Criminal Justice and Prisons

At San Quentin Prison, Law Students See Restorative Justice In Action

January 30, 2023 Juan Moreno Haines, Next City. Create! California, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Legal System, Restorative Justice

After serving 36 years and seven months, Tommy “Shakur” Ross counted down the last four days of serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole at San Quentin State Prison. Months earlier, the parole board had already approved his release. Nevertheless, last April, he volunteered to play a part in a restorative justice class. As eight law students and eight other incarcerated restorative justice facilitators listened, he sat in a circle with them to discuss the 1985 murder conviction that had led him to prison. “Talk to somebody,” Ross told the students. “Tell somebody the truth. You can’t keep it all inside.” Because it was participating in restorative justice programs at San Quentin, he says, that helped him find a sense of redemption. And on this day, through their impact statements and a number of exercises, Ross and his co-facilitators were helping the law students reconsider what accountability and the criminal justice system could look like.

Five Suggestions For When State Repression Comes To Town

January 28, 2023 Lauren Regan, It's Going Down. Strategize! Civil Rights, Criminal Justice and Prisons, State Repression

CLDC has been providing movement aligned legal support to the campaigns and activists in the so called U.S. for over 20 years now. In that time period, I have personally witnessed numerous waves of state repression targeting the campaigns that were moving the needle on the moral compass—anti-racism, environmental and animal defense, water and food safety, Indigenous sovereignty, LGBTQIA+, and others. The state, whether government actors or big corporate profiteers, have a limited playbook that they tend to repeat over and over. This is why knowing your movement history is core to building resilience. History has demonstrated that when state repression comes to town it is often because your campaign is winning or demonstrating strength and the state elects to spend vast resources on derailing your momentum.

Diplomatic Immunity

January 27, 2023 John Perry, London Review Of Books. Educate! Alex Saab, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Diplomatic Immunity, US Sanctions

After Harry Dunn was killed by a car that emerged from a US base in Northamptonshire on 27 August 2019, the driver, Anne Sacoolas, claimed diplomatic immunity and within three weeks was whisked out of the country on a US military aircraft, with the British police only being informed after she’d left. Sacoolas eventually appeared by video at the Old Bailey last month, but is unlikely to serve the suspended sentence she received. The US government refused an extradition request to return her to the UK to face trial, even though her diplomatic immunity arose from a legal ‘anomaly’ that has now been closed. The State Department said that extraditing Sacoolas ‘would render the invocation of diplomatic immunity a practical nullity and would set an extraordinarily troubling precedent’. Yet last month the US denied immunity to the Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, charged with conspiring to launder $350 million via a bank in Florida.

Australia Has Not Written To US On Assange For Six Months

January 26, 2023 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. Educate! Australia, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange

A Freedom of Information request by a member of the Australian parliament has revealed that the Australian government has not engaged in correspondence with the United States regarding the case of imprisoned publisher Julian Assange for at least the last six months. Independent MP Monique Ryan filed the requests with the offices of Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus and Foreign Minister Penny Wong and no documents were returned, indicating that there has been no written communication with the U.S. over the fate of Assange since at least last May, reported former Australian Senator Rex Patrick in the Australian publication Michael West Media. The absence of written correspondence does not exclude that Australian officials may have engaged in verbal communications with U.S. counterparts about Assange over the past half year, though written notes are normally made on such meetings.

Julian Assange And The US Government’s War On Whistleblowers

January 22, 2023 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. Resistance Report Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Press Freedom

The long persecution of Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, is set to culminate in its final act: a trial in the United States, probably this year. Kevin Gosztola has spent the last decade reporting on Assange, WikiLeaks, and the wider war on whistleblowers. His new book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange, methodically lays out the complex issues surrounding the case, the gross distortions to the legal system used to facilitate the extradition of Julian, now in a high security prison in London, the abuses of power by the FBI and the CIA, including spying on Julian’s meetings when he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London with his family, doctors, and attorneys, and the dire consequences, should Julian be convicted, for the press. Joining me to discuss his new book is Kevin Gosztola. So Kevin, you do a very… I think your book and Nils Melzer are the two books I would recommend for people who don’t understand the case.

Washington DC: Belmarsh Tribunal Calls For Assange’s Release

January 21, 2023 People's Dispatch. Educate! Belmarsh Tribunal, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

On Friday, January 20, progressive groups in the United States will be hosting the third Belmarsh Tribunal in the capital, Washington DC. The 17-member Belmarsh Tribunal is hosted by Progressive International along with the Wau Holland Foundation. The DC Tribunal will be held at the National Press Club, close to the US Capitol building, which houses the US Congress. The Club was where Assange first screened Collateral Murder over a decade ago. Collateral Murder is 39 minutes of unedited, leaked footage from a gun cam that showed a US military drone attacking Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, a suburb of Baghdad, and killing 12 civilians. The Tribunal was formed in October 2021 and named after the high-security prison near London where Assange has been held since 2019. He has spent most of this time there under judicial remand, awaiting the conclusion of his extradition trial.

Keith Davis, Jr. And Black Political Corruption

January 21, 2023 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Baltimore, Black Politics, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Maryland, Police, Police abuse

Baltimore, Maryland - Keith Davis, Jr. is free after an ordeal which began when he was shot by Baltimore, Maryland police on June 7, 2015. The police claimed to be looking for a robbery suspect and chased Davis into a garage where they fired 44 shots, three of which struck him. The robbery victim testified that Davis was not the perpetrator who attacked him, but the police charged Davis with another crime, a murder which took place in a different part of the city. They did this despite evidence showing he was also innocent of that charge as well. Five trials resulted in either hung juries or judges overturning verdicts. Davis was scheduled to be tried yet again but newly elected State Attorney Ivan Bates dropped all charges against him on January 13, 2023. No one knows how many Black men are like Davis, charged and most often convicted wrongfully due to police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Ex-FBI Agent Coleen Rowley Breaks Silence On Leonard Peltier, COINTELPRO

January 19, 2023 Nick Estes, Mintpress News. Resistance Report COINTELPRO, Criminal Justice and Prisons, FBI, Indigenous Rights, Leonard Peltier

The first FBI agent close to the Leonard Peltier case is calling for his freedom. Coleen Rowley recounts, in this wide-ranging and exclusive interview, her time as an agent in the Minneapolis field office. For nearly 50 years, the FBI has indoctrinated its agents on a specific version of events that led to Leonard Peltier’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. The mentality then, Rowley argues, is little different than the mentality today. That’s why she decided to break the silence and is calling on President Joe Biden to grant Leonard Peltier executive clemency. Rowley gives us an insider’s view of the FBI and how the dark and violent history of COINTELPRO, which targeted civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and social movements like the Black Panthers and AIM, didn’t end in 1971. It morphed and evolved over the years and continued well into the U.S. war on terror.

Record Police Killings In 2022 Show Need To Organize For Abolition

January 18, 2023 Austin C. McCoy, Truthout. Strategize! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Police, Police Abolition, police brutality

Law enforcement killed a record number of Americans in 2022, two years after the largest racial justice uprising in the U.S. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, police slayed 1,183 people in the U.S. last year. Of those murdered, according to the database, 25 percent were Black, although Black people make up less than 13 percent of the national population. One would think, in a post-George Floyd “moment of reckoning,” that a record number of police killings would garner more attention, especially in an election year. But would an average American recognize the names of Kiaza Miller, Mable Arrington or Joshua Leon Wright? Probably not. Instead of a reckoning, we are living in a moment of reaction. This is evident in Republican attempts to discredit demands to defund the police through fearmongering around crime.

FBI’s Opposition To Releasing Leonard Peltier Driven By Vendetta

January 18, 2023 Nina Lakhani, The Guardian. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, FBI, Indigenous Rights, Leonard Peltier, Political Prisoner

The FBI’s repeated opposition to the release of Leonard Peltier is driven by vindictiveness and misplaced loyalties, according to a former senior agent close to the case who is the first agency insider to call for clemency for the Indigenous rights activist who has been held in US maximum security prisons for almost five decades. Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent whose career included 14 years as legal counsel in the Minneapolis division where she worked with prosecutors and agents directly involved in the Peltier case, has written to Joe Biden making a case for Peltier’s release. “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta,” said Rowley in the letter sent to the US president in December and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

21 Years Later, Guantánamo Is Still Open — And We Are Still Protesting

January 15, 2023 Frida Berrigan, Waging Nonviolence. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights, Protests

The prison that started out as a provisional, secret, slapdash gulag on the lee side of the Cuban state of Guantanamo is now a rebar-enforced institution with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into it every year for a dwindling but entrenched population. It survives despite Supreme Court rulings against it, the accumulation of literally millions of billable hours by some of the best legal minds in the United States and Europe, decades of fervent and smart and courageous protest, and four presidents. Witness Against Torture is a small part of that protest movement. We were founded in 2005, when 25 of us went to Cuba with the plan of marching to Guantánamo to see the prisoners. In the process, we would publicly violate the Bush administration’s travel related bans on Cuba and have an opportunity to draw attention to the treatment of “war on terror” prisoners while on trial.

Saving Julian Assange, With John Shipton And Kevin Gosztola

January 14, 2023 Lee Camp, Mintpress News. Resistance Report Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Journalism, Julian Assange

Shipton has been on a mission to secure his son’s freedom for many years now. Assange is currently serving a sentence in a U.K. prison for skipping bail, and is facing extradition to the United States, where he could potentially be sentenced to life in prison for his role in Wikileaks’ publishing of classified documents. Shipton has traveled all over the world, speaking out against the treatment of his son and calling for his release. He has argued that Assange’s prosecution is a threat to press freedom and that he is being targeted for exposing the misconduct of governments and powerful organizations. Shipton’s efforts have gained widespread support from a wide range of organizations and individuals, including human rights groups and high-profile figures like Noam Chomsky and Pamela Anderson.

CIA Pushes To Dismiss Lawsuit Against Alleged Spying On Assange Visitors

January 14, 2023 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! CIA, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Julian Assange, Privacy

The Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA director Mike Pompeo notified a federal court in New York that they intend to push for the dismissal of a lawsuit that alleges that they were involved in spying against attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy. Both the CIA and Pompeo maintain that the “allegations in the complaint do not establish a violation of the Fourth Amendment [right to privacy].” In August 2022, four Americans who visited Assange in the embassy sued the CIA and Pompeo in his individual capacity: Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney; Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer, represented Assange or WikiLeaks; journalist John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks; and journalist Charles Glass, who wrote articles on Assange for The Intercept.

On Prison Journalism: ‘The Lesson Here Is That the System Is Cruel’

January 13, 2023 Maggie Duffy, In These Times. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Journalism, Prison Labor

From 2010 to 2012, Keri Blakinger was incarcerated in state and county correctional facilities for possessing a “tupperware of heroin.” Since then, she has gone on to work as a prison reporter at the Houston Chronicle, The Marshall Project and, most recently, the Los Angeles Times. In June 2022, Blakinger published Corrections in Ink, a memoir about her experience in the prison system. The book shows how Blakinger and fellow incarcerated people navigated the New York state prison system, profiling their resilience in the face of dehumanizing conditions. Since its release, Blakinger has shared notes on Twitter from people in prison who have found the book to be a tool for hope and post-carceral strength. But a few months after its publication, Blakinger learned the Florida Department of Corrections was considering permanently banning her “dangerously inflammatory” book at prisons across the state after an inmate at Okaloosa Correctional Facility requested the book through the Prison Book Program.

Statement By Ana Belen Montes After Her Release From Prison

January 12, 2023 Resumen English. Educate! Ana Belen Montes, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Cuba, Puerto Rico

Here is an update and current image of Ana Belen Montes, after her release from prison … we share with you the only authorized statement she wanted to share and make public, sent through her lawyer Linda Backiel on Sunday, January 8, 2023.

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