Hey Stranger, Gotta Match?

Hey Stranger, Gotta Match? New York Attorney/Activist/Mother Needs Bone Marrow Transplant

by Molly Secours

[...]

Less than one week ago, I recognized that ingenuousness in the face of Jennifer Jones Austin, a highly accomplished and compassionate New York City attorney, wife, and mother of two who has spent the last 20 years advocating for disenfranchised children and families.

Although her life biography is filled with achievements and accolades, as of four months ago, 41 year old Austin faces the harsh reality that a diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) requires a bone marrow transplant.

In short, unless a donor steps forward in the next several months, Jennifer’s chances of survival greatly diminish.

Because a transplant may only occur between parties matching genetic tissue, it requires a donor who is of African descent. Unfortunately, since this group is dramatically underrepresented within national and international bone marrow registries, Jennifer’s challenge is magnified.

In spite of massive support and numerous bone marrow drives organized in the New York City area, none have succeeded in producing a match.

[...]

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It’s Time to Step Up Enforcement of Children’s Rights

LINK

Statement of SPLC President Richard Cohen on President Obama’s pledge to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement
 

  After a drastic decline in civil rights enforcement by the U.S. Justice Department over much of the past decade, President Obama’s declaration during last night’s State of the Union Address that his administration is “once again prosecuting civil rights violations” is a promising sign. We’d like to remind the president of one area that often gets overlooked — the responsibility to protect the rights of our most vulnerable children.

Across America, countless schoolchildren are being denied educational opportunities because of overly punitive, zero-tolerance policies that exclude them from the classroom and increase the odds they will drop out of school and enter the criminal justice system.

These children are disproportionately African American and Latino. Children with disabilities also are far more likely to be thrown out of the classroom — even while many schools ignore their legal obligation to provide the special services these children need to learn and succeed.

Tens of thousands of children each year are being arrested in school for petty misbehavior and routed into the juvenile justice system, where many are abused in brutal facilities that fail to provide rehabilitative and mental health services.

In fact, in a special report issued earlier this month, the Justice Department said that one in eight youths imprisoned in state, local or privately run correctional facilities have been raped or otherwise victimized sexually while in custody. That’s a shocking statistic, one that should offend every American’s sense of justice. But it doesn’t even begin to capture the true scope of the violence and neglect suffered by children behind bars, including the thousands of children who are sentenced to serve in dangerous adult prisons.

Justice Department research shows that youths imprisoned with adults are eight times more likely to commit suicide than those held in juvenile facilities, five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, three times more likely to be assaulted by prison staff and 50 percent more likely to be assaulted with a weapon.

In another report issued by the Bush administration, the Justice Department noted that six independent large-scale studies found “higher recidivism rates among juveniles convicted for violent offense in criminal court when compared with similar offenders retained in juvenile court.” The same report found that juveniles transferred into the adult system were significantly more likely to re-offend than juveniles who remain within the juvenile system.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations are taking action — filing complaints against negligent school districts and suing state and local governments that operate abusive detention centers.

But federal action is urgently needed to stop this unfolding civil rights crisis. A commitment by the Justice Department to crack down on these abuses would be a good place to start.

No ‘hope for Haiti’ without justice

By Mark LeVine

On Friday, the US’ leading entertainers will once again organise a star-studded telethon in order to raise money for victims of an almost incomprehensible tragedy – the third time they have done so in less than a decade.

The first, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, understandably avoided any sort of critical political imagery or discourse in favour of uniting the country in support of the victims.

The 2005 telethon in response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina occurred at a tenser political moment, as violence was flaring in Iraq and Americans were beginning to question President Bush’s true motives for invading the country.

The massive incompetence surrounding the government relief effort was already apparent, but apart from rapper Kanye West declaring – to much criticism – that “President Bush doesn’t care about black people,” none of the artists who performed or spoke addressed the glaring structural problems that allowed the hurricane to produce such unprecedented damage.

Four-and-a-half years later, the endemic problems that exacerbated the hurricane’s damage remain largely unaddressed.

But they are far from public view (aside from the poor and working class public of New Orleans, that is) and outside the cheery narrative of rebuilding and recovery symbolised by the success of the New Orleans’ football team, The Saints, who will host the city’s first Conference Championship game in the refurbished Superdome, which during the height of the Katrina disaster housed thousands of flood refugees.

As the carnage of the largest earthquake to hit Haiti in 200 years comes into full view, the biggest stars of Hollywood and the music industry are coming together for a “Hope for Haiti” telethon.

But there can be no hope for Haiti without justice, and no justice without an honest appraisal of the centuries-long history that set the country up for such a devastating political and social collapse in the wake of the earthquake.

Click to continue reading the entire article: A history largely ignored

‘Black People are Looting’

Haiti. At the moment I lack once again the words for the many thoughts that come to mind. Language is a powerful tool and right now white supremacy becomes once again quite disgusting, how stories are being told without telling the whole story.

I found a blog with important information, for those not so interested in ‘white speech and self-praise’, but the truth:

“Shame on you Mr Obama asking Bush & Clinton to oversee humanitarian aid. After three days have passed and no aid has arrive the people are angry and taking their anger to the streets. That is called Violence and looting – not hunger and fear. The next step to further militarize the earthquake.”

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Police-on-Police shootings

Statement of New York City Police Department
Deputy Commissioner, Training
Wilbur Chapman
Before the Governor’s Task Force on Police on Police Shootings
December 3, 2009:
LINK

Exonerated after 35 years

LINK

James Bain spent more time in prison than any of the 246 inmates previously exonerated by DNA evidence nationwide, according to the Innocence Project of Florida. The longest-serving before him was James Lee Woodard of Dallas, who was released last year after spending more than 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

“Nothing can replace the years Jamie has lost,” said Seth Miller, a lawyer for the project, which helped Bain win freedom. “Today is a day of renewal.”

Mr Bain made his first-ever mobile phone call on Thursday, dialling his elderly mother to tell her he had been freed.

Mobile devices did not exist in 1974, the year he was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping a 9-year-old boy and raping him in a nearby field. Neither did the sophisticated DNA testing that officials more recently used to determine he could not have been the rapist.

As Mr Bain walked out of the Polk County courthouse on Thursday, wearing a black T-shirt that said “not guilty”, he spoke of his deep faith.

“No, I’m not angry,” he said. “Because I’ve got God.”

The 54-year-old said he was looking forward to eating fried turkey and drinking a Dr Pepper soda. He said he also hoped to continue his education.

Attorneys from the Innocence Project of Florida got involved in Mr Bain’s case earlier this year after he filed several previous petitions asking for DNA testing, all of which were thrown out.

He was convicted largely on the strength of the victim’s eyewitness identification, even though testing available at the time did not definitively link him to the crime.

The boy said his attacker had bushy sideburns and a moustache. The boy’s uncle, a former assistant principal at a high school, said it sounded like Mr Bain, a former student.

The boy picked Mr Bain out of a photo lineup, although there are lingering questions about whether detectives steered him.

The jury rejected Mr Bain’s story that he was home watching TV with his twin sister when the crime was committed, an alibi she repeated at a news conference last week. He was 19 when he was sentenced.

Florida last year passed a law that automatically grants former inmates found innocent $50,000 for each year they spent in prison. That means Mr Bain is entitled to $1.75 million (£1 million).

Addicted to Incarceration

The Cost of Incarceration

“The Cost of Incarceration” is an eight-part occasional series written by Patrice Gaines, former Washington Post reporter; author and co-founder of The Brown Angel Center, a program in Charlotte, N.C. that helps formerly incarcerated women become financially independent. Gaines received a 2009 Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute to research and write articles on the impact of mass incarceration on the Black community. The National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service has agreed to make this exclusive series available to its membership of more than 200 Black-owned newspapers.

Part I:
WASINGTON (NNPA) – In communities around the country, Black people are missing. Neighborhoods languish.

Dreams deferred rot in distant warehouses we call prisons. The similarities between the correctional system and slavery are eerie: Families ripped apart. Traditions lost or never made. The shipment of flesh, the pipeline that nearly guarantees Black children go from the cradle to the prison; the insane profits made by warehousing human beings; the burden borne forever by those labeled as “convicts.”

Today, a brutal recession which dictates the need to cut budgets and proof that mass incarceration does not reduce crime is changing conversations in legislative halls around the country. Some politicians, who in the past have only paid attention to fearful constituents who want to make sure people who commit crimes are locked up, are beginning to consider alternatives to imprisonment.

Meanwhile prison reform advocates are wondering if a Black president and a Black attorney general means a quicker end to the disparity in incarceration between Blacks and whites.

Prison “was never a tool to fight crime. It is an instrument to manage deprived and dishonored populations, which is quite a different task,” says Loic Wacquant, a renowned ethnographer and social theorist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Rest of Article

Links to part II and III:
Part II: The Curse of Mandatory Minimums
Part III: The Conspiracy Charge Traps Women