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ms-hells-bells · 2 months

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Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one night I’d single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. “He needs a long penitentiary sentence,” the prosecutor told the judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence.

I’d been locked up for about 15 months when I entered Virginia’s Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high school. In that prison, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences — 30, 40, 50 years — all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison.

The most difficult discussion to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offense and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter; 165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery; and 136,000 for assault. That’s more than half of the state prison population.

When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: “She’s a cop,” meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen ample evidence of how corrupt the system can be: Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, “The New Jim Crow,” which argues that the war on drugs marked the return of America’s racist system of segregation and legal discrimination; Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” a series about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, and her documentary “13th,” which delves into mass incarceration more broadly; and “Just Mercy,” a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, that has also been made into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row, who is eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.

My mother had an experience that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors — though I didn’t know about it until I came home from prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, “I need to tell you something.” We were in her bedroom in the townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she’d call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was good now. But instead she told me about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the bus that would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her job in the nation’s capital. But on that morning, a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.

My mother’s words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could have happened to her. I knew she kept this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the word “rape” along with my hometown and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a Black man. And I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.

The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do? The outrage at this country’s criminal-justice system is loud today, but it hasn’t led us to develop better ways of confronting my mother’s world from nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting her son in a prison in Virginia; weekdays attending the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her.

We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn’t been inside Brookland Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of letters she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris’s speech was the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The evening began with the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and at the opening chord nearly everyone in the room stood. There to write about the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the first verse before realizing I’d never sung any further.

Each table in the banquet hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday best. Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was Black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked about the chapter’s long history in the civil rights movement. One called for the current generation of young rappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wanted to be safe. I didn’t hear anyone mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audience, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked away. If Harris couldn��t persuade that audience that her experiences as a Black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved.

Describing her upbringing in a family of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants. “I was cleareyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me,” she said. This mattered for Harris because of the “prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of Black people in her office. When she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.s nationwide. And when she was elected California attorney general in 2010, there were no other Black attorneys general in the country. At these words, the crowd around me clapped. “I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision about someone else’s life or death,” she said.

Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a Black woman’s doing this work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included: baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she’d told her colleagues: “So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? Well, that’s actually stylish in my community.” She continued: “You know that music you were talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in my car right now.”

The second example was about the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco’s D.A. — women who wanted to speak with her, and her alone, about their sons. “The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would see them,” Harris said. “And I mean literally see them. See their grief. See their anguish.” They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. “My son is being treated like a statistic,” they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and their dead sons were Black. Harris outlined the classic dilemma of Black people in this country: being simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Harris told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe.

Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris was talking about Black people’s needing protection from us — from the violence we perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells.

Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films by Black directors — “New Jack City,” “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood” — turned Black violence into a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that “we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fear that they might be arrested” and “go to jail for the rest of their natural life.” Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that ended federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole; made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in court; and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions.

Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire generation of young Black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison during those years. Terell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he’d been carrying a pistol during three. After he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.

Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced us to more of the same. And though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty, end mandatory minimums, bring back parole and even abolish prisons, there were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered. And we felt alone. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends’ stories to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word “patina” and introduced me to the music of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and Juvie, who could give you the sharpest edge-up in America with just a razor and comb.

When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. I’ve persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono. Put together parole packets — basically job applications for freedom: letters of recommendation and support from family and friends; copies of certificates attesting to vocational training; the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We argue that today each one little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter — which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I write, struggling to condense decades of life in prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board’s office in Richmond, Va., and try to persuade the members to let my friends see a sunrise for the first time.

Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a conditional pardon by Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now, released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others still inside. Now free, they’ve sent me text messages with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn’t expect to see again, enjoying a cold beer that isn’t contraband.

In February, after 25 years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terell will be eligible. These years later, he’s the mentor we searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children, and he’s spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim’s family. My man Anthony was 19 when he committed his crime. In the last few years, he’s organized poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was among the graduates, earning all three of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, and what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. But he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.

I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn’t fight so hard for just anybody. But maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us — beyond that we’d served enough time in prison. There was a skinny light-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that we were there. The rumor was that he’d broken into the house of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He’d had to break a man’s jaw with a lock in a sock to prove he’d fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the way I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I’d probably be arguing that he should be free.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

My mother purchased her first single-family home just before I was released from prison. One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn’t spend a single night more than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn the place from memory.

I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first time she missed work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he’d attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witness the trial of the man who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor’s subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others.

After my mother told me what had happened to her, we didn’t mention it to each other again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast “Death, Sex & Money.” The host asked my mother about going to court for her son’s trial when he was facing life. “I was raped by gunpoint,” my mother said. “It happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself.” I hadn’t forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating.

On the last day of the trial of the man who raped her, my mother told me, the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn’t get enough time. She says her nose began to bleed. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied, “That I’d taken the deputy’s gun and shot him.”

Harris has studied crime-scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers. In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” Harris praised the work of Sunny Schwartz — creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the first restorative-justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year sentence for a series of restaurant armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, “should tell anyone considering viciously preying on citizens and businesses that they will be caught, convicted and sent to prison — for a very long time.”

Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to “unravel the decades-long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh, to the point of being inhumane”; criticized the bail system; and called for an end to private prisons and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic-monitoring services.

In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and before she was tapped as the vice-presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer’s knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he called for help, had been captured on video. Each night, thousands around the world protested. During our conversation, Harris told me that as the only Black woman in the United States Senate “in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery,” countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was not about to start telling them “about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country as part of the greatest stain on this country.” Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that “the very serious function of racism” is “distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

But these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his classmates and teachers: “As you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn’t the police who killed Floyd go to jail?” My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for Black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell.

“In the criminal-justice system,” Harris replied, “the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that whenever we use the words ‘accountability’ and ‘consequence,’ it’s always about the individual who was arrested.” Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable. And while I found myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers in the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I’d represented in parole hearings — and the friends I’d be representing soon. And wondered out loud to Harris: How do we get to their freedom?

“We need to reimagine what public safety looks like,” the senator told me, noting that she would talk about a public health model. “Are we looking at the fact that if you focus on issues like education and preventive things, then you don’t have a system that’s reactive?” The list of those things becomes long: affordable housing, job-skills development, education funding, homeownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco district attorney and started Back on Track (a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges), many people were critical. “ ‘You’re a D.A. You’re supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out,’” she said people told her.

It always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons do little to address violence. If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they’ve fought with the system — with themselves and sometimes with the men around them — to be different. Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted — many, maybe all — do far too much time in prison.

And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I’m certain I’d write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn’t go to work because she was in a hospital; tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed at her head has never left; explain how when I came home, my mother told me the story. Some violence changes everything.

The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony, Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free is our friendship. Learning that a Black man in the city I called home raped my mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all — if they should ever contact victims and their families.

Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target. But if the system is broken, it is because our flaws more than our virtues animate it. Confronting why so many of us believe prisons must exist may force us to admit that we have no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it — any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there.

In light of Harris being endorsed by Biden and highly likely to be the Democratic Party candidate, I thought I would share this balanced, understanding of both sides, article in regard to Harris and her career as a prosecutor, as I know that will be something dragged out by bad actors and useful idiots (you have a bunch of people stating 'Kamala is a cop', which is completely false, and also factless and misleading statements about 'mass incarceration' under her). I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be criticised or that there is nothing about her career that can be criticised, but it should at least be representative of the truth and understanding of the complexities of the legal system.

#I think this article also touches well on the flaws of 'abolish prison'

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offender42085 · 4 months

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Post 1258

The victim's father expressed compassion for the young defendant, who stood to the side of the courtroom in prison garb, with his hands cuffed.

Alan Faynzilberg, New Jersey inmate 821030E, born 1997, incarceration intake December 2017 at age 20, released November 2023

Vehicular Homicide -- Reckless Driving, Manufacture/Distribution/Dispense of Controlled Substance

In October 2017, a Belleville New Jersey man was sentenced to eight years in prison for a drunken head-on collision that took the life of a young father of two in May 2016.

During a somber afternoon hearing in Superior Court in Newark, the judge said he had seen other victims' family members express forgiveness toward their loved one's killer. But none, he added, had ever done what Pietro Davila did following the death of his son, 33-year-old Luis Davila.

"I've never had a victim's family member come before me and request that he be put on the defendant's visitation list," said Superior Court Judge Ronald D. Wigler.

And while Wigler wished defendant Alan Faynzilberg, 20, success in eventually turning his life around, the judge was not as forgiving as Davila's family, and refused to reduce the 8-year sentence recommended by prosecutors in a deal that led to Faynzilberg's guilty plea earlier on June 26.

Faynzilberg was jailed for 10 months following the incident, then released, but has been back in custody since the prior week, when he turned himself in on what was supposed to be his original sentencing date.

Pietro Davila, 59, of Jersey City, was one of three people who made victim impact statements. But rather than condemning Faynzilberg, DaVila expressed compassion for the young defendant, who stood to the side of the courtroom in prison garb, with his hands cuffed.

"I feel content, because we are Christian," Davila said through an interpreter. Turning to Faynzilberg, he added, "This young man, Alan, on my behalf I forgive him."

The victim's sister, Giselle Davila, was equally compassionate, telling Faynzelberg, "I hope that when you complete your sentence, you change your life for the better."

Assistant Prosecutor Betty Rodriguez said during the hearing that Faynzilberg admitted using alcohol, marijuana and the tranquilizer Xanax prior to the crash. She told the judge that in that and prior arrests for drug-related offenses, Faynzilberg had repeatedly shown "a complete disregard for the law."

With his lawyer, William Fitzsimmons, at his side, Faynzilberg made an emotional plea for leniency.

"Let me express my deepest and most sincere apologies for May 27, 2016," Faynzilberg said, sobbing at that point and others during the hearing.

"I'm sure it was sincere," said Wigler, the presiding criminal judge in Essex County.

That said, Wigler told Faynzilberg that, under his plea deal, the prosecutor's office had already agreed to downgrade the vehicular homicide charge against him from first degree to second degree, sparing him several years in prison under sentencing guidelines.

Wigler added that Faynzilberg's prior record included two drug arrests, one in which he avoided a criminal conviction by being accepted into a pre-trial intervention program, or PTI, on April 15, 2016 -- just six week before the drug-fueled crash that killed Luis Davila.

"What's concerning is you don't learn from your past mistakes," Wigler told Faynzilberg. "And a family was destroyed."

A friend of the Faynzilberg, Alexandra Roth, made a statement on his behalf, assuring the court that he would have the loving support of his family to help him overcome his drug dependence and reintegrate him into society upon his release.

"The level of remorse that he felt was not of the kind, 'What's going to happen to me?' but truly of the magnitude of what happened," Roth said.

#inmate

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dilfl0v3rss · 1 year

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okay lemme give y’all the back story before i let this fic go this week.

jailbird!ony was locked up for seven years for drug possession and attempted murder. since it was only his first offense for drug possession and there was only a little over thirty grams of weed on him, he only got a year for it. and since ony could clearly afford it, he got a really good lawyer and convinced the judge that his attempted murder was to the second degree instead of the first so he only got six years for that instead of life.

his bday is still august eighth so i imagine that he was twenty-one when he got locked up and got out a month before his birthday, so he was still twenty seven.

ty for listening🫶🏽

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humanrightsupdates · 11 months

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: EXECUTION SET DESPITE UNRELIABLE TESTIMONY

Brent Brewer is scheduled to be executed in Texas on 9 November 2023. His 1991 death sentence was overturned in 2007, but he was resentenced to death in 2009. In 1991 and again in 2009, the prosecution relied on unscientific and unreliable, but influential, testimony of a psychiatrist who asserted that Brent Brewer would likely commit future acts of violence, a prerequisite for a death sentence in Texas. Nineteen years old at the time of the crime, Brent Brewer is now 53. He has been an exemplary prisoner, with no record of violence during his three decades on death row.

Brent Brewer was sentenced to death after being convicted of the 1990 capital murder during a botched robbery of a 66-year-old man. He was fatally stabbed in his truck as he was driving 19-year-old Brent Brewer and his girlfriend (“KN”), 21, who had asked him for a lift. Weeks before the crime, Brent Brewer had been committed to a state hospital with depression and suicidal ideation. There he had met KN, who was in the hospital for drug rehabilitation treatment. In 1992, KN pled guilty to capital murder in the stabbing and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In 2007, Brent Brewer’s death sentence was overturned because of inadequate jury instructions at the 1991 sentencing. At the 2009 resentencing, the defence put two mitigation witnesses, the defendant’s sister and mother, on the witness stand for a combined 28 minutes. A psychologist, who had been involved in the case on appeal in 1996, provided a report to the post-2009 appeal lawyers on mitigating evidence that could have had been presented in 2009. At the time of the crime, he wrote, Brent Brewer “suffered from major depression, severe anxiety,” and “substance abuse, tied to his history of neglect, abuse, and family dysfunction”. He “suffered from brain dysfunction,” which the jury did not learn about, that represented a critically important mitigating factor concerning Mr Brewer’s judgment and decision-making capability. Abandonment fears were of particular importance in understanding Mr Brewer’s behavior at the time of the offense, as was his dependent relationship with his co-defendant, [K.N.]”. Their relationship “helped to undermine his judgment and increase his impulsivity”.

In Texas, a prerequisite for a death sentence is a jury finding that the defendant will likely commit future acts of criminal violence. At Brent Brewer’s resentencing, the prosecution presented a psychiatrist (Dr C.) who testified he would likely commit future violence, the same as he had said at the 1991 sentencing. In 2009, he added that despite Brent Brewer’s lack of violent conduct during nearly two decades on death row, he still believed he would commit such acts in the future. As was the case in 1991, Dr C. had not met or evaluated the defendant. He testified by responding to hypothetical scenarios set by the prosecution, and opined that the defendant had no conscience, violence “doesn’t seem to bother him”, he would join a gang in prison, and had a “preference for a knife”.

As long ago as 1983, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) informed the US Supreme Court (USSC) in a Texas capital case that “the unreliability of psychiatric predictions of long-term future dangerousness is by now an established fact within the profession”.

TAKE ACTION: WRITE AN APPEAL IN YOUR OWN WORDS OR USE THIS MODEL LETTER

PREFERRED LANGUAGE TO ADDRESS TARGET: English. You may also write in your own language.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE UNTIL: 9 November 2023

#human rights #amnesty international #united states #texas #death penalty

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justinspoliticalcorner · 14 days

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Andrew Gumbel at The Guardian:

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son. Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.

In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.” Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence. A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December. In an emailed statement after he entered his plea, Hunter Biden said: “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment. For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this, and so I have decided to plead guilty.”

The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial. After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them. “It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi. “[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”

A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could have aired embarrassing details of Hunter Biden’s life. Lowell told the judge that the evidence against his client was “overwhelming” and that Biden wanted to resolve the case. The son of the president was accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as facing two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion. Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges, related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019, and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction. But all that changed on a whirlwind day in court.

Hunter Biden will plead guilty on 9 counts of federal tax violations.

#Hunter Biden Trial #Hunter Biden #Trials

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backonmybullship · 3 months

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Okay so I know that people didn't like Ashley when she was dating Tim, but she has done literally nothing wrong, from day one her boyfriend has been in love with someone else.

When she brought it up after the double date he reassured her, and she trusted him but it was definitely a red flag from the get-go. So was the whole Kojo thing, and even the fake proposal.

If your boyfriend asked you to fake a proposal to prank the girl that you think he's a little too close with, wouldn't you say no? I would. I would wonder why he thinks that she would care.

Chris on the other hand was an arrogant dick from the beginning, trying to a 16 year old kid as an adult for one minor drug offense. He truly liked Lucy, but in his defense she was so obviously uninterested the entire time. But it was really weird how he suddenly started looking for houses without telling her? She never gave him an answer and he's like "I'm going to put an offer down!"

They should never have gotten as far as they did, him getting hurt by Rosalind shouldn't have even been able to happen.

But everyone acts like he's like an evil freak or something, no he's just an arrogant lawyer. But his relationship with Lucy was way more bothersome to me than Tim and Ashley honestly.

#chenford #the rookie #tim bradford #lucy chen

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jabalaw · 2 years

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Monmouth County Drug Offense Defense Lawyer | New Jersey

The Law Offices of Jonathan F. Marshall are experienced in defending drug cases in Monmouth County. Call us at 877-322-2865 for the assistance of Drug Offense Defense Lawyer New Jersey.

#Drug Offense Defense Lawyer New Jersey #Monmouth County Drug Offense Defense Lawyer

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lilithism1848 · 1 year

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Atrocities US committed against PRISONERS

The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies.

Ramping up since the 1980s, the term prison–industrial complex is used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activist groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have argued that the prison-industrial complex is perpetuating a flawed belief that imprisonment is an effective solution to social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy.

The War On Drugs, a policy of arrest and imprisonment targeting minorities, first initiated by Nixon, has over the years created a monstrous system of mass incarceration, resulting in the imprisonment of 1.5 million people each year, with the US having the most prisoners per capita of any nation. One in five black Americans will spend time behind bars due to drug laws. The war has created a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have few educational or job opportunities as a result of being punished for drug offenses, in a vicious cycle of oppression.

In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed “aliens”, 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren’t considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion.

Over 90% of criminal trials in the US are settled not by a judge or jury, but with plea bargaining, a system where the defendant agrees to plead guilty in return for a concession from the prosecutor. It has been statistically shown to benefit prosecutors, who “throw the book” at defendants by presenting a slew of charges, manipulating their fear, who in turn accept a lesser charge, regardless of their innocence, in order to avoid a worst outcome. The number of potentially innocent prisoners coerced into accepting a guilty plea is impossible to calculate. Plea bargaining can present a dilemma to defense attorneys, in that they must choose between vigorously seeking a good deal for their present client, or maintaining a good relationship with the prosecutor for the sake of helping future clients.

European countries. John Langbein has equated plea bargaining to medieval torture: “There is, of course, a difference between having your limbs crushed if you refuse to confess, or suffering some extra years of imprisonment if you refuse to confess, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Plea bargaining, like torture, is coercive. Like the medieval Europeans, the Americans are now operating a procedural system that engages in condemnation without adjudication.”

A grand jury is a special legal proceeding in which a prosecutor may hold a trial before the real one, where ~20 jurors listen to evidence and decide whether criminal charges should be brought. Grand juries are rarely made up of a jury of the defendant’s peers, and defendants do not have the right to an attorney, making them essentially show-trials for the prosecution, who often find ways of using grand jury testimony to intimidate the accused, such as leaking stories about grand jury testimony to the media to defame the accused. In the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, all of whom were unarmed and killed by police in 2014, grand juries decided in all 3 cases not to pursue criminal trials against the officers. The US and Liberia are the only countries where grand juries are still legal.

The US system of bail (the practice of releasing suspects before their hearing for money paid to the court) has been criticized as monetizing justice, favoring rich, white collar suspects, over poorer people unable to pay for their release.

On Jan 26th, In Mississippi state penitentiary, an inmate was found hanging in his cell, in a string of deaths in the prison. This is the 12th death within a single month.

A photo surfaced of a November 2019 training class for prison guards in west virginia, showing 34 trainees doing a nazi salute. Only 3 people have been fired. A large number of prison workers, and populations in prison towns, are white supremacists.

A black-site interrogation warehouse in Chicago called Homan Square is notorious for the sexual abuse, torture, and disappearances of its prisoners. The main interrogator, Richard Zuley, applied torture techniques he learned at Guantanamo Bay at Homan Square.

On Oct 25, 2014, a mentally ill inmate, Michael Anthony Kerr, at the Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, NC, died of thirst after being denied water during a 35-day solitary confinement. Prison officials have said since Kerr’s death six months ago that they would investigate the events that led to his death, but no report has been issued and officials have not said when one would be.

On May 23rd, 2014, a mentally ill inmate at a Dade County correctional facility near Miami FL was tortured to death by prison guards. Darren Rainey was serving a two-year sentence for cocaine possession when he was forced into a locked shower by prison guards as punishment for defecating in his cell, says one inmate. Once Rainey was inside the shower, guards blasted him with scalding hot water as he begged for his life. Investigators determined that there was not enough evidence to charge the guards.

The Crime Bill of 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, increased the size of the US prison industry and dealt with the problem of crime by emphasizing punishment, not prevention. It extended the death penalty to a whole range of criminal offenses, and provided $30 billion for the building of new prisons, to crack down on “super predators”, a term used by Hillary Clinton to refer to remorseless juvenile criminals.

In the 1978 case, Houchins v. KQED, Inc. the Supreme Court ruled that the news media do not have guaranteed rights of access to jails and prisons. It ruled also that prison authorities could forbid inmates to speak to one another, assemble, or spread literature about the formation of a prisoners’ union.

In September 1971, prison guards killed George Jackson, a black Marxist and member of the Black Panthers in San Quentin prison (who had served 10 years of an indeterminate prison sentence for a $70 robbery), after he attempted to free himself and other inmates. Outrage over this, terrible prison conditions, and mistreatment by white prison guards, caused the Attica Prison Riot, in which 33 inmates and 10 prison guards were killed, and sparked dozens of prison riots across the country. In Attica, 100 percent of the guards were white, prisoners spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families were conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, 75% were there as a result of plea bargaining, and their parole system inequitable.

Many companies in the 1800s were guilty of using prison laborers, such as the Tennesee Coal Iron and Railroad Company. In 1891, the prison workers struck and overpowered the guards, and other neighboring unions came to their aid.

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sroloc--elbisivni · 9 months

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Something from the Transformers Band AU or Regency AU? Those were super fun.

Five times Drift’s new bandmates were weird and one time he embraced the chaos

The first time Drift realized how weird his new bandmates were, he hadn’t even joined the band yet. They weren’t his bandmates. They were just Arcee and Rod’s friends he was meeting at a diner because they were about to go on tour without a bassist and one of them had heard him practicing on the couch. Drift was kind of expecting to get about five questions in before they figured out he wasn’t worth it and moved on.

What he got instead was the guy he was pretty sure he hadn’t met going, “So you’ve done tours before, right? You know you can handle it?”

“Yes,” Drift said, and got ready for it to fall apart as soon as they asked him about those tours.

“And double checking—you’re not using anything, right?’ the guy he was pretty sure he had met said. “Like, no shade, no harm, it’s not a problem, we just gotta know.”

“Using…?” Drift said, carefully.

“Drugs,” Rod elaborated from where he was playing games on his phone and stealing fries from the guy who must have been the one Drift had already met.

“No. No, I’m not.”

“Do you snore?” the guy he hadn’t met before asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Rod said. Drift tried not to wince. That didn’t seem like an answer they’d want to hear.

“Okay, you’ll bunk with Percy,” the guy he’d met before said. “So how this is gonna work is, we’ll run you through the schedule and the set basics and if it all sounds good, we’ll get you in to talk with our lawyer and—do you have an agent?”

Not anymore. Drift just shook his head, cautiously.

“—that’s fine, you can borrow ours. You can talk to them two and get the contract shit straightened out and call the first tour leg a trial run. Doesn’t work out, that’s fine, we can track down someone else and you can get back to your life?”

It went up at the end like a question. Drift was still trying to figure out what was going on. They hadn’t told him to leave yet.

“He’s in,” said Rod, who had managed to figure out how to interpret Drift’s blanking face in the past two months. “Hey, you should let me be your agent.”

“Don’t do that.” The guy Drift had just met today, whose name he would learn in short order was Impactor, pulled out a pen and grabbed a napkin out of the dispenser. “So here’s what the first few shows are going to look like—”

===

Drift had actually learned what band he was gigging for by the time the publicity circuit started. Seemed like the ‘Wreckers’ were pretty well known in the States. They had pretty regular radio interviews, and after they’d wrapped a very successful first leg of the tour and were starting to talk about him sticking around, they had him come along to one of them.

Drift hadn’t absorbed much of Springer’s rundown besides “Are you kidding me, that’s fucking hilarious, please say that,” when he checked if it would be okay for him to say that he’d never heard of the band before he joined if the interviewer asked. About the only other thing he’d tracked was “Oh, and if we all stand up, that’s a signal that the lady asked a walkout question and we’re getting the hell out of there.”

He’d assumed this was them trying to fuck with him and nodded accordingly. As such, it took him a couple seconds to notice when the rest of the group went silent in response to a question to Springer about some kind of anniversary.

“Welp,” Impactor said, and slapped his hands against his thighs. They were all standing now, and Drift scrambled to his feet to follow them out. The radio host was staring at them with baffled offense, but none of the rest of them even looked at her.

Whirl led the way out of the radio station at a confident saunter, losing his helmet that he wore for all official band business into his backpack in a quick slight of hand Drift couldn’t catch. That plus Perceptor’s sunglasses rendered them just about invisible, as a group.

“So, ice cream?” Whirl asked. “I’m feeling ice cream.”

“What was that?” Drift asked, still glancing back. No one was coming out of the station after them, not even Kup. Were they in trouble?

“I told you about walkout questions, right?” Springer asked. “Stuff about my dad who’s in jail qualifies.”

“...I thought you were joking.”

“Oh, super not joking.”

“It’s in the contract,” Perceptor said. “All of us have things we’d rather not discuss publicly. Some of the press don’t read it, or think that the ‘right to terminate immediately’ isn’t something we’ll actually exercise.” He adjusted his sunglasses. “Kup will take care of it. We haven’t had to show we’re not bluffing in a while.”

“Sorry, dude,” Impactor said, clapping Springer on the back.

“It’s whatever. Drift, you wanna put anything on the list? Shit people absolutely cannot ask about?”

He did. Might as well start big and let them help him figure out what was unreasonable, right? “My entire career before this.”

“Fuck yes,” Whirl said. “I love it. Walking enigma of a man number two. Do you want help making up a fake backstory or are we just calling it a void?”

Drift’s new bandmates were very weird, but he couldn’t say he minded.

===

They were through the second of three tour legs and taking a night to celebrate—both making it this far and that Drift had decided he’d be joining the band. They’d crammed into the same room, along with Rod and Arcee and a bunch of things from the game shop down the road that looked fun. Everyone except Impactor was drunk and Arcee had her head in Springer’s lap while he petted her buzzcut. Drift was pleasantly buzzed for the first time in a while

“Hey,” Arcee said, reaching out to pat Drift on the arm. “Hey. Hey Drift. If you’re with the band now. What’s your carsona.”

“What?”

“OH FUCK YES,” Whirl said, sitting up so fast he fell off the bed. Perceptor dropped a pillow on top of his face. It didn’t dampen the effect. “Did I tell you guys, I had the coolest fucking idea for the next one. First off, I’m going to need a bunch of guns—”

“What are you fucking talking about,” Drift said, because he’d learned that Whirl explaining one of his ideas could take an entire conversation’s worth of words and he didn’t want to move on without an answer. “Impactor?”

Impactor was already scrolling on his phone, and five seconds later he shoved it in front of Drift’s face. Drift could recognize the opening notes of Wreck and Rule before it even got four bars in, playing over an animated shot of a tank rolling down a deserted road. The song built to the opening fermata, and as the saxophone held out the note, the tank started to break into pieces and reform into a helicopter.

“What,” Drift repeated.

The helicopter launched into the sky as the bass dropped and the drums kicked in, and two cars shot off a ramp in the background to come crashing into frame as another helicopter dive-bombed the camera. An unsupported microscope flew through the air to keep up.

“What.”

The next three minutes featured car chases, helicopter acrobatics, and absolutely no concern for the laws of physics. It came to the end and Drift immediately dragged the video back to the beginning to watch it again, this time complete with commentary as everyone had to tell him which vehicle they were and why and the cool effects.

“What,” Drift said, helplessly, again, when it had finished. “Why is this a thing.”

“Percy’s idea,” Whirl said. “Because he’s a weeb.”

“Revolutionary Girl Utena is a masterpiece,” Perceptor said to no one in particular.

Drift hit replay on the video again, because he could. This was so weird. It was so cool.

“I wanna be a racecar,” he said, when it had finished again.

“ONE OF US,” Hot Rod cheered, and tried to wrestle him into a noogie. He failed, of course. Springer helped pin him down while Drift got his revenge.

===

“Hey,” Whirl said, somewhere during a long overnight drive on the bus when he and Drift were the only ones awake. “Do you like instrumental stuff?”

Drift looked up from his book. “Sure?”

Whirl waggled a pair of headphones at him. “Wanna give something a listen for me?”

“Sure.”

Drift knew Whirl did a lot of the band’s instrumentations, and that he got bored easy, so he was expecting this to be a new riff on one of the songs they’d been playing so far, or maybe a completely unknown song for the album that was scheduled for work when they were done with the tour. Instead, he got a string quartet.

Even with the tinny, unvarying tones of automated transcription software, it flowed. It was elegant, all the notes interlocking like clockwork, the instruments passing around the melody and making it their own. It cut off abruptly enough that Drift could feel how much he wanted more.

“Okay, this bit. Is the cello doing enough?” Whirl asked, and played the last thirty seconds again.

Drift hadn’t done instrumental music in years, but he had a pretty good understanding of bass parts thanks to this tour. “It’s kind of boring. Syncopate it, maybe?”

“Well, fuck you too,” Whirl said, and snatched the headphones back. He clicked something and scowled at his screen. “Fuck. You’re right.”

“You’re writing this?” Drift asked, instead of going back to his book.

“Side gig. Cyclonus listens to the classical music station all the time. I will get something on there. He can’t escape from me.”

Every time Whirl mentioned either of his housemates Drift wasn’t sure if he was dating them or not, and at this point Drift was honestly kind of scared to ask.

===

Drift was already nervous on the first day of recording for the new album. It was going to be the first time he’d been in a recording booth in almost a year. He might completely fail at this, and not know how to work with them, or not be able to adapt, and just stick to being a touring backup. Which he liked, it was great, but it wasn’t like he could live on that, and it was pretty damn unlikely that he was going to trip into gigging for any other bands the way he had for this one.

So his nerves were running high even before he let himself in with the code and wandered down a hallway towards the sound of raised voices and found Perceptor, of all people, having a shouting match with a stranger in the production booth. The rest of the band was in the recording booth, all doing things completely unrelated to music. Drift snuck in to join them.

“Uh…” At least it was quiet in here. “Are they…”

Impactor flipped a page in his motorcycle magazine. “They’ll need another couple of minutes.”

Drift decided to take a very long time tuning his bass.

Sure enough, a couple minutes later Percy stormed out of the recording booth and slammed the door open to join them. The stranger, grinning smugly, flipped on the mic to chat with them and waved. “Hey! You must be the new guy. I’m Percy’s ex-boyfriend.”

“I told you to stop telling people that!” Perceptor shouted at the booth. “He’s my husband,” he added in a far calmer aside to Drift.

“Oh,” Drift said. He’d vaguely known Perceptor was married, but he hadn’t really expected...this?

“Mwah!” The guy who must be Brainstorm blew a kiss at the booth. “Oh-kay, if you gentlemen would like to get this show on the road, I need some sound checks.”

“Our regular producer is your husband?” Drift asked Percy, quietly. He was pretty sure this wasn’t standard, even for the American music industry.

“He works for takeout,” Springer said, and played a rimshot.

Well. At least his nerves were gone.

===

The album recording process went...fine? It went fine. It went great, actually, Drift didn’t have to do any singing at all and finally understood enough about how they liked the bass to fit into their songs that he could improv some of his own parts instead of asking Kup for help or trying to follow Impactor’s increasingly incomprehensible whims. The album was coming together, they were creeping towards release and planning the next tour, the paparazzi still hadn’t figured out where he was, and he only slept on Rod and Arcee’s couch when he didn’t feel like going home after movie night.

They were doing their first show in a while, to build hype for the upcoming album, and Drift was wandering around the venue after sound check doing nothing in particular. Springer was nearby, challenging people to dance-offs with the camera guy who was doing a documentary for the upcoming tour and also enabling Springer’s burgeoning social media empire trailing behind him.

“Hey, Drift!” Springer waved at him. “Dance-off?”

Drift thought about it. He was less scared of being found than he had been a year ago. He liked it here, he liked his band mates, his old agency hadn’t tried to get in touch with him at all. He’d found a life after washing out of Kpop. Why not?

“Sure,” he said, and launched into an old routine. Not one of the ones from his last tour, that had ended with him falling off the stage, but one of the ones from before that when his health hadn’t been as bad. It wasn’t one of his flashier ones, but he’d drilled it a lot and it looked good close up.

It ended with him facing his audience, one hand outstretched, so he had a fantastic view of the shocked and delighted awe on Springer’s face two seconds before he tackled Drift into a nearby couch shouting “What the FUCK was THAT?”

Drift was going to assume he’d won.

#talky talk #becauseforoncethisisme #sroloc writes stuff #prompts 2023 #maccadams #is this transformers

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