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 May 10, 2021
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- Attorney Jim Lafferty Commentary on Solitary Confinement
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Steven Donziger Trial Set To Begin This Week
Sixty-year-old environmental lawyer Steven Donziger has been under house arrest without trial for the last 25 months on charges that normally have a max sentence of six months. To date this is the longest sentence imposed in New York on an attorney convicted of contempt. The contempt charges are from Donziger’s refusal to give his cellphone and computer to the court. We’ve been covering Chevron’s retaliation campaign against Donziger after he helped communities in Ecuador’s Amazon win a historic $9.5 billion judgment against the oil giant. His case showed how Chevron for deliberately dumped billions of gallons of carcinogenic oil water onto Indigenous ancestral lands. The multinational corporation enlisted 60 law firms and 2,000 attorneys to block Donziger’s advocacy. In the process they bankrupted his family, and intimidated environmental activists and allies internationally.
At last, Donziger’s trial is set to begin Monday, May 10. This case offers a play-by-play account of a private oil company set out to destroy an altruistic lawyer, environmental justice, corporate accountability, Indigenous rights, and free speech.
Guest – Attorney Martin Garbus, one of three pro bono lawyers representing Donziger in an attempt to get his law license restored. Garbus has a long and distinguished career as a civil rights and first amendment litigator.
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International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence in the US
As issues of violent policing nag at the American public’s consciousness, a new report finds the US guilty of crimes against humanity and other violations of international law. On April 27, the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence in the US Released its final Report on Racist Police Violence in the US. The report pulls together weeks of live hearings chronicling cases of people killed by police with African descent. The report also contains recommendations addressed to national and international policy makers.
The International Commission of Inquiry was organized by the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and the National Lawyers Guild. A distinguished panel of international legal experts from eleven countries served as Commissioners. The full 188-page document is available at the Commission’s website as are videos and transcripts from the live hearings in 44 cases.
Guest – Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught from 1991-2016, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She lectures, writes, and provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media outlets. Professor Cohn has served as a news consultant for CBS News and a legal analyst for Court TV, and a legal and political commentator on the BBC, CNN, NPR, and other major stations.
Law and Disorder May 3, 2021
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- Attorney Jim Lafferty Commentary: 2021 Cold War
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Journalist Put On FBI Terrorist Watch List Starts Class Action Case
Philadelphia-based journalist Dave Lindorff learned in spring 2019 that he was on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List, used to require special searches of international fliers from and to the US. The list is readily accessible on computer to all domestic law enforcement agencies and most corporate security departments. Lindorff is about to bring a case against the US government over the list on First Amendment grounds.
Attorney Baruch Weiss, a partner at the major DC law firm, Arnold & Porter, is handling the case on a pro bono basis. Weiss was previously a deputy lead counsel to the Homeland Security Department shortly after it was created in the Bush/Cheney administration. He wants to add to the case any other plaintiffs who have First Amendment grounds for challenging their suspected inclusion on the list before filing the case in federal district court in Philadelphia later this spring, so that it will more likely have an impactful decision if the court finds the list to be unconstitutional.
Examples of First Amendment issues would be a journalist who has written stories that challenge one or another US government agency. If that was followed by a sudden inability to obtain a boarding pass online the day before the flight or being called to the gate on a return flight to the US undergoing a special inspection of person, carry-on luggage and electronics by special security personnel as happened twice to Lindorff. A First Amendment issue might involve being active in a human-rights or antiwar or other anti-establishment protest or advocacy organization and finding it suddenly difficult to obtain early boarding passes or being subjected to lengthy special inspections before being allowed to board a plane.
Guest – Dave Lindorff, contributor to The Nation, and writes for Salon, London Review of Books, and Counterpunch. He is founder of ThisCantBeHappening.net. Author of four books, Dave was a 1990s Hong Kong/China correspondent for Business Week.
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Stevens Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine
The 1861 to 1865 Civil War and the reconstruction period which followed it is widely considered to be the second American revolution. The slave-owning planter class in the south was defeated, at least for a while. Slave labor was abolished, but came back in other forms after reconstruction was crushed by 1877.
The promise of the declaration of independence that all men are equal before the law was fulfilled, at least for a while. Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens was the foremost political leader in the struggle, even more than Abraham Lincoln. Stevens helped to bring about the abolition of slavery and was a leader in the effort during Reconstruct to make the United States a biracial democracy This wise and eloquent revolutionary has been vilified and rendered rendered obscure during most of the years since he died 153 years ago.
The distinguished historian Bruce Levine in his just published biography of Stevens “Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice” has secured a place for him alongside his contemporary John Brown in the pantheon of American revolutionary figures.
Guest – Bruce Levine, emeritus professor of history at the University Illinois and the author of four previous books on the Civil War era.
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Law and Disorder April 26, 2021
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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
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.