Tag Archives: parish

Republican Congressman on Suspected Islamic Radicals: "Kill Them All"

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In response to the London terror attack, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) had an extreme proposal: kill anyone suspected of being an Islamic radical.

On his campaign Faceboook page, Higgins, a former police officer, posted this message:

The free world…all of Christendom…is at war with Islamic horror. Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identity them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.

The post went up early on Sunday morning. On Saturday evening, suspected terrorists killed seven people during an attack on London Bridge. ISIS has claimed credit for these murders.

With his declaration that Christendom is “at war with Islamic horror,” Higgins was embracing a theme of the far right: the fight against extremist jihadists is part of a fundamental clash between Christian society and Islam. And in this Facebook post, he was calling for killing not just terrorists found guilty of heinous actions, but anyone suspected of such an act. He did not explain how the United States could determine how to identify radicalized Islamists in order to deny them entry to the United States. It was unclear whether his proposal to deny any assistance to any nation that harbors “these heathen animals” would apply to England, France, Indonesia, Spain, and other nations where jihadist cells have committed horrific acts of violence.

Higgins office refused to allow a Mother Jones reporter to speak to a spokesman for the congressman. But in an email, his spokesman confirmed the Facebook post was authentic.

In late January, Higgins delivered a fiery floor speech attacking Democrats and the “liberal media” for opposing President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban. He declared that “radical Islamic horror has gripped the world and…unbelievably…been allowed into our own nation with wanton disregard.”

Shortly before running for Congress, Higgins resigned from his post as the public information officer of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office, where he had earned a reputation as the “Cajun John Wayne” for his tough-talking CrimeStopper videos. Higgins abruptly quit after his boss, the sheriff, ordered him to tone down his unprofessional comments. “I repeatedly told him to stop saying things like, ‘You have no brain cells,’ or making comments that were totally disrespectful and demeaning,” the sheriff said.

“I don’t do well reined in,” Higgins noted at the time. “Although I love and respect my sheriff, I must resign.”

Update: Higgins’ campaign spokesman, Chris Comeaux, told Mother Jones in an email: “Rep. Higgins is referring to terrorists. He’s advocating for hunting down and killing all of the terrorists. This is an idea all of America & Britain should be united behind.”

Visit source:  

Republican Congressman on Suspected Islamic Radicals: "Kill Them All"

Posted in Brita, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republican Congressman on Suspected Islamic Radicals: "Kill Them All"

Singer Aaron Neville’s Rough Road to Salvation

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Jacob Blickenstaff

The distinct beauty of Aaron Neville’s voice has been a constant through a recording career that covers regional soul of New Orleans, his integral work with his siblings in the Neville Brothers, his crossover pop success with Linda Ronstadt in the ’80s, and his more recent tributes to his old doo-wop and gospel influences.

Now 75, Neville’s latest album, Apache (a nickname from his youth), reconnects him with the sounds of 1960s and ’70s New Orleans soul, courtesy of producer Eric Krasno of the bands Soulive and Lettuce. Apache also serves as Neville’s reclamation of a youth fraught with challenges. He served a six-month stint in Orleans Parish Prison for car theft at the age of 19, and was later sentenced for burglary (the result of his falling in with a bad manager, the 1950s R&B singer and pimp Larry Williams). He also struggled with addiction into the early ’80s.

Neville’s poems—candid statements on love, awareness of the world, and his memories—are the lyrical source for the majority of the album, a first for a singer whose work is typically more interpretive. But his original songs have been signposts in a long career, starting with the 1960’s “Everyday” on the flip side of his first single, the Neville Brothers staple “Yellow Moon,” and “To Make Me Who I Am,” from the 1997 album of the same title.

Apache presents an opportunity to get to know an honest, humble soul who happens to be one of our greatest living voices. I photographed and spoke with Neville at his farm in Duchess County, New York, where he lives with his wife, Sarah; their peekapoo, Apache Jr.; and a whole bunch of chickens.

Mother Jones: You were 19 when you first set foot in a New Orleans recording studio. Tell me about the experience.

Aaron Neville: I just wanted to sing. I’d been wanting to record, like Ernie K-Doe and Irma Thomas, and I got a chance to be on the same label, Minit Records. Larry Williams got me the first recording session, he and Larry McKinley, who was a disc jockey. I would learn the song right then, because most of the stuff Allen Toussaint wrote. I wrote my first song, “Everyday” and he wrote the B-side, “Over You.” It’s not like today where they can fix things. Whatever you did was what you had—there wasn’t no 10 and 12 takes. If you did harmonies, it was everyone around the same microphone. To hear my voice coming back on the tape, that was amazing: “Oh wow, that’s me.” Then when it started playing on the radio, that was a big thing there.

MJ: I heard a story that Toussaint pushed you to sing more straight-ahead on that first session. Was there much creative tension in that relationship?

AN: No, I just sang that the way he wanted me to, and he was satisfied. After he did the music on “Everyday,” he started modeling everything else he wrote for me behind that—sort of like a doo-wop thing.

MJ: Tell me about your relationship with Larry Williams.

AN: Larry came to New Orleans around ’56 and took the Hawkettes out on the road with him, but he told me, “I’ll be back for you.” When I got out of jail, he got me in the studio to record and took me on the road. He got tired of being misused, so he says he’s going to be a pimp—he went to California and started pimping. When I went out there, he was going to manage me, but I had a contract with Minit records, so I did a few gigs with him and Etta James and Johnny Watson at the 5-4 Ballroom.

I had to do something to earn my keep. Since I didn’t want to pimp, he said we’ve got this guy who will book some burglaries. We’d go and clean the place out, and we had rooms in a hotel out on the highway and we’d fill it up with clothes and suits and whatever. The whole time I’m saying to myself, “Lord, get me out of this, send me back home, please.” So when I did get busted, I said, “Thank you, Jesus.” I ended up doing time in ’63 and part of ’64 fighting forest fires. It was dangerous. That’s when I first got into the weights. I was looking like the Hulk up in there. I was 22 years old.

MJ: The success of 1966’s “Tell It Like It Is”—another local New Orleans production—caused problems in that the label, Parlo, couldn’t keep up with the demand. Was that frustrating for you?

AN: They were trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t. They had to declare bankruptcy, so hey. I was fresh out on the streets with a hit record. I didn’t have time to really think about that. I had people coming at me to manage me—they didn’t have nothing to offer, they were just telling me crazy stuff. They were going to send me on the road with no music, no stage clothes, no nothing. This guy Joe Jones, who was managing the Dixie Cups and Alvin “Shine” Robinson, was a shyster, but he kinda saved the day because he came in and made sure that I had music, clothes, and pictures and stuff. He was a professional but, like I said, a shyster—he was looking out for his interests. At the time, Frank Sinatra wanted to do something with me but Joe didn’t let me know about it, and messed it up.

I never really got paid for “Tell It Like Is,” but I look back at it and say God knew what he was doing; he probably figured that if I had got money back in them days I wouldn’t be here now. That’s okay. I’m here. And I’m still singing the song.

MJ: So, Apache marks the first time in your career you’ve written the lyrics for an entire album.

AN: I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there. So I wanted to do some of my stuff and that’s how I got hooked up with Eric Krasno and Dave Gutter. We started talking on the phone, or texting, and they’d send me some ideas, and then we got in the studio.

MJ: So these songs start purely as poems? Expressions of feeling that you later set to music?

AN: I write when there’s something happening in my life and it helps me to get through whatever. I have to be inspired. I can’t just sit down and plan to write. “Yellow Moon” was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel—she’s dead now—it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I’m home with the kids and looking up and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.

MJ: A few songs on Apache speak of your love for your second wife, Sarah, whom you married in 2010, three years after Joel passed. How did you navigate your grief and open yourself up to a new relationship?

AN: I buried Joel on our 48th anniversary. I had been with her since I was 16. I think Joel might have sent Sarah into my life. It was God-sent. That first year after she passed, I can’t even explain it. I would cry, and people would come and tell me, “I know what you’re going through.” I’d think, “You don’t know what I’m going through.” They had no idea! It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Before that, the lowest part was when Joel had left with the kids and went to be near her momma in ’72. That’s when I did “Hercules.” When Sarah came in, she let me talk about Joel, because it was heavy on me. I’d cry and it was a healing thing, you know?

MJ: Anyone who writes about you points out how distinctive your voice is. Even when you account for your influences—cowboy yodels, early gospel, doo-wop, and soul—there’s something in it that is undeniably unique, improvisational, and in the moment.

AN: There’s a saying, “He who sings prays twice.” It’s like somebody is telling me how to do it. I can’t explain it, and sometimes I’ll be singing and I just want to close my eyes, and I wish I could just hit a note that could cure cancer. That’s how I feel when I’m singing. This lady told me about an autistic boy in Las Vegas, he was about six years old, they couldn’t do nothing with him; he’d flail around and they had to keep him constrained. The only thing that would calm him down: They’d put the headset on and I was singing. It gave me chills to hear that. I said it must have been the God in me touching the God in him. I ain’t gonna take credit for that.

MJ: It’s worth mentioning this beautiful farm that we’re looking out at.

AN: It’s paradise. Going to the city, I’m always in a hurry to get back here. Peace and calm. Sometimes I just sit out there and look at the trees, the harmony in the trees. They just lay together. There are no problems, nobody arguing with each other, except the chickens maybe.

Jacob Blickenstaff

Visit source – 

Singer Aaron Neville’s Rough Road to Salvation

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Paradise, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Singer Aaron Neville’s Rough Road to Salvation

What We Know About Violence in America’s Prisons

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

Safety is an issue in all prisons, but accurate data on violence in prisons can be hard to come by. Here’s a look at what we know about physical and sexual assault in America’s prisons—and what was reported at the private prison in Louisiana where Shane Bauer worked.

Physical Assault Behind Bars

19% of all male inmates in US prisons say they’ve been physically assaulted by other inmates.
21% say they’ve been assaulted by prison staff.

Sexual Assault Behind Bars

Officials reported fewer than 8,800 incidents of rape and other sexual victimization in all American prisons and jails in 2011.
Yet between 3 percent and 9 percent of male inmates say they have been sexually assaulted behind bars, which suggests more than 180,000 current prisoners may have been victimized.
Former inmates of private state prisons are half as likely to say they have been sexually victimized by another inmate as those who were in public state prisons. However, they are nearly twice as likely to report being sexually victimized by staff.
66% of incidents of sexual misconduct by prison staff involve sexual relationships with inmates who “appeared to be willing,” according to authorities.

Women are…

7% of the total prison population
22% of all victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization
33% of all victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization

Private vs. Public prisons

There is no current data on how violence in public prisons compares with violence in private ones. The last study released by the Department of Justice, in 2001, found that the rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults was 38 percent higher at private prisons than at public prisons.

Violence at Winn Correctional Center

While working as a guard at the Corrections Corporation of America’s Winn Correctional Center in early 2015, Shane Bauer noted 12 stabbings over two months. Yet records from Louisiana’s Department of Corrections show that Winn reported just five stabbings during the first 10 months of the year. (CCA says it reports all assaults and that the doc may have classified incidents differently.)

During those 10 months, Winn reported finding 114 inmate weapons—nearly 3 times what was found at the GEO-run Allen Correctional Center, a medium-security prison of roughly the same size.
Winn’s rate of uses of “immediate” force by staff at Winn was 40 times greater than that of the similarly sized state-run prison in Avoyelles Parish.
The rate of incidents where Winn inmates were sprayed with pepper spray or other chemical agents was 3 times the rate of such incidents at Allen and Avoyelles.

Read More:  

What We Know About Violence in America’s Prisons

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What We Know About Violence in America’s Prisons

How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

One of the best parts of my job at Mother Jones is teaming up with colleagues to shoot and produce video for our investigations. In March 2015, I traveled to Louisiana to work with Shane Bauer, a reporter who was in his fourth month as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a medium-security private prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

It was Friday the 13th, around 7:45 p.m. The night was warm and overcast when I set out to collect “B-roll” of the prison, a 20-minute drive from Winnfield, the nearest town. Between the prison and the Kisatchie National Forest was a wide, unfenced field. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was prison property. I walked into this open field with a telephoto lens, intending to get a shot of Winn from about 1,000 feet away.

Why We Sent a Reporter to Work in a Private Prison

Then I stepped deep in mud. I used my iPhone flashlight to check out the muck. About two minutes later I saw searchlights coming from the direction of the prison. I walked back to my rental car parked on the side of the road. A powerful light swept the trees, emanating from a prison patrol vehicle that pulled up about 150 feet behind me. I called out “Hello? Hello?” and waited for an answer. When no one addressed me, I got into my car and drove away.

I wound my SUV back through the dark forest—and straight into several police cars and prison vehicles blocking the road outside Winn. I stepped out of the car and was surrounded by three sheriff’s deputies and five or six men dressed in black from head to toe. I saw their faces as they passed in and out of the light from their headlights and flashers. Shane had told me about them: They were members of the prison’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT), the tactical squad called in to restore order when things got out of hand.

I handed over my Australian driver’s license. In my panic, I told the cops I’d stopped to go to the bathroom beside the road. I quickly realized things were getting serious, and I told them I was a photographer working in the area.

Police body camera footage that I later obtained captured part of my arrest (and gloriously, for a videographer, from two angles). “What kind of pictures you got there?” asked the main arresting officer, Winn Parish deputy Kelly Fannin, a paunchy man with a white mustache.

“They’re my pictures,” I replied. I knew they probably couldn’t look at the images on my cameras or memory cards without a search warrant. I don’t remember acting this defiant at the time, but there it is, on video. Still, I wore a worried grin on my face and I sounded scared.

“Now, wait a minute. Let me explain something: What you took here don’t belong to you,” Fannin said, stabbing the air with his finger. “When you come here in this country, when you get around a prison, you don’t fuck around, okay?”

With my camera gear now strewn on the road by the SORT officers, my profession seemed obvious. But the cops and guards were amped up like I was a big catch. I heard them talking repeatedly about the threat of ISIS and the possibility that I was an actual terrorist. “An Australian with a Texas license plate in Louisiana runs some red flags,” Winn Parish Sheriff Cranford Jordan later joked to CNNMoney.

Fannin demanded my camera’s memory card. His temper was rising: “Let’s have it.”

“No, sir, I’m not going to show you that,” I said.

“I will take everything you’ve got!” he said.

I reached down to grab my camera from the pile of gear, setting off a bout of tussling and yelling. “Whoa, come here!” Fannin grabbed my arm in a stiff grip.

“You can’t take my camera,” I protested. “I know that.” The cops said they would get a search warrant. But, Fannin warned, “If you don’t want to give it to me, I will take it. It’s just that simple.”

“Do you want me to charge you for going on that property?” he continued. “And put you in jail tonight and show you what a jail is?”

“I mean, no sir, I do not want that,” I replied.

Going through my gear, the officers pulled out an aerial drone I’d brought along—a discovery that ratcheted up the tension even more. Never mind that it was broken and I was planning to return it to Amazon.

Deputy Tommy Chandler told me to “go ahead and turn and put your hands behind your back.”

“I’m cooperating,” I said.

“No, you ain’t,” he shot back.

After a Miranda warning, I was put in the back seat of a patrol car next to a police dog in a cage. The door slammed.

The deputies’ body cameras continued to roll after I was taken into custody. “We’ll just book him for trespassing,” one said. “I know what it was: He was out here looking for kangaroos!”

“Apparently they’ve got different laws over there in New South Wales, Australia,” an officer can be heard saying. “Welcome to the Free State of Winn!”

The footage also shows one of the prison’s SORT members scrolling through the contents of my camera, without a warrant, while the deputies looked on. The Winn Parish sheriff later said he was “not aware” of anyone searching my belongings; his office declined to comment further for this article. CCA’s spokesman said that the company was “not aware of the camera footage or what it contains.” Yet months later, Winn’s former assistant chief of security emailed Shane what looked like a photo of a screen showing an image of him. The image’s geolocation data suggested it had been created on the premises of the sheriff’s office. There’s only one place the original image of Shane could have come from: my memory card, which contained a video of him that I’d made shortly before my arrest.

I arrived at the Winnfield jail sometime around 10pm. I was charged with simple criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. (In Louisiana you can be charged with trespassing even if you didn’t know that you were on private land.) The computer system couldn’t compute the address on my Australian drivers’ license, which gave one guy plenty of time to brag about how he once made it with an Aussie girl with hairy armpits.

The Corrections Corporation of America, by the numbers

“Are kangaroos good for hunting?” the old jailer asked me. “Perhaps we’ll all have to go there when Hillary Clinton becomes president.” After I was made to strip and show my asshole (just to make sure I wasn’t carrying any contraband), I was put in handcuffs and leg shackles and made to wait in a small office surrounded by three or four guards.

I mostly observed my right to remain silent. But I also wanted to be a good cultural ambassador, so I told them kangaroos are eaten for meat and sometimes are regarded as pests that need to be shot. They seemed to like that.

Maybe it was the stress, or the adrenaline, or the accents, but I understood only every fourth or fifth word the cops and prison orderlies were saying to me. The bewilderment was mutual. I do know that I was threatened with an FBI investigation, immigration detention, and deportation. I asked to speak to a lawyer, but that never happened. I was allowed to call my editor, who started working like hell to get me out.

A couple of hours later, around midnight, my mugshot was snapped and my fingerprints were taken. My arrest records indicate that CCA said that night that it wanted trespassing charges filed against me. The jailer finally led me to a small cell separated from rest of the prisoners. The sheriff had told me earlier that, “They’d whoop you bad.” A 23-year-old named Alex was put in there with me, but he was too out of it to really talk, apart from telling me everything was gonna be okay. My standard-issue orange jumpsuit swam on me. “I wish I could keep it and wear it out in Brooklyn,” I thought.

The next morning, I felt grateful to be protected by prison bars. “Hey girl, hey girl,” someone shouted from the next cell. “You ever slept with a man? Do you want to?” It wasn’t an invitation; it was a threat.

This went on sporadically for hours. “No one’s letting us rape that girl’s hole.” I was scared I might do something to really out myself—I’m gay. I was hoping that just as being an Aussie threw a curve ball at the cops’ ability to identify a real terrorist, it also might scramble their gaydar.

Sheriff Jordan, a big man with a comb-over who liked to make jokes, came by to tell me the judge had denied me bail. It was Saturday, which meant it would be two days before I could get a hearing. Worse, it meant two nights of threats and snoring and unpredictable meals and gawking. I asked if I could call my parents. “Tell them we didn’t shoot you at dawn,” Jordan said.

I tried to start reading the the third volume of Game of Thrones, taken from the jail bookshelf. I wrote a letter. A prisoner sang a top 40 tune, but in a slow, sad baritone—”So baby now, take me into your loving arms, kiss me under the light of a thousand stars…” The prisoners and guards all began to call me “Australia.”

I started to resign myself to several days in this shithole, even though Jordan told me Mother Jones‘ lawyer had been “hollering” down the phone line, a fact that made him displeased.

Then suddenly, at about 4:30 p.m., I was shackled again and taken to be interrogated by two state police officers, a local deputy, and—you’ve got to be kidding me—a Homeland Security agent. These new guys already knew everything about me, and seemed bored that I was just a journalist. “Write all the exposés about CCA you like,” one told me. After about 45 minutes, I shuffled from the room with promises that the judge would soon set bond.

About five hours later, I heard that I’d made bail—for $10,000. “How cool are drones! I really want one!” said an officer, a professed camera buff, as he took stock of my equipment and processed me out of the jail. “Send me a copy of the article when it’s done.”

The old jailer came down to say good-bye. “I’m so sorry you had to see that,” he said. “Some of these places I wouldn’t put my dog in.” I thought about my cellmate Alex and wondered about the people who would never see the outside of Louisiana’s criminal justice system. I felt good to be walking free, unscathed.

Everyone shook my hand as I left to meet the bail bondsman, who turned out to be the son of the local lawyer hired to kick-start my defense, the fabulously named Bobby Culpepper. (Culpepper died suddenly several months later at age 74. My case was eventually concluded by a criminal defense lawyer named Marty Stroud.) The bondsman drove me to a gas station at the edge of Winnfield where Shane and his wife Sarah were waiting for me, tired yet relieved. We embraced, then we got the hell out of there.

News of my arrest broke not long after we left town, first in the local paper (the Winn Parish Enterprise called me a “renowned international journalist,” which I will treasure forever), then in CNNMoney, the Washington Post, and Gawker. I didn’t comment publicly, but the police account of was over-dramatized: The sheriff claimed I’d run from my vehicle toward the prison’s fence, which never happened. “You don’t go to a prison at night. You don’t violate the law when you’re doing a story,” Sheriff Jordan told CNNMoney. CCA issued a statement about Shane and me. It said that trespassing “is a security threat that we take very seriously” and noted that a drone “could be used to transport contraband or provide detailed imagery in a way that could create a security risk.”

Seven months later, I entered a no contest plea on a criminal trespass charge and paid a $500 fine. The alternative was to face down a maximum sentence of 30 days in prison and a trial that could have potentially compromised our investigation. The court then dismissed the conviction under a state law that allowed me to have my criminal record expunged.

I recall one prisoner yelling out to me during my night in orange: “You’re gonna get Winnfield on the news.”

We did. I’m really proud of our work.

More: 

How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

Posted in Accent, alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In late November 2015, New Orleans police arrested a man named Joseph Allen for attempted murder in relation to one of the bloodiest nights the city had seen in years. Shots had broken out at a party in Bunny Friend Park, wounding 17 people. Allen was the first of several suspects to be detained after an eyewitness named him as a shooter.

Except that Allen hadn’t been in town at the time. Within a week of his arrest, his private attorney had tracked down footage of the 32-year-old shopping for baby clothes with his pregnant wife at three stores in Houston, Texas, putting him far from the crime scene. A week or so later, Allen learned that no charges would be filed against him—he was released from jail the next day.

In his office down the street from the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, chief public defender Derwyn Bunton couldn’t help but think about what might have happened to Allen had he ended up with a public defender. In the wake of a budget crisis that had ravaged the Orleans Public Defenders Office several years earlier, Allen would’ve been lucky even to talk with one of the office’s overworked lawyers—there were 42 at the time—within any reasonable time frame. Only then would one of the office’s eight investigators have received a request to look into Allen’s case.

Bunton suspects his investigators wouldn’t have made it to Houston in time to obtain the store security footage that exonerated Allen. “I’m not going let people believe that everything is okay, that they get assigned a public defender and we’ve got that kind of resources,” Bunton told me, adding that two of the 10 Bunny Friend Park co-defendants are being represented by his office. “We don’t.”

Here’s how one Florida public defender’s office turned things around. Tristan Spinski

This past January, with more budget cuts looming, Bunton’s office did something drastic: It began turning away clients. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly responded with a federal lawsuit against the Orleans Parish defenders and the Louisiana Public Defender Board that oversees them. The suit alleges that rejecting new cases amounts to leaving people languishing in jail without counsel in violation of the Constitution. Late last month, Bunton told the Times-Picayune that his office cannot afford to represent itself in the lawsuit.

“The lawsuit itself can’t change anything,” concedes Brandon Buskey, an attorney for the ACLU. “The political actors in Louisiana have to step up. The lawsuit can put pressure on them. It can point out that the system is unconstitutional. But if the state wants a better system, it has to fix it.”

In a court filing—and an interview with Mother Jones—Bunton denies that his actions were unconstitutional. “Is it better to violate the constitution by being incompetent and ineffective?” he says. “I think where we would be violating the Constitution and ethics and professional standards would be to continue to take on cases we don’t have the resources to handle.”

Bunton’s move was just the latest in a string of decisions since last July designed to keep the lights on at the struggling defenders office, which represents more than 80 percent of New Orleans’ criminal defendants. It has been a rough turnabout for an office that as recently as five years ago was cited by the Southern Center for Human Rights as “an inspiration” for its “vigorous client-centered representation.” Even then, the office was looking at a shortfall for 2012 and had begun to cut back on staff. “Louisiana is an extreme at this moment,” says Marc Schnidler, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute. “How they got to where they are—that tells the story of indigent defense in this country.”

Like many of their peers around the nation, the Orleans Parish public defenders are saddled with massive caseloads on a shoestring budget. In 2014, the office’s 51 attorneys juggled more than 22,000 cases—a whopping 431 per lawyer—which included nearly 8,000 felonies and nine death penalty cases. And while rejecting clients was seen as a last resort, Orleans is not the only one doing it. Fourteen of the state’s 42 judicial districts have cut back on their defender services and six have stopped taking certain cases, according to James Nixon, chair of the Louisiana Public Defender Board.

The way the state funds defense for its poor is deeply flawed, criminal justice experts agree. Louisiana is the only state where public defenders rely heavily on income sources that fluctuate significantly. In its 2015-16 fiscal year, Orleans Parish got just 40 percent of its budget from the state—which faces a new shortfall of at least $800 million for the upcoming fiscal year. The rest of the money had to be found locally. Nearly 40 percent of the defenders budget relied on local court fines and fees. But according to a state Supreme Court report, the number of traffic tickets filed in Louisiana courts—already low post-Hurricane Katrina—has dropped by 29 percent since 2009. This has translated to a shortfall for public defenders. “What you have is a local funding crisis,” Nixon told me.

The chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court noted in a recent annual report to the legislature that numerous defender offices could face insolvency. “We’re funding public defenders offices off the backs of folks who can’t afford a lawyer,” explains Clarke Beljean, a Plaquimines Parish defender who worked at the Orleans Parish office for six years. The Defender Board’s 2014 report called the situation “unstable, unreliable, and untenable.”

And this system was supposed to be an improvement.

Prior to Katrina, impoverished defendants in Louisiana didn’t even have access to full-time public defenders. Instead, parish-level defender boards enlisted private lawyers to handle those clients. New Orleans was served by the Orleans Indigent Defender Program, which consisted of 54 attorneys with a slim $2 million budget, working part time out of a room in the courthouse.

The hurricane disrupted everything. In Katrina’s wake, according to a 2012 evaluation, only six attorneys were left to handle more than 6,000 open cases in Orleans Parish. The local defender board resigned, a new reform-minded group took over, and the Indigent Defender Program became the Orleans Public Defenders office. In 2006, it won a $3 million Justice Department grant for rebuilding efforts and to fund 40 positions for two years. New lawyers were recruited, salaries were increased, and the original lawyers were told to give up their private practices and focus on public defense. The office, which was adorned with donated furniture and equipment, found new digs and shifted its philosophy to a client-based model, meaning that public defenders would now be connected with defendants within a day of their arrest and stick with them throughout their case—instead of being assigned to a courtroom and handling whatever cases came through in a given day. In 2007, the legislature established the state Public Defender Board to oversee similar district offices.

Bunton was named Orleans Parish chief public defender in late 2008. Bolstered by grants and city and state funding, the office grew into a 72-attorney shop with 20 investigators and a $9 million budget. “If we were a stock, we were trending up,” Bunton says. But four years later, the office was hit with large cuts at both the state and local level—including a drop in traffic-ticket revenue. Bunton tearfully broke the news to staff: He would have to lay off 27 people.

The remaining attorneys, who already worked 60- to 80-hour weeks, had to pick up the slack. “It’s like, you’re already trying to keep your head above water while holding however many pounds of weight on your back and then they throw you a baby. You’re like, ‘What do I do?'” says former Orleans defender Clarke Beljean, who survived the cutbacks that day. “And then they throw you another one. And then they throw you a few more, and they’re like, ‘What do you mean, you can’t hold these seven babies above water?’ Honestly, that’s the feeling.”

Bunton’s lawyers routinely exceed the maximum recommended caseloads that many experts view as excessive. In 2015, the office had four attorneys handling roughly 9,500 misdemeanors—a rate nearly six times the recommended limit of 400 per lawyer. The offices’s 55 felony defenders had 7,705 cases that year, which falls within the 150-felony limit, but the office recently lost more lawyers, including veterans whose high-level cases had to be redistributed. Three months into 2016, the office projects that the 39 remaining felony attorneys are already exceeding the 150-case limit, its spokeswoman told me. As of April 3, the office had refused 53 cases and put another 56 on a waiting list.

A 2009 Department of Justice report noted that, to properly defend 91 percent of the city’s indigent defendants—private attorneys working pro bono would presumably handle the rest—the Orleans office would need an $8.2 million budget and 70 staff attorneys. In real life, Bunton’s office is projected to end up with just $5.9 million—$1 million less than it expected. About 30 percent of the shortfall is expected to come from subpar revenue from fines and fees. Meanwhile, the office has one-third fewer attorneys than the DOJ recommended, and about half as many as the DA’s office employs.

In a letter to city and state officials last June, Bunton outlined a cost-cutting plan he said would “likely cause serious delays in the courts and potentially constitutional crises” for criminal justice in New Orleans. A month later, his office imposed a hiring freeze. To make ends meet, the defenders office even resorted to crowd-funding. In September, after the comedian John Oliver did a segment about the problem on his HBO show, it raised just over $86,000 to help the office narrow its budget gap. At a November 20 hearing, Bunton asked the courts to stop sending his office new cases. In January, hoping to stave off further hardship, the New Orleans City Council shelled out $200,000 for the defenders. Jo-Ann Wallace, executive director of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, says that Orleans Parish’s decision to turn away clients as a last resort is consistent with “their ethical obligation to provide zealous representation.”

On the state level, the Public Defenders Board is facing cuts that could range from 30 percent to 62 percent, Nixon told me. Under the latter scenario, two judges wrote in an op-ed, the board could “force the complete elimination of juvenile defense services statewide.” A final budget is due from the legislature in July.

As the Orleans office waits for the ax to fall, Bunton is ethically torn about the choices he’s been forced to make. “It sucks,” he says. “I don’t do this job to tell people no.” In fact, he’s embraced the ACLU lawsuit as a way to pressure state officials. Indeed, over the past decade, deluged defenders’ offices in Florida, Missouri, and Montana have turned away clients as a way to get legislators’ attention. It has worked, too. In 2013, Florida’s Supreme Court ruled that Miami-Dade County’s efforts to turn down cases was justified.

But what to do with those defendants in the meantime? Last week, private attorneys assigned to represent seven poor clients in Orleans Parish filed court motions requesting compensation—or permission to withdraw from the cases. Tulane law processor Pamela Metzger told CityLab that the clients in custody should be released: “You can’t make lawyers do this for free, or ask them to spend out of their own pocket for overhead and costs.” Assistant DA David Pipes countered, “It is their job to protect the rights and interests of their clients in their individual cases…If that means that a private lawyer must defend the poor without the certainty of knowing they are going to be paid, that is preferable to seeing justice denied, criminals turned loose, or victims and defendants languishing in uncertainty.”

On April 8, New Orleans Judge Arthur Hunter ordered the release of the seven clients, concluding that their rights to an effective attorney should not rest on “budget demands, waiting lists, and the failure of the legislature to adequately fund indigent defense.” He added,› “We are now faced with a fundamental question, not only in New Orleans, but across Louisiana. What kind of criminal justice system do we want? One based on fairness or injustice, equality or prejudice, efficiency or chaos, right or wrong?”

“There’s no such thing as Cadillac justice and Toyota justice. There’s justice, and there is injustice,” Bunton says. “And we are not going to be complicit in any injustice.”

Source: 

These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

Posted in alo, Anchor, Bunn, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

Louisiana Republican Stokes Fears of Syrian Refugees to Boost Struggling Campaign for Governor

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the days since terror attacks roiled Paris, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who has been trailing in the race for governor against his Democratic rival John Bel Edwards, has settled on a new strategy for winning over voters: warning them about Syrian refugees entering the state.

After Edwards released an apparently altered statement on Facebook in the attacks’ aftermath noting he would help “to assist the people coming here and fleeing from religious persecution,” Vitter’s campaign pounced. In a robocall over the weekend, Vitter warned that President Barack Obama’s “reckless policies” for allowing 10,000 Syrian refugees into the country would turn Louisiana into a “dangerous refugee zone.” (The State Department confirmed to the Times-Picayune that only 14 Syrian immigrants had settled in Louisiana since January 1.)

On Monday, as Gov. Bobby Jindal signed an executive order seeking to block refugees from entering the state, Vitter released an ad claiming that Obama had been “sending refugees to Louisiana” and that Edwards had vowed to work with the president to welcome them. A day later, Vitter introduced federal legislation that would halt incoming refugee admissions for at least 300 days while a review of the screening process takes place.

An email sent from the Louisiana Republican Party on Tuesday warned supporters about the possibility of “missing” refugees in the state.

Just yesterday, David Vitter had to notify the Obama Administration that a Syrian refugee who had been living in Baton Rouge has gone missing. What kind of accountability is that? There is an unmonitored Syrian refugee who is walking around freely, and no one knows where he is.

It turns out that the “missing” refugee in Baton Rouge hadn’t disappeared at all. A day before the email went out, the New Orleans Advocate reported that Catholic Charities, the organization that aids in refugee resettlement, had helped the Syrian man for a few days before he left the state to meet with family in Washington, DC. Before he left, the man filed relocation paperwork to the federal government.

Vitter’s wife, Wendy Vitter, reportedly works as a lawyer for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which is affiliated with Catholic Charities. The organization received a flood of phone calls about the supposedly “missing” refugee, according to the Advocate, and a Jefferson Parish Sheriff warned that “somebody’s going to get killed” as a result of the misinformation, according to the New Orleans alt-weekly The Gambit.

Vitter, whose campaign has also been mired in reports that he may have had a love child with a prostitute, will find if his last-ditch effort to lure Louisiana voters is successful when the election takes place on Saturday.

See the original post – 

Louisiana Republican Stokes Fears of Syrian Refugees to Boost Struggling Campaign for Governor

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Louisiana Republican Stokes Fears of Syrian Refugees to Boost Struggling Campaign for Governor

The Americans With Disabilities Act Is Turning 25. Watch the Dramatic Protest That Made It Happen.

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Twenty-five years ago this weekend, the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law, officially outlawing discrimination against disabled people in employment, transportation, public accommodation, communications, and government services. The law was a long time coming: Activists had fought for decades against unequal access to jobs and exclusion from public schools. But the ADA might never have gotten to President George H.W. Bush’s desk were it not for a group of activists in wheelchairs who took matters into their own hands earlier that year.

On March 12, 1990, hundreds of people with disabilities gathered at the foot of the Capitol building in Washington to protest the bill’s slow movement through Congress. Dozens left behind their wheelchairs, got down on their hands and knees, and began pulling themselves slowly up the 83 steps toward the building’s west entrance, as if daring the politicians inside to continue ignoring all the barriers they faced. Among the climbers was Jennifer Keelan, an eight-year-old from Denver with cerebral palsy. “I’ll take all night if I have to!” she yelled while dragging herself higher and higher.

Here’s some footage of the protest, via PBS’s Independent Lens:

The Capitol Crawl, as it became known, made national headlines and pushed lawmakers to pass the ADA into law. When Bush finally signed the landmark bill, it was seen as one of the country’s most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation to date. But it was not a total cure-all, according to Susan Parish, a professor of disability policy at Brandeis University. The Supreme Court later watered it down, she says, in a series of decisions that created a narrow definition of disability.

In 2008, lawmakers passed amendments to strengthen the ADA, but Parish says people with disabilities have still struggled to gain equal access to employment, in part because employers are expected to comply with the law but do not have to follow reporting requirements. “I feel that the country needs a full-scale affirmative action program for people with disabilities,” she said in a recent interview.

President Obama issued an executive order in 2010 requiring the federal government to hire more people with disabilities. In a speech earlier this week, he said the West Wing receptionist, Leah Katz-Hernandez, is the first deaf American to hold her position. But despite some progress since 1990, he acknowledged, “We’ve still got to do more to make sure that people with disabilities are paid fairly for their labor, to make sure they are safe in their homes and their communities…I don’t have to tell you this fight is not over.”

Continue reading – 

The Americans With Disabilities Act Is Turning 25. Watch the Dramatic Protest That Made It Happen.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Americans With Disabilities Act Is Turning 25. Watch the Dramatic Protest That Made It Happen.

5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The intersection of race and justice on the street has loomed in the headlines this past year or two, with racially charged killings—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, among others—sparking widespread protests and highlighting stark police biases: A recent Justice Department investigation, for instance, found that blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, accounted for an overwhelming majority of traffic stops, traffic tickets, and arrests over a two-year period—nearly everyone who got a jaywalking ticket was black. When black drivers were pulled over in Ferguson, the DOJ found, they were searched at twice the rate of white drivers.

Continue Reading »

Link:  

5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

Posted in Anchor, Bunn, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Sterling, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

Giant, oil-belching sinkhole dooms more than 100 homes in Louisiana

Giant, oil-belching sinkhole dooms more than 100 homes in Louisiana

It’s looking like a neighborhood in Assumption Parish, La., has been permanently wiped out by a sloppy salt-mining company.

A sinkhole in the area has grown to 15 acres since an old salt mine that was emptied to supply the local petrochemical industry with brine began collapsing in August. Hundreds of neighbors were long ago evacuated, and many of them are now accepting that they will never return to their homes.

The sinkhole isn’t just endangering homes, it is also burping out oil, natural gas, and debris, shaking the area so powerfully that seismic equipment is being used to monitor the site. And brine from the sinkhole is in danger of contaminating local waterways. This thing is so big it even has its own Facebook page.

On Wings of Care

This is not a lake. It’s part of the 15-acre sinkhole in Assumption Parish.

By Monday, the company responsible for the disaster, Texas Brine, had reached agreements to buy up the homes of 44 affected households, but dozens more are still negotiating or have filed suit against the company. From the Baton Rouge Advocate:

“While not every resident chose to participate in the settlement process, Texas Brine has been committed to offering reasonable offers to those residents who decided they wanted to move from the area and voluntarily participated in the settlement process,” [Texas Brine spokesman Sonny] Cranch said.

But not everybody thinks the offers are reasonable.

“Me and my wife worked for the last 10 years to get where we are,” Jarred Breaux said at his home Tuesday afternoon. “Do you feel like starting over?”

He said Texas Brine’s offer just wasn’t enough for him to pick up his family and leave his home, but he would be interested in extended discussions and participating in mediation with Texas Brine.

“I know we’ve got a big decision (to make) pretty soon,” said Breaux, who doesn’t have an attorney but said he likely will look for one soon.

This is not the first such trouble triggered by a former brine mine, but it caught the attention of Louisiana lawmakers. From a report earlier this month in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Gov. Bobby Jindal [on] Friday signed a slew of bills tightening regulations for underground cavern operators and written in response to a debris-filled sinkhole in the swamps of Assumption Parish. …

“These laws will ensure that companies are acting in good faith and upholding public safety. It’s critical that we hold companies accountable when they put communities at risk and these new laws will help achieve that goal,” Jindal said in a statement.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Originally from:

Giant, oil-belching sinkhole dooms more than 100 homes in Louisiana

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Giant, oil-belching sinkhole dooms more than 100 homes in Louisiana

BP oil spill cleanup continues, three years after blowout

BP oil spill cleanup continues, three years after blowout

Louisiana GOHSEP

Tar balls on a Louisiana beach in 2010. Unfortunately, tar balls still keep washing ashore.

As the three-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout approaches, laborious efforts to remove mats of oil and tar balls are still underway along Gulf of Mexico shorelines.

The U.S. Coast Guard just wrapped up a 10-day operation along a two-mile stretch of Pensacola Beach in Florida that recovered more than 450 pounds of oil from the spill, which was triggered by the explosion of a BP oil rig on April 20, 2010.

From the Pensacola News Journal:

Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Commander Natalie Murphy said most of that [oil] was found in one large mat.

“The mat was the only big hit, and we had some scattered tar balls but nothing else significant,” she said.

The search was field-testing scientific analysis of data related to the number of tar balls collected in the area since oil washed up on local beaches in June of 2010, along with shoreline erosion and wave/current action to pinpoint likely spots where the oil may have become buried.

Similar cleanup efforts are tentatively planned along other beaches where BP’s tar balls continue to pollute the coastline, such as on Perdido Key near Pensacola.

With the three-year anniversary coming up this weekend, The Independent reports on the grim and still-unfolding legacy of the 4.9-million-barrel spill of crude:

Infant dolphins were found dead at six times average rates in January and February of 2013. More than 650 dolphins have been found beached in the oil spill area since the disaster began, which is more than four times the historical average. Sea turtles were also affected, with more than 1,700 found stranded between May 2010 and November 2012 — the last date for which information is available. On average, the number stranded annually in the region is 240.

Contact with oil may also have reduced the number of juvenile bluefin tuna produced in 2010 by 20 per cent, with a potential reduction in future populations of about 4 per cent. Contamination of smaller fish also means that toxic chemicals could make their way up the food chain after scientists found the spill had affected the cellular function of killifish, a common bait fish at the base of the food chain.

Deep sea coral, some of which is thousands of years old, has been found coated in oil after the dispersed droplets settled on the sea’s bottom. A recent laboratory study found that the mixture of oil and dispersant affected the ability of some coral species to build new parts of a reef.

Meanwhile, locals and environmentalists continue to call for BP to be held accountable for the disaster. The company is currently on trial in New Orleans, where a judge will rule on how much it must cough up for payouts and federal fines. The New Orleans Times-Picayune posted photographs of a courthouse demonstration held Tuesday to commemorate the anniversary. From an Environmental Defense Fund press release:

“Three years after the Gulf was inundated with BP oil, the wildlife, habitats and people of the Gulf are still feeling the effects of the disaster,” [said David Muth of the National Wildlife Federation]. “In 2012 alone, some 6 million pounds of BP oil was collected from Louisiana’s shorelines and 200 miles of coast remain oiled. We can’t allow BP off the hook for anything less than justice requires—a full payment for its recklessness so that real restoration of the Gulf’s ecosystem and economy can begin.”

“We still have concerns about the long term effects on the Gulf and its estuaries. We still see oil on the surface after storms with no one out there monitoring it. We will not stop until we get the help we need,” Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said.

“Our cuisine, culture and economy are all dependent on a thriving, healthy Gulf. That means we’ve all got a stake in holding BP accountable and ensuring effective restoration begins as soon as possible,” said Susan Spicer, chef and owner of Bayona and Mondo restaurants.

“Two years ago, BP promised $1 billion to early restoration to be used in two years. To date, BP has only spent seven percent of the promised total,” said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network. “Despite BP’s slick ad campaigns, the Gulf is still hurting and can’t wait any longer for restoration. It’s time BP be held fully accountable under the law.”

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See original article here:  

BP oil spill cleanup continues, three years after blowout

Posted in alo, Anchor, Dolphin, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BP oil spill cleanup continues, three years after blowout