CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Chicago Gang Intervention Programs: BUILD
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently vowed that the Justice Department has zero tolerance for gang violence. “If you are a gang member, he said, “we will find you,” “We will devastate your networks. We will starve your revenue sources, deplete your ranks, and seize your profits. We will not concede a single block or a street corner to your vicious tactics.” President Trump tweeted his approval of Sessions comments, saying “I promised to get tough and we are!” The administration’s efforts to crack down on gangs will mean more arrests and lengthy incarceration for young persons with little attention being paid to alternatives to detention and programs that will offer productive and meaningful choices.
In Chicago, where gang violence has received a great deal of media attention, one community-based organization has been working in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods to stem violence before it interferes with young peoples’ potential. In 1969 BUILD began working with gang-affiliated teenagers and now serves nearly 3,000 youth each year offering targeted services designed to prevent kids from joining gangs and also working with gang-involved youth to develop alternatives to this lifestyle. BUILD also works with young persons who are in contact with the justice system to provide alternatives to detention and assist with successful re-entry.
Guest – Martin Anguiano, BUILD’s Manager of Intervention Services . Martin has worked at BUILD since 1994. He oversees BUILD services to young people involved in, or at risk for involvement in, gangs and the juvenile justice system. He is trained in trauma-informed practices and certified in peace circle keeping. Martin holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Attorney Jim Lafferty On Trump Administration
Donald Trump has been in office now for over 100 days. His cabinet and closest advisers constitute a group of generals, multimillionaires, and billionaires. It is the richest cabinet in American history. His closest advisers and members of his family, an organizational set up that more resembles the mafia than past executive office inhabitants. His predecessor, Barack Obama, was a disappointment to many people who supported him eight years ago. He presided over US wars in the Middle East. His government overthrew the government of Libya, the Ukraine, and Honduras. Domestically he failed to prosecute those guilty of torture, which is illegal under American and International law. He failed to close the offshore prison in Guantánamo, Cuba. He failed to prosecute the bankers who crashed the American economy in 2008. He deported more people than any other president in American history. Now, with Donald Trump in office, people are asking the question, is he qualitatively different than Obama. What is the continuity and what is the discontinuity between the Obama and Trump administrations?
Guest – Los Angeles National Lawyers Guild attorney Jim Lafferty. Jim participated as a lawyer during the civil rights movement in Mississippi. He is a former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. He was a central leader in the movement against the war in Vietnam. For the last 30 years he was the head of theLos Angeles National Lawyers Guild, growing it into one of the most active an influential chapters in the United States.
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Paul Gattone
Arizona has long been Ground Zero for immigration controversies. It’s a state with one of the harshest immigration laws in the country, Senate Bill 1070. In the state capitol of Phoenix, immigrant rights groups have dedicated the past two decades to fighting the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for racial profiling, late-night raids and a “tent city” outdoor prison. Arpaio was voted out of office in 2016. But the state still has its share of threats to civil rights.
Guest – Attorney Paul Gattone of Tucson, Arizona. A Chicago native, Paul has spent over two decades in Ariona as a criminal defense attorney at the People’s Law Center and now in private practice. A longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild, Paul’s focus is in advancing and defending civil rights. He and his wife Joy also run a radical bookstore called Revolutionary Grounds.
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Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Silk Road, Kingpin Charge and Ross Ulbricht
In 2015 a jury found that then 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht had created and run an anonymous digital black market for drugs called Silk Road. The case was a high profile one, and Ulbricht had come to be known by some as the face of the Dark Web. He was convicted on seven charges—including a “kingpin” charge—and Judge Katherine Forrest imposed two life sentences and 40 years without possibility of parole. Prosecutors had not even sought such a long sentence.
In a 2016 appeal, defense attorneys outlined a litany of improprieties and abuses in the investigation and trial. Perhaps most serious was that the court procluded information about two corrupt federal agents investigating Silk Road who are now both serving prison sentences for corruption.
The defense team maintains that the convictions for Ulbricht should be vacated and that a new trial should be ordered or that he receive re-sentencing before a different judge.
A new book by Nick Bilton called “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind Silk Road” has received glowing reviews but presents what the Ulbricht family, his legal team, and supporters describe as a fictionalized version of the government’s narrative of the case, It is said that in many instances the author relied on claims that were not charged in trial.
Guest – Ross’s mother, Lyn Ulbricht. Lyn is working to help her son and directs those who want to learn more about her son’s case to the site Free Ross Ulbricht.
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Williams v. Pennsylvania: Mumia Abu-Jamal
In 2016 the Supreme Court in Williams v. Pennsylvania held that a prosecutor involved in seeking the death penalty should recuse himself if asked to judge an appeal in the capital case. Two months later, Mumia Abu-Jamal filed an appeal based on that decision, calling into direct question the validity of his criminal conviction, and the denial of his appeals. Ronald Castille, the same prosecutor in the Williams case, was a senior district attorney while Mumia’s case was being tried. He was also the District Attorney of Philadelphia during Mumia’s direct appeals. While serving on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Castille rejected a recusal motion filed by Mumia’s defense.
On April 24, Mumia’s 63rd birthday, his lawyers were back in court arguing that a Motion for Discovery should be granted to determine the particulars of Castille’s personal involvement in Mumia’s prosecution and appeals.
Judge Leon Tucker ruled in favor of Mumia’s demand for discover and for the DA’s files. The records must be turned over to Mumia’s attorneys by May 30, 2017.
Guest – Attorney Judy Ritter, Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Widener’s Delaware campus. She argued in 2011 before the Third Circuit that the instructions given to the sentencing jurors were unconstitutional. The so-called Mills claim argument succeeded and Mumia, as our listeners know, no longer faces a sentence of death.
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Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted
Capital punishment has made news headlines over the past few months, as the state of Arkansas rushed to execute six men in a span of several days. For many years, the issue of state sanctioned killings has not received much attention. News of exonerations of innocent men and women are rare.
A new book, Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted, presents the true stories of 15 exonerees who were wrongfully convicted and thrown into the complex criminal justice system before being among the few to be exonerated.
Edited by Leslie Klinger and Laura Caldwell, the book is unusual in that each exoneree is paired with a high-profile mystery and thriller writer (including Lee Child, Sara Paretsky, Laurie King, Brad Parks and others) to present their narratives. Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project and author Scott Turow also provide commentary.
The book also includes a letter from playwright Arthur Miller, believed to be the first and only unpublished piece since his death. Kirkus Reviews called the compilation “a unique collection of 15 wrongful conviction sagas bound to shake faith in the American criminal justice system.”
Guest – Attorney and author Leslie Klinger, co-editor of Anatomy of Innocence and widely considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, H. P. Lovecraft, and 19th-century genre fiction.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Death Penalty Focus
The state of Arkansas had plans to execute 8 men in 11 days this April, rushing to do so before the expiration date of one of the drugs used for the lethal injections. The executions have been temporarily stayed by several court orders. Arkansas’s unseemly rush has raise anew questions about the efficacy, humanity, cost, and morality of the death penalty. Statistically, it has an discriminatory impact on non-white, intellectually deficient, and poor people. The United States along with Saudi Arabia and China is one of the few countries in the world still using the death penalty.
Guest – Mike Farrell, actor and activist and the president and founder in 1988 of the San Francisco based organization Death Penalty Focus. DPF views the death penalty as an ineffective, cruel, and inappropriate response to the serious problem of violent crime. The organization provides information to the public, conducts media campaigns and is a resource to lawyers and educators across the country.
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Republicans Propose Medical Malpractice House Bill Limiting Damages Award
The Republicans in the House of Representatives recently introduced a bill to limit medical malpractice lawsuits brought by low income people on Medicaid and elderly people on Medicare. It would do so by limiting the amount they could recover for their pain and suffering caused by, for example, getting infected bedsores in a nursing home, a medication mixup, malnutrition, dehydration, or being the victim of a egregious medical errors such as when a foreign body is left inside a patient. More examples include when a baby’s brain is damaged, or when surgery is performed on the wrong body part. The bill has the support of the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and the American Healthcare Association, a trade group for nursing homes.
The bill has several provisions that closely resemble legislation introduced by Tom Price, President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. When he was a House member from Georgia, Price, an orthopedic surgeon, championed legislation that would set limits on damages and make it easier for doctors to defend themselves and medical malpractice lawsuits. For decades, Republicans have charged that there is a medical malpractice lawsuit crisis brought about by frivolous lawsuits.
Guest – Attorney Steven Pegalis, a trial attorney who represents patients and medical malpractice claims. Attorney Pegalis is the author of the three volume textbook The American Law of Medical Malpractice. He teaches the subject at New York Law School and is codirector of the New York Law School Health Law and Patient Safety Project. Attorney Pegalis is the founding partner of Pegalis and Erickson and one of the nations foremost medical malpractice trial attorneys. He has practiced law for over 50 years.
Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power
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Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide
To commemorate this, the first genocide of the 20th century, Law and Disorder co-host Heidi Boghosian presents a 60-minute documentary special titled “Speaking In Turkish: Denying the Armenian Genocide.”
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Hosts Mourn The Passing Of Friend And Colleague Lynne Stewart
Attorneys Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith remember the courageous people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart.
We listen back to a past interview with Lynne Stewart February 4, 2008.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Hears Lynne Stewart’s Arguments
Law and Disorder hosts welcome back civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart. Lynne Stewart has been free on bail pending appeal since federal judge John Koeltl gave her a 28 month sentence in October 2006. As you may recall Lynne Stewart was initially facing up to 30 years after being found guilty of conspiring to aid terrorists. She was convicted of distributing press releases on behalf of her jailed client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman who is serving a life sentence on terror-related charges.
Here on Law and Disorder we’ve followed Lynne Stewart’s case as it contains key breaches of civil liberties such as government eavesdropping into attorney/ client conversations.
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Recognizing 50 Years of The Center For Constitutional Rights And Michael Ratner
Michael Ratner co-founded Law and Disorder Radio radio 13 years ago. He died last May in New York City of complications after cancer surgery at age 73. At the time, he was the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Some years ago he helped form it’s European counterpart, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The held a commemorative conference in Berlin last December on the 50th anniversary of the CCR and honored it’s president, Michael Ratner. Michael Smith, the co-host along with Heidi Boghosian of Law and Disorder Radiospoke at the conference about Michael Ratner and the four founders of the CCR. He was joined in his presentation by attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a key figure in the early days of the CCR. Today we bring you excerpts from this presentation.
CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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The Deep State: The Fall Of The Constitution And The Rise Of The Shadow Government
A century ago, Ferdinand Lundberg wrote the classic book “America’s 60 Families” describing them, their interconnections and the powerful role they played in American governance. This was in 1965 when the great sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote “The Power Elite” and then William Domhoff wrote “Who Rules America?” Now, Mike Lofgren has made a significant contribution in describing the workings of the American ruling elite with his book The Deep State: The Fall Of The Constitution And The Rise Of The Shadow Government.
Guest – Mike Lofgren worked in Congress for 28 years, 16 of them as a senior analyst at the House and Senate Budget Committees. He held a top security clearance. He now represents no political party, no business interest, and no ideology. His previous book The Party Is Over was a New York Times bestseller.
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The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
As director of the CIA, from 1952 until Kennedy fired him, Allen Dulles has been said to exemplify unbridled authority at the height of the Cold War. Under his leadership the CIA became a lawless force domestically and internationally that engaged, with impunity, in covert acts such as the assassination of foreign leaders including Patrice Lumubo in the Congo and overthrowing the government led by Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
As an attorney for the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell in the 1930s, Dulles protected and promoted Nazi-controlled cartels. He wielded his influence in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then in the CIA to shield former Nazis from prosecution for war crimes in the ’40s and ’50s. David Talbot writes in book The Devil’s Chessboard, ” over the final months of the JFK presidency, a clear consensus took shape within the American “deep state” Kennedy was a national security threat. For the good of the country he must be removed and Dulles was the only man with the stature, connections and decisive will to make something of this enormity happen. so he could enlist them to fight communists. In addition to assisting with the assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, he organized the Bay of Pigs invasion and tried repeatedly to murder Fidel Castro.
Guest – David Talbot, the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and the acclaimed national bestseller Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love. He is the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, and was a senior editor at Mother Jones and the features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, The Guardian, and other major publications. Talbot lives in San Francisco, California.
