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Law and Disorder December 4, 2023

Chris Hedges Returns From Gaza

Israel is a long time strategic ally of United States in the Middle East If you look at a map of the area Israel is shaped like an aircraft carrier: that’s its use to the USA.

Israel is given $3.8 billion a year of taxpayer dollars to use to purchase American military weapons. It has just been granted a multi billion dollar military aid package to facilitate its war efforts. The 2000 pound bombs being used to destroy the tiny Gaza Strip making it into a parking lot are made in the USA, so are Israel’s tanks, planes, armored personnel carriers, bullets, grenades and artillery shells.

On October 7, several hundred young Palestinians of the resistance movement Hamas broke through the fence of besieged Gaza killing Israelis and taking hostages. This was illegal and inhumane, but understandable given Israel’s historical blocking of a peaceful solution. The Netanyahu government used the attack and hostage taking as a pretext and an excuse to begin a genocidal war against the 2.3 million people in Gaza. Their slogan was “finish the Nakba,” the catastrophe Israel inflicted on Palestinians on 1948.

Through the use of murder and terror they then drove out 750,000 Palestinians and destroyed 531 of their villages. The Zionist took 78% of their land. Now they want the rest. They hope to level Gaza and drive the Palestinians across the border into Egypt. The USA is facilitating this process and is complicit in the genocidal war. There may be a paradigm shift in the 100 year war on the Palestinians.

We also hear a letter to the children of Gaza written by Chris Hedges, read by Eunice Wong, a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Association: www.eunicewong.actor

Guest – Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaking former middle east bureau chief at the New York Times. Chris Hedges has just returned from Doha broadcasting on the crisis in Gaza for Al Jazeera as well as being in Egypt where he covered the war. Hedges spent 20 years as a war correspondent and reported on the past two Palestinian “intifadas”, or uprisings. He is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity school and the author of 14 books. Many people consider him not only a journalist, but a moral philosopher. His work can be found on chrishedges.substack.com

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Attorney Bill Goodman –  In Remembrance

William (Bill) Goodman died in his home in Detroit on November 16, 2023. He was 83 years old. Bill was the son of Ernie Goodman, who was one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild and a partner in the first racially, integrated law firm in the United States

Bill was a past national president of the NLG, one of the founding officers of the NLG National Police Accountability Project, the former Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a founding board member of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice,

He worked until his death and was a partner in the Detroit civil rights firm, Goodman, Hurwitz and James where he fought for the rights of victims of government and corporate abuse. Bill was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Wayne State Law School, where he taught Constitutional litigation.

Bill has successfully litigated numerous police and government misconduct cases as well as other high-profile cases on behalf of prisoners, toxic tort victims, the wrongfully convicted and victims of racism, always in the pursuit of constitutional, social and economic justice.

Host Attorney Julie Hurwitz: Bill was my law partner in Goodman Hurwitz & James and a former long-term partner in life – we knew each other a long time! In this interview, which we did last year, we will discuss two cases that we brought to confront the unconstitutional and inhumane conduct of individual police officers, but more importantly, the historically unconstitutional and inhumane ways in which police departments institutionally tolerate, promote and reward such behavior by their officers.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz

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Law and Disorder November 27, 2023

CCR Files Suit: Palestine v Biden

Since the illegal October 7 attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 people in Israel, the Israeli occupying forces have mounted a massive military assault on the Palestinian people. As of November 21, more than 14,128 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 5,600 children and over 3,550 women; at least 30,000 have been injured; and about 1.7 million out of 2.2 million people in Gaza have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have mounted mass protests against Israel’s war on the Palestinians in Gaza.

On November 13, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed suit on behalf of Palestinians against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for failure to prevent genocide and complicity in genocide.

Guest – Maria LaHood is Deputy Legal Director at CCR, with expertise in constitutional rights and international human rights. Maria works closely with Palestine Legal to support students and others whose speech is being suppressed for their Palestine advocacy around the country. She graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and was named a 2010 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalist. Maria and other lawyers from CCR wrote the complaint filed in federal court.

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Remembering Professor Holly Maguigan

Holly Maguigan, noted professor and attorney who was a pioneer of the battered woman defense, has died. Holly was Professor of Clinical Law at the New York University School of Law, where she ran the Criminal Justice Clinic: Focus on Domestic Violence and Evidence. She practiced law in Philadelphia in the 1970s and ‘80s, both as a public defender and in private practice, specializing in the defense of victims of domestic violence who assaulted or killed their abusers and then faced criminal prosecution. Judges and juries were largely unsympathetic to women who stayed with their abusive partners even though many were emotionally and psychologically unable to leave those relationships. Traditional self-defense principles require that the abused person have a reasonable belief that she is about to suffer imminent death or great bodily injury. But some people kill their abusers preemptively, before the next attack can occur.

Sue Osthoff, a founder of the Philadelphia-based National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, who worked with Holly for decades, said, “I do believe many, many victims of battering would not have done as well as they did” without Holly’s work. Many defendants were acquitted, and several others were not charged at all.

Holly once wrote that criminal defense attorneys must “explain the impact of intimate violence without appearing to pathologize battered women and deny their reason and capacity.” Holly was a member of the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s National Advisory Committee on Cultural Considerations in Domestic Violence cases and she was a co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers.

Professor Holly Maguigan:

  • I was doing medieval history and I was at Berkeley. It was 1967 and Oakland stopped the draft.
  • I got very interested in the anti-war politics.
  • I hated lawyers. I really hated lawyers. They were boring. They talked about themselves all the time. They only had stories about their cases and how great they were and they would never post bail when people got arrested.
  • The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia is where I stayed for 17 years.
  • First I started out as a public defender. I loved being a public defender, it was the beginning and end of everything I hoped it would be.
  • That’s where I met David Rudovsky and David Kairys. They were then defenders while I was a student.
  • After they went out on their own, they kept inviting me to join them. I kept putting it off because I loved being a defender so much.
  • In Philadelphia there was much more actual litigation, not just motion litigation there’s a lot of that here in New York City but actual trials.
  • You had a sense, there was an analysis that people were doing life on the installment plan and you needed to do what you could to kick them loose any particular time.
  • It was a community in its own odd way and I found it difficult to leave it.
  • I was doing major felonies within a couple of years.
  • David Kairys was very focused on constitutional litigation and government misconduct. He did the Camden 28 which was a big draft resistance case.
  • My interest was more into criminal defense.
  • Grand juries (all over the country) convened to investigate the alleged transportation of Patty Hearst by the SLA from California where she had been captured.
  • He was a killer. (Frank Rizzo) There was no question. More people died in police actions before or since.
  • I don’t mean to suggest that all the police started out as homocidal. This was a situation which from the top down came the message if you’re a good cop then you’re going to take people out however you think you need to.
  • I knew about race and class bias in the court room as much as a white woman who was middle class could know.
  • I was just blown away by what happens when you add hatred of women to hatred of black people and hatred of poor people.
  • Judges would go by me in the hall and say Maguigan, ahem, you didn’t give me anything this Christmas, not even one lousy bottle, you’re not getting any assignments.
  • Judges would do things, like open the drawer in their chambers, and there would be wads of bills, and they’d let you know.
  • I developed a specialty on women who kill men.
  • In the early eighties a group in Philadelphia called Women Against Abuse began working and they did advocacy for battered women accused of crime and meant a huge difference.
  • The battered women cases I was working on were quite consuming because people then didn’t know very much in how to try these cases.
  • The judges expected you to plead insanity or guilty. Reasonable doubt was a consideration at sentencing not at trial.
  • There were cases that did require teams. There was no question.
  • I wanted to be in court. I wanted to be in the presence of that conflict between the authorities and regular people.
  • I went to NYU where I taught in the criminal defense clinic for many years.
  • To see students react to the great stories their clients have is just amazing.
  • SALT (Society of American Law Teachers) is about who gets into law school, what they learn and who teaches them. It’s about access to justice. It’s about relating to law school as a place where you train people to do social justice.  SALT’s focus is on students and teaching.
  • Holly Maguigan to be honored by Society of American Law Teachers.

Guest – Professor Holly Maguigan teaches a criminal defense clinic and one in comparative criminal justice as well as a seminar in global public service lawyering and a course in evidence. She is an expert on the criminal trials of battered women. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary. Of particular importance in her litigation and scholarship are the obstacles to fair trials experienced by people accused of crimes who are not part of the dominant culture. Professor Maguigan is a member of the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s National Advisory Committee on Cultural Considerations in Domestic Violence cases. She serves on the boards of directors of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women and the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. She is a past co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest membership organization of law professors in the U.S.

Hosted by attorneys Michael Ratner, Michael Smith, Heidi Boghosian and Marjorie Cohn

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Law and Disorder November 20, 2023

Jewish Voice For Peace Leads US Ceasefire Protests

In 1948, 750 thousand Palestinians were terrorized, murdered and driven out of their homeland in Palestine where they had lived for thousands of years. Many fled to Gaza at the southern end of what is now Israel.

Gaza is tiny strip of land along the Mediterranean and is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. More than 500 of their villages were destroyed and the remaining Palestinians were left to live in 22% of historic Palestine. The process of murder, terror, and displacement is going on again. 1.5 million Palestinians, many of them descendants of the refugees from 1948, have been driven out of northern Gaza. Their homes have been bombed and destroyed, their hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches have been bombed. To date, 11 thousand have been killed, almost half are children.

Israel has cut off clean water, medicine, electricity, fuel and food and ordered Palestinians to get out or be killed. Israeli ground troops are going door to door mopping up those who have not fled.

This genocidal operation has the full support of the American establishment and the corporate media. Israel is a strategic military ally of the United States and gets support from the military industrial complex and right wing Republican oriented American Jews.

But this time there is a push back. Thousands of young American Jews have not been taken in by the propaganda and identify with the new organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)

JVP has organized thousands of people in spectacular demonstrations that have shut down Grand Central Station in New York, blocked entrances to Congress, sat in on the Capital rotunda, and amassed at the Statue of Liberty. These have been some of the largest acts of civil disobedience since the Iraq war, and the largest demonstrations of Jewish people in solidarity with the struggle for Palestine freedom ever.

Guest – Elena Stein, Director of Strategy for Jewish Voice For Peace. She lives in New York.

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What Will It Take To End The War In Gaza?

Israel’s war in Gaza, which has already created a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, now threatens to spread even more death and destruction as Israel’s military force, the IDF, has now occupied the last hospital in Gaza still barely functioning, as it attempts to operate without electricity or medical supplies. And this at a time when Israel’s IDF forces claim to control all of northern Gaza and Gaza City. Notably, the Israel forces occupying the hospital, despite its earlier claims to the contrary, has failed to produce any proof that the hospital was being used by the forces of Hamas for military purposes.

Of course, for some weeks now, many world leaders and United Nations officials have declared that what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to genocide. And so far, even efforts at achieving any meaningful pause in the fighting, let alone a real ceasefire, remains beyond reach, still being opposed by Israel and the Biden Administration.

Meanwhile, no one is prepared to predict an end to the slaughter in Gaza, as the civilian death toll continues to grow, and as Gaza’s infrastructure continues to disappear. And so, the protests over the war, the accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity on the part of Israel continue to grow, as well. Indeed, in the last week there have been huge anti-Israel protests, including a massive one organized by the orthodox Jewish community in the United States. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is coming under more and more attacks from members of its own Administration. Already more than 400 high level and mid-level government officials in the Biden Administration have sent Biden letters protesting his refusal to ask Israel to declare a ceasefire, and many of them have resigned in protest.

Guest – Attorney Ameena Qazi the Co-Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Law Center in Los Angeles. She formerly served as the Deputy Executive Director and Staff Attorney for the Greater Los Angeles Area Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (or “C.A.I.R.”), the largest American Muslim civil rights and advocacy group; and Ms. Qazi is also a former Executive Director of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. US Campaign For Palestinian Rights

Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty

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