"Failure to Pay Fine" in Racist System: Debt Company Makes Sheriffs Rich by Extorting & Jailing the Poor in Oklahoma

A company increases debts by 30%, then tells Oklahomans to pay up or go to jail. Law enforcement is in its pocket, a new lawsuit claims.

From [DailyBeast] Ira Wilkins should be a free man. Wilkins has served his time in an Oklahoma prison and is clear for release. But a private court fee collections agency is keeping him behind bars.

Wilkins is the lead plaintiff in a new racketeering lawsuit against the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association, every sheriff’s department in the state, and the court fee collections firm Aberdeen Enterprizes II. When Oklahomans owe court fees, their case is assigned to Aberdeen, which charges them an additional 30 percent on top of what courts want. If they don’t pay, Aberdeen requests a warrant for the debtor’s arrest. It’s big business for Aberdeen and the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association, which received more than $800,000 from Aberdeen in 2015.

But while Aberdeen and the OSA strike it rich, poor Oklahomans are languishing in modern day debtors prison, the lawsuit alleges.

“These plaintiffs are victims of an extortion scheme in which the Defendants have conspired to extract as much money as possible from indigent people through a pattern of illegal and unconscionable behavior,” the suit filed last week in federal court alleges.

Court fees add up quickly in Oklahoma, and quicker when Aberdeen is on the case.

The lawsuit cites the case of an unnamed homeless man who was arrested on retail larceny and trespassing charges on New Year’s Eve 2016. The man, who is on disability payments, claims he didn’t have the $150 he needed to bond out of jail. When he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, he was slapped with $425 in fines and fees, plus $385 in “hidden costs.” The sum came out to over $800—more than the man’s monthly disability earnings. Then the man’s money troubles got worse. His case was handed to Aberdeen, which increases all debts by 30 percent.

“Plaintiff was given a letter to sign, not by the court or an attorney, but by a sheriff’s officer at the jail acknowledging his ‘debt’ to Aberdeen,” the lawsuit reads.

Aberdeen is the brainchild of Jim Shofner, a former Oklahoma bankruptcy lawyer who was disbarred after pleading guilty to fraud in 2001. Shofner admitted to helping a client hide over $100,000 from the IRS under a fake name. After his release from prison in 2003, he founded Aberdeen in 2006. Reached by phone on Tuesday, Shofner said he had retired from Aberdeen and was unaware of the lawsuit. Neither Aberdeen nor the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association returned requests for comment.

Under Aberdeen’s watch, debtors can also wind up in jail. When an Oklahoman owes court fees, Aberdeen contacts the debtor by phone or mail, informing them of the arrest warrant. The message is clear: Pay or go to jail.

In 2016, “failure to pay” was the fourth most common cause of incarceration in the state, with 1,163 Oklahomans booked into jail, according to the lawsuit. (That’s almost as many as possession of controlled substance, the most common cause of incarceration, with 1,326 people book.) Currently, Oklahoma has approximately 45,000 open “failure to pay” warrants, Daniel Smolen, one of the attorneys representing Wilkins told The Daily Beast.

Smolen said the system represents a private company’s disturbing creep into law enforcement.

“Imagine if Visa could call you, if you didn’t make an arbitrary payment for the amount they thought was fair, and issue a warrant for your arrest,” Smolen said.

Sometimes Oklahomans could be accused of “failure to pay” even if they were giving Aberdeen everything they could.

“I’d bring $50 in and set it on the counter saying ‘this is all I have,’” Montell Fisher, an Oklahoma man whose case is referenced in the suit, told The Daily Beast. “The clerk called up Aberdeen, which said if you don’t have the full $75, we can’t accept it.”

Fisher said he was arrested three times for failure to pay, resulting in the suspension of his license. After his release from jail, he started taking the classes required to regain his license, which he said added up to around $400. And soon he learned his license would remain suspended until he paid of his debt to Aberdeen.

Ironically, the suspended license made it difficult for Fisher to go to work and earn money to pay off Aberdeen, he said. Without a car, he relied on the bus, or friends for rides to work. “I’m taking a risk every day,” he said. “There’s no guarantee I make it on time.”

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association is making serious money off its relationship with Aberdeen, the lawsuit alleges.

Aberdeen has a contract with the OSA, a nonprofit group that trains and coordinates policies for all of Oklahoma’s 77 sheriffs’ departments. That contract gives the OSA a cut of Aberdeen’s earnings. Although the exact percentage of the OSA’s cut is redacted in the copy of the contract included in the lawsuit, the OSA’s public tax filings show that the figure is over $500,000 annually.

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60,000 Non-White Inmates Suing Prison Company, Geo Group for Forced Labor Under the Threat of Solitary Confinement

From [Bloomberg] On Nov. 15 the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver will hear arguments in a case that could change the future of the $5 billion private prison industry. Judges will decide whether a district court was correct in February when it certified a class action on behalf of around 60,000 current and former detainees who are suing Geo Group Inc., one of the largest U.S. private prison companies, for allegedly violating federal anti-trafficking laws by coercing them to work for free under threat of solitary confinement.

The case was first filed in 2014 by a group of non-white immigrants who had been detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility run by Geo in Aurora, Colo. Their key claim rests on the assertion that Geo violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a law designed to stop human trafficking—a scourge many associate with sexual exploitation by gangs, not with government contractors’ treatment of detained immigrants. Their lawsuit argues that Geo violated the law’s prohibition on using threats to obtain labor. 

“It would be forced labor for someone to say, ‘We’ll arrest you for not working for me,’ ” says David Seligman, who represents the plaintiffs. “It’s similarly forced labor to say, ‘We’re going to remove you from all contact with other people.’ ” The lawsuit also argues that Geo, through an optional work program that pays $1 a day, violated common law against “unjust enrichment,” since extensive use of low-paid detainee labor has saved the company money; it employs only one janitor in Aurora who isn’t in custody, the plaintiffs say. 

“There is, almost by definition, a focus on maximizing profits and shareholder value ”

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No, Ta-Nehisi: "When YOU Realize that you are a Nigger, the moment of that realization, you're no longer a Nigger"

Yes, But Can You Make a Mirror Out of a Brick? Above is video from [Vox] of Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of We Were Eight Years in Power, talking to a mostly white audience at Evanston Township High School in Illinois. "Educating" white people about a system they pretend not to understand will not neutralize or fight the power of white supremacy/racism.  De-colonize & revolutionize your own mind. Fuck what they are doing & saying. [quote in headline is James Baldwin as quoted by Doc Blynd in FUNKTIONARY]

According to Dr. Bobby Wright, 'by and large, white people treat each other humanely. But in their relations with non-white people, white people function as psychopaths." "It is pathological for Blacks to keep attempting to use moral suasion on a people who have no morality where race is the variable." [MORE] "People who classify themselves as White, who wish to be taken seriously, and who are righteous and responsible, will only talk about ending White Supremacy (Racism) and replacing it with Justice." [MORE]

Tired of Nigger Shit. 'The vested interests have invested Billions in Nigger, Bitch & Ho. It is mentacide designed for maximum demeanment and degradement of Black people. Not fun & games. Reducing yourself to less than trash. [MORE] Yes, when you know through being what nigger is, you will drop nigger and want nothing to do with nigger shit. Anon explains, "in the absence of white supremacy, niggers would not exist." "Once we understand what a "nigger" is, we will understand that a made-up word does not define who we are; it defines what is being done to us." [MORE]

In FUNKTIONARY Dr. Blynd explains:

NGHR - the consonant-letter-configuration for the ineffable (unmentionable) derogatory name ascribed to Afrikans, first by ignorant and degenerate Caucasians, then by us—especially here in racist Amerikkka. We use the unexpressed letters "NGFfR" to convey the reality that we cannot delete (erase) the name, nor can the name "Nigger" for which it represents, be rehabilitated or commandeered to a word of endearment (without dire consequence)—even between two Afrikans conscious of the damage and semantic baggage the name carries and the atrocities carried out from its dehumanizing effects without—and the psychological effects of self-hatred deep within. When group slurs are used to insult an individual—in person our through the media—unwittingly a whole people are being attacked in the process. Using the "N-word" loosely among ourselves arms those who are our natural enemies the aided ability and added enmity to act out their madness upon us as we act-out (perpetuate) the self-hate buried within and behind the seemingly harmless expression that whenever spoken is exhumed and haunts us like a ghost off the Goree Island coast. The "brother" who playfully embraces you with a hug around the neck as he greets and speaks "My Nigga," is more likely (than not) the same one who will point a gun to your dome and pull the trigger. Supposedly though, you were his "Nigger," so now being a statistic only your survivors are left to go figure. Through the means of languacultural and literary exorcism the historical word "Nigger," whenever summoned by a writer, should now be written as "NGHR" to inform all others that you have consciously taken control over your use of the nefarious name and realizing that using it from now on will never be taken, given or accepted the same nor will it be spoken like its all just a harmless game. "NGHR" is alsc an acrostic for "Now Giving Honor Respectfully." That is, we are no longer giving the "N-word" circulation because its currency has always been spurious, inflammatory, "illegit" and strictly counterfeit.

Nigger - "A non-white person who is subject to the system of White Supremacy." -Neely Fuller Jr. 2) someone who can take "please" not just to another level, but to a whole 'nother dimension. 3) any unwanted or undesired non-removable presence. 4) the consciousness of having no weigh-in and no way out—uselessness. You can avoid or even evade a nigger but you cannot escape him. Niggers are only of the male gender as there is no such feminine receptivity in a nigger unless you think in terms of a sponge. The thing about a nigger is that you won't know one when you see one (unless you've become one or sporadically act as one), rather you will only see one when you really ignore one—that's when a real nigger will appear (show up and show out). A nigger never really arrives anywhere—a nigger simply "comes out" (exposing himself by imposing himself on others) with unstoppable insistence and unflappable persistence when various situations precipitate its manifestation Niggers are not born-they are made in the lkeness of the prevailing confluence of psychological states and socio-economic conditions (e.g. mentacide, self-hatred, drug addiction, and double-consciousness-due exclusively, or at least primarily  to racism white supremacy), and the level (or state) of consciousness present in their upbringings and current surroundings. Have you observed in general that most niggers exhibit a need to get out, but don't desire going anywhere in particular? Niggers amplify the intrigue tied up between man and being, having and not having, accountability and no-countability, needing and wanting, and being and doing. Not all niggers are blacks; not all blacks are niggers—the tacit commonalities are not confined to race or localities, but to complicit modalities. That's why niggers act the same regardless of their locale or game. Don't get it twisted— not only blacks end up getting blacklisted. Niggers are swift-lipping, ego-tripping jive-ass ghetto philosophers—always asking you things like "What it is?" Knowing full well that "it" just like the word "nigger" itself is undefined and without context, and "is" merely an ontological unknown. Some folk got hip and began retorting "What it look like?" Nigger's response—"Solid." No, all is not solid, but to a nigger it doesn't matter if it isn't solid matter because he nevertheless has just turned the matter of the exchange into the energy necessary to bug you for a second light for his only square—because, to a nigger, its all relative, and you're related—a "brother"—or even called "blood." In his dereliction, a nigger is often bereft of the distinction between the act, the fact, and the fiction. A nigger can never be an outlaw; and an outlaw can never be a nigger. Try as you may, a nigger cannot be saved—only preserved—because you get what you deserve; respect is something earned. Nigger's lament: Everybody knows of me, but nobody knows, nor cares to know my name—they call me one just the same. We've got to save— Black People. Nigger please! We've got to love—Black People. Nigger Please! Without further adieu, I end my soliloquy on you know who—appears to be one too just like you. You can take niggers out of the ghetto but, you can't take the ghetto out of niggers. "Niggers are scared of revolution." -The Last Poets. "Yo' nigger this, and Yo' Nigger that—I don't want to be called Yo' Nigger!" -Flava Flav (Public Enemy). "While non-Blacks may embrace the N-word, their African-American counterparts face the consequences of its use, within and outside of the community. For some, the word is just a word, but for others, it is a legacy of racism and possibly, internalized oppression." -Kristine Wright. "When you realize that you are a nigger, the moment of that realization, you're no longer a nigger." -James Baldwin. Bored of toleration, they have dismantled the Board of Education and created for us the Board of Incarceration instead. The architects of White Supremacy never gave the word "nigger" a definition—if they did, they realized it would go away." (See: Racism White Supremacy, HOOD, Outlaw, GHETTO, SOON, Hip-Hop, Rap, Definitions, Oppression, P.I.C., B.O.P., Eugenics, Neo, Black Flask Brigade & RISE)

nigger- a species of caterpillar—known also as a 'black-jack.'

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[Whitenology] Modern Slavery - Fantasy of Freedom

Proper Gander and [MORE]

Contrary to Pentagon Claims, New Study says the US Spent $5.6 Trillion on Wars Since 9/11

From [RT] Washington has expended a whopping $5.6 trillion on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan since 2001, according to a new study. That figure is more than three times what the Pentagon has claimed in official estimates.

Research from the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University found that as of late September, the US wars combined with “additional spending on Homeland Security and the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs” had totaled more than $4.3 trillion since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. That number surged to $5.6 trillion once likely costs were added for fiscal year 2018, along with estimated future spending on veterans.   

The study noted that its figure is drastically different from the $1.52 trillion which the Pentagon claims the wars have cost US taxpayers between fiscal years 2001 and 2018. That number was given in an earlier Pentagon report titled ‘Estimated Cost to Each Taxpayer for the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.’

The Watson Institute claims to have used a “more comprehensive estimate” of the global ‘War on Terror,’ citing a total approximate cost of $23,386 per US taxpayer. “The difference between this Costs of War Project estimate and other estimates is that it includes not only Pentagon/Department of Defense military spending, but other war-related costs, including war-related spending by the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security,” says the report.

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Senate to Hold Hearings on Whether "Maniac" President Has Unilateral Authority to Use Nuclear Weapons

From [AntiWar] Senate Foreign Relations Committee head Bob Corker (R-TN) has announced that the committee will be holding hearings next week discussing the question of presidential authority to unilaterally use nuclear weapons.

 Though a lot of the reporting in painting this as Sen. Corker having problems with President Trump, the senator says that the hearings, the first since 1976 on the issue, are “long overdue.”

There isn’t a settled legal structure for how the US would use nuclear weapons as an aggressive act, which mostly rests on the historical assumption they’d be used purely in a retaliatory way. US officials, however, have long resisted ruling out a nuclear first-strike as an option.

This is becoming a growing issue because of the growing number of wars the US is finding itself involved in, and because of growing talk of a possible US attack on North Korea, a war which almost certainly would have a nuclear component.

This has already spawned legislation in both the House and Senate trying to bar the president from preemptive nuclear strikes without Congressional authorization. These bills, however, have struggled to get an airing from the leadership.

The Senate hearings could solve that, allowing many in the Foreign Relations Committee to air their thoughts on the possibility of any US president just deciding to nuke somebody some day. If there’s at least some consensus that this would be undesirable, it may force the leadership to allow specific bills to advance.

Like its Coverage of Flint, Elite White Media Has Moved On From Puerto Rico

From [MediaMatters] As Puerto Rico begins a recovery effort from Hurricane Maria that could take years, the national media have already moved on. This has happened before, specifically in Flint, MI, where residents have been struggling for years to obtain clean drinking water. National media turned away from the ongoing disaster in Flint, and if the past is any indication, the people of Puerto Rico may face the same fate.

A Media Matters analysis found that from October 3 -- the day President Donald Trump visited the island -- to November 3, prime-time cable news coverage of the recovery in Puerto Rico has fallen dramatically. On October 3, 22 segments ran on prime-time cable news about the recovery efforts. On November 3, that was down to just one segment.

Save for a small spike in coverage -- which coincided with a tweet from Trump threatening the island’s aid -- prime-time cable news programs have moved on from the ongoing recovery efforts, even though they could continue for years.

The situations in Puerto Rico and Flint (where lead-tainted water still runs through the pipes) have a good deal in common. For one thing, both have dire impacts on public health. In Puerto Rico, some people who are desperate for water have turned to drinking from a hazardous-waste site. And a recent study found that the lead-poisoned water in Flint had a “horrifyingly large” effect on fetal deaths.

Both of these crises have hit areas populated primarily by racial minorities and low-income people. As CNN reported, Flint is “mostly black and about 40% poor.” And as the Pew Research Center noted in a 2011 report, “The population of Puerto Rico is almost entirely of Hispanic origin,” and 44 percent of Hispanic people in Puerto Rico “live in poverty.”

Much has been written of the lackluster media coverage of the crisis in Flint -- specifically, as Harvard’s Shorenstein Center put it, “the failure of national media outlets to respond to the Flint water crisis in an urgent manner.” Then-New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, now a Washington Post media columnist, wrote last year about the Times’ coverage of the crisis, suggesting that if initial reporting “had been followed up with some serious digging, and if the resulting stories had been given prominent display, public officials might have been shamed into taking action long before they did.” Sullivan added, “With its powerful pulpit and reach, The Times could have held public officials accountable and prevented human suffering. That’s what journalistic watchdogs are supposed to do.” It would be reasonable to fear that a similar lack of national media attention could slow down or stall recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico already faces plenty of obstacles to a full recovery. The island’s economic problems (officials declared bankruptcy in May) are expected to make the recovery efforts harder, as are the territory’s infrastructure issues. And, as USA Today reported, donations to Puerto Rico have been lackluster compared to those directed to Florida and Texas after hurricanes struck those regions.

Public Servants or Rulers? ACLU Finds 'Disturbing Pattern' of Unlawful Conduct by Cops in Bakersfield & Kern County

From [LATimes] The American Civil Liberties Union called for major reforms in the Bakersfield Police Department and the Kern County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday, releasing a scathing report that detailed repeated allegations of excessive force and the misuse of police dogs to injure and intimidate suspects.

Both departments were already the subject of a civil rights investigation by the California attorney general’s office, but the ACLU said Thursday that its study shows officers and deputies have been involved in “a disturbing pattern of shootings, beatings and canine attacks” in recent years, many of which involved unarmed suspects.

"We urge the office of the attorney general to take all action within its power to correct the patterns and practices we've identified," Adrienna Wong, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, said in a statement. "The people of Kern County have the right to live free from police excessive force."

Both agencies have been involved in a disproportionately higher number of shootings compared with other California law enforcement agencies that police populations of similar size and rates of crime, according to the study. Bakersfield police have shot and killed 19 people since 2013, according to the study. Authors of the report also found that since 2009, one-quarter of all people shot by police department officers were unarmed.

A “significant percentage” of the people shot by both agencies were also exhibiting signs of mental illness at the time of their contact with police, according to the study.

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In White Supremacy System Chicago can afford shiny new police academy but not schools or community services

From [ThinkProgress] What can Chicago afford?

The city couldn’t afford to keep 50 of its public schools open in 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) decided. The previous year, he deemed six of the city’s 12 mental health clinics didn’t have a seat at the table either, pushing thousands closer to the prison system one local sheriff has described as the city’s new last-resort clearinghouse for people who belong in treatment.

Emanuel’s schools raid shaved about $800 million off the city’s expenses. Shoving the clinic patients into a chaotic transition of delicate care regimens saved another $3 million.

But now he’s getting a green light to build a brand new $95 million police training facility. City aldermen voted 48-1 in favor of the plan Wednesday, after hours of angry public comments from citizens who attended the hearing.

The city will finance the new project in part by selling existing public properties. Even after those conversions, the project will need close to $40 million in cash from the same budget Emanuel insisted could not bear the demands of educating kids in his city’s blackest neighborhoods or maintaining mental health care for more than 5,000 people. He has continued to privatize mental health facilities around the city in the years since.

Emanuel’s preference for police resources over other public services is consistent with his longstanding approach to leading his city. The man who once advised then-President Barack Obama to “never waste a crisis” has repeatedly toggled budget math around to justify pushing money away from one policy space and toward another. He has pleaded poverty on city worker pensions only to turn around and find a surplus to fund teacher salaries. Up until that reversal, he’d insisted the money wasn’t there throughout teacher contract negotiations — all while promising to expand the Chicago Police Department by 1,000 officers, at a cost of approximately $135 million per year.

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South Carolina to Stop Jailing Poor Blacks & Latinos for Unpaid Traffic Tickets

From [NYMag] In the United States, many municipalities rely on fines from traffic violations and other misdemeanors to fund basic government services. The upside of this means of revenue generation, from a political perspective, is that it’s invisible to most voters, and painless for rich people (who are often campaign donors).

But the policy’s downsides are considerable.

For one thing, you generally need to milk those fines from the most disempowered community in your area (any police chief who aggressively cracks down on every little misdemeanor rich, well-connected people commit won’t be in office for long). But the thing about disempowered people is, they don’t have a lot of money. So it can be a real hassle to get them to pay up. And then, if they wish to contest their fine in court, you’ve got to provide them with an attorney. Pretty soon, you’re spending more on collecting the fines than they’re even worth.

South Carolina found a pair of elegant solutions to this conundrum:

(1) Intimidate poor people into dutifully paying their fines by imprisoning those who don’t (debtors’ prisons may be a tad costly, but you’ve gotta spend money to make money).

(2) Don’t inform poor defendants that they have a constitutional right to an attorney.

This worked really well for a while. As the American Civil Liberties Union demonstrated in a 2016 report, the South Carolina municipalities of Beaufort and Bluffton were able to extract fines from thousands of poor people every year, without ever providing them access to a public defender. Meanwhile, South Carolina’s Lexington County sent a strong message to its fine-evading poor, by sending hundreds of impoverished people to modern-day debtors’ prisons.

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A NY courtroom gave every detained Non-White immigrant a lawyer. The results were staggering

From [Vox] Omar Siagha has been in the US for 52 years. He’s a legal permanent resident with three children. He’d never been to prison, he says, before he was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention — faced with the loss of his green card for a misdemeanor.

His brother tried to seek out lawyers who could help Siagha, but all they offered, in his words, were “high numbers and no hope” — no guarantee, in other words, that they’d be able to get him out of detention for all the money they were charging.

Then he met lawyers from Brooklyn Defender Services — part of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, an effort to guarantee legal representation for detained immigrants. They demanded only one thing of him, he recalls: “Omar, you’ve got to tell us the truth.”

But Siagha’s access to a lawyer in immigration court is the exception.

There’s no right to counsel in immigration court, which is part of the executive branch rather than the judiciary. Often, an immigrant’s only shot at legal assistance before they’re marched in front of a judge is the pro bono or legal aid clinic that happens to have attorneys at that courthouse. Those clinics have such limited resources that they try to select only the cases they think have the best shot of winning — which can be extremely difficult to ascertain in a 15-minute interview.

But advocates and local governments are trying to make cases like Siagha’s the rule, not the exception. Soon, every eligible immigrant who gets detained in one of a dozen cities — including New York, Chicago, Oakland, California, and Atlanta — will have access to a lawyer to help fight their immigration court case.

The change started at Varick Street. The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project started in New York City in 2013, guaranteeing access to counsel for detained immigrants.

According to a study released Thursday by the Vera Institute for Justice (which is now helping fund the representation efforts in the other cities, under the auspices of the Safe Cities Network), the results were stunning. With guaranteed legal representation, up to 12 times as many immigrants have been able to win their cases: either able to get legal relief from deportation or at least able to persuade ICE to drop the attempt to deport them this time.

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White Hearing Officer Re-instates White Denver Cops Who Murdered Mentally Ill 120lb Black Man - Suffocated, Not Resisting in Jail for Trespass

'Marshall Law' in Racist System. From [DenverPost] A white Denver hearing officer has overturned the suspensions of two Denver Sheriff Department deputies involved in the killing of inmate Michael Marshall — a case that already brought criticism from Marshall’s family who said the punishment was too light.

Deputy Bret Garegnani and Deputy Carlos Hernandez each had received suspensions in Marshall’s death after Stephanie O’Malley, director of the Department of Public Safety, found they used excessive force while restraining Marshall.

Garegnani was given a 16-day suspension for continuing to apply pressure on Marshall’s upper body even after nurses asked him to ease up for fear Marshall could aspirate on vomit. Hernandez was suspended for 10 days for using his nunchaku to apply pressure on Marshall’s right foot while trying to restrain him.

Bruce Plotkin, a Career Service Authority racist suspect hearing officer, ruled Friday that neither deputy broke a department rule when they used pressure to restrain Marshall for 11 minutes during a struggle in a secured hallway at the Downtown Detention Center in November 2015.

“Neither had any prior discipline; both attempted to talk to Marshall to persuade him to comply with lawful orders and, when discovering those efforts were unavailing, used only that force required to prevent harm to responders; when Marshall’s heart stopped, both appellants, Garegnani in particular, engaged in extraordinary measures to save Marshall’s life [measures to avoid a murder charge], even when told by outside medical responders to cease resuscitative measures,” Plotkin wrote in his order reversing the suspensions.

A third deputy, Capt. James Johnson, was given a 10-day suspension for failing to properly supervise the scene.

Plotkin’s ruling comes after a two-day hearing in September where video footage of the death was reviewed and multiple witnesses testified, including a Denver Sheriff Department trainer who said he would like to use the Marshall death video to show future deputies a good example of how to use force.

Marshall choked or asphyxiated on his vomit during a "struggle" with white police.

Marshall was arrested Nov. 7, 2015, on trespassing and disturbing-the-peace charges after creating a commotion at a Denver motel because he was looking for his Bible.

The family of Marshall will receive $4.6 million from the city in an agreement that also includes policy changes in how Denver Sheriff Department deputies treat mentally ill inmates. The settlement matches the amount a federal jury decided in 2014 to award the family of Marvin Booker, another homeless, Black inmate killed at the hands of white deputies in the jail. [MORE]

The City Council will be asked to approve the settlement Nov. 13. If approved, the city will have spent more than $19 million in the past three years to settle claims against its sheriff and police departments.

On November 11, Marshall was allowed free time out of his cell.

Marshall walked down the hall shirtless, his laundry in hand. He was 50 years old, 112 lbs. and homeless, a paranoid schizophrenic who had been arrested a few days earlier on a trespassing charge at a Colfax Avenue motel where he sometimes stayed. He was being held on a $100 bond whcih could not afford. But when he "was observed behaving in a strange and erratic manner" and approaching another inmate aggressively, deputies intervened and took him to an area dubbed a "sally port," with a bench on one side of a long hallway.

It's at this point the video begins. 

Marshall adjusted his sagging pants, then stood up, blanket in hand and tried walking between one of the deputies and the wall in an attempt to get past him.

The deputy reached out, pinned Marshall to the cement block, then swung him back toward the bench. Two other deputies approached and swung Marshall to the floor where the three officers seemed easily to restrain him (even though he didn't appear to be struggling). A fourth officer walked up and stood over the others as they held Marshall to the floor — apparently without much physical effort — for about four minutes.

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NY Prosecutors [mostly white] Ordered to Disclose Info Favorable to Defendants [many non-white] in Felony Cases

From [NY Law] All judges who preside over criminal cases in New York state will order prosecutors to disclose information favorable to the defense at least 30 days before a trial on a felony, a change that some legal experts say will dramatically change the way trials are conducted.

“This newly adopted measure will go a long way to help prevent and remedy systemic errors that contribute to wrongful convictions,” Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said in a statement Wednesday. 

While many state and federal judges have issued such orders on their own, it is the first time that an entire state has sent such a directive to all its judges, said Lucian Chalfen, director of public information for the state court system. Judges were informed of the rule in a memo from Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks distributed Monday afternoon.

“Number one, this is a very big deal,” said Barry Scheck, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and co-founder of the Innocence Project. “Once prosecutors are ordered by a court to do that, they’re going to pay a lot more attention because they don’t want to be a position in which they can be held in contempt for failing to do so.”

In consultation with the Innocence Project, the state’s Justice Task Force recommended the rule change in a February report. Task force recommendations have also led to expansion of the DNA databank, video-recording of interrogations and procedural safeguards for photo identifications.

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Vitale: 'To address inequality in any way other than policing is politically unacceptable in our current political environment'

TCR: Another issue your book addresses is the militarization of the police, both in tactics and the supply of military-grade hardware, a reality memorialized by the protests in Ferguson. Please explain your perspective.

 AV: Political violence is a political problem, and it needs to be solved in the political arena. But, too often, rather than addressing those political concerns, our political leaders hand it off to the police to deal with. That leaves, again, police in a no-win situation where they feel the need to use force to resolve what are ultimately political problems. The other thing is that militarization of policing is about a lot more than humvees and tactical vests. It’s about a whole ethos that has become widespread in policing in the United States. About politicians telling police to wage a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on terror, and a war on disorder and then giving them budgets to buy military equipment and create paramilitary units with training regimes that treat the public as enemies to be neutralized.

We have seen that ethos at work in some of the most horrible abuses of policing. So what is to be done? Quit telling the police they’re at war with the public, scale down the kinds of thing that they’re being asked to deal with, and then think about what kinds of tools, training, and technologies are best for accomplishing that. In my mind, that would result in a vast reduction in the use of militarized equipment and training.

TCR: In your book, you point out that poor and minority populations almost exclusively shoulder the burden of overpolicing. Why?

 AV: We persist in a fantasy of color blindness that says the police response is merely a professional technocratic response to where the crime is, but ignore the ways in which our society has been structured along racialized lines and the ways in which poverty in the United States is growing and becoming more entrenched. This includes a lot of white rural communities that are suffering from opioids and other kinds of crime problems.

Our political leaders have chosen to define those communities as criminal rather than as communities that are in deep distress because of entrenched joblessness, discrimination, geographic isolation, etc. If they were to admit that the problems in those communities were the result of market failures, rather than individual moral failures, then they would have to intervene in markets in ways that those who put them in office don’t want them to. To address the problems of inequality in any way other than policing is politically unacceptable in our current political environment.

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[Believing Lies Told by Elite Whites] Colonization of Land & Mind: The Struggle for a Post-Colonial Puerto Rico

From [MintPress] by Michael Nevradakis. Part of the problem with the colonized mentality is that the one who is colonized begins to believe the lies that have been told by the colonizer: that we are inferior, we are backward, that we would be poor, that we would have no hope if it were not for a more developed, more civilized, more powerful entity.

ATHENS, GREECE and LAS PIEDRAS, PUERTO RICO – Until recently, the similarities were stunning. Puerto Rico, mired in a deep economic crisis for the past decade, has often been dubbed “The Greece of the Caribbean.” While there are a great many similarities in the “debt crises” both Greece and Puerto Rico have been experiencing, this superficial description hid a deeper truth: that colonial Puerto Rico, under the control of Washington and a Washington-imposed “fiscal control board” or “junta,” strongly resembles neocolonial Greece, under the thumb of the “troika” (the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), on many levels above and beyond the economic difficulties both nations are experiencing.

This all changed after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico. While the hurricane itself left a trail of destruction all across the island, the real catastrophe is the perfect storm of colonialism, bureaucracy, cronyism, and disaster capitalism that has followed. Almost two months after the hurricane, much of Puerto Rico remains without access to electricity, water, or telephone and internet service.

As the humanitarian crisis on the island continues to deepen, Puerto Rico’s colonial governing regime, and its U.S.-imposed “fiscal review board,” could be accused of sabotaging recovery efforts on behalf of monied interests.

Déborah Berman-Santana is a retired professor of geography and ethnic studies at Mills College in Oakland, California. Now permanently residing in Puerto Rico, she was fortunate enough to be in Greece when Hurricane Maria struck the island. Part One of the interview with Berman-Santana that follows was recorded in Athens in early September and broadcast on Dialogos Radio: [MORE] [listen above]