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Criminal Justice and Prisons

CIA Sex Crimes

Buzzfeed reported on Dec. 1 that over the past 14 years, the C.I.A. has amassed credible evidence, including confessions, that 10 employees and a contractor committed sex crimes against children and that only one was ever charged with a crime. The evidence the C.I.A. released to Buzzfeed in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit shows that the 10 employees and one contractor committed crimes including child rape, the purchase of violent child pornography, and viewing as many as 1,400 photos of nude children on a C.I.A. computer while overseas on a work assignment. The contractor had arranged to have sex with an undercover F.B.I. agent who he thought was a child. The only C.I.A. officer prosecuted for child sex crimes had also mishandled classified information.

On Contact: Assange Can Be Extradited, Says Court

On Friday, the British High Court in London overturned an earlier lower court decision blocking the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. The ruling sends the case back to the Magistrate’s Court with instructions to allow the extradition to be approved or denied by British Home Secretary Priti Patel. The ruling, which included a decision to continue to hold Assange in a high security prison, is a severe blow to the Wikileaks co-founder’s efforts to prevent his extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act. The extradition is now in the hands of Patel, unless Assange’s lawyers, as expected, file an appeal to the UK Supreme Court.

Incarcerated Journalists Fought Isolation And Illness To Expose Abusive Conditions

In the summer of 2020 we launched a collaborative writing program to connect incarcerated writers with outside journalists and editors. Our goal was to help them publish their writing in mainstream media publications. We began only a few weeks after COVID-19 came into San Quentin State Prison, where Rahsaan lives. We knew that COVID-19 would be an incredible threat to people incarcerated, but were unprepared for the devastation and loss ahead. At San Quentin — which became home to the largest outbreak in the country — Rahsaan became infected with the virus and experienced the mental health toll of being locked in a cell, 24 hours a day, for days at a time. With a total of 2,607 confirmed cases, 29 people died.

A Plea To Make Widespread Environmental Damage An International Crime

The campaign to make ecocide an international crime took center stage in the Hague on Tuesday as Bangladesh, Samoa and Vanuatu advocated criminalizing environmental destruction during a virtual forum at the annual meeting of the International Criminal Court’s 123 member nations. The forum, attended by more than 1,300 individual participants, represented a collective cry for justice from three of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries. It came less than a month after they and other developing nations pressed their claims at the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow for greater resiliency and adaptation funding from the industrialized world, but came away largely unsatisfied.

Protesters Demand Justice For Survivors Amid Maxwell Trial

New York - On December 4, protesters and survivors of sex trafficking gathered outside the Thurghood Marshall Courthouse in New York City to demand justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose trial is ongoing. “Epstein and Maxwell trafficked children for 25 years and Maxwell is only charged with one count of child trafficking,” investigative journalist Nick Bryant told the crowd. “Testimonies indicate that Epstein demanded sexual acts from women and girls up to three times a day,” explained Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking In Women, adding: If true, that would be 1,032 acts of sexual violence a year. And with at least 3 decades of Epestin’s reported patterns of sexual abuse, that is over 32,000 instances of rape and sexual assault by Epstein alone. And 30, 40 years later, there are four survivors in that courtroom that are accusing Maxwell of pimping. Four!”

Assange Plans To Appeal High Court Decision Backing Extradition

Attorneys for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plan to appeal to the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom after the country’s appeals court overturned a decision that blocked the extradition of Assange to the United States. The High Court of Justice was “satisfied” with diplomatic assurances offered by the U.S. government related to how Assange would be treated in jail or prison, and they stated, “There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say.” “There is no basis for assuming that the U.S.A. has not given the assurances in good faith,” the High Court also insisted.More significantly, the High Court remitted the case back to the district court and instructed a district judge at this level to send the request to the Secretary of State in the Home Department for extradition.

A Judicial Kidnapping

Miscarriage of justice is an inadequate term in these circumstances. It took the bewigged courtiers of Britain’s ancient regime just nine minutes on Friday to uphold an American appeal against a District Court judge’s acceptance in January of a cataract of evidence that hell on earth awaited Assange across the Atlantic: a hell in which, it was expertly predicted, he would find a way to take his own life. Volumes of witness by people of distinction, who examined and studied Julian and diagnosed his autism and his Asperger’s Syndrome and revealed that he had already come within an ace of killing himself at Belmarsh prison, Britain’s very own hell, were ignored. The recent confession of a crucial F.B.I. informant and prosecution stooge, a fraudster and serial liar, that he had fabricated his evidence against Julian was ignored.

People In Prison Organize Collectively For Survival

On this show, we talk about how to build the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. When we have talked about the rise of fascism, and how to fight it, I have often made the point that we have a lot to learn from prison organizers, who operate under the most fascistic conditions in the United States. But amid this pandemic rollercoaster of hope, disappointment and uncertainty, I feel like we also have a lot to learn from imprisoned and formerly incarcerated organizers about how to sustain ourselves and each other psychologically during hard times. So, today we are going to hear from Monica Cosby, a formerly incarcerated Chicago organizer whose insights about mutual aid as a form of social life support are invaluable right now. We are also going to hear from Alan Mills, the executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center about the fight for mental health care in Illinois prisons, how COVID has affected the situation, and what we can do about it.

How Can They Accept Extradition To A Country That Plotted To Kill Julian?

I want to emphasize that the High Court accepted all the medical evidence and the conclusions of the magistrate that if Julian is extradited and placed under extreme conditions of isolation it will drive him to take his own life. That extradition is oppressive. Yet the High Court decided against Julian on this occasion on the basis of political assurances—non-assurances—that the US has given to the UK government. I say non-assurances. Amnesty International says non-assurances. Amnesty International has analyzed these assurances and has said that they are inherently unreliable. They incorporate the possibility of breaking those assurances in their very wording. Today, it’s been almost a year since I stood outside court with our victory of the blocking of the extradition.

Alex Saab’s Diplomatic Immunity Ruling Freezes His Court Case

The trial against the Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab, in the Court of the US Southern District of Florida, was suspended due to the ongoing appeal for his diplomatic status. The appeal was filed in April of 2021, reported FuserNews. The current complaint in regards to the recognition of his diplomatic status, which would confer immunity for Ambassador Saab, has been fought in the Court of Appeals of the Eleventh Circuit of Atlanta, Georgia, since April 1, 2021 when the defense team requested that the court “annul the order conferring the status of fugitive.”

England And Wales’s Police Bill Threatens Anyone With A Cause

Just over a year ago, disturbing reports began trickling out: the British government was preparing an attack on the right to protest in England and Wales. The right through which we won many of the things we take for granted today – from voting rights to marriage equality – which allows all of us to stand up against injustice. Now we know the government is taking a sledgehammer to this right, smashing everyone’s ability to stand up to power. In February, we at Liberty obtained proof that a bill was coming that intended to retain lockdown-like restrictions on our protest rights. Throughout the pandemic, we warned that “crisis is the ground on which long-term erosion of our rights and freedoms are often seeded”.

Assange’s Judge Is Longtime Friend Of Minister Who Oversaw Arrest

Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge who will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy. The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan called Burnett “the Judge.” Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a judge at the court of appeal. Now the most powerful judge in England and Wales, Burnett will soon rule on Assange’s extradition case. The founder of WikiLeaks faces life imprisonment in the U.S..

It’s Time To Free Leonard Peltier, Longest Serving Political Prisoner

Too few have heard of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement activist who has been imprisoned for 44 years based on accusations that were never proven and a trial that was appallingly mishandled. Based on his mere presence in South Dakota’s 1975 Pine Ridge Reservation shoot-out, where one Native American activist and two FBI agents were killed, Peltier has spent the better part of his life behind bars. As the website FreeLeonard.org points out, this gross miscarriage of justice has been condemned by everyone from by Amnesty International and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. Jesse Jackson, among many others who consider him America’s longest serving political prisoner.

International Call For New Year’s Eve Noise Demonstrations

This is a call for a night of strong solidarity with those imprisoned by the state. Historically, New Year’s Eve is one of the noisiest nights of the year. This year, most of which has been consumed by a global pandemic, we encourage folks to take whatever measures are necessary to insure individual and community well-being, in response to both the virus and the state, understanding the balance each of us must strike for ourselves. Given our current reality, on New Year’s Eve gather your crew, collective, community, organization, or just yourself to raise a racket and remind those on the inside that they are not alone. Internationally, noise demonstrations outside of prisons are a way to remember those who are held captive by the state and a way to show solidarity with imprisoned comrades and loved ones.

Some European Prisons Are Based On Dignity Instead Of Dehumanization

On a cold morning in February 2013, I led a group of American policymakers and criminal justice practitioners — judges, public defenders, legislators, corrections officials, law professors — on a visit to a juvenile prison in eastern Germany. We met with a group of young men, largely between the ages 18 and 21, who were serving between two to five years at the facility; most had been convicted of a violent offense. Although these young men certainly looked like teenagers or very young adults — dressed in jeans, cargo pants, colorful T-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball caps — they would certainly not be considered “juveniles” in the American system of punishment, which generally caps the upper age of juvenile status at 17.
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