What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
NEW YORK – At a press briefing today, President Obama restated his belief that the prison at Guantánamo should be closed. Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, responded to the president's comments by detailing immediate actions the president could take.
"We welcome the president's continuing commitment to closing Guantánamo and putting an end to the indefinite detention regime there," Romero said. "There are two things the president should do. One is to appoint a senior point person so that the administration's Guantánamo closure policy is directed by the White House and not by Pentagon bureaucrats. The president can also order the secretary of defense to start certifying for transfer detainees who have been cleared, which is more than half the Guantánamo population."
"There's more to be done, but these are the two essential first steps the president can take now to break the Guantánamo logjam," Romero said. "We couldn't agree more with President Obama's statement that the 'idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried – that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.'"
A five-year-old girl has died two weeks after being raped in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
The girl died on Monday evening, said the hospital in Nagpur City where she was being treated.
At least one person has been arrested in connection with the attack.
This is the latest in a spate of similar cases. Earlier this month, the rape and abduction of another five-year-old girl in Delhi sparked protests.
She is said to be recovering slowly after she was kidnapped, raped, tortured and abandoned in a locked room for more than 48 hours, rescued only after neighbours heard her cries. Two men have been held over the incident.
The story of Kendrick Johnson is finally starting to be seen by the public eye, even if it’s three full months after the 17 year old was found dead at Lowndes High School, where he attended in Georgia. On Janurary 11th, Johnson was found dead in the high school’s gymnasium, rolled up inside wrestling mats and his face heavily swollen as if beaten. He also had lacerations on his face and on other parts of his body. The local Sheriff’s investigators have said that they believe Johnson fell into the mats and wasn’t able to get out, and they ruled the death an accident. The investigators clearly wanted to close the case and move on, but the family of Kendrick Johnson has pressed on for answers. They were able to get the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to take on the case, but their investigation has lagged, possibly due to department funding issues. The GBI has not released any information on their findings, now ten weeks after they’ve taken on the case.
The family of Kendrick Johnson has tried to use political pressure in order to get answers. Kendrick’s father Kenneth Johnson was quoted as saying: “We haven’t gotten any information. So if they’re still investigating why haven’t they brought fourth the evidence? We don’t think, we know that he was murdered.” This past week, Johnson’s family took action, and blocked the entrance of the Lowndes County Judaical Complex in a non-violent protest. They were arrested and booked, but their protest worked–it garnered national attention to a case that has lagged and that sheriff’s investigators in Lowndes hoped would quietly fade away.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Days later, the survivors’ faces tensed at the memory of the grim evening: soldiers dousing thatched-roof homes with gasoline, setting them on fire and shooting residents when they tried to flee. As the village rose up in smoke, one said, a soldier threw a child back into the flames.
Even by the scorched-earth standards of the Nigerian military’s campaign against Islamist insurgents stalking the nation’s north, what happened on the muddy shores of Lake Chad this month appears exceptional.
The village, Baga, found itself in the cross hairs of Nigerian soldiers enraged by the killing of one of their own, said survivors who fled here to the state capital, 100 miles south. Their home had paid a heavy price: as many as 200 civilians, maybe more, were killed during the military’s rampage, according to refugees, senior relief workers, civilian officials and human rights organizations.
Earlier this month, on the same day as the horrifying news on the front page of a national newspaper, the Hindustan Times, about a 5-year-old who had been brutally raped, there was something puzzling on page 3. It was an advertisement from the Delhi Police (DP). It showed a graphic of a happy human talking on a mobile phone and crossing the road on a crosswalk. The caption said in bold print, "Talking while crossing is a bad idea." Then, in a smaller font it advised, "Avoid talking on the phone while crossing the road. It could lead to accidents." There were several other similar ads scattered through the paper that day from the DP, speaking of equally innocuous non-issues.
VICIOUS sectarian and ethnic violence has set back the fragile political reforms introduced inMyanmar last year. As tensions flare in the majority-Buddhist country that I and other exiles still call Burma, many fear that the deadly anti-Muslim riots are no accident but the product of an effort led by army hard-liners to thwart both the reforms and Myanmar’s opening to the world.
This weekend, dozens of marijuana activists converged on the National Mall to celebrate 4/20 and push for the drug's legalization. If photos and videos are any indication, most of the attendees were white. As a black man, I find their efforts laudable and hearteningly altruistic. D.C.'s campaign against marijuana is racist. If it wasn't, District marijuana enforcement would look a lot less abominable.
In 2010, I wrote about how Jon Gettman, a public policy professor at Shenandoah University, pored through the city's 2007 marijuana arrest records to discover the District had arrested more pot offenders per capita than any other jurisdiction in the country. Gettman also found that the overwhelming majority of pot miscreants the city went after that year—91 percent—was black.
His analysis suggested yet another black-white divide (like the one for incomeand the one for achievement) driving through the federal city. In 2007, a black person was eight times more likely to be arrested for a District marijuana offense than a white person, even though researchers have exposed what any college pot dealer can tell you from the comfort of his Barcalounger: Members of both racial groups consume cannabis at nearly equal rates.
D.C.'s dope divide is just as striking when you zoom out. According to arrest numbers obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department and crunched by a statistician, between 2005 and 2011, D.C. cops filed 30,126 marijuana offense charges. A staggering number of those—27,560, or 91 percent—were filed against African-Americans. Only 2,097 were filed against whites.
Broken Justice in the Bronx - NYTimes.com: "Quietly over time, the gleaming glass building near Yankee Stadium that houses the Bronx criminal courts has become a place where delay and dysfunction are the norm and central ideals of the American justice system — especially the promise of a speedy trial — have been disgracefully subverted."
A Blogger on Trial in Russia - NYTimes.com: "IF you set out to design a political nemesis who would give Vladimir Putin the shivers, you might well come up with Aleksei Navalny. That is why the trial of the popular Russian activist on Wednesday is the most important political trial in Russia in decades."
The “American psyche” was damaged when an armed arsonist set fire to a Toledo mosque, much like the impact of Monday’s bombings in Boston, a federal judge said in sentencing an Indiana man to 20 years in prison.
Randolph Linn, 52, of St. Joe, Ind., was also ordered to pay restitution of more than $1.4 million. He pleaded guilty in December to setting fire to the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo last September. He told the court he was inspired by media accounts, specificially those on Fox News, suggesting Muslims were threatening Americans and controlling parts of the federal government.
BAGHDAD — With increasing regularity, Iraq’s condemned prisoners are rounded from their cells in groups. One by one, they are led down a hallway to an execution chamber where they are hanged, the sound of the trapdoor reverberating through the cells. There is no advance notice, no last meal, no goodbyes.
Jon Stewart let CNN have it over its erroneous reporting that an arrest had been made in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing. Stewart mocked how much CNN kept boasting of its “exclusive reporting,” which turned ot to be exclusive “because it was completely fucking wrong,” and was even more blown away by how CNN was subsequently backing away from and questioning that very report. Stewart described this as the network “shit[ting] in their own mouths,” christening CNN “the Human Centipede of News.”
According to a Unicef report issued last week — “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries” — the United States once again ranked among the worst wealthy countries for children, coming in 26th place of 29 countries included. Only Lithuania, Latvia and Romania placed lower, and those were among the poorest countries assessed in the study.
But let’s start with the good news, or what little there is to glean from the report: the United States has one of the lowest rates of children reporting that they smoke regularly or have been drunk at least twice, and our children are among the most likely to exercise daily. We also have one of the lowest levels of air pollution. We’re in the middle in terms of overall educational achievement, so I guess that could be considered “good” (give me a break, I’m reaching here). But that’s where the good news ends.
CHRIS ROCK caused a stir last Fourth of July when he tweeted, “Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.” Mr. Rock’s tweet may not have topped the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s “God damn America” sermon, but both sentiments are of a piece, and both seem a far cry from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal to the American dream and his embrace of “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”»
But this view of King as an ardent proponent of American exceptionalism fails to capture a significant part of his thinking, a set of ideas embodied in one of his most famous works, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What we remember today as a stirring piece about freedom and justice was also a furious reading of American history and an equally indignant attitude toward King’s white contemporaries.
WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.
In 1961, an itinerant man named Clarence Earl Gideon was accused of breaking into a pool hall in Florida and stealing some liquor, as well as money from a jukebox and a cigarette machine. He asked the judge in his burglary trial for a lawyer. He was too poor to hire one himself, Gideon said, but he needed help with his case. The judge said the state was under no obligation to provide him with an attorney. So Gideon represented himself, badly, andended up in prison. But he fought his conviction — all the way to the Supreme Court, insisting that there was no such thing as a “fair trial” if both sides didn’t have representation.
Monday marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in that case,Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the constitutional right to free counsel for poor people accused of serious crimes. Most Americans are familiar with this result, thanks to television and movies; police officers say as they arrest someone: “You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
y inbox began filling with hateful, personal attacks on Monday, apparently as a result of conservative reactions to a recent “Lean Forward” advertisement now airing on MSNBC, which you can view above. What I thought was an uncontroversial comment on my desire for Americans to see children as everyone’s responsibility has created a bit of a tempest in the right’s teapot. Allow me to double down.
One thing is for sure: I have no intention of apologizing for saying that our children, all of our children, are part of more than our households, they are part of our communities and deserve to have the care, attention, resources, respect and opportunities of those communities.
When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief. I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade! But of course, that is a ridiculous notion. As a teacher, I have unique responsibilities to the students in my classroom at Tulane University, and I embrace those responsibilities. It is why I love my job.
Then I started asking myself where did I learn this lesson about our collective responsibility to children. So many answers quickly became evident.
I learned it from my mother who, long after her own kids were teens, volunteered on the non profit boards of day care centers that served under-resourced children.
I learned it from my father who, despite a demanding career and a large family of his own, always coached boys’ basketball teams in our town.
I learned it from my third-grade public school teacher, who gave me creative extra work and opened up her classroom to me after school so that I wouldn’t get bored and get in trouble.
I learned it from the men who volunteered as crossing guards in my neighborhood even if they don’t have kids in the schools.
I learned it from the conservative, Republican moms at my daughter’s elementary school, who gave her a ride home every day while I was recovering from surgery.
I learned it watching the parents of Newtown and Chicago as they call for gun control legislation to protect all the children of our communities.
I learn it from my elderly neighbors who never complain about paying property taxes that support our schools, even if they have no children in the schools today.
And I have learned it from other, more surprising sources as well. I find very little common ground with former President George W. Bush, but I certainly agree that no child should be left behind. And while I disagree with the policies he implemented under that banner, I wholeheartedly support his belief that we have a collective national interest in all children doing well.
I’ll even admit that despite being an unwavering advocate for women’s reproductive rights, I have learned this lesson from some of my most sincere, ethically motivated, pro-life colleagues. Those people who truly believe that the potential life inherent in a fetus is equivalent to the actualized life of an infant have argued that the community has a distinct interest in children no matter what the mother’s and father’s interests or needs. So while we come down on different sides of the choice issue, we agree that kids are not the property of their parents. Their lives matter to all of us.
I believe wholeheartedly, and without apology, that we have a collective responsibility to the children of our communities even if we did not conceive and bear them. Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values. But they should be able to do so in a community that provides safe places to play, quality food to eat, terrific schools to attend, and economic opportunities to support them. No individual household can do that alone. We have to build that world together.
So those of you who were alarmed by the ad can relax. I have no designs on taking your children. Please keep your kids! But I understand the fear.
We do live in a nation where slaveholders took the infants from the arms of my foremothers and sold them for their own profit. We do live in a nation where the government snatched American Indian children from their families and “re-educated” them by forbidding them to speak their language and practice their traditions.
But that is not what I was talking about, and you know it.
I venture to say that anyone and everyone should know full well that my message in that ad was a call to see ourselves as connected to a larger whole. I don’t want your kids, but I want them to live in safe neighborhoods. I want them to learn in enriching and dynamic classrooms. I want them to be healthy and well and free from fear. I want them to grow up to agree or disagree with me or with you and to have all the freedom and tools they need to express what they believe.
WASHINGTON — With a coordination and an energy that echo a Supreme Court nomination fight, the Obama administration is pushing for the confirmation of a senior Justice Department lawyer to the country’s most prestigious appellate court. If the effort fails, it could lead to a confrontation with the Senate over the long-simmering issue of judicial nominees.
A bipartisan effort has been mounted to support Sri Srinivasan for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The White House is lobbying some of the president’s most vocal foes, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Administration officials are trumpeting the endorsement of top Republican lawyers like Kenneth W. Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated the Clintons. And former clerks for Supreme Court justices, liberal and conservative, are writing letters of support for the nominee, Sri Srinivasan.
When it comes to the death penalty, the only thing the United States can do is plead the insanity defense. The rest of the advanced world has moved on, but America resolutely remains among the top five executioners — behind China, Iran and Iraq, and just ahead of Pakistan. In Colorado, prosecutors are seeking the death of James Holmes, the clearly insane young man who dyed his hair a vivid orange, allegedly killed 12 people at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” and made no effort to escape. “Justice is death,” declared the prosecutor. The Taliban, I tell you, are among us.
That utterance came from the Arapahoe County district attorney, George Brauchler, who said he decided to go for the max after talking to 60 family members of those murdered. Presumably and understandably, they all favored the death penalty — and I might, too, if someone I loved was murdered. But this is the crime, as heinous as it might be, of a crazy person. Holmes’s execution will not deter anyone else — although sensible gun control might — and so his death, if and when it comes, will amount to vengeance. That’s understandable, but it is not justice.
THE elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn., in December produced two polar public reactions: fear among some Americans that the federal government will restrict gun rights, and hope among others that it will actually do so. Colorado, New York State and, most recently, Connecticut have clamped down on guns, while states like Texas, where I live, are considering legislation that would try to block the enforcement of federal gun regulations. The uncertain approach to guns is good for no one, except perhaps for gunmakers, whose sales have skyrocketed.
The NRA is in the headlines again, promoting “School Safety Shield,” its initiative to get more guns in schools in response to the Newtown shooting. The plan calls for arming select school personnel, who would receive 40-60 hours of training and also undergo background checks to qualify.
In Mississippi, they weren’t waiting for the NRA. Legislators have been working on a proposal to spend $7.5 million on armed guards in that state’s schools and to allow school staff to carry concealed weapons, and are hammering out a final version of the bill now.
"If they're not going to abide by the law and they're going to bring guns in the school and shoot our children and our teachers then I think somebody ought to be shooting back at them," said Senator Joey Fillingane, one of the bill’s co-authors.
On a variety of social and cultural issues, public attitudes are changing rapidly, and in general, are moving in a progressive direction. But as part of this discussion, let's not forget opinions on marijuana use, which have changed dramatically just over the last few years. The Pew Research Center has been polling on the issue for more than four decades, and its new report is the first ever that shows a majority of Americans now favor marijuana legalization.
Some law enforcement agencies in the US use informants in as many as 90% of their drug cases. But there are surprisingly few rules on how informants are used and a groundswell of calls for the system to be reformed.
"Snitches" are staple fare in Hollywood crime dramas, often working secretly with the police to bring down mafia godfathers or powerful drug cartels.
The reality of informants in the US criminal justice system is usually rather different.
Take the case of 46-year-old John Horner, a fast-food restaurant worker who was prescribed painkillers after he lost an eye in an accident in 2000.
Three years ago he was befriended by a man called Matt (not his real name).
"We kind of clicked right off the bat. One day he came to where I worked. We were standing there talking, and I realised he was in pain," says Horner.
RIO DE JANEIRO — An American woman was raped by three men aboard a public van in a six-hour abduction over the weekend that began in the seaside district of Copacabana, the police said.
Turmoil engulfing American prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was sparked by a new base commander whose aggressive approach to the detainees has backfired, according to defense attorneys. The camp is now in the midst of a full-blown revolt, with most of the inmate population committeed to a hunger strike, yet the commander, Col. John V. Bogdan, has rejected the simple demand made by the prisoners, the lawyers said.
With 86 U.S. detainees cleared for release, but held indefinitely nonetheless, the camp had become peaceful over the past few years, with detainees being given a measure of dignity and, for the most cooperative, additional privileges. That changed when Bogdan took control in June 2012 and began confiscating personal items such as photographs, letters and yoga mats, cranking down cell temperatures, and reimposing the practice of searching detainee Qurans for contraband.
HARTFORD — More than three months after the massacre of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., state legislative leaders announced on Monday that they had agreed on what they called the most far-reaching gun-legislation package in the country.
KABUL, Afghanistan — As the shadows lengthened around her family’s hut here in one of Kabul’s sprawling refugee camps, a slight 6-year-old girl ran in to where her father huddled with a group of elders near a rusty wood stove. Her father, Taj Mohammad, looked away, his face glum.
“She does not know what is going to happen,” he said softly.
If, as seems likely, Mr. Mohammad cannot repay his debt to a fellow camp resident a year from now, his daughter Naghma, a smiling, slender child with a tiny gold stud in her nose, will be forced to leave her family’s home forever to be married to the lender’s 17-year-old son.
