Two Judges Admit Jailing Kids For Cash

What a sickening news item.

These judges, though, are in the grand tradition of the american injustice system. You can be sure that this business venture involved selective repression of Blacks and Latinos.

Corrupt judges paid to detain youths in private jails

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Two former judges in Pennsylvania have admitted to receiving more than 2.6 million dollars in pay-offs from companies that run private prisons for sending them minors for detention or disciplinary camps.

The admissions, which were made by judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan in a plea agreement filed in federal court last week, has sparked protests by outraged parents and relatives of youths whose cases were handled by the judges.

In the plea agreement, Ciavarella and Conahan admitted they “abused their position … by secretly deriving more than 2,600,000 (dollars) in income … in exchange for official actions.”

Those actions included “entering into agreements guaranteeing placement of juvenile offenders with PA Child Care, LLC (and) facilitating the construction of juvenile detention facilities,” according to the document.

Pennsylvania Child Care and Western Pennsylvania Child Care also stood to make tens of millions of dollars from the scheme, the plea document said.

They were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud against the United States.

The Juvenile Law Center, an advocacy organization for youths in trouble with the law, will file complaints from several dozen families who learned that their child was unjustly detained, a spokesman told AFP Monday.

Some families have filed complaints separately.

More than 5,000 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 were found guilty between 2002 and 2007 when the judges were active in Luzerne county, an impoverished former mining area where the majority of residents are white.

Of those, more than 2,000 were ordered sent to detention, said Marie Roda, a spokeswoman for Juvenile Law Center.

Many were from families with little money or education, which made them “easy targets,” she said.

“A lot of them didn’t have lawyers and when they asked for a public defender and they were told it would be weeks to wait,” she said.

The judges face at least seven years in prison under the plea agreement. But the federal judge hearing their case could sentence them to up to 25 years in prison.

A decision is not expected for several months.

“Families have been calling non-stop since this came out but not all of the families have signed onto the suit yet,” Roda said.

“We don’t know how many families it’s going to be. We know some of them are not going to file. They just want it to go away, they just want to let it go,” she said.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday named a special judge from outside the area to review all the cases tried by the tainted judges.

The cases include those of a youth detained for nine months for stealing a four-dollar jar of spices, and a 13-year-old who was sent to “boot camp” for several weekends for exploring an abandoned building.

In many cases, youths were sent to prisons far from their families, often against the recommendation of probation officers.

Oakland transit cop murders man handcuffed, lying on the ground

Brace yourself for the following video footage. Here’s the latest known murder of a minority by a member of the gang of trained killers, this time in California.

Oakland transit cops came to a subway station to break up a fight. They had a 22 year old man named Omar Grant handcuffed and on the ground when an officer shot him point blank in the head.

A person who witnessed the horrific execution also filmed the shooting as it happened.

Tennessee man freed after 22 years on death row

tennessean.com

House release is a long-awaited triumph of democracy
By DWIGHT LEWIS • July 3, 2008

It was 9:52 a.m. Wednesday when the 2004 white GMC Yukon XL pulled out from inside the trap gate of the Tennessee Department of Correction’s Lois DeBerry Special Needs Facility in the Cockrill Bend area in west Nashville.

It was a long-awaited ride to freedom for 46-year-old Paul Gregory House, who had been on Tennessee’s death row for the past 22 years for a murder many say he did not commit.

“It’s a great day,” House, drinking a Pepsi and eating a candy bar, said as the vehicle in which he was riding came to a stop before a group of supporters and journalists. They were there to cover his release from prison on $100,000 bond while awaiting the state to retry him in October in the 1985 rape and murder of Carolyn Muncey in Union County.

“It’s been a long fight,” added his mother, Joyce House, who was seated alongside her son in the SUV driven by Paul House’s newly appointed lawyer, Dale Potter, an assistant public defender from the state’s Eighth Judicial District in LaFollette. “I think this is the last time I will be going in this prison. I told Paul, ‘You’re going home.’ “

Yes, it has been a long fight.

I first wrote about House back in October 2004 immediately after a New York Times story said he remained on Tennessee’s death row although six of the 15 members of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said that he is not guilty of the murder for which he was convicted in 1986 and should be freed immediately.

Eight other judges on the court said in an appeal decision that House should be executed, while another judge said the inmate should at least be given a new trial.

In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-3 that DNA evidence from semen collected from Muncey’s clothing, along with other evidence, was strong enough that a jury would not have convicted House.

And last Dec. 20, Judge Harry S. Mattice Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee issued a ruling that ordered House be released unless prosecutors begin a new trial within 180 days after the order becomes final.

The state announced that it would retry House even though DNA has shown that the semen evidence used to help convict House was really that of Muncey’s husband, Hubert. In early June, a state court judge in Union County, not far from Knoxville, set a $500,000 bond for House, but another judge last week reduced the bond to $100,000. House, who has been suffering from multiple sclerosis for the past 12 years and cannot walk, was released from prison after an anonymous donor sent his mother $10,000 toward House’s bail.

“It’s hard to say that justice has been served now,” the Rev. Joe Ingle, a longtime prisoner-rights advocate who has ministered to Paul House. “An innocent man has been on death row for 23 years.

“The whole experience reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen said ‘convict first, facts later.’ … The people who are to be commended are the lawyers and those people who have fought over the years for Paul’s freedom.

“That’s the better part of the American justice system. And that makes me proud to be an American” on the eve of Independence Day.

Ingle is right. Those people, such as House’s longtime attorney, Stephen M. Kissinger, the federal public defender in Knoxville, have been on the home front working for democracy.

“He is absolutely innocent,” Kissinger told me back in October 2004 when I first talked to him about the House case. “There is no doubt that he’s innocent. … It’s easily the best case of innocence I have seen in 20 years of practicing law.”

As you take time off Friday to celebrate the Fourth, and as you think about the words of the Declaration of Independence, say a thank-you for people such as Kissinger, Ingle and Stacy Rector, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing. Say a thank-you, because they help keep democracy working on the home front.

—————————-
nashvillecitypaper.com

House case shows more flaws in death penalty system
Posted: Thursday, July 3, 2008 1:56 am

Given his death sentence, the mound of evidence supporting his innocence and a U.S. Supreme Court formal recognition of those facts, it is a mystery how Paul House stayed in jail for the last two years.

House spent 23 years on Tennessee’s death row. New evidence in the murder case of Union County woman Carolyn Muncey appears to prove House’s innocence. Specifically, DNA evidence shows rape could not have been a motive for House to kill Muncey as prosecutors successfully argued in the mid-1980s. The DNA found on Muncey was that of her husband, according to advocates for House.

The highest court in the land over two years ago agreed no jury would have convicted House given the modern-day evidence. In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that, “this is the rare case where—had the jury heard all the conflicting testimony—it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror viewing the record as a whole would lack reasonable doubt.”

House’s case is another example of deep flaws in Tennessee’s death penalty system that forces for and against the death penalty should want to change.

Clearly, more uniform standards need to exist from jurisdiction to jurisdiction for prosecutors to follow given the state continues to pursue House despite the evidence to the contrary. Some measure of review for older cases should also automatically happen as those condemned to death may, like House, have a real case for innocence using modern-day DNA testing and forensics.

Some would call these kinds of safeguards coddling criminals. We argue that the death penalty is the ultimate use of the state’s power. After using it, there is nothing else the government can take away from a person. If we are going to grant the government this kind of power, the system itself should also be held more accountable.

Texas “Justice”

Texas has scheduled 12 executions between June 3 and September 18. The state has carried out 405 of the nation’s 1,100 executions since the reinstatement of the death penalty and it currently has about 380 prisoners on death row.

It is tied for third in the nation for death-row exonerations (eight) and since 1993, 33 other Texans (non-death row cases) have been exonerated through DNA evidence, including 17 from Dallas County. These 33 men have served a combined 427 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

And those are only the known cases.

In light of all these grim numbers and overwhelming proof that innocent people have been wrongly convicted, many of whom have ended up on death row in Texas, its governor Rick Perry, who has carried out more executions (166) than any governor in modern history (including his predecessor, George W. Bush), claims that an innocence commission in Texas is unnecessary.

Texas needs a way to learn from its grave mistakes
By The Editorial Board
Austin American-Statesman

Gov. Rick Perry says Texas does not need an innocence commission, which, he asserts, would add an unnecessary bureaucracy to state government. But the facts overwhelmingly point the other way. We urge the governor to take another look at establishing a commission that studies ways to bring greater fairness to the state’s justice system by examining its mistakes.

Perry’s leadership would greatly improve chances that the Legislature would create and finance an innocence commission next year. Also, Perry’s backing would send a message to the world that Texas is serious about correcting mistakes that send innocent people to prison and leave criminals on the street.

As it stands, 33 Texans have been exonerated by DNA evidence, all but three occurring after 2000. There have been other exonerations during that period as well, including more than a dozen residents of Tulia who were wrongly convicted on the false testimony of a single law enforcement official and bogus prosecution of a West Texas district attorney.

Texas has paid out more than $8 million since 2001 to dozens of innocent people convicted of and imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. Those people spent from four to 27 years behind bars for crimes someone else committed.

If those facts and figures aren’t persuasive enough, then the governor should listen to those closest to the justice system, including some fellow Republicans. Among those endorsing an innocence commission is Texas Supreme Court Justice Wallace Jefferson, who said, “The state has an interest in protecting its citizens from convictions when citizens are innocent.”

“Over 30 people have been exonerated, and there is no institutional response to those incidents,” Jefferson said on Tuesday. “When this happens as frequently as it seems to happen in Texas, there ought to be some examination of what went wrong in those cases.”

In 2005 and 2007, Jefferson backed the creation of an innocence commission, supporting legislation by state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston. An innocence commission could offer statutory reforms that reduce preventable errors.

As chief justice of the state’s highest civil court, Jefferson said he has discussed the matter with many chief justices across the nation. He said several states have commissions or institutions that Texas could model.

In Sunday’s editions, we discussed the main reasons why innocent people have been wrongfully convicted. They include intentional errors by unethical prosecutors or police who suppress evidence or coerce false confessions as well as unintentional mistakes by victims or witnesses who incorrectly identify attackers.

Another prominent Republican, Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she, too, favors a state innocence commission if it does not duplicate the work of other entities.

If any state needs an innocence commission dedicated to preventing people from being sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, it is Texas. That much is clear. No one who professes to love justice should be satisfied with the status quo that is stealing time and money from the state and its residents.

As the state’s chief executive officer, Perry should use his moral and fiduciary duty to help establish such a commission.

Happy Malcolm X Day

“Brothers and sisters, if you and I would just realize, that once we learn to talk the language that they understand, they will then get the point. You can’t ever reach a man if you don’t speak his language. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why goodnight! He’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can’t speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can’t communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out, what does this man speak? Once you know his language, learn how to speak his language. He’ll get the point, there will be some dialogue, some communication, and some understanding will be developed. You’ve been in this country long enough to know the language the Klan speaks, they only know one language. What you and I have to start doing in 1965, I mean that’s what you have to do because most of us have already been doing it, is start learning a new language. Learn the language that they understand, and then when they come up on our door step to talk, we can talk.”

“It is a duty, it is your and my duty, as men, as human beings, it’s our duty to our people, to organize ourselves. Let the government know if they don’t stop that Klan, we’ll stop it ourselves. Then you’ll see the government start doing something about it. But don’t ever think they are going to do it on some morality basis, no. So I don’t believe in violence, that’s why I want to stop it.”

“I am not a Republican nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I am one of the 22 million Black victims of the Democrats, and one of the 22 million Black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million Black victims of Americanism…. You and I have never seen Democracy, all we’ve seen is hypocracy…. If you go to jail, so what. If you are Black, you were born in jail. If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.”

Paul Robeson: Words Like Freedom

“I defy any part of this insolent, dominating America, however powerful; to challenge my Americanism; because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death.”

“The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

Paul Robeson: Words Like Freedom is not only the history of Paul Robeson as a freedom fighter but also the history of the fight for freedom in the U.S. It is Paul Robeson’s voice we hear; it is his spirit that gives voice to the Black struggle. In the voice, we hear a resolve to be alive with the struggle of resistance.

Featuring a collection of Robeson’s interviews and speeches, Words Like Freedom includes a little more than eleven minutes of riveting testimony by Robeson to the HUAC, June 12, 1956.

The CD also includes an excerpt from Here I Stand, Robeson’s autobiography, written in 1958, in which his concept of the “oneness of people” resonates with the force and the dignity of a commitment to freedom for all suffering injustice and inequality through the system of capitalism.

In his autobiography, Robeson talked about his belief in the principles of scientific socialism an his conviction that a “scientific socialism” would represent “an advance to a higher stage of life—that it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally, and ethnically superior to a system based upon production for private profit.”

Robeson lectured tirelessly across the country and around the world urging people of color and workers to unite and to organize in order to bring about a radical new world in which people are truly free. We hear him urge the audience to unite, in the “Harlem Speech: Communists.” “We must unite. We must know our strength.” Black people, Robeson declared, “must be the decisive voice” in the struggle for freedom. “We must shout at the top of our voices” about the injustices committed in the U.S.

In his interview with Elsa Knight Thompson, he called on Black people to be “militant” and at the fore front for freedom because Black Americans “we have a tradition of tremendous consistent speaking out.”

Since the days of slavery and the abolition movement, Blacks have followed the footsteps of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth who did not, along with others enslaved, settle for the lesser brand of slavery. In his speech to the Progressive Party, “Lesser Evil,” Robeson reminds the audience that those enslaved ancestors “refused to settle for less.” Certainly now we will not settle for less in our struggle for freedom. Masses of Americans, Robeson declared, will be inspired by the Blacks and the workers fight and will join the fight, “working on the level of complete equality.”

This was a man who “never separated his work as an artist from my work as a human being.” “To me, my art is always a weapon.” And indeed, from his beginnings in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898, Words Like Freedom offers Robeson’s own voice exuberant and strong even in the telling of his personal tragedies and harassment by the U.S. government.

Words Like Freedom should find its way in the high schools and college classrooms. We hear the voice of a warrior, a radical voice who did not talk of triangulation! Robeson had convictions and was committed to fighting for the human rights of Black Americans and workers—but all Americans and all of humankind. We hear the voice of a warrior for freedom and we should not fear this voice.

Official Website

When Pigs Attack

The latest case of police brutality caught on tape comes from the city of brotherly love.

A half-dozen cops pull 3 men from a car and proceed to beat all of them. They are kicked, punched and hit with a baton.

Needless to say, this gang of trained killers will not spend a day in jail.

Two Reports Detail Racial Disparity in Arrests and Imprisonment

These are the latest studies to document injustice and inequality in the United States. Clearly exposing the racist nature of the american justice system and the brutal and equally racist assault by the police in their rush to criminalize blacks in U.S. society.

The enormous disparity in arrests and convictions for drug offenses between blacks and whites is horribly unjust but not accidental. The criminal justice system is a class system. If you’re working class and a person of color you will be targeted and discriminated against at every stage of the judicial process.

These reports are further evidence of the systematic racism and oppression faced by the black community.

“Drug War” Unjust to African Americans: Two Reports Detail Racial Disparity in Arrests and Imprisonment

The Sentencing Project’s newest study, Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America’s Cities, is the first city-level analysis of drug arrests, examining data from 43 of the nation’s largest cities between 1980-2003.

The study found that since 1980, the rate of drug arrests in American cities for African Americans increased by 225%, compared to 70% among whites. Black arrest rates grew by more than 500% in 11 cities during this period and in nearly half of the cities, the odds of arrest for a drug offense among African Americans relative to whites more than doubled.

The report was released the same day as Human Rights Watch’s Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States which documents with new statistics in 34 states the persistent racial disparities among drug offenders sent to prison. Both organizations urge public officials to restore fairness, racial justice and credibility to drug control efforts.

The Sentencing Project Report: Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America’s Cities

Human Rights Watch Report: Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States

Book Asserts Black Reporter Didn’t Kill White Cop in ’81

nytimes.com

Book Asserts Black Reporter Didn’t Kill White Officer in ’81
By JON HURDLE

PHILADELPHIA — A book published on Thursday asserts that a black radio journalist convicted of murdering a white Philadelphia police officer more than 26 years ago is not guilty of the crime and that it was actually committed by another man who is now deceased.

The book, “The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” by J. Patrick O’Connor, asserts that Officer Daniel Faulkner died on Dec. 9, 1981, from shots fired by Kenneth Freeman, a business partner of the brother of the convicted man, Mr. Abu-Jamal, who has been on death row for 25 years for a crime he says he did not commit.

The book, published by Chicago Review Press, is the latest to cast doubt on the conviction, which critics have said was tainted by racism, police corruption and judicial bias, turning Mr. Abu-Jamal
into a cause célèbre for death penalty opponents.

“Abu-Jamal’s trial was a monumental miscarriage of justice,” Mr. O’Connor writes, “representing an extreme case of prosecutorial abuse and judicial bias.”

The police charged Mr. Abu-Jamal with the murder, the book says, because he had antagonized them as a Black Panther and as a radio reporter.

Hugh Burns, chief of the appeals division in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case in 1982, dismissed the new accusations, saying, “There is zero credible evidence Freeman was involved.”

Mr. Burns also rejected the book’s assertion that two key prosecution witnesses had changed their stories after inducements from prosecutors determined to prove their case.

In March, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Mr. Abu-Jamal’s conviction but said his sentence might be reviewed.

Levon Jones exonerated in North Carolina

Some great news heading into the weekend.

This is the 129th exoneration in the US and the fifth exoneration in the last five months.

In North Carolina, it is the third in the last four months and Levon Jones is the eighth innocent person to be exonerated from death row.

Another life saved from the death chamber.

charlotte.com

N.C. death row inmate to go free
Levon ‘Bo’ Jones won’t be retried in the 1987 slaying of a Duplin County bootlegger
By Mandy Locke
(Raleigh) News & Observer

Another North Carolina man once condemned for murder will walk free today.

Levon “Bo” Jones of Duplin County spent 13 years on death row, convicted of robbing and shooting a well-liked bootlegger. In 2006, a federal judge ordered Jones off death row and overturned his conviction, declaring his attorney’s performance so poor that his constitutional rights had been violated.

Today, Jones will become the eighth North Carolina man spared execution after charges against him were dropped. Judges turned the inmates loose after discovering a variety of problems in their cases, ranging from hidden evidence to inadequate defense attorneys.

The latest release comes as the legal system is re-examining the use of capital punishment in North Carolina. The death penalty has been on hold in the state since 2007. It has faced several legal attacks, including a case that challenges doctors’ participation in executions.

Jones was sentenced to die for the death of Leamon Grady, who was robbed and shot in his home in February 1987. After the federal judge took him off death row in 2006, Jones remained in prison awaiting a prosecutor’s second try at a conviction.

On Thursday, Duplin County District Attorney Dewey Hudson decided to give up. He said he’ll ask a judge this afternoon to drop all charges against Jones and let him go. A new trial for Jones had been set to begin May 12.

Hudson, who also prosecuted Jones in 1993, had planned to ask a jury later this month to send Jones back to prison for life. Then, his case crumbled. Lovely Lorden, the state’s star witness and Jones’ former lover, recanted her claims that Jones killed Grady.

In an affidavit that Jones’ attorneys filed in April, Lorden said, “Much of what I testified to was simply not true.” She said a detective coached her on what to say at Jones’ trial and that of co-defendant Larry Lamb. She collected $4,000 from the governor’s office as a reward for offering the clues that led to arrests.

Lorden’s new testimony also casts doubt on the conviction of Lamb, who is serving a life sentence for Grady’s murder. Another co-defendant, Ernest Matthews, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was released in 2001.

Hudson doesn’t believe Lorden’s change of heart.

“She’s lied one time or another, then or now,” Hudson said. Still, he said he won’t risk taking Lorden before another jury.

Hudson still thinks Jones had a hand in Grady’s death.

Jones’ attorneys swear he is innocent.

“Any investigation in this case shows Bo didn’t do it,” Ernest “Buddy” Conner said. “She gave at least five different stories. She’s been recanting to people for a while.”

A judge’s wrath

Two years ago, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle had stern words for Jones’ previous defense attorneys when he took Jones off death row. Boyle granted the relief after state courts failed to do so.

Boyle lambasted defense attorneys Graham Phillips Jr. and Charles C. Henderson for performance he deemed “constitutionally deficient.” He criticized the lawyers for failing to research Lorden’s history well enough to try to discredit her before jurors. He also said they had inadequately prepared to investigate Jones’ mental health problems and troubled childhood in attempts to ask the jury to spare Jones the death penalty.

“Given the weakness of the prosecution’s case and its heavy reliance on the testimony of Lovely Lorden, there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.”

Jones spent Thursday night back in his native Duplin County, in the county jail. Conner drove there to share the good news.

Conner said Jones smiled, saying simply, “I knew this day was coming.”

(Staff writer Titan Barksdale contributed to this report.)

……………………………………

newsobserver.com

By Mandy Locke, Staff Writer
Another North Carolina man once condemned for murder will walk free Friday.

Levon “Bo” Jones of Duplin County spent 13 years on death row, convicted of robbing and shooting a well-liked bootlegger. In 2006, a federal judge ordered Jones off death row and overturned his conviction, declaring his lawyer’s performance so poor that his constitutional rights had been violated.

Friday, Jones will become the eighth North Carolina man spared a lethal injection after being cleared of the charges against them. Judges turned the inmates loose after discovering a variety of problems in their cases, ranging from hidden evidence to inadequate defense attorneys.

The latest release comes as the legal system is re-examining the use of capital punishment in North Carolina. The death penalty has been on hold in the state since 2007. It has faced several legal attacks, including a case that challenges doctors’ participation in executions.