Black Man [DeMarlo Berry] Spent Half of His Life in Prison for Crime He Didn’t Commit

From [HERE] Earlier this week, DeMarlo Berry—a 42-year-old Las Vegas man convicted of murder in 1995— was exonerated and freed. A Clark County judge overturned his conviction based on new evidence secured by Berry’s attorneys in collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center which revealed his innocence. Prosecutors decided to dismiss the case.

According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Berry was convicted and sentenced to life for the 1994 deadly shooting of Charles Burkes, but he’s long maintained his innocence.

Several years ago, Berry’s attorneys submitted to the court a 2013 affidavit from a man named Steven Jackson who claimed responsibility for the shooting. Berry had previously identified Jackson as the person who killed Burke.

The attorneys also submitted a statement by a witness who said that Jackson had confessed to her that he’d committed the murder. There was also a statement from a jailhouse informant who said that he’d falsely testified—in exchange for a plea deal with prosecutors—that Berry had confessed to the crime.

As a result of that new evidence, prosecutors reviewed Berry’s case and reached the conclusion that he was innocent.

“In this case, a confession by Mr. Jackson, and verification of that and other information by our CRU [Conviction Review Unit], resulted in our decision to no longer oppose Mr. Berry’s request for conviction relief,” said District Attorney Steve Wolfson to the Journal.

Racist Suspect Missouri Governor Announces St. Louis $10 minimum wage will Revert Back to $7.70 in August

From [HERE] The minimum wage in St. Louis will revert to $7.70 an hour on Aug. 28, with Gov. Eric Greitens announcing on Friday that he will allow a bill blocking the city’s increase to become law without his signature.

When the Legislature sends the governor a bill, he has several options. He can sign it, veto it or take the middle course — without action before a constitutional deadline, the bill automatically takes effect.

The bill in question bans local minimum wages, requiring all cities and municipalities in Missouri to stick to the statewide standard.

Minimum wage workers in St. Louis are making $10 an hour after winning a two-year legal fight against business groups who challenged a 2015 city ordinance authorizing an increase.

Under that city law, the wage was set to rise again in January to $11 an hour, then increase annually with inflation.

“It will kill jobs,” Greitens said of the increase. “And despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people’s pockets.”

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Racist Suspect Missouri Governor Signs Law Making it Harder to Prove Employment & Housing Discrimination: Must Have Smoking Gun Evidence of Racism

In a system of white supremacy/racism all white people should be suspected of being racist. In such a system most white people are racist or the most powerful persons are racist. This does not mean that all white people are racist. However, it is important to understand 'that Most white people hate Black people. The reason that most white people hate Black people is because whites are not Black people. If you know this about white people, you need know little else. If you do not know this about white people, virtually all else that you know about them will only confuse you.'  

A racist suspect is any white person who is capable of practicing racism against non-whites. In general, if a White person is able to be a Racist (White Supremacist), he or she may be one and should be presumed to be Racist. According to Neely Fuller, as long as white supremacy exists, every person classified as "white" should be suspected of being Racist (White Supremacist). [MORE]  

In the system of racism once a victim presents minimal facts establishing racism, an employer or landlord/owner should be required to prove no discrimination occurred with clear & convincing evidence.  

From [HERE] Missouri’s racist suspect, Republican governor signed a controversial proposal into law Friday that will make suing for workplace and housing discrimination more difficult.

Despite high-profile opposition from civil rights groups, a personal friend and Democratic lawmakers, Gov. Eric Greitens approved a measure that will require people to explicitly prove their race, sex or other protected status actually motivated their boss or colleague to mistreat them to win an employment discrimination case.

Greitens, a political newcomer who took office in January, had said little about his position on the measure, which was sponsored by Sen. Gary Romine, R-Farmington.

On Friday, in a release, the governor said the law brings Missouri in line with 38 other states and the federal government.

“Tort reform is important. We need to prevent trial lawyers from killing good jobs,” Greitens said.

Missouri workers currently need only prove their protected status was a “contributing factor” to prevail in court. For example, if a Hispanic plaintiff is fired for being late for work while white workers show up late and aren’t fired, the Hispanic employee could ask a jury to compare the treatment and contend that race “contributed” to the boss’s decision.

Under the new law, which goes into effect Aug. 28, such an employee would need to meet a higher standard: The worker would have to show that race explicitly “motivated” mistreatment through, for example, written documentation of racist comments.

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Democratic Senators Condemn Betsy DeVos’ Plan to scale back investigations into civil rights complaints

From [HERE] In a letter sent today, more than 30 Democratic senators rebuked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for scaling back civil rights enforcement at the Department of Education.

“You claim to support civil rights and oppose discrimination, but your actions belie your assurances,” wrote the senators, who said that the secretary’s recent moves to curtail civil rights efforts heightened their longstanding concerns about her commitment to protecting students from discrimination and harassment.

As ProPublica has reported, the Department of Education quietly laid out plans to scale back investigations into civil rights complaints in an internal staff memo earlier this month.

Under the Obama administration, the department’s civil rights investigators applied a broad approach to investigating complaints, often widening probes to look for patterns of harassment or discrimination in schools or districts. Investigators were frequently required to obtain multiple years of data to assess whether civil rights violations were systemic in nature.

In the recent memo, acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Candice Jackson instructed her staff to narrow this approach. Under the new directive, civil rights staffers will only look for systemic violations if the original complaint raises such concerns or the investigative team suggests it.

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Federal Ct Paves Way For Ohio To Resume Murdering It's Disproportionately Black Death Row Population

From [HERE] A federal appeals court paved the way on Wednesday for Ohio to resume executions by lifting a lower court's decision to halt the state's lethal injection process. Although Ohio is only 18% Black, it's death row is 55% Black. [MORE]

It was a contentious decision that split the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges in an 8-6 vote.

In the case brought by death row inmates, the judges focused on the effects of the sedative midazolam, one of the three lethal injection drugs used by Ohio.

As The Two-Way has reported, the drug has been "used during multiple botched executions in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma and Alabama."

Authorities used it in Ohio during the Jan. 16, 2014, execution of Dennis McGuire, who took 24 minutes to die. As we've reported, a witness said he appeared to be gasping and choking. Since then, executions in the state have been on hold.

Death row inmates Ronald Phillips, Gary Otte and Raymond Tibbetts say that executing them using midazolam would violate the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.

A federal judge ruled in January that midazolam is not sufficiently humane and blocked the upcoming executions. In that decision, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Michael Merz stated that the "use of midazolam as the first drug in Ohio's present three-drug protocol will create a 'substantial risk of serious harm' or an 'objectively intolerable risk of harm.' "

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SF Public Defender: Prosecutors are Filing Excessive Charges Against Black People, Racial Disparities Pervasive

From [HERE] San Francisco’s criminal justice system is facing accusations of pervasive disparities in the treatment of minorities, from police arrests to booking charges and prosecutions.

A study commissioned by the Public Defender’s Office shows black defendants are held 62 percent longer than white defendants. Once arrested, cases for black defendants take 14 percent longer to resolve, and black defendants are 62 percent more likely to be charged with felonies.

The study also shows police in certain neighborhoods like Bayview-Hunters Point, The Mission and The Tenderloin are more likely to add felony charges for black defendants.

At a press conference Tuesday, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said his office is starting a pre-trial release unit in October with funding provided by the city and supported by Mayor Ed Lee. The program will allow public defenders to meet with arrestees earlier on in the process in order to identify the cases with excessive charges, and get them thrown out before a trial begins.

Adachi said the process starts with police filing excessive charges against minorities, and the booking charges create a ripple effect, accounting for 72 percent of the conviction gap between black and white defendants in misdemeanor cases and 46 percent in felony cases.

“You have a police department that trains its officers and charges essentially whatever they can imagine,” said Adachi.

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Black Prosecutor & Racist Suspect Florida Governor spar over death penalty in Florida's top court

From [HERE] Florida Supreme Court justices on Wednesday asked whether a Black Orlando prosecutor removed from first-degree murder cases by white Governor Rick Scott had the discretion to adopt a policy not to seek the death penalty in her district.

Aramis Ayala, a Democrat who took office in January, sued the Republican governor this spring over his decision to take her off two dozen murder cases.

She has said the death penalty is not in the best interest of justice and argues Scott is exceeding his authority. Scott says Florida state attorneys should "prosecute individuals to the fullest extent of the law," including the death penalty.

Ayala's lawyer, Roy Austin of Washington, argued on Wednesday that she had used allowable discretion in choosing not to pursue capital punishment, including in a high-profile case against a man accused of killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend and an Orlando policewoman in separate incidents.

Justice R. Fred Lewis said Ayala appeared to be creating a blanket policy when she announced at a March press conference that she would not seek death sentences in the Ninth Judicial District, which includes Orange and Osceola counties in central Florida.

"How is that really within the concept of discretion?" Lewis asked. "To my mind, discretion is when you make a decision on a case-by-case basis."

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White Federal prosecutor Quits after Revealing she listened to Leavenworth Prisoner phone calls with their Attorneys

From [HERE] A federal prosecutor at the center of an investigation at Leavenworth Detention Center has left the U.S. attorney’s office, days after she revealed that she had listened to attorney-client phone calls at the prison, contrary to her previous statements in court.

Erin Tomasic had been a special assistant prosecutor in Kansas City, Kan., and came under increasing scrutiny in recent months as a federal judge ordered an investigation into whether law enforcement officials used prison recordings of inmates talking with their attorneys — conversations that are protected by law.

Federal prosecutors notified a judge on May 16 that Tomasic no longer works for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas. That came six days after Tomasic told her supervisor she had listened to the recorded phone conversations of two Leavenworth Detention Center inmates and their attorneys, according to court documents filed June 19 by the U.S. attorney’s office.

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Federal court: Despite ‘grossly negligent’ testimony that put 2 innocent Black men in prison, forensic experts can’t be sued

From [HERE] Regular readers of The WashPost will by now be familiar with the saga of Steven Hayne and Michael West, the two men who dominated Mississippi’s death investigation system for the better part of 20 years.

West testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in thousands. Both often gave testimony well outside the constraints of science. Hayne, for example, once claimed that the bullet wounds in a murder victim were “consistent with” a theory that two people were holding the murder weapon when it was fired. West has claimed to be able to trace bruises on a victim’s abdomen to the specific shoe that inflicted the injuries; claimed to match fingernail scrapes to the specific fingernails that made them; and in one particularly nutty case, claimed that the knife wounds in a murder victim could only have been caused by one specific knife, and then claimed to have found marks on the chief suspect’s hands that could only have been caused by gripping the handle of that knife — and only that knife.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that because Hayne and West are protected by qualified immunity for any case in which they testified, they’re only liable to a lawsuit if the plaintiff can show that they acted recklessly. Mere negligence — even gross negligence — is not enough.

The lawsuit in question was brought by Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, two men who were wrongly convicted in the 1990s, largely due to testimony from Hayne and West. In both cases, a little girl was abducted from her home at night, sexually assaulted and murdered, and her body was thrown into a creek. The two crimes occurred just a couple of miles apart. In both cases, the authorities suspected a boyfriend of the mother. In both cases, they took the body to Hayne for autopsy. In both cases, Hayne claimed to have found bite marks that other experts have since said were not human bites at all. In both cases, Hayne then called in West, who was making a name for himself as an expert bite-mark analyst. In both cases, West claimed that the marks were in fact human bites and that the marks “indeed, and without a doubt” were a match to the authorities’ chief suspect.

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House Passes 2 Strict Immigration Bills, at Trump’s Begging

NY Times

The House on Thursday voted to crack down on undocumented immigrants and localities that shelter them, approving two bills President Trump has championed but that are certain to meet resistance in the Senate.

The legislation from the Republican-controlled House would increase prison sentences for those re-entering the country illegally and pressure so-called sanctuary cities to comply with federal immigration officials, including through cutting federal funds.

While the measures gave the president a modest, if predictable, win, they would need Democratic support to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, an unlikely prospect.

As Senate Republicans worked on the other side of the Capitol to salvage their health care bill and notch their first major legislative victory of Mr. Trump’s presidency, House Republicans trumpeted the immigration-related bills as common-sense measures to bolster public safety.

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[Democracy Hoax] "Trump 2020" is "Real" b/c Media & Democrats Ignore the Crosscheck & Deletion of Non-White Votes

html5 video converter by EasyHtml5Video.com v3.9.1

From [HERE] and [HERE] and [HERE] 

Presidential Election "Integrity" Commission Requests personal data, voting history, & party affiliation of every Voter

From [HERE] The Al Capone of vote rigging, Crosscheck creator Kris Kobach, in his capacity as Vice Chair of Trump's so-called Presidential Election "Integrity" Commission, has demanded the personal information, voting history, and party affiliation of every US voter.

The letter Kobach sent to Connecticut Secretary of State Denise W. Merrill, which demanded:

"Publicly-available voter roll data for Connecticut, including, if publicly available under the laws of your sate, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information."

According to Vanita Gupta, President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who first shared the letter on Twitter, every US Secretary of State was sent a similar missive.

If all 50 states turn over their voter lists to Kobach, expect an additional 2 million voters, mostly citizens of color, to be purged. Even states not in his Crosscheck program will find their lists used for the lynching by laptop. Our elections would be safer giving this info to the Russians!

For more on Kobach and his racially biased-by-design vote purging op watch the Amazon bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — available to view worldwide from just $2.99. Or get a signed DVD, signed companion book, or a combo pack and support our work with a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund.

Well over 20 Secretary of States are refusing to fully comply with Kobach's request including, bizarrely, Kobach himself, in his capacity as Secretary of State for Kansas. The most forthright response so far has come from a Republican Secretary of State, Delbert Hosemann of Mississippi, who told Kobach & Co that: "They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from."

Dakota Access Pipeline Company Used Collaboration of Cops & Unlicensed Race Soldier Goons to Target Water Protectors

From [HERE] and [HERE] TIGERSWAN, THE PRIVATE company behind a monthslong, multi-state surveillance operation targeting opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline, illegally provided security and investigative services to the pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, despite being denied a license to do so, a new civil lawsuit alleges. Even after oil began to flow through the contested pipeline, and long after the crowded Dakota Access resistance camps gave way once again to empty prairie, TigerSwan continued its unlicensed security operations in North Dakota. TigerSwan is just one of several security companies hired to monitor the Dakota Access Pipeline that have been targeted by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board for failing to obtain licenses.

The allegations are part of a lawsuit the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board filed against TigerSwan and its founder James Reese on Tuesday. Violating the license law is a class B misdemeanor in North Dakota, though local prosecutors have not filed criminal charges.

The complaint against TigerSwan requests an injunction against the firm and its founder, which would prevent them from continuing to illegally operate as a security company in the state. At the time of the lawsuit, TigerSwan continued to deploy personnel “armed with semiautomatic rifles and sidearms” in North Dakota and was still monitoring “persons affiliated with the DAPL protests,” according to the court filing.

Two weeks prior to the initiation of the suit, The Intercept published a selection of more than 100 leaked situation reports prepared by TigerSwan for its client ETP, as well as additional documents obtained via public records request detailing the scale of TigerSwan’s security operation and its close collaboration with law enforcement. Communications to the security board obtained via public records requests show that as late as December, Reese, a former Army Delta Force commander, declared that TigerSwan was only “doing management and IT consulting for our client and doing no security work.” But internal company reports as well as an overview of TigerSwan’s operations that was shared with law enforcement show the company had been doing much more than that since September. Both sets of documents were included in the lawsuit.

The complaint describes invasive tactics used by TigerSwan, including “flyover photography,” “surveillance of social media accounts,” placing or attempting to place “undercover private security agents within the protest group,” and coordination with local law enforcement officials. The security operations overview obtained by The Intercept and cited in the suit states plainly, “All elements are engaged to provide security support to DAPL.”

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GOP: Fu*k Health Care & the Environment b/c We're Going to Die Anyway & Jesus Coming Back like Really Soon

Federal Monitor Says NYPD Stops and Disparities Gave Decreased

From [HERE] The number of reported street stops by New York City police officers has plunged and the racial disparity in stops may be narrowing, according to a new analysis by a federal monitor covered in The New York Times. Undertaken as part of a federal court order, the analysis shows that stops decreased from a peak of 685,724 in 2011 to a low of 22,563 in 2015. Focusing on the 2013-2015 period, the report notes, “the steep decline in stops … did disproportionately affect Blacks and Hispanics because they were the subject of the vast majority of stops.”

A multivariate regression model accounting for persistent racial disparities in stops revealed that the racial composition of neighborhoods still influenced stop rates. But another approach, which compared stop rates per reported crime on census blocks for different racial groups, found a reduction in stop disparities.

The report also found overall improvement in disparities in stop outcomes—such as the rate of frisks and use of force—and in hit rates—the rate at which a frisk or search identified a weapon or other contraband. But in 2015, Hispanics were more likely than non-Hispanics to be searched and arrested after stops and blacks were less likely to be found with weapons after being frisked compared to “Non-Hispanic Others” (Whites, Asians, and Native Americans).