Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq War, Truth to Power
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Maze of Injustice – The failure to protect Indigenous Women from sexual violence in the USA
A recent Amnesty International study on the sexual violence against indigenous women in the United States exposes a disturbing trend in human rights abuse. The reasons why indigenous women are at particular risk of sexual violence are complex. According to the report, more than one in three Native American and Alaska Native women are survivors of rape. Most of the abused women have not followed through in their cases to seek justice because of a general inaction within the tribal government authority and its chronic under-resourced law enforcement agencies which should protect indigenous women. As one support worker said, “Women don’t report because it doesn’t make a difference. Why report when you are just going to be re-victimized?” Too many times, as the Amnesty Report identifies, those responsible for the violence are able to get away with it.
Guest – Michael Heflin, the Amnesty International USA Campaign Director.
Guest – Juskwa Burnett, counselor for the Otoe-Missouria Tribe in Oklahoma. Juskwa Burnett has a long history of working on domestic abuse and sexual assault of Native women.
Listen to or download Maze of Injustice Segment
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Conscientious Objectors from Vietnam to Iraq
Here on Law and Disorder we continue to look at the issue of Iraq war resisters and conscientious objectors. We’ve interviewed war resistors – their families and discussed conscientious objection. We also look at how legislation has changed for soldiers applying for CO status.
Since the Vietnam War more than 170,000 men were officially recognized as conscientious objectors. But, in 1971 the Supreme Court refused to allow objection to a particular war, a decision affecting thousands of objectors to the Vietnam War. Some 50,000–100,000 men are estimated to have left the United States to avoid being drafted. Now, the US military is all-volunteer. We talk with Citizen Soldiers’ Tod Ensign about what’s changed for Conscientious Objectors since the Vietnam War and compare what it means to be a CO in today’s United States military.
Joining us in this discussion is Tod Ensign, lawyer and the director of Citizen Soldier, a support organization for Gis.
Check out – The Different Drummer Cafe
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Maze of Injustice – The failure to protect Indigenous Women from sexual violence in the USA
A recent Amnesty International study on the sexual violence against indigenous women in the United States exposes a disturbing trend in human rights abuse. The reasons why indigenous women are at particular risk of sexual violence are complex. According to the report, more than one in three Native American and Alaska Native women are survivors of rape. Most of the abused women have not followed through in their cases to seek justice because of a general inaction within the tribal government authority and its chronic under-resourced law enforcement agencies which should protect indigenous women. As one support worker said, “Women don’t report because it doesn’t make a difference. Why report when you are just going to be re-victimized? Too many times, as the Amnesty Report identifies, those responsible for the violence are able to get away with it.
Guest – Michael Heflin, the Amnesty International USA Campaign Director.
Guest – Juskwa Burnett, counselor for the Otoe-Missouria Tribe in Oklahoma. Juskwa Burnett has a long history of working on domestic abuse and sexual assault of Native women.
Civil Liberties, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo, Prison Industry, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
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Guantanamo Bay Detainee Dies : Alleged Suicide
Law and Disorder hosts Dalia Hashad, Michael Ratner and Michael Smith discuss the recent alleged suicide at Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. The Saudi Arabian detainee died last Wednesday at Guantanamo Bay prison. The U.S. military says he apparently committed suicide.
“It’s conceivable he (the detainee) was murdered.” – – Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“This death demonstrates the urgent need to close Guantanamo Bay Prison.” – – Dalia Hashad, Amnesty International USA Program Director .
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Listen to the Pacifica National Special – The War on Immigrants – Co-hosted by our own Dalia Hashad.
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“War on Terror” Prisoners and Secret Detentions Update
Michael Ratner describes how the Bush Administration has been pushing coercive interrogations with limited resistance in Congress. He also points out the new laws that apply to prisoners in US military custody. Ratner says they are now required to obey the Army Field Manual on detainee treatment FM 34-52 that include almost 20 interrogation techniques that do not constitute torture. Those prisoners, alleged enemy combatants citizen or non-citizen in the custody of the CIA (secret prisons) are not subject to the Army Field Manual.
Anti-Torture Movement in Chicago Police Torture Case Gains Traction
The City Council will hold hearings on a special prosecutor’s “whitewash†report into police torture by former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge, thanks to a resolution co-signed today by 26 aldermen
The case includes a four-year investigation focused on allegations that 148 black men were tortured in Chicago police interrogation rooms in the 1970s and ’80s. The men say detectives under the command of Lt. Jon Burge beat them, used electric shocks, played mock Russian roulette and started to smother at least one to force confessions. Prosecutors described this type of criminal justice system where top officials in a position to put a stop to police torture appeared blind to the abuse. Among them, Mayor Richard Daley, when he served as Cook County state’s attorney.
Guest – Flint Taylor – Attorney with the People’s Law Office, leading the fight against covering up torture by the Chicago Police Department.
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Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine
Last month we heard author Joel Kovel discuss his book at the Brecht Forum. He recently joined Law and Disorder in the studio for a riveting interview that also looked into Kovel’s personal changes that led him to write Overcoming Zionism. Toward the end of the interview, co-host Dalia Hashad asks why Joel Kovel chose the word “overcoming” in his title.
“This book is absolutely fundamental for those who reject the unfortunate confusion between Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel — a confusion which is the basis for systematic manipulation by the imperialist power system. It convincingly argues in favour of a single secular state for Israelis and Palestinians as the only democratic solution for the region.” Samir Amin, Director of the Third World Forum.
Guest – Joel Kovel author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, has been engaged in struggles for peace and justice since the Vietnam War era. He has worked within the antiwar and antinuclear movements, the solidarity movements in Central America and the Caribbean, the movements for democratic media, and, increasingly, for ecological transformation. He lived in Nicaragua for a period in 1986, and accompanied Pastors for Peace as they broke the US blockade on Cuba in their 1994 Friendshipment. He has acted in films, worked frequently with the Bread and Puppet theatre, and lectured on four continents. Kovel joined the Green Party since 1990. In 1998, he was the Green Party candidate for US Senator from New York, and in 2000 sought their Presidential nomination.
Civil Liberties, Death Penalty, Truth to Power
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Recently we brought you the voices of activists and attorneys outside the Third Circuit Court in Philadelphia all responding to the oral arguments of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Today we have a chance to talk with lead attorney Robert R. Bryan from San Francisco. As the former chair of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Mr Bryan’s career spans more than 3 decades and has included other highly political cases such as representing leaders of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.
Guest – Robert Bryan, lead attorney representing Mumia Abu-Jamal
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We recently broadcasted speeches from the demonstration in New York voicing opposition to the release of admitted former CIA operative, Luis Posada Carriles. He’s accused of being one of the masterminds of a l976 mid-air explosion that demolished a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people. This demonstration was among other protests worldwide including Canada, Mexico, Central and South America.
Meanwhile the Cuban Five remain in prison. Look at photographic evidence here against Luis Posada Carriles / Washington Post Article – Free Ride For A Likely Killer
We hear a riveting speech from Father Luis Barrios, pastor of La Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas
Left Forum; Prisons, Prisoners and Political Prisoners
We hear a speech by J. Soffiyah Elijah at the Left Forum. The panel is titled, Prisons, Prisoners and Political Prisoners and chaired by our own Michael Smith. Soffiyah Elijah serves as Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School.
Left Forum: Iraq, What’s At Stake – Anthony Arnove
We turn now to hear an excerpt of a speech from author Anthony Arnove at the Left Forum this year. The panel is titled Iraq, What’s At Stake. Anthony is the author of Iraq:The Logic of Withdrawal, examining why continuing the occupation is a wildly unrealistic and reckless strategy that makes the world a more dangerous place.
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Robert R. Bryan
San Francisco
Robert R. Bryan has specialized in death-penalty litigation for three decades and is lead counsel in various murder cases pending at the federal and state level. He is a member of the bar of California, New York, United States Supreme Court, various federal courts, and was elected a Fellow in the American Board of Criminal Lawyers. Also, he serves on the Steering Committee, World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Paris, is active in the National Lawyers Guild, New York, and formerly served as Chair of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Washington, D.C.
In 2003 Mr. Bryan became lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the African-American journalist who is Pennsylvania’s death row. They began corresponding nearly two decades ago, but Mr. Bryan was unable to take the case at that time due to other capital-case commitments.
Nr. Bryan has defended many other people against whom the death penalty was sought with the first being an acquittal in the Ammons case in BirmingÂham, Alabama when the lawyer was just 26. He represented Jerry D. Bigelow who had spent years on California’s death row before being granted a new trial. Even though the evidence included the client’s 10 confessions to an execution-style murder, a Monterey County jury returned a non-guilty verdict. Another client was Larry Layton, the only person ever charged in the Peoples Temple case which concerned the death of CongressÂman Leo Ryan and over 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana, at the direcÂtion of Rev. Jim Jones. Mr. Bryan also defended Buddy Cochran who attacked the leadership of the Klu Klux Klan at their national convention in Plains, Georgia, near the home of the then President Jimmy Carter.
For 15 years Mr. Bryan represented Anna Hauptmann, who died at the age of 95 in 1994 in Pennsylvania. She was the widow of Richard HauptÂmann, a German immigrant who was executed in 1936 in New Jersey for the kidnap-murder of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. The attorney uncovered eviÂdence from government files establishing that the authoriÂties knowingly prosecuted an innocent person and that the Trial of the Century was the greatest fraud in US legal history. He pursued litigation in New Jersey against the FBI and those who prosecuted the case in an effort to officially right the wrong. His findings are the subject of The Airman and The Carpenter by Ludovic Kennedy (Viking, Penguin), various other books, documentaries, and a movie. A section of MurÂders Die by Denis Brian (St. Martin’s Press) is an interview with the attorney on the Hauptmann case and the death penalty. Mr. Bryan is intermittently working on a book concerning the case.
Mr. Bryan has also been counsel to members of the American Indian Movement. He won a dismissal of all murder charges again Jimmy Eagle, who was indicted for the June 26, 1975 killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota (Leonard Peltier, represented by others, was later convicted). Mr. Bryan represented federally Gladys Bissonette, who was actively involved in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. He was also the attorney for the Menominee Warrior Society during its 1975 armed occupation of the abandoned Alexian Brothers’ Novitiate near Gresham, Wisconsin. He successfully demanded that the 65-room mansion, other buildings and its acreage be returned to the Native Americans who had lived on the land long before the white man arrived.
Often Mr. Bryan speaks on the death penalty and other human-rights issues both in the U.S. and Europe. In 2007 he addressed the erd World Congress Against the Death Penalty, Paris. Since 1994 he has been doing legal commentaries for ABC News, San Francisco, and appears on other news outlets.
Mr. Bryan has written articles on the death penalty and human rights, e.g., Taking A Stand, Verdict (Jan. 1998); What Price Justice?, Parliamentary Review (England, Oct. 1997); Waco: Inferno of Rights, San Francisco Attorney (S.F. Bar Assoc., Sept., 1993), Death Penalty Trials: The InnoÂcence of Jerry Bigelow and Defense CreativÂity, Champion (National Assoc. of Crim. Defenders Law., Dec. 1993), Death Penalty Trials: Lawyers Need Help, Forum (Calif. Attys. for Crim. Justice, May-June, 1989), Champion (Aug., 1988); In Trial By Fury: The Lindbergh Case, SF Examiner (Apr. 3, 1996), he discussed the wrongfulness of the death penalty on the 60th anniversary of the execution of Richard Hauptmann in New Jersey for the Lindbergh kidnap-murder. A longer version of the article appears in the book Frontiers of Justice, Volume 1: The Death Penalty (Biddle). He demonÂstrated that innocent people are unavoidably put to death in any capital punishment system regardÂless of precauÂtions to ensure fairness, in The Execution of the Innocent: The Tragedy of the Hauptmann-Lindbergh and Bigelow Cases, 18 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 831 (1991). Dedicated Defender, Verdict (July 1998) also contains an interview with the attorney.
A chapter entitled “The Defender” in the book A Punishment In Search Of A Crime by Ian Gray and Moira Stanley (Avon Press) describes Mr. Bryan’s work in fighting capital punishment. His work is featured in Modern Trials by Melvin Belli (West). The lawyer has appeared as an expert witness regarding the minimum stanÂdards of attorney compeÂtence in capital cases.
The activities and memberships of Mr. Bryan have included: World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Steering Committee, Paris; National Lawyers Guild, NY; National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Chair and Board (1985-95), Washington; Chopin Foundation, Board (2004-present); Amnesty International; ACLU; National Coalition Concerned Legal Prof., Board (2000-present); Lycée FranÂÂçais La Pérouse, Board (1997-98); No. Calif. Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Board and Chair (1985-92); NY State Defenders Assn.; NY State Assn. of Crim. Defenders Lawyers; Amer. Indians and the Death Penalty, Adv. Council (1985-92); Int’l Soc’ty for Prof. Hyp., Legal Adv. Board; Criminal Trial Law. Assn.; NAACP; Int’l Churchill Soc’ty; Glenn Gould Foundation.
Mr. Bryan is married to Nicole, a French citizen who is actively working on behalf of death-row clients. They live in San Francisco, but also spend time at the family home in France. Their daughter, Auda Mai, is a classical pianist and attends Rugby School, England.
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Contact information:
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
RobertRBryan@aol.com
