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Criminal Justice and Prisons

Georgia Frames Cop-City Protest As Criminal Conspiracy

December 4, 2023 Rachel McKane and David Pellow, Consortium News. , , , , ,
When does lawful protest become criminal activity? That question is at issue in Atlanta, where 57 people have been indicted and arraigned on racketeering charges for actions related to their protest against a planned police and firefighter training center that critics call “Cop City.” Racketeering charges typically are reserved for people accused of conspiring toward a criminal goal, such as members of organized crime networks or financiers engaged in insider trading. Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr is attempting to build an argument that seeking to stop construction of the police training facility – through actions that include organizing protests, occupying the construction site and vandalizing police cars and construction equipment – constitutes a “corrupt agreement” or shared criminal goal.

Derek Chauvin And The State Of US Prisons

December 3, 2023 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. , , ,
I’ve written a lot about the corrupt, inefficient and failing Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP.)  Most recently, the mainstream media have lauded the BOP’s new director, Colette Peters, who was brought in to “clean the place up.” Peters is a former successful director of the Oregon Department of Corrections. The idea was that, rather than promote somebody from within the BOP to lead it, which has been done time and time again and which has failed time and time again, maybe a fresh face from outside could bring a new perspective and could turn the BOP around. That hasn’t happened.  If anything, Peters has been ignored by her subordinates and, in many cases, circumvented. 

Activists Protest Jail Deaths, Demand ‘Care Not Cages’

December 2, 2023 Martha Grevatt, Workers World. , , ,
Cleveland, Ohio - Four people have died inside Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County Jail in 2023 — Nathan Myers in July, Elving Lopez in September, Freddie Tackett in October and most recently Rogelio Cubano on Nov. 16. Myers and Cubano were still in their mid-20s. Lopez was supporting a two-year-old daughter and Tackett had five children and three grandchildren. Myers reportedly suffered a drug overdose, and the other three supposedly died after experiencing a “medical emergency.” However, the Cuyahoga County Jail Coalition issued a statement after Tackett’s death raising the possibility of foul play, calling for an investigation.

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 46: Israeli Tanks Besiege Hospital

November 22, 2023 Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Mondoweiss. , , , , , ,
On the 46th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has so far killed close to 13,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, Israeli forces continued the unabated targeting of hospitals, schools and displaced civilians in Gaza. Following the siege, raid and forced evacuation last week of Al-Shifa Hospital, west of Gaza City, Israeli forces moved to target the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahi in northern Gaza. On Monday evening, at least 12 people were killed when Israeli artillery bombed the second floor of the hospital. There are at least 700 patients and medical staff inside the hospital who are in talks with the ICRC to transfer them to Al-Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza.

Corporate War Profiteers Finally Put On Trial

November 21, 2023 Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine. , , , , , , , ,
In early January 2009, a thirteen-year-old girl named Almaza Samouni watched in horror as 30 members of her family were killed while her home in Gaza was shelled by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during Operation Cast Lead. Among the victims was her brother, who was struck by a missile while exiting the house to look for wood. The lethal missile that killed her brother was fired from an Apache AH-64 attack helicopter, which had been supplied to the IDF by Boeing, a top American defense contractor with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. On November 12, 2023 a group of peace activists associated with World Beyond War convened a war crimes tribunal designed to hold Boeing and three other top defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Atomics—accountable for the kind of war crimes that led to the death of Almaza Samouni’s brother and most of the rest of her family.

The Vision Of A Renewable Rikers Island In New York City

November 19, 2023 Claire Greenburger, Portside. , , , , ,
Along, narrow bridge spanning the East River in New York City is the sole link between two realities. To the south, the familiar city skyline stands tall. To the north, walls of barbed wire enclose the site of an ongoing human rights crisis: the Rikers Island jail complex. This bridge, known to justice-impacted New Yorkers as “the bridge of pain,” is a constant reminder of their isolation from loved ones. Rikers, located on an island between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, is one of the largest jail complexes in the United States. It houses nearly 6,000 people, the vast majority of whom are pretrial defendants who have not been convicted of a crime.

Longest Wrongful Conviction Sentence In US Ends In Exoneration

November 9, 2023 Victoria Valenzuela, Scheer Post. , , ,
Glynn Simmons, who spent 48 years 1 month and 18 days in an Oklahoma prison for a crime he did not commit, has been exonerated, having served the longest sentence for a wrongfully convicted person in U.S. history. Simmons and a co-defendant were sentenced to death in 1975 for a murder committed during a liquor store robbery, but the death sentences were commuted to life in prison when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional. The co-defendant was paroled in 2008. Simmons was 22 years old when two women were shot in a liquor store robbery on New Years Eve in 1974.

Protesters Block US Military Ship Allegedly Carrying Weapons For Israel

November 7, 2023 Hilary Beaumont, Al Jazeera. , , , , , ,
Under dark skies and steady rain, hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators rallied at the Port of Tacoma, in Washington state, to block a military supply vessel they believe will carry weapons from the United States to Israel. There, they fear any weaponry on board will be used in Israel’s ongoing campaign against the Gaza Strip, where more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed. “We want a ceasefire now. We want people to stop getting murdered now. We want a real examination and action on US foreign policy and US funding to Israel,” said Wassim Hage, one of the protesters at the Tacoma rally.

Latest Stats Show US’ Continued Love Affair With Mass Incarceration

October 19, 2023 Stacy M. Brown, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Preliminary data released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) revealed a notable increase in the number of individuals held in local jails nationwide. As of midyear 2022, the incarcerated population stood at 663,100, marking a 4 percent surge compared to the previous year’s 636,100. The surge is part of a more significant trend that has seen jail admissions rise by 6.6 percent from July 2021 to June 2022, totaling 7.3 million entries. However, the figure is still 37 percent lower than ten years prior, when admissions peaked at 11.6 million. According to the new data, of the incarcerated population in mid-2022, 14 percent were female, representing an increase over the previous year.

Global Call To End Capital Punishment: World Day Against The Death Penalty

October 11, 2023 Victoria Valenzuela, Scheer Post. , , ,
On Oct. 10 — World Day Against the Death Penalty — activists, political leaders and lawyers unite in solidarity from around the world to call for the universal abolition of capital punishment. Now in its 21st year, the day is meant to recognize the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment and build on the momentum of the current global abolition movement, according to the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The death penalty is also disproportionately applied to people of color, as over half of the US death row population is Black or Latino, and typically subjects people on death row to harsher conditions than the general prison population.

Judges Should Have To Go To Law School

October 4, 2023 Seth Stern, Freedom of the Press. , , ,
Laws are only as good as the judges tasked with upholding them. And lately, journalists across the U.S. have learned that the legal protections they thought they could rely upon often exist only on paper. But what they may not realize is that, in many states, some judges deciding their constitutional rights aren’t even required to go to law school. The August raid of the Marion County Record, purportedly to investigate whether a journalist illegally accessed driving records, is illustrative. The warrant application failed to mention the federal law -– the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, or PPA — that bans newsroom searches except in limited, inapplicable circumstances.

The Case For Child Welfare Abolition

October 4, 2023 Roxanna Asgarian, In These Times. , , , , ,
Early last December, CBS Sunday Morning ran a 12-minute segment about the harms of the child welfare system. The report led with the story of Vanessa Peoples, a Colorado nursing student and mother of three who became the subject of an abuse investigation after her two-year-old briefly wandered away from a family picnic. A stranger saw the child and called the police, despite the fact that Peoples, who is Black, caught up with her son shortly afterward. The call initiated an investigation from child protective services (CPS). A month later, a social worker made an unannounced visit to Peoples’ home.

Maryland’s Parole System ‘Conditions People For Despair’

October 3, 2023 Mansa Musa, The Real News Network. , , , ,
Thomas “Tahaka” Gaither was out on parole when then-Gov. Glendening of Maryland revoked parole for all persons convicted of a life sentence. Since the late 1990s, Gaither has remained incarcerated—despite once having been deemed fit for release. His story is not unusual for those who’ve experienced Maryland’s parole system. Since 2015, barely half of 523 parole-eligible prisoners serving life sentences have had their cases reviewed, and just 76 have been released. A new study from the Justice Policy Institute, Safe at Home: Improving Maryland’s Parole Release Decision-Making, identifies the problems with the system and attempts to map solutions.

Inside The High-Security ‘Black Site’ Where Leonard Peltier Is Incarcerated

September 30, 2023 Silja J.A. Talvi, Scheer Post. , , ,
Unbeknownst to most protesters who gathered at the White House on the occasion of Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier’s 79th birthday, Peltier wasn’t able to celebrate, much less receive reports on how the well-attended event was progressing. That’s because Peltier, who is now spending his 48th year in captivity, was sitting on his bunk, across from his cellie, “locked down” in a cramped and concrete maximum-security cell designed for one man. The Bureau of Prison’s “lockdown” phenomenon has spread to other federal facilities, but nowhere is as pronounced and as repressive as at USP Coleman I, part of the nation’s biggest federal prison complex, FCC Coleman, which consists of four prisons of various security levels.

Australian, Latin American Leaders Demand End To Assange Prosecution

September 27, 2023 Chip Gibbons, The Dissenter. , , , , , , , ,
During their addresses to the UN General Assembly, both Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Honduran President Xiomara Castro called for Assange to be freed. Lula stated, “It is essential to preserve the freedom of the press. A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.” Castro struck a similar chord, calling Assange a “faithful defender of free expression.” Both Lula and Castro are left-wing leaders who were elected as part of what’s been dubbed in Latin America as a second or resurgent “Pink Tide." Lula had previously served as Brazil’s president during the original Pink Tide.
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