US Iraq War Veteran Arrested Over Florida Airport Shooting

Florida Supreme Court issues order declaring death penalty procedure unconstitutional

[JURIST]

The Florida Supreme Court [official website] issued a one-paragraph order Wednesday informing judges and prosecutors that the state's death penalty procedure is unconstitutional, marking the second such order in three months. Attorney General Pam Bondi [official website] argued that, although the court ruled the statute unconstitutional in October [JURIST report], prosecutors should be able to apply the death penalty to pending trails so long as the jury voted unanimously. Wednesday's 5-2 ruling concluded that, counter to Bondi's argument, the unconstitutionality of the death penalty will universally prevent it from being applicable to all pending prosecution. At 1 PM ET on Wednesday afternoon, the court removed the order from its website due to a "clerical error," according to a court spokesman. The spokesman did not indicate if or when the order would be reissued. [MORE]

No Retrial for Black Man Falsely Arrested & Assaulted by White BART Cops in Racially Charged Incident

KQUED and [MORE]

Prosecutors declined Friday to retry a young black man whose arrest this summer at a San Francisco BART station highlighted issues of race in policing. The decision ends the criminal case stemming from a controversial arrest caught on video.

Videos of BART police officers arresting Michael Smith on July 29 went viral and showed the aftermath of a 911 call reporting a threatened robbery and a black man who potentially had a gun.

A jury acquitted Michael Smith in mid-December of four charges of battery on a police officer, but split on additional battery and resisting arrest charges. The district attorney’s office could have retried him on those undecided charges, but they declined to Friday, ending the prosecution.

Body camera video released this week by the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office shows four officers briskly approaching a westbound BART train as it pulls into Embarcadero Station. They quickly locate Smith, possibly because of the caller’s description of him wearing a “Mickey Mouse” shirt, and with guns drawn order him to the ground. Smith doesn’t appear to resist as the officers handcuff him and remove his backpack, but the videos later show him kicking and struggling with the police.

“He was slammed down to the ground, his face hit the concrete, he was put in a very painful — what’s called a figure four leg lock twice. They also put their fists in his chest, all before he offered any real resistance,” Adachi said, adding that Smith started to resist only after informing officers that his partner, Andrea Appleton, was pregnant.

“This is also a situation where his pregnant girlfriend was thrown to the ground, the officer’s knee was in her back 20 seconds after both she and Michael told the police she was pregnant,” Adachi said. “As a result, they lost the baby.”

Appleton told the San Francisco Chronicle this week that she suffered a miscarriage about two weeks after the incident. The public defender’s office did not respond to inquiries seeking any medical evidence that the miscarriage was related to Smith’s arrest or Appleton’s handcuffing.

The case comes at a time of scrutiny of police use of force and several shootings of young men of color throughout the Bay Area and the rest of the country.

But the judge presiding over Smith’s case disallowed mention of other cases during the trial, including that of the fatal BART police shooting of another young black man, Oscar Grant, who died on the Fruitvale BART Station platform on New Year’s Day in 2009.

That ruling — coupled with decisions that excluded witness testimony that the 911 caller had been harassing Smith and Appleton on the train — prompted Adachi to launch an unsuccessful attempt to remove Judge Anne-Christine Massullo from the case. He accused the judge in a motion of bias, a move he conceded was “controversial.”

“One of the first things that she did is excluded testimony of witnesses who would have said that Michael did nothing wrong in the train,” he said. “I thought that was extremely unfair given, that she was going to allow the call made by the person who falsely accused Michael of attempting to commit a robbery and falsely having a weapon.”

“The judge immediately said, ‘I’m not going to let you talk about Black Lives Matter or the Oscar Grant case,’ ” Adachi said. “How do you talk about a case involving a young African-American man assaulted by BART police without talking about Oscar Grant, without talking about racial attitudes in America, particularly at this point in time?”

Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg said the context of race and policing impacted the case.

“This case sort of fell into the strike zone of a whole bunch of vectors in legal and police controversies in recent years,” he said, noting that while the San Francisco Police Department was not involved in the case, the prolonged scrutiny on the city’s police force was likely in the minds of jurors.

Like Adachi, Weisberg wondered whether an unconfirmed report that Smith may have had a gun should provoke a more subdued police response.

“We simply don’t know how careful the police were to confirm or disprove the allegation that Mr. Smith was carrying a weapon,” Weisberg said. “All they knew is someone reported that. That gives them a pretty good reason to suspect the person has a weapon, but maybe not an automatic inference of it.”

Adachi said the police’s strong response to the call was beyond inappropriate, and the caller should be charged with making a false report.

“There’s a double standard that’s applied to police,” he said. “There’s a double standard that’s applied based on race. What if the roles had been reversed? What if Michael Smith was the one that made a false allegation against a white man, and as a result the white man was taken down by police?”

A spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said there was insufficient evidence to charge the caller.

BART maintains that police were using an appropriate amount of force, given Smith’s behavior and the report of a gun.

“It’s just unfortunate that Mr. Smith didn’t comply in the beginning, and this never would have happened,” said BART Deputy Police Chief Jeffrey Jennings.

A BART district spokeswoman said Friday that an “active internal affairs investigation” into the incident is ongoing, and that “there is nothing for us to add,” about the end of Michael Smith’s criminal trial.

A district attorney’s spokesman said there is a “wide range of reasons” that the office would not purse a retrial in the case. He said the whole of the police body camera footage answers the question of why prosecutors charged the case to begin with and declined to elaborate. More video footage can be viewed here.

“We make our decisions based on the facts and the law,” he said.

After Paying For Voter Purge Efforts Koch Brothers Move to Pimp Blacks w/ Fossil Fuels

New York Times and Greg Palast 

The crowd that thronged a gospel concert last month in Richmond, Va., was in for an unusual Christmas treat.

“Your energy bill’s paid!” the M.C. declared between soaring numbers from recording artists like VaShawn Mitchell and Charles Jenkins, calling to a young woman from the audience, who shrieked and started twirling on the floor.

Though few in the crowd knew it, the concert had a powerful sponsor: Fueling U.S. Forward, a public relations group for fossil fuels funded by Koch Industries, the oil and petrochemicals conglomerate led by the ultraconservative billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch. About halfway through the event, the music gave way to a panel discussion on how the holidays were made possible by energy — cheap energy, like oil and gas.

The concert flier was adorned with a red car bearing Christmas gifts. “Thankful for the fuels and innovation that make modern life possible,” it read.

The Kochs, whose use of their fortune to promote climate-change denial research has angered environmentalists, are quietly courting new allies in their quest for a fossil fuel resurgence: minorities.

Since its start in the spring of 2016, Fueling U.S. Forward has sent delegates to, or hosted, at least three events aimed at black voters, arguing that they benefit most from cheap and abundant fossil fuels and have the most to lose if energy costs rise.

Fueling U.S. Forward is “dedicated to educating the public about the value and potential of American energy, the vast majority of which comes from fossil fuels,” the group says on its website. “We’ll talk to people of diverse backgrounds — industry employees, small-business owners, community leaders and low-income families — and share their stories.”

The group has seen early results from its outreach.

“Policies that subsidize electric vehicles and solar panels for the wealthy raise energy prices and harm the black community,” read recommendations adopted by delegates at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., in August. The event brought together African-American political groups and counted Fueling U.S. Forward among its sponsors.

“We’re standing up for poor, underserved communities,” said Linda Haithcox, executive director of the National Policy Alliance, which organized the convention. She said her group’s funding from Fueling U.S. Forward and other energy groups had not affected its position on energy.

In a statement, Charles Drevna, president and chief executive of Fueling U.S. Forward and a former vice president at Sunoco, the company behind the Dakota Access oil pipeline, confirmed that the group was supported by Koch Industries, among other backers. “I am proud to help Fueling U.S. Forward promote the importance of domestic oil and natural gas to making people’s lives better,” he said.

A Koch Industries spokesman, David Dziok, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Kochs’ public relations drive takes a page from minority outreach by other industry lobbies, like those representing tobacco and soft drinks. Those industries have long argued that stiffer regulations or taxes on cigarettes or sodas would disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities.

It also adds a new dimension to the Kochs’ more traditional approach to climate and the environment, which has mainly involved financing research skeptical of climate change, backing pro-oil politicians and ballot initiatives, and fighting incentives for renewable energy, all through a network of charitable and political organizations.

Fueling U.S. Forward is a more emotional campaign. “How do we start winning hearts and minds?” Alex Fitzsimmons, the Fueling U.S. Forward spokesman, wondered in a Facebook Live broadcast he hosted with Mr. Drevna in August at the RedState Gathering in Denver.

Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that works with low-income and minority neighborhoods on environmental issues, called the campaign “an exploitative, sad and borderline racist strategy.” He pointed to the falling costs associated with renewable energy, which he said made shifting away from reliance on fossil fuels a winning proposition for everyone.

In seeking to change hearts and minds, Fueling U.S. Forward addresses a greater conundrum for the Kochs, their private empire — which generates an estimated $100 billion in sales a year — and the wider fossil fuel industry.

In recent years, the industry has increased its sway among Republicans, supporting a rightward shift toward sharp cutbacks of Social Security and Medicare and the rollback of environmental protections. And the Kochs find themselves well positioned to influence the Trump administration, with many allies in important cabinet and transition posts.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, has received contributions from Kochpac, the political action committee of Koch Industries. Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Pruitt after entrusting the agency’s transition to Myron Ebell, who is a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an advocacy organization that has received funding from the Kochs’ charitable foundations, and who has been hostile to the work of the E.P.A.

But numerous polls show that a majority of American voters continue to support many environmental regulations, including those that govern carbon dioxide emissions. And there is significant support among voters, even in red states, for renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which the Kochs have long worked to quash.

Fueling U.S. Forward seeks to narrow that schism by courting public support. The group is set to air ads in Virginia and Indiana, the news site Environment & Energy reported in September. The ads portray fossil fuels as the driver of human progress.

“This moment we’re in didn’t just happen. We didn’t just arrive here by luck — a world where billions of people have greater opportunities came about through years of progress,” a preview posted on the group’s site states. In the backdrop is video of people driving, turning on lights and plugging in appliances.

We got here, the ad says, by “harnessing the power of the earth and the natural fuels of soil and rock.”

It remains unclear who else, apart from the Kochs, is financing Fueling U.S. Forward. It is registered as a nonprofit business association, a designation that allows its involvement in both lobbying and political activities. But because it is so new, it has not yet made public filings detailing its financial and other activities.

Fueling U.S. Forward’s outreach to minorities builds on work by two Koch-funded organizations, the Libre Initiative and Generation Opportunity, that have focused on Latinos and millennials. The Kochs have also previously reached out to black organizations on issues related to criminal justice reform.

Congressional Black Caucus joins opposition effort against Sen. Jeff Sessions

ThinkProgress

Days after vowing to resist President-elect Donald Trump and his administration, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) began what it considers a “longshot” attempt to keep Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) out of the Department of Justice. During a press conference on Thursday, Chairman and Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) declared the CBC’s “adamant opposition” to Sessions’ attorney general nomination and pledged to hold anyone who votes in favor of him accountable.

The CBC, made up of black senators and representatives, currently has no members who can vote against Sessions during his confirmation hearing next week, but the Caucus will pressure their colleagues Senate Judiciary Committee to do so. The group also urged Americans to call their senators to oppose the nominee, who has a long history of racism and disdain for civil rights organizations.

Following Richmond’s announcement, members of the Caucus detailed the many ways Sessions is unqualified to serve as the country’s top cop.

“We live in a time where states are passing laws requiring special identification before a citizen can cast his or her vote. We live in a time when a police officer can break protocol — shoot a person of color without cause. And we live in a time when states can pass laws making discrimination legal,” Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN), a former police officer, said. “But instead of calling for investigations and even justice, Jeff Sessions stands by and makes disparaging remarks against people of color who raise their voices in protest.”

Maxine Waters (D-CA) narrowed in on alarming comments Sessions made in the past about civil rights groups and white supremacists, while speaking to his colleagues, J. Gerald Hebert, who worked for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and former assistant U.S. attorney Thomas Figures. Sessions called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “communist-inspired,” and considered other civil rights groups “un-American.” He also implied that the Ku Klux Klan’s biggest fault was its members’ use of marijuana.

“Not only does Sen. Sessions carry a long legacy of insensitive, racially-charged comments against minorities in this country, his behavior ultimately cost him a federal judgement in 1986,” Waters said on Thursday, noting that his history of racism fits into the white-supremacist platform championed by the president-elect. “What [Trump] is doing with Jeff sessions is carrying out his promise and his commitment to that agenda, by putting the person there that he knows is opposed to civil rights.”

Who is Jeff Sessions?

Sessions was ultimately considered too racist to become a federal judge by a Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee, but his leadership as a U.S. Senator is indicative of the damage he’ll cause as attorney general.

In addition to making disparaging remarks about black people, Sessions supports the mass deportations of immigrants, who he argues “create culture problems.” He opposes marriage equality and expanding protections for LGBT people who face violence and discrimination. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act and said it was a “stretch” to call Trump’s statements about grabbing women’s genitals sexual assault.

Sessions also has an abysmal criminal justice record, opposing bipartisan reform legislation supported by members of Congress, law enforcement and President Obama.

“We need an attorney general who represents the American people’s best interests, by fighting to strengthen voting rights, reform our criminal justice system, prevent violence against women, and work to reform our broken immigration system, among other priorities,” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the longest-serving member of the House, said during the press conference on Thursday.

The CBC’s new mission comes two days after the body expressed its commitment to resisting Trump’s administration. “The stakes are incredibly high and our community is counting on us as the last line of defense between Donald Trump and the worst of what America could offer,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Politico.

But the CBC isn’t the only group fighting Sessions’ confirmation. The growing list includes Hebert, more than 1,100 law school professors from 170 schools, civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, People for the American Way, and women’s rights advocates.

“We are fighting for the justice of everyone in America. We’re talking about voting rights, civil rights. We’re talking about the basic fundamentals that make this the best country on Earth,” Richards said. “We may not have a vote in the Senate, but we have a voice.”

Cowardly Liar Trump Uses Twitter To Hide From Public Accountability for His Claims

Media Matters

The New York Times made the same headline misstep twice in four days.

Typing up reports based on President-elect Donald Trump’s tweets and staged announcements, the Times presented as breaking news -- and in a very Trump-friendly manner -- the contents of his latest utterances:  

• “Trump Says He Has Hacking Information Others ‘Don’t Know'” (December 31)
• “Trump Says Intelligence Officials Delayed Briefing on Russian Hacking” (January 3)

Obviously, public pronouncements from incoming presidents can, and should, be treated as news. The problem with the “Trump says” formula (and similar variations) that the Times and other news outlets have adopted since Election Day is that what Trump said was, at best, either baseless or openly disputed.

There’s no indication Trump will ever reveal new information about U.S. government allegations that Russians unleashed cyberattacks against the Democratic Party. (And it certainly didn’t happen on “Tuesday or Wednesday” this week, as Trump originally suggested.) An aide quickly downplayed the notion that Trump would even try.

And while Trump claimed his intelligence briefing on the hacking topic was “delayed” from Tuesday until Friday, as the Times article itself makes clear, “senior administration officials disputed it, saying that no meeting had been scheduled for Tuesday.”

Trump’s claims falling apart shouldn’t be a surprise, though, since the president-elect has shown himself to be a committed liar who will falsify all kinds of information. 

And therein lies two ongoing problems. One: How does the press treat a new president who is a habitual liar, the likes of which we’ve never seen in U.S. presidential politics? And two: How does the press treat an incoming president whose primary form of communication is Twitter, which means he refuses to take most press questions or be held publicly accountable for his claims?

Those parallel-track problems then produce a third one: lazy, misleading headlines that play right into Trump’s strategy of routinely lying while also being historically inaccessible to reporters. Within that sphere, I’d suggest there’s a very specific headline problem -- the “Trump says” formula. Solution? Ban uncritical, context-free "Trump says" headlines. It’s a good first step.

Yes, most politicians, on occasion, like to bend and twist the truth to their favor. But Trump has been cracking the truth in half, and in full public view, since he entered the presidential race in June 2015. (Here’s a list of 560 documented falsehoods Trump told in the span of only four weeks during the campaign.) People like that don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and benefit of the doubt is what drives “Trump says” headlines.

The headlines often revolve around what Trump has stated on Twitter. Or misstated on Twitter, to be more accurate. With no real access to him, journalists are reduced to a this-is-what-Trump-said-today style of reporting, as if they’re covering the utterances of a reclusive royal family member.

If Trump’s tweeted claims are almost always disputed and often proven wrong, the dispute should be the headline; that’s what the news of the day is, not the fact that Trump floated some new nonsense; not what “Trump says.” If Trump tweeted that the moon was made of cheese, news organizations shouldn’t produce a “Trump says” headline for him, while also quoting experts in the article itself who confirm the moon is not a dairy-based orbital.

As Times columnist Paul Krugman noted this week:

Memo to newspapers: if Trump says something false, and headline reads "Trump says X", it doesn't matter if u say later it's false

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 4, 2017

Another problem is that the timid mentality behind “Trump says” headlines often leads to timid reporting.

Note that last week Trump made news when he claimed responsibility for Sprint bringing back 5,000 jobs to the United States. Trump insisted that the jobs were coming back “because of me.”

That boast immediately produced a rash of Trump-friendly headlines. And yes, it produced plenty of “Trump says” headlines:

WSJ: “Trump Says Sprint Bringing 5,000 Jobs Back to U.S.”

New York Post: "Trump says Sprint is bringing 5,000 jobs back to US”                                

Reuters: "Trump says Sprint to bring 5,000 jobs back to U.S." 

But those Sprint jobs were part of a previously announced, pre-election jobs initiative by the telecommunications giant. Which means this Bloomberg headline was perhaps the most accurate: “Trump Seeks Credit for 5,000 Sprint Jobs Already Touted.”

By choking off access with the press, Trump has produced a media thirst for presidential pronouncements and tidbits of news; tidbits that now arrive on the form of inaccurate tweets. The press needs to stop rewarding Trump’s strategy with passive and misleading “Trump says” headlines.

NAACP Leader Discusses Jeff Sessions Protest

Ford Puts Amazon Echo into their cars [Puts the Govt in Your Car. Everything Recorded & May be Subpoenaed in Criminal Case]

The Verge

A year ago, Ford teased a possible integration with the Amazon Echo smart home device, so car owners could turn on their home lights or browse their music libraries from the comfort of their Fusions or F-150s. Or they can switch it up and ask Alexa to start their car from inside their homes. Now the integration between Ford and Amazon is official and will be rolling out in the weeks to come, the companies announced at CES today.

Ford claims it will be the first automaker to offer real-world integration with Amazon’s popular smart home device. Other car companies have also working to get Alexa in their vehicles, but it looks like Ford may have won the sprint to get there first.

As soon as its available, Ford owners will be able to play and resume audiobooks, order items on Amazon, and search for and transfer local destinations to the in-car navigation system. From home, Ford vehicle owners will be able to remote start, lock or unlock doors, and get vehicle information using voice commands.

Ford will roll out its Alexa integration in two phases. The first, available later this month, connects you to your car from your home through Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. The second, expected this summer, allows you to command Alexa while driving. [MORE]

In an ongoing murder case in Arkanasas, prosecutors have obtained a subpoena for the defendant's Amazon Echo recordings and data from inside his own home. [MORE] The Supremes have ruled that you have less of an expectation of privacy in your car than in your home. 

NBC Hires Racist Suspect Megyn Kelly

TruthDig

Megyn Kelly, the Fox News stalwart who once reported that both Jesus and Santa are verifiably white, is leaving the network for a new role at NBC, according to the New York Times. Kelly has become one of Fox News’ two most popular and highest paid personalities (the other is Bill O’Reilly) since she landed at the right-wing outlet 12 years ago. The Times reports that Kelly will be multitasking in her new position at NBC, which will include “a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an in-depth Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other big-event coverage.”

Kelly’s departure was not unexpected. In a book released earlier this year, the Fox News host wrote that ex-Fox News head honcho Roger Ailes had, on numerous occasions, offered to help her career in “exchange for sexual favors.” Those allegations came after Gretchen Carlson, another high-profile Fox News star, filed a lawsuit against Ailes claiming years of harassment. A number of other women also stepped forward with similar stories, indicating a pattern of abuse likely dating back decades. Ailes stepped down in July of this year, only to reappear soon after as an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

It’s worth remembering that Kelly, while she did not deserve the ugly sexist rhetoric sent her way by Trump and others during the presidential campaign, has been a key contributor to the right-wing echo chamber’s deft use of racist fearmongering in all things. She has dedicated an inordinate amount of time to propagating the absolutely made-up idea that New Black Panthers are a massive group of militants coming to upend good white peoples’ lives. Kelly once maligned a 15-year-old girl abused by a cop twice her size as “no saint.” She has tossed around words like “thug” to describe unarmed black shooting victims of cops. Her insistence that Santa Claus, a fictional character, is white, is a good indicator of where Kelly stands on race, and how her ideas have influenced her reporting.

“The Most incarcerated city [New Orleans] in the most incarcerated country” May Spend Millions to expand Foul facility

ThinkProgress

A 15-year-old boy found dead in his cell, asphyxiated by his mattress cover. A suicidal 63-year-old man hanging from a showerhead. A 24-year-old who wrapped a telephone cord around his neck.

Awaiting trial at New Orleans’ jail has been likened to a “death sentence.” Now, the “most incarcerated city in the most incarcerated state in the most incarcerated country in the world” is considering spending millions of dollars to expand the troubled facility.

A federal judge set a deadline of Tuesday for the city to come up with a plan to house mentally ill inmates. Sheriff Marlin Gusman is pushing a proposal to construct a new building, with hundreds of new jail beds. The expansion would cost an estimated $97 million to build.

The city, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, has steadily reduced the number of people in jail over the past six years. But if the new beds get built, community organizers warn, they won’t stay empty for long.

“As the incoming Trump administration takes power with its promises to be ‘tough on crime,’ we know that if those beds are built, they will be filled with our community members,” Alfred Marshall, an organizer who delivered a petition to city officials against the expansion, said in a press release.

Empty spaces

The current jail, which opened in 2015, has a curious layout. One building houses the intake processing center and jail cells. The second building houses the kitchen and warehouse. Between them is an empty plot of land. Stretching out to the empty space in the middle are two long gangways — the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC), which is leading the anti-expansion campaign, calls them “bridges to nowhere.”

That empty lot makes clear that the sheriff always intended to expand the jail and build a third building later, OPPRC organizer Adina Marx-Arpadi said.

We know that if those beds are built, they will be filled with our community members.

The history of that empty space is fraught. Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005, the decrepit Orleans Parish Prison housed 6,500 inmates on an average day, making New Orleans the most incarcerated city per capita. Federal funds after the storm presented an opportunity to shake that title and rebuild with a new vision.

The storm had decimated New Orleans’ population, so constructing a smaller jail made sense. Gusman originally proposed more than 5,000 beds in the new jail. But that plan would have given the city the capacity to incarcerate one out of every 60 residents remaining in the city.

The city council unanimously decided in 2011 to cap the jail at 1,438 beds, which still allows for an incarceration rate close to double the national average.

The sheriff, who was paid per prisoner until 2015, said that number was far too low to accommodate all the people who needed to be locked up. But he agreed to construct the new jail according to the city’s parameters — leaving open the possibility “to determine appropriate future facilities, if any are needed.”

Gusman opened the $150 million facility in September 2015, calling it “the beginning of a new day” that would shed the old jail’s reputation for violence and abuse.

But almost immediately after that rosy prediction, the horror stories started pouring in. Less than two months later, a man awaiting trial died after his chronic sickle cell disease went apparently ignored and untreated in jail. Soon after that, an inmate on suicide watch hanged himself in the shower. And last summer, a teenager allegedly killed himself after spending months awaiting trial. [MORE]

California generally pays its some 7,000 inmate workers between 35 and 95 cents an hour for their labor

The Intercept 

IN SEPTEMBER, AFTER months of organizing via smuggled cellphones and outside go-betweens, prisoners across the country launched a nationwide strike to demand better working conditions at the numerous facilities that employ inmate labor for little or no pay.

The strike, which spread to dozens of institutions in 22 states, briefly called attention to a fact about prison labor that is well-understood in America’s penal institutions but scarcely known to the general public: Inmates in America’s state prisons — who make everything from license plates to college diploma covers — are not only excluded from the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on slave labor, but also exist largely outside the reach of federal safety regulations meant to ensure that Americans are not injured or killed on the job. Excluded from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s mandate of protecting American workers, these inmates lack some of the most basic labor protections other workers take for granted.

This vacuum of oversight causes the labor performed behind prison walls to be doubly invisible because it excludes inmates from federal record-keeping rules requiring non-prison employers to report serious job-site injuries to the federal government.

Yet injury logs generated by the California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA) — the agency in charge of overseeing the prison work programs in the country’s second largest prison system — provide a rare window into the varied dangers that face inmate laborers. Since 2012, inmates in California have reported more than 600 injuries while working for as little as a 35 cents an hour, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept. The logs contain a wide range of job-site harms, from fingers being smashed in steel molds or sucked under sewing machine needles to less serious maladies like carpel tunnel syndrome and other common overuse conditions.

In some severe cases, inmates’ appendages were amputated after being crushed or severed in machinery. “[The inmate’s] sleeve became caught in gear and pulled hand into assembly,” one log reads, “resulting in amputation of r. hand.”

California generally pays its some 7,000 inmate workers between 35 and 95 cents an hour for their labor, and it is unclear whether any of the inmates listed as having lost appendages while working in California prisons have yet received any compensation for the amputations. A CALPIA spokesperson told The Intercept that the state had provided each of the inmate amputees with workers’ compensation forms, but the injured prisoners could take no action to pursue their claims until released from prison. California state law prohibits inmates from receiving workers’ compensation while still incarcerated, meaning that inmates serving life without parole sentences would never be entitled to a penny of compensation even for losing limbs on the job.

A common theme running among throughout the logs is the potential for many of the injuries to have been averted. “I did not really see anything in here that wouldn’t have been preventable,” said Linda Delp, the director of University of California Los Angeles’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health program, who reviewed the injury logs. Delp said that entries in the CALPIA logs conform to patterns she has seen on non-prison worksites where there is too little training of workers or where the employees are impelled to cut corners because management is requiring too much work to be done in too little time — or both.

A variety of recurring and preventable injury-types caught Delp’s attention. For instance, repeated entries describe objects becoming lodged in inmates’ eyes while they use industrial grinders. A possible solution, according to Delp, would be to ensure that inmate workers wear appropriate safety goggles or visors and have adequate training. Many other logs involve workers losing control of unwieldy objects, which then fall on workers, causing injuries in which body parts are strained, crushed, or lacerated. A solution to this, said Delp, would be to make sure inmates have enough help lifting and maneuvering heavy objects. There are also recurring cases where workers’ fingers become stitched through under sewing machine needles, or have their hands pulled into moving parts on sanders or other machinery — all of which could be prevented by proper machine guarding mechanisms and training, Delp said.

“In looking at these,” Delp said, “there’s something going on in terms of not providing the training and equipment that they need.”

Michele Kane, a CALPIA spokesperson told The Intercept that the office reports all inmate injuries to the state’s department of labor. “They implement and enforce safety regulations over all employers in California,” Kane said, “including state agencies such as CALPIA.”  In response to questions from The Intercept regarding the potential preventability of injuries, a CALPIA spokesperson assigned workers responsibility for their injuries. “In spite of training and proper safety equipment provided by CALPIA,” Kane said in a statement, “there are times when inmates violate training protocols.”

While Delp cannot say anything for certain about CALPIA management practices by reviewing the logs alone, she took notice of the agency’s tendency to blame workers for their injuries.

“I always look for how these things are described and whether individual workers are blamed for what happened,” Delp said. “What’s fairly common across different types of jobs is for management to look the other way when people are breaking the safety rules because they want them to work faster, until someone gets hurt. And then that person is blamed for not following the safety rules.”

A typical example of CALPIA’s allocation of blame appears in one of the several logs that describe an incident resulting in an inmate suffering an amputation, in this case, a finger in garment machinery at the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo County in April 2014. “While inmate was cutting fabric, inmate removed his glove to adjust machine, and failed to put his glove back prior to operating the machine,” the log reads, adding no additional information other aside from its result: amputation of “Finger(s)/Thumb(s).”

“I don’t think we’re free in America” – an interview with Black Attorney Bryan Stevenson

The Intercept

ALTHOUGH THE UNITED STATES has just elected a new president whose promise to make America great “again” evoked an unspecified, presumably more glorious past, Americans’ appreciation of their own history, and particularly its most damning chapters, is limited at best.

The country’s long history of racial violence can hardly be denied, but that history is regularly erased from public commemoration. Some civil rights victories are celebrated, but the violence that preceded them is seldom acknowledged.

Aiming to confront and reclaim that history, the Equal Justice Initiative, led by civil rights attorney and author Bryan Stevenson, launched its “Lynching in America” initiative, a yearslong effort to compile the most comprehensive record of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The project includes a detailed report of more than 4,000 lynchings in 12 states in the South, including 800 that were previously unreported, as well as plans for a museum in Montgomery, and an effort to erect markers in the places where lynchings took place.

That the effort has so often met the resistance of local officials is, to Stevenson, just another sign of how urgently this public conversation is needed, as is an honest assessment of the ways in which the racism of the past endures today. Earlier this year, vandals once again shot up a sign marking the site in Mississippi where in 1955 Emmett Till’s brutalized body was found. In December, President Obama signed a reauthorization of the Emmett Till Act, which directs the DOJ and FBI to continue the investigation of cold civil rights-era hate crimes.

To Stevenson and those fighting to promote greater awareness of the nation’s racial history, this is hardly about history alone. Since the November election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented 1,094 hate incidents across the country. But as manifestations of the country’s persistent racism have multiplied, so have attempts to discount it. Shortly after the election, The Intercept spoke with Stevenson about America’s failure to come to terms with its racist past — and therefore its present.

“Lynching in America” was a response to the lack of public memorials commemorating the thousands of African Americans lynched in the country. Your argument is that we can’t move forward if we don’t take stock of this history. Yet this violence is not forgotten — certainly not by its victims and their descendants, but also by today’s racists. Just in the last few months we have seen people show up at football games dressed as President Obama with a noose around his neck, or black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania being added to a social media account that included a “daily lynching” calendar invitation and photos of people hanging from trees.     

There’s no question that there’s a consciousness and an awareness about our history of slavery, and terrorism, and segregation. But that doesn’t mean there’s an appreciation of the significance of that history, and people will invoke elements of that history in a way that is oppressive and bigoted and problematic because there is no appreciation of the significance of that history. Part of our work is aimed at trying to re-engage this country with an awareness and understanding of how our history of racial inequality continues to haunt us. I don’t think we’re free in America — I think we’re all burdened by this history of racial injustice, which has created a narrative of racial difference, which has infected us, corrupted us, and allowed us to see the world through this lens. So it becomes necessary to talk about that history if we want to get free.

Our project is trying to do that. We want there to be some acknowledgement that we’re a post-genocide society, that when white settlers came to this continent, there were millions of native people here whom we’ve killed through famine and war and disease, and that we forced off their land sometimes in cruel and barbaric ways. And instead of acknowledging that genocide we said, “No, those people are different, they’re not really people, they’re savages,” and we used this narrative of racial difference to justify this horrific behavior. That same narrative of racial difference was employed to justify centuries of slavery.

For me, the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor, it was this narrative of racial difference.  In my view, slavery didn’t end in 1865, it just evolved. It turned into decades of terrorism and violence directed at people of color and this terrorism has profound implications for a range of contemporary issues: the urban North and West, the ghettoes, the relocation of millions of black people into these spaces. Black people in Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Oakland did not go to those communities as immigrants seeking economic opportunities, they went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South. That legacy has to be revisited if we’re going to appropriately understand the iconography of lynching, or even the language around the Civil War and the resistance to enfranchisement and emancipation.

Even in the context of civil rights, we focus on the heroism of civil rights leaders without focusing on the intense resistance to integration by white political leaders. And that’s what we’re trying to do: trying to engage this country into a more honest accounting of what it means to be a slave society, what it means to be a place where terrorism and mass atrocities took place, what it means to have been an apartheid country for decades. If we have that appreciation, things will change. We won’t be able to celebrate Jefferson Davis’s birthday as a state holiday — as we do in Alabama — or celebrate Confederate Memorial Day or celebrate Robert E. Lee day without being seen as offending the notion that slavery is wrong. It would be unconscionable for Adolf Hitler’s birthday to be celebrated in Germany.

Your efforts to set up markers of lynchings and other sites of racial violence, for instance by commemorating a major slave market in Montgomery, were sometimes met with fierce resistance by local leaders. Are they actually denying that this history is real?

They are denying it. They are saying, “Slavery was wonderful for black people. The Civil War was about state rights. Black people were treated well during enslavement. Lynching was just tough justice; they were all criminals who deserved lethal punishment. Black people were better off in segregated schools; we just all wanted to be in our own place.” This process of truth telling will push some people to try to deny it. And if there’s not complete denial, there’s certainly no shame. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that looks like a public expression of shame about slavery, or lynching, or segregation.

When we present the history, people have a hard time saying it didn’t happen, they just say we shouldn’t talk about it. When we tried to put up markers in downtown Montgomery, local historical officials said it would be “too controversial” to put up markers that talk about slavery. They didn’t say that didn’t happen, they just said it would be controversial, it would be unsettling, it would be uncomfortable for people to be reminded of slavery even though we have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in the same space.

You argue that understanding this history is essential to understanding not only acts of overt racism and hate happening today, but also the ways in which racism has become engrained in virtually every aspect of our society. Has that narrative of racial difference become institutionalized? 

I don’t think there’s any question that our failure to deal honestly with this history has made us vulnerable to tolerating bias and discrimination in virtually every sector. It’s not just the overt acts of hate that we see on campuses — although I think those are a direct manifestation of this. It’s also the way in which you can have the Bureau of Justice Statistics saying that one in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime and nobody cares. That’s not a policy or a political issue that our leaders are talking about. There is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to black or brown people and people just see that as well, that’s America. We tolerate bias and discrimination and bigotry in ways that we wouldn’t tolerate them if we had a higher shame index about our history.

That certainly is evident in the way we’ve seen some of this rhetoric and demonization of people based on their ethnicity or religion or any of these other things; that’s clearly an example of that. But it manifests in other ways too. That the two largest high schools in Montgomery are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High is a manifestation of this failure to confront history. That people are actually trying to eliminate the Voting Rights Act is a manifestation of this history.  That people resent when we talk about bias and discrimination because they think that’s all we talk about is a manifestation of this history. I think it’s hard to find things that are not implicated by our failure to deal with this history more honestly. I really can’t identify many parts of our popular life, our cultural life, our social or political life, that are not haunted by this history of racial inequality.

The openly hateful rhetoric of the election, and then the election’s result itself, have shocked many who might have liked to think this country was “not as racist” anymore. What you seem to say is that this is all very much part of a continuous history that was never truly interrupted?

I think we’re seeing an affirmative use of people’s racial resentment and ethnic resentment to gain power in a way that we haven’t seen before at the national level. I live in Alabama and there’s nothing exceptional about the last election. When you live in places like Alabama, this is the political culture that we’ve seen since the civil rights movement. But at the national level, it’s interesting to see an affirmative use of this kind of racial intolerance, racial resentment, this shameless advocation of America’s great past as a tool for gaining political power. We’ll see how that plays out and what that means.

Are you saying you’re less terrified, because you’re used to it?

I am most worried about the poor and vulnerable people who have had to endure lifetimes of bigotry and discrimination, and who are now going to have to continue meeting those challenges without the possibility of a Justice Department that will protect them, or a federal government that will be attentive to their complaints, or health care, or support systems. There’s a whole host of things that have made enduring the challenges of bias and discrimination in this country a little easier, because of federal programs and because of efforts to try to be responsive. Those programs are now under attack and that will make dealing with the burden even harder. So in that sense, yes, I am worried about the current political future of this nation. But I’m also worried about it in this other sense: I think our identity is shaped not by how we treat the rich, the powerful, and the privileged — we are shaped by how we treat the poor, the incarcerated, the disfavored. And if we say, we only want to be an America for people who have lived here for five generations, we only want to be an America for people who are Christian, and a particular kind of Christian, we only want to be an America for straight people, or white people, then we become a country that is at war with its ideals, with its values, with its principles, with its very Constitution.

Do you agree with the interpretation that this election was a “whitelash” — a white backlash against a changing country and against its first black president?

I think there are a lot of complex factors — I don’t think it can be reduced to any one thing. I certainly think it is a troubling moment in American history when someone can employ this rhetoric of hate and division and bigotry and become elected to the presidency of the United States. I think it is a crisis for America and its identity, its relationships around the world and its relationship with ethnic minorities. Many of us see this as an enormous step backwards, and we’re going to have to figure out how to recover when the nation has done when it has apparently done.

One of the “takes” on the election we have heard repeated in countless ways since November is the idea that, somehow, we talked about racism “too much,” and failed to reach out to growingly resentful white voters. A project like yours is predicated on public discussion. How do you even do that when any attempt to discuss racism is preempted by this aversion to any discussion that’s not about the ways in which whites have perceived a decline in their status and power?

There’s nothing that anybody can point to about the global economy, about trade, about jobs, about declining opportunities that have affected the white working class that hasn’t impacted black people and poor people ten times as hard. It’s not sufficient to talk about the unique challenges of white working class people. Whatever their problems are, they are the same problems that black working class people have, and brown working class people have, and black and brown people are also burdened with a presumption of dangerousness and guilt and a network of other issues. When you have 90 percent of the power and status and it drops to 85 percent, you can use your 85 percent of power and status to complain a lot about the 5 percent you lost, but when you have 5 percent of the status and power and you lose three percent you only have two percent to complain. So there is a disproportionate ability to make your loss, your problems, your struggles seem like the most important struggle, because you have so much more power and status. I am skeptical about this idea that somehow we have done too much to address the challenges of people of color, address the challenges of immigrants, and the challenges of the poor. I just don’t find much evidence of that.

There is a lack of knowledge, and I think knowledge prompts conversation. If you know you live in a city or a county or a space where a dozen people were killed in acts of mass violence, it changes your relationship to that space. If you don’t know it, then it’s never even something you need to think about. The first act is education, bringing to mind and consciousness this history. That’s why we’re trying to do what we’re doing.

[Criminal Cops w/bodycams Watching You] Anti-surveillance clothing aims to hide wearers from facial recognition

Guardian 

The use of facial recognition software for commercial purposes is becoming more common, but, as Amazon scans faces in its physical shop and Facebook searches photos of users to add tags to, those concerned about their privacy are fighting back.

Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey aims to overwhelm and confuse these systems by presenting them with thousands of false hits so they can’t tell which faces are real.

The Hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face.

This is not the first time Harvey has tried to confuse facial recognition software. During a previous project, CV Dazzle, he attempted to create an aesthetic of makeup and hairstyling that would cause machines to be unable to detect a face.

Speaking at the Chaos Communications Congress hacking conference in Hamburg, Harvey said: “As I’ve looked at in an earlier project, you can change the way you appear, but, in camouflage you can think of the figure and the ground relationship. There’s also an opportunity to modify the ‘ground’, the things that appear next to you, around you, and that can also modify the computer vision confidence score.”

Harvey’s Hyperface project aims to do just that, he says, “overloading an algorithm with what it wants, oversaturating an area with faces to divert the gaze of the computer vision algorithm.”

The resultant patterns, which Harvey created in conjunction with international interaction studio Hyphen-Labs, can be worn or used to blanket an area. “It can be used to modify the environment around you, whether it’s someone next to you, whether you’re wearing it, maybe around your head or in a new way.”

Explaining his hopes for how technologies like his would affect the world, Harvey showed an image of a street scene from the 1910s, pointing out that every figure in it is wearing a hat. “In 100 years from now, we’re going to have a similar transformation of fashion and the way that we appear. What will that look like? Hopefully it will look like something that appears to optimise our personal privacy.”

To emphasise the extent to which facial recognition technology changes expectations of privacy, Harvey collated 47 different data points commercial and academic researchers claim to be able to discover from a 100x100 pixel facial image – around 2.5% of the size of a typical Instagram photo. Those include traits such as “calm” or “kind”, criminal tendencies like “paedophile” or “white collar offender”, and simple demographics like “age” and “gender”.

Research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, for instance, claims to be able to predict criminality from lip curvature, eye inner corner distance and the so-called nose-mouth angle.

“A lot of other researchers are looking at how to take that very small data and turn it into insights that can be used for marketing,” Harvey said. “What all this reminds me of is Francis Galton and eugenics. The real criminal, in these cases, are people who are perpetrating this idea, not the people who are being looked at.”

Harvey and Hyphen-Labs plan to reveal details on the Hyperface project this month, as part of Hyphen-Labs’ new work NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism.

Free marijuana to be handed out Inauguration Day in DC

Detroit Free Press

The DC Cannabis Coalition says it plans to hand out thousands of joints of marijuana on Inauguration Day — for free — to urge federal legalization of pot.

The group plans to start handing out joints at 8 a.m. Jan. 20 on the west side of Dupont Circle in the nation's capital, where recreational marijuana is legal. Then, marchers will walk to the National Mall where the real protest will begin.

“The main message is it’s time to legalize cannabis at the federal level," said Adam Eidinger, the founder of DCMJ, a group of D.C. residents who introduced and helped get Initiative 71 passed in the District. Initiative 71 made it legal to possess 2 ounces or less or marijuana, to grow it, and to give it away, but it is not legal to sell it.

Eidinger is worried, though, that all this progress will be lost with the incoming administration, specifically, with President-elect Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

"We are looking at a guy who as recently as April said that they are going to enforce federal law on marijuana all over the country. He said marijuana is dangerous," Eidinger said.

The great marijuana giveaway is legal, as long as it's done on D.C. land.

"We don't want any money exchanged whatsoever. This is really a gift for people who come to Washington, D.C.," he said.

There will 4,200 gifts, to be exact. Then, at 4 minutes and 20 seconds into Trump's speech (420 is the internationally known code for weed), protesters are encouraged to light up. That part, is most definitely illegal. [MORE]

The Truth Behind the ‘New’ Police Tool for Confronting Fentanyl Menace

Propublica

Heroin overdoses killed thousands nationwide last year — some 75 over just three days in Chicago. The central culprit in many of the fatalities was fentanyl, a lethally powerful compound often added to drugs sold on the street. As a result, health officials have called fentanyl a new public menace, and police forces across the U.S. are searching their neighborhoods for the dangerous painkiller.

Sirchie, a leading law enforcement equipment supplier, has found its own way to respond to the crisis. The company now markets an addition to its popular line of drug field tests, NARK II. Police officers use the inexpensive chemical kits to make drug arrests by the thousands every year. The new kits, Sirchie claims, are “designed” so that police can quickly identify fentanyl, and lock up those selling or buying it, potentially rescuing heroin and pain pill users from overdose.

The company has been aggressive in expressing its enthusiasm for the product.

“HOT” is stamped on images of the fentanyl tests found on Sirchie's website.

“NEW!” Sirchie asserted on the cover of one of its catalogues, which served as a full-page advertisement for the “New Fentanyl Reagent Available Now!” Sirchie described the kit as an “industry first.”

The only problem is that there is nothing new about the fentanyl kit except its name.

Sirchie’s records disclosing the materials contained in its products show the new kits are little more than a repurposed chemical test that has been used to detect all manner of substances for more than a century. There is, then, no special “design” to the product. [MORE]