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“Darren Wilson Saw ‘A Demon.’ What Do You See?”: Michael Brown Was A Very Human Being

“He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face.” That’s how police officer Darren Wilson described unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon.”

Wilson’s testimony convinced the grand jurors and others that the officer was justified in shooting and killing Brown last summer in Ferguson, Mo. Yes, the citizens did a tough job admirably when confronted with mountains of material. But could they also have been affected by research that says black boys as young as 10 are seen as older and guiltier than their white peers?

In an August column “So, black teens who aren’t angels deserve whatever they get?” I wrote, “The shelf life for innocence is short when you are a black male — and there is no room for error.” You don’t get the second chance others might have after an incident of teenage rebellion, such as mouthing off to an authority figure or a more serious scrape. See any number of car-overturning, fire-burning melees after a big sports victory or loss for proof of a double standard.

The answer to the question I posed then has consequences for all Americans because Ferguson, Mo., is about more than one shooting in one town in Middle America. Whatever anyone thinks of the grand jury’s findings, “it” was not a “demon.” Michael Brown was a very human being.

 

By: Mary C. Curtis, She The People, The Washington Post, November 25, 2014

November 26, 2014 Posted by | Darren Wilson, Ferguson Missouri, Michael Brown | , , , , | Leave a comment

“Lift Yourself Up”: Rand Paul Wants To Prevent Another Ferguson By Scolding The Poor

Rand Paul begins his Time op-ed about Ferguson with a good point: One concrete way politicians can lessen discrimination in the criminal justice system is by reforming policing practices and the war on drugs. “Michael Brown’s death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America,” the Kentucky senator writes. “The War on Drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation.”

But Paul’s meandering argument unravels from there. Going into full libertarian mode, he writes that “we all hold a certain degree of responsibility for our lives and it’s a mistake to simply blame others for our problems.” He says, unbelievably, that “no law” can possibly reform the criminal justice system. Then he points to the “link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups.”

It sounds a bit like another one of his rambling speeches. And then there’s this:

I have no intention to scold, but escaping the poverty and crime trap will require more than just criminal justice reform. Escaping the poverty trap will require all of us to relearn that not only are we our brother’s keeper, we are our own keeper. While a hand-up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.

Paul is essentially arguing that escaping poverty is not just a matter of criminal justice reform, but of character reform, too, on both the individual and community level. Of course, in scolding the poor, he also manages to scold government assistance. Lift yourself up, he’s saying, because the government can’t—and shouldn’t—do it for you.

Paul’s references to “lack of education” and single parenthood are the only nods toward the systemic socioeconomic issues that make it so hard to escape poverty. And character’s hardly the reason for it. For starters, it’s the lack of job training and opportunities, inner-city schools’ inability to attract top talent, and the struggle to put enough food on the table (the link between learning and nutrition is well documented). And guess who has the power and means to address many of these problems? The very government whose laws Paul has no faith in.

 

By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, November 25, 2014

November 26, 2014 Posted by | Ferguson Missouri, Poverty, Rand Paul | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Re-Purposing The Grand Jury”: The St. Louis County Prosecutor Implicitly Conceded The Need For A Trial

Here is the irony of St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement Monday night that a grand jury had declined to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown: The entire presentation implicitly conceded the need for a trial.

McCulloch was at pains to persuade the public that the grand jury had extensively weighed all the available evidence, and that it pointed to the conclusion that Wilson had not committed a crime. He talked about witnesses who changed their stories once they were presented with knowable facts that contradicted their original claims. He discussed the forensic evidence suggesting that Wilson’s initial shots against Brown occurred during a struggle in or near Wilson’s police cruiser, and that Wilson only began firing again after Brown, who’d initially fled, began moving toward him again. He talked about the lack of agreement over the position of Brown’s hands when Wilson fired the second, fatal barrage of shots.

So far as I know, McCulloch was under no obligation to discuss this evidence publicly. Nor was he under any obligation to release the evidence into the public domain following his remarks, as he repeatedly pledged to do. He presumably did these things to assure us that the decision not to prosecute Wilson was arrived at fairly and justly.

The problem with this is that we already have a forum for establishing the underlying facts of a case—and, no less important, for convincing the public that justice is being served in a particular case. It’s called a trial. It, rather than the post-grand jury press conference, is where lawyers typically introduce mounds of evidence to the public, litigate arguments extensively, and generally establish whether or not someone is guilty of a crime. By contrast, as others have pointed out, the point of a grand jury isn’t to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt what actually happened. It’s to determine whether there’s probable cause for an indictment, which requires a significantly lower standard of proof. That McCulloch appeared to turn the grand jury into an exercise in sorting out the former rather than the latter suggested he wanted no part of a trial.*

And, in fairness, it would have been extremely difficult to convict Wilson in a trial. But that’s a separate question from whether or not the verdict would be seen as legitimate after the fact. If McCullough was truly as concerned as he suggested tonight that the public accept the process that’s allowed Darren Wilson to walk away a free man, he had an obvious way to help ensure that this would happen. That he chose to avoid it demonstrates a rather appalling level of cynicism.

UPDATE: Some readers have argued that it would have been unethical for McCulloch to go to trial with a case he didn’t believe in. Two points in response: 1. Well, he went to the grand jury with a case he didn’t believe in, and it’s pretty unusual for that to happen, too. Clearly, the reason he did that was to make the process of letting Wilson off the hook look fair–again, not the typical purpose of grand juries, which are about establishing probable cause for an indictment. My point is that there’s a much better venue for establishing the fairness of the process (and for nailing down what actually happened)–a trial. Conversely, if this were simply about assessing probable cause, then the platonically correct move would have been to avoid a grand jury altogether, since McCulloch clearly didn’t think it exists. 2. Yes, it would have been hard to convict Wilson. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a case to be built. That McCulloch didn’t believe in the case says as much about him and his biases as it does the underlying facts. A different prosecutor could have easily come down differently.

 

By: Norm Scheiber, The New Republic, November 25, 2014

November 26, 2014 Posted by | Darren Wilson, Ferguson Missouri, Robert McCulloch | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“GOP Anger Cannot Obscure Legal Reality”: On Immigration Policy, The Law And Facts Are On Obama’s Side

There is an adage every young lawyer learns: If you have the law, pound the law; if you have the facts, pound the facts. But if you have neither, pound the table.

The heated Republican rhetoric in response to President Obama’s immigration announcement is unquestionably table-pounding. His opponents have neither the law nor the facts on their side, so they have resorted to name calling and threats. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued a news release referring to “Emperor Obama,” while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused him of being like a monarch and of having a “temper tantrum.” Some conservative legislators have called for censuring the president, or even initiating impeachment proceedings.

As a matter of law, however, it is absolutely clear that Obama has the authority to decide not to prosecute or deport anyone he chooses. Prosecutorial discretion is an inherent part of presidential power. The Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon declared: “The Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.”

No one believes that the federal government has to prosecute every violation of every federal crime or to deport every person who is eligible for deportation. The federal government, for example, long has not prosecuted people caught with small amounts of marijuana even though it violates the federal controlled substance act.

Choices about whether to prosecute are based on a wide array of policy considerations, including how to best allocate scarce prosecutorial resources and whether enforcing a law produces desirable outcomes. Constitutionality is another issue that can be taken into account. It is well established that the president does not have to enforce laws that he believes to be unconstitutional; indeed, to do so would violate his oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Nor does the president have to enforce laws that he believes to be unwise.

All of this is especially clear in the area of immigration policy. The Supreme Court long has recognized that immigration and deportations are closely tied to foreign policy, which is uniquely in the domain of executive power and control. The executive discretion granted by the Constitution certainly includes deciding whether to bring deportation proceedings. Throughout history, the federal government has chosen — for humanitarian concerns or foreign policy reasons — to not try to deport some individuals or classes of individuals, even though they are not lawfully in the United States.

Republican presidents have used this discretion as much as Democratic ones. In 1987, in a decidedly political move by a president who opposed the Sandinista regime, the Reagan administration took executive action to stop deportations of 200,000 Nicaraguan exiles. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, to advance his foreign policy, stopped deportations of Chinese students and in 1991 prevented hundreds of Kuwait citizens who were illegally in the United States from being deported. In 2001, President George W. Bush limited deportation of Salvadoran citizens at the request of the Salvadoran president, ordering that deportation decisions include consideration of factors such as whether a mother was nursing a child or whether an undocumented person was a U.S. military veteran.

All of the Republican anger cannot obscure the legal reality: Obama has the authority to decide to suspend deportations. Likewise, the facts support Obama. A cruel aspect of immigration policy is that it often separates parents, who are in the United States illegally, from their children who are U.S. citizens because they were born in this country.

Nora Sandigo, in Miami, has a sticker in her car that says “Every child is a blessing.” It is a reminder for her as she drives around to pick up yet another child whose parents have been deported. Since 2009, Sandigo has taken legal guardianship of 812 U.S. citizens whose parents have been deported. “La Gran Madre” is what many call her, but she knows her limitations. “All I can do is hold back some of the bleeding. There is no way I can give 812 children the love and attention they need, but … the system is broken.”

It is estimated that there may be as many as 5 million parents in this situation. The irony is that Republican rhetoric for years has emphasized “family values,” but it is Obama who is acting in a profoundly pro-family way.

 

By: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Samuel Kleiner, a fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project; Published in The National Memo, November 24, 2014

November 25, 2014 Posted by | Immigration Reform, Presidential Powers, Republicans | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Growing Fissure Within The Tea Party Movement”: Tea Party Nativists Seething Over Obama’s Immigration Reform Action

Even before President Obama entered the East Room of the White House to give his speech outlining a series of executive actions on immigration reform, some, though not all, national Tea Party factions were whipping up their followers into a nativist frenzy.

“This is by far the most serious communication I have ever sent,” wrote Steve Eichler, executive director of the 1776 Tea Party (aka TeaParty.org), in an email to supporters.  “Everything is at stake. Illegals will bankrupt our social, economic and financial systems. Terrorists will just blow it all to pieces. They’ll all be in our backyards in a matter of weeks, even days, if we don’t step up and demand action,” he warned.

That type of feverish nativism is no surprise coming from Eichler, who is also the executive director of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minuteman Project. His email went on to predict “open rebellion” and “chaos” if Republicans don’t withhold funding for Obama’s executive order.

Echoing Eichler’s terror hysteria was one of the activists who helped shape the early Tea Party movement. Eric Odom, who now works for the Patriot Action Network, a Tea Party faction, also put forward the notion that executive action on immigration would somehow lead to terrorists destroying America.

What makes it so dangerous is that Obama’s announcement says to all of our enemies that now is the time to invade our nation’s borders. We’re no longer talking about innocent women and children riding trains to our borders then crossing with the hopes of gaining access to our welfare system. We’re talking about ISIS and other evil groups who want to embed individuals here with the plan of doing harm.Essentially, our President just made a proclamation that puts American lives, and the security of our nation, directly at risk. Obama said to the world that if they can get across our borders, we will not send them home. We will not enforce our immigration laws.

Grassfire, parent outfit of the Patriot Action Network, added “With his amnesty announcement in just a few hours, Obama will unilaterally defy the will of the people and Congress –becoming a threat to liberty.”

Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation went even further in denouncing President Obama, arguing that the immigration actions were part of a diabolical plot. In a prebuttal to Obama’s speech, Phillips told Tea Party Nation members, “Today, Barack Obama is going to announce his long-cherished goal of destroying America.”

Phillips, a birther racist and advocate of limiting voting to property owners, isn’t new to nativist extremism. In 2011, his group mourned the falling birth rate of native-born Americans, and warned that “American culture” will soon perish since the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population is headed for extinction.”

Eichler, Odom, and Phillips weren’t the only Tea Partiers to adopt an inflammatory pose. Echoing their sentiments was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a favorite among Tea Party nativists, who warned portentously that President Obama’s executive actions and general “lawlessness” on immigration could lead to “ethnic cleansing.”

Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) also joined the fray, contending that President Obama’s immigration executive order is “declaring war on the American people and our democracy.”

“This is truly an emergency. There’s not a moment to lose,” wrote Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin to her group’s members last Wednesday. While other Tea Party groups are busy inflaming nativism sentiment, the Tea Party Patriots are crafting a plan to scuttle any immigration reforms.

Having already primed their members with the October release of the gruesome anti-immigrant video, The Border States of America, Tea Party Patriots are focused now on organizing opposition.

As a first step, they plan to “melt the phones to stop amnesty” by having their members contact Congress en masse to register opposition. The next step is to flood congressional offices with protesters. According to Martin, the group “must deploy our thousands of local affiliates to congressional offices all across the country, demanding that they cut off all funding from this order immediately.” But the Tea Party Patriots do not have the “thousands of local affiliates” as Martin claims; instead they have around 300 remaining active local groups.

They plan to deploy those remaining local groups, however, to pressure the new Congress to defund anything relating to immigration reform. Kevin Broughton, a spokesperson for Tea Party Patriots, noted, “We expect [the new GOP majority] to use the power of the purse to defund amnesty, especially those—and there were many—who ran against it.”

The group is also canvassing its membership base to gauge possible attendance for a noon rally on December 3 in Washington D.C. called by the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, retiring congresswoman Michele Bachmann. The decision to possibly join Rep. Bachmann’s rally came after she declared on Wednesday that executive action on immigration will lead to a flood of “illiterate” voters.

Previous Tea Party Patriots anti-immigration rallies in Washington D.C., such as the muddled Immigration/IRS rally on June 19, 2013 on Capitol Hill have not been well attended, so larger attendance at a December rally would be an indicator of some success for efforts to promote nativism without one of the largest Tea Party factions.

Not all national Tea Party factions are in agreement with the Tea Party Patriots’ plan. Obama’s move on immigration has uncovered a growing fissure within the Tea Party movement over the centrality of nativism. Curiously, while Tea Party Patriots, Patriot Action Network, and the 1776 Tea Party were rushing to sound more and more xenophobic  (and fundraising off the issue), some Tea Party factions tried to dance around the immigration issue, while others stayed conspicuously silent.

Indeed, although many members of the FreedomWorks social network were outraged by the president’s announcement last week, the organization’s leadership chose to duck the issue. FreedomWorks completely sidestepped the topic of immigration, choosing instead to concentrate the organization’s message on tried-and-true Obama bashing.  In a pre-speech press release, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe took a page from the GOP establishment playbook, sticking to the line about the president being an “emperor” and railing against the “expansion of executive power.”

Said Kibbe, “The president’s announcements tonight have nothing to do with immigration. This fight has to do with whether or not we are a country with laws and a separation of powers designed to protect the will of the American people from the arbitrary actions of Washington insiders.”

As other Tea Party groups have dug in for a massive fight around immigration, FreedomWorks appears fixated on getting Congress to let the Export-Import Bank expire. In fact, many in the Tea Party movement have been suspicious of FreedomWorks because of their unwillingness to wholeheartedly embrace nativism.

Unlike all the other factions, Tea Party Express hasn’t uttered a peep about the issue. That could be because the group is hoping not to call attention to the pro-immigration reform stance that Sal Russo, a Tea Party Express co-founder, expressed in an article for Roll Call last spring.

Russo’s commentary, titled “Conservatives Need to Fix the Broken U.S. Immigration System,” called for an approach remarkably similar to that proposed by the president. “We need to make the 11 million people who are here illegally obey the law, pay taxes and come out of the shadows. We have to get them right by the law in exchange for legal status, but not unbridled amnesty,” he wrote.

In the past, these disagreements have caused strains between various organizations in the network that comprises the Tea Party movement. Obama’s executive order is the first major test of these policy differences in years, and Tea Party organizations may well be held to account for their positions.

Expect the caution initially evident among Republican leadership to vanish if the Tea Party successfully mobilizes anti-immigrant sentiment. Given the vitriolic nativist tone already circulating in Tea Party circles, and the fusion of nativism with hatred of the first African-American president, the coming mobilization could make the ugly rancor and racism that erupted during the passage of Obamacare look polite. At the same time, if supporters of human rights stand strong for immigration reform and actively combat nativism, it could protect immigration reform gains for the long term and even split the Tea Party.

 

By: Devin Burghart, The National Memo, November 24, 2014

November 25, 2014 Posted by | Executive Orders, Immigration Reform, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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