Alleged white supremacist to stand trial for assault charges against two black men

Please note, a white supremacist is a white person (a racist) who practices racism against non-whites. Being a white supremacist has nothing to do with income, title, or status. It does not mean a white person belongs to the KKK, the Aryan Nation, or is covered with Nazi tattoos. A white supremacist can be a soccer mom, a businessman, or a US Senator if they are practicing racism against non-whites. Another term for a white supremacist is “racist white man” and “racist white woman.” [MORE] 

KTVU

An alleged member of the Bavarian Brotherhood white supremacist group was held over for trial Tuesday afternoon on charges of assaulting two black men in Santa Rosa in August.

Salvatore Bordessa, 33, of Windsor, and Aaron Welch, 27, of Clearlake were charged with a hate crime, a knife assault of the two men near the McDonald's restaurant on Santa Rosa Avenue on Aug. 26.

Welch stabbed one of the men in the arm and leg, and both men yelled racial slurs and pro-Bavarian Brotherhood slogans during the confrontation, according to testimony at Tuesday's preliminary hearing in Sonoma County Superior Court.

Welch pleaded guilty in January to two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon and admitted inflicting great bodily injury and hate crime and gang allegations. He faces 15 years in prison as part of the plea agreement.

Bordessa faces 16 years to life in prison if he is convicted of the nine counts and gang and hate crime allegations against him.

A third defendant, Vanessa Michaels, 25, of Novato, was ordered to stand trial Tuesday afternoon to the assaults and intimidating a witness. She allegedly grabbed the cellphone from the girlfriend of one of the victims who was trying to call police.

According to testimony at the preliminary hearing, the confrontation began when one of the victims told Bordessa and Welch to stop harassing and making derogatory comments to two women.

Santa Rosa police Sgt. John Cregan said at first the suspects and victims exchanged words, and the victims, one of whom is a Sonoma County corrections officer, fled to an auto repair parking lot when Bordessa and Welch, armed with knives, "squared off" toward them.

Cregan said Bordessa and Welch then found the two victims, who are brothers, and assaulted them.

Bordessa's attorney Joseph Passalacqua told Judge Gary Medvigy the confrontation began because one of the victims challenged Bordessa and Welch about their treatment of the two women. He said the assaults were not motivated by hate, but by the victim's comments toward Bordessa and Welch.

Michaels' attorney Rebecca Linkous said her client, who had dated Welch but broke up with him before the assault, is not a member of the Bavarian Brotherhood. She said Michaels didn't make any threats when she grabbed the cell phone from the victim's girlfriend.

At most, Michaels is guilty of a misdemeanor count of interfering with a witness, Linkous said.

Deputy District Attorney Jason Riehl asked Medvigy to hold both defendants over for trial on all the charges against them.

Michaels and Bordessa are scheduled to re-enter pleas on April 12.

Emails Detail Northern District's Use of Controversial Surveillance

Law.com

In 2011 federal prosecutors were working with magistrate judges in the Northern District to resolve concerns about the government's use of sophisticated surveillance technology known as a stingray to track people using their cellphone signals.

The problem, as described in an email from Criminal Division chief Miranda Kane, involved agents' use of stingray devices, also known as WIT or triggerfish, without obtaining specific permission from the court. Such devices, which simulate a cell tower, can be placed in a van and driven anywhere in order to pinpoint the location of wireless devices like cellphones or broadband Internet cards.

Now, Kane's May 2011 email, along with two responses, have emerged at the center of a controversy over the Justice Department's use of stingrays to track suspects, what magistrates are being told, and what legal standard applies to the warrants. The issue, like the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on GPS tracking, lies at the intersection of privacy and evolving technology.

Civil liberties advocates contend the emails obtained last month by the ACLU and submitted in a federal criminal case in Arizona show that federal agents in the Bay Area and perhaps elsewhere routinely used stingrays without informing the court.

"It's a smoking gun," said Hanni Fakhoury of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the organizations questioning the Justice Department's surveillance in the Arizona case. "It validates the exact argument we raised in our amicus brief that prosecutors weren't telling judges they were using stingrays."

Stingray devices raise privacy concerns in part because they are indiscriminate and draw information from all devices on the same network in a given area, Fakhoury said.

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag declined to comment. However, Justice Department lawyers in the Arizona case have defended the employment of a stingray in the investigation of Daniel Rigmaiden, a pro se defendant charged with perpetrating a multimillion-dollar tax fraud by filing false tax returns, including some in the names of dead people.

Rigmaiden's case is one of the first to test the constitutionality of stingray technology, which is relatively new and lacks clear legal precedent. Though the prosecution is in Arizona, key aspects of the investigation unfolded in the Northern District. Then-U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Seeborg issued the order under which agents employed the stingray device. That device was used to track Rigmaiden's broadband Internet card to a unit in a Santa Clara apartment complex.

The Northern District emails, written roughly three years after the Rigmaiden investigation, were released March 22 under a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU.

In her email, Kane urged prosecutors to be "consistent and forthright" regarding plans to use a stingray when they sought court approval for pen register devices, the more traditional means for tracking incoming and outgoing cellphone calls.

"As some of you may be aware, our office has been working closely with the magistrate judges in an effort to address their collective concerns regarding whether a pen register is sufficient to authorize the use of law enforcement's WIT technology," Kane stated. She added: "It has recently come to my attention that many agents are still using WIT technology in the field although the pen register application does not make that explicit."

Kane, who rejoined the U.S. attorney's office in late 2010 as part of Haag's management team, directed prosecutors to seek a supervisor's approval before requesting court authorization for a pen register and to review their requests from the prior six months to determine whether a stingray had been used.

Karen Beausey, then chief of narcotics prosecutions, responded that prosecutors should consider whether the initial intended purpose of the pen register was to use a stingray or whether agents later made that decision. (Beausey has since moved to the U.S. attorney's office in Boston.)

"And just to be super clear," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle Waldinger, "the agents may not use the term 'WIT' (or 'WITT') but rather may be using the term 'Triggerfish' or the term 'Stingray,' so please make sure that the agents know what you are referring to."

The emails raise questions about the practice of prosecutors and agents prior to 2011 and during the investigation of Rigmaiden, San Francisco ACLU attorney Linda Lye said in an interview.

"The email confirmed that what we thought in Rigmaiden, that the government was not being forthright, was part of a larger pattern that went on for at least three years," Lye said. "To the extent corrective actions have been taken that's obviously a necessary and welcome development."

U.S. District Judge David Campbell in Phoenix is considering the Northern District emails in connection with a motion to suppress evidence in Rigmaiden's case. The ACLU and EFF have joined Rigmaiden in arguing the use of stingray in his case violated the Fourth Amendment because Seeborg, now a U.S. district judge in San Francisco, was not specifically informed that stingray technology would be used. Seeborg issued an order in July 2008 directing Verizon Wireless to assist agents in ascertaining the physical location of a Verizon broadband access card that had been linked to the fraudulent transmissions.

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said it would be troubling if prosecutors did not inform Seeborg that stingray technology would be used to locate Rigmaiden's computer.

"There's a big difference between getting data from the provider and using this kind of technology on your own, and it doesn't appear in the Rigmaiden case that the investigators spelled out for the magistrate what they were going to be doing," Granick said. "That's a very serious problem."

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Israel launches air raids on Gaza

Aljazeera Israel has launched air raids on the Palestinian Gaza Strip, the first such attacks since a truce ended eight days of crossborder assaults in November. The Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday that its aircraft had targeted "two extensive terror sites" overnight and that "accurate hits were identified". The interior ministry in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip said planes had bombarded an open area in northern Gaza and that there were no injuries. Earlier, the Israeli military said Palestinians had launched three rockets towards Israel. A coalition of Salafist groups claimed its fighters had fired two rockets at Israel on Tuesday afternoon. The Mujahedeen Shura Council said in a statement received by the AFP news agency that its action was "part of our answer to the death of Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh". Abu Hamdiyeh, a 63-year-old prisoner from the occupied West Bank, had been suffering from throat cancer. His death on Tuesday morning sparked Palestinian anger, with officials blaming Israel for allegedly refusing to release him early on compassionate grounds. Israel and Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-mediated truce in November, after eight days of fighting, in which 170 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed. Israel launched the 2012 offensive with the declared aim of ending Palestinian rocket fire into its territory.

1300 Counter Protesters vs. 70 KKK in Memphis

Criminal Injustice: The Best Reporting on Wrongful Convictions

Propublica

In 1991, an unemployed printer named David Ranta was convicted of killing a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn.

Last week, Ranta was released from the maximum-security prison in which he’d spent nearly 22 years, after almost every piece of evidence used to convict him fell away. The New York Times reported that the lead detectives on the case “broke rule after rule” — they “kept few written records, coached a witness and took Mr. Ranta’s confession under what a judge described as highly dubious circumstances.” 

Last Friday, just a day after he was released, Ranta suffered a serious heart attack.

With Ranta’s case in mind, we’ve rounded up some of the best reporting on wrongful convictions.

CASE FLAWS

Trial By Fire, The New Yorker, September 2009
In 2004, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham, an unemployed mechanic from Corsicana who had been convicted of killing his three children 12 years earlier by setting fire to his house. But as The New Yorker’s David Grann reports, the arson investigation findings that the prosecutors used to convict Willingham were based on “junk science,” according to a highly acclaimed fire investigator. The jailhouse informant who testified against him was unstable and had a history of addiction and mental illness. The year after Willingham’s execution, a fire scientist hired by a state commission concurred that the original investigators had no scientific basis for claiming the fire was arson.

Are Memphis Prosecutors Trying to Send an Innocent Man Back to Death Row?, The Nation, March 2013
Timothy Terrell McKinney is facing his third trial for the murder of an off-duty police officer in Memphis. His first case was overturned after the prosecution suppressed evidence that questioned McKinney’s guilt. Multiple testimonies now suggest it would be near impossible for McKinney to have committed the murder. But as one local put it, “when it’s a police officer killed here in Memphis, you know, they quick to nail somebody.”

Defendants Left Unaware of Flaws Found in Cases, The Washington Post, April 2012
In the 1990s, reviews by the Justice Department found shoddy testing in FBI labs was producing unreliable evidence. But that news failed to make its way to defendants who may have been wrongfully convicted based on flawed forensics. “Hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration [or] a retrial,” the Washington Post found.

The Hardest Cases: When Children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive, ProPublica, June 2011
Our 2011 investigation with Frontline and NPR found mistakes made by coroners and medical examiners led to the wrongful conviction of numerous babysitters, parents and others for murdering children. Ernie Lopez may be one such case: he was convicted for murdering a 6-month-old girl, despite evidence that later suggested she may have died from a rare blood disease. (Lopez later agreed to a plea deal for a reduced charge.)

Death Row Justice Derailed, The Chicago Tribune, November 1999
The first part of an epic investigation by Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills of how Illinois had sent innocent men to death row. “Capital punishment in Illinois,” Armstrong and Mills reported, “is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken, a Tribune investigation has found.” The series helped convince Gov. George Ryan to put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois the next year, which remains in effect today.

House of Screams, The Chicago Reader, 1990
Over 20 years ago, journalist John Conroy broke a story that shook the foundation of Chicago’s criminal justice system. Conroy unearthed the routine torture tactics used by then-police commander Jon Burge — from suffocation to electric shocks — that resulted in numerous false confessions and wrongful convictions.

DNA EVIDENCE

The Innocent Man, Parts 1 and 2, Texas Monthly, November 2012
Michael Morton spent a quarter-century wrongfully behind bars for the brutal murder of his wife, Christine. In a two-part investigation, journalist Pamela Colloff reconstructs the exhausting years spent fighting for his innocence: from the fight for DNA testing to his battered relationship with his son.

Who Shot Valerie Finley?, Boston Review, March 2013
An examination of convictions overturned by DNA testing found three-quarters involved mistaken eyewitness identification. The Boston Review examines the case against Rodney Stanberry, accused of shooting 29-year-old Valerie Finley. Finley identified Stanberry as her shooter after awaking in the hospital from a coma. Stanberry was convicted, despite an alibi corroborated by at least six other testimonies. But without DNA evidence, his innocence has been nearly impossible to prove.

A Blind Faith in Eyewitnesses, The Dallas Morning News, October 2008
Wiley Fountain spent 15 years in prison after his rape conviction before DNA testing proved his innocence in 2002. The Dallas Morning News examined his case and those of 18 other exonerated men in Dallas County — which led the nation in DNA exonerations. Of the 19 cases, 18 of them were based on eyewitness testimony, which frequently convinces juries but is often fatally flawed.

DNA Evidence Exonerates Louisiana Death Row Inmate, The Washington Post, September 2012
Damon Thibodeaux, a deckhand on a Mississippi River workboat, spent more than 15 years in solitary confinement on death row in Louisiana, convicted of the rape and murder of his 14-year-old cousin. In September, Douglas A. Blackmon reports, he “became the 300th wrongly convicted person and 18th death-row inmate exonerated in the United States substantially on the basis of DNA evidence.”

AFTER INCARCERATION

Freed Prisoners Lose Their Innocence, The Wisconsin State Journal, December 2011
Prisoners who are exonerated typically don’t receive the same support — a parole officer, mental health treatment, help finding employment — after they’re released that other inmates do, which can make for a hard readjustment. Take Forest Shomberg, The Wisconsin State Journal reports spent six years in jail before a judge overturned his sexual assault conviction on the basis of DNA evidence. But two years later, he was back in prison with a yearlong sentence after a suicide attempt.

The Exonerated, Texas Monthly, November 2008
By 2008, Texas had exonerated 37 men — who had served a combined 525 years in prison — on the basis of DNA evidence. Texas Monthly’s Michael Hall tracked down 32 of them: One has tried to kill himself three time since being released. Half a dozen of them spent more than two decades in prison. One man, James Waller, works in counseling now. “Send me the worst people they got,” he told Hall, “and I can give them a story where they will want to live again.”

Larry Peterson: Beyond Exoneration, NPR, June 2007
NPR’s Robert Siegel spent two years following the case of Larry Peterson, who was convicted of raping and murdering 25-year-old Jacqueline Harrison in 1989. Peterson spent almost 18 years in jail before being freed on the basis of DNA evidence. But two years after his release, Peterson was unemployed and was only beginning the long battle for restitution for his time in prison. And Patricia Harrison, Jacqueline’s sister, still believes he did it. “If I had my way, he’d be dead,” she told Siegel.

Arizona Arson Case Featured on 60 Minutes - Black Man Wrongfully Convicted

Innocence Blog

Watch the full episode.

Sunday night’s episode of CBS’ 60 Minutes featured a segment on Louis Taylor, a man who was wrongfully convicted of setting the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson, Arizona which took the lives of 29 people. 

Taylor, who is represented by the Arizona Justice Project, has maintained his innocence for more than 40 years. On the night of the fire, 16-year-old Taylor arrived at the hotel to attend a Christmas party. He was arrested shortly after by police who claimed he had set the fire as a distraction so he could burglarize hotel rooms.
 
The fire science that was used by investigators in 1970 that led them to label the fire as arson has changed significantly. The Arizona Justice Project continues to focus on the flawed fire science at the heart of the case. In the episode, fire science expert John Lentini explains the limitations of fire investigation to 60 Minutes. 

“It has been very common for people to start with the proposition that the fire is set. If they can’t find an innocent cause for it, they say, well somebody must have set it. That presumes that we’re good enough fire investigators that we can find the cause of every fire and that’s simply not true.”

Old Newspapers Shed New Light On Emmett Till Murder

NPR

New details about one of Mississippi's most infamous murders are coming to light — more than a half-century later. The death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who allegedly whistled at a white woman, helped spark the civil rights movement.

Till lived in Chicago, and was visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was murdered. His body was mutilated and dumped into a river. The accused were the woman's husband and her half-brother, and their trial drew reporters from both the white and black press.

Researchers have long studied the court proceedings. Among them, Davis Houck, a professor at Florida State University and co-author of a book about the media's coverage of the trial.

It wasn't until a few years ago, however, that Houck learned another black paper — the St. Louis Argus — also had journalists there. But the paper's archive from that time had gone missing.

So he began working with his students to track down the Argus. It was one frustrating dead end after another, as microfilms from that time didn't contain the trial coverage. Then, just a few days ago, they caught a break. Houck and his students figured out the missing issues were in a state historical archive in Missouri.

"This is just going to be another layer for us to process," he says. "Another layer of what it was like to be black in the Jim Crow South covering this case."

Houck says he still has to go through the documents to see if the paper scored an exclusive interview with anyone or if it offers any new piece of evidence at all.

The discovery is already a treasure trove, however, with never-before-seen pictures of the NAACP's Medgar Evers as well as articles written during the trial and long forgotten. Houck says he's savoring the find and taking his time to read through the new discovery. His search, though, is not done yet.

"There's a couple of Canadian newspapers and a London newspaper we're still searching for, and one from New York, actually, too," he says. "So I'm encouraging all the folks who study civil rights history, let's keep looking."

Egyptian comic arrested for insulting Pharaoh (president)

Smh

Egypt's public prosecutor has ordered the arrest of popular satirist Bassem Youssef over alleged insults to Islam and to President Mohamed Mursi, in the latest clampdown on critical media.

Judicial sources said several complaints had been filed against Youssef, whose razor-sharp humour – delivered on his weekly television program Albernameg (The Show) – has spared few public figures.

He is accused of offending Islam through "making fun of the prayer ritual" on his show, and of insulting Dr Mursi by "making fun of his international standing", the sources said.

In one of the suits filed against him, the plaintiff asked that legal measures be taken against Youssef to discourage others from following his example, a source said.

Youssef confirmed a warrant had been issued against him.

"The warrant against me is true. I will head to the public prosecutor's office tomorrow [Sunday] unless they send me a police car today and help me save on transport," he wrote on his Twitter account.

Dubbed the Egyptian answer to Jon Stewart, the heart surgeon-turned-comedian has repeatedly poked fun at the ruling Islamists and Dr Mursi in particular.

He shot to fame after starting his satirical show on the internet shortly after the 18-day uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011, attracting more than 5 million views after only seven episodes.

He was signed up by private satellite television channel ONTV, before moving to another channel, CBC, to front the first Egyptian television show to be filmed before a live studio audience.

Youssef and his cast of sidekicks have become household names in Egypt with their merciless critique of public figures and fearless humour.

Perhaps the biggest appeal has been Youssef's ability to hold a mirror up to those in power, starting with Mubarak's entourage, followed by the military council that ruled after his downfall and finally Dr Mursi, who was elected in June.

But post-revolutionary media freedoms have proved no laughing matter.

Youssef now joins the ranks of several colleagues in the media who face charges of insulting the president.

The soaring number of legal complaints against journalists has cast doubt on Dr Mursi's commitment to freedom of expression – a key demand of the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak.

Under Egypt's legal system, complaints are filed to the public prosecutor, who decides whether there is enough evidence to refer the case to trial. Suspects can be detained during this stage of investigation.

Rights lawyers say there have been four times as many lawsuits for insulting the president under Dr Mursi than during the entire 30 years that Mubarak ruled.

Maryland Senate Committee to Vote on Legislation That Would Reverse Progress in Delivery of Indigent Defense Services

NACDL

In this, the 50th anniversary year of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee is expected to vote early next week on legislation that would reverse progress the state has made in the delivery of defense services to indigent Marylanders accused of a crime. If passed, the measure would then move to the full Senate.

HB 153 was already adopted by the House of Delegates and was the subject of a hearing before this Senate committee on Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at which John Gross, Indigent Defense Counsel at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), testified. The legislation’s primary purpose is the erection of bureaucratic, procedural hurdles for Marylanders to secure and retain counsel when they are accused of a crime and cannot afford an attorney. Specifically, under Maryland’s current Public Defender Act, an indigent accused is entitled to court-appointed counsel when they go before a district court judge for a bail hearing (which itself can mean an accused is behind bars for up to 72 hours without a lawyer). If HB 153 becomes law, those defendants who had already qualified for court-appointed counsel will lose that counsel upon being released on their own recognizance or posting bail, and will have to duplicate the very same qualification process with the Office of the Public Defender.

Foreign aid: A blessing or a curse?

Aljazeera Most people would agree that donating money to a good cause is a positive thing. But, looking deeper into aid and development, a more complex picture emerges. In some cases, foreign aid has been more damaging than helpful - undermining local economies, prolonging wars and triggering corruption. Africa is more dependent on aid than any other continent and its citizens have had little choice about whether to accept it or not. Is it possible that we could see Africa taking charge of its own future instead of being the passive recipient of aid? This week, leaders from five of the world’s leading emerging economies, also known as the BRICS group, met in South Africa to discuss how south-to-south partnerships can free developing countries from the shackles of aid and western economic dominance. First guest Dr Stuenkel has taught global governance at leading research institutions including the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. He explains the origins of the BRICS grouping and its relevance in modern economics and politics. Is BRICS a reaction to the western-dominated IMF? And is it a viable model for development that would aid the region? “There's no way around the emerging powers today .... If you look into the future there will no solution to any problem without China, India and the other emerging powers .... I think the presence of emerging powers in Africa has made an enormous difference, and in a way the West has rediscovered Africa in response to China’s, India’s, Brazil’s growing presence in Africa. So in a sense I think the bank will also allow emerging powers to develop new ideas and practices that are difficult to implement in the existing institutions.” Second guest Moeletsi Mbeki is a vocal critic of South Africa and other African governments and the author of Advocates for change: How to overcome Africa’s challenges. His brother Thabo Mbeki was the second president of South Africa after Nelson Mandela. Mbeki explains that China has access to high levels of skills in Africa in industries such as mining and that problems arise when these relationships are not regulated. “I think there is a great deal of exaggeration about China’s relations with African countries. I must say the regulations of the African countries are really the problem, rather than China as such,” he says. Third guest Joanna Kerr heads up ActionAid International, one of the world’s most influential NGOs. The organisation is present in over 45 countries and employs thousands of people worldwide. Redi asks her if aid is addictive to underdeveloped countries. “Aid is going to exist for the current moment … Not all aid is the same, there are very different forms of aid … we refer to real aid, aid that actually tackles poverty, that which promotes human rights,” explains Kerr. The three guests discuss how if aid is still necessary if partnerships like BRICS continue to strengthen and grow. On this episode of South2North, Redi explores the different facets of giving and finds out why international aid as we see it today could become a practice of the past.

Kansas (White Party) Seeks compulsory drug tests for welfare and unemployment recipients

RT.com

Two bills are currently moving through state legislatures in Texas and Kansas which would tie welfare benefits to mandatory drug testing. A recently-passed Kansas bill goes a step further, requiring drug tests for unemployment recipients as well.

Previous attempts by state legislatures to welfare benefits to drug screening in both Florida and Georgia failed, because they called for testing regardless of whether an individual recipient appeared to be a drug user.

Other states that unsuccessfully explored drug testing with unemployment services include New Jersey and Indiana, and the policy was even attempted within a Republican plan for the federal extension of unemployment benefits in 2012, which would have empowered individual states to drug screen prior to disbursing unemployment benefits.

The argument invoked by legislators looking to integrate drug testing into either or both unemployment and welfare is to prevent taxpayer money from being used to purchase illegal drugs. Meanwhile, opponents such as the ACLU argue that such efforts are based on the erroneous assumption that welfare recipients purchase and consume drugs at a higher percentage than the general population.

In 2011, Florida’s Governor Rick Scott successfully stumped for mandatory drug screenings of all recipients of the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), though the ACLU was quick to point out that only 2 per cent of drug tests came back positive before a federal judge blocked the law. In Florida’s case, TANF applicants were also responsible for paying for their own drug screening, to be reimbursed later with tax payer money, assuming the test came back negative.

In the case of Florida’s program, US District Judge Mary Scriven ruled that mandatory drug testing violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. In an apparent attempt to sidestep the Constitutional issue, both bills in Kansas and Texas requires “reasonable suspicion” for a search.

Senate Bill 149 in Kansas, for example, states that such reasonable suspicion would be based on factors “including, but not limited to, an applicant’s or recipient’s demeanor, missed appointments and arrest or other police records, previous employment or application for employment in an occupation or industry that regularly conducts drug screening, termination from previous employment due to use of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog or prior drug screening records of the applicant or recipient indicating use of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog.”

In Texas, Senate Bill 11 would require applicants to TANF assistance to be screened for drug use if they appear to be using drugs or if their records include previous drug convictions. In Kansas, on the other hand, anyone convicted of a drug felony after July would be ineligible to receive welfare for five years, and a second drug conviction would represent a lifelong ban. In a surprise move, the bill recently approved by the Kansas House of Representatives would also require drug testing for members of the state legislature.

As this article was published, it seemed likely that both the Kansas and Texas bills would be passed, with Governor Rick Perry throwing his support behind such legislation in Texas. It remains to be seen whether legal challenges would be mounted against the new laws, despite their emphasis on “reasonable suspicion.”

A Tribute to Chinua Achebe

BlackFeminists

It’s October 2008, and I’m in my first year of an English Literature degree. We are slowly working our way through the great works of the English literary canon- which peculiarly fetishises the writings of dead white men. This week’s book is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It’s a deeply unsettling novel, soaked in white supremacy, by an author dedicated to denigrating blackness in all its forms.

There’s a lot than can be said about the politics of canonized literature. These are the books that are taught over and over again in classrooms across the west. Their elevated status encourages us to accept their content uncritically. This book, set in the year 1899, was predictable in its race hate, but that didn’t make it any less shocking. Black skinned people were violently ‘othered’ and repeatedly reduced to the status of an animal. The novella’s protagonist would stare into black skinned brown eyes and struggle to find humanity. This book painted us as bestial. And there was I, of African heritage, one of two black students in a lecture hall of roughly 100, feeling uncomfortable, feeling ashamed. We were expected to discuss the literary merit of a text that I’d now consider hate speech.

We were encouraged to seek out literacy criticism applicable to the text. That’s when I came across Chinua Achebe’s essay- ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

Every now and then the power of the written word proves itself when you stumble across a writer who speaks to you. That’s why I’ve always liked literature- ideas suspended in time and space are as relevant now as the day the words were written, and they will continue to be long after an author passes away.  There are few writers whose work shapes your understanding of the world, and Chinua Achebe did that for me.

Achebe was one of the greatest literary thinkers of the past century, who contributed greatly to a shifting of the accepted boundaries of representations of race in literature. And that essay was one that rests alongside the legendary status of works such as Orientalism by Edward Said.

The essay was the literary equivalent of sticking his neck out, exposing Joseph Conrad for the racist he is.  ‘Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’’ smashed apart white supremacist, euro centric thinking that was too often accepted as the norm. His work inspired so many influential critical race writers after him. Toni Morrison cites Achebe as one of the writers who inspired her work.

He wrote about the danger of not owning your own stories. Born into an African diaspora I found myself submerged daily in narratives that othered me. We can critique, but to own our own narratives, we must create. With his writing, Achebe achieved this.

We rely on thinkers who came before us to ignite a curiosity about the status quo. That questioning takes courage, because the repercussions can be violently adverse. Writers like Achebe and Morrison walked a difficult terrain that made it easier for people like me to speak about our understanding of race and racism without fear. Last week he died, aged 82. He left a legacy and I for one am indebted to him.

White New Orleans Mayor Tries to Deceive: Black on Black Crime is Caused by White Supremacy/Racism

"Failing to comprehend the environmental context of the white supremacy system and its ultimate goal of white genetic survival, Black people also fail to grasp the deeper sense of what actually is occurring in front of our eyes. We do not realize that the massive deaths of Black males constitute the genocide of Black people (as it takes Black males to make Black babies and ensure future Black generations).

The destruction of Black males for the purpose of white genetic survival is the reason behind the ever increasing disparity between the number of Black females entering and graduating from high schools and institutions of higher education compared to the far lesser number of Black males. This becomes an additional facet of Black genocide. Furthermore, white genetic survival is the dynamic behind the high incarceration rate of Black males in the U.S., which is second only to that of South Africa. The high rate of Black male incarceration contributes in genocidal fashion to the prevention of Black births and the Black male-supported development of all Black children, particularly boys." - Cress Welsing

Nola

The dustup between Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the local NAACP, culminating in simultaneous but separate community meetings on Monday evening, came down to this: whether it's more important for New Orleans to be talking about alleged racial profiling by police officers or how to halt the violence that claims so many of the city's young black men every year.

Ultimately, the mayor and civil rights leaders agreed to disagree.

Landrieu spoke Monday at First Emmanuel Baptist Church in Central City, opening the microphone to residents for about 90 minutes and then offering a forceful defense of his efforts to improve the NOPD and prioritize cutting the city's murder rate, while the NAACP called residents to the Christian Unity Baptist Church in Treme to discuss profiling. 

Danatus King, head of the NAACP's local branch, got the mayor's office last week to agree to hold a meeting, but then accused Landrieu of attempting to broaden the discussion to include crime and other issues, so both sides met at about 6 p.m. but at different venues.

"The community has one purpose and that's to address the issue of racial profiling," said King. "The mayor's meeting is going to cover a myriad of issues. The community does not want to discuss various issues tonight."

As it happened, the mayor and Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas offered brief introductory remarks and then opened the floor to comments. The mayor's office placed no time limits on speakers, touching off a wide-ranging discussion that hit on everything from youth programs to the city's blight problem and even a brief aside about the ancient Mayan calendar.

But after about a dozen speakers, Landrieu stood and defended his administration's approach to crime, conceding deep and lingering flaws at the police department, but also aiming obvious frustration at the NAACP and others for not giving him more time on reform and for shifting the focus away from the city's stubborn murder problem.

Alluding to 5-year-old Briana Allen and other recent murder victims, Landrieu pointed out that of 13,000 people murdered in the United States last year, about 7,000 were young African-American men killed by other African-American men, and that about 88 percent of them knew each other.

"Not everybody wakes up or gets upset or yells for community meetings about that, and that bothers me," Landrieu said. "That's not that all the other issues raised here tonight are not important, but if there is one issue that will save the city of New Orleans, it is saving our children, saving our sons."

He added: "If we turn in on ourselves, if we fight each other, if we blame rather than find the answer, we are never going to find a way out."

Landrieu agreed "there is no place for racial profiling in this city" and that police officers should "be able to deal with somebody respectfully."

And he conceded the police department's failings. "It should not come as a surprise to anybody here that this is not a perfect police department," he said. "This department hasn't been perfect for a long time. This department hasn't been well hired, well trained, well supervised, well commanded for a very long time."

But reform "can't happen overnight," and the "time we spend yelling at each other, the time we spend screaming at each other, the time we spend not being constructive and moving to a positive place ... is time we don't spend doing everything we need to do," he said.

Still, across town, some residents who turned out for the NAACP's meeting said they felt slighted, calling for a unified voice against racial profiling. Longtime community activist Dyan "Mama D" French Cole said, "If I had a ride, I'd go uptown and tell Mitch Landrieu that the Bible tells you how to treat your neighbor."

Norris Henderson, who leads a group called V.O.T.E. that advocates on behalf of the formerly incarcerated, compared the community's relationship with Landrieu to a marriage. "We're kind of like wedded to this mayor, whether we voted for him or not," he said. "So our demand is like, 'Hey, buddy, you work for us.'"

Landrieu has made police reform and the city's crime rate the focus of his first term as mayor, drawing up a detailed plan for police improvements and negotiating with the U.S. Justice Department on bringing the NOPD up to constitutional standards. But a pair of reports earlier this month brought attention back to the issue of racial profiling as it relates to the department's "stop and frisk" policies, with the city's independent inspector general saying that police keep too little information to draw firm conclusions about whether profiling goes on, and the independent police monitor calling for additional training to prevent discrimination.

The NOPD generates "field interview cards" when officers stop and question suspicious individuals, recording names and personal information for a central database of potential criminals, but groups like the NAACP question whether police too often single out African-American men as "suspicious." 

Stephen Parker, former chief of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Unit, told the audience at Christian Unity Baptist that the federal consent decree meant to reform the NOPD focuses on racial profiling. 

And Susan Huston, the independent police monitor, called for a rally at the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee meeting Wednesday at 2 p.m. in council chambers.

The discussion at First Emmanuel Baptist, where Landrieu and Serpas sat on folding chairs in front of the pulpit, a group of white-shirted police captains behind them in the choir section, underscored a range of concerns, both about racial attitudes among police officers and the city's crime problem.

Michael W. Dummett scolded the mayor for staying silent after a surveillance camera captured a group of white plain-clothes State Police officers wrestling two black teenagers to the ground in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras.

"I was looking for your leadership," Dummett said. "We didn't hear anything."

Others defended the mayor and his police chief, arguing that whatever racial biases exist, violent crime is the real problem confronting the black community in New Orleans.

"In this city right now, criminals are running rampant," said Rev. A. Wallace, who gestured toward Landrieu and said, "You come in here and vilify this man, vilify these officers," but "they're trying to prevent crime."

On the other hand, Sharon Alexis, a social worker, said racial profiling can't be "swept under the rug just because there is crime."

But she suggested that the best way to resolve the issue may be to put more resources into improving the lives of young black men in New Orleans before they encounter the police.

"Where are the resources that are going to change the profiles of the young men that you have to face every day?" Alexis asked. "We must break this cycle of poverty. God has plans for us, and it's not to be in a wheelchair." 

Racial intimidation incidents at Grand Haven High School the focus of parent forum

Mlive

A "parent forum" to discuss racial incidents at Grand Haven High School has been scheduled for tonight.

The Lakeshore Alliance for Ethnic Diversity is hosting the forum that comes less than a month after a freshman detailed several incidents of racism from other students. The forum will be 7 p.m. today, March 26 at the high school's performing arts center.

Katie Bridgeforth's family contacted the U.S. Department of Education, which is conducting a civil rights investigation into the matter. Bridgeforth, who is bi-racial, said she has endured racist comments and sexual threats on the school bus, as well as racist comments at school where students have worn KKK-type hats.

The district confirmed six separate incidents of racial intimidation this year that resulted in the punishment of six students. It also vowed to work with the Lakeshore Alliance for Ethnic Diversity to address attitudes in the school, and in the community at large.

Killer Zimmerman's Brother directs racist tweets to the NAACP (the Zimmermans are White People)

NewsOne and Examiner

On March 24, 2013 Robert Zimmerman, the brother of the accused murderer of Trayvon Martin tweeted an image of De'Marquis Kareem Elkins along side the image of Martin. He sent the tweet to several recipients on Twitter including the NAACP, NRA and film-maker Michael Moore. Elkins is the 17-year-old arrested along with a 10-year-old in the shooting of an infant in a stroller in Brunswick, GA earlier this week. The Zimmermans are white people. 

The image contained the words:

"A picture speaks a thousand words. Any questions?"

In the Brunswick shooting, the mother of the teen along with his aunt were arrested on today in connection with the case. The tweet was sent to suggest that Trayvon Martin and De'Marquis Elkins were both of the same mindset. Other than connecting them in an image posted on Twitter, the only similarities are the fact that they both were African-American youths around the age of 17.

In the Tweet Zimmerman stated:

"1 of those pics is a person who may have murdered @ point-blank range, the other: a person who gave every indication they prob would've."

Robert's brother George is facing second-degree murder charges for the Feb. 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman pleaded not guilty in the case on the grounds of self defense. The case gained national attention due to the Florida "Stand Your Ground" law of which Zimmerman was original released by the Sanford Police Dept.

For Robert Zimmerman to compare a kid walking home with a bag of Skittles and a can of ice tea to a cold-blooded murderer, only causes people to imagine that the correct similarity would have been his own brother.

Medina, White city manager must pay $2M to fired Chinese American police chief over racial bias

Patch.com

Race played a role in the way that former Medina Police Chief Jeffrey Chen was treated when he was ousted from his position by City Manager Donna Hanson, a jury decided on Tuesday.

Jeffrey Chen, the fomer police chief of Medina, just south of Kirkland, who was ousted two years ago, has won his federal bias lawsuit against Medina City Manager Donna Hanson and the City of Medina.

The jury of four men and four women decided that race played a factor in the way that Chen was treated by Hanson, and that race played a factor in his dismissal in April 2011.

The jury awarded Chen $2 million, including $285,000 in back pay, $1.65 million in loss of income from his inability to find employment in law enforcement, and $100,000 in emotional damages. The jury also said that Hanson must pay $25,000 in punitive damages.

Chen's attorney Marianne Jones made the argument that Hanson was racist against Chen, and treated him with suspicion and differently from other employees, culminating in his firing in 2011. 

Attorney Suzanne Michael, representing Hanson and the city of Medina, argued that Chen abused his power at the city and tried to undermine Hanson, who fired Chen after he used another employee's login information to get access to all the city emails.

Along with the back pay of $237,900 and back benefits of $47,580, loss of income from his inability to find employment at $1.65 million, and emotional and punitive damages, Chen had asked for reinstatement of his position as Police Chief at Medina.

In Medina, where Chen was hired in 2001 as captain and promoted to chief in 2004, he initially resigned Dec. 17, 2010. Less than two weeks after, he rescinded his resignation. However, rather than reinstate Chen, Hanson put him on administrative leave and launched an investigation of him.

That culminated in her firing him about four months later, saying that he violated the city's codes of conduct, saying that he lied during two city investigations, abusing his position in voiding some tickets, making improper purchases and improperly accessing the city’s email archives.

Chen refuted the allegations, and defended himself at the time, and in court over the past two weeks.

Many residents disagreed with the action, and dozens of residents spoke up for Chen at City Council meetings in his support.

The bias suit cited instances in which Chen and other witnesses say that city officials and employees made derogatory statements about blacks and Asians, and made disparaging statements to Chen regarding his Chinese-American background.

Chen states that Hanson was less communicative with him than she was with non-minority employees and said she had failed to discipline employees for making derogatory racial statements to Chen and others.

Jones also told jurors when Hanson would be out of town, she appointed someone else as acting city manager, instead of the police chief, which previous city managers had done.

Chen's attorney Marianne Jones was able to exclude from testimony Chen's employment with the Seattle Police Department. Chen left the Seattle Police Department in 2001 after Seattle began an investigation that began over travel expenses to a conference in Las Vegas, in which he billed the department $382. The matter was settled when Chen quit the Seattle PD before the investigation was completed.

White Governor of Virginia signs bill mandating Jim Crow photo ID to vote

Timesonline

A measure requiring Virginia voters to bring photo identification with them to the polls will become law next year.

Gov. Bob McDonnell has signed the election bill that his fellow Republicans said was a safeguard against voter fraud. Democrats bitterly denounced the legislation as a Jim Crow-era tactic to suppress the votes of the elderly, minorities and the underprivileged.

The legislation provides for a free valid ID with the bearer's photo to any registered voter who lacks one.

Along with signing the legislation, McDonnell issued an executive order directing the State Board of Elections to implement a public education program to tell voters about the new requirement before the 2014 congressional and U.S. Senate elections.

Coin Operated "Black" Mayor of DC Turning Youth Away From Homeless Shelters Despite $400 Million Budget Surplus

 

ThinkProgress

Homeless youth in Washington D.C. are being turned away in droves from shelters after the city slashed its budget for homeless children’s services.

In its latest budget, the city enjoys a $417 million budget surplus, yet they cut funding for youth homeless shelters by $700,000 and overall homeless services by $7 million. Mayor Vincent Gray has announced he will keep the surplus in the city’s savings account, which will now total $1.5 billion.

D.C.’s budget cuts are having a disastrous impact on the city’s homeless. As the Washington Post details, many youth are being turned away from shelters who no longer have the budget to accomodate them.

Counselors at one of the city’s largest shelters for homeless youths have had to turn away more than 80 unaccompanied children — some as young as 12 or 13 — who came to them for help in the past six weeks after the city cut more than $700,000 from the shelter’s budget. [...]

For workers on the ground, the effect of lost — or redirected — money has been clear and immediate. One counselor at Sasha Bruce House recalled trying to counsel a sobbing teen seeking a place to sleep after her mother lost the family apartment, and being able to do little to help.

“To not be able to help somebody and know there is not any other option for them — it’s heartbreaking, it’s awful,” said Gina Bulett, the primary counselor. The program now just has five emergency beds, down from 16 last year, but houses dozens more in apartments.

The city’s cuts to homeless services come at a particular inopportune time as the number of people living on the streets continues to increase. A survey last year found 6,954 homeless people in our nation’s capital, a 6 percent increase from the year prior. It’s no surprise then, with increased demand and less funding for shelter beds, that the end result is scores of homeless individuals being turned away from shelters. One notable exception was two months ago when D.C. kept its shelters open throughout inauguration weekend, perhaps in an attempt to hide its homeless population from hundreds of thousands of revelers in town.

Charles M., a soft-spoken middle-aged man living in Washington D.C., was troubled by the budget cuts. “The daily struggle to get rest supersedes schooling, work, and even most health concerns,” he told ThinkProgress. Charles would know. When he was a young man, he founded a homeless shelter in Rhode Island. Now, decades later, Charles, who fell on hard times during the recent financial crisis, finds himself presently homeless. “Without a safe place to sleep,” he notes, “most other needs cannot be addressed, either by service providers or by the homeless person themselves.”

When money’s tight, services for homeless people are often the first items axed from a city’s budget. So what’s D.C.’s excuse now that times are good?

Guantanamo Hunger Strike Continues - No Legal Basis for Holding Prisoners

TheRealNews

The reasons for the hunger strike are--the main reason, apparently--and I wasn't down there, but other attorneys were--was really a misuse by the military of the Quran, the way they either looked for it or inspected it or cleaned it, which always causes issues among the Muslim population at Guantanamo. Second issue is, apparently, deteriorating conditions at Guantanamo. A third issue, which is obvious, is, as I said, 166 people who may be there forever, who may have the only way of getting out of there as being death--and 86 of those, as I said, are clear. But there is no way out. And the hunger strike is a way of bringing attention to it.

Now, you might ask at this point: why--considering Obama promised to close it within a day or two of taking office over four years ago, why hasn't he closed it? He wrote an executive order. It says, close it in a year. And that would have made it closed in 2010, January 20, 21. It was one of his first acts of office in doing so. And somehow, over three years later, it has not been closed. And, in fact, there's no plans for even getting another person out of it.

There are a number of reasons why nothing has happened to close Guantanamo. I put most of them at Obama's feet. But, of course, there's antediluvians in our Congress and in our government.

But let's go through what those three reasons are. The first is Obama showed tremendous weakness even after signing the executive order saying it should be closed. The first case that came to him was a few weeks after he was in office, the case of the Uyghurs, Muslims from Western China. They had been caught, caught, captured--taken prisoner is the better word--and some kind of bribes in Afghanistan, brought to Guantanamo. But it was soon realized that they hadn't done anything and they shouldn't be there. The federal court ordered them released into the United States. The Uyghur community in Washington said, we'll take them. No risk to anybody. Obama gets clay feet, cold feet, whatever kind of feet you want to call them, and says, I'm not going to bring them into the United States; it's I who decide that; the court doesn't. At that point, Obama looks incredibly weak on this issue.

Then what happens is Congress gets into the issue. Congress passes, over the last three years, various versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, which we've talked about on this show before, that has to do with Americans and whether they can be captured and all that. It also has to do with how our military's supported. But it also has provisions about Guantanamo, and it says that any person transferred from Guantanamo--not just to the United States; you can't do that at all under the NDAA--but to another country, you have to notify Congress 30 days in advance. And there has to be a certification by the attorney general of various factors, that the person is not a danger, etc. Well, you know, Obama could tomorrow direct his attorney general to take the 86, certify each one, and give notice to Congress, and transfer them. It doesn't say Congress is going to stop it; it just requires his certification. But has Obama done it once? Has he certified one person to be transferred out of Guantanamo under the NDAA? The answer is no.

JAY: Michael, I don't get--according to the Obama administration, what is the legal basis for keeping people who have been cleared in jail?

RATNER: Paul, the answer is: there is no legal basis, none at all. Under even their worst legal scenarios that they make up, they're obviously--if they were prisoners under criminal law, they're not charged with anything, they should be out. If they were held under the laws of war as, you know, prisoners of war or captives in a war, then they could be held to the end of war. But they're not being held as that, because they're not considered to be combatants or captives. They were cleared of any of that. So there's no reason under military law. And there's no reason under what we call the third way, the U.S. idea that it can pick up terrorists--quote, "terrorists"--anywhere in the world and hold them indefinitely. They're not under that category.

So there is absolutely no legal basis. The courts know there's no legal basis. The courts have on occasion ordered them to be released, that they're ignored by the administration. The administration says it rules where people go. Congress has now gotten in the act, saying they have to be certified. As I said, the second basis for releasing them would be a certification. Obama has not done that and hasn't done that.

The third reason they have been held up is a number of them are from Yemen. Perhaps half of them are from Yemen. Yemen is a country, according to our government, that's unstable, that has problems. And even though 56 of the cleared people are from Yemen and have been cleared, they're not being sent to Yemen. Obama put a moratorium on sending anyone to Yemen, even though they're as innocent as you and I going to Yemen. Somehow they fear that if they go to Yemen, they'll become terrorists or something like that. I don't know. But there's a moratorium on Yemen.

So if you look at the three things, it's Obama's weakness, it's Congress, which made it difficult and requires a certification, which Obama has so far not been willing to do, and there's Obama having a moratorium on sending people to Yemen.

So here we sit with 186 people [sic] at Guantanamo, 86 on no charges, and the world should be screaming. I mean, I don't understand it. And the question is: what are we going to do about it?

There is some activity. There's--the Center for Constitutional Rights has a number of actions on the website. But also, starting on March 24, there's a one-week hunger strike here in solidarity in the United States and around the world. The group is called Witness Against Torture. Their website is WitnessTorture.org. And you can go to that site. There's a number of actions you can take, including joining in a seven-day hunger strike, or even missing a meal, certainly writing letters and all of that, but actually showing your outrage.

I mean, we used to ask ourselves--and, of course, it's not close to what happened in places like Germany or Chile or other places, but where was the population while this was going on, while a human outrage is going on? And each of us has to ask ourselves. People stranded and left forever in an offshore prison, and the United States population and its media is completely passive about it. [MORE]

Black Man Exonerated after Wrongful Conviction to be Featured on 60 Minutes

InnocenceBlog

Sunday, March 24 at 7:00 p.m. California Innocence Project client Brian Banks will appear on CBS’ 60 Minutes to talk about his experience of wrongful conviction and how it derailed his future as an NFL hopeful. Banks spent five years in prison and another five as a registered sex offender after being wrongfully convicted of raping a classmate who eventually admitted that she made up the story.
 
Banks recorded their conversations and took the evidence to the California Innocence Project. Director Justin Brooks presented prosecutors with the project’s findings, and they agreed the case should be dismissed.
 
For more about the segment.
 
Read more about the Banks case.