The Glorification of Antonin Scalia: No One Dare Say What Needs to Be Said

"The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote..."

Illustration by DonkeyHotey

By Tom Carter, WSWS
The sickening tributes across the official US political and media spectrum to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, are a barometer of the putrefaction of American democracy.

The universal deference towards Scalia from what passes for the “liberal” faction of the establishment is particularly repulsive. The statements of the Democratic presidential candidates, the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders no less than Hillary Clinton—echoing similarly sycophantic drivel from the likes of the New York Times—are monuments to political cowardice.

One would say these people lack the courage of their convictions if they had any convictions to lack!

They have sprung into action to join their Republican counterparts in hailing Scalia as a towering figure in American jurisprudence. Virtually every description of the deceased justice includes the words “brilliant” and “intellectual.” One is reminded of the programmed acclamation of Sergeant Raymond Shaw recited by his brainwashed fellow soldiers in the film The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.”

Sanders took time off from his hollow calls for a “political revolution” to demonstrate his political obeisance to the ruling class, declaring, “While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

Clinton praised Scalia as “a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

President Obama called Scalia a “towering legal figure.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat hailed Scalia for “putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism,” and for his “combination of brilliance, eloquence, and good timing.”

No one dares say what needs to be said. The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

In one case last year, Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car. According to Scalia’s reasoning, it was not deadly force because the officer claimed to have been aiming at the car, not the person in the car.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this method—absurdly described in the media as “constitutional originalism”—was the 2000 Supreme Court decision Scalia engineered to halt the counting of votes in Florida and hand the White House to the loser of the election, Republican candidate George W. Bush.

The 5-4 decision to steal the election all but acknowledged its own speciousness when it declared that the justifications it advanced could not be applied to any future cases. In his separate concurring opinion, Scalia declared that the Constitution did not give the people the right to elect the president.

At the time of the theft of the 2000 elections, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the counting of votes, and the acceptance of that ruling by the Democrats and the entire political establishment, demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency for democratic rights within the American ruling class. The reaction to Scalia’s death is a measure of the further erosion of democratic sentiment in the ruling elite.

Scalia personified the decay of bourgeois democracy in the United States over a protracted period of time. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, he flourished and exerted increasing influence in the decades of political reaction, militarism and Wall Street criminality that ensued, continuing without a hitch under Obama. Not only in the anti-democratic substance of his rulings, but also in his methods and bearing, he embodied the promotion by the ruling elite of backwardness, prejudice and outright cruelty.

He was corrupt and made no bones about his corruption, proudly voting to remove limits on corporate bribes in elections and flaunting his private outings with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was a party in a case before the court. He was a bully, making a practice of baiting and harassing lawyers who came before him.

Throughout his career, Scalia consistently advocated positions that can only be described as barbarous and fascistic. Fittingly, his last judicial act was to deny a stay of execution. He was a figure who relished the power and trappings of the state, openly defending torture and internment camps.

Scalia worked tirelessly to break down constitutional and democratic limits on state power, infiltrating fascistic doctrines into Supreme Court jurisprudence. His theory of executive power, according to which the American president has unlimited and unreviewable powers for the duration of the “war on terror,” resurrects Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine in all but name.

Scalia’s mere presence on the court testified to the advanced decay of American democracy. That decay is linked, on the one hand, to the extreme growth of social inequality, accompanied by the rampant parasitism and criminality of the ruling class, and on the other hand to unending war, which has its domestic reflection in the build up of the repressive state apparatus that Scalia championed.

The bitterness of the disputes over his replacement is a reflection of the importance of his role in American politics over three decades during which the political establishment shifted violently to the right.

The deference shown to such a figure from all quarters of the political establishment should be taken as a warning by the working class. The ruling elite fears above all the growth of social opposition and class struggle. It exalts the legacy of Scalia because it is preparing police state methods to defend its power and property against an insurgent working class.

Forensic 'Evidence' Was Manipulated by the FBI: US Admits Providing Tainted Evidence in Court that was Used to Put Citizens on Death Row

Americans have been brainwashed to believe forensic "evidence" is dependable and unimpeachable. In fact, police and prosecutors manipulate and distort forensic "evidence" often.  The Justice Department admits nearly every FBI examiner gave flawed forensic hair testimony for over twenty years.

Adapted from a photo by Alan Cleaver.

By Kate Randall

The US Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that over a more than two-decade period before 2000, nearly every FBI examiner gave flawed forensic hair testimony in almost all trials of criminal defendants reviewed so far, according to a report in the Washington Post.

The cases examined include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death, 14 of whom have been either executed or died in prison. The scandal raises the very real probability that innocent people have been sent to their deaths, and that many more wrongfully convicted are languishing on death rows across the US due to FBI analysts’ fraudulent testimony.

RELATED STORY: 'Mass Disaster' - FBI Formally Admits Flawed Hair Analysis Testimony in Hundreds of Cases Spanning Decades

Testimony involving pattern-based forensic techniques—such as hair, bite-mark, and tire track comparisons—has contributed to wrongful convictions in more than a quarter of the 329 defendants’ cases that have been exonerated in the US since 1989. In their pursuit of convictions prosecutors across the country have often relied on FBI analysts’ overstated testimony on hair samples, incorrectly citing them as definitive proof of a defendant’s guilt.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project are assisting the government in the nation’s largest post-conviction review of the FBI’s questioned forensic evidence. The groups determined that 26 of 28 examiners in the elite FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.

The nation’s courts have allowed the bogus testimony, masquerading as definitive scientific evidence of defendants’ guilt, to railroad innocent people and consign them to decades in prison, life in prison, or death row and the execution chamber.

Federal authorities launched an investigation in 2012 after a Post examination found that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people nationwide since at least the 1970s. Defendants in these cases were typically charged with murder, rape and other violent crimes.

The scandal involves about 2,500 cases in which FBI examiners gave testimony involving hair matches. Hair examination is a pattern-based forensic technique. It involves subjective examination of characteristics such as color, thickness and length and compares them to a known source.

There is no accepted scientific research on how often hair from different people may appear the same, and any hair “matches” must be confirmed by DNA analysis. However, the Post ’s 2012 review found that FBI experts systematically testified to the near-certainty of matches of hair found at crime scenes to the hair samples of defendants. The FBI gave flawed forensic testimony in 257 of the 268 trials examined so far.

In 2002, a decade before the Post review, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing revealed that examiners reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time.

In Washington, DC, the only jurisdiction where defenders and prosecutors have carried out an investigation into all convictions based on FBI hair testimony, five of seven defendants whose trials included flawed hair evidence have been exonerated since 2009 based on either DNA testing or court appeals. All of them served 20 to 30 years in prison for rape or murder.

In an interview with the Post, University of Virginia law professor Brandon L. Garrett said the results of the DC investigation reveal a “mass disaster” inside the criminal justice system. “The tools don’t exist to handle systematic errors in our criminal justice system,” he said.

Those exonerated since 2009 in DC include:

* Donald Eugene Gates was incarcerated for 28 years for the rape and murder of a Georgetown University student. He was ordered released in December 2009 by a DC Superior Court Judge after DNA evidence revealed that another man committed the crime. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of an FBI analyst, who falsely linked two hairs from an African-American mail to Gates.

* Kirk L. Odom was wrongfully imprisoned for more than 22 years for a 1981 rape and murder. He completed his prison term in 2003, but it was not until July 2012 that DNA evidence exonerated him of the crimes. A DC Superior Court order freed him from remaining on parole until 2047 and registering as a sex offender.

* Santae A. Tribble was convicted in the 1978 killing of a DC taxi driver. An FBI examiner testifying at Tribble’s trial said he had microscopically matched the defendant’s hair to one found in a stocking near the crime scene. In 2012, DNA tests on the same hair excluded him as the perpetrator, clearing the way for his exoneration.

Federal authorities are offering new DNA testing in those cases where FBI analysts gave flawed forensic testimony. However, in some 700 of the 2,500 cases identified by the FBI for review, police or prosecutors have not responded to requests for trial transcripts or other information. Biological evidence is also not always available, having been lost or destroyed in the years since trial.

Although defense attorneys argue that scientifically invalid testimony should be considered a violation of due process, only the states of California and Texas specifically allow appeals when experts recant their testimony or scientific advances undermine forensic evidence given at trial.

In a statement responding to the new scandal’s eruption, the FBI and Justice Department vowed that they are “committed to ensuring that affected defendants are notified of past errors and that justice is done in every instance” and that they are “also committed to ensuring the accuracy of future hair analysis, as well as the application of all disciplines of forensic science.”

The scandal over fraudulent testimony, however, only reveals the corrupt and anti-democratic character of the US prison system as a whole. The United States locks behind bars a greater proportion of its population than any other country, topped off by the barbaric death penalty that is supported by the entire political establishment.

Whatever the hypocritical posturing of the Obama White House, it cannot bring back the years spent in prison by the wrongfully convicted or the lives of those likely executed for crimes they did not commit.

Copyright © Kate Randall, World Socialist Web Site, 2015

Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.

Targeting Black Americans Just for Existing: It's An Orwellian Police Tactic — From the Slavery Era

How To Impose Slavery 'Post-Slavery' — A case history on how it's done:  'No Trespass Letters' allow police to decide who looks like they're trespassing. Guess who they choose.

 By Jason Williamson
Kirk McConer was arrested and jailed while talking to a friend outside a convenience store, where he had just purchased a soda. Tyrone Hightower was arrested and jailed after sitting in his car in the parking lot of a nightclub, as he waited to make sure his friends were admitted to the club. And Jacob Manyong was stopped and placed under arrest after the back tire of his car barely crossed the property of a private business, as he drove out of an adjacent public lot.The charges against McConer, Hightower, and Manyong? Trespassing.

Although the charges against each of them were eventually dropped, memories of the experience still linger—so much so that each of them remains fearful that he could be victimized again at any moment.

And they’re scared for good reason. Their respective ordeals were the product of a practice introduced by the Grand Rapids Police Department decades ago, which relies on the use of generalized “No Trespass Letters” to justify arrests for criminal trespassing on commercial property. But more to the point, the policy gives police in Michigan’s second-largest city an excuse to stop and search people immediately based on nothing more than a gut reaction to the way someone looks or acts—without bothering to determine whether the person is actually trespassing.

_______________

Instructions were provided to local governments for the legal formation of
America's post-slavery caste system. Police were the
'first line of defense' against former slaves.
(Michelle Alexander)

_______________

Here’s how it works: Grand Rapids police officers solicit business owners in select “high-crime” neighborhoods and ask them to sign a No Trespass Letter, stating that they do not want unauthorized people on their property and that they will cooperate with any efforts to prosecute trespassers. The signed letter, valid for one year, is then placed on file with the police department and can be renewed.

So far, so good, but here’s the rub:

According to Grand Rapids police officials, the signed letter allows officers to stop and arrest people for trespassing at the business in question—even while the business is open—whenever the officer thinks the person is on the property without a “legitimate business purpose.” In other words, cops are given unrestricted discretion to decide who does and does not belong on the property of an open business, without ever talking to the business owner or any employee to find out why the person is on the property, how long they’ve been there, and whether the person is welcome on the premises.

Which raises the question: How can Grand Rapids patrol officers possibly know who is and is not a trespasser without first determining whether the business has authorized the person to be there? The short answer is: They can’t. But if the business has a No Trespass Letter on file, police officers are given carte blanche to make that very judgment.

The results have been predictably disturbing.

Between 2011 and 2013, the Grand Rapids Police Department either cited or arrested approximately 560 people for trespassing on business property, pursuant to the trespassing-letter policy. In a city in which black people make up roughly 20 percent of the population, 59 percent of those detained for trespassing under this policy were black. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that African-Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to be arrested, rather than simply ticketed, when the police bring charges for trespassing on the property of an open business in Grand Rapids.

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Obama Grants Clemency to 22 Prisoners This Week — But the Frightened President Has Left Thousands in LImbo

A ProPublica review of Justice Department statistics in 2012 found that Obama granted fewer petitions for pardon than the four preceding presidents at similar points during their administrations. To date, Obama has granted only 3.4 percent of petitions for pardons and commuted less than one percent of petitions for clemency. He has denied more than 9,000 petitions.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson.

By Annie Waldman ProPublica
President Obama commuted the sentences of 22 people on Tuesday, doubling the number of commutations he has granted during his administration in just one day. The decision follows a push from the Justice Department last year to grant clemency to nonviolent prisoners, many of whom had been sent to prison under the harsh sentencing laws and aggressive anti-crime policies that were originally implemented during the 1980s and 1990s.

Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and the founder of the nation's first law school clinic on federal commutations, said that the President's action is not only historic, but also represents a commitment. "This is intended to be a message of hope," Osler told ProPublica. "There are thousands of Americans who are going to read this and say that's like my case or my father's case. Now, the President has to follow through and take that seriously."

In April 2014, the Justice Department announced a new initiative to fast-track clemency petitions for prisoners who, under today's sentencing laws, would have received a substantially lower sentence for the same offense. To speed up the application process, the Justice Department introduced new criteria to help prioritize the petitions, stating that the agency would prioritize non-violent offenders who had served more than 10 years of their sentences.

Alongside the announcement of the new initiative came the removal of the Justice Department's Pardon Attorney, Ronald Rodgers. In 2012, ProPublica and the Washington Post revealed that Rodgers had failed to disclose critical information in recommending that the White House deny the petition of Clarence Aaron, who was sentenced to three life terms for minor involvement in a drug deal.

Following our reporting, Obama granted Aaron clemency, after he spent two decades in prison.

Like Aaron, all of the individuals who were granted clemency this week were serving sentences longer than 10 years for non-violent drug crimes. The White House reported that President Obama penned letters to each of them.

"Thousands of individuals have applied for commutation, and only a fraction of these applications are approved," the President wrote in one letter to Terry Andre Barnes, who was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in 2005 for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

"I am granting your application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around. Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity."

Margaret Love, who served as U.S. Pardon Attorney for the Justice Department from 1990 to 1997 and now represents petitioners, recognizes the need for further action. "I know that the President is committed to redressing some of the wrongs of federal sentencing," she said, "but I think he is going to need to put a system in place for handling hundreds as opposed to dozens of cases that deserve a sentence reduction."

A ProPublica review of Justice Department statistics in 2012 found that Obama granted fewer petitions for pardon than the four preceding presidents at similar points during their administrations. To date, Obama has granted only 3.4 percent of petitions for pardons and commuted less than one percent of petitions for clemency. He has denied more than 9,000 petitions.

According to the Justice Department, nearly 8,700 individuals are still waiting for their petitions to be reviewed.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Tennessee Has A Human Extermination Program: Nashville Prosecutors Made Sterilization of Women Part of Plea Deals

Nashville's prosecutors were treating suspects like insects. (Photo by IAEA Imagebank)

By Michael Arria
Nashville’s district attorney recently banned his staff from using invasive surgery as a bargaining chip, after it became apparent that local attorneys had been using sterilization as part of plea bargains.

In the most recent case, a woman with a long history of mental illness was charged with neglect after her young baby died. Jasmine Randers, 26, suffers from paranoia and had fled from a Minnesota treatment facility where she was under state commitment. The district attorney refused to go forward with a plea unless she agreed to be sterilized.

The cause of Randers’ baby’s death could not be determined. A cab driver who drove her to a hotel the night before she brought the baby to a hospital claims the baby was screaming, but stopped completely during the ride. Prosecutors speculated that the child could have suffocated in Randers’ coat during the cab ride, died as a result of unexplained infant death syndrome, or been accidentally crushed to death by Randers while she slept. According to an investigation by the Tennessean, the child was healthy and there were no signs of traumatic injury.

[...]

The case was picked up by the assistant district attorney Brian Holmgren and assistant public defender Mary Kathryn Harcombe. Holmgren wouldn’t accept a plea deal unless Randers had her tubes tied. Harcombe viewed the stipulation as coercive, so she went over his head to Davidson County district attorney Glenn Funk and explained the situation. Funk has now cracked down on the practice, saying, “I have let my office know that that is not an appropriate condition of a plea. It is now policy that sterilization will never be a condition of deal-making in the district attorney's office."

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Department of Justice Covers Up Information on an Anti-Iran Neocon Front Group Likely Created by Israel and the CIA

The organization ran an "attack, discredit, and defame" operation against anyone advocating for better US relations with Iran

By Glenn Greenwald
A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability. The details are crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here. At the center of it is an anti-Iranian group calling itself “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), which is very likely a front for some combination of the Israeli and U.S. intelligence services.

When launched, NBC described its mission as waging “economic and psychological warfare” against Iran. The group was founded and is run and guided by a roster of U.S., Israeli and British neocon extremists such as Joe Lieberman, former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and current CNN “analyst”) Fran Townsend, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former Mossad Director Meir Dagan. One of its key advisers is Olli Heinonen, who just co-authored a Washington Post Op-Ed with former Bush CIA/NSA Director Michael Hayden arguing that Washington is being too soft on Tehran.

This group of neocon extremists was literally just immunized by a federal court from the rule of law. That was based on the claim — advocated by the Obama DOJ and accepted by Judge Ramos — that subjecting them to litigation for their actions would risk disclosure of vital “state secrets.” The court’s ruling was based on assertions made through completely secret proceedings between the court and the U.S. government, with everyone else — including the lawyers for the parties — kept in the dark.

In May 2013, UANI launched a “name and shame” campaign designed to publicly identify — and malign — any individuals or entities enabling trade with Iran. One of the accused was the shipping company of Greek billionaire Victor Restis, who vehemently denies the accusation. He hired an American law firm and sued UANI for defamation in a New York federal court, claiming the “name and shame” campaign destroyed his reputation.

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Forensic 'Evidence' Is Sometimes Faked by Cops: Fabricated Forensic 'Evidence' Sent Innocent Man To Prison for 19 Years

Photo by West Midlands Police.

By DANIEL W. STAPLES
Police fabricated evidence to pin a woman's 1994 murder on her innocent boyfriend, the man claims in Federal Court, exonerated after 19 years in prison.

Sabein Burgess says Maryland vacated his wrongful conviction on Feb. 21, 2014, after the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project helped him reveal that prosecutors relied on fabricated gun-shot residue evidence.

"Mr. Burgess spent nearly two decades in prison for a murder he did not commit," the March 23 complaint states. "Worse yet, he was convicted of killing a woman he loved."

His attorney, Gail Horn of Loevy & Loevy in Chicago, noted in an interview that "no amount of money will give him back that two decades of his life, but hopefully this lawsuit will give him some justice and true ability to rebuild the life he has now."

Now 44 years old, Burgess spent 19 years in prison for the Oct. 5, 1994, murder in Baltimore of his then-girlfriend, Michelle Dyson.

Burgess said he had just stepped out after Dyson put her four children to bed that night when "two men pushed their way into" the house, brought Dyson down to the basement and shot her.

Police allegedly set their sights on Burgess from the get-go, swabbing his hands at the scene and taking him immediately to the station for interrogation.

Burgess says "no evidence implicating him" in the crime, however, and that he was released from police custody the next morning.

Rather than search for the real killers, Burgess says the police conspired with crime lab employee Daniel Van Gelder over the next month to fabricate gun-shot residue, or GSR, evidence against Burgess.

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Innocent Man Sent to Prison for 30 Years: Prosecutor Apologizes in Letter — ‘I Wasn’t Interested in Justice’

The attorney said all he cared about was winning cases.

Illustration adapted from Krishnaraj Rao.

By Tom Boggioni
The lead prosecutor in a case that sent an innocent Louisiana man to death row for 30 years, penned a heartfelt apology to the man admitting, “I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning.”

In the letter, published by the Shreveport Times, attorney A.M. Stroud III claimed responsibility for the conviction of Glenn Ford in the 1983 murder of Isadore Rozeman, a Shreveport jeweler.

“I was at the trial of Glenn Ford from beginning to end. I witnessed the imposition of the death sentence upon him. I believed that justice was done,” Stroud wrote. “I had done my job. I was one of the prosecutors and I was proud of what I had done.”

Ford, now 64, was released from Louisiana’snotorious Angola prison on Tuesday by a Shreveport judge after Louisiana state prosecutors stated they could no longer stand by his conviction.

Ford was sentenced to death by an all-white jury and convicted despite the testimony of a primary witness who admitted in court that she lied to protect her boyfriend who was also a suspect.

Stroud wrote his letter in support of Ford, who is seeking to be compensated by the state for the time spent while wrongly incarcerated.

“Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system that effectively destroyed his life,” Stroud wrote. “The audacity of the state’s effort to deny Mr. Ford any compensation for the horrors he suffered in the name of Louisiana justice is appalling.”

According to Stroud, he was only interested in winning the case, writing, “In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning. To borrow a phrase from Al Pacino in the movie And Justice for All, ‘Winning became everything.'"

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Ex-General and CIA Director Leaks Classified Information and gets Slap On The Wrist — While Others Go to Jail

Attorney for convicted leaker asks for ‘release,’ says his client went to jail while ex-CIA director walked after leaking

Photo by US Army.

Defense lawyer rips Petraeus plea deal for ‘double standard’ in leak cases

By Michael Isikoff
The lawyer for a former State Department contractor imprisoned last year for leaking classified information is asking federal prosecutors for the “immediate release” of his client in light of the relatively lenient treatment of former CIA Director David Petraeus for similar conduct.

Abbe Lowell, the lawyer for former contractor Stephen Kim, acknowledged that he’s not expecting a positive response to a recent letter he wrote to Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and three other federal prosecutors who pursued his client.

But Lowell wrote the letter, obtained by Yahoo News, to highlight what he described as a “profound double standard” in the government’s prosecution of leak cases — a subject of mounting debate that could weigh on the Justice Department's decision in at least one ongoing high-profile leak probe.

The issue of the differing treatment of leakers — and especially the relatively light plea deal for Petraeus, who will receive no prison time — is also expected to come up in next month’s sentencing of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer convicted of leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen.

Edward MacMahon, one of Sterling’s lawyers, confirmed to Yahoo News that he too will be citing the Petraeus case when his client — who is potentially facing up to 10 years in prison — is sentenced next month. “I’ll be discussing all the sentencing in leak cases,” MacMahon said.

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Judge Rules Philadelphia Buses Must Run Anti-Islam Ads Featuring Hitler (Video)

Why aren't Muslim Americans pushing for bus ads that feature Jews who collaborated with Hitler, or ads about Israel's Gaza massacres? — Perhaps it's because they have more integrity than the creeps who want to run anti-Islam ads.

Islamophobic bus ad paid for neo-racists.

By CBS
Anti-Islamic ads could soon be coming to Philadelphia public buses.

CBS Philadelphia reports that a federal court judge on Wednesday sided with a New Hampshire based non-profit on its claim that it has a first amendment right to run bus ads linking Muslims to Hitler.

The ads include images of Adolf Hitler and read "Islamic Jew Hatred: It's in the Quran." While they may be incendiary to some, a federal court judge wrote they're perfectly acceptable under the first amendment.

"He agreed with us on all the issues," said attorney Robert Muise.

Muise represents plaintiff American Freedom Defense Initiative. The group has filed more than a half dozen lawsuits against transit authorities across the country over anti-Islamic ads. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority refused to run their ad saying it disparaged Muslims, but the court held the buses are public forums -- so SEPTA cannot censor AFDI's political speech.

Comedy Duo Turn Anti-Islam Bus Ads Into a Joke

"He found the restriction on our client's speech to be content-based and unconstitutional," said Muise.

Muise says his clients hope to run the ad. Spokesperson Jerri Williams says SEPTA is disappointed, but is evaluating whether to appeal.

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Trayvon Martin's Murderer Gets NO Civil Rights Charge: Obama's Justice Dept Took 3 Years To Make Decision on Zimmerman

Unarmed Trayvon Martin was murdered by a sociopath named George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012 while on the way home from a store in his father's own gated community. Zimmerman stalked and murdered Trayvon Martin after being advised by police not to interfere with the 17-year-old teenager. George Zimmerman has been arrested several times since he was "acquitted" of killing Trayvon Martin in a sham state show trial.

Trayvon Martin (left) and George Zimmerman.

By NBC
The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it had closed its investigation into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and would not bring federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman.

The department said in a statement that it had met with Martin's family to inform them of the decision.

________________

RELATED STORY: Prosecutor Who 'Intentionally' Blew George Zimmerman Case — Has Record of Disproportionately Seeking Death Penalty for Black Men, Charging Minority Kids As Adults

RELATED STORY: Murderer of Trayvon Martin Arrested — Again - George Zimmerman Charged With Aggravated Assault

RELATED STORY: White Supremacist Who Backed George Zimmerman Has 'Change of Heart' — Now Says Zimmerman Racially Profiled Trayvon Martin and Got Away With Murder

RELATED STORY: Murderer of Trayvon Martin Gets Yet Another Reprieve: Zimmerman 'Girlfriend' Drops Charges of Aggravated Assault, Battery, Criminal Mischief - Changes Story

RELATED STORY: George Zimmerman's Ex-Girlfriend Says He Sent Sex Tape Footage and Images to Her Daughter - As Court Bans Him From Owning Guns

RELATED STORY: George Zimmerman Arrested in Another Domestic Violence Incident

________________

Attorney General Eric Holder said that while the standard for a federal hate crime prosecution could not be met, the shooting still requires the country to confront the "issues and tensions" brought to the surface by the killing.

"We, as a nation, must take concrete steps to ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future," he said.

Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges. He was charged with second-degree murder, and jurors also had the option of convicting him of the lesser charge of manslaughter. He said that he was acting in self-defense when he killed Martin, 17, during an altercation in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, on Feb. 26, 2012.

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New York City Settles More Wrongful Conviction Cases for $17 Million: So Far, No Law Enforcement Officials Jailed for Wrongdoing

New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer. (Photo by jackie weisberg)

By Benjamin Weiser and Stephanie Clifford
The New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, has agreed to pay $17 million to settle three more claims based on wrongful criminal convictions, his office said on Sunday, part of an emerging strategy to resolve civil rights cases before they are formally filed as lawsuits in court.

The settlements were reached with three defendants whose cases involved Louis Scarcella, the retired homicide detective whose investigative tactics have come under question and whose cases are being reviewed by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

The men, Robert Hill, Alvena Jennette and Darryl Austin, who are half brothers, spent a combined total of 60 years in prison — one died there — before their convictions, made in the 1980s, were vacated by a judge in May. The office of Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, is examining 130 convictions, including 70 cases in which Mr. Scarcella played a key role. Most of the cases under review date to the crime-plagued 1980s and 1990s.

Mr. Stringer, in an interview, made it clear that the settlements were intended to help the family, but that he also believed that the city should avoid litigation in which it could, if found liable at trial, face exposure to high damages.

“The 1980s were a difficult time in our city’s history,” Mr. Stringer said, “and in a certain way, we are sort of unearthing the tangled history of that time period in our court system today.”

“Clearly, our heart goes out to those who have been wrongfully incarcerated,” he continued. “We are also very concerned about the impact these cases will have on the fiscal health of the city.”

The settlements are the third, fourth and fifth prelitigation deals in major civil rights cases reached by Mr. Stringer since he took office a year ago. The comptroller’s office traditionally settled other kinds of claims, like slip-and-falls or property damage, before they went to court, but left significant civil rights cases to the city’s Law Department, an agency under the mayor’s direction.

The two earlier prelitigation deals were a $6.4 million settlement last February with David Ranta, who was imprisoned for 23 years after being wrongfully convicted of murder, and a $2.25 million agreement in October with the family of Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran who died at Rikers Island in an overheated jail cell.

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SWAT Called In to Execute DUI Arrest in NY: House Destroyed After 3-Day 'Siege' Followed By Commando Raid — Family Left Homeless

SWAT was "needed" to execute a warrant on a DUI arrest. The home was systematically destroyed from end-to-end.
It appears the family was subjected to "collective punishment" for the DUI suspect's recalcitrance. (Screen capture
from YouTube video)

By John Vibes
A SWAT team in New York entirely demolished a family’s home last week in order to arrest a DUI suspect.

The aftermath of the raid looked more like the devastation caused by a tornado or earthquake, and the police have made no mention of the destruction in their reports.

During the standoff, the suspect shot and killed himself to avoid going to jail, but now his family is left homeless, and there is very little chance that the police who participated in the raid will help in any way.

According to The Ithaca Journal, 36-year-old David M. Cady Jr. had recently missed court dates relating to a DUI arrest, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. At around 7 p.m. on December 30th, police arrived at Cady’s house to serve a warrant, but he refused to leave his home because he was afraid of going to jail. Cady’s wife, Melissa, and their two son’s were also in the house at the time of the raid.

Police then pulled hundreds of officers from at least 18 different local police departments and staged a 3 day siege of the family’s home.

The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Department made a statement which glossed over the destruction of the home, saying only that they “breached the outside area of the house.”

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The Big Reality Show, the 1% and the Myth of the 'Thin Blue Line' of Policing

"...the myths of the triflin' lazy, drug-addled crime-ridden, mostly black and brown poor are essential to the stability of America as we know it..."

Photo by jayneandd.

By Bruce Dixon

Commentary

There's a potent and powerful racist and classist myth that tough cops, jailers, judges and prosecutors are all that stand between us and rampant crime, anarchy and ruin. For American politics its an increasingly necessary fantasy, a myth that generations of public officials from jailing judges and hang 'em high prosecutors, to lock 'em up legislators, sheriffs, governors and even presidents have based their careers upon.

The myths are necessary because no modern society can openly abandon its duty to provide its people quality educations, decent housing, living wage jobs and economic security, unless it is willing to brand large numbers of those it won't provide education or housing or jobs and a dignified retirement unworthy, undeserving and irredeemable. The American political class of both parties, including black politicians stopped even talking about any rights to full employment, decent housing, economic security and the like decades ago, preferring to pretend that There Is No Alternative.

Thus the myths of the triflin' lazy, drug-addled crime-ridden, mostly black and brown poor are essential to the stability of America as we know it. These myths are the ethical and moral justification of the neoliberal economic order and its prison state. Overpolicing and mass incarceration don't just happen because the cops are racist, the prosecutors corrupt, and the legislators and media vicious and cowardly, nor are they driven by the profits of private prisons or captive labor.
"...The burgeoning movement against police immunity and impunity really IS a threat to so-called 'national security'"...

America's savage police and prison states provide us with a long running reality show that justifies our profoundly unequal and unjust social order. It gives us a morality play that casts the criminalized and mostly nonwhite poor as villains kept at bay by the heroism of that thin blue line, while schools, roads, parks public works, nature and even water are privatized, while private and public pensions are looted, while student loan debt, black unemployment and underemployment continue to rise and wages continue to fall, while child homelessness is at an all time high and there are more vacant homes than homeless people, and while the rich and famous are celebrated and lionized for being famously rich.

This is something that politicians from the president down to local mayors and aldermen know, and top cops, from Homeland Security and the FBI to state and local departments know as well. It's something those in motion in the streets today over the last dozen and the next dozen police atrocities need to better understand and articulate. The burgeoning movement against police immunity and impunity really IS a threat to so-called “national security”, a menace to the privileges of banksters and employers, of privatizers and gentrifiers, the prerogatives of the 1%.

When more of them openly question these prerogatives in the same breaths as they do the privilege of cops to murder and maim with immunity and impunity, we'll be a long step closer to a better world.

For Black Agenda Radio I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

____________________
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him via this site's contact page or via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

NYPD Corruption Exposed: The Informal NYPD Slowdown is Proving That Cops Do More Harm Than Good

“The hyper policing inflicted on black communities is a sick farce, serving only the purpose of making white people feel comfortable about the numbers of black people in jails.”

Photo by Krystian Olszanski.

By Margaret Kimberley
“The police want their way or no way.”

The false narrative about the need for hyper policing has come crashing down and police themselves destroyed the well-cultivated propaganda. The awful truth which black people were well aware of is now out in the open for all to see. Police departments in the United States exist for the purpose of maintaining white people’s prerogatives as the group in control of everyone else. Enhancing public safety is a secondary consideration.

Under the Michael Bloomberg administration the New York City police department (NYPD) was infamous for its stop and frisk policies. Up to 575,000 people, almost all of them black or Latino, were stopped by police annually at the height of the stop and frisk program. A mysterious designation such as “furtive movement” was a reason for any person of color to be searched and harassed. Precinct commanders were pressured to meet quotas for stops, summonses, and arrests while also lying about the real crime rate in order to make the mayor and the NYPD look good.

All of that changed in the past two weeks. The NYPD have all but ceased writing summonses and making arrests and they have done so with the same zeal they once used in acting as the modern day slave patrol. The police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) ordered the slowdown in order to punish current mayor Bill de Blasio. The behavior seems odd because the mayor reappointed as commissioner the architect of stop and frisk, William Bratton. Despite this and other pro-police actions, de Blasio doesn’t meet enough of the police terrorism threshold to please New York’s “finest.”

“The NYPD have all but ceased writing summonses and making arrests and they have done so with the same zeal they once used in acting as the modern day slave patrol.”

This scandal is an opportunity for many lessons to be learned. As a candidate the mayor used his bi-racial son in campaign commercials to fool black voters into supporting him. The reality of his administration is in sharp contrast to the marketing which got him into office. After a bystander videotaped the police murder of Eric Garner, de Blasio’s most memorable statement was to warn against resisting arrest.

Emboldened by the people of Ferguson, Missouri, New Yorkers took to the street after Eric Garner’s killers went unpunished. These righteous acts only served to make the NYPD angrier. They became the target of public animus and scorn and they didn’t like the fall from grace.

After two policemen were killed by a mentally ill vengeance seeker de Blasio asked protesters to stand down. Appointing Bratton didn’t help in the eyes of the police mob. Telling people who have the right to protest not to do so didn’t help either. The police want their way or no way and have gone all out to punish de Blasio even though he acts as the junior partner in police criminality.

At the first policeman’s funeral, nearly every officer present turned his or her back on the mayor as he entered the church service. Days later at a police academy graduation ceremony, hecklers were heard interrupting the mayor’s speech.

In order to punish de Blasio and the city further, the PBA ordered a work slow down. Suddenly the number of arrests dropped 66% from the same period one year earlier. Parking and traffic violations and summonses for low level offenses all fell by more than 90%. So far none of these declines in enforcement have had an impact on safety in the city.

Ironically, the police proved the point that many of their critics have made for years. The hyper policing inflicted on black communities is a sick farce, serving only the purposes of making white people feel comfortable about the numbers of black people in jails, and adding to the mass incarcerations system with the ancillary benefit of raising revenue and prison profits.
“The number of black politicians who spoke out strongly when Eric Garner was killed may be counted on just one hand.”

It is very good news for black people that the number of arrests has plummeted. The system catches some violent criminals but more often people committing minor offenses who were down on their luck. A majority of inmates in New York City jails are not there because they are dangerous, but because they can’t pay bail.

We don’t need nearly as many police as we have in order to insure public safety. If we lived in a just society, there would be serious discussions about the need for law enforcement, and more importantly about how to keep them under community control. Instead we have a “liberal” mayor who danced to their tune only to be treated little better than the people they victimize.

The mayor is part of a larger political problem. In our system elected officials have little incentive to fight for their constituents against the police state. There is no City Council member or state legislator who risks losing his or her office by genuflecting to the NYPD. In fact, they risk their positions if they are seen as opposing the established order that makes black people the victims of brutality. The number of black politicians who spoke out strongly when Eric Garner was killed may be counted on just one hand. The number who felt compelled to give condolences to the two officers was much larger.

No one knows exactly how many Americans are killed by police, but reliable estimates by concerned groups and individuals indicate approximately 1,000 deaths every year. We should keep that number in mind when we are told that other nations violate their citizens’ human rights.

If the police can cut the number of arrests they make by 66% because they are feuding with the mayor, they can do it again. If New Yorkers don’t feel afraid despite the work stoppage, perhaps we can begin asking serious questions about why and indeed if we need the police force that we have. For once we may owe the police a bit of gratitude.

_____________________
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Murderer of Trayvon Martin Arrested — Again: George Zimmerman Charged With Aggravated Assault

Protesters at the Minneapolis, MN rally in response to George Zimmerman's
not guilty verdict,  July 15, 2013. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue)

By Zachary Fagenson

RELATED STORY: George Zimmerman Charged With Aggravated Assault - Held Without Bail —  Alleged to have Pointed Shotgun at Girlfriend - Police Seek Search Warrant for Guns

George Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer acquitted in a fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager in 2013, was charged with aggravated assault on Saturday after his arrest in connection with a domestic disturbance in Florida.

RELATED STORY: Prosecutor Who 'Intentionally' Blew George Zimmerman Case — Has Record of Disproportionately Seeking Death Penalty for Black Men, Charging Minority Kids As Adults

Zimmerman, wearing a blue jumpsuit and handcuffs, appeared before Florida Circuit Judge John D. Galluzzo who offered him a $5,000 bond, ordered him to turn over any firearms and restricted his travel to Seminole County in central Florida.

RELATED STORY: White Supremacist Who Backed George Zimmerman Has 'Change of Heart' — Now Says Zimmerman Racially Profiled Trayvon Martin and Got Away With Murder

“Anywhere else in the state and we have a problem,” the judge said.

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Local SWAT Teams Say They Are 'Private Corporations' — Completely 'Immune' From Public Scrutiny

SWAT Squads in Massachusetts don't want to be subject to "open records" laws. They say they are "private corporations" and hence are not accountable to the tax paying public. Meanwhile, there are botched raids based on fabricated information, SWAT teams used to check liquor and barbershop licenses, the burning down of apartment complexes, or citizens killed and maimed "by mistake during the tens of thousands of  SWAT commando raids a year—Ronald David Jackson

"SWAT Team Prepared" - Photo by Oregon Dept of Transportation)

Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws

By Radley Balko
As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response.

RELATED STORY: SWAT Commando Raid On Wrong House Leads To $1 Million Medical Bill for Toddler Hurt by Stun Grenade

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. In 2012, for example, the Tewksbury Police Department paid about $4,600 in annual membership dues to the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC. (See page 36 of linked PDF.) That LEC has about 50 member agencies. In addition to operating a regional SWAT team, the LECs also facilitate technology and information sharing and oversee other specialized units, such as crime scene investigators and computer crime specialists.

RELATED STORY: SWAT Team Kills Man After He Calls Suicide Hotline for Help

RELATED STORY: America's Militarized Police — Cops Subject Iowa Family To Terrifying Commando Attack - Over Suspected Credit Card Fraud

Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.

RELATED STORY: SWAT Teams Used To Check On Barbershop Licenses — Cops Slammed by Judge

RELATED STORY: Masked, Heavily Armed Police oOfficers in Louisiana Raid a Nightclub as Part of a Liquor Inspection

[...]

Massachusetts also has a long history of accountability and excessive force problems with SWAT teams. A few examples:

SWAT Commando Raid On Wrong House Leads To $1 Million Medical Bill for Toddler
Hurt by Stun Grenade in Janesville, Wisconsin Bounkham Phonesavanh Jr., known as
"Bou Bou," (Courtesy Phonesavanh Family).

• In 1988, Boston Det. Sherman Griffiths was killed in a botched drug raid later revealed to have been conducted based on information from an informant a subsequent investigation revealed that the police had simply made up.
  
• Six years later, the Rev. Accelyne Williams died of a heart attack during a mistaken drug raid on his home. The Boston Globe found that three of the officers involved in that raid had been accused in a 1989 civil rights suit of using fictional informants to obtain warrants for drug raids. In testimony for that suit, one witness testified that after realizing they’d just raided the wrong home, a Boston police officer shrugged, apologized and said, “This happens all the time.” The city settled with the plaintiffs.
  
• In 1996, the Fitchburg SWAT team was already facing a lawsuit for harassing a group of loiterers when it burned down an apartment complex during a botched drug raid. The SWAT team subsequently faced a number of other allegations of recklessness and misconduct.
  
• In January 2011, a SWAT team raided the Framingham, Mass., home of 68-year-old Eurie Stamps at around midnight on a drug warrant. Oddly, it had already arrested the subject of the warrant — Stamps’s 20-year-old stepson — outside the house. But because he lived in Stamps’s home, the team went ahead with the raid anyway. When the team encountered Stamps, it instructed him to lie on the floor. He complied. According to the police account, as one officer then moved toward Stamps to check for weapons, he lost his balance and fell. As he fell, his weapon discharged, sending a bullet directly into Stamps’s chest, killing him.

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Coordinated Nationwide Crackdown On Police Brutality Protests Begins — Pt 3: NYPD Seeks Court Approval For Mass Arrest of Protesters Without Warning

The NYPD wants to return to the "old way" of doing things. (Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons)

New York City Cops Seek Federal Court Approval to Mass Arrest Protesters Without Warning

A legal fight from Occupy resurfaces amid 2014's police brutality protests.

By Steven Rosenfeld
As New York Mayor Bill de Blasio takes high-profile steps to try to curtail abusive policing—sympathizing with protesters over Eric Garner’s death and vowing to reform the notorious Rikers Island prison—the city’s Law Department is going back to federal court to seek new authority to make mass arrests at protests.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has agreed to meet in full to reconsider an August ruling that sided with protesters and chastized the New York Police Department for the way it herded and arrested 700 Occupy protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in fall 2011. It concluded that the cops violated the protesters' constitutional rights and the police did not have “cause” to arrest them.

“This decision will frustrate, not further, the work of police attempting to facilitate peaceful demonstrations while ensuring both the safety of demonstrators and those among whom demonstrations are staged,” the city’s rehearing brief argued.

Attorneys representing the protesters say the NYPD seeks renewed power to make mass arrests after entrapping protesters, as was the case in October 2011, when police walked calmly beside Occupy marchers from lower Manhattan onto the bridge. As a majority on the lower Appeals Court panel noted, most protesters did not hear any arrest warning from police and felt they were led by cops onto the Brooklyn Bridge to continue their march.

“This is the most significant and most defining legal case on protesters’ rights in the last 40 years, since the mass arrests of May Day 1970,” said Carl Messineo, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund legal director, which represented the protesters. “Mayor de Blasio seeks the authority to arrest today’s protesters in the same manner Mayor Bloomberg falsely arrested Occupy Wall Street protesters by the hundreds.”

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