When we think of doctor closing a wound many things come to mind – sutures, staples, band aids or the like. It might astound many to learn that some doctors use Krazy glue on inmate patients. During a time when government transparency is nearly obsolete, we find the few that act as beacons of hope. When he first requested the records for medical malpractice cases involving inmates in 2000, Paul Wright never imagined how much trouble it would be.
Guest – Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, a publication that looks into our correctional facilities and reports on prisoner’s rights. Paul is also on the board of the National Lawyers Guild.
Police used excessive force when they attacked peaceful protestors who rallied at a University of Michigan event sponsored by the American Movement for Israel. As the senior medical professional on scene, Dr. Catherine Wilkerson took responsibility for the well-being of a middle-aged man who claimed he couldn’t breath and lost consciousness. She exhorted the police to get off of him, and was allowed to check his pulse and breathing.
Wilkerson later protested when Emergency Medical Service (EMS) personnel breached ethical medical practices by forcing ammonia into the man’s nostrils and face. It was at this time that she was physically assaulted and detained by Ann Arbor police.
No charges were filed until after Dr. Wilkerson wrote a complaint to authorities about the actions of the police officers. A week since writing the letter, Dr. Wilkerson was charged by the Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie’s office, at the request of the UM police, with two attempted felonies—one against Officer Warner and one against the EMS personnel.
Children In Conflict With The Law: The U.S. Leads The World In Sentencing Children To Life Without Parole.
There are more than 2000 child offenders serving life without parole sentences in U.S. prisons for crimes committed before they reached the age of 18. The United States is one of few countries in the world that permit children to serve a life sentence without parole. Forty-two states currently have laws allowing children to receive life without parole sentences. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by every country in the world except the United States and Somalia, forbids this practice, and at least 132 countries have rejected the sentence altogether.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published a 130 page report on this topic called The Rest of Their Lives (PDF). The statistics are staggering and includes four juvenile offenders in South Africa, one in Tanzania and five in Israel. It is based on self-reported cases found in these countries’ reports to the U.N. International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). While many of the child offenders are now adults, 16 percent were between 13 and 15 years old at the time they committed their crimes. An estimated 59 percent were sentenced to life without parole for their first-ever criminal conviction.
Alison Parker historically references where these laws came from. In the United Kingdom the sentence was known as “Detention During Her Majesty’s Pleasure”, the only sentence available to the courts for a person convicted of murder who was aged over 10 but under 18 at the time of the offence.
Guest – Alison Parker, Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch. Alison says she is among many helping to change the legislation that incarcerate children permanently without rehabilitative options.
Guest – David Berger, attorney with O’Melveny & Myers. David is a former researcher for the Amnesty International report.
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Bernadine Dohrn
Bernadine Dohrn joins Law and Disorder to discuss juvenile justice and the development of Draconian laws for children in conflict with the law. Bernadine is a clinical professor at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University in Chicago. Bernadine is also the former leader of the Weathermen. She now serves on the board of numerous human rights committees and teaches comparative law. Since 2002, she has served as a Visiting Law Faculty at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Here on Law and Disorder we’ve followed the pivotal moments in the Mohammed Salah case. Earlier this year, Salah was cleared of terrorism charges but recently convicted of lying about his ties to the Palestinian group Hamas. He faces nearly two years in prison. The sentence for a minor charge of obstruction of justice comes as a major setback for prosecutors who have spent a decade investigating charges that could have put Salah behind bars for life.
In his latest article in the New York Review of Books, David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University reviews several books including, John Ashcroft’s Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice, General Ashcroft: Attorney at War by Nancy V. Baker and It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, by Joe Conason and also Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror by Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq.
These publications create an outline of how former Attorney General John Ashcroft helped create a platform that allowed the Bush administration to torture, allow coerced confessions and hold defendants indefinitely without trial.
Peter Weiss is Vice-President, former President, of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and its US affiliate, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy; Vice-President, Federation Internationale des ligues des Droits de l’Homme; and Vice-President, Center for Constitutional Rights. Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and has lectured and written widely on the international law of war and peace, nuclear weapons and human rights. He was the principal author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion, and served as counsel to Malaysia at the hearings.
He has published several articles on the ICJ opinion, including in the fall 1997 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems. Mr. Weiss is also a leading human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Pena-Irala). Since his retirement in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, he has been Senior Intellectual Property Counsel to The Chanel Company Limited. He is also a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace in the Middle East and is currently a member of the Arab-Jewish Peace Group in New York and of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which supports the Peace Now movement in Israel.
US Marine Corporal Adam Charles Kokesh and other members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) wore parts of their Marine Corps Combat Utility Uniforms during a street theater demonstration that marked the 4th anniversary of the Iraq War. The Marine Corp warned the soldiers of disciplinary action for violating uniform policies at political demonstrations. Kokesh tells hosts that he responded with a letter (ending it with “[I] … ask you to please, kindly, go f&%# yourself.”). As a result, a military court convened to look at changing Kokesh’s military discharge from “honorable” to “other than honorable” because of “Disrespect toward a Superior Commissioned Officer”, and violating “Wearing of the uniform” regulation.
At the time Kokesh was part of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) Kokesh’s attorney, Mike Lebowitz, claimed that the Marine Corps is attempting to stifle Kokesh’s constitutional right to free speech. Lebowitz and JAG defense counsel LT Joseph Melaragno argued that the military did not have jurisdiction over Kokesh based on the Marine Corps’s use of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, since the UCMJ does not apply to members of the IRR. Ultimately Kokesh was given a general discharge a step lower than honorable, instead of the harsher penalty that included losing access to certain veteran’s health benefits and being forced to pay back more than 10 thousand dollars in educational benefits.
Guest – Adam Kokesh
Guest – Michael Lebowitz, attorney for Adam Kokesh.
Former Staff Sergeant of the Florida National Guard and anti-war activist Camilo MejÃa became known in the antiwar movement in 2004 when he applied for a discharge from the Army as a conscientious objector. After serving in the Army for nearly nine years, he was the first known Iraq veteran to refuse to fight, citing moral concerns about the war and occupation. Mejia spent six months in combat in Iraq where he witnessed the killing of civilians and the abuse of detainees.
After he returned to the United States he decided never to return to fight in Iraq. He went into hiding to avoid redeployment and was classified as AWOL by the military. MejÃa was ultimately convicted of desertion by a military court and sentenced to a year in prison. He has recently written a book titled – Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant MejÃa which recounts his journey of conscience in Iraq.
The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a 90-day stay of execution to Troy Davis. On July 16, less than 24 hours before Troy Davis was scheduled to be executed in Georgia, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a stay of execution, to be not longer than 90 days, “for the purpose of evaluating and analyzing” the information submitted to it during the clemency hearing earlier in the day. Act today to ensure that the the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles grants Troy clemency!
Troy Davis was sentenced to death in Georgia, for the murder of a police officer. The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimonies that were full of inconsistencies, even at the time of trial. Since then, all but two of the states’ nine non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted their testimony. Many state in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis. Listen to Law and Disorder interview with Troy’s sister Martina Correia.
Co-Host Heidi Boghosian and National Lawyers Guild members publish a powerful report chronicling government tactics employed on city, state and federal levels aimed at suppressing public dissent. The report outlines the hierarchy of government attacks on free speech, from sophisticated data collecting agencies to arresting demonstrators without probable cause. Order yours here $3
National Lawyers Guild President, legal scholar and co-author of Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of Justice, Marjorie Cohn has written a new book titled, Cowboy Republic, Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law. She provides an in-depth analysis of six significant ways in which the Bush administration has undermined the rule of law in this country. Professor Cohn details the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; the policy of torture; war crimes; the kangaroo courts of Guantanamo; unconstitutional laws; and the unlawful surveillance of American citizens. Her book contains practical ways to strengthen the rule of law domestically and internationally, including both political and legal remedies.
