Black Union Soldier Finally Honored Almost 100 Years After Death

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

Associated Press

A runaway slave who joined the Union Army during the Civil War and lost a leg after being wounded in battle finally received recognition Sunday, nearly 100 years after he died in Nevada.

Nevada historians say they decided to hold a military funeral for Pvt. Scott Carnal of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry because it’s unlikely he received any recognition after his death in 1917 in Dayton, about 40 miles south of Reno.

Carnal was long forgotten until modern researchers discovered that he belonged to the United States Colored Troops and was severely wounded in the Battle of Honey Springs in what is now Oklahoma on July 17, 1863. He was roughly 73 when he died, and no obituary on him has surfaced.

Over 200 people, many of them wearing Civil War-era attire, paid tribute to Carnal and other unsung veterans at the Dayton Cemetery during the ceremony staged by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, the Historical Society of Dayton Valley and several other groups. Firing squads and a bugler stood to offer three-volley salutes and play taps. A riderless horse led by a man circled Carnal’s grave.

Read More Black Union Soldier Finally Honored Almost 100 Years After Death.

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Supreme Court could reshape voting districts, with big impact on Hispanics

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Drew DeSilver

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take up a Texas case that challenges the way nearly every U.S. voting district – from school boards to Congress – is drawn. The case, in essence, asks the court to specify what the word “person” means in its “one person, one vote” rule. The outcome of the case could have major impacts on Hispanic voting strength and representation from coast to coast.

Ever since a series of landmark rulings in the 1960s, districts have been drawn “as nearly of equal population as is practicable.” (As Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority in Reynolds v. Sims, “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”) The high court didn’t directly say what “equal population” meant, but states and localities have almost invariably used total population figures. And that population is determined by the decennial census.

However, the appellants in the Texas case, Evenwel v. Abbott, argue that districts instead should be drawn to have equal numbers of eligible voters. (The case involves redistricting within states, not reapportioning congressional seats among states.)

Read More Supreme Court could reshape voting districts, with big impact on Hispanics | Pew Research Center.

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McKinney officer Eric Casebolt resigns; police chief calls actions at pool party ‘indefensible’

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Sarah Mervosh

McKinney Police Chief Greg Conley condemned as “indefensible” the actions of Eric Casebolt, an officer who resigned Tuesday, after a video of Casebolt physically confronting teenagers at a pool party attracted national attention and sparked protests.

Conley said at a news conference late Tuesday that Casebolt, 41, resigned “on his own will” while under investigation. He will keep his pension and benefits.

“Our policies, our training and our practice do not support his actions,” Conley said. “He came into the call out of control and, as the video shows, was out of control during the incident.”

Teens who were at the pool party said they were happy Casebolt was off the force. But some worried he could become an officer at another department.

“What he did was wrong and he shouldn’t be able to do it to someone else,” said Ladariene McKever, 15.

When Casebolt resigned Tuesday, he didn’t apologize or make any statement. “It was just a simple resignation: ‘I resign,’” the chief said.

Read More McKinney officer Eric Casebolt resigns; police chief calls actions at pool party ‘indefensible’ | | Dallas Morning News.

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Justice Or Else! Countdown to Million Man March 20th Anniversary Gathering Begins with Farrakhan’s East Coast Tour

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

Two decades ago the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam convened the historic Million Man March in Washington, D.C., the largest mass gathering in the history of the United States and perhaps the largest gathering of Black men in world history.

“Justice Or Else” is the poignant and powerful theme as Min. Farrakhan convenes the 20th anniversary gathering October 10, 2015 in the Nation’s Capitol.

Starting in Washington D.C., the Minister initiated an east coast tour in early June with stops in Philadelphia and New York to promote and begin organizing for this vital event. After the Million Man March in 1995, Min. Farrakhan toured over 50 countries and met with heads of state connecting the Black struggle in America with the international struggle for freedom, justice and equality.

Twenty years later, with the world engulfed in turmoil, Min. Farrakhan returns to the seat of government for the world’s sole superpower and represents a universal cry for justice heard echoing across the globe.

Read More Justice Or Else! Countdown to Million Man March 20th Anniversary Gathering Begins with Farrakhan’s East Coast Tour.

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Private Prisons, Public Shame

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Mary Turck

Last month the state of Washington contracted with the GEO Group, one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S., to move up to 1,000 inmates from the state’s overcrowded prisons to its correctional facility in Michigan, thousands of miles from their homes and families. This makes family visits and connection with the community harder, though studies show that inmates who receive more visits are less likely to re-offend after release.

Prisoners can’t vote in the United States and as a result they don’t have much sway over public policy decisions. But private, for-profit prison companies do, their voices amplified by big campaign contributions and millions spent on lobbying. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, some of the candidates’ ties to the prison-industrial complex raise a lot of questions. For example, the GEO Group has contributed heavily to campaigns of Florida senator and Republican contender Marco Rubio. And Republican candidate Jeb Bush’s support of for-profit prisons goes back to the 1990s, when he oversaw prison privatization as Florida governor.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is calling for criminal justice reform, which would reduce profits for private prisons and reduce mass incarceration. The election offers voters a choice between candidates who support the current system that allows corporations to profit from the misery of the inmates and those committed to fundamental reform, which includes changing inflexible sentencing laws and ending the for-profit prison system.

Washington’s contract with the GEO Group is part of the boom in for-profit prisons, whose inmate population increased by 1,600 percent from 1980 to 2009. The privatization of prisons and prison services accelerated during former President Bill Clinton’s administration based on promises of cost savings and better treatment for inmates. For-profit prisons have delivered on neither.

Read More Private Prisons, Public Shame | Al Jazeera America.

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By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Jamiles Lartey

shootingpic2_1393533174022_3170714_ver1.0_640_480It’s rather difficult to compare data from different time periods, according to different methodologies, across different parts of the world, and still come to definitive conclusions.

But now that we have built The Counted, a definitive record of people killed by police in the US this year, at least there is some accountability in America – even if data from the rest of the world is still catching up.

It is undeniable that police in the US often contend with much more violent situations and more heavily armed individuals than police in other developed democratic societies. Still, looking at our data for the US against admittedly less reliable information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait, and one that resonates with protests that have gone global since a killing last year in Ferguson, Missouri: the US is not just some outlier in terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar economic and political standing.

America is the outlier – and this is what a crisis looks like.

Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.

Behind the numbers: According to The Counted, the Guardian’s special project to track every police killing this year, there were 59 fatal police shootings in the US for the days between 1 January and 24 January.

According to data collected by the UK advocacy group Inquest, there have been 55 fatal police shootings – total – in England and Wales from 1990 to 2014.

The US population is roughly six times that of England and Wales. According to the World Bank, the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of the UK.

Read More By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years | US news | The Guardian.

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Cook County Jail, America’s Largest Mental-Health Facility

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Matt Ford

It was 9 o’clock in the morning at Cook County Jail, but in the subterranean holding cells where dozens await their turn before a judge, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Pre-bail processing here takes place entirely underground. A labyrinth of tunnels connects the jail’s buildings to one another and to the Cook County Criminal Court. Signs and directions are intentionally left off the smooth concrete corridors to hinder escape attempts. Even those who run the jail get lost down here from time to time, they told me.

No natural light reaches the tunnels. Human voices echoed off the featureless walls, creating an omnipresent din. On this Monday, when those arrested over the weekend in Chicago and its suburbs filled the fenced cages, that din became a roar. Many inmates were standing, sitting, or milling around. But some—perhaps two or three per holding pen—were lying on the floor, asleep.

If you can sleep through this, you’re fighting far greater demons than the commotion outside. And the doctors here want to know what they are.

At Cook County Jail, an estimated one in three inmates has some form of mental illness. At least 400,000 inmates currently behind bars in the United States suffer from some type of mental illness—a population larger than the cities of Cleveland, New Orleans, or St. Louis—according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI estimates that between 25 and 40 percent of all mentally ill Americans will be jailed or incarcerated at some point in their lives.

“This is typically what I see everyday,” said Elli Petacque-Montgomery, a psychologist and the deputy director of mental health policy for the sheriff’s department. She showed me a medical intake form filled with blue pen scribbles. Small boxes listed possible illnesses: manic depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, and so on. The forms are designed to help jail officials identify which inmates have mental illnesses as early as possible. Details from four new inmates could fit on a single sheet. She showed me a completed one. “Of those four,” she said, pointing to the descriptors, “I have three mentally ill people.”

Read More Cook County Jail, America’s Largest Mental-Health Facility – The Atlantic.

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How Many People Are Killed by Police? We’re Only Beginning to Find Out

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Leslie Savan

Amazingly, although people are killed by police virtually every day in the United States, there is no government agency, no bureaucracy, and no database that counts them all. Nor is there any national prayer wall or shrine where images of the dead and their stories are collected in an effort to portray them as individuals.

Last week, almost simultaneously, The Washington Post and The Guardian US unveiled large-scale journalistic projects that tried to supply a comprehensive, independent accounting of citizens killed by police since the beginning of this year. Same story, similar journalistic standards. So far, The Guardian story, with its interactive database linking to photos and stories of the dead, has come closest to filling the shameful gap.

In what Lee Glendinning, the new editor of The Guardian US, called “the most comprehensive public accounting of deadly force in the US,” the site launched “The Counted,” an interactive database of those killed by police since January 1 that includes the names, locations, background, race, means of death—along with, when possible, photos and stories of the dead.

Combining traditional reporting and “verified crowd sourcing,” Glendinning said the idea was to “build on the work on databases already out there,” most of which, she said, “are largely numbers and statistics. We wanted to build on these by telling the stories of these people’s lives, over a whole year, every day, and update them every day.”

Read More How Many People Are Killed by Police? We’re Only Beginning to Find Out | The Nation.

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Federal Judge Orders Release Of Last ‘Angola 3’ Prisoner

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Eyder Peralta

A federal judge has ordered the unconditional release of the last member of the “Angola 3” who remains in prison.

Albert Woodfox, the 68-year-old former Black Panther leader, has spent the past four decades in solitary confinement after he was twice convicted in the 1972 stabbing death of a prison guard. Both convictions have been overturned because of racial prejudice and lack of evidence. U.S. District Judge James Brady has now ruled that Woodfox could not receive another fair trial so he should be released.

The Associated Press reports:

” ‘The only just remedy is an unconditional writ of habeas corpus barring retrial of Mr. Albert Woodfox and releasing Mr. Woodfox from custody immediately,’ Brady wrote.

“In his ruling, Brady cited doubt that the state could provide a ‘fair third trial’; the inmate’s age and poor health; the unavailability of witnesses; ‘the prejudice done onto Mr. Woodfox by spending over forty years in solitary confinement,’ and ‘the very fact that Mr. Woodfox has already been tried twice.’

“Woodfox has been in solitary confinement or isolation for 43 years. He was accused, along with three other prisoners, in the stabbing death of Brent Miller, a 23-year-old guard at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Miller was killed during a period of prison upheaval sparked by Black Panther activism aimed at improving conditions inside Louisiana’s notorious prisons.”

Over the years, the other two Angola 3 inmates were released. Robert King was freed in 2001 after his conviction was overturned. Herman Wallace was released in 2013.

Read More Federal Judge Orders Release Of Last ‘Angola 3’ Prisoner : The Two-Way : NPR.

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For Black Women, Police Brutality And Sexual Harassment Go Hand In Hand

Posted on June 9, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Zeba Blay

 

Mia Fermindoza, The African American Policy Forum

Mia Fermindoza, The African American Policy Forum

There is a moment in the McKinney, Texas pool party video that’s both horrifying and absurd: when Cpl. Eric Casebolt manhandles, violently restrains, then sits on top of an unarmed, 15-year-old, bikini-clad black girl as she cries for her mother.

The absurdity, of course, lies in how unnecessary and over-the-top Casebolt’s behavior is (earlier in the YouTube clip, he barrel rolls across a lawn for no reason in particular). But the horror emerges from the undertones of sexual violence in that instant. Casebolt pulls the girl by her hair, forces her face against the ground and presses his knee into her back — all while she pleads for him to stop. Here’s a grown man, forcing a young girl into submission against her will. The video acts as a prime example of the inherent reality of both physical and sexual harassment against black women and girls at the hands of cops.

The scene is reminiscent of a video that went viral last year. The clip featured 51-year-old Marlene Pinnock being punched repeatedly by California Highway Patrolman Daniel Andrew. Equally as problematic as his brute force was the compromising and dehumanizing position the patrolman had her in. Andrew straddled Pinnock as he beat her, with her torso and bra exposed. Pinnock later reached a settlement in the case, with Andrew never charged, and his sexual harassment never acknowledged.

via For Black Women, Police Brutality And Sexual Harassment Go Hand In Hand.

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