One injustice follows another

Marlene Martin tells the story of Santos Reyes, who was a victim of California’s unjust three strikes law. When he was finally released from prison, ICE agents were waiting to deport him. His story shows the relentless brutality of the criminal INjustice system.

Protesters in Boston oppose the new three strikes law

THE STATISTICS don’t lie: Barack Obama has become the deportation president.

The number of people thrown out of the U.S. for lacking proper immigration documentation started growing from the late 1990s through the 2000s, but it hit a peak during the Obama years. As the New York Times reported:

In four years, Mr. Obama’s administration has deported as many illegal immigrants as the administration of George W. Bush did in his two terms, largely by embracing, expanding and refining Bush-era programs to find people and send them home. By the end of this year, deportations under Mr. Obama are on track to reach two million, or nearly the same number of deportations in the United States from 1892 to 1997.

The Obama White House defends its record, claiming that rather than a general crackdown, the Department of Homeland Security under Obama has just been highly successful in making “[deportation] of criminal aliens the top priority,” according to the Times. The message is that the federal government is focused on getting rid of the “bad guys.”

In fact, immigrant rights activists point to studies showing that the government is still deporting huge numbers of people whose only “crime” was to enter the country without documentation. Even among deportees with a criminal record, the offense was minor in many cases. In a report last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency admitted that over one-quarter of “criminal immigrants” deported from the U.S. in fiscal year 2011 had been convicted of traffic violations.

But the case of Santos Reyes shows why the Obama’s administration deportation injustices extend even to immigrants with felony convictions.

Santos was finally freed from prison this year after spending 15 years behind bars as a victim of California’s draconian “three strikes and you’re out” law. He was convicted of a minor and completely nonviolent offense–taking a California drivers’ license test in the name of his cousin to help him get a license–but because he already had two felony convictions, he got a 26-years-to-life sentence.

This year, Santos finally won his long struggle against the cruel three-strikes sentencing law and was ordered released. But he then suffered another injustice–on March 28, ICE agents were waiting for him at the prison when he was released, to deport him to Mexico immediately because he was undocumented.

This society owes Santos the many years he spent unjustly imprisoned. Instead, the federal government is kicking him out of the country.

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SANTOS WAS sent to prison in 1998 after being convicted and sentenced under California’s three-strikes law, passed by voter referendum in 1994, which requires that anyone convicted of a third felony to be given a 25-year-to-life term, even if the third felony was nonviolent in nature. No plea bargains are allowed under the law, and the first chance at a parole is after 25 years are served. Even after that long, 80 percent of all parole requests are denied.

Santos had been working as a roofer steadily for the previous decade. He was married with two children, aged one and three. Little did he know his life was about to be turned upside down when he offered to help out a cousin who had failed the written part of a state drivers’ license test because he couldn’t read English well. When Santos sat in for his cousin and took the test, he got caught.

This “crime” should have been classified as a misdemeanor under California law. But the prosecutor decided to charge Santos with perjury, which is a felony. He had two prior felony convictions. In 1981, as a juvenile, he was found guilty of stealing a radio from the home of someone he knew, and in 1987, when he was 22, he was convicted of armed robbery. In neither case was anyone harmed.

So in 1998, Santos went to prison for what could have been the rest of his life–for nothing more than helping out his cousin.

The sentencing had a devastating effect on Santos’ family. He lost touch with his wife and never saw his children–he only recently started to correspond with them by letters. As he said in an interview with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty’s New Abolitionist in 2010:

At this time, I’ve been literally left behind, and my wife and children have moved on with their lives. It breaks my heart, but I also know that this is my experience, and to some degree, it is best that they don’t suffer with me. I yearn to someday some how see my children and, like any father, know how they are doing in school, give them sound advice, and ultimately love and encourage them.

I have not seen my children for over 13 years–the length of my incarceration. All I’m left with are the memories of them as little boys. I know that I’ve made mistakes in the past, and those growing pains/errors were used to bury me, but this injustice has affected every person in my family.

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CALIFORNIA STARTED a three-strikes avalanche in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, 24 states and the federal government had some form of the mandatory sentencing law–though California’s was considered the harshest because it didn’t matter if the third offense was nonviolent and minor, as long as it was classified as a felony.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone chronicled some of the “crimes” that have landed people in jail for at least 25 years under “three strikes”: stealing a slice of pizza, three golf clubs baby shoes or five children’s videos, not to mention possession of small quantities of drugs.

Curtis Wilkerson has already done 18 years at California’s Soledad prison for the crime of stealing a pair of tube socks worth $2.50. On top of that, the judge imposed a $2,500 fine, which he is still working to pay off at his prison job, in the cafeteria. Wilkerson is paid $20 a day–and the state takes $11 of it. According to Taibbi, “Curtis will be in his 90s before he’s paid the state off for that one pair of socks.”

Wilkerson is Black, which is no surprise, since racism pervades every aspect of three strikes. A disproportionate number of African Americans are sentenced under the law. Why? Because district attorneys typically get to make a choice on how to prosecute each case, which determines whether three-strikes laws apply.

“After the police arrest someone, the prosecutor is in charge,” wrote Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. “Few rules constrain the exercise of his or her discretion. The prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all. The prosecutor is also free to file more charges against a defendant that can realistically be proven in court, so long as probable cause arguably exists–a practice known as overcharging.”

Alexander writes that prosecutors are well aware that racial bias, as long as it is not overt, will be tolerated–so they have free reign.

So is it any wonder, under a system where the vast majority of prosecutors are white, that Blacks, who make up only 7 of the California population, are 28 percent of the prison population and 45 percent of those subject to the three-strikes sentencing laws?

After a long battle, the three-strikes law in California was finally amended in November 2012 with passage of Proposition 36, which requires that a defendant’s offense be serious or violent enough to justify a 25-years-to-life sentence.

This gave prisoners like Santos a chance to be free.

The change in California’s three-strikes law was years in the making. Groups like Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes held protests and press conferences to push for the change. A previous ballot measure challenging three-strikes was narrowly defeated in 2004 after a last-minute influx of big money to pay for ads to scare people into voting against it.

Thus, Santos Reyes remained behind bars, despite the efforts of his energetic defense committee that worked to bring his case into the public light. The late socialist activist Peter Camejo, the 2004 vice presidential candidate on Ralph Nader’s independent ticket and three-time Green Party candidate for California governor, took up Reyes case during his statewide campaigns. He spoke from the podium often about the injustice Santos was enduring.

Now, after the passage of Prop 36, more than 150 people have already been freed, and many more will likely follow. But there is still work to be done–to get rid of the punitive three-strikes law altogether.

For Santos, he won his freedom, but at a cost. Because he was an undocumented, he could no longer live in the U.S. after his release. So on March 28, when Santos was finally released from prison, ICE agents were there to transport him to Mexico. There, Santos reunited with his elderly mother. Fortunately, reports David Warren of the Sntos Reyes Defense Committee, “we were able to raise around $4,000 to help him restart his life.”

Despite the injustices he has faced, a letter from Santos on April 12 strikes a note of optimism: “I am so happy. I am at my mother’s house now. I made it at the border without an ID, and I crossed about five checkpoints. So pretty much I did it. Now I’m going to my birthplace to get my birth certificate so I can start my new life here at Guadalajara.”

Via The Socialist Worker

Related articles

• A Mother’s Fight Against 3 Strikes Law ‘A Way of Life’ (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses – We Have Private Prisons to Fill (texasobserver.org)
• FOCUS | Cruel and Unusual Punishment (readersupportednews.org)

California objects to moving 3,000-plus inmates due to valley fever, says more study needed

It is premature to move more than 3,000 inmates out of two state prisons until more is known about an airborne fungus that is being blamed for nearly three-dozen inmate deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations, Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration said in a court filing Monday night.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the affiliated National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health agreed last week to study problems with valley fever at Avenal and Pleasant Valley state prisons.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco should wait for the centers’ recommendations before enforcing an order last week by the federal official who controls prison medical care, the administration said.

J. Clark Kelso, the federal receiver, says more black, Filipino and medically risky inmates have contracted the illness, leading to his order that the state exclude them from the prisons.

That would mean moving about 40 percent of the 8,200 inmates at the two prisons just as the state faces a federal court order to reduce prison crowding statewide to improve conditions for sick and mentally ill inmates.

The state is preparing to move about 600 medically high risk inmates out of the two prisons by August, but the complexity of swapping thousands of vulnerable inmates with other inmates who are less susceptible to valley fever makes it difficult to comply with Kelso’s larger order, the state argued. It also says Kelso’s order is confusing about which inmates could stay and which would have to go.

Via The Republic

 

Related articles

• Calif. objects to moving inmates because of fungus (sfgate.com)
• Calif. Objects to Moving Inmates Because of Fungus (abcnews.go.com)

From Oct22 Bay Area….Join us!

Tens of thousands of people imprisoned in the US are being subjected to torturous, inhumane conditions. 

 Many are:

 ·       Held in long term solitary confinement; locked in tiny, windowless, sometimes sound proof, cells; cut off from fresh air and sunlight for 22-24 hours every day and given small portions of food that lacks basic nutritional requirements. 

·       Denied human contact and violently taken from their cells for petty violations.

·       Put in solitary arbitrarily, often because of accusations of being members of prison gangs based on dubious evidence, and have no way to challenge the decisions of prison authorities to place them in solitary.

 

Many are forced to endure these conditions for months, years and even decades!  Mental anguish and trauma often results from being confined under these conditions.  Locking people down like this amounts to trying to strip them of their humanity.

 

These conditions fit the international definition of torture!  This is unjust, illegitimate and profoundly immoral.  WE MUST JOIN IN AN EFFORT TO STOP IT, NOW!

 

People imprisoned at Pelican Bay State Prison in California have called For a Nation-wide Hunger Strike to begin on July 8, 2013. They have also issued a call for unity among people from different racial groups, inside and outside the prisons.  People who are locked down in segregation units of this society’s prisons, condemned as the “worst of the worst,” are standing up against injustice, asserting their humanity in the process.  We must have the humanity to hear their call, and answer it with powerful support!

 

A Nation-wide and World-wide Struggle Needs to Be launched NOW to bring an End to this widespread Torture Before those in the Prisons Are Forced to Take the Desperate step of going on hunger strikes and putting their lives on the line!

                                                                                               

To the Government: We Demand an Immediate End to the Torture and Inhumanity of Prison House America – Immediately Disband All Torture Chambers.  Meet the demands of those you have locked down in your prisons!

 

To People in this Country and Around the World: We Cannot Accept, and We Should Not Tolerate This Torture.  Join The Struggle to End Torture in Prisons Now!

 

To Those Standing Up in Resistance Inside The Prisons: WE SUPPORT YOUR CALL FOR UNITY IN THIS FIGHT, AND WE WILL HAVE YOUR BACKS!

 

June 21, 22 and 23 Will Be Days of Solidarity With the Struggle to End Prison Torture!  There will be protests, cultural events, Evenings of Conscience, sermons in religious services, saturation of social media – all aimed at laying bare the ugly reality of wide spread torture in US prisons and challenging everyone to join in fighting to STOP it.

 

Send Your endorsements (name . and if you wish, organization and/or title,  to:

StopMassIncarcerationBayArea@gmail.com

 

 

For more information and to join in this struggle contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network at:

http://www.stopmassincarceration.org/support-california-prison-hunger-strikers.html

 

Related articles

• The Horrifying Existence Of Solitary Confinement (asolitarytorture.wordpress.com)
• 9 Petitions Fighting Solitary Confinement (lockupreform.com)
• Support Pelican Bay SHU Prisoners’ Five Core Demands (hunger strike) (stopsolitary.wordpress.com)

California Prisons in the News

While Governor Brown protests ( read…cries) over the mandate handed down by the three Judge panel, one thing is certain- all 33 prisons in California remain critically over crowded. Brown and CDCr will make the best choice for public safety in releasing prisoners, which should be- releasing the lifer prisoners who sentenced indeterminate sentences. Meaning those that have done their time, plus many, many more YEARS, non violent drug offenders ( who should never have been sent to prison in the first place) and those who pose no danger to the public -the medically incapacitated.

FILE — In this Aug. 3, 2006 file photo, inmates are housed in three-tier bunks, in what was once a multi-purpose recreation room, at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Calif. Crowding in state prisons has been reduced under a two-year-old state law that is sending less serious offenders to county jails instead of state prisons. Gov. Jerry Brown faces a midnight deadline of May 2, to say how the state will further reduce its inmate population. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli

Brown and CDCr together will releases prisoners who will go on to re-offend, then scream “you see! this is what happens when you release prisoners early!!” The bottom line here is they want prisoner release to fail. It all comes down to the money… do not be fooled into thinking its about safety. They have viable choices and clearly it is not about public safety.  62 prisoners have died needless and preventable deaths from Valley Fever since 2005. Those are the ones we KNOW about. Suddenly its a public emergency and isbeing addressed. When Prison Reform Movement wrote to then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Human Rights Watch ( back in 05) it was a public health emergency then too. And NOW they want to take some action? How ridiculous is this? How do we explain to the families who have lost their loved ones? Inadequate medical care is no excuse.

Pleasant Valley Prison in Coalinga was built on a former dump site. The hospital directly behind that prison is also built on that same contaminated soil. The state has known about this for years…and done nothing. Not only are prisoners at risk, the staff at both facilities, as well as visitors.  On a positive note, the prisoners being kept in Solitary at Pelican Bay filing a class action law suit. IMO, all prisoners locked up in California should take part in a HUGE class action lawsuit against CDCr, the state and the receiver. Sue them all, force them to finally clean things up, once and for all.

California corrections officials say they are still trying to develop a plan to cope with outbreaks of soil-borne valley fever at two prisons, including Avenal. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation / April 29, 2013) Via LA TIMES

 

 

Here is a round up of articles detailing the incidents of this past week. I ask you all, where is the outrage?

Solitary confinement inmates seek class-action status

 

California details plans to reduce prison crowding

 

California ordered to move prisoners at risk of valley fever

 

Advocates for CA inmate rights blast Jerry Brown’s prison plan

Related articles

• Valley fever cases spur call to close Avenal prison (fresnobee.com)
• California details plans to reduce prison crowding (sfgate.com)
• Valley Fever Threatens Thousands of California Inmates (medicaldaily.com)
• Are California Prisons Punishing Inmates Based On Race? (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)
• California Prison Conditions Driving Prisoners to Suicide (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• CDC probing valley fever outbreaks in two California prisons (latimes.com)
• Motion denied, Governor: Medical neglect is still killing prisoners (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)

The Ten Worst Prisons in America

Via Solitary Watch -also published in Mother Jones….this is so good, no GREAT I had to share with you all.  Make sure to read it through…filled with FACTS and STATS, very on point. Dont  miss it!

By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

“The Ten Worst Prisons in America,” our eleven-part article, premiered yesterday over at MotherJones.com with the notorious ADX Florence federal supermax. A new worst prison will be published each weekday (with some dishonorable mentions at the end), so please check in from time to time for new postings. What follows is the introduction to the series.

“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment.

Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

The United States boasts the world’s highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at last count 81,622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons.

Thousands more are being held in solitary at jails, deportation facilities, and juvenile-detention centers. Nearly 1 in 10 prisoners is sexually victimized, by prison employees about half of the time—more than 200,000 such assaults take place in American penal facilities every year (PDF), according to estimates compiled under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. Suicides, meanwhile, account for almost a third of prisoner deaths, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while an unknown number of fatalities result from substandard nutrition and medical care.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of these problems, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of the contenders over the next 10 days, complete with photos and video.

Read the rest at MotherJones.com.

Free Lynne Stewart

By Finian Cunningham

Half a century ago this month Martin Luther King wrote his famous prison protest against racial injustice, entitled ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. An excerpt reads: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Fifty years on to this very month, King’s defiant cri de coeur could hardly be more apt to express the barbarous injustice being committed by the US government against one of that nation’s bravest defence lawyers – Lynne Stewart.

Ms Stewart (73) is dying in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, from cancer that has spread from her breast to the rest of her body. Her family has little doubt that her life-threatening illness has been induced by the vindictive conditions of her incarceration by the US authorities.

Ralph Poynter, her husband for the past 50 years, and more than 10,000 petition signatories from across the world are mobilising to face down the barbarity of the American regime. Her supporters are demanding Lynne’s immediate release from her prison cell on compassionate and legally entitled grounds.

Lynne Stewart’s story is not just one of personal harrowing torment. The US state’s cruel persecution of this woman epitomises the general destruction of human rights and the rise of draconian police powers across America in the aftermath of 9/11 and the fraudulent “war on terror”.

This climate of repression and xenophobia also became evident last week in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings, where one of America’s major cities was put under a state of virtual martial law for several days while the security apparatus hunted down two brothers, who were already known to these authorities.

Lynne Stewart came of age politically in the turbulent 1960s. Growing up in the poor New York working-class districts of Brooklyn and Harlem, she became a defence lawyer with the express purpose of upholding the rights of the oppressed, marginalised and downtrodden – many of whom were her friends and neighbours.

She witnessed how many of her friends from the African-American community were harassed and brutalised by American racist police forces. She saw how the courts denied justice to poor communities and how these communities were neglected and abandoned by elitist governments, to live in open-air prisons called inner-city ghettoes.

With irrepressible passion and wit, Lynne Stewart saw her duty to her fellow human beings as representing those who had been cast aside as untouchable and unwanted in an American society where all too often poverty and racial prejudice automatically impose a harsh life sentence of misery and suffering at birth. Without fear or favour, Lynne saw her vocation as, in her own colourful words, to not just defend those who couldn’t make it to the finish line, but to defend those who couldn’t even make it to the starting line.

Once, she stated publicly her purpose as a defence lawyer: “Our quests are formidable. We have in Washington poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe. There is a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless. Our enemy is motivated only by insatiable greed, with no thought of other consequences. In this enemy there is no love of the land or the creatures that live there, no compassion for the people, no thought of future generations. This enemy will destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink as long as the dollars keep filling up their money-boxes… We go out to stop police brutality; to rescue the imprisoned.”

Lynne’s words were not those of a bookish lawyer, but rather those of an impassioned human being who clearly saw injustice as an enemy of the people, as a political oppression that must be fought with all her body, heart, mind and spirit.

Her trenchant defence of the principle of presumed innocence saw her take on cases that many other attorneys shunned. These cases included members of the Black Panther movement and other radical social movements, such as Anti-Vietnam War, Weather Underground and Irish freedom fighters. She defended a great many other unknown ordinary citizens who were victims of daily American police brutality and racism. For Lynne Stewart, the courts were not a place to make a moneyed career in – they were battlegrounds to take up the plight of people who were victims of elite privilege and abusive state power.

During the 1990s, typically Lynne recognised the plight of American Muslims who were increasingly being harassed and demonised by America’s state security and police services. She took on the case of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh”.

Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombings in New York, the Egyptian-born cleric was accused in 1995 of “seditious conspiracy” in another plot to blow up various city landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the United Nations Building. Many observers denounced the prosecution as a set-up, pointing out that Sheikh Omar was poor, blind and disabled. Also, it was well known in the communities that FBI undercover agents had been for months going into mosques inveigling youths with these very same hare-brained terror schemes.

As with the recent Boston marathon bombings, there are many unanswered questions about the shadowy role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1993 New York blasts and the subsequent alleged landmarks bombing plot. There are strong suspicions that the FBI used “sting” tactics to entrap unwitting felons – in much the same that many people have questioned how the two Tsarnaev brothers in Boston were permitted to apparently evade known security concerns.

Lynne Stewart was not intimidated out of defending Sheikh Omar even though the increasingly unhinged American corporate media portrayed him as the “embodiment of Islamic terrorism”. By then, there was a growing pernicious climate of Islamophobia in the US – a disturbing trend that has since become a hate-filled crescendo in the decade following the 9/11 explosions in 2001.

Sheikh Omar was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 along with nine other defendants. His prosecution was seen then as a travesty, owing to Lynne Stewart’s vigorous defence and evidence. For many observers, she proved in court not only the sheikh’s innocence, but also that the American government, the legal system and the law enforcement agencies were all implicated in insider-job terrorism and perverting justice. Recall that these revelations made by Lynne Stewart’s legal work were six years before 9/11 and the so-called “war on terror”.

True to her humanitarianism, Stewart maintained professional client relations with the incarcerated Sheikh Omar – who is currently serving out his sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina. The sheikh may have been behind bars, but Lynne Stewart continued working to clear his name and for his eventual acquittal.

This legal representation of an unfairly demonised man would lead to Lynne Stewart’s downfall in the following decade at the hands of the increasingly militant US authorities.

After 9/11, President George Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft instituted a raft of laws that would target defence lawyers and prevent their exercise of constitutional rights of free speech. Under these new stringent so-called anti-terror laws in the aftermath of 9/11, Stewart was accused of aiding terrorism because of her prison visits to Sheikh Omar and for allegedly passing written communications to his supporters on the outside. This latter accusation was based on a highly contaminated misrepresentation of a press release Lynne Stewart sent to the Reuters news agency concerning the case of her client. In the pre-9/11 era, such legal activities would have been considered normal confidential defence-client relations. Not any more; they are now seen as “collaborating with enemies of the state”. That is a measure of how extreme political and legal conditions in the US have deteriorated.

Lynne Stewart was arrested in 2002 and charged with “materially supporting terrorism”. Bizarrely – and indicating the witch-hunt climate that has gripped the US following 9/11 – the arrest was announced by Attorney General Ashcroft during an appearance on the David Letterman Late Show aired on the television channel CBS.

After a lengthy controversial legal battle, Lynne Stewart was herself sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment at the end of 2009 for aiding and abetting terrorists. She has now served more than three years of that sentence. Such is the sadistic nature of her incarceration, for some of the time she has been shackled with arm and leg irons to her prison bed, even while receiving medical treatment for her cancer.

The conclusion from this American state-sanctioned barbarity is clear. Lynne Stewart’s imprisonment is an attempt by the US regime to bury her alive behind bars. Of all people, Lynne Stewart knew best how the Washington shadow government of corrupt politicians and secret services were constructing the war-on-terror charade to demonise Muslims and create a climate of fear and paranoia in American society – a climate that would soon enable the shadow government to strip citizens of their human rights and constitutional protections. In a word, Lynne Stewart had to be silenced and got rid off. She knew too much and was too articulate about the vile inner-workings and scheming of the US secret state.

If voices like those of Lynne Stewart had remained free and active, it is probable that the US secret government would not be able to get away so easily with expanding its panoply of barbarities, such as the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, torture of detainees held without charge, the wholesale collapse of civil liberties, spying and surveillance on citizens, the illegal invasions and aggression towards other countries, and – perhaps the ultimate totalitarianism – the extrajudicial murder of foreign and American nationals with assassination drones by presidential order.

Owing to her life-long commitment to defending the rights of others and her rapidly deteriorating health, Lynne Stewart’s prison ordeal has won a growing public call for her immediate release, both within the US and across the world. Her case has also drawn widespread awareness and concern about the repressive trajectory of US society and the encroachment of a full-blown totalitarian police state.

Her cause has gained support from thousands of ordinary people who recognise Stewart’s towering defence of society’s weak and vulnerable members. Her supporters include human and social rights activists, UN special rapporteur on human rights Richard Falk, and many renowned thinkers and writers, such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Ralph Schoenman, Alice Walker and Cornel West, as well as former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu has added his voice calling for Stewart’s immediate release, as has veteran American actor Ed Asner, who said: “Given the enormous good that Lynne Stewart has done for humanity throughout her life as a courageous lawyer for the poor, the oppressed and the unjustly accused, I am shocked by the cynical perversity of an American government that has pursued her savagely and vengefully.

Asner continued: “Lynne Stewart must be freed. The law requires her compassionate release and the medical care that can save her life. We must deny the US state a death sentence aimed at the freedom of us all. The state power that torments Lynne Stewart invades countries at will, murders hundreds of thousands with impunity and creates a climate of fear and repression to prevent the people of this country from calling those in power to account.”

Author and media commentator Ralph Schoenman said: “We must mobilize world opinion to stop the judicial and political murder of Lynne Stewart, an ominous measure of the mass repression in preparation for all working people and the oppressed. Few cases encapsulate so fundamentally the destruction of democratic rights in the United States as the persecution of Lynne Stewart.”

African-American comedian and political commentator Dick Gregory has vowed to continue a hunger strike until Stewart is freed. Nearly three weeks after refusing food, Gregory said: “The prosecution and persecution of Lynne Stewart is designed to intimidate the entire legal community so that few would dare to defend political clients whom the state demonizes and none would provide a vigorous defense. It also was designed to narrow the meaning of our cherished first amendment right to free speech, which the people of this country struggled to have added to the Constitution as the Bill of Rights.”

In sum, we may return to the words of the late Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

It is high time for the US authorities to free Lynne Stewart from her unjust imprisonment.

Sign Lynne’s petition click >> HERE !!!

For more information, go to http://www.lynnestewart.org

Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127

Related articles

• Dick Gregory to fast until imprisoned attorney is freed – Texas Metro News I Messenger Enterprises (inquiringminds.cc)
• Lynne Stewart Update (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• The Persecution of Lynne Stewart (truthdig.com)

Mule Creek State Prison: Abuse, Neglect, Cover ups & MURDER….

The state of California, Governor Brown and CDCr can no longer deny what is truly going on inside its 33 prisons.  While they play their “human chess game”  ( read…Re Alignment) at the expense of the taxpayers, and public safety- the fact remains that prisoners are STILL dying and lacking adequate medical care. Realignment has been proven to have no lasting affect on the serious over crowding.

Women prisoners have been forced into one facility, where severe overcrowding is rampant. The women have been begging for tampons, and media attention. Yet Governor Brown screams he wants the Feds out, no more federal oversight. Here is an email I just received detailing years of abuse at Mule Creek State Prison.

While guards are raking huge salaries and great benefits walking the “toughest beat in the state,” people are losing their lives due to indifference, a lack of  morals, job responsibility and accountability. Do you really think CDCr deserves to be without Federal Oversight? Read this and then answer….

Hi Carol,

Sorry it took me a minute to get back to you…  I decided to get my facts straight on what I am going to share with you.

First, I want to share this with you about a man named Ty Lopes who died while custody at Mule Creek prison in 2011, I have been following this story since it happened and sources close to me  have stated the same thing over and over.  On the eve of  Ty Lopes murder by he cell mate  witnesses remember hearing and seeing what happened.  The cell mate went to the C/O to complain, he wanted Ty out of his cell or he would kill him, he repeated over and over, the C/O  told him to get out of  his site and return to the cell.  The Cell mate complied and returned to his cell; when went back he began to threaten Ty Lopes, by telling him over and over he was going to kill him if he didn’t get the C/O  to move him that day.  The cellmate was enraged beyond belief, many people surrounding the area heard it and Ty was nervous.

Ty Lopes spent most of the morning trying to get the on duty C/O  to move him.  The C/O  told Lopes, no he would not move him and to deal with it, Ty begged the C/O  and the C/O  told Ty Lopes “I need to go to lunch” and sent him back to the cell.  The guard never reported this to another C/O or to his next in charge.  But by the time staff checked on Ty Lopes and his cellmate again, there was blood all over the floor, matter a fact it was coming out from underneath the door according to eye witness accounts.  Eye witness accounts state that a broom handle was used to sodomize Ty Lopes, he was dead, strangled and sodomized.  During the altercation of the two men, Ty Lopes was heard for several hours screaming and begging for someone to come to his rescue, guards did nothing. When he was found it was to late.

It is clear that there is a problem here, but there was never any mention about this to the media.  It is clear that the guards did nothing to prevent a murder, it is clear that guards at Mule Creek did not apply safety and security for the prison during this moment, if anything they over looked a murder in the making.  But we all know the guards will be covering for each other on this one, which they have.  This instance clearly reminds me of the gladiator mentality  of other prisons in past years.  So many have been hurt or killed because the guards find amusement in watching or making this happen.  Guards with child like mentally of pranks gone bad… Playing or Bullying mentality of the weaker person…

These are just the publicized ones below:  But in this last month there has been at least 5 or more incidents of stabbing and numerous violent out burst leaving many unpublicized, with guards doing nothing to stop the out breaks that many men are facing at Mule Creek today.  Fighting has been going on and off at Mule Creek for years, stabbings have occurred at least 7 I can recall, with several fatal ones that have placed the prison on lockdown none of which made it to the media.

 9/3/09  David Noles age 73, supposedly found dead 4:05 pm Sunday strangulation by his cell mate.

 

 August of 2009 John Linley Frazier age 62, found hanging in cell so called suicide.

In 7/30/2007  Robert Bardo, 37 was stabbed 11 times by inmates;  guards did not do anything after bringing  him back from the ER -they released  him to the general population again…  He ended up in another fight the next day…

It is very sad that instead of helping these men to over come conflict, they continue to breed retaliator  behavior within the institution placing some men there in bad situations where they are forced to defend themselves or be killed.  Even at the hand of the guards who continuously cover up to defend the murderous rampages they promote.  In my personal view, it will become again a way to murder lifers and LWOP rather than them dying of natural causes.  I see the writing on the wall, it is coming!

The lies and cover ups are endless….

Mule Creek locked down the prison when these incidents broke out through the day and a 6th incident that evening, last Wednesday13th through Friday 22nd -there were no phone calls to loved ones.  The incident on the yards are continuing, thanks to guards promoting it, even today 4/2/2013 guards intercepted a letter from an inmate who wanted to turn evidence of the drug operation at Mule Creek and guards shared with serveral well known prisoners showing that this inmate being held in AD Seg  is turning evidence over to the authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence since he him-self was just found with drugs in his possession; he was doing it to reduce the time he will have added to his stay…  You know what will be next if he is released from AD Seg…

Mule Creek C/o’s have a long history of cover up, Lies and twisted stories and even with the mentally ill and treating sick prisioners. 

As I learn more I will try to share with you….

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Report Outlines Abuses by California Prison Staff

English: Image is similar, if not identical, to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation patch. Made with Photoshop. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A California parole agent was accused of soliciting one of his parolees
to kill another. Numerous corrections department employees allegedly had
sex with inmates, including juveniles.

And a prison guard was suspected of carousing regularly with prisoners,
even joining them as they drank a form of booze the inmates manufactured
themselves.

The incidents are among 278 cases of alleged employee misconduct
detailed in the latest report by the independent inspector general of
the state corrections department.

The abuses highlighted in the reports produced every six months raise
questions about how effectively the state prison system hires and
polices its sworn peace officers.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has promised to better follow existing policies and procedures.

But a top prison official said no dramatic policy or training changes are planned as a result of the reports.

“We’re pretty comfortable or satisfied with the level of screening or
prevention that we do already in the department. We have a pretty high
bar as it is,” said Martin Hoshino, acting undersecretary for
operations.

The department has improved since the days when officers were found to
have encouraged inmates to engage in what were known as “gladiator
fights” or developed a code of silence to protect officers who broke the
rules, he said.

“Do we have examples of misconduct? Sure, but I think that’s true for any large organization,” Hoshino said.

The union representing prisons guards did not respond to a request for
comment Wednesday on the report, which details cases that were closed
during the second half of 2012.

In his previous report in October, the inspector general criticized the
corrections department’s Southern California internal affairs office for
doing a particularly poor job of investigating and prosecuting such
complaints.

That region still has the worst record, with nearly a third of allegations handled improperly.

However, many of the allegations of employee abuse predate the
department’s most recent promises about following its existing rules.

Inspector General Robert Barton says in the latest report that he is optimistic the record will improve.

Details such as where the incidents occurred or what happened to the
employees involved are scarce because the inspector general’s role is to
evaluate whether the department property investigated the reported
malfeasance.

The inspector general’s office selected the most egregious cases from
among 1,074 incidents investigated by the department’s internal affairs
office.

In one case, a prison guard allegedly stripped off his duty weapons to
duke it out with an inmate, then encouraged other guards to cover up the
fight.

Among the allegations of improper sexual relations was a case involving a
year-long series of complaints that a high-ranking official at a
juvenile facility repeatedly fondled two wards, had sexual skin-to-skin
contact with another ward, and watched wards engaging in sexual acts.

The department outlined similar behavior in its report last fall,
including the case of one prison employee accused of bearing an inmate’s
child and another who purportedly sent nude photos of herself to an
inmate’s contraband cellphone.

Overall, nearly half the allegations in the most recent report involved
neglect of duty or dishonesty, while 8 percent alleged unreasonable use
of force.

Sexual misconduct was alleged in 2 percent of the reports, 9 percent
involved overfamiliarity with inmates, and 5 percent detailed
trafficking of contraband — often cellphones that have become a major
security risk behind bars.

By DON THOMPSON

Associated Press

Link to article

 

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Oklahoma County jail inmate deaths attributed to inadequate medical care, records show

An attorney says Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel and the Oklahoma County board of commissioners are responsible for failure by the county jail‘s former medical contractor to provide medications and proper staffing.

why is this such a familiar issue to all of us? Because it happens way too often. We allow this to happen….silence is NOT golden. Who would you turn to if it were your loved one? The facility will not help you…what would you do?

BY TIM WILLERT

In the days leading up to his death, Charles Holdstock and other inmates in need of medical attention often languished on the 13th floor of the Oklahoma County jail, waiting for assistance, court documents indicate.

Many sat handcuffed to a bar for hours, only to be returned to their cells without seeing a nurse or doctor, according to documents filed in connection with Holdstock’s May 15, 2009, death.

“I hear they got charged $15 to be taken up and seen by medical staff,” a physician assistant for the jail’s former medical provider testified in a sworn deposition. “We would never see them. They’d be sent back down, and they got charged.”

Oklahoma Health Department investigators found another seven men died while in jail custody during a year-and-a-half period before Holdstock’s death because they did not receive proper medical treatment.

Holdstock, 63, was in poor health and needed to get his pacemaker checked when he was brought to the jail’s medical floor in March 2009.

The physician assistant tried scheduling an appointment with an off-site cardiologist but the request was never carried out.

“I know that he was not seen because this man kept coming back, you know, kept putting in sick calls, which he paid for, to come back and see me just to ask to have his pacemaker checked,” said the assistant, who requested anonymity.

Less than two months later, Holdstock was dead.

Family files lawsuit

His three daughters sued Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel, county commissioners and the jail’s former medical provider, claiming their father was denied his constitutional right to adequate medical care while in custody.

Whetsel declined to comment on the Holdstock case, which is pending.

A judge blocked a trial, ruling the claims against Whetsel and the county lacked merit. The family settled out of court with the medical provider, Correctional Healthcare Management of Oklahoma.

An appeals court reinstated the case, citing years of warnings about serious jail deficiencies as their basis for reopening it.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded earlier this month that “a reasonable jury could find that Sheriff Whetsel and the County acted with deliberate indifference” to substandard jail conditions that may have caused Holdstock’s death.

Continue Reading @ NewsOk (page 2)

 

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Criminal justice system’s ‘dark secret’: Teenagers in solitary confinement

As more and more minors serve time in adult prisons, a growing number are placed in solitary confinement. Officials say it’s to protect the minors from the adult prison population. Some of those who served time in solitary as teens and their advocates say it’s a harmful practice and a dark secret of the criminal justice system.

By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News, and Deirdre Cohen and Sarah Koch, Rock Center

James Stewart, a 17-year-old from Denver who committed suicide while in solitary confinement, had never been to jail before August of 2008. That was when, under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, Stewart had gotten into a head-on car collision, killing a 32-year-old man.

Courtesy of the Stewart family

James Stewart, who was arrested after being charged with vehicular homicide when he was 17, is seen in an undated school photo.

 

Because of the severity of his crime, Stewart was charged with vehicular homicide – and charged as an adult. His family couldn’t make bail, so Stewart was placed in the Denver County Jail while he awaited his sentence.

There was just one problem: Since he was a minor, Stewart was ordered to be put in protective custody, separate from the adult prisoners— and the best protection the jail had to offer was solitary confinement.

Weeks later, the psychological impact was too much. After a brief reprieve from solitary to be in a shared cell with another juvenile offender, Stewart was sent back to isolation after a minor argument with his cellmate.  According to his older sister, Nicole Miera, Stewart took his own life after less than 10 minutes of being back in what inmates called “the hole.”

“It was stated that that when he got in there, he was pretty upset,” Miera told NBC’s Ted Koppel, her eyes filling with tears. “He had taken a sheet and he had wrapped around his neck and just twisted until he couldn’t twist anymore.”

Stewart was one of many juveniles who are in adult jails and prisons across America. Not all of their stories end as tragically as his, but the increasingly blurry line between juvenile offenders and adult correctional facilities have made many wonder if better solutions are needed for this growing population.

 

For each of the past five years, roughly 100,000 juveniles have been held in adult jails and prisons, according to data from the Department of Justice.

Defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative, told NBC these youths are getting unfairly harsh treatment for the crimes they commit.

“Ninety-one percent of the children who are serving time in adult jails and prisons are serving time in jails and prisons for crimes that are not murder, crimes that are not sex crimes,” he said. “Solitary confinement is pretty horrible for anybody, but it’s especially horrible for a child. It is psychological torture.”

‘The dark secret of the criminal justice system’
Data on how many of those young people nationwide are held in solitary confinement isn’t available, but a report published this past October by Human Rights Watch and The American Civil Liberties Union said the New York City Department of Corrections, for example, reported that in fiscal year 2012, 14 percent of all detained adolescents were held in solitary at least once.

“I spoke to kids. They talked about being in a cell alone, the size of a parking space, the size of an elevator,” said Ian Kysel, who authored the HRW/ACLU report. “This is sort of the dark secret of the criminal justice system. … Jails and prisons don’t make available their data on solitary confinement.”

At New York City’s Riker’s Island, the average length of solitary confinement for youths last year was 43 long, 23-hour days, according to Kysel’s report.

The catch-22 of being prosecuted as adults but segregated from the adult prison population because they are still minors is literally making young offenders go out of their minds — and many of them have mental health issues before they are put in isolation, according to the HRW/ACLU report.

Stuart Grassian, a Boston-based psychiatrist who is an expert on solitary confinement, cites CIA research done in the 1950s, which found solitary confinement made American prisoners of war in North Korea go psychotic.

“What was produced by that was a person who was so unhinged, he was confused, disoriented, disheveled,” he told NBC News, “They wouldn’t sometimes know who they were. They couldn’t think.”

Kysel, the author of the report on adolescents in adult prisons, has called for youth solitary confinement to be banned and for other punishments — such as taking away privileges — to be instituted instead. Grassian agrees that this is necessary.

“You have these kids getting more and more out of control, more and more impulsive, more and more emotionally out of control because they’re in solitary. It’s very likely that’s going to be a permanent impairment in their lives,” he said. “Well, guess what? Ninety-five percent of them are gonna get out back into your community. What do you want them to be like when they get out?”

Via NBC News/Rock News

 

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