The racist US criminal justice system in action in Michigan

Siwatu-Salama Ra & daughter

How can any criminal justice system produce such an outcome and not be universally condemned as catastrophically broken?

Siwatu-Salama Ra is a 26-year-old black mother who watched in horror as an angry assailant—a neighbor with whom Ra had a dispute—deliberately crashed her vehicle into Ra's car while Ra's two-year-old daughter was playing inside. Ra removed her unloaded, legally purchased handgun from the glove box and brandished it, scaring the neighbor off.

The assailant, Channel Harvey, was never charged. Ra was arrested for felonious assault. She is now serving a mandatory two-year-sentence, even though Michigan is a Stand Your Ground state and Ra was clearly defending her family on her own property.

Ra is pregnant, and she is expected to give birth in prison.

The entire case is a clusterfuck from start to finish.

Incidentally, for some reason, I don’t see the NRA going to bat for this law-abiding gun owner who exercised her Second Amendment right to defend herself and her family. Isn’t that what they’re all about?

(via @robbysoave; retweet by @Popehat)

Daily Links #123: Bill Cosby found guilty

Bill Cosby

• Bill Cosby ^[pictured]: Guilty on all counts of sexual assault. At his age, it’s effectively a life sentence. Good riddance.

• In totally unsurprising news, the Toronto van murderer is affiliated with women-hating incels.

• Here’s an TV show idea: Disgraced accused sexual predator Charlie Rose interviews other disgraced sexual predators like Matt Lauer and Louis CK about #MeToo. I’m sorry to say that’s not a joke.

• Not a repeat: Right-wingers triggered by NRA boycott destroy their own expensive property to own the libs, clearly need more safe spaces.

• Finally, NRA dude is sad that the unarmed hero who stopped the Waffle House shooter didn’t have a gun to shoot the gunman dead with instead.
  (via @fark)

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Daily Links #122: Utah police kill unarmed Black man

Elijah James Smith

• Whatever else Elijah James Smith ^[pictured] may have done, the fact remains that Utah police shot an unarmed Black man dead for obeying their order to remove his hands from his pockets.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Free speech advocates warned FOSTA/SESTA would stifle free speech online. Now that the bills are law, they’re … stifling free speech online.

• Meanwhile, the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules comes into effect today. Any changes will be gradual, and that’s if the multifaceted efforts to restore the old rules on state and federal levels don’t succeed first.

• Actual religious persecution: Russian government continues its crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses, forcing thousands to flee abroad or go into hiding.

• A Minnesota court just ruled that basically everyone on Twitter is now a stalker.
  (via @ScottGreenfield)

• Finally, James Comey’s new book is exactly what you expect from the memoir of the former director of the FBI. That’s not a compliment.
  (via @cjciaramella; retweet by @Popehat)

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Daily Links #121: Trump’s trans military ban blocked yet again

Will you look at that: 500 posts. Do I win something?

• Trump’s trans military ban just keeps getting, er, banned by federal courts.
  (via @fark)

• The Supreme Court just made it a little harder for the Trump administration to deport immigrants.
  (via @Popehat)

• What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests; or, the importance of recognizing, and fighting against, implicit bias.

• You’d think a professional defender of the Catholic Church’s handling of child-diddling priests would know better than to weigh in on the David Silverman affair. (Yes, of course it’s Bill Donohue.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton presents: Eight Rules for Understanding Our Teenage President.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #120: Trump signs FOSTA/SESTA into law

• Trump signs terrible, counterproductive, sex-worker-endangering, free-speech-chilling pseudo-anti-sex-trafficking bill FOSTA/SESTA into law.

• Speaking of, this comes after the US government seized Backpage.com, undermining their own arguments that they needed FOSTA/SESTA do so. Bonus: After years crusading against the site for supposedly harboring sex traffickers, none of the litany of charges against Backpage executives contain anything about sex trafficking.

• Hawaii becomes seventh state to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.
  (via Secular Student Alliance | Facebook)

• “Values voters” indeed: White evangelical support for Trump has increased though the Stormy Daniels scandal.

• On the other end of the spectrum, credit where it’s due: Texas-based evangelical church takes a leaf out of John Oliver’s book and wipes out over $10.5 million in medical debt.

• Finally, Iceland government refuses to legalize speech that insults foreign leaders.
  (via @sarahemclaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Feds raid Trump personal attorney’s office: What we know

Michael Cohen

Big news, in case you somehow haven’t heard: Acting on a tip from Special Counsel Mueller, the FBI has raided the law office and hotel room of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Before you get too worked up one way or another, head right over to actual lawyer Ken “Popehat” White’s breakdown of what this does (and doesn’t) mean, as far as we can tell this early on. In short: Whilst we don’t know what exactly they were looking for, we can glean that the authorities felt the evidence of criminality was solid enough to warrant batting aside Trump and Cohen’s attorney-client confidentiality. That’s big. As White puts it:

Recently I've been listening to the Podcast "Slow Burn," about Watergate. There's a fascinating theme throughout it: when you're living a historical event, how do you know? How can you tell when a development is a Big Deal?

This is a big deal.

Keep in mind that White isn’t the kind to overstate things.

Trump, for his part, is freaking out. That can only be good.

CORRECTION (04/10/18 @ 4:47 PM ET): The first line originally read “As part of the Mueller probe”, which is inaccurate. Fixed.

Daily Links #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Louisiana AG: No charges for cops who killed Alton Sterling

Alton Sterling

The last couple years have seen an uptick in the number of cops charged (or even successfully prosecuted) for the wrongful shooting of Black people, but it’s important to remember that those cases are still a minority. Case in point: The Louisiana Attorney General has decided that family of Alton Sterling will see no such justice.

More than 20 months after the fatal police shooting of a black man outside a Baton Rouge mini-mart touched off protests nationwide over police treatment of African Americans, the Louisiana attorney general said Tuesday that he would not charge two white officers in the death.

The decision from Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry's office brought strong condemnation from Alton Sterling's family and civil rights activists, and closed the possibility of criminal charges in one of the most prominent police shootings in recent years.

Landry's announcement came close to 11 months after the U.S. Department of Justice similarly ruled out federal charges against the officers, Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II.

Meanwhile, Sacramento police killed unarmed Black man Stephon Clark in his own backyard after mistaking his cellphone for a weapon, whilst a Houston deputy gunned down unarmed Black man Danny Ray Thomas in only 17 seconds. And those are just the reports I’ve heard of over the last week.

It doesn’t matter how many badge-wearing thugs get hauled into a courtroom; the number of Black lives needlessly lost will always far outpace the prosecutions of their killers.

(via @SinKirabo, retweeted by @pzmyers; Danny Ray Thomas link via @FairPunishment, retweeted by @radleybalko)

Daily Links #117: Unarmed Black man shot by Sacramento cop

Stephon Clark

• Sacramento, CA: Unarmed black man ^[pictured] shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Meanwhile, the Minneapolis, MN officer who shot Justine Damond turns himself in on murder charges.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Having finally lost their cause to keep their old gerrymandered district map, Pennsylvania Republican officials are now moving to impeach the Democratic justices of the state supreme court who ruled against them.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• New Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner promised big criminal justice reforms. And he’s delivering.

• The 400 residents of Dewey, Delaware must be nothing but hardcore gangbangers, because the town’s 11-officer police force requested, and obtained, 31 military vehicles and other gear through the Pentagon’s 1033 program.

• Finally, just a reminder that nine years later, Sean Hannity still still hasn’t been waterboarded as he promised he would be “for the troops”.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #116: Officials misbehavin’ edition

• It may interest you to know that the NYPD lies in court so often they have a name for it – “testilying”.
  (via @Snowden)

• Seattle, WA district attorney’s office ratchets up their prostitution-related caseload to meet quotas set by a privately run anti-sex-worker organization that pays them yearly grants. This is amazingly messed up. (Of the over 100 clients arrested last September, roughly half had their charges dismissed because police had illegally wiretapped them.)
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Alabama sheriff legally rerouted $750K meant to feed inmates to pay for his beach house. Reporter breaks the story. Days later, the source who blew the whistle is arrested on drug charges and held in one of the sheriff’s prisons.
  (via @G_Padraic; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Wisconsin school district limits discussions of racism after an MLK Day exercise on social privilege made the majoritarily White community uncomfortable.
  (via @jeffelrod; retweet by @Popehat)

• In several death-penalty cases in the 1970s, prosecutors in Muscogee County, Georgia systematically excluded Black jurors in handwritten notes where they marked their names with ‘N’ (White jurors were marked with ‘W’). Of 44 potential Black jurors, two were allowed to serve.
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @Popehat)

• Finally: Look, I understand that guns in schools is a sensitive topic. But can we still agree that “hand gestures” by a six-year-old cannot possibly warrant a police investigation for “terroristic threats”?
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

El Salvador woman released after 15 years in prison for abortion

This terrible report is a good reminder of why it’s so important to fight for abortion rights. For anti-choice zealots, “abortion is murder” isn’t just rhetoric, it’s an actual belief, one that leads to situations such as what’s happening in El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all cases and where women are convicted of murder for terminating their pregnancy – or even if they miscarry or their infant is stillborn.

Maira Veronica Figueroa was a teenager when she lost her baby and was put behind bars under El Salvador's strict anti-abortion laws.

Now, 15 years later, the 34-year-old woman left prison Tuesday after the court commuted her 30-year sentence for aggravated homicide.

[…]

But there are at least 24 other women in similar circumstances still languishing in jail, Boukher said, including Evelyn Beatriz Hernandez Cruz, who was jailed after she gave birth to a stillborn conceived during an alleged gang-rape.

[…]

In 2016, the country's ruling party introduced a bill to allow abortion in cases of rape or a risky pregnancy, but no date has been set for a vote, and it will likely face tough opposition from the Catholic Church and evangelical groups.

If you want more proof that reproductive rights are human rights, look at what happens when countries don’t consider them as such. Punishing women for having an abortion isn’t just wrong, it’s inhumane, and I’d go so far as to call it a crime against humanity.

Also, fuck the Catholic Church. That doesn’t get said often enough.

Daily Links #115: Homeland Security separates refugee families

Whoops – I’m so out of it today I almost forgot to give y’all your links.

• Last year, Homeland Security threatened to punish families that cross the border illegally by separating them. They’re now doing just that to refugees fleeing violence – only now they deny it’s meant as punishment. Because there must be a perfectly reasonable basis for wrenching a crying child out of their parents’ arms and detaining them in different states.
  (via @hiattf; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Baton Rouge, Louisiana officer goes 94 MPH on a 50 MPH road and plows into a woman’s car, killing her 1-year-old infant. So naturally, police arrest the mother and charge her with “negligent homicide”.

• Death meets Stephen Hawking at the edge of the Dark Desert over half a century later than expected.

• My guess is Trump heard about the sci-fi trope of space marines and decided, “I want that.” Includes a name only Trump (or a child) could come up with.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: Jesus jailed for saying he’d bomb the gays. (I’m so sorry.)
  (via Joe.My.God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.