Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder July 27, 2020
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Democracy, If We Can Keep Keep It: The ACLU’s 100 Year Fight For Rights In America
The American Civil Liberties Union was formed 100 years ago in 1920 in a climate of fear in our country not unlike what exists today. Anarchists and socialists were scapegoated. They were rounded up, tried under the newly passed espionage act, and hundreds were deported or imprisoned, Eugene V Debs being the most prominent.
To mark a century of defense of the first amendment and the Bill of Rights, Ellis Close has written an important history of the ACLU titled Democracy, If We Can Keep Keep It: The ACLU’s 100 year fight for rights in America. The Los Angeles review of books recently featured an extensive appreciation of Closs’ book written by constitutional lawyer Stephen Rhode.
Guest – Attorney Stephen Rohde has been on the board of the southern California ACLU over 25 years. He has taught constitutional law and has written a number of books on civil liberties.
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Dakota Access Pipeline: Update
July has been a legal roller coaster ride with respect to efforts to shut down the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines. First, a judge invalidated federal permits saying that the Army Corps of Engineers failed to address the potential damage from oil spills in the Dakota pipeline. He ordered the company Energy Transfer to stop pumping crude oil through South Dakota. On the heels of that order, a federal appellate court temporarily blocked that shutdown.
As for KXL, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta Canada through Montana and South Dakota before reaching Nebraska, the Supreme Court in early July rejected the Trump administration’s request to allow construction of the KXL Pipeline by TC Energy. A Montana court ruling halting construction therefore still stands.
As listeners will recall, protesters and lawsuits against both pipelines cite the devastation that pipeline leaks would cause to the environment. In the case of tar sands oil, it is thicker, highly volatile, and more corrosive than conventional crude oil. This increases the likelihood of a leak. That renders it far more difficult, if not impossible, to clean up such a spill.
https://www.wecaninternational.org/divest-invest-protect
Guest – Attorney Natali Segovia is the Staff Attorney for the Water Protector Legal Collective – the organization that grew out of the legal tent at Oceti Sakowin camp in the Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. She chairs the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Committee of the National Lawyers Guild and serves on the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Global Justice. She also serves on the Indian Law Section Executive Council of the Arizona State Bar.
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Law and Disorder July 20, 2020
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Attorney Marjorie Cohn: Trump, Assange, Democracy And Rule of Law
Without democracy and the rule of law there can be no significant social change. However, much democracy was constricted by race and class before the attacks on September 11, 2001 and before Trump, democracy and the rule of law are now facing lethal attacks on many fronts.
Trump has successfully put 198 young, reactionary, and some ignorant judges on the federal bench. He has illegally called out troops to violently disperse peaceful protesters in the park in front of the White House. Trump has threatened the personnel of the International Criminal Court who are attempting to investigate US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. These include the crime of torture. These crimes, perpetrated under the Bush administration, went unprosecuted by President Obama who infamously said “we must look forward not backward.”
Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing and attempting to extradite truth telling whistle blowing journalist Julian Assange who 10 years ago released the “collateral murder” video showing the commission of American war crimes in Iraq, among other embarrassing information. Assange is confined in London’s Belmarsh prison. He is sick, in solitary, and has been psychologically tortured. He faces 175 years in prison in the United States if convicted under the old Espionage Act for activities protected by the first amendment.
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught for 25 years. She is a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, a criminal defense attorney, a legal scholar, and a political analyst. She writes books and articles and lectures throughout the world about human rights, US foreign policy, and the contradiction between the two. She has testified before Congress and debated at the prestigious Oxford Union.
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Law and Disorder July 13, 2020
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Police Unions Are Racist Power Brokers in Opposition to Movement for Black Lives
When they commit violence against civilians, abusive police in the United States are protected in various ways. The power elite, whose property police protect, have given them almost complete legal immunity from successful lawsuits for damages under the doctrine of qualified immunity. When a cop has illegally hurt someone he or she can count on what’s known as – the blue wall of silence – knowing that a fellow officer will not contradict their defense.
What is the role of police unions regarding the protection of police who have abused and even murdered citizens? Police unions act as power brokers in opposition to the rights of victimized citizens. They provide legal defense funds, public relations, and political pressure in defense of abusive cops. And they are a very powerful force in these respects.
The US Congressman from Chicago Bobby Rush has recently said that the Chicago police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, is “the number one cause that prevents police accountability, that protects police corruption, that protects police lawlessness. They are the organized guardians of continuous police lawlessness, police murder, and police brutality. They are the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness in the land and stand shoulder to shoulder with the KKK then and the KKK now.”
Guest – Attorney G. Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People Law Office in Chicago starting out over 50 years ago representing the family of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Who was assassinated by the Chicago Police Department with the help of the FBI. He has represented numerous police torture survivors during the past 33 years. Taylor was one of the lawyers involved in the struggle for reparations and has chronicled the decade long fight against Chicago police torture in his award-winning book “The Torture Machine : Racism and Violence in Chicago.
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First Amendment Auditor: Big Nick South Florida Accountability
Most of the populace, some police officers and federal employees may not realize that its every photographers right to take photos and video of federal buildings on public property. The easing of restrictions began when the New York Civil Liberties Union had looked into several cases of people who were wrongly harassed, detained and arrested by federal agents while photographing or shooting video of federal buildings from public plazas and sidewalks.
In 2010, the NYCLU brought a suit against the US Department of Homeland Security in federal court to end this practice. In October of 2010, a judge actually signed a settlement where the US government agreed that no federal statures or regulations bar people from photographing the exterior of federal buildings.
The US government agreed to issue a directive to members of the Federal Protective Service on photographer’s rights. A decade later, the rights attained in this decision are recently being put to the test in what’s known as First Amendment audits.
Guest – Nick Freeman – First Amendment Auditor with millions in view counts joins us to talk about his work in Fort Lauderdale being part of a long emerging trend to educate local law enforcement about the right to photography and subsequent issues such as police accountability.
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