Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Death Penalty, Human Rights, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
- Chris Hedges – NDAA
- Grant Of Review In The Supreme Court On Warrantless Wiretapping ACLU Case
- CCR Bradley Manning Case Update
- Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike Update
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Police Entrapment of the NATO 3
Last week, as many listeners may know, more than 100 protesters were arrested at the NATO summit in Chicago. Five activists were charged with terror related crimes, two were accused of attempted possession of explosives, 3 were accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives. Sarah Gelsomino, with the People’s Law Office says three of these activists were set up by government informants who had planted the explosives.
Attorney Sarah Gelsomino:
- The National Lawyers Guild of Chicago learned that at 11:30 at night, a home in the Bridgeport area of Chicago had been raided by the Chicago Police Department.
- People were concerned because several people had gone missing, and we couldn’t find them.
- This raid was completely unprofessional from the beginning.
- Three other apartment units were just neighbors. Police removed them from their apartment, detained them, interrogated them, and then without consent or a warrant, went in and searched their home.
- The city refused to acknowledge that they had them in custody (their clients) that they had any arrests and also refused to acknowledge that that had a raid in that neighborhood.
- Over the next day or so, 6 of the 9 were released without any charges, after being held for over 30 hours. A good part of that time shackled at their feet and hand cuffed to a wall.
- There 2 additional people that were also arrested, and those are the 2 people that haven’t been seen since they were arrested in the raid and who we now believe were working for the police department as a part of this investigation.
- We believe they infiltrated Occupy Chicago a month ago.
- As a criminal defense attorney, we have a duty to vigorously defend our client.
- Members of Occupy Chicago have been coming forward very concerned about the 2 people who had been working for the police department – passing information to the police department.
- The state’s case will never be as strong as it is right now, when they have not yet come forward with any evidence whatsoever, all they’ve made is allegations that have yet to be substantiated.
- People are very afraid, particularly people in the occupy movement because they now feel so violated.
- It is an alarming pattern that states are turning to terrorism charges in these types of cases.
Guest – Sarah Gelsomino joined People’s Law Office in the Fall of 2008. She concentrates her practice on police misconduct, wrongful conviction, representation of political activists and criminal defense cases. During law school, Sarah clerked with the Cook County Public Defenders’ Office and was the recipient of various awards, including the Sonnenschein Scholar Award which funded Sarah’s pro-bono public interest work. She is a current board member of the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and is the co-founder of the NLG Chicago Next Gen Committee. Sarah also sits on the Advisory Board of the Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning at DePaul University.
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Lawyers You’ll Like: Anne O’Berry
As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series we’re joined by attorney Anne O’Berry, she’s the Vice President of the Southern Region of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of The Law Only As An Enemy: The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia. While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights.
Anne clerked for federal judges in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, with whom she co-authored an article on the law as a tool of oppression against slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War Virginia and taught civil rights and South African apartheid law at the University of Pennsylvania. She later taught Race and the Law at St. Thomas University Law School in Miami, Florida.
In the last 12 years, Anne has served as counsel at a Florida law firm that specializes in class action litigation, particularly in the areas of securities, consumer and economic fraud, as well as some environmental and privacy rights litigation.
Attorney Anne O’Berry:
- We did a lot of historical research in terms of racism and the law back in pre-civil war Virginia.
- We focused on Virginia because it was a paradigm for slavery basically in the slave laws that were in place.
- We wrote an article for publication, it was published in the University of North Carolina law review. The Law Only As An Enemy:’ The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia.
- Depending on your status, if you were a free white person or a slave, you were treated differently by the law.
- As an overall theme, depending on the race of the victim was that would effect what your sentence would be.
- For example, if a black woman was raped, that was not considered a crime. If you were a black person and you stole something, you would be put to death.
- It was ironic for the slave owner because if their slave was put to death, they would have to be compensated by the state.
- If the victim was black, the crime was treated less seriously than if the victim was white.
- I started out working at a firm in New York, a large prominent, Wall Street type.
- Among some people I was known as the pro-bono queen.
- I was there for 2 and a half years and the first pro-bono case was a death penalty case.
- The court ruled back then (1990s) that it was ok to execute the mentally retarded.
- I was so moved by that experience that I gave up my cushy job in New York and go do death penalty work full time.
- I ended up at the Federal Resource Center doing death penalty work in Tallahassee Florida.
- I worked for the Battered Women’s Clemency Project in Florida.
- More recently the Supreme Court did rule that it is unconstitutional to execute people who were juveniles at the time of the offense and unconstitutional to execute people who are mentally retarded.
- I believe in my lifetime we will see the end of the death penalty in this country.
- It’s just an amazing system that we have where the courts will say – yes you’ve got compelling evidence of innocence but we’re not going to hear your case.
- I would say what got me through was the victories.
- Presently, I’m working with an attorney Jim Green, who’s a prominent civil rights attorney in West Palm Beach, kind of a legend down here.
- I also some volunteer work with El Sol. It’s a day laborer center in Jupiter, Florida.
Guest – Anne O’Berry, National Lawyers Guild’s Regional Vice President for the Southern Region and a member of the Guild’s South Florida chapter. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and her law degree from New York University Law School in 1986. While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights. She was a member of the law school’s civil rights clinic and an editor on one of the law school’s journals, and authored a law review article on prisoners’ rights. During and after law school, she clerked for federal judges in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, with whom she co-authored an article on the law as a tool of oppression against slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War Virginia and taught civil rights and South African apartheid law at the University of Pennsylvania. She later taught Race and the Law at St. Thomas University Law School in Miami, Florida.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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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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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Iraq War, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Updates:
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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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Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister
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Updates:
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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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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Truth to Power, War Resister
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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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Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Military Tribunal, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Torture, War Resister
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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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