United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, 4 March 2015. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities. Over time, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices have sown deep mistrust between parts of the community and the police department, undermining law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.”
Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division
A Brutal Beating Wakes Attica’s Ghosts
Tom Robbins, A Brutal Beating Wakes Attica’s Ghosts: A Prison, Infamous for Bloodshed, Faces a Reckoning as Guards Go on Trial. The New York Times, 28 February 2015. “This article was produced in collaboration with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.” On the evening of 9 August 2011 guards told George Williams, an inmate at Attica prison, that he was being taken from his cell for a urine test. “Mr. Williams was wondering why a sergeant would be doing the grunt work of conducting an impromptu drug test when, he said, a fist hammered him hard on the right side of his rib cage. He doubled up, collapsing to the floor. More blows rained down. Mr. Williams tried to curl up to protect himself from the pummeling of batons, fists and kicks. Someone jumped on his ankle. He screamed in pain. He opened his eyes to see a guard aiming a kick at his head, as though punting a football. I’m going to die here, he thought.”
Playing With Fire: How Junk Science Sent Claude Garrett to Prison for Life
Liliana Segura, Playing With Fire: How Junk Science Sent Claude Garrett to Prison for Life. The Intercept, 24 February 2015. “Just before dawn, on the unseasonably warm morning of February 24, 1992, a small house caught fire in Old Hickory, Tennessee, a few miles northeast of Nashville. The one-story cinderblock home, located at 114 Broadway Street, in a low-income neighborhood called Hopewell, was shared by 35-year-old Claude Francis Garrett and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Lorie Lee Lance. Claude did construction jobs, and Lorie waited tables at the Uno’s Pizzeria while going to school part time. As the fire tore through the living room, devouring the furniture, smoke and flames rose rapidly behind the front windows, then burst through the door. Across the street, a dog started barking.”
Guantánamo torturer [Richard Zuley] led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession
Spencer Ackerman, Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession. The Guardian, 18 February 2015. “In a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture, a Guardian investigation [reveals] that Richard Zuley, a detective on Chicago’s north side from 1977 to 2007, repeatedly engaged in methods of interrogation resulting in at least one wrongful conviction and subsequent cases more recently thrown into doubt following allegations of abuse.” Part One: Bad lieutenant–American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo. 18 February 2015. “At the notorious wartime prison, Richard Zuley oversaw a shocking military interrogation that has become a permanent stain on his country. Part One of a Guardian investigation reveals he used disturbingly similar tactics to extract confessions from minorities for years–as a police officer in urban America [Chicago].” Part Two: How Chicago police condemned the innocent: a trail of coerced confessions. 19 February 2015. “Before his interrogation tactics got supercharged on detainees in Guantánamo, Richard Zuley extracted confessions from minority Americans in Chicago–at least one leading to a wrongful conviction. Part Two of a Guardian investigation finds a trail of dubious murder cases and a city considering the costs.”
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. Equal Justice Initiative, 10 February 2015. “The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) today [10 February 2015] released Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, which documents EJI’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 3959 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 700 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.” Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror: Report Summary. “For a copy of the full-length report, please e-mail EJI at contact_us@eji.org or call 334.269.1803.”
Swiss Leaks: Banking Giant HSBC Sheltered Murky Cash Linked to Dictators and Arms Dealers
Gerard Ryle, Will Fitzgibbon, Mar Cabra, Rigoberto Carvajal, Marina Walker Guevara, Martha M. Hamilton and Tom Stites, Swiss Leaks: Banking Giant HSBC Sheltered Murky Cash Linked to Dictators and Arms Dealers. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. 8 February 2015. “HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) continued to offer services to clients who had been unfavorably named by the United Nations, in court documents and in media as connected to arms trafficking, blood diamonds and bribery. HSBC served those close to discredited regimes such as that of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian president Ben Ali and current [2015] Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad…. The bank repeatedly reassured clients that it would not disclose details of accounts to national authorities, even if evidence suggested that the accounts were undeclared to tax authorities in the client’s home country. Bank employees also discussed with clients a range of measures that would ultimately allow clients to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. This included holding accounts in the name of offshore companies to avoid the European Savings Directive, a 2005 Europe-wide rule aimed at tackling tax evasion through the exchange of bank information.”
A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA. Rolling Stone, 19 November 2014. “From reading headlines today, one might think colleges have suddenly become hotbeds of protest by celebrated anti-rape activists. But like most colleges across America, genteel University of Virginia has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy. There are no red-tape-wearing protests like at Harvard, no “sex-positive” clubs promoting the female orgasm like at Yale, no mattress-hauling performance artists like at Columbia, and certainly no SlutWalks. UVA isn’t an edgy or progressive campus by any stretch. The pinnacle of its polite activism is its annual Take Back the Night vigil, which on this campus of 21,000 students attracts an audience of less than 500 souls. But the dearth of attention isn’t because rape doesn’t happen in Charlottesville. It’s because at UVA, rapes are kept quiet, both by students – who brush off sexual assaults as regrettable but inevitable casualties of their cherished party culture – and by an administration that critics say is less concerned with protecting students than it is with protecting its own reputation from scandal. Some UVA women, so sickened by the university’s culture of hidden sexual violence, have taken to calling it ‘UVrApe.'”
Death by Deadline: How bad lawyering and an unforgiving law cost condemned men their last appeal
Ken Armstrong, Death by Deadline: How bad lawyering and an unforgiving law cost condemned men their last appeal, Part One. The Marshall Project, 15 November 2014. And Death by Deadline: When lawyers stumble, only their clients fall, Part Two, The Marshall Project, 16 November 2014. Published in partnership with The Washington Post. “[In 1996] President Bill Clinton endorsed a Republican plan to limit death-penalty appeals by setting a one-year deadline for the filing of habeas corpus petitions. Those federal appeals, which typically come after claims in state courts have been exhausted, allow inmates to seek a final review of their convictions on grounds ranging from juror misconduct to the suppression of evidence by prosecutors. Yet an investigation by The Marshall Project has found that in at least 80 capital cases in which lawyers have missed the deadline – sometimes through remarkable incompetence or neglect – it is almost always the prisoner alone who suffers the consequences.
Among the dozens of attorneys who have borne some responsibility for those mistakes, only one has been sanctioned for missing the deadline by a professional disciplinary body, the investigation found. And that attorney was given a simple censure, one of the profession’s lowest forms of punishment. The lack of oversight or accountability has left many of the lawyers who missed the habeas deadlines free to seek appointment by the federal courts to new death-penalty appeals.