Law and Disorder May 21, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Federal Appeals Court Revives Lawsuit Brought By Two Iraqi Detainees
• Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike Update

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ACLU of Georgia to Release Report on Immigration Detention in Georgia

A report released by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Georgia exposes the privatized corporate  immigrant detention facilities in that state. The report contains interviews from more than 60 individuals detained inside four different detention centers.

Guest – Azadeh Shahshahani, the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project Director with the Georgia ACLU.

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HIV Specific Criminal Laws

We talk today about HIV-specific criminal laws and sentence enhancement.  HIV criminal prosecution of occurs when an HIV-positive individual does not disclose their HIV status to a partner before engaging in sex.  The person charged may face decades in prison, life time registration as a sex offender and stigmatization.  While there have been hundreds of prosecutions for HIV crimes in the United States, disclosure and consent is a defense but is difficult to prove and actual transmission of HIV is unnecessary.

Sean Strub:

• About 35 states and territories have HIV specific statutes that only apply to people with HIV that mandate disclosure of their HIV status prior to engaging in intimate contact with another person, independent of whether there is any risk present, independent of whether there is any harm incurred and independent of any intent.
• The statutes have created a viral underclass that is pretty concerning. Right now there’s an explosion of laws based on people’s viral status.
• The vast majority of the prosecutions do not involve the transmission of the virus.
• There are also a number of HIV prosecutions that fall within the phenomenon we call HIV criminalization that aren’t about sex but are heightened charges for other behaviors.
• Willie Campbell in Texas is serving 35 years for spitting on a cop because the court found his saliva to be a deadly weapon even though saliva doesn’t transmit HIV.
• We’ve been alerting people to the fact that this horrific public health policy, that increasingly you hear, take the test, risk arrest.
• The best defense (under the current laws) for not getting prosecuted for HIV criminalization is not getting tested.  Not knowing your status in the first place.
• A man in Iowa just had a 50 year sentence upheld. These forms are driving the criminalization specifically as well as contributing to the stigmatization that makes people reluctant to get tested, reluctant to disclose.
• These states that HIV specific statutes, they don’t have specific statutes for hepatitis or HPV. Four thousand women last died from cervical cancer, almost every single one of them got it from Human Papilla Virus.  HPV – genital warts.
• But we’re not out prosecuting people for HPV.
• The answer is obvious those sexually transmitted diseases aren’t associated with an outlaw sexuality.  They’re not associated with people of color or gay men, with anal intercourse or people who use drugs.
• Poz Magazine The SERO Project

Guest – Sean Strub, writer and activist who founded several magazines and websites, including POZ magazine and POZ en Español, (for people impacted by HIV/AIDS), Mamm (for women impacted by breast cancer), He is the founder of the SERO project to help oppose the use of HIV specific criminal laws.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Daniel Gross - Focus On the Food Chain Victory

Victories continue for Brandworkers,  a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees. Last fall we talked with Attorney Daniel Gross, Executive Director of Brandworkers about the 470 thousand dollar settlement reached in a labor dispute with Pur Pac, a food distribution warehouse giant that illegally withheld wages from their workers. Today we discuss the latest victory in another settlement recovering nearly 600 thousand dollars in unpaid wages and compensation for workers at Flaum Appetizing. According to Daniel Gross, the Latino workers there were subjected to constant verbal harassment and forced to work at unsafe speeds.

Attorney Daniel Gross:

• New York City economy has a burgeoning food processing and distributing sector.  There are 35 thousand workers, the vast majority are immigrant workers of color.
• The vast majority depend on this sector for their livelihood.
• The business model is simple. It’s exploiting recent immigrant workers of color through wage theft, through reckless disregard of health and safety and egregious discrimination of workers from Latin America, China, Haiti, Nepal.
• Flaum Appetizing , regrettably but not surprisingly really fit the mold. Flaum is a hummus manufacturer and distributor of kosher food products based in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
• It starts the sector of the food corridor of food manufacturing and sweatshops.
• Flaum Appetizing  engaged in a tremendous amount of wage theft, a failure to pay overtime and in some cases, minimum wage.
• Millions and millions of dollars of real wealth had been illegally withheld from workers.
• There was offensive and insulting discrimination against Latino workers including Latino workers being called cockroaches and aliens.
• The Flaum Appetizing workers approached me in 2010 with some hope and energy because they had seen the victories of our members at the Wild Edibles Seafood had won.
• The workers through incredibly persistent grassroots energy persuaded over 120 of the best most prominent grocery stores in New York to stop selling Flaum products including their Sunny and Joe’s Hummus until workers’ rights were respected.
• Our commitment with Brandworkers, if fight to win. When we engage with an adversary, they should know if we have to, we will chase them to the gates of hell and back.
• Almost all of our members in the Flaum campaign are raising young children.
• There were two components we were able to bring home which was really a hard fought struggle.
• One was our members were proud to report they recovered 577 thousand dollars in wealth that will help them transform their families lives both here and in their home countries, Mexico and El Salvador.
• They also one a binding code of conduct which will force  Flaum Appetizing into full compliance of workplace protections.
• Our model is the labor movement of the late 19th century. Unions like Local 8, the great IWW on the Philadelphia docks that used worker direct action and everyday solidarity.
• Unions and worker centers and community groups are going to converge at the New School on June 6, 2012.  Food Justice Movement  Food Chain Workers
• I owe my politicization to a company that’s now bankrupt. That was Borders Books and Music.
• I come out of working in retail and fast food and Starbucks as you mentioned.
• My grandfather was a member of the teamsters union. He drove a liquor truck out of the Bronx. So I knew in the back of my mind he was able to live the last years of his life as amazing grandfather with dignity because he had his union pension.
• Fighting Starbucks honed my skills because they are such a sophisticated and determined adversary.
• The evil brilliance of the Starbucks union busting operation.
• I had the unique pleasure which I will remember all my life to be represented by Leonard Weinglass.

Guest – Attorney Daniel Gross, Executive Director of Brandworkers, a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees.

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 Law and Disorder May 14, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• In Memory: Karen Detamore, Former Executive Director Friends of Farmworkers, Inc.
• Yelp Hit With Class Action Lawsuit

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Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper

Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper is the title of Patrick O’Connor’s new book. This is an important document chronicling Kevin Cooper’s  controversial conviction and death sentence in 1985.  When O’Connor committed to writing the book, he poured over thousands of case documents from trial transcripts, grisly autopsy photos, appeals and judicial rulings. He then began interviewing those involved in the trial and appeals. The picture began to take shape, a familiar one. The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin Cooper from the brutal murders of the Ryen Family and their guest.

J. Patrick O’Connor:

• In 2008, the Mumia book that I wrote was coming out and I was in the San Francisco Bay area with (attorney) Jeff Mackler of the Mobilization to Free Mumia.
• We had about 15 venues that we went to all over the bay area. Invariably, supporters of Kevin Cooper would come to these events and afterwards would take me aside and say you got to write a book about Kevin Cooper.
• His case is a lot different than Mumia’s but there are a lot of similarities.
• Once I started reading the transcripts of this trial, I could see there were a lot of things wrong with this case.
• It took me about 2 and half years from the start to the publication of the book.
• There was a terrible, in Chino Hills, this is Arabian horse country. This family named the Ryens, they live on a hilltop house with a very big spread, about 15 Arabians. San Bernadino-45 miles east of Los Angeles.
• In this area, most of the people were either raising horses or grazing cattle. This family was a mom and dad and they were both chiropractors. 41 year old chiropractors, and they had a 10 year old daughter named Jessica and an 8 and a half year old son named Josh.
• A friend of Josh’s 11 year old Christopher Hughs, spent the night.
• Around midnight that night, the home was breached. The master bedroom. The family was assaulted with an axe, or a hatchet, I think 2 knives, and an ice pick.
• It was an incredible fight, these people didn’t stand in line and say I’m next.
• The father Doug was 6’1″ 190lbs, a former Marine, an MP in the Marines and could take care of himself. The mother 5’8″ very strong, she was the one that could train the horses, these enormous horses that she could control.
• Both of them kept loaded weapons in the bedroom. The idea that one perpetrator could use 4 weapons to perpetrate this attack is kind of fecitious on its face.
• What put Kevin Cooper in the crosshairs is 3 miles from Chino Hills is Chino which is home to the California Institute for Men, where every felon in Southern California is sent for classification.
• Cooper was sent there for 2 burglaries in LA. Escapes and holes up in Chino Hills for the next 2 days, in a house located 125 yards from the Ryen’s house.
• Josh who had survived, told the deputy sheriff through a hand squeeze method that it was 3 white men.  They put out APBs for 3 white guys.
• When they discern Kevin Cooper’s prints are all over that hide out house, they discard that information and start planning evidence that would implicate Cooper and making big lies about stuff that would implicate him.
• He would have been the only African-American in the community.
• They contaminated the crime scene, there are 2 bathrooms in this house, the cops used one of the bathrooms that had blood in the sink.
• They don’t type the blood properly, they put blood from all different parts of the room in the same bag.
• So, there’s no way to track the motions of who died, what was the order of death?
• They took the walls out, they carted out all the furniture, put it on the front yard. Then they moved it to a warehouse where the air conditioner broke. It went to 120 degrees, they lose all the blood evidence in the warehouse.
• The night of the murders, Cooper left after 9pm to hitchhike to Mexico. Cooper sees his mugshot on TV, he goes on the lamb.  Cooper is got and convicted, he gets the gas chamber.
• He came with 3 hours and 45 minutes of being executed because of a moratorium. Kevin Cooper is fifth in line, this moratorium will end in 2013.
• They had to have the complicity of numerous people inside the sheriff’s department and a very willing DA’s office to perpetrate this fraud on Cooper.

Guest – J.Patrick O’Connor, editor of Crimemagazine.com and the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2008). He has previously worked as a reporter for UPI, editor of Cincinnati Magazine, associate editor of TV Guide, and editor and publisher of the Kansas City New Times.

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Homeland Security Documents Show Massive Nationwide Monitoring of Occupy Movement

Last month we gave Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messinio of the Partnership for Civil Justice the Law and Disorder Tip Of The Hat Award for creative use of FOIA.  The documents obtained by the Department of Homeland Security show a massive nationwide monitoring, surveillance and information sharing between DHS and local authorities.  But its only the tip of the iceberg. The documents are heavily redacted and don’t show the full scale of coordination. “These documents show not only intense government monitoring and coordination in response to the Occupy Movement, but reveal a glimpse into the interior of a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people,” says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, she’s the Executive Director of the PCJF.

Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard:

• We filed a series of FOIA requests and demands in November of last year when it was clear the Occupy movement was being subjected to a coordinated assault.
• We wanted to expose and uncover the role of the federal government working hand in hand with local police and municipalities to shut down this movement. A movement that is inspiring people all over the country and is a force for social change.
• What we have is the tip of a very carefully submerged iceberg.
• What we’ve seen is massive surveillance, coordination, monitoring of peaceful protesters all over the country by the federal government.
• There is monitoring that’s gone on from Washington DC, to Atlanta, to Detroit, to Dallas, that there is an intense focus going all the way up to high ranking members of the administration.
• We know that with the creation of the fusion centers and the suspicious reporting activity, the vertical integration of law enforcement and intelligence operatives in the US, that coming from a federal level, from the Department of Homeland Security, with billions of dollars. There is in place where all of the hundreds and thousands of law enforcement officers . . local is almost deputized, where they’re collecting information and feeding data.
• It’s critical that the people of the United States see this. The way for this to be stopped is to uncover it and expose it.  We see time and again the FBI creating its own terrorist plots, in many times as PR to justify their oppressive apparatus.
• One of the defining features of the Obama Administration is the fact that it took on this apparatus put in place by the Bush Administration and not only didn’t take it apart, they have deepened it.
• There is really a structure now in the United States that has the US government spying and collecting data on its own citizens.
• We have regulation that has been put into place under the Obama Administration where there is growing use of military support for domestic civilian authorities which is very concerning.
• We can see that the real spark for social change is people getting together for collective action.
• What we want to accomplish is to keep the streets, sidewalks and parkland open for grassroots democracy and social change and people need the ability to come out and come together and in order to do that without fear that they’re going to be beaten . . or mass arrested.
• National Special Security Events: The Secret Service and Federal Government becomes the lead coordinating arm and local police work under that umbrella. In Tampa and Charlotte you can see they’re enacting these very repressive ordinances that facially look unconstitutional.
• The ordinances are trying to stop people from doing things are permitted, that are lawful.
• There is growing effort to take public space out from under our feet and one way of doing that is to say that there’s going to be an effort to restore the grass, and we fought this battle back in 2004 at the RNC in New York when we came to challenge the effort of New York City to ban mass assembly on the Great Lawn of Central Park.
• A lot of this effort is to make people feel alone and suffer in silence.

Guest – Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the Guild’s national Mass Defense Committee. Co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, DC, she recently secured $13.7 million for about 700 of the 2000 IMF/World Bank protesters in Becker, et al. v. District of Columbia, et al., while also winning pledges from the District to improve police training about First Amendment issues. She won $8.25 million for approximately 400 class members in Barham, et al. v. Ramsey, et al. (alleging false arrest at the 2002 IMF/World Bank protests). She served as lead counsel in Mills, et al v. District of Columbia (obtaining a ruling that D.C.’s seizure and interrogation police checkpoint program was unconstitutional); in Bolger, et al. v. District of Columbia (involving targeting of political activists and false arrest by law enforcement based on political affiliation); and in National Council of Arab Americans, et al. v. City of New York, et al. (successfully challenging the city’s efforts to discriminatorily restrict mass assembly in Central Park’s Great Lawn stemming from the 2004 RNC protests.)

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 Law and Disorder May 7, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian Discuss May Day Events
• Michael Smith Reads A May Day Letter From Lynne Stewart
• Retired Chemistry Professor Tried For Jury Tampering Represents Self and Wins.
• Federal Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD For Improper Use Of Barricades
• Four City Council Members File Suit Against NYPD For Police Abuse

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Former Head of CIA Clandestine Service Justifies Torture On CBS 60 Minutes

In a recent interview on CBS news, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service Jose Rodriguez discussed the destruction of 92 tapes in which terrorism suspects were subjected to water boarding and other forms of torture. Rodriguez told CBS that he destroyed the tapes to protect the people who worked for him at various black sites. But critics say Rodriguez is afraid of criminal prosecution because those 92 tapes contained compelling evidence of criminality and are a threat to Rodriguez and those who approved the use of torture.  Rodriguez,  a thirty-year veteran of the CIA, and spent most of his entire career in Latin America, supports the idea that torture works to get information.

Attorney Scott Horton:

• We know the government in response to FOIA requests, and litigation requests has released photographs and tapes repeatedly in the past, and always obliterates the faces involved, so of course the identities are not released.
• Obama announced in his speech from Kabul, al-Qaeda’s been defeated. It’s a faint shadow of what it was before.
• The tapes contained evidence of crimes, it showed water boarding and other torture techniques. It documented those techniques, and that presented a risk to Jose Rodriguez and to the the people up above Rodriguez who are responsible for putting through torture policy.
• George Tenet was involved, Bybee, a judge in the Ninth Circuit in Las Vegas, John Yoo who is a professor at the University of California, Steven Bradbury who is now a partner in a law firm in Washington DC and then it went into the White House where it went into the National Security Council.
• The trail consistently leads straight into the office of former Vice President Dick Cheney. He was the key mover for the introduction of torture policy.
• Domestically, we have an anti-torture statute that includes for conspiracy to torture, both of those things were violated. They apply outside of the United States, so they would have applied to the conduct of a CIA agent operating in Poland or Thailand for instance.
• Jose Rodriguez: He’s trying to make money, he’s selling a book, what you saw was a 36 minute advertisement for his book, published by an affiliate of CBS.
• Beyond that I’d say he’s trying to build sympathy and beat back calls for his own prosecution.
• I think this was an ill advised strategy and I think he confessed to criminal conduct in the course of this interview.
• At one point they claimed that they were able to track down and pick up Jose Padilla through the use of water boarding, which is very very interesting because Padilla was arrested and in custody before the first case of water boarding was applied.
• Mitt Romney has been out there punching away constantly on the advocacy of torture and the response from the Obama campaign has been silence. Silence.
• The guy came across to me as something of a psychopath (Jose Rodriguez)

Guest -  New York attorney Scott Horton, Scott is known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict. Scott is also the contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.

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Common Cause Files IRS Whistleblower Complaint Against ALEC

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is a tax exempt charity that spends millions of dollars annually to lobby for hundreds of bills in state legislatures around the United States. It came to the attention of the public for having drafted and pressured passage of the so-called stand your ground legislation after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February. The watchdog group Common Cause has asked the IRS to review ALEC’s status claiming that ALEC is “a corporate lobby masquerading as a charity,” and that contributors should not be allowed to claim the gifts as charitable contributions.

Nick Surgey:

• ALEC describes itself as nonpartisan although the majority are members of the Republican Party.
• It’s concerning from a tax perspective, ALEC is operating as 501c non-profit, which means its a charity.
• Therefore corporations who are members of ALEC are allowed to take a tax deduction, when they contribute up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• If Visa, Verizon or Amazon then those lobbying would not be tax deductible, they would be subject to tax, but they do the same lobbying through ALEC.
• All of those contributions are subsidized by us – the tax payer. And that’s wrong.
• We shouldn’t be subsidizing the activities of any corporation.
• Until recently ALEC operated 9 Task Forces, they were forced to close one 2 weeks ago.
• Stand Your Ground Bill / Drafted by the NRA, lobbied by them and presented to legislators in Florida 2005.
• The NRA took it to ALEC, who they’re a member of, Walmart chaired the taskforce. Walmart the largest retailer of weapons in the United States.
• The Stand Your Ground bill is now law in 20 states.
• ALEC organizes around these 9 task forces. They have bills that really cover almost every policy area.
• Other areas include rolling back environmental protection, they have a commerce task force, where a lot of anti-union bills, the right to work legislation, it comes from that task force.
• Corporations will use the state essentially to lobby on their behalf.
• Common Cause has a very good picture of what ALEC has been doing in the last 2 years and this formed the basis of this massive IRS submission.
• One document are these scorecards which they send to their corporate members, where they celebrate the success that they have. Some of the early scorecards, they mapped out the complete picture of the United States and where all of their model bills have been introduced.
• A source provided us with emails going between ALEC and state legislators. We were very greatful to be represented pro-bono by one of the country’s leading whistle-blower firms, Phillips and Cohen.
• Voter ID has been increasingly connected to ALEC.
• We believe the bigger fraud is disenfranchising millions of predominantly African American, elderly or young student voters.  In wasn’t until 2009 when ALEC took it up, that it really injected energy into it at the state level and its been introduced in 34 states. (Voter ID)
• ALEC has an ability to take a law, not always a new law and sell it to their almost 2000 state legislator members.
• ALEC has about a third of all state legislators in the entire country as members.
• There was a fracking bill, and it was sponsored by Exxon Mobile.
• ALECExposed.org

Guest -   Nick Surgey, Nick conducted the research helping to expose the American Legislative Exchange Council.  Nick joined Common Cause in March 2011 as a Legal Associate.  He formerly worked at the British Refugee Council in Leeds, England, where he advocated on behalf of asylum seekers. He previously worked at an immigration law firm, as an elected student union officer and as a paid campaigner. Nick holds an undergraduate degree in History and Politics and a post-graduate diploma in law.
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 Law and Disorder April 30, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Update: Occupy The Justice Department
  
• Bradley Manning Trial Update: Attorney CCR Attorney Shane Kadidal
• Bradley Manning: A Show Trial of Secrecy by Michael Ratner
  

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39 Ways To Limit Free Speech

39 Ways To Limit Free Speech is the title Law Professor David Cole’s recent article.  Earlier this month, a 29-year old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating a document. The text he translated from Arabic is “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and its all over the internet, you can read it says David Cole, but don’t try to translate it. One issue in the government’s prosecution of this case is the use of the decision from the Brandenburg v. Ohio case in which the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against blacks and “Jews.”

Professor David Cole:

• He was accused of providing material support to al-Qaeda by translating various documents and videos from Arabic into English. There’s no allegations that Mehanna ever met with or even talked to a member of al-Qaeda. There are no allegations that the translations were delivered to or provided to al-Qaeda which was the designated group.
• The government argued that because he translated these documents and put them up on the web and hoped to encourage people to support jihad and support al-Qaeda, that’s enough to constitute material support.
• Here’s an instant in which the government is prosecuting pure speech but no showing that the speech was connected to illegal conduct, no showing that it was intended to produce eminent lawless action, which the Supreme Court said is required to produce under Brandenburg.
• It’s enough that he put it up on the web and wanted to support al-Qaeda.
• If that’s a crime what about the New York Times when it does a report on one of the many messages Osama Bin Laden put after 9-11?
• I represented the Humanitarian Law Project in the case that went to the Supreme Court in 2010, in which the HLP was in engaging in advocacy of human rights and peace, clearly non-violent, non-criminal conduct.
• But because they wanted to do it to and with the Kurds in Turkey and particularly the political representatives of the Kurds in Turkey which is the Kurdistan Workers Party (designated as a terrorist organization) the government argued that it was a crime to teach the KWP to bring human rights claims in Geneva and work with them in peace overtures to the Turkish Government.
• The Supreme Court upheld that, but doesn’t apply to independent advocacy. (until now)
• Now if you wanted your speech to support terrorist organizations, even if you did it independently of that organization, even if you never met or talked to anyone in that organization, we can make it a crime.
• Very much about declaring a “new front” in the war on terror and the front is going after internet propaganda.
• To me it recalls the kind of aiding the enemy prosecutions we saw in World War 1.
• We as citizens need to be active in monitoring and pushing back against this material support statute.

Guest – Professor David Cole teaches constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice at Georgetown University Law Center.  He is also a volunteer attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He has been published widely in law journals and the popular press, including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.

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FAA Releases Lists of Drone Certificates—Many Questions Left Unanswered
Earlier this year we discussed the partnership with Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The two institutions are working together to build a campus in New York City.  Technion is involved with developing robotic weapons systems, which include aerial drones, and unmanned combat vehicle technology.  There are many more universities involved with drone technology. Through a series of Freedom of Information requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FAA has been forced to reveal approximately 63 active drone sites. These sites are located in 20 states and their owners include military and universities. Universities include Cornell, (which we just mentioned)  the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, Eastern Gateway Community College and many more.

Attorney Jennifer Lynch:

• We filed a FOIA request with the FAA last April asking for copies of all the certificates of authorization and the special air-worthiness certificates that the FAA issues to anybody to wants to fly a drone in the US.
• We asked for these lists which are called COAs, or Certificates of Authorization. The COAs apply to public entities like state and local law enforcement, universities, the federal government.
• We got two lists from the FAA and the FAA says these cover all of the entities that applied for an authorization to fly a drone in United States.
• They’re very interesting, the COA list includes some unsurprising entities like DARPA, DHS, Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, various branches of the military. We already knew those entities were flying drones.
• What was more surprising was the number of universities and colleges on the list.
• Universities that have an aerospace engineering program they may be seeking authorization so the students can learn about and design drones.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil liberties non-profit, we focus on civil liberties and new technology, and we’re concerned about surveillance equipment used by the government.
• Drones are a duel use technology, they can be used for good or for bad.
• They can see inside buildings, survey an area at night with heat sensors, they also have the ability to carry communications intercept tools. You could swap out various payloads on a drone.
• Then of course these drones can carry weapons.
• You can build your own drone, DIYDrones.
• We don’t know too much about what’s going on now. The reason the EFF file the FOIA request in the first place is that we just don’t know how agencies are using these drones.
• What we found is that a lot of the police forces that have drones are required to fly them under 600 feet. If its something that flying under 600 feet you’re going to be able to see that.
• Congress was getting a lot of pressure, and the FAA was getting a lot of pressure from state and local law enforcement, the military and the federal government to authorize more drones to be used in the United States.
• We’ve heard from the Congressional Research Service that 1 in 3 warplanes right now is a drone.
• The wars are going to end and the military is going to want to something with these drones.

Guest – Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on open government, transparency and privacy issues as part of EFF’s FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. In addition to government transparency, Jennifer has written and spoken frequently on government surveillance programs, intelligence community misconduct, and biometrics collection. Prior to joining EFF, Jennifer was the Clinical Teaching Fellow with the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law. At the Samuelson Clinic, Jennifer specialized in privacy and intellectual property issues, including investigations on social media, privacy and the smart electrical grid, digital books, and open source regimes for biotech. Before the Clinic, Jennifer practiced with Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco and clerked for Judge A. Howard Matz in the Central District of California. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley.

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 Law and Disorder April 23, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Law and Disorder Tip Of The Hat Award: Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messinio For Creative Use of FOIA
• Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)
• Forty years in solitary: Two Men Mark Somber Anniversary in Louisiana Prison
  
• Movie – Herman’s House
• Creative Protest At the Florida Atlantic University Campus

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Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice

The FBI now spends more than 3 billion dollars a year on counter-terrorism, the bureau maintains a team of 15 thousand spies in a nationwide network of informants. Criminal informants or snitches are part of a criminal system most people know little about. Many of these informants are tasked with infiltrating Muslims communities in the United States. We’ve discussed in the past, the expanded FBI guidelines plus the broad over reaching powers and underhanded tactics the FBI use when targeting Mosques and Muslim Americans.

We talk today with Professor of Law and author Alexandra Natapoff, about her book Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.  Her book catalogues the downside in the use of snitches on social structure and democracy and suggests ways to make the use of informants acceptable within the criminal justice system.

Professor Alexandra Natapoff:

• Snitching is such a massive part of our criminal justice system even though the public rarely gets a good look at it.
• It’s an under the radar aspect of the way our criminal justice system handles investigations, the way it handles cases, the way it shapes our case law.
• It’s such a powerful deal, a deal that exerts a huge amount of influence and plea bargaining.
• The reality is that this is a deeply under-regulated arena. The handler is the law enforcement official who creates and uses an informant.
• It could be a police officer talking to a street corner addict cutting a deal right then and there.
• It could be an FBI agent who has an established documented supervised relationship with a long term criminal informant.
• Somebody may be suspected of a crime or even just of interest to the government. People who have mild brushes with the criminal system can end up through this mechanism of criminal informing entering into a world in which really anything can happen to them.
• Argument: Either you let us use informants in an unaccountable, invisible, secretive, undocumented way or we can’t run the criminal system at all.
• We permit the barter of crime under the radar, in a way that is unfair to other defendants and other suspects. We produce unreliable information through the use of informants without regulation.
• My contention is that we shouldn’t ban this practice, but run it as any other public policy with transparency and accountability and some rules.
• My favorite criminal informant of recent is Jack Abramoff.
• Usually we don’t learn when informants have been mistreated because often they have very little power.
• The courts have said, informants proceed at their own risk.
• This is a deal that they can enter if they want to risk their life.
• The law does not owe criminal informants much protection.  Our criminal system is built on the principle that the defendant should not have to face the government unaided by council.
• That’s a principle that should be extended to criminal informants.
• The state of Florida passed a ground breaking law, called Rachel’s Law.
• What sort of deal should we permit the government to cut with informants?
• The use of criminal informants is a massive source of error in capitol cases.
• States across the country are starting to impose greater restrictions on the use of criminal informants, in particular jailhouse snitches as a way to improving reliability of the information.
• Confidential Informant Accountability Act – Federal Legislative Proposal
• One of the things the government doesn’t keep track of is how many crimes are committed by criminal informants in the pursuit of investigating new cases.

Guest – Alexandra Napatoff, professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and a member of the American Law Institute. I have also been a federal public defender, a community organizer, and the recipient of an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship.

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It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest

Remember the multi-day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol by tens of thousands of people. Massive demonstrations erupted when the Republican controlled state government proposed to dismantle public employee bargaining rights as Wisconsin trade unions already conceded to wage and benefit cuts. These protests became the largest labor demonstrations in modern American history. Protesters from the Middle East sent pizzas and solidarity as thousands occupied Madison’s Capitol building.

We’re joined today by Paul Buhle, historian, and editor of the book It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest. A powerful collecton of eyewitness reports and essays by striking teachers, students, and many others. This book exposes the corporate agenda that imposed anti-union legislation across the country and highlights the power of the people coming together in protest.

Paul Buhle:

• Brecht Forum, Friday night – April 27,2012
• The “it” is very large, perhaps vaporous and very promising.  We were thinking of occupy in the sense that Madisonians, labor supporters from as far away as California, occupied the State Capitol, the rotunda in February of last year and remained there for some weeks.
• The “it” may mean occupy or the emergence of a new kind of movement.
• We should have seen it coming but we were deluded or Walker, when running for election never mentioned these promises or threats at all and made some statements about getting along with unions when he was a county executive.
• The response was just as stunning as the shock. A mass outpouring that really began with students in Stoten, an old Norwegian community about half an hour south of Madison – working up their own protests with facebook to support their teachers.
• And then, the following weeks, a massive outpouring of people around the Capitol and then occupying the Capitol.
• Things went on and on until there were crowds of 150 thousand in a town of Madison that has normally only 250 thousand residents.
• Pacifica has been in the business from the late 1940s in the Bay area, in providing the documentation that other commercial radio stations rarely provide.
• I would say these protests in Wisconsin are probably the most recorded mass movement of the Left in recent history.
• Among the most important developments, relative to the stories in the history of labor, the unions of public workers are substantially, if not overwhelmingly women.
• So, the shape of the movement, perhaps its cultural character, perhaps the infernal degree of politeness that outsiders frequently complained about, the chant – let us in, let us in please.
• What it demonstrated was that women in the labor movement were ferociously militant.
• My assessment was that the labor movement was in no way prepared to stage a general strike.
• Nor that a massive walk out of public workers mean that the wheels of industry would stop what few wheels are left.
• The sense that public workers wish to put pressure on the political system.
• Contrary to our expectations of the Democratic Party in general, assorted leaders, were quite wonderful in their constituencies and the things that they did, and how they related to the movements.
• As an editor and producer of radical comics, I’m always interested in new developments in the field, and its exciting there are young comic artists who are working in and around “occupy.”

Guest -  Paul Buhle, senior lecturer at Brown University, a historian of American radicalism., a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and author of many books including images of American Radicalism. Also, Che, A Graphic Biography, and Isodore Duncan, a graphic biography by Sabrina Jones.

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May Day: Workers’ Rights and Immigrant Communities

In the past year, public employees around the country have rallied to hold on to their collective bargaining, workers rights and pensions. May Day protests this year will emphasize these issues and will be especially significant for immigrant rights in California that directly effect certain communities. On May Day in 2006, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of San Jose marking one of the largest demonstrations in California history.

Guest -  Celina Benitez, director of the Committee In Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, Celina is also with the Southern California Immigration Coalition and produces radio for Suplemento Comunitario on sister station KPFK in Los Angeles.

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 Law and Disorder April 16, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Cuban Five Rally in Washington DC
• Coalition For Immokalee Workers Rally Tour
• Mumia Abu-Jamal – Occupy The Justice Department
• European Court of Human Rights Allows Extradition: Imprisonment In Supermax Prison Doesn’t Constitute Torture

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Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning

In the past year, we’ve covered Wikileaks and specifically the Bradley Manning case in our updates.  We talk today with Greg Mitchell co-author of the new published book, Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning.  In the first part of the book titled Solitary Man, Greg Mitchell gives readers a detailed look into the character of Bradley Manning. The second part of the book details the Bradley Manning trials written by co-author Kevin Gosztola.  Hard journalism let the voices of friends and family document the important details in Manning’s life leading up to Wikileaks and then the book dives into the complexities of the trial. In the preface Greg writes “Ultimate truths, in this case, may lead to ultimate consequences for one who would not be silent.

Greg Mitchell:

• The second half of the book is really the only thing out there that covers in depth what has happened to him in the last few months.
• Namely his court martial proceedings after he was imprisoned for a year and a half. His first hearing was last December.  He is awaiting what is expected to come out as a formal court martial in August. If it does start in August, it will be well over 2 years since he was arrested.
• A lot of the charges are related to passing along to Wikileaks, this classified secret information. Course the most dynamite charge is that he gave aid to the enemy.
• Who is the enemy? The government was forced to say that it was Al-Qaeda. That charge potentially carries the death sentence.
• They’re interested in punishing Manning, the big fish they’re after is Julian Assange.
• Last year there was global outrage when he was kept in solitary confinement, being forced to sleep naked, and stand at attention naked.
• All the top media outlets had a falling out with Wikileaks, and I think there’s a spill over from that.
• There hasn’t been any media coverage that really probes into what’s going on here.
• Over and over he (Bradley Manning) cited his outrage at what he was seeing in those cables and in Iraq, and things he was asked to participate in.
• The court martial will be extremely embarrassing to the military because they gave him access to these documents.
• He was a kid who grew up in Oklahoma, his parents eventually got divorced. He was a computer nerd, growing up. He realized in his teens, he was gay.
• He wasn’t a longtime peacenik or things like that, he always had some social conscience, and when he got to Iraq, he saw things that upset him.
• It may have never come out, that he would be arrested, except that he had these online chats with Adrien Lamo, who is a convicted hacker. Lamo decided Manning was talking too much about what he did and went to the authorities.
• The Manning case shows this incredible legacy of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have gone on for a decade, its never ending and yet the American public has never been brought face to face with what the US has done in those countries, civilian casualties.

Guest – Greg Mitchell writes daily for The Nation magazine’s web site.  He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Campaign of the Century (winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize), So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq,  Why Obama Won, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, The Age of WikiLeaks, and with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death?   His most recent books are Atomic Cover-up and Journeys With Beethoven.   He was the editor of Editor & Publisher from 2002 to 2009.  He also served as longtime editor of Nuclear Times magazine, and before that was senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy.  Hundreds of his articles have appeared in leading publications and he has served as chief adviser for two award-winning documentaries.

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Lawyers You’ll Like – Attorney Natsu Saito

For our Lawyers You’ll Like series, we welcome back attorney and professor Natsu Saito. In our last interview, Professor Saito mentioned how the current system of international law evolved from the a broader agreement between the European colonial powers based on how they were not going to destroy each other in the process of taking over the rest of the world. It is this duality that Natsu writes about in her book Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law.  Professor Saito joined the College of Law faculty in 1994 and teaches international law, human rights, race and the law, immigration, criminal procedure, and professional responsibility. Her scholarship focuses on the legal history of race in the United States, the plenary power doctrine as applied to immigrants, American Indians, and U.S. territorial possessions, and the human rights implications of U.S. governmental policies, particularly with regard to the suppression of political dissent.

Professor Natsu Saito:

• The duality that the US does exempt itself (from international law) very consistently and very frequently and yet promotes international law very strongly and relies upon it.
• It has relied upon certain premises that are fundamental to the whole outlook and paradigm of colonialism – which is that there is a higher good, a more civilized approach the US embodies.
• The law doesn’t apply because we have a higher aim of civilization and that justifies not playing by the rules.
• The United States making others comply with human rights standards while exempting itself
• Moving humanity toward this higher goal is so critical because if you strip that away and you look at the realities on the ground, you see what has been termed Western civilization has been incredibly barbaric.
• In order to get around that analysis, you have to say it was for a higher good.
• I think the “left” tends to accept the general framework, and to make particular criticisms of policies and practices that are obviously problematic. The US government engaging in torture for example, but each instant is accepted as anomalous instead of the larger picture.
• It is too frightening even for the people on the left to deal with the reality that this is a country that sits on occupied land, illegally occupied by its own rules. People on the left want to make it a kinder, gentler colonialism.
• I started out thinking I was writing a book about the failure of the United States failure to comply with international law, as I got into it, the more interesting questions were the push / pull dynamics between reliance on international law
• The current system of international law evolved from the international law which was the agreement between the European colonial powers of how they were not going to destroy each other in the process of taking over the rest of the world.

Guest - Professor Natsu Saito, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado. Co-Sponsors: UCI Department of Asian American Studies; UCI Department of Planning, Policy, and Design; UCI Department of Criminology, Law and Society; The Center for Unconventional Security Affairs; The Center for Research on Latinos in a Global Society. Legal scholar Dr. Natsu Saito delivered a lecture on homeland security. Her lecture examined the implications of the USA Patriot Act on Civil liberties for immigrant groups and for the rest of the population

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 Law and Disorder April 9, 2012 [57:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Mumia Abu-Jamal Appeal Rejected
• Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip Search For Any Arrest – Targets Minorities
• ICC Declined Investigation Into Operation Cast Lead

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Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond

Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond is the title of a new book chronicling the militant career of radical activist David Gilbert.  As many listeners may know David Gilbert was the founder of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University and he helped build an underground resistance to war and racism known as the Weathermen, one of the most radical movements in the United States. Gilbert was incarcerated because of his involvement in the 1981 Brinks robbery that resulted in four deaths. His book is a very personal account told from first person that marks his various stages as a liberal, a radical and then revolutionary. Gilbert has been in jail for the past 3 decades and readers get a rare glimpse into this retrospective.

Dan Berger:

• David has been in prison my whole life. As a teenager and activist I needed a mentor.
• I started writing political prisoners and David Gilbert was one of them.
• He was patient and gracious in answering my many questions. Helping me think about race and empire and my role in the world.
• I think he’s done a phenomenal job of walking us through the thought process.
• In his own case, David was reluctant to write about prison conditions, and Love and Struggle is not at all a prison memoir.
• I think its quite rare to have a prisoner write a book that’s not about prison conditions.
• The humanizing effect he writes about is not about the abuse he’s suffered inside. Video with readings

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Naomi Jaffe:

• David and I met when we were both graduates at the New School in New York, in ’67 it must’ve been.
• We were co-founders of New School SDS, we were fire-y young students together for several years in New York.
• David wrote (Love and Stuggle) because young people were asking him, what the lessons were from that period. Lessons- the way that our generations have much to learn from each other, passing a legacy from generation to generation.
• There’s a huge amount on racism and white supremacy and being a white ally, an analysis of how you move in a way as a white person to oppose white supremacy.
• To me, its not only the connection but learning from who you learn from.
• His (David Gilbert) ability to figure out that the clearest analysis of an oppressive system comes from people who are on the receiving end of it.
• David says Malcolm X opened the eyes of his generation.
• People are beginning to read it for the transfer of information from one generation to another.
• I think one of the lessons is how has David survived as a prisoner.
• He wrote an earlier book which was a collection of essays called No Surrender. It meant; how do you maintain your spirit?
• From the point of view of the Occupy Movement, the ability to center the narrative of people of color and of the most oppressed people.

Guest – Dan Berger, a writer, activist, and the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes about race and postwar American social movements. His latest book is The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism

Guest – Naomi Jaffe, writer and prison activist who  helped to proof read Love and Struggle, add political and other detailed commentary.

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Guatemalan People Experimented On And Used As Test Subjects

We discuss a very shocking story today, about tests conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on more than five thousand individuals in Guatemala. From 1946 to at least 1953, more than a thousand people were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases. The victims included prisoners, soldiers, the mentally ill and commercial sex workers none of the had consented to this egregious treatment.

In November 2010, President Obama demanded an investigation regarding what he called the “intentional infection of vulnerable human populations.” He noted that “The research was clearly unethical.” President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Secretary Sebelius have publicly apologized. Last fall, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a report on its investigation into medical experimentation that took place in Guatemala. The Commission called these experiments “especially egregious”.

It’s important to note that the experimentation in Guatemala was overseen by the same lab — the Public Health Services Venereal Disease Research Laboratory — as the STD experiments at Tuskegee. In fact, some of the same researchers were involved and some of the same diseases. In the Tuskegee matter, the parties reached a $10 million settlement in 1974 in which the United States promised to provide medical benefits to the participants and established the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program (now the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention).

Meanwhile, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 8 individuals who claim to have been victims in the Guatemalan case, spouses or descendants of victims and is now moving its way through federal courts.

Attorney Piper Hendricks:

• There were experiments going on in Terra Haute, Indiana and Tuskegee, Alabama.
• There were ethical limitations with what they could do within the United States.
• The US medical researchers went down to Guatemala and targeted vulnerable populations including ophans, mental health patients, prisoners, soldiers; people who never gave consent to be part of these experiments.
• They used different methods, bringing fluid out of the spinal column, mixing that with Syplitic material and injecting that back into the person. Mixing material from genitalia into water and having people drink it.
• The populations that they were working with were in institutions already.
• Susan M. Reverby is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, and an historian of American women, medicine, public health and nursing.
• There wasn’t a known treatment for syphilis at the time and they wanted to watch the course of the disease, what does it do to the human body left untreated.
• But when penicillin became a known remedy for syphilis, the fact that it was withheld, and that people were intentionally misled.
• In Tuskegee, you have a population that’s not as well protected, not respected, this pre-civil rights movement.
• We’ve brought several claims, some under International Law and some as Constitutional violations.
• International law claims, look at specifically the non-consensual human medical experimentation and also bring a claim of cruel and degrading treatment.
• The statute that we’re proceeding under, the Alien Tort Statute is one you can’t use in court unless you clear the hurdle of having a violation of international law.
• Given the nature of the disease this is something pass on to your spouse, and potentially to your children.
• The defendants in this case are the US Government and the Pan American Health Organization which is the subsequent organization from the Pan American Sanitary Health Bureau.
• They’re arguing that they should be substituted under the Westfall Act for any individual defendants.
• When you substitute the US Government you’re then proceeding under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
• In sum, you can only sue the US Government when the US Government gives you permission to do so.
• Change.org link

Guest – Piper Hendricks,  an attorney working on the Guatemalan case, she has served as the International Justice Project Director of The World Organization for Human Rights USA in Washington, D.C

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 Law and Disorder April 2, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Park Slope Food Co-op Vote
• Mamilla Cemetary Update

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Vodak Settlement:  Setting Precedence For Demonstrations

Attorneys with the National Lawyers Guild recently settled a class action lawsuit brought against the Chicago Police Department on behalf of protesters falsely arrested during a 2003 anti-war demonstration. On March 20 2003 nearly 10 thousand anti-Iraq War protesters marched through downtown Chicago before police surrounded a large group, trapping and arresting more than 700 people without ordering them to disperse. A Seventh Circuit ruling on the case (Vodak v. City of Chicago, 639 F.3d, 738 (2011)) held that police can’t arrest peaceful protesters without warning because the demonstration lacks a permit. This decision bears new weight in light of mass arrests within the Occupy movement. The National Lawyers Guild attorneys reached a 6.2 million dollar settlement in this case on the eve of a scheduled trial. The suit was litigated over the course of almost nine years by a team of NLG lawyers and legal workers including People’s Law Office attorneys Janine Hoft, Joey Mogul, Sarah Gelsomino, and John Stainthorp, as well as People’s Law Office paralegal Brad Thomson, and attorneys Melinda Power and Jim Fennerty.

Attorney Joey Mogul:

• We think it sends a significant message to Chicago and the Chicago Police Department that it must honor and respect people’s right to protest.
• It was the day that Bush had dropped bombs on Iraq. There was a massive out pouring of opposition, and people came down to the center of Chicago, to the Federal Plaza which is the heart of downtown. There were 10 thousand people and they marched on Lake Shore drive, and this was all permitted by the Chicago Police Department. This was a spontaneous demonstration, there was no written permit, but the CPD allowed it.
• Toward the end of the march, they decided that they wanted it to be over. They proceeded to surround everyone on Chicago avenue, and they prevented them from leaving, trapped them there for hours.
• They then proceeded to take over 500 people into police custody. 200 hundred were released, the rest were arrested with bogus phony charges of wreck-less conduct.
• They mass arrested everyone in that area including joggers and people shopping. It had an extremely chilling effect for people participating or near a demonstration.
• The message to the Chicago Police is that they cannot mass arrest people without giving orders to disperse.
• The new changes in the Chicago ordinances are very scary, it does allow for this increased surveillance of protesters and individuals seeking to protest.
• We’re very well aware of what the law is and we will seek to vindicate people’s constitutional rights.

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Brad Thompson:

• I’ve been working on this case since 2004, when I first started at the People’s Law Office.
• The work that I’ve done is a tremendous amount of discovery work in terms of going through the video work that was shot that night, by protesters, independent journalists, mainstream media and by the police.
• I did a lot in maintaining communication with class members. We had over 800 people that were taken into custody or held in the street for over 90 minutes.
• We did obtain over 250 affidavits by people who had their rights violated that night.
• The majority of protesters were from Chicago or the Greater Chicago area.
• I was one of the people taken into custody that night and released without being charged.
• I was witnessing the police aggressively arrest someone and I started to point and chant “shame” and then I became targeted.  The police tackled me, and pulled me to my feet and struck me in the face which broke my nose and had a wound that required five stitches.
• I spent the night in jail bleeding all over myself.

Guest – Attorney Joey Mogul, partner at the People’s Law Office in Chicago and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University’s College of Law. She focuses on civil rights cases involving police misconduct, criminal cases brought against individuals engaged in street demonstrations and other forms of First Amendment expression, and capital defense cases.

Guest – Brad Thompson, legal worker with the People’s Law Office in Chicago.

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Locking Away Children For Life Without Parole

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to life, without the possibility of parole. Last month, the US Supreme Court revisited the question of whether juveniles convicted of murder should be given mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court had once ruled against imposing death sentences on juveniles and imposing life sentences on youth who aren’t convicted of murder. Currently, 2500 kids in jail are serving life sentences without parole in the US.  371 of those individuals are in Michigan prisons. Our next guest has been working on a lawsuit on behalf of 9 Michigan individuals who were sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed when they were minors and who are being denied the possibility of parole.

Attorney Deborah LaBelle:

• The concept that we’ve been talking about that these are children both under international law and US law for civil matters, children are different from adults.
• The Supreme Court seemed to readily grasp that, they weren’t speaking about juveniles or teenagers or young adults, they spoke continuously on what to do about children who are involved in homicide crime.
• The court had two cases in front of them, both involving 14 year olds, one in which the 14 did not commit a homicide, but convicted of either felony murder or aiding and abetting.
• That juvenile got mandatory life without possibility of parole, because the child was sentenced as an adult, the other case, the 14 year old actually committed the homicide.
• There is a handful of states, Michigan and I think 8 others who treat 17 year olds always as adults for all purposes in the criminal justice system.
• Under the 38 states, there’s a whole range, some you can only get life without parole, if you’re 16 and up, some allow it for 15, some states allow it for a child of any age, Michigan is one of them.
• One of the justices talked about that. Is there an age in which we would all share a collective cringe. What about a 5 year old, what about a 10 year old.
• The frontal lobe area of the brain that really addresses impulse control and long term consequences, and control issues of risk management, is developing through adolescence.
• People draw the age at different points, some say not til 19, some not til 23 as you say.
• There’s a bright line in civil law that’s been drawn in civil law that youth have a maturity that they can vote, when they can decide to leave school, when they can drink in some places, when they can drive.
• There are these bright lines.
• Every other country who has signed on to the conventions of the rights of the child which prohibits putting children in prison for life without possibility of parole explicitly has recognized that this practice is banned.
• The only other country that hasn’t signed on is Somalia and they don’t quite have a government right now to do that.
• We stand alone in not adhering to that convention on the rights of the child as well as we stand alone on approving this sentence.
• We have over 2500 youth who are serving of life without any possibility of parole. About 70 percent are children of color. A third of them, did not commit homicides.
• No one is arguing that there might not be circumstances, that a state couldn’t decide upon review that child couldn’t be released.  What the argument is, you can’t keep them in there without any hope. You have to give them an opportunity to demonstrate upon maturation that they have been rehabilitated and they aren’t a threat to public safety.
• We should think of putting children in places where we can nurture, council and believe in their rehabilitation and give them a second chance.
• I read transcript after transcript of judges saying, – listen I don’t want to do this to this 14 or 16 year old, but I don’t have any choice.  What is the value of putting a child away with no hope. It’s certainly not a public safety issue, because that can be addressed by the state by having parole or review hearings.

 Guest – Attorney Deborah LaBelle, an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan’s Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative.

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 Law and Disorder March 26, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Bradley Manning Update: Michael Ratner – We Have A Secret Trial Going On Right Now
• Park Slope Food Co-op Vote
• Len Weinglass Remembrance

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Leonard Weinglass TV Interview: Cuba 2004

We hear excerpts of an interview with attorney Leonard Weinglass and Miguel Alvarez, adviser on international and political affairs to Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba’s National Assembly.  In this interview Len Weinglass discusses his early career representing the first African-American mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Paper, plus  crucial turning points that shaped his life story as a people’s lawyer.

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Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story Of An Action That Changed America – Writers For The 99%

A collective of writers for the 99 percent have created a very interesting new book for OR Books, distributed by Haymarket Books. They’ve employed a  unique writing method to chronicle the many details within the movement of Occupying Wall Street. A team of nearly 60 writers with rotating membership, collaborated on the describing the intricate structures and daily life of the movement such as running the general assembly, how the security and medical center operate and then the stories of the activists involved.

Colin Robinson:

• We were supportive of what was going on down in Zuccotti and I thought we should do a book about this too.
• Beginning of October I went down to the trash cans outside my apartment and pulled an old Budweiser carton out of the trash and cut it into the shape of a book cover and wrote on it with a Sharpie, “Occupying Wall Street, By Writers With the 99%.
• I photographed it with my iPhone at home, and sent it out with a press release, and New York Magazine picked it up saying Occupy Wall Street has a book and it then went everywhere.
• The journalists were calling me up saying, who are the writers for the 99 percent?
• So then I had to get some volunteers. We went down to Zuccotti and talked to some of the facilitators down there. They said you should just come to a General Assembly and we’ll put it on the agenda.
• Tell the GA about the book, get some volunteers and you’ll be fine.
• So we went down on a Wednesday night, in early October. I was not feeling comfortable about this.
• I was a little nervous about speaking at the GA to try and get permission to publish the book.
• They suggested to go to and Education and Empowerment Meeting Committee at 60 Wall Street and take it up there and ask for volunteers there.
• The following week we went the meeting and the response at that point was not very encouraging.
• People were suspicious of who we were. Whether this book was going to be seen as the official book of Occupy Wall Street, which we were saying it wasn’t but they thought it would be.  And that it was going to develop an analysis that they didn’t agree with.
• No, we were saying its going to be descriptive, it’s not analytical. A lot of the twinkling was out flat, some of it was down. In the end, some guy stood up in the back and said I don’t think we should support this.
• We got blocked, he crossed his arms in front of chest. If this goes through, I’m walking out. We felt really wounded by it.
• But afterward some people from the committee came up and said we feel badly about the way you were treated, we’ll volunteer to help.  We started meeting weekly at 60 Wall Street and the meetings got bigger and bigger.
• We came up with a structure, chapter by chapter. There were 2 themes in the book, one was a chronological account of the action. The day the occupation started on September 17.
• The drilling down of the daily detail for what life is like in the square. We’ve got sections in the book of how the kitchen worked, how the library worked, how the general assembly worked.
• I thought at first, what I would do would be to interview the people who are volunteering to write, pick the ones who could write well, and as kindly as possible tell the ones who couldn’t write they couldn’t be part of it.
• I soon realized that was not is the spirit of Occupy Wall Street.
• We were trying to reproduce the book in a way that reflected the values of Occupy Wall Street that meant it was produced in a very democratic, horizontal fashion. Anyone who wanted to participate could.
• We came up with a chapter structure, we sent people out into the square and we did about 200 interviews in the square. We allocated the interviews to each chapter and we tried to find 3 or 4 people to write each chapter.
• The whole book was written by 60 people in 2 weeks. This book absorbed the ethos of Occupy Wall Street.
• If you repress a little bit of it, its going to spring up somewhere else.

Guest – Colin Robinson,  former Publisher, Verso Press and The New Press, and Scribner senior editor; John Oakes, former Grove Press Editor and founder of 4 Walls, 8 Windows and ORBooks.  He’s written for magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the London Guardian.

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 Law and Disorder March 19, 2012: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Updates:

• Rene Gonzalez – Cuban Five Update: Contact Form
• CIW: Publix Campaign Fast – Publix Surveillance Truck
• Ugandan LGBT Activists File Case Against Anti-Gay U.S. Evangelical in Federal Court
• The Progressive: Michael Smith’s Book Interview “Who Killed Che?”

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Church Puts Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group

Earlier last year, we reported on the Vatican revising its laws making it easier to discipline sex abuser priests.  This month, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse and pedophilia have used the courts to force the group SNAP Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.  A Kansas City judge decided SNAP must comply with lawyers because it had relevant information regarding 2 cases in Missouri.

Attorney Barbara Blaine:

• As you know we are a not for profit, self help support group run by and for people who have been victims of clergy sexual abuse.  We have been providing support information to each other since 1988.
• The church officials have taken an unprecedented move and they have subpoenaed records from our SNAP leaders.
• We are an international group, we have groups forming in other countries as well.
• Here in the United States, we have support groups meeting in about 70 cities. In these support groups people share their feelings and tidbits of information on how to cope with the repercussions of sexual violence.
• There are subpoenas from 2 different cities, 2 different cases, both from the state of Missouri.
• In Kansas City, what’s happen in the past year, is a lot of sex abuse by priests has been uncovered, exposed and brought to light. In the process, the Bishop himself was indicted for failure to protect children.
• In one particular civil case, the church attorneys have subpoenaed the records of our national director and they are looking for very extreme information.
• These subpoenas are not tailored to be helpful to get information for the case, SNAP is not a party to either of these cases. They ask for records with no date, from the very beginning of SNAP, from 1988.
• They’re asking for all the information in our emails, in our files, and they’re looking for any information that names any priest from the diocese of Kansas City, St Joseph.
• We do believe that the victims who have spoken out in Kansas City, have had an impact. I think its empowered other victims to come forward. I think they’re trying to shut down SNAP in Kansas City.
• The biggest concern we have now is the fear that this is spreading. In many ways, the intended effect has already taken place.
• I started SNAP, I did so, after I was raped and sexually violated by a priest in my parish growing up.
• Stop The Legal Bullying Petition.

Guest - Attorney Barbara Blaine, founder of SNAP  the nation’s oldest and largest self-help organization for victims of clergy sexual abuse 10 thousand survivors.

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Court Rules FDNY Liable for Up to $128 Million in Back Pay to Black and Latino Applicants

Last week, a US District judge awarded plaintiffs back pay in a class action lawsuit that found the New York Fire Department to have racially discriminatory hiring practices.  US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis also ruled that the City of New York is liable for nearly 129 million in lost wages.  This amount will be distributed to Black and Latino applicants,  82 and 42 million dollars respectively.   The judge also ordered the FDNY to hire 186 Black firefighters and 107 Latino firefighters.

Attorney Darius Charney:

• The Vulcan Society which is the Black fraternal organization for New York City brought a lawsuit in the early 1970s challenging the hiring practices of the department as violative of the equal protection clause of the Constitution, saying that they racially discriminated.
• Blacks and Latinos, its over half of the city’s population today. If you look at the fire department today, its roughly if you combine Blacks and Latinos about 10 percent.
• A federal judge in New York found that the hiring practices were discriminatory and violated the 14th amendment, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision and the Fire Dept was ordered to make some changes in 1970s.
• As of 2002 when we actually formerly brought this case, the department was 3 percent Black, 5 percent Latino, which is not much different than it was in 1970.  The city was asked to work out a settlement, the city refused for 2 years.
• So, the EEOC referred the case to the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. This was during the Bush Administration and as you know the Civil Rights Division didn’t do much.
• We’ve proven discrimination about 3 times over now to the judge. Last year we had a big federal trial in Brooklyn on what relief the court should order because of the discrimination that was found.
• If you try to obstruct a federal court order, that could lead to some serious penalties.
• Our clients, the Vulcans first met with Mayor Bloomberg when first came to office in 2002 about this problem.
• We felt it was a purposeful and intentional effort by the city to exclude people of color.
• There have been incidence, we think retaliatory incidence we think against Vulcan members for there efforts in this case.
• The FDNY has really dropped the ball in responding to these acts of discrimination.
• The court has to oversee a lot of different aspects to this case. There’s a new test being developed, they’re going to start administering this week. There’s now the piece about the compensation for the plaintiffs.
• Federal judges can’t closely supervise the case so they appoint these monitors to simply act in the role of the judge and oversee each of these aspects of the case.
• We hope that the city will at some point stop fighting because all the things the judge has ordered for changing, I think benefits the fire department.
• A group of women sued in the early 1980s alleging sex discrimination and again they pointed to the test and other aspects of the hiring process.
• They were victorious and the court ordered them to hire 50 women, which they did do.

Guest – Attorney Darius Charney,  senior staff attorney in the Racial Justice/Government Misconduct Docket.  He is currently lead counsel on Floyd v. City of New York, a federal civil rights class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s unconstitutional and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, and Vulcan Society Inc. v. the City of New York, a Title VII class action lawsuit on behalf of African-American applicants to the New York City Fire Department which challenges the racially discriminatory hiring practices of the FDNY.

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