in the filing. "These officers also have faced trying circumstances, and have had to confront society's ills. But unlike the defendant, the majority of these officers did not succumb to the principle that the ends justify the means."
A jury convicted Burge in June on all three counts of obstruction of justice and perjury for lying in a 2003 civil lawsuit when he denied he knew of or took part in torture under his command at the Calumet Area headquarters on the city's South Side.
For years it looked as if Burge would escape criminal charges altogether. He was fired from the Police Department in 1993 for torturing a cop killer, but a four-year investigation by special Cook County prosecutors concluded in 2006 that the statute of limitations on the claims of abuse had long passed. It wasn't until 2008 that federal prosecutors figured out a way to indict him — not for the tortures themselves, but for lying about them.
At Burge's trial, five ex-cons alleged torture by Burge's "Midnight Crew" of detectives in the 1970s and 1980s. According to the testimony, Burge smothered one with a bag, played Russian roulette with another and shocked a third on the genitals with an electrical device the detectives used because it inflicted pain but "left no marks" on the suspect, prosecutors said. The abuse tainted dozens of criminal investigations.
Burge's attorney did not return a call Monday seeking comment. At his trial, his attorneys suggested that the decorated veteran officer was heroic, a notion attacked by prosecutors in their latest filing.
"He was no hero. Rather, the men and women who … honorably and honestly serve the community are the heroes," they wrote. "Perhaps these officers were not promoted through the ranks as quickly as the defendant was, and perhaps they were not present at press conferences promoting their own ill-obtained achievements, but they were, and are, heroes because they serve with honor and integrity."

Lancaster County Man Dies After Police Use Taser On Him

2010-11-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. -- A Lancaster County man died after police used a Taser on him early Saturday morning.

Robert Neill Jr., 61, died after he become unresponsive after police used a Taser on him twice and sprayed him with Mace, state police said.

The incident happened at about 4 a.m. Saturday at Neill's home in the 300 block of Marietta Avenue in Mount Joy.

Several police departments assisted, including Mount Joy Borough police, Susquehanna Regional police and state police from Ephrata.

According to police, Neill said that he had been harassed by his neighbors. When officers arrived, they said Neill was combative and aggressive.

That is when officers used a Taser on him and sprayed with Mace him. Neill died on the way to the hospital.

"Police officers acted appropriately and used the proper amount of force to subdue Mr. Neill," said state police Lt. William White.

An autopsy was performed Monday, but state police said they are waiting for toxicology results to determine the cause and manner of Neill's death.

NSC Study Shows You are More Likely to Killed By a Cop Than a Terrorist

2010-11-08T07:25:00.000-08:00

After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears.

While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations?

The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.

-- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane

-- You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack

--You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack

-- You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack

--You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack

--You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack

--You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

--You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

-- You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

SOURCE: The Progressive Review

Violence After Sentence in Oakland Killing

2010-11-08T07:12:00.000-08:00

By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN
Published: November 5, 2010

OAKLAND — Protesters vandalized storefronts and clashed with the police here on Friday night after a white former transit police officer was given what they considered to be a light sentence for the killing an unarmed black man. But protests initially seemed less violent than others that have surrounded the controversial case.

The authorities said one officer was hit by a car — perhaps by a police vehicle — and another officer’s gun was stolen and turned on him. That protester was arrested, Police Chief Anthony W. Batts said, and a police spokesman said 152 people had been arrested. “You have a very aggressive crowd,” Chief Batts said.

The demonstrations started after Judge Robert Perry of Superior Court in Los Angeles sentenced the former officer, Johannes Mehserle, to two years in state prison. But the judge dismissed a component of the charges that would have led to more prison time.

With time already served, Mr. Mehserle could be released from prison as early as next year. He was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, who was shot while lying face down on New Year’s Day 2009. He had been removed from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train after a fight, and Mr. Mehserle said that he had mistaken his gun for a Taser. He was acquitted of the more serious charge of second-degree murder.

The jury found that Mr. Mehserle was eligible for additional prison time because he had used a gun in the crime. But Judge Perry rejected that finding.

The shooting and subsequent verdict drew an angry reaction from Mr. Grant’s family, who thought Mr. Mehserle should have been convicted of murder, and sparked riots in Oakland.

The crowd on Friday initially assembled for a peaceful rally in front of Oakland City Hall, which had closed early, as had many businesses. But after the rally wrapped up, several hundred of the protesters began to roam downtown Oakland, vandalizing vehicles and businesses.

In Oakland, tensions between the city’s sizable black population and its police force are longstanding, even though the city has a black mayor and police chief. The mayor, Ron Dellums, had pleaded for calm, and police officers were out in force, with days off canceled and police helicopters hovering overhead.

But frustrations seemed present nonetheless. At the rally, Michael Johnson, a 26-year-old graduate student and medical case manager, said the sentence was a part of historic inequality.

“I’m indignant today,” Mr. Johnson said.

City's 'stop and frisk' policy draws lawsuit

2010-11-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

By WENDY RUDERMAN, BARBARA LAKER & CATHERINE LUCEY
Philadelphia Daily News

CITY POLICE have targeted thousands of minority residents and illegally stopped and searched them for no reason under Mayor Nutter's amped-up "stop and frisk" policy, a team of prominent civil-rights attorneys allege in a lawsuit filed yesterday.

The class-action lawsuit - filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg - claims that Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey "instituted more aggressive stop-and-frisk practices," and then, "with deliberate indifference," failed to properly train, supervise and discipline officers who routinely violate civil rights.

"These unconstitutional actions have had and continue to have a devastating effect on the lives of many Philadelphians," attorney Paul Messing said. "Beyond that, these police practices have had no real impact on stemming criminal conduct in our city. They just subject innocent people to humiliating and degrading treatment."

The suit was filed on behalf of eight black and Latino men, including state Rep. Jewell Williams, a former Temple University police officer who plans to run for city sheriff in next year's Democratic primary.

Officers handcuffed Williams in March 2009 and placed him into the back seat of a squad car after he inquired about the well-being of two elderly men whom police had detained - then subsequently released - during a car stop in Williams' North Philly neighborhood.

Williams, who was stopped about three car-lengths back, said he emerged from his state-leased Chrysler after he overheard an officer threatening to beat up one of the elderly men. Williams alleged that another officer ordered him to "get back in the f---ing car," even though Williams said he identified himself as a state legislator.

In an interview yesterday, Williams said the nightmarish incident "was like a flashback to the civil-rights era."

"You can command attention and respect without calling a person an 'm-effer,' " Williams said. "When you use 'm-effer' and all kinds of words like that, what comes next is pushing and shoving. . . . Those are words that, in my opinion, were used in slavery days."

When asked how the lawsuit might affect his bid for sheriff, Williams said he hoped that voters would want a sheriff who stands up for their civil rights and wouldn't "turn his head to bad things."

Ramsey declined to comment, citing the open lawsuit. City Solicitor Shelley Smith, however, said Ramsey has beefed up police training and supervision, responded quickly to allegations of abuse and meted out discipline when warranted. Last month, Ramsey added more investigators to the Internal Affairs Bureau.

"The Police Department and Commissioner Ramsey take seriously the need to protect the constitutional rights of citizens," Smith said.

Yesterday afternoon, Nutter said he had not yet reviewed the suit. But he said the "stop and frisk" policy was legal and effective if used correctly. Since taking office in January 2008, Nutter has championed "stop, question and frisk" policing as part of a plan to fight crime and get guns off the street.

Nutter stressed that overall crime, including violent crime, is down and said race is not a factor in who gets searched. He also noted that "stop and frisk" - in which police stop people suspected of criminal activity and pat them down for illegal weapons - was being used before he became mayor.

ACLU attorney Mary Catherine Roper said: "You can't go into a neighborhood as an officer and say, 'This is a high-crime area; everybody is under suspicion.' That's not what our country is about."

Citing Police Department statistics, the lawsuit says that pedestrian stops have jumped dramatically, from 102,319 in 2005 to 253,333 in 2009 - an increase of 148 percent. Of those pedestrians stopped in 2009, about 72 percent were African-American and only 8 percent led to arrests.

"Most of those arrests had nothing to do with the reason they were stopped," Messing said. "The charges were often for disorderly conduct because they complained they were stopped for no reason."

In response to the argument that "stop and frisk" has reduced violent crime, Messing said, "This is a high price to pay - constitutional violations on a massive scale in an effort to find a microscopic amount of criminal activity."

The lawsuit, which names nine officers individually and at least 12 as "John Does," asks the court to bar police from stopping and frisking residents on the basis of race or nationality or without reasonable suspicion. The suit also seeks court-mandated training, supervision and discipline to eliminate the "unconstitutional" policy.

The named plaintiffs in the suit seek unspecified compensatory damages.

Among the plaintiffs are John Cornish and Carl Cutler, both 65, who were detained in the incident connected to state Rep. Williams; Mahari Bailey, a Georgetown-educated lawyer who has been stopped four times since 2008, all allegedly without cause; and Fernando Montero, a Princeton graduate who works as a University of Pennsylvania ethnographer and is working on a book about the Latino community.

Other plaintiffs are Timothy Streaty, 32, who worked several years at a pharmaceutical company; Gregory Blackmon Jr., 21, a Simon Gratz High School graduate who has worked as a carpenter; and Preston Fulton, 21, who, the suit says, has been unlawfully stopped numerous times by officers in North Philadelphia and in one case was pushed against a wall and frisked.

Feds: Ohio Jail's Stun-Gun use Unconstitutional

2010-11-05T07:50:00.001-07:00

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- The Justice Department says jailers in a central Ohio county regularly break the law and violate inmates' civil rights with excessive stun-gun use.

U.S. officials say Franklin County deputies use stun guns to subdue inmates who aren't acting up and regularly shock inmates who are naked or restrained and for minor rule violations. The county includes Columbus.

The Justice Department's Wednesday filing in U.S. District Court in Columbus also alleges jailers routinely use stun guns on inmates who are disabled, pregnant or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

The government wants to join a lawsuit against Franklin County brought last summer by a legal rights group.

Maricopa County to pay $2 million in shooting by its deputies in post-Katrina duties

2010-11-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

by Yvonne Wingett and JJ Hensley - Nov. 3, 2010 12:29 PM
The Arizona Republic

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will pay $2 million to a Louisiana man who claimed deputies working for the Sheriff's Office shot him in the eye while on assignment to aid New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

The Board of Supervisors approved the payment on a 4-0 vote at a Wednesday meeting; Supervisor Fulton Brock was absent for the vote.

Asked why the supervisors decided to settle the case, spokeswoman Cari Gerchick responded, "It was a business decision made to minimize taxpayer expense."

Gerchick referred questions to county Risk Manager Peter Crowley, who said, "It's just one of those cases where we felt it was in the county's best interest to settle."

The Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sheriff's deputies Aaron Brown and Jason Lier were among the members of the Sheriff's Office that flew to Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.

According to a complaint filed in federal court, Naquin was driving on a highway outside New Orleans when he crossed paths with Brown and Lier, who were driving an unmarked SUV.

Naquin's truck and the SUV briefly reached an impasse when one of the highway's lanes narrowed. According to the complaint, as the SUV and truck pulled alongside each other, Naquin saw the SUV's passenger-side window roll down and the barrel of a rifle come out, pointed at him.

Naquin did not see Brown or Lier wearing any clothes indicating they were law enforcement, and in the fallout from the hurricane, Naquin assumed the worst and sped off, according to the complaint. Brown and Lier continued to follow Naquin and activated the emergency lights under the grill of their unmarked SUV.

"Because of his experience and, in particular, his rescue work in New Orleans, Plaintiff knew that ordinary people, with no official status, had been using products such as under-the-grill lights for nefarious purposes," according to the court documents.

The deputies eventually turned off their emergency lights and stopped behind Naquin at an intersection, according to the court documents. According to the complaint, Naquin said he felt threatened and got out of his truck, unarmed, with his palms turned upward and asked Lier and Brown, "What do you (expletive) want?"

The passenger pointed a rifle at Naquin, according to the complaint, and shot the Louisiana resident in the left eye.

With a portion of his eyeball in his palm, Naquin asked the deputies why they had shot him, according to the complaint.

Paramedics took Naquin to a hospital where he had surgery, but physicians could not save his eye. Naquin alleges that Lier was the passenger and shooter and that Brown was the driver.

Lier is no longer employed with the Sheriff's Office while Brown remains a deputy.

New report questions NYPD's 'Stop and Frisk'

2010-10-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

By Jim Hoffer

NEW YORK (WABC) -- A new report is calling into question the legality of the NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy.

The study by a Columbia University law professor makes the claim that the highly-touted crime fighting tool is based on race, not crime.

It's a rather damning report that challenges the NYPD's claims that stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of people every year is constitutional.

The findings claim the practice is actually targeting blacks and Latinos and yields few results.

To the NYPD, Its "Stop and Frisk" practice is one of its greatest crime fighting tools.

To many of those stopped, it seems like racial profiling.

Now, a new report by a Columbia University Law Professor finds race may drive the policy.

Professor Jeffrey Fagan analyzed 2.7 million stops made during a 6 year period and found police "often used race in lieu of reasonable suspicion" to make the stops.

7% of the time, data he says, shows police had no legal justification for the stops.

24% of the time, the stops lacked enough details to assess whether they were constitutional.

"That's a huge problem and means hundreds of thousands of people are having their rights violated," said Darius Charney, of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Center for Constitutional Rights commissioned the study which also found that 50% of the time people were stopped for the vague reason of "furtive movements".

6% of the stops led to arrests and most surprising, in less than 1% of the stops were any guns found.

"A rate of .1% of the time finding an illegal gun on someone they stop really calls into question the effectiveness of this practice and really the purpose of it," Charney said.

"Had me against the wall and pat me down," said Emmanuel Candelario, a Fordham graduate student.

Earlier this year, Candelario told Eyewitness News how he had been stopped and frisked at least 10 times in the last five years.

"It's a really big problem, you feel unsafe when police are around because at any time you might get stopped frisked," Candelario said.

The NYPD insists "Stop and Frisk" has made the city one of the nation's safest.

"I am proud of the men and women of the NYPD, I know they're saving lives," Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

The report is part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against the city.

The city is expected to come out with its own "Stop and Frisk" study in the coming weeks.

(Copyright ©2010 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

NY jury awards $17.5M to diabetic jailed sans meds

2010-10-23T07:35:00.001-07:00

The Associated Press

updated 10/19/2010

NEW YORK — A jury ordered New York City on Tuesday to pay $17.5 million to a diabetic man who suffered a seizure after police refused to give him his insulin while he was in jail, the man's lawyer said.

Jose Vargas, 43, now lives in a nursing home confined to a wheelchair with diminished mental faculties and motor and coordination skills, his lawyer Seth Harris said after Tuesday's verdict.

"If a doctor was present in central booking (when Vargas was in custody) the city could have saved themselves all of this money," Harris said.

In a statement Tuesday, the city's lawyer department said they were disappointed with the verdict and expect to file an appeal based on "a number of legal and factual issues." It didn't cite those issues.

Harris said $10 million of the settlement was for Vargas' future nursing home care.

Police took away Jose Vargas' bag containing his insulin and needles when he was arrested in September 2006 on a felony charge of criminal sale of a controlled substance, Harris said. Vargas later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal facilitation of a drug sale, Harris said.

As police transported him to a police precinct and then to central booking in Brooklyn, Vargas complained to them that he needed the insulin, Harris said,

"He's complaining each and every step of the way that he needs his insulin," said Harris, who added that no one responded as 58 hours passed.

At central booking, "he becomes shaky, dehydrated and anxious," Harris said. "He has a diabetic seizure on the floor of his cell."

Vargas suffered additional seizures at the hospital, Harris said.

"Now he's in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and he's 43," Harris said.

$18 Million to Man Wrongly Imprisoned

2010-10-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Published: October 19, 2010

A Bronx man who was imprisoned for more than two decades on a rape conviction before being cleared by DNA evidence was awarded $18.5 million by a jury on Tuesday.
Enlarge This Image
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Alan Newton in 2006 after his release from prison. A jury awarded him $18.5 million from New York City on Tuesday.

The judgment, which came about four years after the man, Alan Newton, was released from prison, is one of the largest ever awarded to a wrongfully incarcerated person in New York City. Mr. Newton was convicted of rape, robbery and assault in 1985 — based largely on eyewitness testimony — and spent years fighting to have DNA evidence from the case located and tested after more advanced testing procedures became available.

A rape kit from the case was found in a Police Department warehouse in 2005 — about a decade after Mr. Newton and his lawyers had requested it — and subsequent testing showed that DNA collected from the victim did not match.

Mr. Newton, now 49, was released from prison in July 2006. On Tuesday, a jury ruled that the city had violated his constitutional rights, and found two police officers liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress for failing to produce Mr. Newton’s evidence when requested.

“I’m just real numb right now,” Mr. Newton said in an interview on Tuesday. “It hasn’t really sunk in. It’s so emotional. It’s something I’ve been fighting for the last four years, since I came home. I’m just glad things worked out at the end of the day.”

A spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department said the city was “disappointed” with the verdict, which was rendered in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and planned to appeal it.

Mr. Newton’s lawyer, John F. Schutty III, argued that the Police Department’s system for storing and keeping track of post-conviction evidence was so shoddy that the city showed a reckless disregard for his constitutional rights. Mr. Schutty pointed out that for years the city had been registering and tracking the movement of evidence strictly by paper and pen.

“Only this year are they attempting to introduce a bar-code system,” he said.

Mr. Newton’s claim was supported by the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that seeks to free convicts through DNA evidence. It said that of about 50 people from New York City it had represented in the last five years, half had received the DNA evidence in their cases from the city. In the other cases, the city was unable to produce the evidence or explain what had happened to it.

“The City of New York,” Mr. Schutty said, “has been engaged in a pattern of failing to pay proper attention to their duties to preserve post-conviction criminal evidence and its associated paperwork.”

Since being released from prison, Mr. Newton has tried to catch up on lost time. He immediately enrolled as a full-time student at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and completed his studies over the next two years.

He now works as a research associate at the Black Male Initiative of the City University of New York, helping to recruit, retain and assist students to ensure they graduate from college, he said. And he recently took the law school admissions test and plans to apply to law schools this year. Eventually, he said, he would like to do public interest work, helping to prevent people in poor neighborhoods from suffering the fate that he did.

“I want to work with people that really need that legal assistance that’s just not there for them,” he said. “There are so many issues where people need competent counsel, and it’s just not out there. I think I’ll jump into it with both arms.”

Asked if he planned to celebrate his verdict, Mr. Newton said he was in no rush.

“There’ll be time for celebration, but there are some other things to take care of,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of patience in my life. I’ve learned not to rush anything. Good things take time. This decision took time, but it was worth every moment.”

D.C. police testify about 2002 World Bank arrests

2010-10-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

By Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 17, 2010

Former D.C. police chief Charles H. Ramsey and other top officials have been summoned to federal court this week to account for the loss of key evidence in a case of possible police misconduct more than eight years after the unfounded arrests of hundreds of protesters roiled the city.

Fifteen top police officials and lawyers have paraded through the courthouse since Tuesday in hearings that could lead to a criminal probe. They have tried to explain under oath how the city's preeminent law enforcement agency could mishandle evidence of its own conduct.

The hearings before U.S. Magistrate John F. Facciola, which will continue this week, underscore how the mass arrests of World Bank and IMF protesters in 2002 are still reverberating in the city.

Lawsuits related to the arrests have cost taxpayers more than $10 million in settlements of complaints that police officers, without warning, swept up demonstrators, commuters and tourists three blocks from the White House, leaving some hogtied wrist-to-ankle or detained for up to a day.

The most authoritative police evidence - video surveillance tapes, radio recordings and a master log of police command actions of the day's chaotic events at Pershing Park - disappeared or were mysteriously edited, according to evidence uncovered in civil suits.

The hearings have not been flattering. The officials who then managed the District's command center, Stephen J. Gaffigan and Neil L. Trugman, denied testimony by a subordinate that they had received 13 paper copies and the location of a computer file logging police actions during the protests. Those vanished.

Assistant Police Chief Peter Newsham, who said he ordered the arrests with Ramsey's approval, said he felt no obligation to preserve any records other than his own.

Longtime police general counsel Terrence D. Ryan and his deputy, Ronald B. Harris, said they never explicitly told officials to preserve potential evidence, saying that they assumed it was common practice or that standing policies would suffice - deviating from typical legal practice.

In his turn on the stand, Ramsey, who left the District at the end of 2006 and who is now police commissioner in Philadelphia, said that "the ultimate responsibility for everything in the department falls under the chief's office."

Still, he said, he never asked anyone to preserve evidence. "There are hundreds and hundreds of lawsuits, so the general counsel is the one who I turned to to handle complaints when they come in," Ramsey said.

For Ramsey, the extraordinary judicial proceedings may threaten to dim the luster of his eight-year tenure as chief. When the arrests happened, he gave conflicting statements about whether he had ordered them before stepping forward with a public apology.

Trust in government

In ordering Facciola to conduct the special inquiry, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said the District and its lawyers could face "painful" financial, professional or legal sanctions.

Sullivan said the department's conduct raised the question of "when, if ever, can anyone trust their government?" And Facciola said that witnesses could face criminal investigation by the Justice Department for perjury, obstruction of justice or destruction of evidence.

Carl Messineo, founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice, called the case an important example of court oversight of the $500 million-a-year D.C. police department and its 4,000-plus officers.

"This is a proceeding about restoring personal accountability and making clear if there are persons identifiable as being individually culpable for the loss of evidence, that they be made to answer for that misconduct," said Messineo, who has secured a separate $8.25 million class-action settlement for 386 plaintiffs.

He added, "If this is occurring in this case, when they know everyone is watching, what is going on unearthed, undiscovered in all the other cases - which are perhaps low-profile but life-altering cases - for people entering the justice system?"

New technology

In Facciola's second-floor courtroom in U.S. District Court, witnesses have cast a window back to the anxious days of fall 2002, when memories of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the anthrax scare and protests aimed at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were fresh and police in Washington took aggressive steps to maintain order. Police infiltrated protest groups, ramped up the use of closed-circuit TV cameras and bridled at Internet boasts by anarchists that they would shut down the capital.

But they also struggled to introduce new technology and provide resources to a three-lawyer shop facing 200 cases at any given time.

Sgt. Douglas A. Jones said Trugman asked him to provide - by written note and not e-mail, which would have left an electronic trail - the computer address of the master log. He said that one version of the log might have accidentally been overwritten during the D.C. area sniper case, which erupted days later.

But Jones said that he found it inexplicable that it did not remain on a back-up server and that he told technical employees to store all data on it before it was replaced years later.

Then-police inspector James O. Crane has given contradictory explanations of gaps in police radio recordings at critical moments during arrests. And police officials have struggled to explain how one of the few videotapes they did produce jumps back and forth in time, given their account that it was unedited.

On Friday, Harris said that it "was a mistake on my part" that Ramsey and top city lawyers misled the D.C. Council in November 2003 in response to a subpoena, saying that a less-detailed report was the master police log, which Harris knew was missing.

Police did not report the error or launch a deeper computer forensic search because, Harris said, he did not realize the mistake until a council investigation was over. Thomas L. Koger, the D.C. assistant attorney general who was assigned off the case because of breakdowns in turning over evidence, is set to appear Monday.

The D.C. Council approved new limits on police practices in 2005, ending "trap and detain" tactics in demonstrations and requiring training to protect free speech rights and retain related evidence.

Abuse lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office settled for $600,000

2010-10-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

by Yvonne Wingett and JJ Hensley

The Arizona Republic

A man who accused a Maricopa County Sheriff's deputy of abuse and racial discrimination over a 2009 traffic stop has won a $600,000 settlement.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday approved the settlement with no discussion. Supervisors Don Stapley, Fulton Brock and Max Wilson OK'd the settlement; the two other supervisors were absent.

Maricopa County Sheriff's Deputy Chief Jack MacIntyre said resolving the claim now was a good business decision for the county and good for the Nido family.

The suit highlighted the Sheriff's Office's anti-immigrant reputation and accuse Sheriff Joe Arpaio of failing to properly train deputies how to interact with minority suspects.

In February 2009, Armando L. Nido was arrested after Deputy James Carey tried to pull him over in Tempe for a broken taillight, according to a notice of claim filed with the county and other public records.

Nido stopped and started his car several times during the course of Carey's traffic stop, which is common for drunken-driving suspects, MacIntyre said. Nido claimed he was afraid to stop because of the "pattern and practice" of sheriff's deputies to treat Hispanic residents differently because of their ethinicity. When Nido finally came to a complete stop in front of his home, Carey tried to block Nido's car and hit the suspect with his squad car, pinning Nido underneath it.

"That's when everything turned into an exercise in poor judgment," MacIntyre said. "Blocking the vehicle is one thing, running the person over is another. I'm glad that we could resolve this at this point in time. There's no reason to continue litigation."

Nido remained pinned until paramedics arrived, according to the complaint, and the situation drew Nido's mother and brothers out of the house. They also claimed they suffered physical and emotional injuries from the scuffle that took place with Carey.

Carey has resigned from the Sheriff's Office, a Sheriff's chief deputy has said.

Strip-searching every jail inmate goes too far

2010-10-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

A federal appeals court recently ruled that corrections officers in a county jail can strip-search everyone, even low-level offenders who don’t pose a risk. This misguided decision is a big setback to a class-action lawsuit by former inmates, which had received support from five of New Jersey’s former attorneys general.

What it means in practice: Say you forget to pay an outstanding traffic ticket, and have the misfortune of being arrested and taken to county jail. You will be brought into a private room with a corrections officer of the same gender and ordered to take off all your clothes. As you stand naked, you must open your mouth and lift your tongue. The officer checks under your armpits and the bottoms of your feet.
If you are a man, you must lift your testicles so the officer can look beneath them. Women must lift their breasts. All inmates are told to squat and cough.
It can be a traumatic and humiliating experience, and the state Attorney General’s Office should put a stop to it. Strip-searches shouldn’t be imposed on defendants accused of misdemeanors without reasonable suspicion that they pose a threat.
That’s what a federal judge ruled last year, calling it unconstitutional to strip-search inmates without cause. The case in point was Albert Florence, 34, of Bordentown, a finance director who sued after being picked up for an outstanding traffic warrant and strip-searched — twice — before authorities realized he had already paid the fine two years before. Oops.
But the recent appellate decision overturned the judge’s ruling, concluding officers can strip-search everyone to keep jails safe.
That’s ridiculous. As the federal judge who opposed the practice pointed out, “a hypothetical priest or minister arrested for allegedly skimming the Sunday collection would be subjected to the same degrading procedure as a gang member arrested on an allegation of drug charges.”
Strip searches are justified for dangerous inmates or those arrested on drug charges. They shouldn’t be a catch-all welcome to the county jail.

Puerto Rico cop charged with murder in shooting

2010-10-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

By MIKE MELIA

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – A rookie police officer was charged Tuesday with second-degree murder for allegedly shooting an unarmed bystander last week while responding to a robbery inside a Burger King.

Investigators from the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department also have been asked by the governor to look into the shooting as part of a two-year-old probe into an alleged pattern of abuses by the Puerto Rico Police Department.

The defendant, Abimalet Natal Rivera, allegedly opened fire Sept. 22 after arriving at the restaurant and hearing another officer's gun go off by accident. One of the bullets struck 22-year-old Jose Vega in the head.

At the time he was shot, Vega was giving information about the robbers to other officers who were already on the scene, witnesses said.

Natal, who joined the force nine months ago, is charged with second-degree murder and a weapons violation, local Justice Department spokesman Fidel Rodriguez said. He faces 15 to 25 years in prison if convicted of the murder charge.

The shooting has renewed criticism in this U.S. Caribbean territory that police are poorly trained and resort to violence too quickly.

The federal civil rights investigation began in July 2008 and is focused on allegations that police officers engage in excessive force, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and discriminatory policing, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman, Xochitl Hinojosa. The probe could lead to civil litigation to push for reforms.

One of the most notorious cases involved an officer who in 2007 stood over an unarmed man and shot him three times — once in the head. That crime was captured on video and the officer was convicted of first-degree murder, but critics say other examples of abuse are commonplace even if they do not always make headlines.

William Ramirez, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Puerto Rico, said in a case last week a man was allegedly beaten inside a patrol car and then again at a police precinct.

"If true, these are very serious charges that highlight the impermissible and unlawful conduct that the ACLU has for the past six years been highlighting" before courts in the U.S. and Puerto Rico as well as the United Nations, Ramirez said.

In response to the fatal shooting of Vega, Gov. Luis Fortuno said he would appoint a former judge to monitor the police department.

Confessing to Crime, but Innocent

2010-09-28T19:13:00.000-07:00

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape, but one overwhelming factor put him away: he confessed.

At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could have known, including the fact that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication would come only years after Mr. Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled in 1991.

“I beat myself up a lot” about having confessed, Mr. Lowery said in a recent interview. “I thought I was the only dummy who did that.”

But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.

New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.

An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.

To defense lawyers, the new research is eye opening. “In the past, if somebody confessed, that was the end,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in Manhattan. “You couldn’t imagine going forward.”

The notion that such detailed confessions might be deemed voluntary because the defendants were not beaten or coerced suggests that courts should not simply look at whether confessions are voluntary, Mr. Neufeld said. “They should look at whether they are reliable.”

Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.

Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”

Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were “mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time or both. Most were subjected to lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present. Thirteen of them were taken to the crime scene.

Mr. Lowery’s case shows how contamination occurs. He had come under suspicion, he now believes, because he had been partying and ran his car into a parked car the night of the rape, generating a police report. Officers grilled him for more than seven hours, insisting from the start that he had committed the crime.

Mr. Lowery took a lie detector test to prove he was innocent, but the officers told him that he had failed it.

“I didn’t know any way out of that, except to tell them what they wanted to hear,” he recalled. “And then get a lawyer to prove my innocence.”

Proving innocence after a confession, however, is rare. Eight of the defendants in Professor Garrett’s study had actually been cleared by DNA evidence before trial, but the courts convicted them anyway.

In one such case involving Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder in Poughkeepsie, prosecutors argued that the victim may have been sexually active and so the DNA evidence may have come from another liaison she had. The prosecutors asked the jury to focus on Mr. Deskovic’s highly detailed confession and convict him.

While Professor Garrett suggests that leaking facts during interrogations is sometimes unintentional, Mr. Lowery said that the contamination of his questioning was clearly intentional.

After his initial confession, he said, the interrogators went over the crime with him in detail — asking how he did it, but correcting him when he got the facts wrong. How did he get in? “I said, ‘I kicked in the front door.’ ” But the rapist had used the back door, so he admitted to having gone around to the back. “They fed me the answers,” he recalled.

Some defendants’ confessions even include mistakes fed by the police. Earl Washington Jr., a mentally impaired man who spent 18 years in prison and came within hours of being executed for a murder he did not commit, stated in his confession that the victim had worn a halter top. In fact, she had worn a sundress, but an initial police report had stated that she wore a halter top.

Steven A. Drizin, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, said the significance of contamination could not be understated. While errors might lead to wrongful arrest, “it’s contamination that is the primary factor in wrongful convictions,” he said. “Juries demand details from the suspect that make the confession appear to be reliable — that’s where these cases go south.”

Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.

“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”

Mr. Trainum has become an advocate of videotaping entire interrogations. Requirements for recording confessions vary widely across the country. Ten states require videotaping of at least some interrogations, like those in crimes that carry the death penalty, and seven state supreme courts have required or strongly encouraged recording.

These days Mr. Lowery, 51, lives in suburban Kansas City, in a house he is renovating with some of the $7.5 million in settlement money he received, along with apologies from officials in Riley County, Kan., where he was arrested and interrogated.

He has trouble putting the past behind him. “I was embarrassed,” he said. “You run in to so many people who say, ‘I would never confess to a crime.’ ”

He does not argue with them, because he knows they did not experience what he went through. “You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naïve about your rights,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ll say to get out of that situation.”

Wackenhut's Former Florida GM, Others Charged With Racketeering

2010-09-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

Security firm execs arrested in the wake of a massive taxpayer overbilling scheme

By JEFF BURNSIDE

Updated 10:17 AM EDT, Sat, Sep 25, 2010

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The man at the head of Wackenhut security services in Florida at the time of a 2007 NBCMiami investigation was arrested and charged with racketeering Friday, NBCMiami has learned.

Rene Pedrayes, 49, was general manager of Wackenhut's state operations when he left the company amid allegations that the company systematically overcharged Miami-Dade taxpayers million of dollars for empty guard posts on county transit. [Read the arrest affidavit (PDF).]

State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle also announced the arrest of two other high-ranking Wackenhut officials who oversaw the transit contract.

Eduardo "Eddy" Esquivel was the top Wackenhut official in Miami-Dade County, managing the firm's lucrative security contract for MetroRail and Peoplemover train systems as well as the county's juvenile detention center, and Erika M. Ryan worked as a secretary and assistant to then-project manager of the Wackenhut Miami-Dade Transit contract, Elijah G. Pendleton.

Pendleton was himself arrested and charged with racketeering two weeks ago. Two others were also arrested with Pendleton during the first wave of arrests related to the Wackenhut case.

Rene Pedrayes

Eduardo "Eddy" Esquivel

All are charged with racketeering, a felony. A county audit found Wackenhut overcharged taxpayers by several million dollars over three years, while an independent audit linked to a whistleblower lawsuit against Wackenhut found the amount as high as roughly $17 million over the life of the contract.

Wackenhut has said it did nothing wrong, while investigators on the lawsuit case claim to have gone through every single invoice and timesheet.

Will there be more arrests? Fernandez Rundle's office isn’t saying. But documents have made reference to the possibility of Wackenhut being charged as a corporation, a possibility that would make government contracts more difficult for Wackenhut nationwide.

Government contracts are an important part of the security giant, which was founded in South Florida but has since been taken over by a British firm. Its American operations are still based in Palm Beach Gardens, where it is run by president Drew Levine -- the same executive who presided over the firm during the unfolding scandal in Miami-Dade County.

DOJ Report: FBI Employees Cheated On Skills Assessment Test

2010-09-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ryan J. Reilly | September 27, 2010,

A significant number of FBI employees cheated on an exam intended to assess their skills on criminal investigations, national security investigations and foreign intelligence collection, according to a Justice Department Inspector General report released Monday.

When taking the computerized 51-question Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), some consulted with others while taking the exam, others used or distributed answers sheets or study guides that provided answers to the test and some employees "exploited a programming flaw to reveal the answers to the exam on their computers."

Supervisors -- including two Assistant Special Agents in Charge and a legal adviser -- were involved in such cheating and almost all of those who cheated falsely certified on the final question of the exam that they had not consulted with others, according to the OIG report.

In addition, some instructors taught to the test during training sessions and gave clues about what would be on the test. Instructors "stomped a foot several times, loudly, when they were covering a question that would be on the exam," and other instructors would mark their Power Point slides "with attention-getting signals - such as a cartoon character - if the information on that particular slide would be on the exam."

The FBI found that over 200 employees had completed the exam -- expected to take two hours -- in 20 minutes or less.

The investigation began in September 2009 after the FBI received an allegation that three top managers from the FBI's Washington Field Office (WFO) took the DIOG exam together. The top agent at the WFO, Joseph Persichini Jr., resigned in December. FBI Director Robert Mueller said in July that the OIG investigation was underway.

While the OIG credited the FBI with implementing a rigorous exam on the important requirements of the new guidelines, it found that the actions of some FBI employees undermined those efforts.

FBI employees who cheated should appropriately disciplined, the OIG report recommended, and a new exam should be drafted and disseminated.

The WFO referred calls to the national office of the FBI, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Late Update: FBI Director Mueller has issued a statement on the investigation, stating that personnel actions were taken in cases where misconduct was identified. His full statement:

"An uncompromising commitment to integrity remains the backbone of the FBI workforce. It guides us in every aspect of carrying out our mission to protect the American public. When allegations of misconduct relating to the DIOG testing first came to our attention, we moved quickly to investigate, bringing in the Office of Inspector General (OIG). In cases where misconduct has been determined, personnel actions were taken, and that process continues. We will follow-up in each of the 22 cases the IG has found for disciplinary action, as appropriate, as well as any other allegations of misconduct.
"The vast majority of FBI employees successfully completed the DIOG training and the open-book examination that followed, in accordance with the test-taking instructions. While the Office of Inspector General has identified a number of factors that contributed to problems with the test-taking, nothing excuses the conduct of those who chose not to comply when instructions were clear."

D.C. to drop controversial checkpoints

2010-09-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

By Washington Post Editors

The D.C. government has agreed not to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an appellate court ruling that checkpoints set up by District police in neighborhoods beset by violence are unconstitutional.

The decision is part of a settlement filed in federal court in the District. It ends the use of a controversial crime-fighting tactic police had argued was needed to protect citizens during spates of violence.

But some residents and activists said the roadblocks used to screen those entering the troubled neighborhoods infringed upon the Constitutional rights of those who drove through them.

As part of the settlement, filed Aug. 26, officials agreed to end the checkpoint initiative, known as the Neighborhood Safety Zone Program. Three plaintiffs who were stopped at a checkpoint in the summer of 2008 were each awarded $3,500.

“This is a major vindication for the Constitutional rights of the residents of the District of Columbia,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for the Partnership for Civil Justice," which sued the District on behalf of four residents.

The roadblocks were used for 14 days in the summer of 2008 to screen those entering the Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast Washington after a series of shootings. They have not been used since.

In 2009, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the checkpoints unconstitutional.

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said the city used the checkpoints only under the most dire circumstances when people were “shooting the place up” and that the police have not needed to employ them since.

“I decided it was best to put the litigation to an end,” Nickles said. “There are other ways we can deal with a similar phenomena if it arises.”

Verheyden-Hilliard said the District’s decision to not challenge the ruling will discourage police departments nationwide from implementing similar programs.

-- Maria Glod

Isolation at Tamms leads to mental illness, judge rules

2010-07-27T18:51:00.001-07:00

Federal judge contends it leads to mental illness

BY GEORGE PAWLACZYK AND BETH HUNDSDORFER
News-Democrat

Based on testimony about conditions at the Tamms Correctional Center, where many inmates have been kept in solitary confinement for a decade or more, a federal judge has ruled that such isolation leads to mental illness.
In a statement in support of his decision in a due process prisoners' lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge G. Patrick Murphy wrote, "Tamms imposes dramatic limitations on human contact, so much so as to inflict lasting psychological damage and emotional harm on inmates confined there for long periods. ..."
Murphy's 94-page decision made public Tuesday was praised by prison reformers. It was derived from testimony from prison officials and inmates who described "crushing monotony" of spending 23 hours per day alone in a cell, devoid of human contact. Murphy wrote that prisoners are not told why they were sent to what he has ruled is Illinois' toughest lockup or when or how they can get out. The judge's finding concerning psychological harm contradicts prison officials' numerous claims over the years since the supermax opened in 1998, that long-term solitary confinement does not lead to mental breakdown.
The judge's statements about the adverse effects of confinement at Tamms were similar to information reported by the News-Democrat in its investigative series "Trapped in Tamms" published in August.
"This is another very strong voice that is becoming a nationwide chorus of findings by federal judges and international human rights groups that long-term solitary confinement simply is torture," said attorney Alan S. Mills of the Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago. Mills filed the lawsuit in 2000 on behalf of dozens of Tamms inmates.
Murphy's findings concerning solitary confinement were part of a legal requirement needed to decide the lawsuit's primary issue, that being sent to Tamms amounted to additional punishment that should be regulated by due process under 14th Amendment.
To set a punishment "baseline," Murphy ruled that being sent to the supermax in the southernmost part of Illinois is the equal of being confined at Ohio's supermax prison in Lucasville. A federal judge there said Lucasville inmates "face an atypical and significant hardship."
Murphy's final ruling requires that the Illinois Department of Corrections give each inmate 48 hours notice of a formal transfer review hearing soon after arrival at Tamms. At a hearing, witnesses may be called to allow a prisoner to challenge transfer to the solitary-only lockup. Inmates already held at the supermax will be first in line for hearings.
Murphy declined to comment, citing regulations against public statements by a judge concerning a pending case that is subject to appeal.
Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman Sharyn Elman said her department would not comment until the decision has been fully reviewed by counsel.
Laurie Jo Reynolds, a member of the Chicago-based Tamms Year 10 Committee, which has pushed for reform at Tamms since the relatively small prison, which usually holds about 250 prisoners, opened in 1998, said Murphy's account of existence at Tamms may influence state policymakers.
"Judge Murphy's description of life at Tamms is both riveting and terrifying," Reynolds said. "Never again can a prison official or legislator claim that Tamms is just like other prisons or that conditions there are not uniquely isolating or psychologically devastating."
Murphy's description of life at Tamms included many facts learned from prisoners who took the witness stand at the civil trial in Benton, which ended in December. They testified that their lives consisted of basically doing nothing.
Referring to an earlier, procedural decision in the case, Murphy cited the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago by quoting this section, "being confined to Tamms is to be subjected to virtual sensory deprivation, with prisoners forced to spend most days doing literally nothing but staring at the four blank walls of their cells."
Murphy said he agreed with that court. "The record shows that this is indeed the case," he wrote. "The court notes that a large population of Tamms inmates are poorly educated, if not illiterate, and therefore cannot beguile their time in isolation through activities like reading and letter-writing. ... For those inmates, the long hours that they must spend alone in their cells must weigh especially heavily."
Noting testimony from inmates who displayed good behavior and were allowed to buy radios or televisions, Murphy stated, "Significantly, even Tamms inmates who have maintained clean disciplinary records for years remain at the supermax prison, with no idea how long they may be confined there."
Murphy questioned why Tamms inmates were not allowed to work prison jobs and noted that the lockup had no educational programs. He also cited a report by a prison system task force that confinement at Tamms was supposed to be limited to one year.
Prison reformers at the national level said that for a federal judge to make these observations in a formal ruling meant that they are extreme and possibly unconstitutional.
"The law is clear that infliction of psychological harm on prisoners can violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment," said David C. Fathi, a civil rights attorney and director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project in Washington, D.C.
"Judge Murphy's findings open the door to the possibility that conditions at Tamms may be ruled unconstitutional, at least as to those prisoners held there for long periods."
Malcolm C. Young, an attorney and director of the Program for Prison Reentry Strategies at Northwestern University Law School's Bluhm Legal Clinic in Chicago, said, "When a federal judge enters findings such as Judge Murphy's in (this) case, you can rest assured that the conditions were terrible, (and) the harm to the inmates was serious to the extreme."
Young, the former head of the prison reform group The John Howard Association, said Murphy's finding that isolation is psychologically damaging is "impressive" and matches what activists have concluded for years.
"For a federal judge to make the same kind of observations or reach the same conclusions, he or she has to have had evidence convincingly presented in a court of law," Young said. "The judge can't base his findings on hunch, intuition, supposition, or even plain common sense."
© 2007 Belleville News-Democrat and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

Shared Responsibilities? – A faulty premise

2010-07-18T19:59:00.001-07:00

Brigitt Keller, Nancy Murray, King Downing, Filipe C. Teixeira and Jamarhl Crawford

Can someone be arrested for simply talking back to the police? Do police officers and the public bear the same responsibility to “de-escalate” an encounter?
The Cambridge Review Committee (CRC), specially appointed to look into the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. last year, has produced a report titled “Missed Opportunities, Shared Responsibilities” that ignores the U.S. Constitution and barely mentions the issue of race.
By avoiding the two most important issues, the report is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Without basis, the CRC suggests that the arrest may have been legally justified and that the public and police officers bear the same responsibility “to de-escalate the level of tension in their encounters with each other.”
These are astonishing premises given the First Amendment, which protects even angry speech; the Fourth Amendment, which requires probable cause for arrest and the awesome power of police — along with the well-documented abuse of that power.
The majority of the CRC consisted of current or former police officers or prosecutors and did not include a single civil rights or constitutional rights advocate. This may explain why the report does not acknowledge the power imbalance between an un-armed civilian — here an elderly man with a cane — and a police officer entrusted with enforcing the law, by use of deadly force if necessary. This imbalance was amplified by the fact that the civilian was black and the officer was white.
Police officers have a legal obligation to treat civilians with respect. They deal every day with people who are intoxicated, upset or show signs of emotional distress or mental illness. As trained professionals they are expected to take this into account and know that citizens have a First Amendment right to be verbally disrespectful to police officers.
The arrest of Gates was not legal. According to Sgt. Crowley’s own police report, the professor’s behavior never went beyond words, and 911 tapes of the encounter provide no evidence that these words were capable of inflicting injury or inciting an immediate breach of the peace, which would constitute the prerequisites to remove constitutional protection.
Another unsettling factor is that the 60-page report almost entirely avoids questions around race even though race and racial profiling were issues raised by Gates, the community at the CRC’s forums and other Cambridge events, and by the national conversation.
The report also neglects to mention that Cambridge has a documented history of racial profiling, lending support to Gates’ assumption that his arrest was racially motivated. In the 2004 “Massachusetts Racial and Gender Profiling Study” by Northeastern University, commissioned by the state public safety agency, an evaluation of stop and search data revealed that Cambridge was one of the 15 worst communities out of 366 with significant disparities in all four measurement categories.
Even though the Cambridge Police Department is still collecting stop and search data, the data is currently not analyzed and not publicly available, making it impossible for the public to assess whether the department has improved its performance in regard to racial profiling.
The report also claimed no racial disparities in disorderly arrests based on a subset of only nine arrests out of one year’s total.
The report ignores the significant constitutional and racial issues that are raised by the encounter and public discourse. Gates had the right to express his view that the sergeant’s conduct was racially motivated, even if this was not a welcome message.
Once Crowley determined that there was no longer reasonable suspicion of a crime, he had no right to take further action and should have left. The city should have sanctioned him for his conduct.
Costing more than $100,000 and in the spotlight of the national attention brought by this arrest, the CRC report might have been a “teachable moment.”
Instead, it provides an all too common “avoidance moment” — the real “missed opportunity.”
The authors are Brigitt Keller, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project; Nancy Murray, Cambridge resident and education director of the ACLU of Massachusetts; King Downing of the New York-based Human Rights-Racial Justice Center; Bishop Filipe C. Teixeira, Diocese of Saint Francis of Assisi, Brockton; Jamarhl Crawford, Boston Black Men’s Leadership Group.

Six Officers Charged in Katrina Shootings

2010-07-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — Six current or former police officers were charged in connection with shootings on the Danziger Bridge in the days after Hurricane Katrina that left two dead and four wounded, federal law enforcement officials announced here on Tuesday.

Four of the officers —Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, Sgt. Robert Gisevius Officer Anthony Villavaso and former officer Robert Faulcon — were charged in the killing of a 17-year-old James Brissette. Mr. Faulcon was also charged with shooting Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, in the back, and Sergeant Bowen with kicking and stomping Mr. Madison while he was dying on the ground.

All of the officers could possibly face the death penalty.

The four police officers along with two supervisors, Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and former Sgt. Gerard Dugue, two longtime homicide detectives investigating the shootings for the Police Department, were also charged with obstruction of justice in what officials described as an elaborate and in places blatantly false cover-up story.

The charges were announced at a news conference attended by Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general; Tom Perez, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division; Jim Letten, the United States attorney in New Orleans; and several federal prosecutors and F.B.I. officials.

All of the officers who were charged are in custody, federal officials said. Mr. Faulcon, who is no longer on the force, was arrested at his home in Houston on Tuesday morning.

Five other police officers have already been charged in connection with the killings on the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, when much of the city was still underwater. The first charge came in February, when Lt. Michael J. Lohman pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to obstruct justice.

Four more officers and a civilian have pleaded guilty since then to charges of obstructing justice and covering up a felony.

Last month, five police officers were indicted in connection with the murder of Henry Glover, 31, who was shot to death in the Algiers neighborhood in the days just after Katrina and whose body was later found in a burned car behind a police station.

The police force is the subject of eight federal investigations, some of them for actions years after Katrina.

In early May, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, on his third day in office, formally asked the Department of Justice to conduct a full-scale review of the department, a process that often ends in a consent decree, a binding agreement for systemic reform.

Justice Department officials, who had been discussing such a possibility with the mayor before the formal request, announced shortly afterward that they were beginning the wide-ranging investigation.

Justice denied for Oscar Grant

2010-07-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

John Green and Alessandro Tinonga report on the verdict in the trial of the cop who killed Oscar Grant--and the bitter response in a city with a long history of police violence.

July 9, 2010

As many as 1,000 people gathered in downtown Oakland to protest the verdict for officer Johannes Mehserle on July 8 (Alessandro Tinonga | SW)
A JURY voted to convict the transit police officer who killed an unarmed Oscar Grant III on an Oakland station platform 18 months ago, but of the least serious possible manslaughter charge, leaving Grant's family and their supporters--and the community that Grant called home--bitter and angry.
The jury, without a single African American among its 12 members, deliberated for only six-and-a-half hours before delivering its guilty verdict on the charge of involuntary manslaughter. The white officer, Johannes Mehserle, will spend up to four years in prison--and probably much less.
About 1,000 people--Black, white, young, old--converged on downtown Oakland after the verdict was announced to make it clear they don't believe justice was done.
"Had it been a Black person [shooting a white officer], it would have been life," said Janay Washington, an Oakland high schooler who joined more than 1,000 people at a demonstration after the verdict was announced. "It's an outrage. Can we at least get justice?"
The protests continued into the night, with running battles between demonstrators and police, and some reports of broken windows at buildings in the downtown area.
Mehserle was the first police officer in California to be tried for murder for a shooting committed while on duty, and the jury's vote to convict him is a break from a long history of cops walking free, no matter how brutal their crimes.
But to protesters in Oakland, the involuntary manslaughter conviction was a stark contrast to the evidence that people around the world saw after the killing in the early morning hours of New Year's Day last year--video from at least five sources of Mehserle standing over an unmoving Grant, pulling out a weapon and firing it at point-blank range.
Grant had been dragged off a BART train along with several friends by a group of transit officers that included Mehserle. Witnesses on the crowded platform described the cops acting belligerently as they began to handcuff the youth. A number of passengers used their cell phones to record the incident--the video shows Mehserle helping to hold down Oscar, then standing up, taking his pistol out of his holster, pointing it at Oscar's back, and firing.
The bullet entered Oscar's back, traveled through his body, ricocheted off the concrete floor and punctured his lungs. Grant died several hours later.
Mehserle's lawyers claimed the officer mistook his pistol for a Taser gun he meant to use on Oscar. This story doesn't account for how Mehserle could have confused the two weapons--or even why it was necessary to shoot a man who was laying face down with his arms behind his back. But the jury apparently accepted Mehserle's testimony that the shooting was a mistake, and therefore convicted him of only involuntary manslaughter.
Involuntary manslaughter is a far cry from justice, but Meserhle's conviction is still the first example in recent memory of an on-duty California cop being held accountable for shooting someone. "At least he's not acquitted--this shows there's some penalty," said Jasmine Thana at the rally. "He wouldn't have been charged in the first place unless people stood up in January."
John Burris, a lawyer representing Oscar Grant's family, said the guilty verdict represented a "small victory. But this verdict is not a true representation of what happened to Oscar Grant. This was not an involuntary manslaughter case."
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THE DOWNTOWN protest began minutes after the jury announced its verdict in Los Angeles--where the trial was moved on the grounds that Mehserle couldn't get a "fair trial" in Oakland--and soon swelled to five city blocks, as more and more people reacted in shock and anger.
Emotions at the rally ran from anger to deflation, frustration to determination. The fact that the jury was majority white--with no African Americans and half the jurors claiming police officers as family members--was lost on no one. "It's about racism," said protester Cece Ward. "Most people out here are victims of police--victims of authority."
The turnout after the verdict might have been even larger without the constant fearmongering over the past week by political leaders and the media, who warned of violence and rioting if Mehserle was acquitted or convicted of a lesser charge.
City officials had plenty of riot cops to intimidate protesters and bystanders alike. The city even tried to co-opt the downtown speakout and rally by organizing a counter-event at the same location. But anti-police brutality activists didn't give that a chance to get off the ground.
Speakers battled to be heard over the crowd, sharing personal anecdotes of police brutality, frustration at the injustice system and commitments to continue the struggle. Speakers led chants of "I am Oscar Grant" and "F--- your tears"--the latter a reference both to Mehserle's crying when he was on the witness stand and to city leaders' newfound interest in the Grant case over the past few days.
If politicians truly cared about violence after the verdict, they could have taken a few more positive steps. Eighteen months later, BART police still carry guns to enforce transit system rules. Eighteen months later, there is no independent BART police oversight board. Eighteen months later, all of the systemic racism, police brutality and poverty that sparked rioting when Oscar Grant was laid to rest remain as bad as ever.
Activists will meet next week to coordinate next steps. Oscar's friends and family will be advocating for maximum punishment at Mehserle's upcoming sentencing hearing, pursuing a civil wrongful death suit, and pressing for a federal prosecution for civil rights violations. Meanwhile, the struggle against police violence in Oakland goes on.

What causes people to give false confessions?

2010-07-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

After 14 hours of interrogation in a small, windowless room, Kevin Fox simply gave up. He knew he hadn't sexually assaulted or murdered his 3-year-old daughter, but police had rejected his requests for a lawyer and told him they would arrange for inmates to rape him in jail, according to court records.

The distraught father later testified that detectives also screamed at him, showed him a picture of his daughter, bound and gagged with duct tape, and told him that his wife was planning to divorce him, the records show.

Fox finally agreed to a detective's hypothetical account of how his daughter, Riley, died in an accident, thinking investigators would realize that the phony details didn't match up with the evidence, his lawyer said. Instead, he remained in Will County jail for 8 months, released only after DNA evidence excluded him as a suspect. In May, another man was charged with the crime.

What could be a similar story is now unfolding in Lake County, where Jerry Hobbs III, 39, is accused of murdering his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend. Hobbs, who had a criminal record, has been in jail five years, in large part because of a confession that emerged after hours of high-pressure interrogation. Prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty in his October trial, even though his DNA did not match semen found on his daughter's body.

Authorities recently matched the DNA with another man accused of rape and robbery in Arlington, Va., offering Hobbs a chance at exoneration and once again raising the possibility that police coerced a suspect to falsely confess.

Both cases raise a question: Why would anyone confess to such horrific crimes — especially involving their own child or loved one — if they didn't commit them? Seemingly unfathomable, it happens far more often than most people believe, experts say.

"The interrogation itself is stressful enough to get innocent people to confess," said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "But add to that a layer of grief and shock and perhaps even some guilt — 'I should have been there' — and then that the parent is trying like hell to be cooperative because they want the murder of their child solved."

Trauma, lack of sleep and highly manipulative interrogation techniques are a few factors that can cause the most level-headed people to falsely confess to a crime — even one as heinous as a child's murder, according to experts. Researchers believe that false confessions lead to about 25 percent of wrongful convictions, a statistic underscored by the increasingly sophisticated use of DNA evidence.

Over the past two decades, 254 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence, including 17 who were on death row, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic based at Yeshiva University in New York.

"We know that for certain kinds of people, particularly those with mental illness and mental deficiencies, but other people as well, the psychological intensity of an interrogation can prove absolutely as torturous as physical pain," said Lawrence Marshall, a Stanford University law professor who co-foundedNorthwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Confessions carry powerful weight with juries, and, as shown in the Hobbs case, they also strongly influence authorities. In 2008, Lake County Judge Fred Foreman agreed with prosecutors that Hobbs should remain imprisoned without bail, despite the revelation that his DNA did not match the semen found on his daughter's body.

Prosecutors suggested that Hobbs' daughter Laura had gotten the DNA in her body because she was found in a wooded area where people apparently go to have sex — in spite of the fact she was fully clothed.

Lake County prosecutors have not said if they have ruled out Hobbs as a participant in the crime, but they announced they're renewing their investigation in light of the DNA evidence.

In the Fox case, the Will County Sheriff's Department plans to hire an outside firm to evaluate its procedures and determine if they need to be changed.

"Obviously, there were some things that went wrong in this investigation," the sheriff's spokesman, Pat Barry, said. "We are in the process now of vetting a couple of firms … that will come in and review the Fox case for us."

Confessions that are not backed up with corroborating evidence should be viewed as suspect, Marshall said.

"I think what we are seeing right now is there has become an overdependence on confessions," said Marshall, who is appealing the case of Juan Rivera of Waukegan, who in May 2009 was convicted for the third time of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl despite DNA evidence that excluded him. Lake County prosecutors suggested the girl was sexually active to undercut the DNA.

While law enforcement agencies have long relied on the "Reid Technique" method of interrogation to elicit confessions, some critics argue it's based on faulty assumptions of deceptive behavior. Investigators are taught how to base their questions and method of interrogation on a suspect's verbal and non-verbal cues and mood, sometimes using a "baiting" approach to elicit confessions.

Even those who believe such techniques are effective in obtaining true confessions say they can be misused by authorities.

"There is a lot of coercion that can happen, short of the (former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon) Burge case where they are torturing someone to get confessions," said Fred Hunter of Hinsdale, a licensed polygraph administrator. Burge, 62, was convicted last month of obstruction of justice and perjury for lying about torturing suspects in a civil case.

Those most vulnerable to overzealous police work often are "throwaway people," said Hunter, referring to suspects who lack education, advocates or resources to represent themselves.

Dr. Robert Galatzer-Levy, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of Chicago and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, said interrogations are designed "not simply to get information," as the police often portray them. Instead, he said, interrogations are "well-thought-through psychological manipulations to get a confession."

Police do that by first developing a rapport with suspects. They then give them their Miranda rights, though in such a way that suspects feel they are being uncooperative if they invoke them. Finally, he said, police confront a suspect, saying they know he committed the crime but offering a way out that acknowledges guilt but to something less heinous.

The stress that comes with the death of a child, as in the cases of Hobbs and Fox, makes it all the worse. In such cases, experts say, it is natural for the police to focus their attention first on the child's parents or siblings. Many murders of children, it turns out, are committed by family members.

"People all say, 'I'd never confess. Not in a million years,'" said Galatzer-Levy. "But it turns out that people who are vigorously interrogated will confess — even if they're innocent. The terrified but rational person might give police a story just to end the interrogation, or because they think it might improve their situation."

Richard Leo of the University of San Francisco law school said no research has been done on whether the death of a family member makes a suspect more susceptible to interrogation. But, he said, "it kind of stands to reason. They're grief-stricken. They're distressed. They've often not gotten a lot of sleep. Those are all conditions that contribute to false confessions."

In the book "True Stories of False Confessions," Rob Warden and Steven A. Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions write that reasons for false confessions range from desperation suspects feel as they endure lengthy interrogations to police exploiting suspects' mental handicaps.

Warden draws parallels between the case of Fox and Hobbs. In May, officials announced DNA matched a sex offender, Scott Eby, who has been charged in Riley Fox's murder.

Fox and Hobbs were accused of killing their children, leaving the two fathers especially distraught and more vulnerable to what Warden called "the emotional and intellectual manipulation that interrogators are taught to use."

Hobbs' interrogation ran for close to 20 hours. Although both confessions were videotaped, the interrogations were not — even though a new law had been signed that required the videotaping of interrogations in murder cases. The law at that point had not gone into effect.

"You can't imagine you'd ever confess to something you didn't do," said Warden. "But at some point people simply lose their will to resist. That's the danger of prolonged interrogation."

What's more, police often have preconceived notions of how a father, say, should react to the death of a child. When a suspect's behavior strays from those notions, police may ratchet up pressure.

"Either you're crying too much or you're not crying enough," said Warden. "Both touch off suspicion. You can't win either way."

Oakland's Verdict

2010-07-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

By: Rekia Jibrin

The recent verdict of involuntary manslaughter in the criminal case brought against Johannes Mehserle reveals the duplicitous scandal of the enforcement of law and its participation in institutionalized and violent racism against black and brown people in America. This criminal case is far from a unique story in this country’s history. It is not just about an instance that involves this one police officer and this young African American man; this case is about the terrifying and truthful reality of state brutality and state violence in America that has been legally sanctioned by a line of work that calls itself public protection. This reality is fact, and it must not be buried behind the scenes of courtrooms dramas, behind the limelight of the police-supported, corporate media frenzy, or amidst exhaustive deliberations about agitators who may pose as outsiders to Oakland’s city. Let’s not get the story twisted: this case reflects a reality about violence in America. This is not an issue of violence enwrapped in homicide statistics or “stop the violence” scare tactics. No. This violence, this extralegal violence, is and has been a political reality that our society and city must contend with.

What function does the black body have in our political democracy? What function does handcuffing a young black man to a stop sign in broad daylight, and asking him to lift up his nuts while being searched or habitually detained on the street, have within a “free and liberal” society? What does that image impress upon our psyche public? What becomes normalized to passersby, tourists, residents, students and children? Imagine walking down a neighborhood street in West Oakland. Police officers pull up to a home on the street and position themselves, pointing their weapons. Out of the home walks a four-year-old little black boy with his hands up. What have we done? Each day, children, teenagers, mothers and fathers walk out of their homes, with their hands up in the air, and still they face the threat of death. As BART police overtly demonstrated their pre-emptive fear of the black and brown youths’ on that BART platform, what opportunity was afforded to the youths to articulate their fear of the violent presence of the enforcers of the law? Who could they have gone to? And who would have listened to them? What honest answer can you offer?

According to Oakland’s December 11, 2008 Citizens’ Police Review Board’s Policy Forum on Officer-Involved Shootings, an estimated 45 reported officer-involved shootings occurred from 2004-2008 in Oakland. Victims’ ages ranged from 16-50 years old; of these victims, 36 were African American males, 7 were Hispanic males, and the remaining 2 were an Asian male and an African American female. All of the shootings were “deemed to be in compliance with Departmental policy.” In 2008/2009 the Oakland City Attorney’s office paid out $3,755,698 for documented claims and lawsuits on police matters. These payouts were founded in claims and litigation about excessive police force and fatal/non-fatal police shootings. These claims do not reflect the thousands of complaints brought to the Oakland Police Department’s Internal Affairs Department, nor does it reflect experiences of harassment, violence and racism of residents at the hands of the police that go undocumented.

Some residents of Oakland believe that black and brown people engage in criminal activity more than other groups of people and they believe that black and brown people deserve to be apprehended by police violence. These residents gravitate towards Neighborhood Watch Groups that celebrate gentrification’s development while living their lives in fear within their homes. These residents need to take a hard look at the institutional racism and ideological racism that has played them and shaped their ignorance. Crime does pay—it keeps the police paid, it keeps prison contractors paid, and it eclipses the role of authorities who allow the sham of police as a legitimate response to public safety to breed even more racial divisions along class lines. Crime and gang hysterias, police layoffs, and (declining) homicide statistics have intentionally veiled our senses to the inordinate political power of a police union who can take public stands against city officials, post bail for Johannes Mehserle, and pressure the pockets of city councilors who allow our city to run as a police state. We live in a city that spends more than half of its budget on police (police and fire departments account for 85 percent of the money the city has to spend)—evidence enough to conceive of Oakland as a police state.

Furthermore, the daily socialization of black and brown people by police stops, searches, and harassment generates an overabundance of black and brown people on paperwork. While these interactions are both financially and psychologically disruptive to the everyday lives of people who are criminalized based on their skin culture, these interactions also act as rhetorical justification to normalize policing as a legitimate response to public fear of black and brown people. Poor black and brown people present an ontological dilemma, a dilemma of being, to the scandal of the law—the law designates differences between poor black and brown people and the rest of the public through racist presumptions of criminality and contradictory claims of public safety as an assurance towards a racial democracy. The “criminal irrationality” of black and brown people thus necessitates the irrational exercise of fatal police power which then yields black death just so that white American life can continue to live. Already confined and silenced to the criminality of their skin, black and brown people confront the legality of their illegality when they meet the police. The police embody the reminder of that continuing reality of violence, and the police come to be seen as a criminal and racist threat to community well being.

On July 8, 2010, jurors decided that the ex-BART police officer who shot unarmed Oscar Grant, III, in the back, on the Fruitvale BART platform on New Year's Day 2009 in Oakland, California had no intention of killing Grant. Whereas a murder conviction demands establishing an intent to kill, jurors believed that Mehserle was criminally negligent and acted with "reckless disregard for human life." While this was the first documented case in California history in which a police officer was charged with murder for an on-duty shooting, but it is far from the first time that a police officer has murdered a black man while on-duty. Jurors, the media, nonprofits, city and police authorities do not acknowledge that Johannes Mehserle represents a workforce of police officers who professionally presume criminality within the blackness of one’s skin. This assumption of the criminality of one’s black skin, allows police violence to become police negligence, a matter of mere oversight or of a lack of proper training. And so the scandal continues and the “pain” of racial tension that police chief Anthony Batts urges us to talk about resides romanticized in the memory of a dream unfulfilled, rather than in the exposure of the egregious ravages of racists violence that Batts’ officers exercise on poor, residents of Oakland.

To think that police violence against the black body is unintentional police negligence is to believe the lie that racism is over, or that the Klu Klux Klan is an emblematic vestige of the past, or that the anti-blackness that manifests as anti-poorness is a construction of the past in a post-racial Obama era. To believe such a farce is to fool yourself and to deny that anti-blackness is still made in America, made under the “legality” of the law. The extra-legal practice of gratuitous violence on black and brown people in America has served its function, and it continues to do so. This racial violence exploits vulnerable people in their communities hastening their death; this institutionalized violence occurs without fear of political consequence or moral shame. Every case of violence, excessive force, misconduct, and corruption on the part of the police is emblematic of the historical and current reality of political violence in our cities. It is precisely why police authorities, city, state, and federal authorities must not condone such violence and must publicly denounce and prosecute its criminality, as it threatens the legitimacy of any semblance of a democracy. Instead, Oakland is met with city, police, and nonprofit authorities who make irresponsible, criminal decisions based on political fears of delegitimizing the police force and its police union.

The verdict on July 8th 2010 was condoned, defended, and legitimized by city, nonprofit, and court authorities who in actuality neglect to serve the representative functions of their jobs. To defend the extralegal execution of police violence over the poor is to legitimize and perpetuate the terrifying and truthful reality of gratuitous state violence against black and brown bodies. To perpetuate this history amidst current city politics is to condone racism, institutional racism and to lynch any semblance of a racial democracy in America. To condone such violence is to ensure that racial violence will also continue in America.

Calif. jury awards $1.7M to TV news camerawoman

2010-07-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- A Los Angeles jury has awarded $1.7 million to a television news camera operator who said she was brutalized by police during a 2007 May Day protest.

Jurors awarded the damages on Friday to KTTV-TV camerawoman Patricia Ballaz. The panel also awarded $39,000 to KPPC radio reporter Patricia Nazario but failed to reach a verdict for KTTV reporter Christina Gonzalez.

The journalists claimed police used excessive force on them as officers clashed with immigration protesters at MacArthur Park.

Attorneys for the city argued that the journalists were only shoved after they refused to get out of the way and fought police.

Last year, the city agreed to pay nearly $13 million to settle lawsuits filed by attendees who said they were injured or mistreated during the rally.

Wrongfully convicted veteran could get $6.3 million from city

2010-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

By Maurice Possley and Carlos Sadovi, Tribune reporters

A man who spent 25 years behind bars for a brutal rape he did not commit stands to get $6.3 million from the city of Chicago under a legal settlement the City Council Finance Committee recommended today.

If the full City Council approves Wednesday, the money will go to Jerry Miller, who was an honorably discharged military veteran with a good work record and no criminal background when he was arrested at age 23 on what turned out to be a mistaken witness identification.

Miller was released from prison in 2006. While on parole in 2007, DNA testing determined he did not commit the crime. He has since been pardoned and sued the city in civil court.

That same DNA evidence indicated the crime was committed by a serial rapist, Robert Weeks, who is serving a life sentence but could not be prosecuted for the 1981 rape because the statute of limitations had long since expired.

Miller alleged that the Chicago police crime lab withheld evidence that would have cleared him even before trial.

“It’s another one of those sad tales of how sometimes the criminal justice system does not work for all those who come into it,” said Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, the committee chairman.

At Miller’s trial for the September 1981 beating, robbery and rape, two garage attendants working where the attack took place identified Miller as the offender, Burke said. The victim testified that he was possibly her attacker.

“Mr. Miller was convicted largely on the basis of unequivocal witness identification,” said attorney Karen Seimetz, first assistant to the city’s top lawyer. “Unfortunately, he very much resembled the actual perpetrator of the crime. And of course, back in 1981 there was no DNA testing.”

But Chicago police evidence technician Raymond Lenz reported that tests of semen on the victim’s slip were inconclusive, Seimetz said. A highly regarded forensic scientist prepared to testify for Miller if his case went to trial determined that test, for blood types before DNA testing was available, should have ruled out Miller.

John Stainthorp, Millers’ attorney, said he was prepared to argue that Lenz had not made a simple mistake.

“There was misconduct,” he said. “There was a culture (at the crime lab) of not reporting results unless they helped the prosecution, unless they went along with the police theory.”

The department has since disbanded its crime lab and uses technicians from the crime lab run by Illinois State Police.
Miller sought $27 million in the case. “Obviously, we feel great sympathy for the plaintiff in this case, and I think probably the concern was that a jury would feel great sympathy for him as well,” Seimetz said.
Here is an April 2007 story about the case from the Tribune archives:
    Jerry Miller could be angry that a rape victim misidentified him, or that he spent a quarter of a century in prison for a crime he did not commit. He could be bitter that he was paroled as a registered sex offender, forced to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet that signaled his every move.

    But Miller, 48, says he is "blessed."Since his release in March 2006, he moved in with a cousin in the south suburbs and got two jobs, one at a bus service for the disabled and one as a cook in a Dolton barbecue joint.

    At the same time, he continued fighting to prove his innocence, a battle he has finally won.

    On Monday, prosecutors will ask a Cook County Circuit judge to erase Miller's conviction and sentence because recent DNA tests on evidence have excluded him as the attacker.

    "I am not angry. I am thankful and I feel proud of myself," Miller said Friday in an interview at an office near the Zion Christian Center in Dolton, where he attends weekly services. "I accomplished what I set out to do -- to show that they lied on me .... I made it. I'm not swept under the rug anymore."

    Miller's will be the 200th exoneration in the nation based on DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic in New York.

    It will be the 27th DNA exoneration in Illinois.

    Gary Dotson became one of the first in the nation in 1989, when DNA tests showed he had not committed a rape for which he had been convicted in a Cook County court -- a case that hung over his head years after his accuser recanted.

    Since then, the use of DNA to exonerate the wrongly accused has exposed flaws in the criminal justice system and led to myriad changes, such as videotaping of interrogations and overhauls of lineup procedures.

    An analysis of the 200 exonerations, performed by the Innocence Project, shows that three out of every four wrongful convictions were marked by mistaken eyewitness identification, including Miller's case.

    Crime lab errors or faulty science were present in 65 percent of the cases, according to the analysis.

    The defendants in one out of every four cases were said to have confessed to the crime, although the DNA tests later proved their innocence.


Erasing an error

    Cook County prosecutors, joined by Miller's attorneys, assistant public defender William Wolf, and Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Innocence Project, filed a motion Friday saying they would appear in court Monday morning to request that Miller's conviction be vacated.

    On Sept. 16, 1981, the 44-year-old victim went to the roof of a parking garage at 506 N. Rush St. at about 9:30 p.m., heading home from work. According to evidence at Miller's trial, the woman was about to get into her car when a man came up behind her and shoved her inside.

    The man threatened to kill her if she looked at him, she testified. She said the man beat her, robbed her, then forced her into the back seat and raped her. The attacker then forced her into the trunk and tried to drive out of the parking garage, according to testimony.

    A parking lot attendant recognized the car when it pulled up to the exit and asked the driver if it was his. The man said it was, but the attendant was suspicious and ordered him to back up. When another attendant approached, the man got out of the car and fled.

    The victim began banging on the lid of the trunk. The attendants heard her cries, found a set of keys on the floor of the car and rescued the woman, according to their testimony.

    Shown an array of photos at a hospital, the victim said she could not positively identify her attacker. The parking lot attendants and the victim provided a description that was used to create a composite sketch.


Zeroing in on a suspect

    Miller became a suspect because, days before the crime, Chicago Police Officer Kenneth Fligelman had stopped him in the 500 block of West Armitage Avenue for allegedly "looking" into parked cars, according to court records. Miller was not arrested at the time.

    When the composite sketch was circulated in the Police Department, Fligelman believed it looked like Miller and brought him in for a lineup, where the two attendants identified him as the attacker.

    At the time, Miller had never been convicted of a crime and he was working as a cook after completing a 31/2-year hitch in the Army.

    Now retired, Fligelman said in an interview, "He matched the composite. My partner and I, when we saw the composite at roll call, we remembered him."

    At trial, the attendants identified Miller. The victim said she thought Miller looked like her attacker, even though the attacker was described as having a few days' growth of facial hair and Miller had a full goatee.

    Miller testified that he was not involved and at the time of the crime was home watching a championship boxing match between Tommy Hearns and Sugar Ray Leonard.


'I was devastated'

    The jury found him guilty of rape, robbery, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated battery. Judge Thomas Maloney sentenced him to 45 years in prison.



    "I was devastated," Miller recalled. "And the judge -- he told me the evidence was overwhelming. I was very depressed."

    Shortly after arriving at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, Miller decided that he had to find a way to "improve myself. I went to school. At first, I got my GED. Then I took vocational classes in small engine repair and I got a job as a mechanic on the [prison] grounds crew ... repairing lawn mowers and tractors."

    At the same time, he battled loneliness, as many of his family members and friends did not come to visit him in prison.

    "They had me so guilty," Miller said. "I asked, 'Why me?' You lose hope every day; you have to find a way to gain hope every day. I had found God as a boy. Now I found God in my cell. You open your eyes and you can see there's something here that's more than just me."

    At the urging of his mother, Miller began to read everything he could get his hands on.

    "Mostly, though, it was spiritual books and philosophy," he said. "I missed joy. I missed happiness. It was very painful, being locked up every night. But I decided I didn't want the pain, the disappointment, the hurt. I just didn't want it no more."


'Life is to be lived'

    Miller said he became a better man.

    "I matured. I came to understand life is to be lived no matter where you are," he said. He credits his faith in God with helping him cope in prison, along with a desire to educate himself and "make something of myself. This [exoneration] is the hand of God."

    Miller said he wrote hundreds of letters to lawyers and others seeking help. His letter to the Innocence Project, affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, ultimately triggered the DNA testing.

    Mark Ertler, deputy supervisor of the Cook County state's attorney's office DNA Review Unit, said the Innocence Project reached out last year on behalf of Miller. Ertler located the evidence in the case, including the victim's half slip, which contained the attacker's DNA.

    "This case is a good example of what the DNA unit was intended to do," Ertler said. He said that although the victim has declined to speak publicly, "It was never her intention to have someone who is innocent be prosecuted."

    After Miller was excluded by the DNA tests, the unknown DNA profile was submitted to the FBI's convicted offender database and a match was found, Wolf said. Prosecutors have not identified the suspect whose DNA was a match. But because the database was formed well after the 1981 crime, the presence of the real attacker means he not only escaped prosecution for the 1981 crime, but he committed at least one other crime later.


Help from relatives, friends

    Miller's cousin, Karen Hicks, owner of Yes We Can transportation service, which transports disabled people and others to medical appointments and therapy, said she took Miller into her home after he was released. She said Miller "teaches me patience and to pay attention to people. And I am going to be there all the way for him."

    Meanwhile, Miller has relearned how to drive a car, use an ATM, operate a gas pump, and, for the first time, learned to use a cell phone.

    "I've got emotional stuff to deal with -- how to deal with women," he said. "I've had a lot of emotions locked up and I've got friends who are helping me."

    Fligelman, told that Miller was exonerated, said, "I have always wondered how people can pick someone out of a lineup when things happen so fast. It's unfortunate he had to spend that kind of time in jail if he didn't do it. ... That kind of thing churns my stomach. ... Who knows how many other cases like this might be out there?"

$175,000 settlement includes training for Denver police

2010-07-06T07:55:00.001-07:00

By The Denver Post

The city of Denver will make sure police get proper training on how to enforce restraining orders in the wake of a $175,000 payout to settle a wrongful arrest lawsuit, officials said Monday.

Mel Thompson, the city's deputy manager of safety, told the City Council that all officers will receive ongoing training on the proper protocol.
The council on Monday agreed to pay $175,000 to settle a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Amy Shroff. Officer Frank Spellman mistakenly arrested Shroff on Feb. 23, 2006, for violating a restraining order that was supposed to protect her.
The order barred her former boyfriend from coming within 100 yards of Shroff and was not reciprocal, the city now says. Spellman arrested Shroff after she complained to police that her former boyfriend used his truck to block her from exiting the parking lot of the District 3 police station.
Shroff spent a night in jail. Her 4-month-old baby became ill because she had a medical condition that prevented her from digesting formula. Christopher Osher, The Denver Post

City police lose brutality case

2010-07-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

Jury awards 2 men $150,000 after arrests, scuffle

By Danielle M. Horn TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

WORCESTER — A federal jury has awarded two men $150,000 after finding that police falsely arrested them and used excessive force against them outside a gay nightclub in 2001.

The verdict, which means the city will pay both compensatory and punitive damages for the actions of four Worcester police officers, represents the second time in 17 years that a jury has ruled against Worcester police in a brutality case.

City lawyers, who more often than not have been victorious when such civil cases reach a jury, were disappointed by the verdict and say they will file post-trial motions to address “legal deficiencies” in the trial. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, expressed relief at the end of a nearly decade-old case with bizarre twists and turns.

“I have great relief and the feeling that justice has prevailed,” said Richard N. Tousignant of Brookline outside Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV’s courtroom in U.S. District Court. “I’ve learned a lot of people have suffered at the hands of the Worcester Police Department, and we had an attorney who believed in our cause that was willing to go ahead and fight.”

Mr. Tousignant, formerly of Gardner, and Brandon S. Blair, a California resident who used to live in Boston, saw their case upheld after dismissals and two changes of counsel: the first after lawyer W. Theodore Harris was suspended from practice for an unrelated case, and the second after their new lawyer, Stephen M. Campobasso, killed his fiancée and himself.

In 2007, Judge Saylor — the same justice who oversaw the jury trial — dismissed the case after city lawyers argued police had been improperly served with papers in the suit. Then the appeals court upheld the dismissal. In 2008, however, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals resurrected the case when it overturned Judge Saylor’s decision.

After a weeklong trial and 90 minutes of deliberation, an eight-member jury yesterday found that Officers Daniel Dowd, James Moore, Jose Ortiz and Peter Towler had falsely arrested and used excessive force against Mr. Tousignant and Mr. Blair when they responded Dec. 23, 2001, to a fight at the now-closed A-Men club on Commercial Street.

Police charged both men with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. Soon after a jury in 2002 found Mr. Tousignant and Mr. Blair not guilty of the charges, the men filed suit in U.S. District Court.

In addition to the four officers, the case initially named as defendants the city, then-Police Chief James M. Gallagher, Officers Thomas Dowd, Thomas Falcone, Jonathan Thomas, Thomas C. Duffy, and then-Lt. Edward McGinn. Mr. Tousignant and Mr. Blair later dismissed them as defendants.

According to a summary of evidence from lawyer Michael L. Altman of Boston, Mr. Tousignant yelled at an officer to stop after seeing him “kick and pummel” two bar patrons. Police told Mr. Tousignant to leave the bar or be arrested. When he and Mr. Blair went to his car, a police vehicle prevented them from leaving. They talked to police about moving the cruiser, and Mr. Blair said he wanted to file a complaint over what they saw inside the club. One officer then signaled to others, who reportedly knocked Mr. Blair and Mr. Tousignant to the ground. Mr. Tousignant hurt his face and elbow, and had his face pounded to the pavement several times.

City solicitors, however, said in a press release yesterday that Mr. Tousignant became belligerent after watching police arrest a customer. After several exchanges with police, he started grabbing people outside of the club, inciting them to “get the police!” When officers started to arrest Mr. Tousignant, Mr. Blair allegedly jumped on one of the officers.

Both sides agreed the men received minor physical wounds: Mr. Blair had scrapes on his knees and face while Mr. Tousignant had a small scrape on his face. Mr. Altman alleged Mr. Tousignant and Mr. Blair also suffered emotionally.

The city is now responsible for paying $90,000 in damages related to the false arrest claim and $60,000 for excessive force. The jury award excludes yet-to-be-calculated legal fees Mr. Tousignant and Mr. Blair’s lawyers will pursue.

Included in the jury’s $150,000 assessment of damages were punitive damages totaling $45,000 — $15,000 for each officer except Officer Dowd.

City Solicitor David Moore thought it noteworthy that the majority of damages were related to the false arrest.

“In the jury’s mind, the fact that police arrested these guys was twice as important as any excessive force they saw,” he said.

Since 1993, seven Worcester police brutality cases have progressed to a full jury trial. Police won five of them, said Mr. Moore, noting that lawyers generally refuse to settle out of court when they feel they have a strong case.

“We did think we had a strong defense in this case, and that the officers were justified,” Mr. Moore said.

The last jury trial for a civil suit that Mr. Moore could remember police losing was in 1993, when a federal jury awarded $90,000 (not including legal fees) to city resident Joseph F. Consolo III, whose lawyers argued police were indifferent to his medical needs when he was arrested on a drunken driving charge.

Burge Guilty Of Lying About Torture Of Suspects

2010-06-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

Former Police Commander Allegedly Oversaw Abuse And Forced Confessions

Jon Burge, a decorated former Chicago police commander accused of suffocating, shocking and beating confessions out of scores of suspects, was convicted Monday of federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges for lying about the torture of detainees.

Burge, who did not react when the verdict was announced, now faces up to 45 years in prison. Sentencing is set for Nov. 5.

Jurors began deliberating late last week. They heard nearly five weeks of testimony from felons who described beatings, suffocations and games of Russian roulette at the hands of Burge and his men. They also heard from Burge, a decorated former officer and Vietnam veteran who repeatedly denied ever participating in physical abuse or witnessing any during his 28 years with the Chicago Police Department.

The trial has hinged not on the alleged abuse, but whether Burge lied about it in court proceedings. He pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of lying in a civil suit when he denied committing or witnessing torture.

"I'm not going to say it's a perfect measure of justice," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said of the verdict. "It's a measure of justice. It's sad it took so long, but it would be horrible if it were never addressed."

In a similar vein, attorney Flint Taylor, who has represented alleged torture victims, called Monday's decision "some modicum of justice." But he argues the torture victims should receive compensation and Burge's alleged accomplices should also be brought to justice.

An emotional Mark Clements, who says he was abused by some of Burge's detectives and imprisoned at age 16 on a false confession of arson, said he was "relieved."

"Finally, at least one of these people are now going to finally feel the pain," he told reporters in the lobby of the U.S. Dirksen Courthouse. "My daughter's 29 years old. I missed all those years with my daughter, sitting in those prison cells for a crime I did not commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge."

Burge was cast as both a calculating torturer who took the law into his own hands and an honorable investigator who dedicated his life to making the streets safer as federal prosecutors and defense attorneys closed their cases Thursday.

For decades, scores of suspects — almost all of them black men — have alleged that Burge and a team of officers tortured them into confessing to crimes from armed robbery to murder. Burge's 2008 indictment marked the first time he was criminally charged in connection with torture claims — something that has created outrage in Chicago's black neighborhoods.

Prosecutors presented testimony from five men who said Burge or his officers shocked, suffocated and beat them into giving confessions. One man testified that Burge removed all the bullets but one from his gun, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger three times.

Burge's name has become synonymous with police brutality and abuse of power in the country's third-largest city. For decades, dozens of suspects -- almost all of them black men -- claimed Burge and his officers tortured them into confessing to crimes ranging from armed robbery to murder.

Former Ill. Gov. George Ryan released four condemned men from death row in 2003 after Ryan said Burge had extracted confessions from them using torture.

The allegations of torture and coerced confessions eventually led to a still-standing moratorium on Illinois' death penalty and the emptying of death row -- moves credited with re-igniting the global fight against capital punishment.

But they also earned Chicago a reputation as a haven for rogue cops, a place where police could abuse suspects without notice or punishment.

While Burge was fired from the police department in 1993 over the alleged mistreatment of a suspect, he never was criminally charged in that case or any other, a situation that created widespread outrage in Chicago's black neighborhoods. The community anger intensified when Burge moved to Florida on his police pension and his alleged victims remained in prison.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was Cook County state's attorney when many of the Burge-related cases were under investigation and in court. City Law Department spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle said Monday that Daley had given a sworn statement to the special prosecutors before they issued a report in 2006. The report found dozens of men had credible claims of abuse but that the statute of limitations had run out on any relevant crimes

Daley hasn't been charged with any wrongdoing.

"I was very proud of my role as prosecutor, I was not the mayor, I was not the police chief, I did not promote this man in the 80s, so let's put everything into perspective," the mayor said.

A new legal caste system? Read the book

2010-06-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

By Leonard Pitts

lpitts@MiamiHerald.com

`You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to.'' -- Richard Nixon as quoted by H.R. Haldeman, supporting a get-tough-on drugs strategy.

``They give [black people] time like it's lunch down there. You go down there looking for justice, that's what you find: just us.'' -- Richard Pryor.

Michelle Alexander was an ACLU attorney in Oakland, preparing a racial profiling lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol. The ACLU had put out a request for anyone who had been profiled to get in touch. One day, in walked this black man.

He was maybe 19 and toted a thick sheaf of papers, what Alexander calls an ``incredibly detailed'' accounting of at least a dozen police stops over a nine month period, with dates, places and officers' names. This was, she thought, a ``dream plaintiff.''

But it turned out he had a record, a drug felony -- and she told him she couldn't use him; the state's attorney would eat him alive. He insisted he was innocent, said police had planted drugs and beaten him. But she was no longer listening. Finally, enraged, he snatched the papers back and started shredding them.

``You're no better than the police,'' he cried. ``You're doing what they did to me!'' The conviction meant he couldn't work or go to school, had to live with his grandmother. Did Alexander know how that felt? And she wanted a dream plaintiff? ``Just go to my neighborhood,'' he said. ``See if you can find one black man my age they haven't gotten to already.''

She saw him again a couple months later. He gave her a potted plant from his grandmother's porch -- he couldn't afford flowers -- and apologized. A few months after that, a scandal broke: Oakland police officers accused of planting drugs and beating up innocent victims. One of the officers involved was the one named by that young man.

``It was,'' says Alexander now, over ten years later, ``the beginning of me asking some hard questions of myself as a civil rights lawyer. ... What is actually going on in his neighborhood? How is it that they've already gotten to all the young African American men in his neighborhood? I began questioning my own assumptions about how the criminal justice system works.''

The result is a compelling new book. Others have written of the racial bias of the criminal injustice system. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander goes a provocative step further. She contends that the mass incarceration of black men for nonviolent drug offenses, combined with sentencing disparities and laws making it legal to discriminate against felons in housing, employment, education and voting, constitute nothing less than a new racial caste system. A new segregation.

She has a point. Yes, the War on Drugs is officially race-neutral. So were the grandfather clause and other Jim Crow laws whose intention and effect was nevertheless to restrict black freedom.

The War on Drugs is a war on African-American people and we countenance it because we implicitly accept certain assumptions sold to us by news and entertainment media, chief among them that drug use is rampant in the black community. But. The. Assumption. Is. Wrong.

According to federal figures, blacks and whites use drugs at a roughly equal rate in percentage terms. In terms of raw numbers, whites are far and away the biggest users -- and dealers -- of illegal drugs.

So why aren't cops kicking their doors in? Why aren't their sons pulled over a dozen times in nine months? Why are black men 12 times likelier to be jailed for drugs than white ones? Why aren't white communities robbed of their fathers, brothers, sons?

With inexorable logic, the New Jim Crow propounds an answer many will resist and most have not even considered. It is a troubling and profoundly necessary book.

Please read it.

Monroe Sex-Offender Records Dispute Revealed In Newest Lawsuit Won by Prison Newspaper

2010-06-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

By Rick Anderson

The monthly Prison Legal News has notched another victory in opening state Department of Corrections records, this time prying lose details of a labor grievance between DOC and a Monroe prison sex-offender treatment specialist fired for "significant factual inaccuracies" in inmate records. Though she was later reinstated by an arbitrator, the misconduct charges included cutting and pasting sexual histories from one prisoner's file into the file of another inmate.

PLN Editor Paul Wright says he was concerned about the incident and is trying to determine if there are others like it. Compiling incorrect histories could affect the type of treatment an inmate receives, he says. It could also be a factor in deciding whether a criminal sex offender will be civilly, and indeterminately, committed to the Special Commitment Center at McNeil Island upon finishing his prison term.
DOC spokesperson Rowlanda Cawthon says the Twin Rivers (Monroe) treatment specialist, Urszula Gaweda, was fired in 2006. According to DOC records, she "copied and pasted" from file to file and failed to correct the errors when told about them. Ruben Cedeno, prisons deputy secretary, concluded after an investigation that discharge was merited.

In summary, the evidence shows you repeatedly failed to maintain and secure adequate offender records, committed errors in offender records, then resisted correcting the errors, and that you either knew, or had reason to know that your actions severely compromised offender care.

But Gaweda was reinstated in 2007 and given $21,000 back pay in a grievance settlement supported by Gaweda's union, Teamsters Local 117. "The arbitrator's ruling required the Department of Corrections to overturn its decision and reinstate her," says Cawthon. "We have been working diligently with the employee to make changes" and there have been no repeat incidents, she said.
Editor Wright and PLN have regularly contested DOC's reluctance to release some public records. In 2007, PLN was awarded $541,000 from the state for illegally withholding disciplinary records of state prison medical providers.
In this case, DOC notified Gaweda that PLN was seeking records about her job dispute and she went to court in Snohomish County to block the release. A judge ruled she failed to show how disclosure would "substantially and irreparably damage" her or the state, and ordered DOC to hand over the records.
Neither Gaweda nor her attorney responded to telephone and e-mail requests for comment. Last week the court also ruled Gaweda would have to pay PLN's $2,000 legal fees.

35 Va. inmates file suits to stop prison violence

2010-06-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

By Tim McGlone

Thirty-five inmates at a Virginia prison, fed up with rape and sodomy at the institution, have filed federal lawsuits seeking an end to prison violence.
The lawsuits come at the same time a group of prisoner advocates are demanding that the U.S. attorney general implement regulations, ordered by Congress, to eliminate sexual attacks in prisons.
Scott Howard-Smith of Wisconsin says his story is similar to those of other prison rape victims. Imprisoned in Colorado as a nonviolent offender, he was housed with violent gang members who forced him into prostitution. He said he was passed around for $5. His complaints, he said, were ignored.
Howard-Smith spoke Wednesday at a news conference sponsored by Just Detention International, an advocacy group seeking an end to sexual attacks in prisons.
"The attacks that I suffered were devastating," Howard-Smith said. "I was repeatedly raped, assaulted and extorted by members of a notorious white supremacy gang."
The group is trying to put pressure on Attorney General Eric Holder to implement regulations under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a 2003 law passed by Congress with bipartisan support. Wednesday was the deadline for Holder to implement the rules, but his office has indicated it will need several more months.
Virginia says it already has requirements of the act in place, but other states have balked at the law, citing costs. Alabama, for example, said it would cost $58 million to start such a program in that state; New Mexico estimated its cost at $12 million.
Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said the requirements of the Prison Rape Elimination Act are covered in the basic training program for guards and reviewed annually during training.
The department also provides orientation regarding sexual victimization for all incoming male and female offenders, which is repeated if someone is transferred.
"The information provided is adequate to assist inmates if they heed the guidance," Traylor said in an e-mail. "The subject matter covered in orientation includes: ways to avoid sexual victimization, such as avoiding debt, not seeking protection from other inmates, not soliciting favors, not gambling, etc.
"Guidance is also provided regarding courses of action if one is a victim of sexual misconduct or sexual assault and protection is available from prison staff. Counselors/psychologists are available to provide individual guidance and address interpersonal issues," Traylor said.
The department also separates violent, predatory inmates from those who "want to better themselves and take advantage of prison programs," he added.
The inmates who sued say the department hasn't done enough to prevent sexual assaults and other prison violence. But inmate lawsuits, filed by the thousands each year, face significant hurdles, especially when pursued without attorneys, as in these cases.
The lead plaintiff, John R. Lay, a convicted violent sex offender from Northern Virginia, has filed around three dozen lawsuits challenging his imprisonment or claiming civil rights violations.
Other plaintiffs also have violent backgrounds. Linwood Jenkins, 48, is serving a life term for a string of offenses, including maiming, use of a firearm and robbery in Isle of Wight County. Nelson Bradley, 47, is serving life for a Lynchburg homicide. Rodney F. White, 44, is also serving life for rape and robbery in Northern Virginia.
The other 31 suits are pending in the Alexandria federal court. All 35 inmates are at the Nottoway Correctional Center outside Richmond.
The lawsuit contains a long list of complaints, but the chief claim is "widespread gang activity" including rape, sodomy, stabbings, robbery and drug use. Prison officials have ignored their complaints, the suit says.
Four of the inmates, who filed suits individually earlier this month after being denied class-action status, cleared their first hurdle when a Norfolk federal judge allowed the suits to go forward as long as they submit answers to a questionnaire.
Traylor said the department does not comment on pending litigation.
Tim McGlone, (757) 446-2343, tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com

Sean Levert widow awarded $4 million for jail death

2010-06-23T11:49:00.001-07:00

CLEVELAND -- The widow of R&B singer, Sean Levert, has been awarded $4 million after suing Cuyahoga County for her husband's death while in jail.

Jail security cameras captured disturbing images of Levert strapped to a chair suffering from withdrawal from the anti-anxiety drug, Xanax.
Levert's attorney argued that jail staff deliberately refused Sean Levert his medication while the singer spent 2-weeks in the jail in 2008.
The coroner says Xanax withdrawal contributed to Levert's death.
A magistrate settled the suit Wednesday before it went to trial.
"No amount of money will bring my husband back. No matter what amount of money they offered would be enough. I believe the county and staff were fair to my family. Now I must move on and take care of my sons," said Angela Lowe, Levert's widow.
Lowe says she will press state lawmakers to pass "Sean's Law". It would create a uniform standard for administering prescription drugs to inmates in jails across Ohio.
The 39-year-old Levert was jailed on March 24, 2008, for owing nearly $90,000 in child support. He died six days later.
He was a member of the 1980's R&B trio LeVert and the son of O'Jays lead vocalist, Eddie Levert.

Man wins $1.3M in malicious prosecution case

2010-06-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Fabricated confession had landed him three years in prison

By Duaa Eldeib, Tribune reporter
6:54 PM CDT, June 9, 2010
Donny McGee, who was arrested for the gruesome 2001 murder of his 76-year-old neighbor three days before his wedding, was awarded $1.3 million after a Cook County jury found Tuesday that three members of the Chicago Police Department made up his confession.
Police, facing public pressure to solve the murder of Ethel Perstlen, arrested McGee and then said he voluntarily confessed to the crime — though there was no physical evidence or a written or taped confession, according to the lawsuit filed by McGee. Perstlen was found stabbed and burned beyond recognition in the bathtub of her Clearing home in April 2001.
"The murder was every Chicagoan's nightmare," said McGee's attorney, Russell Ainsworth. "When he refused to confess to the murder, they fabricated it."
McGee, who was acquitted of the murder in 90 minutes by a jury in 2004 after serving three years in prison, filed a lawsuit against the City of Chicago, detectives Edward Farley and Robert Lenihan and Officer Robert Bartik. DNA evidence excluded McGee from committing the crime, Ainsworth said.
The jury found the defendants guilty of malicious prosecution but denied a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress. The city was ordered to pay $975,000 in compensatory damages, and the three officers must pay $110,000 each in punitive damages. Farley and Bartik are still with the department, and Lenihan has since retired.
"These officers lied," McGee, 35, said. "(The jury) saw the truth, and the truth is by their verdict."
Andrew Hale, who represented the city and the officers, called the ruling a "huge travesty."
"The whole case came down to did he confess or not?" Hale said. "And I thought the evidence was overwhelming that he confessed. The jury would have to believe that these three defendants made this all up. For what?"
Ainsworth's firm, Loevy & Loevy, is also pursuing a separate case of a false confession against Bartik.
"The way it turned out, the person who confessed to the murder is actually obtaining money from the officers he confessed to," Hale said. "Justice wasn't served."
Hale said he plans to appeal the ruling.