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Criminal Justice

Anti-Drone Activist Found Guilty, Judge Deaf To Argument

February 20, 2016 Joy First, www.popularresistance.org , ,
By Joy First of the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance. Juneau County, WI - On Friday February 19 Phil Runkel was found guilty of trespassing in Juneau County, WI by Judge Paul Curran after a 22 minute trial. Phil had joined nine other activists in attempting to walk onto the Volk Field Air National Guard base and meet with the commander to share our concerns about the training of drone pilots that takes place there. District Attorney Mike Solovey followed his standard procedure of calling Sheriff Brent Oleson and Deputy Thomas Mueller to the stand and identifying Phil as one of the people who walked onto the base on August 25, 2015 and refused to leave.

Civil Disobedience Often Leads To Jail. Now, Protesters Can Explain

January 14, 2016 Tim DeChristopher, www.theguardian.com , ,
By Tim DeChristopher for The Guardian - In the face of governmental failure in addressing climate change, the climate movement has seen a dramatic increase of civil disobedience. The threat of jail is real to activists who use these tactics – as I learned first hand. But now activists now have a powerful form of defense: necessity. For the very first time, US climate activists have been able to argue the necessity defense – which argues that so-called criminal acts were committed out of necessity – to a jury. The Delta 5, who blockaded an oil train at the Delta rail yard near Seattle in September of 2014, have been been allowed to use the defense in a historic climate change civil disobedience trial being heard this week.

SOTU Was Not The Speech Black Lives Matter Wanted To Hear

January 14, 2016 Kira Lerner, www.thinkprogress.org , , , ,
By Kira Lerner for Think Progress - Last year, Black Lives Matter activists made it a practice to interrupt politician’s speeches to chant the name of their movement and to demand that elected officials recognize the high rate that black men and women are killed at the hands of police. Tonight, one of the movement’s founders will be in the audience at President Obama’s final State of the Union. Though she won’t be interrupting the president, Alicia Garza, who was invited as a guest of Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), told ThinkProgress that she wants Obama to address various issues that affect black Americans including criminal justice reform, voting rights, and immigration.

Nestle’s Bid To Throw Out Child Slavery Suit Rejected

January 13, 2016 Staff, www.mintpressnews.com , , ,
By Staff of Reuters - WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by Nestle, the world’s largest food maker, and two other companies to throw out a lawsuit seeking to hold them liable for the use of child slaves to harvest cocoa in Ivory Coast. The high court left in place a December 2014 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Nestle, Archer-Daniels-Midland Co and Cargill Inc filed by former victims of child slavery. The plaintiffs, who were originally from Mali, contend the companies aided and abetted human rights violations through their active involvement in purchasing cocoa from Ivory Coast. While aware of the child slavery problem, the companies offered financial and technical assistance to local farmers in a bid to guarantee the cheapest source of cocoa, the plaintiffs said.

GE Tree Company Guilty Of Defrauding Workers

January 9, 2016 Kip Doyle, www.popularresistance.org , , ,
By Kip Doyle of Global Justice Ecology Project. New York, NY - Biotech firm ArborGen, a leader in the research and development of genetically engineered trees (GE trees), has been fined $53.5 million in compensation and punitive damages after a court ruled that it acted to use "trickery and deceit" to "defraud" employees. Just before the holidays a judge issued the 180 page ruling (linked below) on the case in favor of ten ArborGen workers, and against the company, as well as its timber company founders, International Paper, MeadWestvaco (now WestRock) and New Zealand-based Rubicon, plus several of their Board members. “It is a shame that this story came out on 29 December, in the middle of a holiday week, and has gone almost completely unreported,” said Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project. “Only two articles have covered this important story in South Carolina papers.

Marijuana, Criminal Justice, Colorado, Marijuana Legalization

January 7, 2016 Art Way, www.huffingtonpost.com , , ,
By Art Way for The Huffington Post - More than three years have passed since Colorado residents voted to legalize marijuana, which immediately allowed adults to possess and cultivate limited amounts of marijuana. This past New Year's Day marked the two-year anniversary of adults being able to legally buy marijuana in Colorado. The policy is still in its formative stage, but the first year after marijuana sales started in Colorado went very well and we continue to see the good shape of things to come.

Which Lives Matter?

January 3, 2016 Beth Maschinot, www.ncronline.org , ,
By Beth Maschinot for National Catholic Reporter. Groups deemed ungrievable "are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death." 2015 may well be seen as the year that many whites were introduced in an immediate and visceral way to the precariousness of black life in America, thanks to the work of Black Lives Matter. Each tweet, every video harnessed and circulated by the movement shows fragments of white abuse and black pain that is often hidden from the majority of the white public. Before Black Lives Matter, we would not have heard of the incidents that end this year: Quintonio LeGrier, the agitated 19-year-old man who was shot by a police officer in his home in Chicago, and his neighbor Bettie Jones, dead for answering her door for that officer.

NYPD Kelly’s Emails Deleted Before He Left Office

January 2, 2016 Stephen Rex Brown, www.nydailynews.com , , ,
By Stephen Rex Brown for Daily News - Press delete. Then repeat. Most of former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s emails on his desktop computer were deleted at the end of his tenure despite an order they be preserved for a high-stakes class-action suit alleging a summons quota system within the department. New filings in Manhattan Federal Court show the city backtracking in an ongoing fight over Kelly’s missing electronic correspondence. “The majority of former Commissioner Kelly’s locally stored emails were inadvertently deleted at the conclusion of his tenure,” city attorney Curt Beck wrote to Manhattan Federal Judge Robert Sweet.

The Solution Isn’t Kinder, Gentler Prisons

December 21, 2015 Laura Flanders, www.commondreams.org , ,
By Laura Flanders. What got a person locked up – no matter what - in 1790? Piracy. Period. At the birth of the republic mandatory minimum sentences were a rare and targeted thing. Attacking and robbing ships at sea got you life, no ifs, ands or buts. What gets you a mandatory minimum sentence today? Any one of 261 different crimes. It wasn’t until the 1980s, that Congress started passing mandatory minimum’s left and right, and we do mean Left and Right. Two terms of tough-on-crime Reagan and Bush Republicans added 72 new mandatory minimum statutes; Clinton’s two terms added 116. Quoting Joe Biden in 1994, Murakawa reminds us of the liberal Democrats’ approach: “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties… 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic party is for 124,000 new state prison cells.” This is the period, let’s remember, that saw black-white racial ratios among the imprisoned go from three to one to eight to one.

Jurors Ask About Jury Nullification

December 20, 2015 Patrick Browne, www.pressfirtruth.ca , , ,
By Patrick Browne for Press for Truth. Twenty-eight year old James Cleaveland was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct back in 2014, after a state trooper had instructed him to walk away from an incident that involved a standoff with a man who had a gun. The 4-1/2-hour standoff with the man eventually ended with him allegedly shooting and killing himself. Cleaveland was told by the trooper to back up and to go around the corner of a building while they were dealing with the incident. Audio recording from the event allegedly demonstrated that Cleaveland had clearly stated that he wasn't resisting arrest. The trial finally came to an end this week, with a hung jury on one charge and a not guilty verdict on the other.

Top Coal Executive Faces Criminal Charges

October 10, 2015 Mason Adams, www.grist.org , , ,
By Mason Adams for Grist.org. Charleston, W. VA - The autocratic, micro-managing, bludgeoning style that won throwback Appalachian coal baron Don Blankenship the ire of environmentalists, the fear of underlings, and the title “Dark Lord of Coal Country” from Rolling Stone may finally have caught up with him. The opening arguments began today in Blankenship’s federal criminal trial. He faces charges of conspiring to avoid safety laws and lying to regulators that could put him behind bars for up to 31 years. Blankenship casts a long shadow over the Appalachian coal industry. Since the early 1980s, he’s fought labor unions, regulatory agencies, environmental activists, and other coal companies.

Annie Clair, Anti-Shale Gas Protester Free, Charges Dropped

September 23, 2015 Jennifer Choi, www.cbc.ca , ,
By Jennifer Choi in CBC - Anti-shale gas protester Annie Clair had all charges against her dropped in a Moncton courthouse on Monday, almost two years after the charges were laid in relation to incidents near Elispogtog First Nation. Clair was scheduled for a four-day trial, but the Crown dropped the charges and she walked out to a small group of clapping supporters. Clair hugged her lawyer, Gordon Allen, and thanked him for his work. "I'm really happy that it's all done and that I don't have any charges," said Clair. "It just shows that I did the right thing. And that I hope that they [provincial government and SWN Resources Canada] realize that this is really important, that they don't do this to any other people any more and that this [shale gas development] stops."

Occupy LA Attorneys Get $668,000 In Fees

September 19, 2015 Elizabeth Warmerdam, www.courthousenews.com , , ,
By Elizabeth Warmerdam in Courthouse News - Attorneys who secured Occupy L.A. protesters a $2.6 million settlement for mass detentions and "militaristic" police tactics were awarded $668,000 in fees by a federal judge. Cheryl Aichele and five other Occupy Los Angeles demonstrators filed a class action in 2012, claiming police used a "shock and awe" campaign to oust hundreds of protesters from the City Hall lawn on Nov. 30, 2011. Officers tightly handcuffed protesters and kept them on buses for 7 hours with no restrooms or water, the protesters said. "In response to requests to use bathroom facilities, they were told to urinate and defecate on themselves, which some were forced to do," according to the protesters, who had camped out around the clock for eight days to protest economic inequality and bank bailouts. Most of the nearly 300 arrested were kept in custody for more than 60 hours. Others had to post the maximum cash bail for a misdemeanor offense.

Freddie Gray Died From Same Racial Injustice Of Court System

September 19, 2015 Julia Craven, www.huffingtonpost.com , , , ,
By Julia Craven in The Huffington Post - Lawyers for the six Baltimore police officers charged in the April death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray recently attempted a similar maneuver. In May, they called for their clients' trials to be shifted outside the city, citing fears that national media coverage of Gray's death and the subsequent protests had tainted the jury pool. Last week, a judge ruled that the criminal trials will remain in the city for now and that the officers will be tried separately. There's still a chance that the trials could be moved if the judge concludes during juror selection that a unbiased jury can't be seated. But no matter where the trials take place, residents from West Baltimore -- where Gray lived -- aren't likely to sit on the jury.

Mother Refuses Gag Order About Son Killed By Police, Rejects $900,000

September 12, 2015 Matt Ferner, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Matt Ferner in The Huffington Post - The mother of Darrien Hunt, a 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed by Utah police last year, rejected an offer to settle her lawsuit against the city and two police officers involved. Had she accepted the settlement, she would have been barred from speaking publicly about the incident. "To me it was a gag order [that said], 'Here's hush money, don't ever say Darrien's name again,'" Susan Hunt, mother of Darrien, told Utah's KSL news about turning down the $900,000 settlement the city offered in response to her wrongful death lawsuit. "My biggest concern is for the truth to be told," Susan said. The suit alleges that the police used excessive force and violated Darrien's constitutional rights when they confronted him and shot him to death while he was wearing a costume and carrying a metal samurai-style sword, one that his family says was rounded and not an actual weapon.
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