The Sound of da Police: the Year Criminal Injustice

I know this for a fact, you don’t like how I act
You claim I’m sellin’ crack, but you be doin’ that
I’d rather say “See ya” ’cause I would never be ya
Be an officer? You wicked overseer
You hotshot, wanna get props and be a savior?
First show a little respect, change your behavior
Change your attitude, change your plan
There could never really be justice on stolen land
Are you really for peace and equality?
Or when my car is hooked up, you know you wanna follow me
Your laws are minimal
‘Cause you won’t even think about lookin’ at the real criminal
This has got to cease
‘Cause we be gettin’ hyped to the sound of da police

– Sound of da Police, KRS-One

January

+ On the night of December 4, Niani Finlayson, a 27-year-old black woman living in Lancaster, California, called 9/11 for help, as she was being beaten by her former boyfriend. The audio from the call records Finlayson shouting: “He won’t get out of my house … He will not leave me alone … I need the police here right now.” She can be heard screaming on the tape and telling the man repeatedly to get off of her.

A few minutes later two Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputies arrive at her apartment complex and knock on the door. Finlayson answers with her young daughter, Xaisha, standing next to her. The body cam footage shows that Finlayson is holding a kitchen knife in one of her hands and begins to tell the cops that she trying to defend her daughter, who her ex has been hurting. The daughter says the man had “punched” her. The female deputy enters the room and Finlayson and her daughter move back. Then Deputy Ty Shelton comes through the door, holding a Taser in one hand and his gun in the other. Three seconds later Shelton opens fire, hitting Finlayson four times, as her daughter stands beside her. The ex-boyfriend can be heard screaming: “No, no, why did you shoot?”

This is Shelton’s second lethal shooting while responding to a domestic disturbance call. In 2020, a few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Shelton shot Michael Thomas in the chest during a verbal argument with his girlfriend. Thomas, a 61-year-old black man, was unarmed. Shelton didn’t have his body cam on and he wasn’t charged.

+ A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations documented 129 cases in which people were falsely convicted at least partly because of flawed hair analysis and testimony. Fifteen of these defendants received a death sentence.

+ U.S. mass shootings over the past ten years:

2014: 272

2015: 332

2016: 383

2017: 347

2018: 335

2019: 414

2020: 610

2021: 689

2022: 646

2023: 654

+ Keith “KJ” Frierson, a 10-year-old boy living in Sacramento, California was shot dead over the weekend when the shooter, who was also 10 years old, got mad after losing a bicycle race, grabbed his father’s gun and opened fire. In Largo, Florida, a 14-year-old boy fatally shot his sister in an argument over Christmas gifts, only to be shot moments later by his own teenage brother.

+ A North Carolina pastor was arrested after trying to shove a man’s head into a McDonald’s deep-fryer.

+ Violent crime in the US is down almost everywhere, but San Francisco, where it has been on the rise since Chesa Boudin was removed from office and “tough-on-crime” Brooke Jenkins took his place.

+ A West Virginia woman says a bartender working on a Margaritaville at Sea cruise ship slipped her a date rape drug, then snuck into her cabin in the middle of the night and raped her. She became pregnant and her rapist later forced her to get an abortion.

+ In keeping with last year’s pardons, which freed no one from prison, Bidenhas issued a new round of pardons that will free no one from prison…

+ During his 2020 campaign, Biden pledged to cut the federal incarceration rate in half. When Trump took office, the federal prison population stood at 185,617. When he left office, there were 155,562 people incarcerated in federal lockup, a decline of 30,055. Under three years of Biden, the number of federal prisoners has increased by 1,149 inmates for a total of 156,711 people behind federal bars.

+++

+ During his campaign, Biden pledged to end the federal death penalty. But his Justice Department just announced it would seek the death penalty in the racist mass murder at a Buffalo supermarket, even though the defendant, Payton Gendron, is already serving a life without parole sentence in New York State. Janai S. Nelson, director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund denounced the decision, saying the organization “roundly condemns the pursuit of the death penalty in all circumstances.” Nelson said that the 2022 mass shooting was a “heinous act of white supremacist violence that had a devastating impact on the black community in Buffalo and beyond. We stand with the Buffalo community as it continues to reel from this painful event and works to continue to heal. We also demand that the federal government pursue an all-of-government approach to the hate motivated incidents that leads with prevention of and protection from white supremacist violence. We do not, however, believe that the death penalty is part of this equation.”

+ Not only is Rudy Giuliani’s personal reputation in tatters but so is the reputation of the tough-on-crime policing system he supervised as mayor of NYC in the 90s. There have now been 18 overturned convictions from that era based on the testimony of a single corrupt NYPD detective, Lou Scarcella. 

+ In 2021, Philadelphia created a Police Oversight group. Nearly three years later it hasn’t investigated a single case.

+ An LA Sheriff’s deputy shot a coworker’s gang tattoo off on a camping trip. Internal documents on the incident uncovered by the LA Free Press show:

+ Investigators never asked about tattoos or deputy gangs

+ Shooter & victim lied in statements

+ 22 people, incl. 1 known deputy gang member attended

+ It’s official: Police in the US killed more people in 2023 than any year in the last decade:

+ At least 1,232 killed, a rate of more than 3 a day 

+ 445 victims were fleeing police 

+ There was a rise in killings by sheriffs and in rural areas 

+ Black people were killed at a rate 2.6 times higher than whites

+ California K-12 schools have more police officers than social workers and more security guards than nurses, according to state data released earlier this month. Police stopped 6,441 kids in schools in 2022. Black youths are handcuffed at twice the rate of white youths.

+ The cop convicted of brutally killing Elijah McClain avoided prison, instead he was sentenced to 14 months in jail with authorized work release. The judge cited his “positive social history and service to his country and community.”

+ Police in Phoenix went on a foot chase of a man accused of domestic violence. They tackled the suspect in an alley, fired beanbags at him, then shot him with a shotgun and ran over him in a police SUV. The cops were agitated because the man had pointed a pellet gun at them in self-defense. All along, the cops had been chasing the wrong guy.

+ At a press conference last week, NYC Mayor Eric Adams first denied that a passage in his 2009 book in which he fired a gun at school ever happened, then blamed a coauthor (none is listed), and finished off by claiming to be unaware that his own book had been published at all. Speaking of the Mayor, the NY Daily News reports that Adams’ legal defense fund has been fattened by donations from Leonard Blavatnik, a billionaire businessman with ties to a US-sanctioned Russian oligarch, and crypto mogul Brock Pierce.

+ NYC Mayor Eric Adams to the graduating class of the Department of Corrections, telling the new Rikers guards he’ll always have their backs no matter what abuses they commit: “People are trying to take away your power and authority to do the job right…But…you have a Goddamn mayor that believes in what you’re doing, and I will fight like all hell to be with you.”

+ In an attempt to slow the rate of re-incarceration, a bill in Colorado would give people up to $3,000 after release from prison. If passed, it would make Colorado the first to codify a program like this into state law.

+ Tony D. Vick, who has been incarcerated in Tennessee for the last 27 years: “The private, for-profit prison I’m housed at does not offer fruit or milk on any of the meal trays, nor fresh vegetables or anything that has any hope of pleasing the palate or the stomach.”

+ Members of the Texas National Guard “physically barred” US Border Patrol agents from trying to rescue three migrants (a woman and two children) who drowned in the Rio Grande. Doesn’t this qualify as negligent homicide, at the very least?

+ When someone calls 911 in Santa Monica now, a drone is dispatched from the roof of the police station.  In as little as 30 seconds, it can start collecting information before officers arrive. Meanwhile, Serve Robotics, a company that delivers food for Uber Eats, provided footage filmed by its robots to the LAPD as evidence in a criminal case. Emails show that the robots, which are now a ubiquitous presence in the city, are being used for surveillance.

+ Yet another dead prisoner in Alabama has been found missing all of his organs, including his brain.

February

+ New York Post (Not the Onion)…

+ The NYPD is the most lavishly funded police department in the world. It has a budget of $11 billion a year, plus an additional $1 billion in overtime. All with little or no accountability. In order to fund the police, the Mayor wants to slash funding for schools, libraries, health care, and housing….

+ Last week NYC Mayor Eric Adams quietly vetoed a measure passed by the City Council to ban solitary confinement in city jails.

+ Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer  published a story about the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl that took taken during an underage drinking party held at the police chief’s house, while the chief was home.

+ Several DC police have been caught turning over confidential information on crash victims to local attorneys in exchange for referral fees.

+ The war on drugs has also been a war on women. Women’s drug arrests have risen 216% since 1985. More than 25% of women incarcerated today are held for drug crimes.

+ Last year, the Alabama Parole Board held 3,583 parole hearings in fiscal year 2023; yet it granted parole in just 297 cases–or roughly 8%–even though the board’s own guidelines suggest more than 80% of eligible prisoners should qualify for release.

+ After Brittany Wise was briefly jailed over a traffic ticket in Georgia, she couldn’t regain custody of her seven children because she didn’t have stable housing. The children have been in foster care for nine months.

+ Two former LA County Sheriff’s deputies have now been sentenced to federal prison for abducting and framing a skateboarder in Compton in 2020. In his victim impact statement, Jesus Alegria told the former deputies: “What goes around comes around.”

+ At least 45 people died while in LA County’s custody at the Men’s Central Jail last year. Three people already died there in the first three weeks of 2024.

+ The FBI raided the homes of four Albuquerque cops and the law office of a local attorney. They also towed away a patrol car, apparently as part of an illicit DUI scheme. The raids took place shortly after Albuquerque DA Sam Bregman threw out more than 150 DWI cases these officers were involved in. Cops who work DUI cases are some of the highest-paid officers largely because of the amount of overtime they earn while testifying in court.

+ Without dissent, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama’s experimental execution of Kenneth Smith with nitrogen gas, an unprecedented method, on Thursday.

+ “I’ve never seen rats jump so high, so fast and look so agitated. They broke their nails trying to claw their way out. It was horrible to watch” – A doctor who used nitrogen to euthanize rats.

+ Federal Judge Jill Pryor of the 11th Circuit on Alabama’s effort to execute Kenny Smith with nitrogen gas after a previous failed attempt to execute him by lethal injection: “The cost, I fear, will be Mr. Smith’s human dignity, and ours.”

+ New York City will purchase millions of dollars of medical debt and then erase it in effort to help as many as 500,000 city residents, I loathe Eric Adams but why Biden isn’t doing stuff like this every day (even if he has no intention of fulfilling his promises) makes absolutely no political sense…Instead, he’s going to war against YEMEN. It’s political malpractice.

+++

Kenneth Smith was executed by the state of Alabama for a contract killing. He was paid by a pastor to murder his wife. The state of Alabama paid an execution squad to strap Kenneth Smith to a death gurney, clamp a mask over his face, and suffocate him to death with nitrogen gas. Smith thrashed and convulsed for at least four minutes as the nitrogen squeezed the oxygen out of his lungs. What is the message here?

Nitrogen hypoxia was touted as an efficient and humane method of killing humans. Compared to what? The lynchings of 340 people that took place in Alabama between 1877 and 1943? The electric chair? Hanging? Firing squad? Lethal injection, which the state previously used to try to kill Smith and failed? It took Kenneth Smith at least 22 minutes to die, gasping for breath, his stomach heaving, vomiting into his gas mask. Is this the new definition of humane? Is 22 minutes to death a new measure of efficiency?

According to Alabama’s State Attorney General, Steve Marshall, it was a “textbook” case of execution. Who wrote the textbook, Dr. Mengele?  Marshall bragged about the execution as if Alabama had been the first state to land a man on Mars: “As of last night, nitrogen epoxy as a means of execution is no longer an untested method; it is a proven one.” Marshall sounded like a pitchman for an execution franchise.

Even though they managed, barely it seems, to kill Kenneth Smith,  the state still can’t find any doctors willing to supervise its lethal gassings and lend the killings medical legitimacy. They can’t even find a willing veterinarian.  Will Alabama state colleges and universities replace their sociology degrees with a BS in Death Penalty Administration? Will community colleges offer certificates in the proper application of Execution Technologies?

But did the execution of Kenneth Smith really go as smoothly as Marshall claimed? We were told that Smith would slip into unconsciousness almost immediately after the valves were opened and the nitrogen began to flow into his lungs. He didn’t. We were told that the execution would be painless. It wasn’t.  We were told it would all be over in minutes. It wasn’t.

It’s impossible to know the full details of what really happened to Kenneth Smith. How much agony he experienced, how long he struggled for breath, how long it took him to die. Why? Because the state of Alabama closed the curtain on the death chamber before Smith was pronounced dead. The handful of witnesses allowed in the execution viewing room weren’t able to witness his death, only the preamble of his killing. What is the state hiding behind its fatal curtain? An affinity for torture?

How long did it take Kenneth Smith to die? We don’t know for sure. At least 22 minutes. But perhaps as long as 28 minutes. A long time. But perhaps that’s the kind of death Alabama wants. Given the blood-thirsty statements of Governor Kay Ivey and AG Marshall, you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

+++

+ On a summer day in 2020, four young black girls were going out to a nail salon with their mother, Brittney Gilliam, when they were pulled over by police in Aurora, Colorado, who mistakenly believed the car Gilliam was driving had been stolen. As Gilliam was led away in handcuffs, the four girls, one of whom was 6 years old and wearing a pink tiara, were forced to the pavement in parking at gunpoint. Two of the girls had their wrists handcuffed, and one of them cried out“Mommy.” The cops held their guns drawn for about three-and-a-half minutes, and only removed the girls’ handcuffs after eight-and-a-half minutes, once they realized the car Gilliam was driving wasn’t stolen. Gilliam sued and this week the troubled Aurora Police Department settled for $1.9 million. Two of the officers who terrorized the young girls remain on the police force.

+ The NYPD makes 40 times more arrests for fare evasion at the Atlantic Av. L station in Brownsville/East New York than at an average stop in the City.

+ A Louisiana law allows judges to profit from their own decisions in criminal cases, taking money from the poorest people in our society and using it for luxury benefits. An in-depth piece by Type Investigations shows that judges across the state have “used these Judicial Expense Funds (JEFs) to pay for expenses ranging from the staff salaries and law library subscriptions to luxury cars and rooms at the Ritz Carlton.” The practice continues even though these court-funding mechanisms that originated in the Jim Crow era were ruled unconstitutional by two federal court decisions in 2019.

+ From 2019 to 2021, the number of children killed by gun violence has increased by about 50 percent to a new high of 4,733.

+ Hawai’i’s Supreme Court ruled this week that its state constitution does not protect an individual right to bear arms. In his majority opinion, Justice Todd Eddins takes direct aim at the deeply flawed reasoning of the US  Supreme Court in its recent gun cases. Eddins writes:

History is prone to misuse. In the Second Amendment cases, the Court distorts and cherry-picks historical evidence. It shrinks, alters, and discards historical facts that don’t fit…Bruen unravels durable law. No longer are there the levels of scrutiny and public safety balancing tests long used by our nation’s courts to evaluate firearms laws. Instead, the Court ad-libs a “history-only” standard.

+ On Saturday, LAPD officers shot and killed a man in Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. The man was allegedly waving a plastic fork.  Here’s how LAPD spokesperson Lt. Letisia Ruiz defended the shooting to KTLA: “Any object can cause harm, depending on how it’s used.”

+ RIP  Craig Watkins, the first black DA in Texas history, who created the first nationally recognized Conviction Integrity Unit, presided over more than 35 exonerations, and designed a roadmap for addressing legitimate post-conviction claims of actual innocence.

+ San Francisco Mayor London Breed is backing a March 5 ballot measure that would require single adults on welfare to be screened and treated for illegal drug addiction or else lose cash assistance. This is squarely within the New Democrat tradition. Drug testing of impoverished single mothers was one of the punitive features of Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform,” which was pushed through the Senate by Joe Biden.

+ Justin Davis, a Pennsylvania pastor who was fired by his Church after he appeared in a video welcoming LGTB parishioners to the congregation, decided to run for office in Harrisburg to denounce the deadly conditions in the Dauphin County jail. Although he ran a shoestring campaign, Davis won a surprise victory and flipped the balance of the county government. Now Davis aims to improve the conditions inside one of the most notorious jails in the country, where at least eighteen prisoners have died since 2019.

+ Rep. Jason Shoaf, a Republican from Port St. Joe, Florida, wants the state to adopt a “stand your ground”-like law targeting what he describes as bears “that are on crack” kicking people’s doors down in the middle of the night.

+ A video taken by a high school student shows an Indiana lawmaker flashing a gun to students who were visiting the statehouse to talk to legislators about gun control.

+ Alabama Democrat Rep. Juandalynn Givan has put forth a bill that calls for convicted rapists to be either castrated or given a vasectomy, Newsweek reported.

+ Lawsuits against prison guards are costing the state millions a year. Ten years ago, a state fund paid out $177,567 related to lawsuits against Alabama Department of Corrections employees and leaders. In 2023, it paid $3.5 million. And, according to the Alabama Daily News, in the first three months of fiscal 2024, it has already shelled out $1.3 million. The prisons being hit with the most claims, and most expensive lawsuits, are St. Clair Correctional Facility ($4.47 million) and Donaldson ($2.48 million).

+ A panel recommended ex-LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva be ineligible for rehire after finding he violated county policies by discriminating against & harassing the Inspector General.

+ In Mississippi, incarcerated women were sent to work at Popeye’s for less than minimum wage and even “hired” out to individuals to do housework, yardwork, etc.

+ Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey just nominated her former romantic partner, Gabrielle Wolohojian, a corporate lawyer known for defending businesses against consumer class action suits, for a seat on the state’s supreme court.

+ Justin Mohn, a MAGA man from Levittown, Pennsylvania, beheaded his father, whom he denounced as a “20-year federal employee,” then posted a video of the decapitated head in a bloody plastic on YouTube, while calling for a “revolution” against the “woke mobs” and the “Biden regime” and to fight an “army of illegal immigrants.” Meanwhile, down in Palm Beach a 44-year-old MAGA man named Brian McGann, Jr. became so enraged when he learned that his father had been vaccinated against COVID that he drove his pickup truck to Brian McGann, Sr.’s house and beat him to death. We’re going to have to revise Oedipus for the MAGA era.

March

+ Alicia White, one of the cops involved in the police killing of Freddie Gray, landed a plum new job Department’s Public Integrity Bureau, where she will oversee Internal Affairs, the division which investigates and disciplines corrupt and killer cops.

+ A Kentucky cop named Brent Hall responded to a call about an extremely drunk woman. She went to the ER. Upon her return home hours later, the cop showed up at her house, gave her vodka, got her even more drunk and raped her. Hall’s now been charged.

+ Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “They’re planning jails for kids whose parents haven’t been born yet.”

+ Three people were caught bringing fentanyl over the Paso del Norte border last week. They were all US citizens.

+ In an unsigned opinion a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the prosecution improperly withheld evidence of Florida death-row prisoner Harry Phillips’ mental illness and presented false arguments at trial. Even so, the court upheld his conviction and death sentence.

+ Almost 40% of LA Sheriff’s Department personnel don’t live in LA County.  At least 51 of them live in states like Idaho and Arizona. One lives as far east as Kentucky.

+ In the last thirty years, the number of violent and property crimes solved by California police through an arrest dropped by 41%. During the same 3 decades, the police budgets in the state increased by 52%.

+ Dominic Choi, the new interim chief of the LAPD, will be paid ($400,000) almost twice as much as California’s governor ($234,000).

+ Percent of people in state prisons who have been diagnosed with a mental disorder: 43%

+ Percent of people in state prisons currently receiving therapy or counseling from a professional: 6% (Source: Prison Policy Institute)

+ From 2014 to 2021, there were over 300 preventable deaths in US prisons, including 187 suicides, 89 homicides and 56 deaths deemed “accidental.”

+ Back in November, I wrote about the case of Timothy Murray, the 11-year-old from Brownsville, Texas was locked up in solitary confinement for three days, following a dispute with his school’s principal. Last week, a judge dismissed all charges against him.

+++

+ There’s no question Thomas Creech committed some awful crimes. But perhaps none as awful as what the state of Idaho did to him last week when it tried to carry out its first execution in 12 years, using, in the words of Creech’s lawyers, “unknown individuals with unknown training” who attempted to “inject him with the State’s mysteriously acquired pentobarbital.” The members of the Idaho Department of Corrections’ death squad jabbed Creech 10 times, searching futilely in both of his arms and both of his legs for a vein that would hold the lethal IV needle. Creech is one of the oldest prisoners on death row. He has been in prison most of his life. He was sentenced to death in 1981 by a judge not a jury and Creech’s challenge to that sentence as a violation of his Eight Amendment rights was dismissed by the Idaho Supreme Court as “untimely.” Idaho has a history of purchasing execution drugs from what Creech’s lawyers called “shady sources.”

+ Michel Foucault: “It is comparatively easy to give up chopping off a few heads, because the blood makes a mess, because this is something that is no longer done in polite circles, and because there is the risk one may occasionally kill an innocent person. One gets into a more serious and difficult debate when it comes to giving up the death penalty in terms of establishing the principle that no public power (no more than any individual) has the right to take anyone’s life. At that point, you immediately come to the questions of war, the army, compulsory military service, and so on.”

+ Iran hanged at least 834 people in 2023, the second-highest number of executions in at least twenty years.

+ Violent crime in the US has declined by 49 percent since it peaked in 1991.

+ Things people have been holding when shot by the LAPD: phones, lighters, a bike part, a car part, a wooden board and, most recently, a plastic fork.

+ A new report from the Texas Defender Service found that 20 of the 21 people sentenced to death in Harris County were people of color.

+ In the U.S., Black women are six times more likely to be killed than white women, according to a new study in The Lancet. In some states, the rate is even higher. In Wisconsin, Black women were 20 times more likely to be killed.

+ A former Missouri car salesman named Harry Trueblood, who sold at least 250 guns across the state, thirty of which ended up at crime scenes, including murders and suicides, was convicted of selling guns without a license and sentenced to…probation.

+ Only a couple of weeks after New York Governor Kathy Hochul was ridiculed for saying she reserved the right to obliterate Canada if it decided to cross Lake Erie and raid Buffalo, Hochul announced that she is dispatching the National Guard into the subways of NYC, authorizing the troops (under no known constitutional provision) to search bags at stations predominately used by poor and minority subway riders. As John Teufel pointed out, the Governor’s theatrical move comes despite the fact subway crime was down 2.5 percent in 2023 over the previous year and “ is on par with 2013/2014 numbers, when everybody was crowing about how safe the subway is.”

+ Hochul: “[Riders] can refuse. We can refuse them. They can walk.”

+ Hochul has that demented HRC gaze and haughty rectitude, revealed by the too-wide open eyes and icy smirk–as if she’d just taken a hit of amyl nitrate and is ready to bomb Benghazi or invade the Bronx…

+ Ending stop and frisk in NYC resulted in 44% fewer children dropping out of school due to contact with the criminal court system.

+ Police chases kill around 700 people a year. Most of the victims aren’t even the fleeing drivers. San Francisco just voted to

+ Cops kill more than 10,000 pet dogs every year.

+ For three decades, as the Democrats went Full-Metal Neoliberal, they tried to keep the Left in line at election time by vowing to be the guardians of the Supreme Court. In that time, the Court moved farther to the right than it’s been since Plessy v. Ferguson and they did nothing to expand the court or restrict the reach of its judicial review.

+ Thousands of former Confederates, including Jefferson Davis, were disqualified from running for office under the 14th Amendment. None of them were disqualified by an act of Congress. So much for originalism.

+ The Courts aren’t broken but working as they almost always have from Dred Scott (1857) to Plessy (1896) to Lochner (1905) to Buck v Bell (1927, eugenics) to Korematsu (1944) to Bowers (1986, sodomy) to Bush v. Gore (2000) to Citizens United (2010) to Bruen & Dobbs (2022).

+ Democrats in the Senate still haven’t subpoenaed Harlan Crow or Leonard Leo.

+++

“The police in this country make no distinction between a Black Panther or a black lawyer or my brother or me. The cops aren’t going to ask me my name before they pull the trigger.”

—James Baldwin

On Wednesday night, the State of Georgia, abetted by the US Supreme Court, executed Willie Pye. It was the first execution in Georgia in four years, long one of the leading death machines in the nation.

Georgia’s pause in executions wasn’t voluntary. It was a consequence of the COVID pandemic, which had caused the prison system to restrict visits to inmates, even visits by lawyers, which meant that the counsels for death row prisoners couldn’t adequately prepare appeals or applications for clemency.  All of those limitations remain in place today, even on death row.

But this rule didn’t apply to Willie Pye. The reasons are too legally obtuse and arbitrary to go into. When Georgia, the state without mercy, decided to restart the death machinery, Pye was at the top of the list, a list he shouldn’t have been on in the first place.

Willie Pye was black. No surprise there. Since the death penalty was re-constitutionalized in 1976, 34% of the defendants executed have been black. The rate is even higher in Georgia, which has put to death 77 people since 1976, 29 of them black (38%). 

Willie Pye was a black man sentenced to death by an overwhelmingly white jury (there was only one black member) in a Georgia county so notorious for its racism that a confederate monument stood in front of its courthouse until the late 1960s. It now resides in the local cemetery.

Willie Pye was poor. Too poor to afford a lawyer, so a public defender was appointed for him. A bad one and the only one in town. Pye’s lawyer, Johnny Mostiler, put on what could charitably be called a perfunctory defense, neglecting to present a range of mitigating factors that might have spared Pye’s life, such as the abuse and violence he endured as a child and the fact that he may have suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. Both of Pye’s parents were alcoholics. And his father, who labored on a prison chain gang when Pye was born, was a violent alcoholic, who frequently flailed on the Pye children and their mother.

Yet, the only witness Pye’s lawyer called during the entire trial was…Willie Pye, rarely a winning courtroom strategy. Indeed his lawyer was so ineffectual at trial that in 2021 a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took the rare step of vacating Pye’s death sentence on the grounds of inadequate legal representation. But a year later the ruling was reversed by the full court, citing the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, one of the merciless federal crime bills of the Clinton Era crafted by Joe Biden. The appeals court didn’t dispute the ineptness of Pye’s lawyer, but simply ruled that under the Clinton/Biden law he no longer, in the interest of “effectiveness,” had the right to challenge it.

Willie Pye wasn’t the only person convicted for the crime he, alone, was sentenced to death for. Two other men were also arrested for the murder of 21-year-old Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. Both of those men, Anthony Freeman and Chester Andrews, pled out and were sentenced to life in prison. Pye, who maintained his innocence, risked going to trial with a lawyer who didn’t even probe the holes in the story told by his alleged co-conspirators. He paid the ultimate price for making the state prove its case against him. (Freeman, after serving 24 years behind bars, is now free.)

Willie Pye’s lawyer was not only incompetent, he was also, according to other lawyers and courthouse watchers, a racist, and frequently made racial slurs about his own clients, telling one colleague he thought “young black men were lazy” and saying of another client facing execution: “This little nigger deserves the death penalty.”

One of Mostiller’s most egregious failings was not to have Pye given a mental health evaluation before his trial or examine his school records. When Pye’s appellate attorneys did so, they discovered that Pye had an IQ score of only 68, which should have excepted him from execution under the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, which ruled that putting to death people with mental disabilities or brain trauma violated their Constitutional rights under the Eight Amendment. But the current Supreme Court rarely feels obliged to follow their own precedents anymore, especially in death penalty cases, and refused to hear Pye’s appeal on these compelling grounds. The Thomas-Alito Court is so obsessed with history and tradition that it seems only a matter of time before it finds a constitutional basis for lynching.

So nearly 30 years after being convicted and sentenced to death in a trial so deeply flawed that three of the jurors who voted for the death verdict pleaded for his life to be spared, the State of Georgia stuck a needle into 59-year-old Willie Pye’s arm and injected him with a dose of phenobarbitol that spread through his system until his heart stopped beating at 11:03 pm.

Willie Pye is dead and Georgia is back in the execution business. 

+++

+ Willie Pye was the third person executed in the US in 2024. There are 29 other scheduled executions for the remainder of the year, 13 in Oklahoma, 8 in Ohio, 3 in Texas, 2 in Missouri, and one each in Alabama, Georgia and Idaho. Of those, 14 have pending death warrants.

+ The morning of Pye’s execution the editorial board of Scientific Americancame out against the death penalty, saying capital punishment “does not deter crime, is not humane and has no moral or medical basis.”

+ In the last 12 months, police have shot and killed 1,137 people in the US. They’ve killed at least 10,000 people since Michael Brown was shot and killed in August 2014.

+ NYC judge to a public defender, prior to denying bail to his impoverished client: “No judge has ever lost their job setting bail on someone.”

+ In 2023, children unintentionally shot and killed 157 people in the US and injured another 270.

+ NYPD overtime pay budget $671 million 2022; cuts to NYC libraries budget $58.3 million

+ During his campaign for office, LA district attorney George Gascón promised to prosecute killer cops.  But thus far his office has charged only 8, securing only one conviction, former LA Sheriff’s deputy Andrew Lyons, who served a mere 12 days in the LA county jail for killing Ryan Twyman, an unarmed father of 3.

+ More than 1000 people in Pennsylvania are serving life without parole sentences for murders they personally didn’t commit–60% of them are black.

+ A Mississippi cop named Michael Green forced a man to drink his own urine, according to a new federal lawsuit: “Green removed his duty vest and filmed B.E. while B.E. got on the ground and licked his urine. B.E. gagged when he made contact with the floor. In response to B.E.’s gagging, Green told B.E., ‘Don’t spit it out.’ B.E. gagged again. ‘Lick that shit up. Drink your fuckin’ piss.’”

+ More than 40% of U.S. exonerations involve cases in which no crime ever occurred. Child sexual assault cases have among the highest rates of false accusations and nearly 250 people have been wrongly convicted of child sex abuse that never happened.

+ Hate crimes committed in K-12 schools have quadrupled in states that have passed anti-LGBT legislation since 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of FBI data.

+  Democrats in the New York General Assembly introduced a bill that would expand the definition of “domestic terrorism” to include blocking a public road or bridge. The “crime” would be punishable by a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

+ Rat fur, arsenic, copper, PFAS “forever” chemicals, DDT, coal ash, and radioactive radon are just some of the toxic substances detected in the drinking water of US prisons.

+ Here’s how San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus defended the lethal shooting of Ryan Gainer, a 15-year-old black high school student, who deputies shot three times while he held a gardening tool: “Certainly juveniles can be dangerous. He’s large of stature. He is physically fit.”

+ On Tuesday, cops in El Cerrito, California pursued a burglary suspect onto the Bay Bridge. The suspect was driving into oncoming traffic, and crashed head-on into another car, killing the driver. San Francisco voters approved Prop. E, earlier this month, would give police even more leeway to engage in these kinds of chaotic chases.

+ The Legal Aid Society has released a list of NYPD officers with the most claims against them. One of the cops, Sergeant David Grieco, has had 48 cases filed against him since 2013, amassing a total of $1,134,825.35 in lawsuit payouts. Grieco remains on the force. In all, NYC taxpayers have paid out more than half a billion in settlements for lawsuits against the city’s police for misconduct.

+ Last February, an LA Sheriff’s deputy accosted Emmett Brock, after Brock had flipped him off when he saw the cop having a confrontation with a woman on the sidewalk. The deputy ordered Brock, who is transgendered, out of his car, then threw him to the pavement in the parking lot of a 7/11 and began punching him repeatedly in the head. The beating was captured on video. The ≠deputy, Joseph Benza, claimed that Brock, a 23-year-old school teacher, had bitten him. Brock was arrested and taken to jail, where he says deputies demanded to inspect his genitals. Brock was charged with felony resisting arrest, which soon caused him to lose his job as a teacher at Frontier High School.  This week a judge ruled there was “no evidence” that Brock bit the deputy and declared him “factually innocent.” Brock is still unemployed. Benza is on the job and has faced no disciplinary action for the violent false arrest.

April

+ Ironically, Biden’s shameful backtracking on his campaign pledge to end the federal death penalty may save Julian Assange from being extradited to the US, since the Justice Dept. has refused to assure the UK it will not try to execute him under the terms of the Espionage Act.

+ The wife of James Ho, one of the circuit judges who banned mifepristone last year, took multiple payments from the group that brought it to court.

+ Federal judge Charles R. Breyer writing in his dismissal of Elon Musk’s suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, for documenting the rising swill of hate speech on Twitter since Musk took it over: “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking the purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”

+ Meanwhile, the Intercept’s Sam Biddle acquired documents through a FOIA request showing that Elon Musk’s Twitter/X was selling user data for government surveillance at the very same time it was allegedly fighting government surveillance in court.

+ The city of San Jose has put cameras on a municipal vehicle to train AI systems to detect homeless encampments. The city sends the footage to private computer vision companies who are using it to build homeless-encampments-detection algorithms.

+ Shortly after midnight on March 21, 17-year-old Karadius Smith was walking home with some friends in Leland, Mississippi, when a town cop began chasing him in a police cruiser and, according to Smith’s mother, ran him over from behind, leaving tire tracks on his back. The black teen died in the hospital later that day from his injuries. The cop who ran over Smith remains on the job and the police department has refused to let the family or their lawyer see the unedited footage of the chase and collision.

+ NYPD officials say they will deploy 800 more officers into the subway to “stop” fare evasion.

+ Earlier this week, 19-year-old Win Rozario, in the midst of a severe mental crisis, phoned 9/11 for help. When the NYPD arrived at his family’s apartment in Queens, they saw the 140-pound Rosario holding a pair of scissors and they tasered him. As he writhed on the floor, Rosario’s mother rushed to comfort him, dislodging the taser prongs. When Rosario reached for the scissors, the two cops shot him dead.

+ When MLK was bailed out of the Birmingham jail, he didn’t finance his own bond. The United Auto Workers, and others, raised tens of thousands of dollars to free him. Now the state of Georgia has passed a law banning bail funds from contributing to people’s bonds.

+ On his first day in his office, the new coroner in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana called in a bomb threat that wasn’t a bomb [it was a box filled with body bags that had been in the office for 10 years], suggested his office had bugged by his predecessor and shut down a rape kit program because he’s “a businessman” and “it’s not a moneymaker.”

+ More than 60 percent of suspended driver’s licenses in the state of Ohio don’t originate from bad driving offenses, but because the driver owes an unpaid debt.

+++

+ Using Andres Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” as the pretext, three House Republicans, Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer of Kentucky Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Mike Waltz of Florida, are launching a probe into “potential threats against critical domestic energy infrastructure after a spike in calls for violence by radical eco-terrorists.”

+ “With radical environmentalists around the world commonly engaged in the destruction or attempted destruction of art and other property, blocking transit, disrupting private gatherings, and delaying energy infrastructure projects,” the three wrote in a letter announcing the probe. “The Committee seeks to understand the threat that environmental violent extremists also pose to the physical energy infrastructure of the United States and implications for national security.” 

+ When FBI director Christopher Wray appeared before the Committee last month, Rep. Waltz grilled Wray on the dangers of the book (published Verso) being taught on college campuses:  “We have 16 universities teaching [Malm’s book]  as part of their curriculum. Sixteen universities! I would consider that facilitating domestic terrorism.” the book by Andreas Malm. As a point of reference, there are around 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. A film of Malm’s book made many top 10 lists last year, including my own.

+ If Comer and Company were really worried about exploding pipelines, they’d be investigating the pipeline companies, themselves. Since 1986, there have been more than 8,000 pipeline explosions, causing more than 500 deaths, 2,300 injuries and $7 billion in damages, according to data from the federal Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. None of the incidents are attributed to sabotage. They blow up on their own.

+++

+ Columbia students were right in 1968. History proved it. Columbia students are right today. The university has no good answers to their demands that the school stop investing in genocide. Calling in the NYPD proves it.

+ Abbie Hoffman: “The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.” In Columbia’s case, the administration is doing the job for the students.

+ Columbia Professor Rebecca Jordan-Young: “The faculty who are supporting the students do not all agree on the issue of Israel and Palestine, [but] we are astonished and disgusted with the way the university has cracked down on the students.”

+ From Wednesday’s House interrogation of Columbia University’s President, Minouche Shafik…

+ God also wanted Abraham to slit his son Isaac’s throat, which is pretty much what Shafik did when she called the NYPD goon squad on the kids in her care. When it comes to protecting academic freedom, Giordano Bruno she’s not…What Shafik is, by contrast, is a former vice president of the World Bank,  a former Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, and a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, who also enjoys a life peerage in the House of Lords. She’s going to serve the university’s donors not its students.

+ Since Eric Adams became mayor of NYC, at least 31 people have died while awaiting trial at Rikers.

+ Before the eclipse, prisons in New York State handed out eclipse glasses to the inmates, then just before the solar event took place the prisons were placed on lockdown. “Then after it was over, they collected the glasses, and the prison literally opened up the doors an hour after it happened, and it was regular movement,” inmate Joseph Perez told HellGate. “Once in a lifetime event, missed.”

+ Police reform advocate Dana Rachlin has filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD. Rachlin charges that officials in the department leaked informationabout rape allegations she had made, as retaliation for her criticism of violent policing.

+ NYC agreed to a $17.5 million payout for women forced by NYPD to remove hijabs.

+ Newly released documents show that at least 12 Minneapolis police officers were disciplined after the George Floyd protests of 2020. One sergeant was fired for pepper-spraying a Vice reporter. Another was let go for brutally beating Jaleel Stallings, a 29-year-old Army veteran who was out after curfew. Eight were suspended for using excessive force on protesters, failing to de-escalate encounters or turning on their body-worn cameras. The city has paid out $50 million in police brutality cases since the murder of Floyd.

+ The US is the only country in the world that sentences children to life without parole, meaning many of them will die in prison.

+ The Appeal has published the first national database of prison commissary prices, revealing an exploitative system that forces incarcerated people to pay up to 5 times the market price for some items. For example, Indiana prisons charge $33 for an 8-inch fan. A similar one sells online for $23 at Lowe’s. In Georgia, where prison labor is unpaid, a 10-inch electric fan is marked up more than 25% to $32. In 2023, the commissary vendor for the Texas state prisons raised the price of water inside by 50%.

+ Kwaneta Harris on how Texas prisons control what women read: “People in solitary aren’t allowed to go to the prison library… we qualify for one book a week… the librarian always sends a Christian-themed book. In 2018, I asked her, “Why don’t you give me what I request?” She said, “I’m called to save your heathen soul.”

+ It sounds like something out of Kafka or Stalinist Russia. Someone stole the identity of William Woods. Woods was later arrested by the LAPD, who believed the man who swiped his identity over him.  A judge later sent Woods to a mental hospital because he continued to insist that he was the real William Woods. He spent two years locked up before he was finally released.

+ A cop in Indian River, Florida was arrested on child porn charges, after he was recognized during a call at a high school by one of his victims, who said the officer had been contacting her police that the officer had been contacting her on Snapchat, asking for naked and topless photos. The deputy, Kai Cromer, was arrested on his first day on the job. Cromer is 19 years old and had told friends, ‘I’m going to be law enforcement, I’m very powerful.’ 

+ A St. Louis judge awarded almost $23.5 million to Luther Hall, a former police officer who was beaten by colleagues when he was working undercover during a protest. Hall suffered several herniated discs and a jaw injury that left him unable to eat.

+ The Albuquerque Police Department has been under federal oversight for the last 10 years. In that time,  Albuquerque police have continued to shoot people at a higher rate than any other large city in the US. In 2014, when the Department came under a federal consent decree, Albuquerque cops killed 9 people. Last year, they killed 13.

+ Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says that if the government locks up 15% of the population, there will be no crime: “Only about 15% of all Americans commit 100% of the crime … If you lock up the 15%, we don’t have any crime.” In other words, he wants to lock up nearly 50 million people. Patrick calls himself a “libertarian.”

+ Louisiana’s House of Representatives passed a bill giving the police the power to arrest anyone who can’t produce identification to the arresting officer and take them in for fingerprinting.

+ A federal judge ruled this week that Los Angeles city officials altered and fabricated evidence to support the city’s defense against allegations that it illegally seized and destroyed the property of homeless people in the city.

+ For decades Idaho has locked psychiatric patients in maximum-securityprison cells. The patients haven’t been convicted or, in many cases, even charged with a crime.

+ Brent Hall, a police officer in Bullitt County, Kentucky, died of a heart attack while chasing some teens when he was off duty. Hall had previously been fired from the Bullitt County Sheriff’s Office after being accused of rape and sodomybut quickly landed a job in the Pioneer Village Police Department in the very same town.

+ Jonathan Stone, county chair of the Trump campaign, in New Hampshire is a former cop who threatened to kill his colleagues in a shooting spree, murder the chief of police and rape the chief’s wife because he was suspended by the department 5 days after it was revealed he had been having a relationship with a 15-year-old high school girl. The incident occurred in 2006 but was just made public last week, after a court case brought by a local paper. After Stone was fired from the department, he opened a gun store and later gave Trump an inscribed AK-47. He now serves as a New Hampshire State representative.

+ The story the Chicago cops told was that they pulled Dexter Reed over in Humbolt Park on March 21 for not wearing his seat belt, then in the next 41 seconds shot at him 96 times. But a video released this week shows that the police officers couldn’t have seen into Reed’s car, given their location and the GMC Terrain’s darkly tinted windows. Three of the four officers emptied their guns and reloaded and continued firing at Reed as he staggered out of the car, unarmed. One officer fired “at least 50 times.” Reed was shot three times while he was on the ground.

May

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

– Allen Ginsburg, “America”

+ As America’s liberal elites declare open warfare on their own kids, it’s easy to see why they’ve shown no empathy at all for the murdered, maimed and orphaned children of Gaza. Back-of-the-head shots to 8-year-olds seem like a legitimate thing to protest in about the most vociferous way possible…But, as Dylan once sang, maybe I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft.

+ Here’s the political background to the police raids against antiwar students on campuses across the country this week, violent crackdowns that have Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over them: On Tuesday, Biden demonized the protesters as hate groups. On the same day 22 Democratic House members called for the students at Columbia to be cleared from the campus, this was followed by Chuck Schumer speaking on the floor of the Senate denouncing the occupation of Hind Hall as an act of terrorism. Then the NYPD did its vicious nightwork at Columbia and CCNY. On Wednesday morning, the Biden White House compared these brave students–from Columbia to UCLA, Indiana to Texas–to the white power tiki torch thugs at Charlottesville. On Thursday, Biden gave a speech that would have condemned the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s movement, Native American Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, Stonewall, anti-apartheid movement, BLM and the labor movement he claims to venerate (not to mention the Boston Tea Party) as outside the American tradition of free speech. Biden is the author of the most repressive crime laws in the history of a nation whose statutes are full of repressive crime laws. He hasn’t changed. In fact, he’s gotten worse as his brain demyelinates and his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous.

+ In contrast to Biden’s reactionary blandishments of the antiwar movement, here are the words of the most successful progressive leader in the US today, Shawn Fain, head of the UAW:

The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting the war.

+ Perhaps the UAW will now retract its premature endorsement of Biden? Unlikely, of course. The endorsement itself probably doesn’t matter much. Many of the UAW’s rank-and-file will still vote for Trump. The campaign money might. The endorsement lends Fain’s very clear statement even more weight. Fain’s statement is not going to change Biden’s mind. He’s encased himself in 50 years of pro-Israeli political concrete. But it helps to undermine the disgusting narrative put out by the White House and top Democrats that the students are naive dupes of Hamas, justifying these brutal crackdowns.

+ The “naive” students at Columbia understand the historical context of their movement and the previous movements on their campus better than any of the administrators seeking to evict, suspend, expel & imprison them. It is why, despite the police raids, expulsions and arrests, they will win and their tormentors fall in disgrace.

+ Columbia University has an endowment of $13.6 billion and still charges students $60-70,000 a year to attend what has become an academic panopticon and debt trap, where every political statement is monitored, every threat to the ever-swelling endowment punished.

+ Doesn’t the White House have anyone who speaks Arabic on staff? Perhaps they didn’t hire any–that would be a Biden thing to do. Or perhaps they’ve all quit. Who could blame them, hearing the administration equate “intifada” with hate speech? “Intifada” means “shaking off,” as in a protest or uprising, the kind of public action allegedly protected by the Constitution. In Arabic, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the women’s movement, the OWS protests, and the BLM protests were all called “intifadas,” as was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  This Intifada will likely spell the end of the Biden presidency without a single stone being thrown.

+ The Biden administration is not only incapable (more likely unwilling) of practicing peace-seeking diplomacy in Gaza or Ukraine, but here at home, as riot police batter unarmed students from coast to coast, in raids the White House’s own belligerent and bigoted statements instigated and justified. It’s a dereliction of the duties of his office and should be as impeachable an offense as any malfeasance Trump engaged in.

+ In 1970, Richard Nixon famously made a trip to the Lincoln Memorial to actually talk with anti-war protesters for more than two hours. Biden sneers at them, encourages the liberal press to smear them and university presidents to send in riot squads to clear them off campus…

+ Columbia student organizer Jon Ben-Menachem: “Joe Biden should immediately stop making statements which manufacture consent for threats to the physical safety of American students.”

+ One of the Columbia trustees that Baroness Shafik “consulted” with before “inviting” the NYPD Riot Squad to invade campus, break into Hind Hall and arrest the students in her care was Jeh Johnson, Obama’s former director of Homeland Security who now sits on the board of Lockheed. Johnson once claimed that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

+ For nearly two days, the NYPD covered up the fact that one of their officers had fired a gun inside Hind Hall, while they were arresting students. Ultimately, the shooting was only revealed by the New York City DA’s office. If you call in the NYPD, you can pretty much guarantee there will be bang-bang…Is there any doubt now that the NYPD raid did more damage to the buildings at Columbia than the students? The people who invited these cops on their campus should never be guardians of students again.

+ Prem Thakker: “The dilemma for American college students is that their tax and tuition dollars are helping fund a plausible genocide; if they protest that fact, their tax and tuition dollars are then used to beat and arrest them & their teachers.”

+ Daniela Gabor: “Minouche Shafik wrote a 2021 book – ‘What We Owe Each )ther’ – where she proposes a reset of the social contract to improve intergenerational fairness. Then she went to Columbia and brought a notoriously violent police force into that social contract.”

+ John Fetterman, the oafish senator from Pennsylvania, went from being a quirky political clown to Pennywise, the clown from Stephen King’s “It”: “The protesters at Columbia demonstrated that there are two factions of the protesters–there’s the pro-Hamas and then there’s the really pro-Hamas.”

+ The great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer: “Gen Z has agitated for action on gun control, climate change, reproductive justice, trans rights, voting rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, reducing police violence, and stopping genocide. Elders have failed them at literally every turn.”

+ Judith Butler: “If calling for an end of genocide is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student. Palestinians are the ones in need of safety [from genocide].”

+ At Dartmouth, the police threw to the ground Professor  Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old head of the university’s Jewish Studies program.

+ Raphael Orleck on the bodyslamming arrest of the chair of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies program, Annelise Orleck: “That’s my fucking mom—-she’s okay now and bailing out the students who got arrested. I’m so proud.” Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from NH riot police. Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from riot police.

+ The pro-Israel fanatics who attacked UCLA students Tuesday night with clubs and bottle rockets, as campus security cowered inside a building like deputies of the Ulvade police force, shouted out it’s time for a “Second Nakba!” Don’t wait for Biden or CNN to condemn this eliminationist rhetoric and violence.

+ Around 3:30 on Weds., morning, the pro-Israel mobs attacked four student journalists for the Daily Bruin on the campus of UCLA. The gang surrounded the Bruin reporters, including editor Catherine Hamilton, sprayed them with mace, pointed laser lights at their faces and verbally harassed them. Hamilton said she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen as she tried to break free. Another student journalist was shoved to the ground, beaten and repeatedly kicked. “We expected to be harassed by counter-protestors,” Hamilton said. “I truly didn’t expect to be directly attacked.”

+ Momma, we’ve found the “outside agitators”… The Daily Beast reports that before the violent attack on anti-war demonstrators at UCLA, Jessica Seinfeld (wife of the comedian) and Bill Ackman (billionaire husband of the plagiarist Neri Oxman) gave thousands of dollars for a pro-Israel demonstration on campus.

+ UCLA professor Danielle Carr: “It’s hard to overstate the degree of outrage & betrayal on behalf of all the faculty now, especially after what happened last night, after about 200 very violent pro-Israel protesters descended on the camp and were shooting fireworks and acting real violent. And it took the university several hours to respond and secure the students’ safety. The irony that in the name of student safety the encampment will be facing a militarised police invasion tonight, probably including tear gas, it’s just hard to say fully how disgusted many of the faculty are finding this.”

+ As Professor Carr predicted, the day after the pro-Israel mob assaulted UCLA students and faculty, the California Highway Patrol arrived on campus, not to protect the students from “outside” assailants, but to open fire on them with tear gas and rubber bullets…

+ During the CHP crackdown on UCLA student protesters, at least 5 students were shot in the head with rubber bullets, the cops fired flash-bang grenades directly into the crowd and more than 130 students were arrested.

+ The Los Angeles Public Defenders’ Union called the UCLA arrests “shameful and a complete failure of leadership”. President Garrett Miller said they are ready to “represent every person facing charges.”

+ There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Joe…?

Biden: Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It is against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest. pic.twitter.com/0Nkttggsy4

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2024

+ Biden: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”

+ From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

+ Biden on the George Floyd protests: “We will not allow any President to quiet our voice. We won’t let those who see this as an opportunity to sow chaos throw up a smokescreen to distract us from the very real and legitimate grievances at the heart of these protests.” But that was then under Him, this is now under Me…

+ Contrary to Biden’s deplorable speech denouncing the student anti-war demonstrations as violent, a new report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) found that 99% of campus protests over Palestine at US colleges have been peaceful.

+ Biden received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War but, like Trump, never took part in the student movement to end the genocidal war in Southeast Asia. He was happy for others–poor whites, Hispanics and Blacks–to serve, kill and die in his place. No surprise he condemns the students protesting to end his wars.

+ In his memoir, Promises to Keep, Biden admitted he “never saw the war as a great moral issue.” While enjoying his draft deferment to attend Syracuse University, he described being irritated by the anti-war protests on campus. His irritation rose to fury after SDS occupied the chancellor’s office and hung banners out the window of the Administration Building. “They were taking over the building,” Biden wrote, “and we looked up and said, ‘Look at those assholes.’ That’s how far apart from the antiwar movement I was.”

+ The bike lock the NYPD held up as proof that “outside agitators” were behind the occupation of Hind Hall is available for sale on campus via Columbia’s Public Safety department under their “Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program”.

+ Chris by Bike: “Cops don’t know this is a bike lock because they’ve never investigated a bike theft in their lives.”

+ Ralph Nader: “The enforcer president of Columbia University— Minouche Shafik—is one of the wealthiest people in America. As president, she makes over $2000 an hour every weekday. In three days, she makes more than many blue-collar workers at Columbia make in a year.”

+ Professor Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “At the hospital, the nurse took photos ‘in case you want to file a report.’ Report to whom? The very people who strangled me at work in broad daylight with cameras rolling? Those people?”

+ During a week of ever-escalating assaults on students and faculty, Jill Biden is hosting the first ever “Teachers of the Year” State Dinner at the White House. Some of the best won’t be there because they’re in jail, in the hospital or trying to arrange bail for their incarcerated pupils…

+ Ari Fleischer was better at his job and he was one of the worst hired liars I’ve ever seen. To compare the racist violent mob at Charlottesville to students on campuses large and small across the US is just repulsive at a personal level and self-destructive on a political one.

The evil that would have to be in your heart to compare campus protests against a US supported mass murder to white supremacists Charlottesville. Jeane Pierre underscores the false connection to antisemitism again at the end of her comments sanctioning violence against students pic.twitter.com/9CplA0MLIy

— Jaime Omar Yassin (@hyphy_republic) May 1, 2024

+ On May 6th, the Pulitzer Prizes are scheduled to be announced at Columbia University. On Wednesday., night student journalists at Columbia, many of them reporting from inside Pulitzer Hall, were threatened with arrest if they moved across their own campus to report on a police raid targeting their fellow students and faculty. They won’t win any Pulitzers, but their reporting has been far more vivid, informative and less biased than the elite media the administration and NYPD allowed on university grounds.

+ One of the lies the Adams administration used to justify the paramilitary raids on Columbia was that “a wife of a known terrorist” was inside Hind Hall with the protesters. NYC media ran with this obvious lie. This morning Deputy Police Commissioner Rebecca Weiner said the woman wasn’t in Hind Hall, wasn’t part of the protests, but had been seen on campus last week and that they “have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part.”

+ The woman Adams slanderously smeared was Nahla al-Arian wife of Sami-al Arian, the former professor of computer engineering at South Florida (and CounterPunch contributor), who was never convicted of a crime by a jury but pled to one count after a mistrial, then was wrongly held under house arrest for refusing to testify in a federal case…the charges were later dismissed. Adams falsely Sami al-Arian was “arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level” and implied that Nahla, a retired elementary school teacher, had somehow helped to train the students in civil disobedience. In fact, she was in NYC with her two daughters Laila and Lama, both journalists, stopped by the encampment for about 20 minutes and, according to her daughter Lama, had some hummus and left because she was tired. Nahla called the Columbia students “beautiful and busy.”

+ “The whole thing is a distraction because they are very scared that the young Americans are aware for the first time of what’s going on in Palestine,” Nahla Al-Arian said. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope that at last the Palestinian people can get some justice. I sat and I felt happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine.”

+ According to Lama, one of the best young documentary filmmakers around, her mother found out this week that more than 200 of her relatives have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

+ Anyone who wants to know more about the bogus case against Sami Al-Arian and the decades-long harassment of his family should watch the documentary, The USA v. Al-Arian, which shows how in the post-9/11 mass hysteria the Patriot Act was used against a university professor for merely knowing someone who was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad years earlier.

+ Two days after the raid, Adams was still being pushed to name how many “outside agitators” had been arrested by the NYPD. Adams had no answers, because there weren’t any and shrugged off the questions, saying: “I don’t think that matters…One professor poisoning a classroom of students is just as bad as 50.”

+ A year ago, NYC Mayor Eric Adams vowed to bring what he’s learned from Israeli Police to the NYPD. That rare promise kept…

+ Adams justifying the police raids: “These are our children and we can’t allow them to be radicalized.” Adams and the Democrats have done more damage to academic freedom than Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo.

+ In Eric Adams, the people of NYC must endure the hybridization of the lies of a politician with the lies of an NYPD cop.

+ The real “outside agitators” on the campuses of Columbia, NYU, and CCNY were the police themselves. (For example, less than half of all NYPD officers live in NYC and only 25% of LAPD officers live in Los Angeles.)

+++

 

In one of the most egregious uses of the pardon power since Bill Clinton freed billionaire tax cheat, Israeli agent and international fugitive Marc Rich as the clock struck midnight on his lamentable administration, last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott freed an avowed racist who ran a red light, before plunging his car into a crowd of protesters and fatally shooting a man who was trying to protect people from being run over. Abbott granted the killer a pardon, even though the gunman had been obsessed for months with the idea of killing BLM activists.

Just before 10 o’clock on the night of July 25, 2020, a crowd of anti-police brutality protesters were crossing the intersection of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, Texas, when a car ran a red light and repeatedly drove into the mass of people.

Several of the protesters approached the car to get the driver to stop menacing pedestrians. One of them was Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran, who was pushing his wheelchair-bound fiancé, Whitney Mitchell, a quadruple amputee, across the intersection as the car honked at and rammed into the protesters. Foster was carrying an AK-47 rifle for protection, as allowed by Texas’ open-carry law.

As Foster approached the car, telling the driver to “move on, move on,” Daniel Perry, a 30-year-old US Army sergeant, took out his own gun, a .357 Magnum revolver, shot Foster five times through the car’s window and fled the scene. Foster, who like Perry was white, died at the scene.

Later, Perry called the police and reported his version of what happened. Seeking to shield himself behind Texas’s expansive Stand Your Ground Law, Perry claimed he shot in self-defense after Foster came toward him with his AK-47 slung over his shoulder. None of the witnesses reported seeing Foster point his weapon toward Perry or his car. And video of the incident showed Foster keeping his rifle at what gun enthusiasts call the “low-ready” position.

Almost before Foster’s blood had dried, Perry had become a hero of the vigilante right, an adult version of the man-child Kyle Rittenhouse. And a Texan, too, with all that implies in the mythology of American masculinity. Perry was portrayed as a brawny defender of the civil order, a regular American who’d struck back at the lawlessness and anarchy, which many conservative blowhards fumed, had taken over the streets of urban America after the murder of George Floyd.

June

+ Since Eric Adams became mayor of New York City complaints against the NYPD have spiked to a 12-year high, according to the city’s Citizen Complaint Review Board. Among the as NYC’s police watchdog agency cracks down on officers wearing ‘white supremacist’ morale patches on duty. Among the complaints investigated by the watchdog agency are reports of NYPD cops wearing white supremacist patches on their body armor: “The skull patch on subject officer 2’s uniform was a specific imagery commonly used by white supremacist groups. Subject Officer 2 stated that the patch was a gift, and the skull insignia did not have offensive connotations. The investigation found that the display of the patch on subject officer 2’s uniform was discourteous and offensive.”

+ Kudos to the NYPL for taking a direct shot at NYC’s ridiculous mayor, Eric Adams, who wants to shovel more and more money to the police at the expense of the city’s libraries…

+ Meanwhile, the NYPD spent $22 million for “ShotSpotter” surveillance technology that was supposed to detect incidents of gunfire in the city. However, an audit of 8 months of ShotSpotter alerts found that 87% of the timeNYPD officers were dispatched to a scene, there was no evidence of a shooting.

+ For decades, prosecutors in Alameda County, California (Oakland) have sought to exclude Jews and blacks from juries in death penalty cases. The handwritten records show numerous examples of DAs marking down when jurors appeared to be Jewish, disparaging Black women and using explicitly anti-gay slurs.

+ Last year saw the lowest rate of violent crime in the US in 50 years. So far this year the violent crime rate has fallen by another 15%.

+ There were only 13 homicides in Baltimore in all of May. From 2015 to 2022, the city averaged more than 32 victims each May. 13 is one of the lowest number of victims for the month of May in the city’s modern history (since 1970). Homicides in Charm City are down by more than 48% since 2022

+ More people were killed by US Customs and Border Patrol (171) in 2022 than died at the Berlin Wall in its entire 28-year existence (136).

+ Biden: “What do you think Trump would have done on January 6 if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol? I don’t think he would be talking about pardons. This is the same guy who wanted to tear gas you as you peacefully protested George Floyd’s murder.” Uh, the Portland Police Department, in one of the most “liberal” cities in the US, drenched so many protesters and nearby neighborhoods in tear gas that a war crimes team was called in to investigate it…

+ The price of freedom!  The first five months of U.S. gun violence in 2024, as of June:

•7,038 gun deaths

•13,154 gun injuries

•195 mass shootings

•322 children shot

•1,864 teenagers shot

•530 incidents of defensive gun use

•593 unintentional shootings

•286 murder-suicides

+ Psychological torture by cop in Fortuna, California: After Thomas Perez reported his elderly father missing, Fortuna cops hauled him in for a 17-hour interrogation, during which they threatened to kill his dog, and badgered him into falsely confessing to having murdered his dad. But unbeknownst to the cops, Perez’s dad was alive.

+ At least 20 elementary school children in San Bruno, California were sickened by a San Francisco Sheriff’s Office training a half-mile away from ingesting decades-old chemical weapons after officers were invited to bring and use up outside munitions.

+ An Indiana sheriff paid child support for his secret child with the county auditor by using the local volunteer firefighter association’s credit card.

+ Apache County, Arizona doesn’t have an animal shelter. So the cops round up homeless dogs, shoot them and dump the bodies by the railroad tracks.

July

“It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.”

— Henry Miller

+ Last Saturday a 20-year-old kitchen worker named Thomas Crooks, described as a loner nerd by friends, asked his father if he could borrow the family AR-15 semi-automatic rifle for some target practice at the local shooting range. Dad handed him the gun and sent young Tom on his way. But Tom bypassed the shooting range and drove 45 miles north from Bethel Park to Butler, Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was presiding over an outdoor rally. Along the way, Crooks stopped to load up with 50 rounds of ammo and buy a five-foot tall ladder. 

Crooks arrived at the scene in Butler after the Secret Service and local cops had swept the area. He used his ladder to climb to the roof of a small warehouse about 450 feet from where Trump was speaking. The warehouse was outside of the primary security area under the supervision of the Secret Service and had been handed over to local police and sheriffs, those heroic figures so often valorized as the “sovereign leaders” of rural America by MAGA. Three police snipers were inside the building Crooks used as his shooting perch, but none of them were on the roof.

Several rally-goers told the local police they’d seen a man (or man-child) walking the perimeter of the site and then climbing onto the roof with a gun. Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said one of his deputies climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who saw the officer and turned toward him, pointing his AR-15. Rather than confront Crooks, the deputy dropped to safety. A few seconds later Crooks started firing. One of his eight shots nicked Trump’s ear (no stitches needed) and others hit three people at the rally, killing one and seriously wounding two. Crooks was then shot and killed by the Secret Service’s “counter-sniper team.” He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo from Demolition Ranch, a youtube channel featuring gun and demolition porn.

Trump, dribbles of blood streaked across his face, was marshaled off the stage by the Secret Service, while pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump was taken to a local hospital, where his ear was swabbed, and he was quickly sent on his way. Trump spent much of the next day playing golf.

As for Trump’s would-be assassin, Crooks didn’t seem overtly political. His politics were the politics of the gun. He searched online for the names of Biden and Trump, equally, it seemed and was likely to have pulled the trigger on the first one who entered the sights of his AR-15. There was just a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as he was concerned. Crooks is the next variation on Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucked up white kid, working a dead-end job in a shabbily run nursing home, who ventured forth bound for glory with a semi-automatic rifle in the Republic of the Shooter.

+++

+ Crooks fits the profile of every young, alienated white mass shooter since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into the lunchroom at Columbine looking to settle scores with anyone who’d bullied, laughed at or ignored them in gym class–only now the semi-automatic rifles can be bought more easily, openly carried nearly everywhere and amped up to full-auto with a bump stock.

+ Laura Bassett: “A white Republican man shot a white Republican man because of critical race theory?”

+ One of Crooks’ classmates at Bethel Park High School told the New York Timesthat as a freshman Crooks became a frequent object of ridicule by bullies at the school. “Those other kids would always say, ‘Hey, look, at the school shooter over there. They would tease him about his poor hygiene, body odor. He was an easy target.”

+ The family of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks is listed in a 2016 Trump campaign database as gun-owning Republicans who live a “gun-owning lifestyle.” The Trump campaign targeted them for pro-gun messaging. When the FBI searched the Crooks’s home, they found more than a dozen guns.

+ There’s no question that the Trump shooting will increase the power of the very same “Deep State” institutions so many MAGA people fear and believe were behind the plot to assassinate him.

+ FDR not only survived an attempted coup plotted by Wall Street tycoons in 1933 but he was also shot at while riding in an open car in Miami during that same year. One of the errant bullets killed the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak.

+ Nixon after George Wallace was shot in 1972 at the Laurel Shopping Center parking lot in suburban DC: “We must all stand together to eliminate this vicious threat to our public life. We must not permit the shadow of violence to fall over our country again.” There’s no originality to American politics anymore. The same trite banalities are recycled over and over.

+ Trump was shot with a 5.56×45mm bullet, commonly called a Five-Five-Six NATO round– the standard cartridge for NATO rifles. No way the US stays in NATO if he’s reelected.

+++

+ Coast Guard gunboats are patrolling the canals of Milwaukee during the RNC Convention. This will probably soon become a permanent feature of all urban waterways in the US…

+ An executive of the gay dating app Grindr described the Republican National Convention as “basically Grindr’s Super Bowl.”

+ Tuesday was Back the Blue night at the GOP convention. It says something about the truly perverse psychological state of American politics that the RNC convention spent last night heaping praise on law enforcement days after local police retreated from confronting the Trump shooter, while in Milwaukee out-of-town cops providing “security” for the RNC gunned down an unarmed black homeless veteran as a threat more than a mile from the convention.

+ Samuel Sharpe, a homeless Black veteran who was a regular at an encampment in downtown Milwaukee, was shot and killed by police today. Not by Milwaukee Police, but by a Columbus, Ohio police officer, in town to help police the RNC Convention, who shot Sharpe a mile from the convention. “Why are cops from Ohio way out here?” asked David Porter, a friend of Sharpe’s. “Had that been Milwaukee PD that man would be alive right now. I know that because they know him.”

+ As if to emphasize their indifference to the victims of the shooting, they’re having an AR-15 giveaway at the GOP convention…

+ Days after a 20-year-old tried to nail Trump with an AR-15, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota’s law requiring people to be at least 21 to carry a handgun in public is unconstitutional.

+ While the Democrats–for some reason comprehensible only to Democrats–have “paused” fundraising after the failed assassination attempt, a Trump-owned company is selling sneakers for $299 a pair with an image of his bloodied face after the rally shooting…

August