Full-Day Conference on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in America’s Criminal Justice System – Friday, December 6, 2013 in Washington, DC

NACDL

Washington, DC (November 25, 2013) – On Friday, December 6, 2013, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, along with the Foundation for Criminal Justice, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the Center for Nu Leadership on Urban Solutions, and the New York County Lawyers’ Association will host an all-day conference, Criminal Justice in the 21st Century: Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparity in the Criminal Justice System: Advancing the Reform Dialogue Through Action. This event is a one year follow-up to a three-day convening on racial and ethnic disparities, which was co-sponsored by the same organizations and held in October 2012 in New York. The current agenda for the December 6th event can be found below. [MORE]

Obama’s Undocumented Uncle Spared From His Nephew’s Deportation Policy

Thinkprogress

Onyango Obama, President Obama’s undocumented uncle, ducked deportation Tuesday, when a federal immigration judge allowed him to remain in the U.S. legally. Obama, 68, has been living in the U.S. for fifty years, but a 2011 drunk driving charge attracted the attention of immigration officials, who have been instructed by President Obama to prioritize criminal deportations. The president’s uncle is a stark example of the low-level, nonviolent offenders who have become the most common victims of the Obama administration’s deportation policies.

Like millions of undocumented immigrants who have spent most of their lives in the U.S., Obama has flown below the radar since his student visa expired in 1970, and most recently was working as a liquor store manager in Framingham, MA. Immigration Judge Leonard I. Shapiro ruled Obama could stay because he was “a gentleman, a good neighbor, paid his taxes, and met the criteria for legal permanent residency,” according to the Boston Globe.

However, countless others with similar upstanding histories have not been as lucky as Obama. Though immigration officials are supposed to focus resources on deporting violent criminals who pose a threat to public safety, 85 percent of deportees as of July 2013 had nothing to do with criminal activity. Of the criminal deportees, many were convicted of non-violent, low-level crimes like drunk driving, minor marijuana possession, or traffic violations. In fact, drunk driving is more likely to land an undocumented immigrant in deportation proceedings than homicide, rape, or aggravated assault, according to a recent study.

So why was Obama spared? Complaints of special treatment because of his famous surname have already cropped up, but another big factor may be his judge. Shapiro, a veteran immigration judge, has a record of forgiving rulings, including one that granted President Obama’s undocumented aunt, Zeituni Onyango, asylum in 2008. Under another judge, Obama may not have been so lucky. A report by the legal advocacy group Appleseed Network found that the single best predictor of an immigrant’s success or failure in immigration court was the identity of the judge who hears the case. Most immigration judges have no judicial experience at all, but come from long careers prosecuting immigrants for the Justice Department or for Homeland Security. This limited selection pool can have dire consequences for immigrants; one analysis found that a judge who used to work as an enforcer of immigration law is 24 percent less likely to rule in an immigrant’s favor.

House Republicans would eliminate even this game of chance by expanding the kinds of crimes that mandate deportation to include low-level offenses like using a fake ID or shoplifting. One drunk driving charge like Obama’s would result in mandatory detention, while a second DUI conviction, no matter how long ago it was, would also automatically boot the offender out of the country. If the House’s SAFE Act becomes law, judges will no longer be able to consider an immigrant’s family ties or community contributions. Even someone like Obama would never get the chance to make his case, no matter how famous his nephew is.

Ebony and Ivy: The Secret History of How Slavery Helped Build America’s Elite Colleges

DemocracyNow

We spend the hour with the author of a new book, 10 years in the making, that examines how many major U.S. universities — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Williams and the University of North Carolina, among others — are drenched in the sweat, and sometimes the blood, of Africans brought to the United States as slaves. In "Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities," Massachusetts Institute of Technology American history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and higher education grew up together. "When you think about the colonial world, until the American Revolution, there is only one college in the South, William & Mary ... The other eight colleges were all Northern schools, and they’re actually located in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy where the slave traders had come to power and rose as the financial and intellectual backers of new culture of the colonies," Wilder says.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to a new book 10 years in the making that looks at how some of the country’s major universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, Williams, the University of North Carolina, to name just a few—are drenched in sweat, and sometimes the blood, of Africans brought here as slaves. The book is called Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. In it, MIT history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and higher education grew up together. He writes, "the American campus stood as a silent monument to slavery." Well, this history is silent no more. Professor Craig Steven Wilder joins us here in New York.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about America’s most elite universities. What relation do they have to slavery?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think there are multiple relationships. The first and probably most poignant, most provocative, is the relationship to the slave trade itself. In the middle of the 18th century, from 1746 to 1769—fewer than 25 years, less than a quarter century—the number of colleges in the British colonies triples from three to nine. The original three were Harvard, Yale and William & Mary, and all of a sudden there were nine by 1769. And it triples in that 25-year period. That 25-year period actually coincides with the height of the slave trade. It’s precisely the rise and the elaboration of the Atlantic economy, based on the African slave trade, that allows for this sort of fantastic articulation of new growth of the institutional infrastructure of the colonies.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk specifically about particular universities.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you are—you do look at some universities in the South—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —but also in the Deep North.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Harvard.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: It’s a very Northern story, actually. You know, when you think about the colonial world, until the American Revolution, there’s actually only one college in the South: William & Mary. There are a couple of other attempts, but they fail. The other eight colleges are all Northern schools. And they’re actually located in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy and where the slave traders had sort of come to power and rose as the sort of financial and intellectual backers of the new culture of the colonies.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about Harvard.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure. Harvard, actually, from its very beginnings in 1636, the college, by 1638, actually has an enslaved man living on campus, who’s referred to as "the Moor." And—

AMY GOODMAN: The Moor.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The Moor. And that actually is directly related to two slave trades. I imagine it’s how he gets to Cambridge. One is right after the Pequot War, the war in which the Puritans defeat the Indians of southern Connecticut. There’s a Pequot slave trade into the West Indies. The captive Pequot are actually sold into the West Indies. That ship actually returns with enslaved Africans. And it’s right after that moment that the Moor appears on campus and becomes part of the sort of legend of early Harvard.

AMY GOODMAN: Toward the end of the book, you include a photograph that shows five men who served as president—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —of Harvard University from 1829 to 1862. Talk about their significance and relation to slavery.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: What I wanted to show in that final chapter, that final epilogue, was the ways in which slavery, even after the end of slavery in the Northeast, even after the Northern colonies and Northern states had actually moved toward emancipation and finished their emancipation processes, they continued to have economic ties to the South and the West Indies. And so, if you—one of the ways you can trace that is just by looking at who became the president of these universities, who the presidents were. And the presidents were virtually always the sons or the sons-in-law of merchant traders, people who were West India suppliers. And so, after the slave trade ends and after slavery ends in the Northern states, one of the businesses that continues is supplying the South and the West Indies with everything—all the provisions that they needed to run the plantations.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to look at this picture again.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve got Quincy. You’ve got Everett. You’ve got—what is it? Sparks?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, Sparks.

AMY GOODMAN: Mather.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Jared Sparks.

AMY GOODMAN: And Felton.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain. For example, Mather. In fact, at Harvard University, there is a house named after Mather.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, the Mathers actually go back a long way. And so, you know—and they actually are part of the colonial story of slavery, too. Increase Mather, of the second generation, is actually a president of Harvard, and he uses his slave, which was a person given to him by his parish—he uses his slave to actually run the business of the college in the colonial period. This slave runs errands between the various trustees. And he writes in his diary that he sent his Negro to do various bits of work for the college.

And if you think about, you know, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, one of the ways that their influence—that they had managed to achieve the kind of influence that they did—Sparks, for instance, becomes rather famous, actually, for his writings about early American history. He becomes something of a really quite polished American historian, but that was actually a way of also creating ties with the South, intellectual relationships with the South. And so, his writings as a historian also allowed him to create intellectual connections to these very important regions, and regions that remained important in the financing of higher education long after slavery ends in the Northeast.

AMY GOODMAN: What about Yale University?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yale actually is a very similar story. Yeah, in 1701, when the original founders were actually meeting to establish what was then the Collegiate School, they—as one of their chroniclers puts it, they come from the various towns to meet up, and they’re followed by their menservants, or their slaves. The slave—the enslaved people are actually at the founding of the institution. And once it’s established, like most of the 18th century colleges—and especially by the 18th century as the slave trade peaks—the new business of higher education, the financial model for a successful college, requires in fact tapping into these new sources of wealth in the Americas. And that means the slave trade in the plantations of the South and the West Indies.

AMY GOODMAN: Did anyone at these universities—and I think you talk about at Yale—say no to slaves?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yes, yes. Yeah, there’s—at every moment that there’s a push toward slavery, there’s also anti-slavery. There’s an anti-slavery tradition actually emerging from the 17th century right through the 18th century. And much of it, because it’s an intellectual movement, because it’s a moral and religious movement, is actually housed on campus. And so you have this tension on campus. And I try and actually point that out at various times in the book.

One of the examples that I use, actually, relates to the image that you showed of the presidents, and particularly Quincy. Under Quincy’s administration, Charles Follen, the German historian—I’m sorry, the German professor at Harvard, who was a rebel of the—in Germany and who was chased out for his radicalism, comes to the United States, gets appointed professor of German at Harvard, and then is immediately attracted to the abolitionist movement. Follen is actually punished for that decision. He eventually loses his professorship. And when you trace the origins of the professorship, the funding had largely come from families with ties to the slave trade and slavery.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s very interesting. What you point out at places like Harvard is that a lot of the endowments for the professor chairs—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —come from the slave trade.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah. The first—actually, the very first endowed professorship at Yale, the Livingston professor of divinity, actually comes from the Livingston family of New York and New Jersey. And it’s the second generation, Philip Livingston, gives it in, basically, recognition of the fine education that his sons had received at Yale. And Livingston is one of the—the Livingstons are one of the larger slave-trading families out of New York City, the rivals for places like Newport, Rhode Island, and Providence, which dominates the North American trade. Certainly the Philadelphians and the New Yorkers were trying to catch up.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about the DeWolf family, the largest slave-trading family, in a moment.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to be joined by one of the DeWolfs, Katrina Browne, and how she traced the trade in her family. But I want to ask you about Princeton University.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure. Princeton is, to me, one of the more interesting of the schools. You know, they’re all distinct in some ways. But, you know, founded in 1746 and founded in a religiously radical tradition, evangelical tradition, Princeton finds itself struggling in its early years. In 1768, it had just had a sequence of short presidencies, two deaths—including two deaths of the presidents. And they recruit the Scottish minister John Witherspoon. One of the Princeton alumni—then the College of New Jersey—is actually studying medicine in Edinburgh, and he’s acting on behalf of his college to recruit John Witherspoon of Paisley to come to New Jersey. Witherspoon eventually makes the decision—he and his wife Elizabeth—to cross the Atlantic and go to New Jersey.

And one of the things I argue in the book is that: What would make this successful minister from Scotland attracted to a relatively unsuccessful college in a colony that’s actually not in fact a powerhouse in North America? And the answer is really the extraordinary network, Scottish network in the Americas, the ways in which the Witherspoon family, in particular, had reached out across the Americas and branched out across the Americas and provided Witherspoon a way of actually securing and stabilizing the College of New Jersey by exploiting these family and national connections, the Scottish diaspora, in the Americas. And it included, particularly, Scots who were moving into the Carolinas and Virginia, into the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas, and into the Caribbean.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did that have to do with slavery?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: That means that actually what he ends up doing is sort of pointing and looking south for new sources of students and money, as soon as he arrives. In fact, shortly after he arrives, he publishes a missive to the West Indies, in which he promises the planters of the British West Indies that their sons would be better off in Princeton, New Jersey, which is intimate and close enough where the faculty take very good care of the boys, rather than sending them to England, where young men from the West Indies are known to be wealthy and get preyed upon by people of loose morals and broad ambitions. So sending them to Princeton actually would be better for them, but it would also be better for Princeton. And he makes this—he’s not the only one to do this. I should point out that if you look at those colleges that are founded in the mid-18th century, they all send ambassadors to the West Indies in search of money and students.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about Betsey Stockton—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —who was enslaved by an early 19th century president of Princeton.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, yeah. Stockton is actually the—was given to the wife of that president as a gift when she was a younger woman, and then the—through marriage, actually comes into the household of Ashbel Green, the president of Princeton—who ends up president of Princeton. He eventually emancipates her. He also actually establishes—and this is that tension between slavery and antislavery—he establishes a ministry with many of the people in the black community surrounding Princeton. He emancipates her. She lives in the president’s house and continues to work there, and actually becomes quite famous as a biblical scholar. She becomes quite good at biblical geography, and noted—

AMY GOODMAN: Spending most of her time in his library.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, yeah—and noted for her geographic skills, her biblical geographic skills. She then eventually becomes a schoolteacher in New York and heads off to a mission to the Sandwich Islands, to Hawaii, where her skill with language and religion become actually critical to the success of the mission. And so, you have this person who is born enslaved and lives as an enslaved person on a college campus, and then who leads this extraordinary life afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about race science.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the search for cadavers for scientific research at these universities.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, right, yeah. And one of the things I wanted to do with the book was to try and explain both how slavery and the slave trade provided the foundations for the rise of the—of higher education in North America, but I also wanted to explain the role that colleges played in perpetuating slavery and the slave trade. And that’s where you get to race science. That’s where race science becomes critical, because it’s precisely on campus that the ideas that come to defend slavery in the 19th century get refined. They get their intellectual legitimacy on campus. They get their scientific sort of veneer on campus. And they get their moral credentialing on campus.

And so, I wanted to trace that process. And one of the ugliest aspects of that is the use of marginalized people in the Americas, in the United States—its enslaved black people, often Native Americans, and sometimes the Irish—for experimentation, the bodies that were accessible as science rose. And science is rising in the 18th century in part by turning dissection and anatomy into the new medical arts. But that requires bodies. It requires people. In the British islands, that means you’re often exploiting Ireland. In North America, it means you’re often taking advantage of people who have no legal and moral protection upon their bodies: the enslaved.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give an example?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure. Actually, at Dartmouth, the medical college—it would be unfair to say that the medical college begins with this moment, but the teaching of science in Hanover begins when the physician to the president, the founder of Dartmouth, Eleazar Wheelock, drags the body of an enslaved black man, who is deceased, named Cato, to the back of his house and boils that body in an enormous pot to free up the skeleton, to wire it up for instruction. That act is not unusual. In fact, when the first medical colleges are established in North America in the 1760s—the first is at the College of Philadelphia, which is now the University of Pennylvania, and the second is at King’s College, which is now Columbia—when those institutions are founded, actually, they’re founded in part—part of what allows them to be established is access to corpses, access to people to experiment upon. And, in fact, it’s precisely the enslaved, the unfree and the marginalized who get forcibly volunteered for that role.

AMY GOODMAN: Craig Steven Wilder is the author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities . Oh, you can go to our website to read the book’s prologue at democracynow.org. Professor Wilder teaches American history at MIT. He also taught at Williams College, as well as Dartmouth. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to part two of our discussion with Craig Steven Wilder, author of a new book. It’s called Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. It’s an astounding book.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about where you began it. I mean, you’re a professor of American history, Professor Wilder, at MIT right now.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But you taught at Williams, you taught at Dartmouth.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Dartmouth.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Dartmouth, actually, it was one of the more interesting cases. I started the book when I got to Dartmouth in 2002. And as I said, you know, it was supposed to be a tiny little article on how black abolitionists became professionals. How do you become a minister, a doctor, a teacher, in a nation where you can’t go to college? And so, the African Americans who oppose slavery actually have this big push into the professions, but they actually are excluded from colleges and universities. And so, one of the things that intrigued me, and particularly because I was at Dartmouth at the time, was the fact that Native Americans had been on campus, for 200 years by then. Native American students had been on campus for 200 years. And that suggests, in fact, when you say it that way, that Native Americans were somehow privileged, which we know is wrong. And so it really requires a rethinking of the college itself, the role of the college in the colonial world.

And in many ways, I think Dartmouth was a perfect example of what I ended up arguing in the book, that we have to think of colleges as animate, as actors in the colonial world and in the creation of the nation that we know. Eleazar Wheelock, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, who arrives in Hanover—after he gets his charter in 1769, he arrives several months later with eight enslaved black people, including a baby. He has more slaves than he has faculty. He has more slaves than active trustees. He has more slaves—if you do an honest accounting, he probably has more slaves than he has students. And by that time, although he spent most of his life as a missionary to Native Americans—and the college is founded, and certainly its supporters believe that he’s continuing the Native American ministry—in fact, Native American students had been relegated to what was basically a grammar school. And Wheelock was in the process of building a college for white students. And like a lot of colleges that took money for Native American evangelization, a lot of that money actually ends up going to support white students and transform them into missionaries and ministers.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that. I don’t think people quite understand that these universities would go out to raise money.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And they would raise it by saying, "We’re educating Native Americans."

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And it wasn’t only Dartmouth.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Particularly in the 18th century, in the decades before the American Revolution, in the 20 years before the American Revolution, the colleges launched endless appeals and campaigns to Europe, but particularly to Britain, in search of dollars. At one point in the book, I point out that they’re literally bumping into each other in London soliciting wealthy donors, and ofter under the claim that they were educating Native Americans. Samuel Johnson, the founding president of King’s College, which is now Columbia, has a great exchange which highlights this, in which he proposes educating some Indian children from the Six Nations, the Iroquois Confederacy, and sends out a loose letter about this, and then quickly withdraws the idea because it’s just too hard to do. He’s not really interested in educating Indian children, but he is interested in making that appeal. And very often the colleges are sending ambassadors to Europe, in particular, under the claim that they’ll be evangelizing Indians. That begins really in the early 17th century with the very first of the British colleges, Harvard.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened at Harvard?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Well, the sending off appeals to England claiming to and championing the evangelization of Native Americans. In 1649, the New England Company is established, and it’s a missionary corporation, which actually becomes a model for later missionary corporations like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. But throughout the 17th century, one of the continuing themes of Harvard—the charter has changed to include Native American education as part of the mission. The first brick building on Harvard Yard is the Indian College. And I—

AMY GOODMAN: The first building in Harvard Yard—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The first brick building—the first brick building is actually the Indian College. And I point out in the book that, you know, you can raise money hand over fist in Europe for Indian evangelization. And these stories of radical Christians transforming native people into religious perfectionists, into models of Christian virtue, are actually, you know, just being eaten up in Europe.

AMY GOODMAN: Why in Europe?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Well, I think in part because there’s a real use of Native Americans in—there’s a way in which Native Americans have now captured the European mind: exotic people of a different color and kind who both perplex and intrigue Europeans. And so you get a lot of conversation about the origins of native people, where they come from, how you explain them. You know, there’s a tremendous attempt to reconcile their existence in the Americas with biblical narrative, and then to missionize them.

AMY GOODMAN: And these people, who are presidents of these universities, from Dartmouth to Harvard, are ministers.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, they’re ministers, and they’re often missionaries.

AMY GOODMAN: And they have slaves.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And they often have slaves, and they’re—they’ve often been Indian missionaries. So Wheelock has spent much of his—

AMY GOODMAN: The first president of Dartmouth.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The first president of Dartmouth has spent much of his life as an Indian missionary. But he’s also run a side business buying and selling people for labor, so that enslaved black people have been part of his life’s work from his earliest years.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you feel about this, Craig Steven Wilder, at Dartmouth yourself teaching, doing this research?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: This slow, uncomfortable realization that you’re part of this world with this very broad, deep, painful history is, to say the very least, awkward. It was—it also became an intellectual challenge for me: How do I tell that story? And how do I get that story to an audience and get them to understand its meaning, what it means for us today and what it meant for us then? And so, I think, in some ways, as a historian it’s probably easier to deal with that realization, because we have the tools for then wrestling with it.

AMY GOODMAN: Did they ever try to get you to stop telling this story?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: No, no. Actually they didn’t. And I have to give everyone a lot of credit. You know, one of the great things that happened is, you know, early in my career at Dartmouth I gave a talk on a part of the book that—what’s now a small part of the book, you know, and the president of Dartmouth at the time, Jim Wright, was sitting in the front row of that talk and gave me a great handshake and a hug afterwards.

And, you know, I often tell the story of going into archives to do the research for this book, from the Carolinas and Virginia to eastern Canada and Scotland. And when I first started, I was somewhat cautious about what I would say, you know, when they ask you on those forms, "What are you studying?" And so, I would say vague things like 18th century education or colonial schools. And as the archivists and librarians sort of—as I got to know them and they found out more about what I was doing, one of the really wonderful things that happened is not only were they quite supportive of the project, but they often in fact introduced me to and brought me material that I would never have known was in the archives. Sometimes they sort of slipped it to me across the table as if they were doing something wrong, but they—

AMY GOODMAN: What were—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: —were always supportive. They were always warm.

AMY GOODMAN: What were some of your great discoveries there?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think, you know, the presidents who owned slaves, what happened to those enslaved people during their lives. You know, at William & Mary, one of the early founders actually ends up killing a child.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that story.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: He orders—

AMY GOODMAN: Who was it?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: It’s Reverend Grey, and he orders a child to be beaten. And the child is beaten so severely that he later dies. The—his parish actually basically pays him in tobacco to leave. And that was one of the sort of really quite difficult moments in writing the book, because there’s a way to tell that story, but it’s a difficult story to tell. And there’s something to be known about the nature of colleges in there, the nature of the colonial world in there.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean there’s a way to tell that story?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Well, I think there’s a way to tell that, meaning that, you know, the—part of my job as a historian is to make that story available to people, to explain it, and to let them understand how that moment comes into being. And it’s one of many in which children actually play a role in the book, because one of the patterns that I had noticed as I was doing this research over years was just the number of children who were owned by college presidents required some kind of explanation, when you really think about how many of them had made specific requests for children.

AMY GOODMAN: Go through them.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And so I end up—well, let—you know, let’s think of some. Ezra Stiles, who’s the president of Yale during the American Revolution, earlier, as a Newport minister, purchases a child, a boy, named Newport, in Newport, Rhode Island. He’s a Rhode Island minister before he becomes president of Yale. And then he emancipates Newport on the day before he becomes president of Yale, before he enters the president’s house. Jonathan Edwards purchases a girl—I believe he names her Venus—in Rhode Island.

AMY GOODMAN: And Jonathan Edwards is?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Is—becomes the president of Princeton. He is earlier an Indian missionary in Connecticut, a rather fantastic career as an evangelical minister and one of the leading evangelicals of the 18th century, probably most famous for the founding evangelical sermon, as it’s often called, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Edwards purchases a girl. The—at Dartmouth, Wheelock owns children. The trustees at Harvard are actually demanding children. Increase Mather gets a boy when he’s president of Harvard.

And I needed to explain this phenomenon, and so one of the things I looked at was I really tried to examine the history around that decision-making process. And in the book, I point out that it has a lot to do with the rising fear of slave revolts in the 18th century colonies and the belief that children would be more easily socialized into slavery and less likely to revolt. And so you end up with these extraordinarily descriptive requests for slaves, the absentee planters of the West Indies who are living up in Massachusetts writing back to their overseers with very exact descriptions of the age, gender and type of personality that they want in a slave. You know, one writes that "I lost my boy," meaning he died, "and I want to replace him with another." And therefore you also end up with a slave trade, an Atlantic slave trade, which deals in human beings, but about 20 percent of whom are children.

And I explore one of those voyages in the book, in which dozens of children, some as young as two and three years old, are being held captive on board and die during the journey. And that’s a Livingston investment, the Livingstons who go on to become the funders of the first professorship, endowed professorship, at Yale, founders of Columbia and trustees at Princeton and at Rutgers.

AMY GOODMAN: Rutgers, you haven’t talked much about.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us a little about Rutgers.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: You know, the—it’s a fascinating institution for a lot of reasons. And the original Queen’s College, which is a Dutch Reformed college, the Dutch colonists are establishing their own institution, and it’s, as we all know, really quite close to the College of New Jersey, Princeton, and Princeton is originally founded in the eastern part of the state over by Newark and then drifts over, and the governor, Governor Belcher, actually helps it eventually settle in Princeton, New Jersey. And—but, in fact, actually, one of the things that happened is there’s a lot of pressure from the College of New Jersey, from Princeton, for the Queen’s College, Rutgers, to actually fold in. But, in fact, the denominational allegiances are too strong for that, so the Presbyterians remain at New Jersey, Princeton, and the Dutch Reformed at Rutgers.

One of their earliest presidents, [Jacob] Hardenbergh, the Reverend Hardenbergh at Queen’s College, manages to purchase slaves despite the fact that the college is doing quite poorly. You know, Queen’s is so financially strapped that it closes multiple times in its early history, and for long periods. But on the eve of one of its first closures, when it just has to shut down and stop operations, Reverend Hardenbergh manages to buy a second slave for his household. And what does that tell us about colleges in the 18th century? One of the things that it should remind us is that colleges survived on the margins in the 18th century. You know, they were constantly seeking sources of funding. And the most obvious and immediate sources of funding were the rising wealthy traders of the big port cities, dominated by the slave traders, and then the planters of the South and the West Indies who had both cash and children but very few schools. As one historian of the British West Indies puts it very nicely, the British West Indies actually didn’t need colleges because of mainland North America. And there are very few institutions of higher education, or even secondary education, established in the West Indies during the colonial period, because those planters could sent their sons to Europe or to North America, the mainland.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does the Civil War play into this? Because you have all these Northerners who owned slaves, but they not only owned slaves, they run institutions that justify slavery.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: It really challenges the whole notion of the Civil War—the North against, the South for, and so you fight over the evil of slavery.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And I argue in the book that one of the things that Northerners contribute to the—Northern intellectuals contribute in the decades before the war is the attempt to establish a common ground between the North and South, an intellectual solution to the crisis over slavery as that crisis boils up. And they actually manage to claim a new public position in this role. I argue in the book that actually what allows the college to become—the university to become what we know today, an independent, influential actor in public affairs, rather than an offshoot of churches, which is what they are in the colonial period, right—what allows them to break free of the church and establish themselves and their own prestige in the public arena is the ability to articulate a new vision of the United States, a new future for the United States. But it’s premised on racial science. It’s premised upon a claim that academics, intellectuals, can make a better, more informed, truer argument about the future of the nation and the question of slavery. And they use race science to make that claim. And so, in the final chapter of the book, I look at the overrepresentation of academics, of college professors and college presidents, in racial cleansing movements.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Like the American Colonization Society, which is established in 1817, originally with the aim of removing free black people from the United States to some place outside of North America. In 1822, the Liberia colony is established and named.

AMY GOODMAN: You mean the country in Africa, Liberia—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Right, Liberia.

AMY GOODMAN: —where—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Where free black people are to be transported to. And they’re also overrepresented in the debates about Indian removal in the South. And they’re overrepresented, I point out in the book, in debates about and the process of establishing missions to convert Jews living in the United States or fund their removal from the United States. And when you put it all together, what you end up with is this extraordinary vision of the United States as a white Christian society, racially cleansed and racially purified. But what that actually means is race becomes the common ground between North and South. Academics, and Northern academics in particular, begin to articulate a vision for the future of the United States as a racially purified society, where slavery could continue to exist as long as it was contained and as long as it served the interest of the white South. But the goal of the nation, the future of the nation, the vision of the nation, would be a white Christian society.

AMY GOODMAN: One image you have in the book is from 1826. It’s a flier, and it’s Washington College, now Washington and Lee, advertising, quote, "Negroes For Hire." It says, "Twenty Likely Negroes belonging to WASHINGTON COLLEGE, consisting of Men, Women, Boys and Girls, many of them very valuable," will be hired out for the year. Explain the significance of this ad.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: This is one of the institutions—and there are many of them—that owned slaves, owned slaves and used their labor to run the campus, to take care of the faculty and the students, and then in—as the seasonal demand for enslaved people changed, further profited off of them by leasing them out and leasing out extra laborers. We can think about this in a number of ways. Washington and Lee, William & Mary in Virginia, in a single year at one point in its early history, purchased 17 people for the campus. The University of North Carolina—and then in the North, you have something similar. Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth, as I said, you know, shows up with eight enslaved people, and so that enslaved people are the—in some ways, the majority population on the rough early campus of Dartmouth College.

And for a lot of people doing this kind of work, studying the relationship between colleges and universities, I think there’s been this look for the sort of smoking gun. And the smoking gun is always—it seems to me to be, what they’re looking for is whether or not the institution owned slaves. Well, lots of them do. But when their presidents do, they effectively do. And when the—when the professors own slaves, the institution effectively owns slaves.

AMY GOODMAN: And the students?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: And the students bring slaves to campus. You know, George Washington’s son, Jacky Custis, his stepson, Washington nixes the idea of sending him to William & Mary because—

AMY GOODMAN: Washington himself didn’t go to college.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, right, he didn’t go to college. And General Washington doesn’t want to send Jacky to William & Mary because Jacky already has bad habits, and he thinks his habits will get worse among the sons of the elite planters in Virginia. And so, he brings him up to New York and enrolls him at King’s College, what’s now Columbia. And Columbia is glad to have him, in part because this creates another entrance to the wealthy planters of the South and a new way of making new ties with a new group of students and potential donors and enrollments. But what’s fascinating is that, you know, Washington shows up in New York with his stepson and his stepson’s slave Joe. Joe actually also comes to campus. And the president of Columbia at the time, Myles Cooper, outfits Jacky with a suite of rooms that then he has—that Jacky has painted and readied for himself, and Joe is basically occupying what’s basically a large closet in one of the rooms.

That’s not unusual. You know, at William & Mary, probably about 10 percent of the students in the 1760s brought slaves with them to campus. And there are examples—you know, there are other examples people are actually looking at right now, other scholars, of these same phenomena, North and South.

AMY GOODMAN: In all of your research, what were you most shocked by?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think, honestly, the thing that most shocked me, there are these moments where you—you wrestle with difficult questions. You know, certainly when you’re seeing—when I was doing the work on the slave ship, The Wolf, which the Livingstons send out to the African coast and which takes, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: And Livingston is tied to Yale.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, Livingston is tied to Yale, to Columbia, to Princeton and to Rutgers.

AMY GOODMAN: And the ship is called?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: The Wolf.

AMY GOODMAN: And it is sent to?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: It’s sent to the African coast on a slaving mission that takes basically a year and a half, an extraordinarily long time. The ship has—the captain has a hard time actually purchasing enough captives to get a full complement, as his surgeon will say, and so he’s holding people below deck for months as he hops between these various ports on the African coast attempting to purchase more people. A lot of the people on board, a lot of the captives on board, are actually small children. And so, you know, this is a voyage in which the surgeon actually goes through—the ship’s surgeon goes through a series of emotional crises himself, which he records in his diary. Babies are dying, two and three years old. He’s doing autopsies on them to try and figure out why they’re dying. He’s finding, you know, that they’re dying of the flux. They’re dying—they have worms, some 12 inches long. It’s a horrific tale. The—

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t people rise up on the ship?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, there’s actually an attempted slave revolt on board before the ship departs. More people actually die on the return journey across the Atlantic. And when they arrive back in New York and the Livingstons put them up for sale, they’ve probably ended up killing as many people as they’ve sold.

AMY GOODMAN: So it was about 200 people, or a little less, on board to begin with.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, right.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s like 88 or something left.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, and the population drops significantly. But the number of people who are killed just along the African coast is just astounding and disturbing. And I want to remember, as I sort of, you know, retell that story in the book, that for me that’s probably the hardest and most shocking thing, but it’s shocking for all of us. You know, it’s—I’m not making a sort of proprietary claim upon, you know, emotional outrage to that kind of historical event. And so, the thing that probably shocked me most was that you have those moments where you just, as a historian, have to find a way to tell a gruesome story, because that story is necessary to understanding in three dimensions this moment in time. But even more shocking was how many of those stories there are. You know, you can find a version of that story for every college that’s established in the colonial world. You’re playing basically two degrees of separation from some horrific slaving voyage.

AMY GOODMAN: Craig Steven Wilder, I want to ask you to stay with us. We’re going to trace one family’s roots—

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —to the largest slave-holding family in America, and I’d like you to comment on it and how it links to the universities of this country.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Craig Steven Wilder is the author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities .

Thousands in Honduras Decry "Fraudulent" Election and Call for Recount

Minnesota Community College says 'Please Don't Discuss White Supremacy in Class'

CBS

RACISM (white supremacy), is the local and global power system and dynamic, structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white, whether consciously or subconsciously determined, which consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sex and war); for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet earth – a planet upon which the vast majority of people are classified as non-white (Black, Brown, Red and Yellow) by white skinned people, and all of the nonwhite people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic recessive white skin people.”

• People who classify themselves as White, who wish to be taken seriously, and who are righteous and responsible, will only talk about ending White Supremacy (Racism) and replacing it with Justice. For further understanding, read "The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)", 1970. Also, "The Isis Papers (The Keys to the Colors)", Frances C. Welsing, Third World Press, 1990. [MORE]

Texas drivers get asked for saliva, blood by federal contractors at police roadblock

CitizensForLegitGov

Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood. It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers. NBC DFW confirmed that the survey was done by a government contractor, the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, which is based in Calverton, Md.

The Making of the ‘Three Strikes’ Laws

NYtimes

Look At What Fox News Is Calling "Sharia Law"

MediaMatters

Fox News incited Islamophobic fears in its reporting on a weekly swim class at a YMCA facility that ensures the privacy of Muslim girls learning to swim, framing it as evidence that "Sharia law is now changing everything." 

In October, a St. Paul YMCA in partnership with the local police department decided to offer an hour long swim practice once a week to give Muslim Somali-American girls between the ages of 5 and 17 an opportunity to learn basic swimming skills, making considerations for the girls' modesty and religious beliefs. On the December 2 edition of Fox & Friends, Fox's Heather Nauert framed this story as evidence that "Sharia law is now changing everything":

NAUERT: Well the minority becoming the majority at one community pool. Sharia law is now changing everything. A YMCA in Minneapolis-St. Paul is starting a swim group for Muslim girls but special considerations have to be made to keep with their religious beliefs. Now this means during the one-hour class, the pool is being shut down, the men's locker room is being locked, and female lifeguards are being brought in. Similar classes are now starting at towns across the Midwest. We'll keep watching this story for you.

Fox's use of an hour-long swim lesson for girls to push the myth that Sharia is taking over is disconcerting to say the least. For many Muslim girls, this class represents their first opportunity to learn these basic skills, and the Star Tribune noted that this is an important and much-needed program for the community, and that "[s]pecial considerations have to be made to address modesty concerns":

Special considerations have to be made to address modesty concerns so that the Muslim girls can swim and not reveal too much of themselves.

[...]

St. Paul Police Chief Tom Smith had discussions with Britts to let the Y know that, through the department's connections with the Somali-American community, they had learned that such a group was needed.

"I think this is just a great opportunity for them to learn basic skills that we take for granted," said Sgt. Jennifer O'Donnell, who has worked with the Somali community regularly during her time with the department.

"We have to have privacy," said Ubah Ali, Dhamuke's mother.

For years, Ali said she has been trying to find a place where her daughter could swim, but nothing seemed to work. Not knowing how to swim is a safety risk, especially in the state of 10,000 lakes, Ali said. 

Fox News' decision to cite this story as evidence of "Sharia law" spreading through the country fits with the network's history of pushing Islamophobia and the myth of "creeping Sharia." In recent history Fox has led asmear campaign against Park51, an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center, claiming it would potentially be a haven for terrorists. The network has also been known to invite discredited anti-Muslim guests on its shows to push fears about Muslims. Fox's pattern of Islamophobia has now reached the new low of presenting swimming lessons for young girls as a problem so worrisome that Nauert promised to "keep watching this story."

Federal Judge Orders State to Implement Parole Process for Children Serving Life Sentences

DETROIT – A federal judge today ordered that all Michigan prisoners who are serving life sentences for crimes committed while children must be provided a "fair, meaningful and realistic" opportunity for parole. The judge gave the state until December 31, 2013 to implement a parole process that comports with his order.

"Courts have repeatedly made it clear that incarcerating children and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual punishment," said Deborah LaBelle, lead attorney in this case, Hill v Snyder. "Today the court demanded that the state of Michigan take action to comply with the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent set almost two years ago. It's now up to the state to develop a process that is meaningful and fair."

In January 2013, U.S. District Judge John Corbett O'Meara, following a decision made by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012, ruled that Michigan's mandatory sentencing scheme for children convicted of certain crimes is unconstitutional because it treats children as adults and denies them any possibility of parole even if they can demonstrate that they are rehabilitated and pose no danger to society.  Such a system, O'Meara ruled, violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment."

"The Supreme Court has made it clear that mandatory life sentences for children are a violation the Eighth Amendment, and Judge O'Meara's ruling enforces the Supreme Court's decisions," said Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project director. "At the center of this case is the simple reality that children are different from adults and should be treated as such in the eyes of the law. The parole process should undertake a serious and meaningful examination of the factors that weigh heavily on children: their home environment, immaturity and failure to appreciate risks and consequences."

ACLU

The state, represented by the office of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, originally contended that the U.S. Supreme Court decision could not be applied to people already sentenced. The state had also argued that Judge O'Meara's ruling could only be applied to the six plaintiffs named in the ACLU's lawsuit and not the more than 350 people currently serving such sentences. In decisions issued in January and August of 2013, Judge O'Meara rejected Schuette's arguments, ruling that the state could not continue to enforce its unconstitutional law denying children any possibility of parole, and that his order would apply to all children serving life sentences.

At the time of the first ruling, Judge O'Meara also stated that he was prepared to determine the reforms that are necessary to guarantee a full, fair and realistic opportunity for parole for individuals who committed their offense before the age of 18. Today's order forces the state to put in place, no later than December 31, a process for parole that:

• creates an administrative structure for processing and determining parole eligibility;
• gives notice to all who have served 10 years of a life sentence that they are eligible for parole;
• includes a public hearing for each individual who is eligible for parole;
• requires the Parole Board to issue a decision and an explanation for its decision in each case;
• prohibits sentencing judges from vetoing the parole decision; and
• allows parole-eligible youth to access educational or training programs to assist with their rehabilitation and reentry.

To read today's order, go to: http://www.aclumich.org/sites/default/files/file/HillOrderRequiringParoleProcess.pdf
To read the August 2013 order, go to: http://www.aclumich.org/sites/default/files/ACLU_JuvenileLife_Order.pdf
To read the January 2013 order, go to: http://www.aclumich.org/sites/default/files/ACLU_JuvenileLife_OriginalRuling.pdf

Supreme Court hears arguments in American Indian casino case

Jurist

The US Supreme Court [official website] heard oral arguments [day call, PDF] Monday in two cases. In Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community [transcript, PDF; JURIST report] the court was asked to consider whether tribal sovereign immunity bars a state from suing in federal court to enjoin a tribe from violating the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) [25 USC § 2701 et seq.] outside of Indian lands. In this case the state of Michigan and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians brought suit to prevent the Bay Mills Indian Community from operating a small casino in Vanderbilt, Michigan. The district court entered a preliminary injunction ordering Bay Mills to stop gaming at the Vanderbilt casino. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held [opinion] that the district court lacked jurisdiction over some of the plaintiffs' claims and that sovereign immunity bars the others. Counsel for Michigan argued that "a tribe should not have greater immunity than foreign nations. There's no dispute that if France opened up an illegal business in Michigan, casino or otherwise, it would have no blanket immunity." Counsel for the respondents argued that "The proper inquiry for this Court ... is it requires an unequivocal expression of purpose of Congress before tribal immunity is abrogated, and we don't get into this kind of question of what Congress might have thought, which creates a guessing game." Counsel for the US government argued as amicus curiae on behalf of respondents.

In BG Group PLC v. Republic of Argentina [transcript, PDF; JURIST report] the court must decide whether a court or the arbitrator determines if a precondition to arbitration has been satisfied in disputes involving a multi-staged dispute resolution process. The case involves a Bilateral Investment Treaty between the UK and Argentina, signed into law in 1990. The treaty provides that a dispute between an investor and a host state will be resolved in the host state's courts, and, if no timely resolution is reached, then the case proceeds to arbitration. British investor BG Group PLC invoked the arbitration clause against Argentina without first filing in Argentine court. The panel found that it had jurisdiction and awarded damages to BG Group. The district court denied Argentina's motion to vacate the award, but the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated the award [opinion]. BG Group argues that it is for the arbitrator, not the court, to determine whether the precondition to arbitration has been satisfied. Counsel for BG Group asked the court "to resolve this case narrowly by reaffirming that an arbitrator rather than a court presumptively resolves a dispute over a precondition to arbitration." Counsel for the US government argued as amicus curiae in support of vacating the lower court's judgment and remanding. Counsel for Argentina argued, "This is a contract formation case and it's a case that is decided properly by the court below whether you apply first options or whether you apply treaty principles."

So called "liberal" white journalist says gorilla cartoon of Obama is not Racist

Daily Kos

White liberal cartoonist Ted Rall drew the above gorilla depiction of Obama on the DailyKos on 11/27 and then defended it [HERE]. 

In a white supremacy system all white people should be suspected of being racist. [MORE] White people practice racism to survive, this includes so-called liberal democrats. For years now white people have been depicting Obama as an ape or gorilla. The belief that non-white people are sub-human or inferior humans is part of the 'white over Black' system; "white supremacy is a religion." [MORE]  Whether you support or Obama or not such depictions are not personal - they are racial. This racist conduct is directed at you. [MORE]

 [MORE]

Lawsuit claims wrongful death of Black Man Shot by Mercer County Police

Post-Gazette

The former girlfriend of a man whom police fatally shot in Mercer County in 2011 filed a lawsuit today accusing two unidentified officers and their department with wrongful death and violations of constitutional rights.

Donteau Napier was 27 when, according to the complaint, police got a call about a "27-year-old male with a history of mental problems" causing problems at the Ira B. Levigne Manor public housing complex in Farrell.

At least two officers responded from the from the Southwest Mercer County Regional Police Department, which serves Farrell and several nearby towns.

Napier was getting out of a vehicle, unarmed, "clearly emotionally disturbed, but not a threat," according to the complaint. The officers shot him from "less than 60 feet away," the complaint claimed.

The plaintiff is Taliea Robinson, the administrator of Napier's estate. The defendants are the department and the two officers.

Police Chief Riley Smoot Jr. said he had not yet seen the lawsuit and could not comment.

The Sharon Herald has reported that Mercer County District Attorney Robert G. Kochems found that the shooting was justified. The newspaper reported that Ms. Robinson made the 911 call that led to the encounter and told law enforcement that her fiance had a gun.

The civil complaint alleged that police violated Napier's rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and excessive force, and caused his wrongful death. It demanded payment for Napier's pain and suffering and economic damages, plus punitive damages.

Durham Police Still Quiet in Death of Runaway Latino Teen: Jesus Huerta Died in Police Custody after mystery gunshot

Herald Sun

A city councilman on Thursday voiced frustration with how long it’s taken to come up with answers for the public regarding a series of shooting incidents involving Durham police.

“Until the investigations are complete, we are all on hold,” Councilman Don Moffitt told colleagues, adding the city “needs information and transparency” about the incidents.

Moffitt prefaced his comments by expressing sympathy to the family of Jesus Huerta, 17, who died Tuesday morning outside the headquarters of the Durham Police Department.

An officer had picked up Huerta, a potential runaway, on the request of his family and was bringing him to headquarters to retrieve an arrest warrant for second-degree trespassing.

The officer, Samuel Duncan, reported to emergency dispatchers there were “shots fired” in the patrol car and a youth was not breathing after suffering a gunshot wound.

Police Chief Jose Lopez has said the death wasn’t the product of an officer firing a weapon. But further explanation awaits a State Bureau of Investigation review.

Also pending are investigations into the July death of Jose Ocampo and the September death of Derek Walker. Both were shot by police officers.

Ocampo’s death came after he confronted officers while holding a knife. Witnesses claimed he was trying to surrender; police said he hadn’t complied with orders to drop the weapon.

Walker’s also followed an armed confrontation with police, in front of numerous witnesses at CCB Plaza in downtown Durham. He was distraught over a child-custody dispute.

City officials regard the incident as a case of “suicide by cop,” but friends of Walker have questioned whether officers at the scene had sufficient training in how to deal with the mentally ill.

Moffitt listed all three of those cases and added another from late 2012, that of Carlos Riley Jr.

Riley is accused of shooting Officer Kelly Stewart, with the officer’s pistol, during a scuffle at a traffic stop. He faces both federal and state charges because of the incident.

In July he signaled through a lawyer that he would plead guilty to a federal weapons-possession charge. He was to have been sentenced this week, but court records indicate that’s been postponed to early January.

Riley, a convicted drug dealer, despite entering the plea bargain maintains he didn’t shoot Stewart. His family contends Stewart shot himself while drawing his weapon, and that Riley Jr. took the pistol to make sure he wouldn’t become a victim of police brutality after having been stopped without cause.

Moffitt said he hopes the SBI and other agencies involved complete their work so officials and the public can know what happened.

“It’s just that I’m frustrated that we have cases that go back a year that are still in the system,” he said. “We need to be moving forward. That’s all. We need the information, we need the results of the investigations, we need to be able to move forward.”

He spoke up at Thursday’s City Council work session and by his own account had not discussed his concerns with other officials beforehand.

But Mayor Bill Bell said Moffitt isn’t necessarily alone.

“All of us share the frustration of not being able to get an answer with all the details as quickly as we’d like to have them and the people involved would like to have them,” Bell said. “But we recognize, I recognize, that there’s a certain due diligence that has to take place.”

Bell added that he’ll place a call to state Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office to make sure officials there appreciate the local worries and “what kind of priority it is to get things speeded up.”

City Manager Tom Bonfield said that when it comes to Riley, his understanding is that local prosecutors are awaiting the outcome of the federal sentencing before moving ahead with state charges.

He added that the lack of closure over earlier incidents can contribute to public concern about new ones.

“When another event happens, it compounds the frustration,” Bonfield said.

Investigation Reveals LA Sheriff's Department hired (liars and criminals) officers with histories of misconduct

LATimes

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department hired dozens of officers even though background investigators found they had committed serious misconduct on or off duty, sheriff's files show.

Of the nearly 400 officers and supervisors from the Office of Public Safety who applied to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in 2010, about 280 were hired. Of those:

188 Were rejected for jobs at law enforcement agencies before being hired by the Sheriff's Department.

97 showed evidence of dishonesty, such as making untrue statements or falsifying police records.

92 were disciplined previously by other police agencies for significant misconduct on duty.

29 were fired or pressured to resign from a previous law enforcement job.

15 were flagged by background investigators for trying to manipulate the results of a polygraph exam.

The department made the hires in 2010 after taking over patrols of parks and government buildings from a little-known L.A. County police force. Officers from that agency were given first shot at new jobs with the Sheriff's Department. Investigators gave them lie detector tests and delved into their employment records and personal lives.

The Times reviewed the officers' internal hiring files, which also contained recorded interviews of the applicants by sheriff's investigators.

Ultimately, about 280 county officers were given jobs, including applicants who had accidentally fired their weapons, had sex at work and solicited prostitutes, the records show.

Several of those with past misconduct have been accused of wrongdoing since joining the department, including one deputy who was terminated after firing his service weapon during a dispute outside a fast-food restaurant.

After sheriff's officials learned The Times had access to the records, they launched a criminal investigation to determine who had leaked them. They also said they would review whether some applicants had been improperly hired. The union representing deputies unsuccessfully tried to get a court order blocking publication of information from the files.

The records provide a rare look into hiring decisions at the nation's largest sheriff's department, an agency dogged in recent years by a string of scandals related to deputy abuse and racially biased policing.

The department's hiring files detail proven and unproven allegations of misconduct based on information from past employers, romantic partners and others. The files also document when applicants were arrested or charged for alleged crimes but not convicted. One new hire had been charged with assault under the color of authority, and another had been arrested for assault with intent to murder and rape.

The Times, however, focused its analysis on allegations that had been proved in court, sustained in workplace investigations or in cases where the applicants themselves admitted to wrongdoing to sheriff's investigators.

The Times attempted to contact all of the new hires through visits to their homes, phone calls or by email. More than a third granted interviews or declined to comment. Others received inquiries but did not respond. Some could not be located. Of those who did respond, some disputed the contents in their files. Others characterized past problems as mistakes made many years ago that did not reflect how qualified they are to work in law enforcement today.

Law enforcement experts said hiring officers with problematic backgrounds undermines the department's integrity.

"Cops are held to a higher standard than the average member of society because we've got to be able to trust them," said Edward Rogner, a retired Sheriff's Department commander who was involved in the expansion but not in hiring decisions.

When told about The Times' findings, Rogner added: "I was under the impression that people with backgrounds like that were not being hired."

Sheriff Lee Baca declined to comment, but his spokesman said Baca was not aware people with such backgrounds were hired.

Before he knew of the newspaper's investigation, Baca told Times reporters that people with records of violence or dishonesty have no place in law enforcement. He said applicants who had been fired from other agencies shouldn't be given a second chance, and that he would not hire applicants with histories of illegal sexual conduct.

"Men that take women and use them as a sexual object are going to always come up against my wrath," he said.

As a county police officer, Ferdinand Salgado had just gotten off work when he was arrested on suspicion of soliciting a prostitute who was actually an undercover cop at a Yum Yum Donuts parking lot in El Monte. According to authorities, he grinned at her, asked for oral sex and arranged to meet her at a motel.

He pleaded to a lesser charge of disturbing the peace. During his Sheriff's Department interview, he denied he said anything to the woman.

"I ain't buying it," an investigator told him after reviewing the police report. "You know you're not telling me the truth."

Salgado, who was hired as a jail guard and has since left the agency, wasn't the only one with a conviction on his record.

Records show almost 30 other hires had been convicted of drunk driving, battery or a variety of lower-level crimes. About 50 disclosed to sheriff's background investigators misdeeds such as petty theft, soliciting prostitutes and violence against spouses.

One hire told investigators of having inappropriate sexual contact with two toddlers as a teenager.

In another case, Linda Bonner was given a job after revealing that she used her department-issued weapon to shoot at her husband as he ran away from her during an argument. He wasn't hit; he was lucky he was running in a zigzag pattern, she told investigators, because if not the end result "would have been a whole lot different."

Albuquerque police Settle Brutality Case with Latino Man Kicked in the Face after DUI Stop

KRWG

The lawyer for man who filed a police brutality lawsuit against Albuquerque police after his jaw was broken in an encounter with officers says the city has agreed to settle the case by paying him $60,000.

Attorney Ryan Villa says an officer kicked his client after he surrendered at the end of a foot chase. Charles Gomez had been stopped by police in May 2011 and was about to be taken into custody for DWI when he took off running.

Villa says Gomez gave up when officer Justin Montgomery found him hiding behind a dumpster but the officer kicked him in the face.

A city official confirmed a settlement has been reach but said it has not been finalized and could not confirm the amount.