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Forum Post: Political Prisoner Marshall Eddie Conway Released from Prison After 44 Years

Posted 10 years ago on March 5, 2014, 3:50 p.m. EST by LeoYo (5909)
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Political Prisoner Marshall Eddie Conway Released from Prison After 44 Years

Wednesday, 05 March 2014 09:09 By Susie Day, Truthout | Report

http://truth-out.org/news/item/22260-political-prisoner-marshall-eddie-conway-released-from-prison-after-44-years

A small hearing March 4, 2014, in an obscure courtroom at the Circuit Court for Baltimore City ended with the release of former Black Panther Marshall Edward Conway, who has spent nearly 44 of his 67 years in maximum security prisons. Eddie, as he is known to his thousands of supporters, entered the courtroom wearing a Department of Corrections sweatshirt, in handcuffs and leg chains, and walked out of the courthouse about an hour later in civilian clothes to greet a host of family, supporters and old friends:

"I am filled with a lot of different emotions after nearly 44 years in prison. I want to thank my family, my friends, my lawyers and my supporters; many have suffered along with me."

Despite Eddie Conway's insistence on his innocence, it took years for Conway and his attorneys to find a way to overturn his conviction. Finally, in May 2012, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Unger v. State that a Maryland jury, to comply with due process as stated in the US Constitution, must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that someone charged with a crime is guilty before that jury can convict the defendant. What made this decision momentous for many people in prison, including Conway, is that it applied retroactively.

Robert Boyle and Phillip G. Dantes, attorneys for Conway, filed a motion on his behalf based on this ruling, arguing that the judge in Conway's trial had not properly instructed the jury that this "beyond a reasonable doubt" proviso was mandatory for conviction. Based on this motion, they negotiated an agreement whereby Conway would be resentenced to time served and be released from prison. In exchange, Conway and his lawyers agreed not to litigate his case based on the Unger ruling.

As he walked away from the courthouse, Boyle said: "It's a big day for black political prisoners that one of them has finally gotten out. I feel that [the late mayor of Jackson, Mississippi] Chokwe Lumumba was speaking into the judge's ear, to urge him to let this happen."

Scores of former Black Panthers are serving virtual life sentences in prison, largely the result of the 1977 Church Committee Senate hearings and the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered his FBI in the 1960s and '70s to target the Black Panther Party. The first Panther chapter was started in 1966 in Oakland, California, but by the time a chapter was formed in Baltimore in 1968, the FBI had had ample time to insert more than its usual share of informants into the fledgling organization. The FBI, moreover, often worked in league with various municipal police departments. As Conway wrote in his political memoir, "The alleged murder of police officers would soon take the place of the mythological rape of white women as the basis for the legal lynching of black men."

On the night of April 21, 1970, two Baltimore police officers, Donald Sager and Stanley Sierakowski, were shot as they responded to a domestic disturbance call. Sierakowski was wounded seriously, and Sager died of his wounds. Two members of the Black Panther Party, Jack Ivory Johnson and Jackie Powell, were apprehended close to the scene soon after the shooting. Other police officers spotted a third African-American man and chased him for several blocks as the man fired back at them, finally escaping. A police officer later testified that the man he chased and who shot at him as he fled was Marshall Eddie Conway, a prominent Panther activist in the community.

"There was a de facto war being waged between the police and the black community," Robert Boyle explained. "Eddie Conway was a well-known person in the Baltimore Black Panthers. If it wasn't Eddie, it was going to be someone else from the Party."

The day after the shooting, Conway was arrested at work in the Baltimore post office.

Mr. Conway's trial, complex and tumultuous, lasted several months. Jack Johnson had, at one point during police interrogations, named Powell and Conway as the shooters but later refused to testify to this in court, saying that police had beaten him until he told this story. Conway chose not to attend much of his trial, protesting the fact that he had been given a court-appointed attorney in lieu of his choice, William Kunstler, who needed more time before he could join this case.

Adding to the mix was a jailhouse informant, Charles Reynolds, who was not charged in the case but testified that the Baltimore Panther Party required aspiring members to shoot a police officer and that Paul Coates - now head of the Black Classics Press - had ordered Conway to carry out the shooting. However, Coates refuted this in court, testifying that Eddie was, in fact, already a party member, higher in party rank than himself. Despite, or possibly because of these and many more complications, a jury finally convicted all three men of the murder of Sager. Conway was sentenced to life without parole.

Powell died in prison in the 1980s. Johnson was released in 2009, having served his full term after he was resentenced. But Conway served until Tuesday in various Maryland prisons, an "exemplary prisoner."

While continuing to maintain his innocence, Conway identified himself as a political prisoner. During his decades of incarceration, he earned three college degrees and organized a literacy program. He has also started other human rights groups, such as Friend of a Friend, which is affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee and helps young men, often gang members, resolve conflicts. Because 78 percent of the Maryland prison population is African-American, Friend of a Friend also teaches these young men about their heritage and culture.

So it was no accident that, in the courtroom and outside the courthouse, several young men whose lives had been changed were waiting to welcome Conway to the outside world. "He helped me when I was incarcerated at 15 years old," said DJ, one of the kids who met Eddie in prison. The Friend of a Friend program helped him a lot; DJ said he owes who he is now to Conway. "Eddie took a chance on me, and changed my life."

Also there to hug Conway for the first time in some 43 years was his old friend Coates.

Ronald Conway, Eddie's son, blinking back tears, talked about how his father had held back from getting to know Ronald's two sons because he didn't want them to see him in prison; and now, they all had a chance to really be together.

Boyle said: "I am absolutely thrilled for Eddie. Finally, what we wanted has happened: to see this innocent man out of jail."

Copyright Susie Day, 2014

In April 2011 Conway's political memoir, Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, was released by AK Press.

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[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a book by American writer Douglas A. Blackmon, published by Anchor Books in 2008.[2] It explores the forced labor of imprisoned black men and women through the convict lease system used by states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. Blackmon argues slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, but instead persisted well into the 20th century.

Slavery by Another Name began as an article Blackmon wrote for The Wall Street Journal detailing the use of black forced labor by U.S. Steel Corporation. Seeing the popular response to the article, he began research for a more comprehensive look at the topic. The resulting book was well received by critics and became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2009, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and in 2011, was adapted into a documentary film for PBS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_by_Another_Name

[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Man who Spent Decades on La. Death Row is Freed

http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/man-who-spent-decades-on-la-death-row-is-freed

ANGOLA, La. (AP) — A man who spent nearly 26 years on death row in Louisiana walked free of prison Tuesday, hours after a judge approved the state's motion to vacate the man's murder conviction in a the 1983 killing of a jeweler.

Glenn Ford, 64, had been on death row since August 1988 in connection with the death of 56-year-old Isadore Rozeman, a Shreveport jeweler and watchmaker for whom Ford had done occasional yard work. Ford had always denied killing Rozeman.

Ford walked out the maximum security prison at Angola on Tuesday afternoon, said Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Asked as he walked away from the prison gates about his release, Ford told WAFB-TV, "It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It feels good."

Ford told the broadcast outlet he does harbor some resentment at being wrongly jailed: "Yeah, cause, I've been locked up almost 30 years for something I didn't do."

"I can't go back and do anything I should have been doing when I was 35, 38, 40 stuff like that," he added.

State District Judge Ramona Emanuel on Monday took the step of voiding Ford's conviction and sentence based on new information that corroborated his claim that he was not present or involved in Rozeman's death, Ford's attorneys said. Ford was tried and convicted of first-degree murder in 1984 and sentenced to death.

"We are very pleased to see Glenn Ford finally exonerated, and we are particularly grateful that the prosecution and the court moved ahead so decisively to set Mr. Ford free," said a statement from Gary Clements and Aaron Novod, the attorneys for Ford from the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana.

They said Ford's trial had been "profoundly compromised by inexperienced counsel and by the unconstitutional suppression of evidence, including information from an informant." They also cited what they said was a suppressed police report related to the time of the crime and evidence involving the murder weapon.

Currently, there are 83 men and two women serving death sentences in Louisiana, according to Laborde.

A Louisiana law entitles those who have served time but are later exonerated to receive compensation. It calls for payments of $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration up to a maximum of $250,000, plus up to $80,000 for loss of "life opportunities."

[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn't Wait on Obama

Friday, 07 March 2014 12:14 By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now! | Video Interview

For more than four decades, the world-renowned author, activist and scholar Angela Davis has been one of most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. An icon of the 1970s black liberation movement, Davis’ work around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements across several generations. She is a leading advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own experience as a fugitive on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list more than 40 years ago. Davis, a professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, and the subject of the recent documentary, "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners," joins us to discuss prison abolition, mass incarceration, the so-called war on drugs, International Women’s Day, and why President Obama’s second term should see a greater wave of activism than in his first. Watch Part 2 of this interview.

TRANSCRIPT: http://truth-out.org/news/item/22327-angela-davis-on-prison-abolition-the-war-on-drugs-and-why-social-movements-shouldnt-wait-on-obama

[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Senate Race-Baiting? Dems Join GOP to Block Obama DOJ Pick Tied to Legal Defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal

Friday, 07 March 2014 12:27 By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now! | Video Interview

In a stunning vote, a group of U.S. Senate Democrats has broken ranks to join Republicans in rejecting President Obama’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Debo Adegbile. The confirmation fight focused almost solely on Adegbile’s role in the legal defense of imprisoned Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer, despite Abu-Jamal’s longstanding position of being not guilty. Adegbile was part of a team of lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who successfully argued the trial judge’s jury instructions violated Abu-Jamal’s rights. Adegbile’s supporters say the attacks on him mark a new form of Willie Horton politics and race baiting. We discuss the controversy with two guests: Johanna Fernández, professor of history at Baruch College-CUNY and a coordinator with the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, and Ryan Haygood, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Political Participation Group.

TRANSCRIPT: http://truth-out.org/news/item/22330-senate-race-baiting-dems-join-gop-to-block-obama-doj-pick-tied-to-legal-defense-of-mumia-abu-jamal

[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Ethics Complaint Filed Against Dallas Police 72-Hour Review Policy

Thursday, 06 March 2014 00:00
By Stephen Benavides, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22275-ethics-complaint-filed-against-dallas-police-72-hour-review-policy

In November 2013, a secret policy allowed Dallas police to take 72 hours to review any evidence before making an official statement. The policy was instituted response to a police shooting report that was contradicted by a home surveillance camera.

On October 14, 2013, Joyce Jackson called the Dallas Police Department because she feared that her son, Bobby Gerald Bennett, who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, would hurt himself. Within minutes of arriving, Officer Cardan Spencer shot Bennett four times in the stomach, nearly killing him. The official report justified the shooting, stating that Bennett moved "in a threatening manner" and "lunged" at the officers with a knife, causing them to fear for their lives.

Luckily for Bennett, Maurice Bunch, a neighbor of Bennett's mother, captured the entire confrontation on a home surveillance camera.

Watch the Dallas Police Shoot Bennett for absolutely no reason.

"When the officers told him to freeze, he complied," Bunch said. Bunch's video showed that Bennett never lunged at the officers and that he never threatened them in any way. Bennett stood up when officers arrived, did not move, and kept his hands at his side. Then, for apparently no reason, Spencer began repeatedly firing his service weapon.

Surprisingly, Bennett was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a public servant, a felony, even though Dallas police were shown the surveillance video. Police Chief David O. Brown decided to pursue felony charges because "Officer Watson's statement really overrode what the video showed." Brown went on to state, "We put a lot of credibility on officer's statements until we have other evidence to prove otherwise." Watson was suspended shortly thereafter for making false statements in the report. Spencer was terminated from the force, and the case has been referred to a grand jury.

But this is only the beginning of a much, much larger national conflict between government double standards, public scrutiny and special treatment for law enforcement.

It is clear that the home surveillance video contradicted Watson's testimony and undermined the criminal charge against Bennett. But rather than make an example of the lying officer, Brown secretly implemented a 72-hour review policy during the 2013 Thanksgiving break that would protect officers from a similar situation. The policy, which may be the first of its kind for a municipal police force in the United States, says that "any Dallas officer involved in a police shooting - whether the officer fired a weapon or witnessed the gunfire - will now have the right to remain silent for 72 hours. ... And even before they give a statement about the shooting, the officers can watch any available video before they give a statement."

In response, Dallas Communities Organizing for Change, which describes itself as a "new school civil rights organization that mobilizes people and resources to change policy" filed an ethics complaint against Brown on February 25, 2014. According to the filing, which is the first challenge to the new rule, "The '72 Hour Review' policy will create an environment where the public will no longer trust officer-involved shootings reports, and elevates public perception of officers as receiving special treatment. It decreases any semblance of transparency in the period between when the shooting happens, and when a report is filed. The public interest of the residents of the City of Dallas does not support the "72 Hour Review" policy, and demands exactly the opposite."

Read the entire ethics complaint.

Implications of this new policy may be felt far and wide, as more and more police chiefs opt to start implementing similar rules that allow law enforcement to craft statements to avoid contradictory evidence in officer-involved shootings and avoid accountability. According to a guest commenter in this article, "Defendants break rules and face the unbridled wrath of the criminal justice system (which seeks to take their money, time, and sometimes freedom). But what happens when the Government breaks rules? More often than not, the government changes the rules so that they don't get caught again."

Copyright, Truthout.

[-] 2 points by DKAtoday (33802) from Coon Rapids, MN 10 years ago
[-] 2 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Why I Stand With Monica Jones: My Liberation Is Bound Up With Yours

Thursday, 17 April 2014 00:00
By Laura Campagna, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23127-why-i-stand-with-monica-jones-my-liberation-is-bound-up-with-yours

On Friday, April 11, I went down to Phoenix with over a dozen students and professors from Prescott College to stand with Monica Jones at her trial. She was charged with manifesting prostitution, picked up in a sting orchestrated by Project Rose, a project of Arizona State University’s School of Social Work, and the Phoenix Police Department. One of the tragedies of the situation is that Monica is a student at Arizona State University, studying social work. She was arrested the day after attending a protest of Project Rose last year, and many believe she was targeted for voicing her opposition.

We joined more than 30 activists affiliated with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Phoenix Chapter, who had organized a press conference before the trial. The multigenerational group chanted that the criminalization of sex work and Project Rose has got to go as we marched into the courthouse. One blessing of living in the belly of the beast is that it’s clear that all of our struggles are interrelated.

Carlos Garcia from Puente Human Rights Movement, who organizes against the criminalization and deportation of the undocumented community in Phoenix, was at the press conference. He recently participated in the Trail to End Deportation, which was a three-day, 60-mile march from Phoenix to Eloy Detention Center. Many members of Puente are in Washington right now, joining immigrant rights activists from across the country on a hunger strike in front of the White House to urge President Obama, the Deporter in Chief, to halt the deportations of immigrants and allow families to be reunited. #not1more, #2million2many, #ni1mas.

Monica’s case is occurring within a larger context of criminalizing queer and gender-variant people in Arizona. In February, the Arizona legislature passed SB 1062, a bill that would have allowed employees and businesses to refuse service to LGBT people on religious grounds. Arizona is famous for passing laws that mandate subjective profiling based on appearance, such as SB1070, which begged the question: what does an immigrant look like? After the bill’s passage, Governor Jan Brewer admitted that she was unable to articulate what exactly an immigrant looked like, but was confident that members of her law enforcement agencies would be able to identify them on sight. Similarly, SB 1062 asked, what does an LGBT person look like? It made all of us queer people in Arizona wonder if we looked “gay.” It made me consider growing out my hair again because at its heart, SB 1062 was about policing gender under the guise of sexuality.

Any teenager knows that people who look gay are those who are not doing gender “correctly” or convincingly. Laws that promote discrimination against those perceived to be LGBT facilitate the policing of gender non-conforming behavior and violence against the transgender community. Many studies have found that transgender women of color are disproportionately targeted for hate violence. SB 1062 and its ilk (copycat bills were introduced in Missouri, Georgia and Kansas shortly thereafter) put vulnerable communities at greater risk. Ultimately, Brewer vetoed the bill, but not because she is a friend to the gays - the Super Bowl was on the line. The NFL was monitoring the situation and thankfully had a stronger anti-discrimination policy than the state of Arizona, which was competing to host the Super Bowl in 2015.

Inside the small courtroom, jam-packed with so many supporters that people had to find seats on the floor or each other’s laps, we heard testimony from the undercover police officer and Monica. There were many inconsistencies between the stories.

The defense attorney reminded the judge that since it was a bench hearing, and he was both judge and jury, the officer’s word should not be given greater credence than Monica’s. The judge agreed that was an important point, but then sided with the officer whose logic boiled down to this: She looked like a prostitute.

Although it was a Friday night and Monica (who does not drive) was walking from her apartment to a neighborhood bar as she often does on weekend evenings, there could be no other explanation for her being on the street than the intent to manifest prostitution. The officer admitted that he spotted Monica from his car and targeted her. He did not have to say it was for the way she looked: there could be no other explanation.

Monica Jones was profiled for looking like a sex worker in a state where law enforcement has been granted the power to determine who people are based on their appearance. And the court reaffirmed that perception. The judge believed the officer’s story over hers not because his made more sense (it didn’t), but because she is an African-American transgender woman. Her identity has already been criminalized.

The judge gave Monica the minimum mandatory sentence of 30 days and charged her with hundreds of dollars in fines. Acknowledging that she is a student, he is allowing her to finish out her classes before fulfilling her sentence. He may have intended to seem compassionate, though his decision is anything but when one considers the violence that Monica may face in prison, since rates of abuse against transgender women who are housed in men’s prisons are horrific.

Monica left the courtroom with her head held high, and once outside the courthouse doors announced her intent to appeal. The constitutionality of the “manifesting prostitution” statute has been challenged by an amicus brief submitted by the ACLU.

There is hope for the case, but in the meantime, Monica needs to raise a considerable amount of money for legal fees. In addition to finishing up the semester, she also has to work with her attorney on the appeal. The community will continue to rally around her locally and nationally. There have been solidarity protests in cities all over the country, such as the one in Washington, D.C., where protestors rallied to repeal prostitution-free zones in their city.

The fact that the university where Monica is seeking a degree in counseling had a hand in creating this situation that greatly undermines her ability to focus on her education is inexcusable. But part of this work for justice includes immediately ending programs like Project Rose and the lengthier task of decriminalizing sex work and dismantling the prison industrial complex.

There are many fronts on which we struggle here because we know that what happens in Arizona spreads to other states. The great part is that we are all in it together because my liberation is bound up with yours. All of us or none.

Copyright, Truthout.

[-] 1 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Man cleared of NYC murder after 25 years in prison

http://news.yahoo.com/man-cleared-nyc-murder-25-years-prison-182841043.html

Associated Press By JENNIFER PELTZ 7 hours ago

Wrongly Convicted Man Freed After Decades Behind Bars

NEW YORK (AP) — From the day of his 1989 arrest in a deadly New York City shooting, Jonathan Fleming said he had been more than 1,000 miles away, on a vacation at Disney World. Despite having documents to back him up, he was convicted of murder.

Prosecutors now agree with him, and Fleming left a Brooklyn court as a free man Tuesday after spending nearly a quarter-century behind bars.

Fleming, now 51, tearfully hugged his lawyers as relatives cheered, "Thank you, God!" after a judge dismissed the case. A key witness had recanted, newly found witnesses implicated someone else and prosecutors' review of authorities' files turned up documents supporting Fleming's alibi.

"After 25 years, come hug your mother," Patricia Fleming said, and her only child did.

"I feel wonderful," he said afterward. "I've always had faith. I knew that this day would come someday."

The exoneration, first reported by the Daily News, comes amid scrutiny of Brooklyn prosecutors' process for reviewing questionable convictions, scrutiny that comes partly from the new district attorney, Kenneth Thompson. He said in a statement that after a monthslong review, he decided to drop the case against Fleming because of "key alibi facts that place Fleming in Florida at the time of the murder."

From the start, Fleming told authorities he had been in Orlando when a friend, Darryl "Black" Rush, was shot to death in Brooklyn early on Aug. 15, 1989. Authorities suggested the shooting was motivated by a dispute over money.

Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, said his lawyers, Anthony Mayol and Taylor Koss. But prosecutors at the time suggested he could have made a quick round-trip plane jaunt to be in New York, and a woman testified that she had seen him shoot Rush. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and was due to have his first parole hearing soon.

The witness recanted her testimony soon after Fleming's 1990 conviction, saying she had lied so police would cut her loose for an unrelated arrest, but Fleming lost his appeals.

The defense asked the district attorney's office to review the case last year.

Defense investigators found previously untapped witnesses who pointed to someone else as the gunman, the attorneys said, declining to give the witnesses' or potential suspect's names before prosecutors look into them. The district attorney's office declined to comment on its investigative plans.

Prosecutors' review produced a hotel receipt that Fleming paid in Florida about five hours before the shooting — a document that police evidently had found in Fleming's pocket when they arrested him. Prosecutors also found an October 1989 Orlando police letter to New York detectives, saying some employees at an Orlando hotel had told investigators they remembered Fleming.

Neither the receipt nor the police letter had been provided to Fleming's initial defense lawyer, despite rules that generally require investigators to turn over possibly exculpatory material.

Patricia Fleming, 71, was with her son in Orlando at the time of the crime and testified at his trial.

"I knew he didn't do it, because I was there," she said. "When they gave my son 25 to life, I thought I would die in that courtroom."

Still, she said, "I never did give up, because I knew he was innocent."

Thompson took office in January, after unseating longtime District Attorney Charles "Joe" Hynes with a campaign that focused partly on questionable convictions on Hynes' watch. Hynes had created a special conviction integrity unit to review false-conviction claims, but some saw the effort as slow-moving and defensive.

Thompson has agreed to dismiss the murder convictions of two men who spent more than 20 years in prison for a triple homicide. He also dropped his predecessor's appeal challenging the 2013 release of another man who had served 22 years in prison on a questioned murder conviction.

On Tuesday, Jonathan Fleming left court with an arm around his mother's shoulders and the process of rebuilding his life ahead of him.

Asked about his plans, he said: "I'm going to go eat dinner with my mother and my family, and I'm going to live the rest of my life."


Reach Jennifer Peltz on Twitter @jennpeltz

[-] 1 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

74-Year-Old Woman Freed after Serving 32 Years for Murder She Did Not Commit

http://news.yahoo.com/74-year-old-wrongful-conviction-prison-release-151643006.html?vp=1

Dylan Stableford, Yahoo News By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo News 5 hours ago Yahoo News

A 74-year-old woman who served 32 years for a murder she did not commit was released from jail early Tuesday after students from USC's law school convinced the district attorney to reopen her case.

On Monday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge agreed to exchange Mary Virginia Jones' first-degree murder conviction without possibility of parole for a no contest plea to voluntary manslaughter with a time-served sentence.

“Words cannot express my gratitude to God and to my fellow man,” Jones said after her release from Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood.

Jones and the students argued that her abusive boyfriend, Mose Willis, forced her to participate in the 1981 murder. Willis was convicted of kidnapping, robbing and shooting two men — killing one — in Los Angeles. Jones, who drove the men to an alley where the crime was committed, fled the scene. It took four trials, including a reversal on appeal and two hung juries, to convict Jones.

"I did not willingly participate in this crime," Jones said in court Monday. "But I believe that entering a no contest plea is in my best interest to get out of custody."

Jones' daughter, Denetra Jones-Goodie, testified that before the 1981 slaying, Willis "threatened not only to kill me, but to kill her and anybody else that came to our aid. He pulled a gun on me and shot at me, and my mother witnessed that."

The law students argued that Jones, known as "Mother Mary," would not have been convicted if the jury had heard expert testimony about the abuse she suffered.

"Courts now allow experts to testify about the effects of being battered," Heidi Rummel, co-director of USC’s Post-Conviction Justice Project, said in a statement. "Willis forced Jones at gunpoint to participate in the robbery and kidnapping — she ran down the alley fully expecting him to shoot and kill her, too."

The students, members of USC’s Post-Conviction Justice Project, asked the DA's office to conduct an independent investigation into Jones' 1982 conviction. On Monday, the office accepted Jones' plea.

“My mother never wavered on her belief of her innocence," Jones-Goodie said.

Driven in part by advances in forensics, a growing number of wrongful convictions have been overturned in the United States.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there were a record 87 in 2013.

Of the 1,337 exonerations tracked by the registry since 1989, nearly half — 619 — were wrongful homicide convictions.

[-] 1 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

From Fallujah to the San Fernando Valley, Police Use Analytics to Target "High-Crime" Areas

Wednesday, 12 March 2014 09:08 By Darwin Bond Graham and Ali Winston, Truthout | News Analysis

http://truth-out.org/news/item/22357-predictive-policing-from-fallujah-to-the-san-fernando-valley-military-grade-software-used-to-wage-wars-abroad-is-making-its-impact-on-americas-streets

In an article in the November 2009 issue of Police Chief Magazine, the Los Angeles Police Department's Chief of Detectives Charlie Beck asked his fellow law enforcement leaders, "What can we learn from Walmart and Amazon about fighting crime in a recession?"

The answer Beck offered was "predictive policing," a new high-tech method by which police crunch crime statistics and other data with algorithms to divine when and where future crimes are most likely to occur. Beck wrote that it was an example of police following in the footsteps of tech-savvy corporate America: "Specific tactics and techniques to execute the predictive-policing model can be found in business analytics. E-commerce and marketing have learned to use advanced analytics in support of business intelligence methods designed to anticipate, predict and effectively leverage emerging trends, patterns and consumer behavior."

Since then, predictive policing has become a media darling. Hundreds of stories have been written on the use of computer models to predict and prevent crime. Police departments from Seattle to London have been profiled using computer prediction and mapping tools to apprehend suspects and saturate high-crime "hot spots" with officers.

However, the media coverage to date has missed the military origins of predictive policing. Far from being a transfer of technology and Big Data advances spawned by corporate America, the predictive policing software used by many cities actually originates in US military-funded research to track insurgents and predict civilian casualties in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Critics say the little-known origins of predictive policing reveal the biases of the technology and methods, and worry that it represents a further militarization of America's police.

UCLA's Military Research Labs

In May of 2006, years before the Los Angeles Police Department began experimenting with predictive policing technology, UCLA professors Andrea Bertozzi and Jeffery Brantingham obtained a US Army Research Office grant to apply statistical modeling to various military problems. On Professor Bertozzi's UCLA website, the grant is titled "Spatio-temporal event pattern recognition," a somewhat benign-sounding project. To the US Army, it is titled "spatio-temporal nonlinear filtering with applications to information assurance and counterterrorism."

Other grants to study counterterrorism and insurgency followed. Over the next several years, UCLA professor Jeffrey Brantingham and his graduate students, and a postdoc researcher named George Mohler, reported back to the Army about how their research findings might be applied to warfare. They modeled patterns of "civilian deaths in Iraq" and "terrorist and insurgent activities," publishing their findings in several academic journals.

"One of the goals is to develop a probabilistic framework for detecting and tracking covert activities of hostile agents," the UCLA researchers wrote about their projects. "This framework will include an algorithmic toolkit for detecting and tracking hostile activities, methodology for analyzing properties of those algorithms, and theoretical models that will address the general question of trackability."

In a presentation last year to the Air Force Research Laboratory, another military agency funding the UCLA professors, Brantingham talked about the "hybrid threats" of "radicalization and adversarial psychology," which leads to "adversarial activity patterns" and ultimately to "hostile events." Slides accompanying Brantingham's presentation showed Afghan men and other Arab or Muslim men with their faces wrapped in scarves, gathered around a cache of automatic rifles. Brantingham's presentation also included images of Latino youths in Los Angeles, labeled "gang members."

In a 2009 report to the US military, the UCLA researchers made direct comparisons between enemy combatants, called "insurgents" or "terrorists," and populations in the United States they defined as "gang members." UCLA's Brantingham and Bertozzi explained that the algorithms they developed for the US military were going to be applied in Los Angeles, California:

"Working with LAPD, we are developing novel algorithms for detecting changes in status of high-crime neighborhoods using a combination of statistical and spatial models developed in this program. Development and implementation of quantitative change-point detection and particle-filtering techniques will provide the Army with a plethora of new data-intensive predictive algorithms for dealing with insurgents and terrorists abroad."

[-] 1 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

LAPD Rolls Out Predictive Policing

In 2010, LAPD received a $3 million grant from the National Institute of Justice to develop "intelligence-led policing" practices, including crime-prediction methods. In conjunction with the Los Angeles Police Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that channels private money to LAPD, (53 percent of which goes to technology purchases), LAPD entered into a research agreement with UCLA professor Brantingham to test their predictive algorithms on property crimes in LAPD's Foothill Division in the San Fernando Valley.

By 2012, officers patrolling the 46-square-mile Foothill Division were receiving daily printouts of maps with 500-by-500-foot square boxes identified by Brantingham's algorithms as the 20 zones where crime was supposedly most likely to occur. The predictions were based on six years worth of geo-located crime reports.

LAPD believes their predictive policing program has made a real impact on crime by helping officers do their jobs and reducing crime rates in areas where the algorithm is used.

"This program is not the panacea," said Captain Jorge Rodriguez, one of the commanders of the Foothill Division. "It's like a big wide net we cast out into the ocean; there's going to be some seepage." However, he said, the historical crime data used to generate the predictions provides more than enough justification to allocate officers to sit on that location - a luxury the LAPD can afford by dint of the department's budget and manpower.

The one-year predictive policing pilot in Foothill Division ended in January 2013, with an evaluation of the program's effectiveness. According to Rodriguez, the analysis showed that Foothill Division led the LAPD's other patrol areas in crime reductions for every week in 2012. Since then, LAPD has restarted the predictive policing initiative in Foothill Division and expanded it to two more patrol sectors.

Militarized, Racialized Police Technologies

While LAPD and other police departments have praised the results of their initial experimentation with predictive policing, the method's military origins and undetermined efficacy have come under fire from some activists and academics. Many worry that it is simply an extension of existing police practices that unjustly target people of color, albeit this time under the guise of objective technology.

Whitney Richards-Calathes, a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York who is studying predictive policing, said that predictive policing in Los Angeles has its conceptual origins in the controversial "broken windows" theory championed by former LAPD chief William Bratton. Under broken-windows policing, officers are encouraged to aggressively police small crimes and even simply examples of disorder. "Predictive policing works on this notion of broken windows. It is technology that predicts these minor offenses, like burglary or auto theft," Richards-Calathes said. "There is no evidence that it is an effective technology for murders, and of course, it is not a technology marketed to hit much more serious issues such as white-collar crime."

Richards-Calathes points out that a large part of determining policing strategy is determining the definition of a crime and which crimes deserve attention. "The most over-policed crimes are offenses that are believed to be committed by people of color," she said.

Richards-Calathes also noted that UCLA professor Brantingham has monetized his research on predictive policing in the form of PredPol Inc., a for-profit company that is marketing a proprietary crime-prediction computer program to municipal police departments as a solution to reduced staffing during a time of fiscal constraint.

In 2012, Brantingham and UCLA postdoc George Mohler, who had by then joined the faculty of Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, and a team of businessmen from Santa Cruz, California, incorporated Predpol. Over the next two years, they signed up cities including Seattle, Richmond, California, and Columbia, South Carolina, for their cloud-accessed, crime-prediction software. The contracts average over $100,000 each.

According to Richards-Calathes, the testing of experimental technologies on low-income communities of color reflects a deepening of the prison-industrial complex. "City, state, and federal agencies as well as corporations make money, and the technologies are implemented in immigrant, poor, communities of color because these are places that are seen as low in political clout and these are places branded as 'dangerous' and 'criminal,' labels that make it seem as if residents are deserving of such surveillance, monitoring and policing."

Hamid Khan, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, has closely studied LAPD's surveillance and information-gathering techniques. He views predictive policing as "a feedback loop of injustice" that has dubious efficacy, since the algorithms used by LAPD rely on reported crime data in low-income neighborhoods.

"There's a clear bias that is inherent because it can only predict the information that is being uploaded," said Khan. "In other words, it's garbage in, garbage out." According to Khan, the reliance on historical crime data skews police presence toward low-income neighborhoods that are already saturated with cops.

"The way the model works is previous crime data is put into these computer algorithms that can predict future crime," Khan said. "This is low-level survival crime, so the same neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, predominantly nonwhite communities, people of color."

In addition to the racialized aspect of crime prediction, Khan is also disturbed by the increasing reliance of police on business analytics and algorithms. Setting aside the element of profit for private companies that make such software, Khan warns that predictive policing has the potential to invert core principles of "justice."

"In essence, the principle that has been held for the longest time - of innocent until proven guilty - has now been turned onto its head because now we're all guilty until proven innocent." Khan said.

Copyright, Truthout.

[-] 1 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Hugo Chavez Frias: In Memory, Solidarity, Commitment to Participatory Democracy and Justice in Peace

Thursday, 06 March 2014 12:25 By Danny Glover and James Counts Early, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/22274-hugo-chavez-frias-in-memory-solidarity-commitment-to-participatory-democracy-and-justice-in-peace

A year after the death of Hugo Chávez Frías, we take time to reflect about his life, his virtues and limitations, his public promises, achievements and unfinished work. Chávez was a bold thinker, uncompromising in his goal of constructing a new, just, economically productive Venezuela.

On March 5, 2014, the government of Venezuela and millions of Venezuelan citizens, joined by many thousands around the world, including heads of state, commemorated the first anniversary of the death of Hugo Chávez Frías. We also will take time to reflect about his life, his virtues and limitations, his public promises, achievements, and unfinished work. At the invitation of the Venezuelan people and government, we joined the commemorations in Caracas, will meet with President Nicolas Maduro and Foreign Minister Elías Jaua, and will make a special visit to talk with Afro-Venezuelan communities in Barlovento about their cooperative economic projects.

We met Chávez for the first time in 2003 in Caracas on an invitational visit of the TransAfrica Forum Board, then chaired by Danny and directed by Bill Fletcher Jr., to participate in the inauguration of the Bolivarian Martin Luther King Jr. School in the coastal town of Naiguata, where large numbers of Venezuelans of African descent live. Our visit also coincided with the launch of official recognition of King's birthday as a national day of celebration in Venezuela.

We became deeply interested and supportive of his vision and projects to manifest a secure national sovereignty and self-determination project that would foster formulation and implementation of profoundly new forms of democratic participation and material development. We bonded with Chávez in mutual interest and determination to confront racism; overcome a lack of education, health care and employment; and support political participation of the masses of impoverished, marginalized, alienated Venezuelans.

TransAfrica has a long history of solidarity with independence and self-determination of the Haitian people, and Chávez was steeped in the history of the Haitian Revolution and the contributions of Haitian government leaders and Haitian fighters and ships that assisted Simon Bolivar's military mobilization against Spanish colonialism. His appreciation was not just historical. He deeply felt and materially expressed an obligation of Latin America and the Caribbean to fulfill a debt to Haiti for its contribution to Latin American and Caribbean liberation from colonialism. Some years later on another visit, we were called late one night to go the presidential palace to meet with Chávez about support for a delegation sent by exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "Danny and James, I trust you," he said as he inquired what we thought he should do about the request for support from the Haitian activists who had unexpectedly arrived. He immediately had them brought to the palace. He listened patiently and gave instructions to find them housing, employment and support for their Haiti projects.

We came to affectionately refer to Chávez among ourselves as "the Big Man" or "Little Brother" - we were senior in age. He readily avowed his Afro-descendant family roots, often observing "Mother Africa" in "my big lips and curly hair." He proudly asserted those prominent physical features and social and cultural affinity with Afro-Venezuelans and with Africa and the Diaspora. He made a point in his administration to increase Venezuelan embassies in Africa. He asked us to tour Africa with him as he wanted to strengthen economic and cultural relations. His most spiteful critics gleefully highlighted his African connections in mocking attacks against him and his progressive people-centered development policies.

Chávez worked tirelessly to ensure that the marginalized and disenfranchised in Venezuela and across Latin America and the Caribbean would one day exercise and benefit from the transformative justice and equality that comes through progressive reforms that lead to systemic democratic and economic change. In response, citizens organized and repeatedly invested their votes in support of his leadership. Citizen participation expanded exponentially under Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution. Millions of citizens came to fervently express patriotism and support for uncompromised national self-determination and sovereignty. Chávez even extended solidarity to US citizens who could not afford heating oil in the winter or count on private profit-driven US energy corporations to be socially responsible and help needy citizens.

While fending off constant criticism and destabilization attempts, he inspired citizens and governments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to not just criticize and protest poverty; a lack of health care, education and employment; and interference in their internal affairs. He worked with them to become active in the democratic process and democratic institutions to critique and dismantle economic principles and practices that have pitched so many millions into a downward spiral of impoverishment, misery and war, and alienation from civic engagement.

Chávez was a bold thinker and a forceful advocate for justice. Hero worship was not his intent, although he handled in stride super admiration from fellow citizens and citizens and leaders around the world, many of whom idolized him and still do today. Uncompromising in his long-term goal of defeating neoliberalism and constructing a new, just, economically productive Venezuelan socialism, he was proactive in engaging different ideological views and different economic projects. He undertook this work to be a complicated process of mutual solidarity.

His anti-democratic detractors resorted to anti-constitutional measures, a coup and unceasing malicious, untruthful media attacks and economic sabotage. Speaking candidly about Chávez, former US President Jimmy Carter reached the same conclusions as we did from our official participation as observers of Venezuelan presidential elections, visiting voting sites and speaking with pro-Chávez and opposition voters selected by their voting precincts to ensure fairness and transparency in the voting process. Carter offered his objective appraisal of Chávez and the Bolivarian democracy project: "Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chávez's commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen. ... Venezuela probably has the most excellent voting system that I have ever known."

We have no doubts that Chávez would be dismayed but resolute in the face of the unfolding inflammatory protests and violence of the Venezuelan opposition and the expressed strategy to undermine the constitutional achievements and electoral will of the Venezuelan majority. He would want people of honest, fair-minded principle to thoughtfully support, critically evaluate and earnestly improve upon his grand vision and dedicated state assistance in support of proactive citizen-involvement and self-uplift.

Sylvia Hill, vice president of the TransAfrica Forum board; James Counts Early; Danny Glover, board member of the TransAfrica Forum, shake hands with Venezuelan National Assembly Deputy and indigenous rights activist Noheli Pocaterra, during a visit of the TransAfrica delegation to Caracas on January 8, 2004. (TransAfrica photo)

He wasn't afraid to speak truth to the powerful and to simultaneously organize with the deprived to implement transformative economic, social and political policies that, to date, have saved thousands of lives through free health care and educated millions through universal education. These policies have transformed a region through community-centered development in which empowered citizens have organized through Petro-Caribe oil programs and the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations (CELAC) to defend social justice and economic and democratic gains that Caribbean and Latin American citizens have won during the last decade andthat many in the United States and Africa have benefitted from.

Commemoration of the life and contributions of Hugo Chávez Frías should not be about hero worship or uncritical praise of his unfinished Bolivarian project. There is no question that he set forth a singular profile, but we should not lose sight of the fact that he was a committed social individual, ultimately one among the many Venezuelans and people around the world dedicated to justice, equality, self-determination and sovereignty. Although he was vigorous, at times assertive, in arguing his principles, forthright in challenging his critics and passionate in his polices and collaborations with the poor and marginalized, he did indeed work successfully with people and national leaders often of radically different outlooks and stations in life in Venezuela and the United States and around the world.

We will forever remember Chávez as we do King and Mandela in their bold convictions about justice, in their deep courage against great destructive powers and in their human foibles that nevertheless led social movements and governance policies that inspired and improved the lives of their societies and the world. And we ask you to do so also, but to do so by critically taking up solidarity with the Venezuelan and Latin American and Caribbean peoples and their governments that in memory of Hugo Chávez Frías are still inspired by his leadership and sincerely strive to improve their democracy, their self-determination and sovereignty, and their material and spiritual well-being.

Copyright, Truthout.

[+] -4 points by RadBrad (12) 10 years ago

Yeah, "political prisoner", okay. Cause the Black Panthers were just a misunderstood civil rights group who never resorted to killing cops or anything like that.

[-] 5 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

The Black Panthers were a political party for self-defense that formed in response to the lethal racist behavior of killer cops. So, yeah, an innocent man imprisoned because of his political affiliation with a group that supported self-defense against killer cops was indeed a political prisoner.

[+] -4 points by RadBrad (12) 10 years ago

An innocent man who was running from the shooting of two cops and who shot back at cops, sounds real innocent.

[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 10 years ago

Seeing as how there had been neither sufficient evidence nor consistent testimony presented at his trial to produce a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, you confirm his identity as having been the shooter based on what?

[-] -1 points by RadBrad (12) 10 years ago

Shot at cops=innocent

[-] 1 points by MattLHolck (16833) from San Diego, CA 10 years ago

as a community leader such a move would be counter productive

and not reflect the discipline such groups follow