Seven Felonies

Trump has been indicted by a grand jury on 7 felonies, including obstruction of justice. I’m told by a prosecutor that I know that proving obstruction can be harder than proving other crimes, and the media is saying that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor, is aggressive in his investigations but conservative in his prosecution decisions: he doesn’t bring cases he can’t win. He doesn’t even bring cases he things are strong maybes. Smith brings cases that he knows he has the evidence to prove.

Other charges, for mishandling classified records and even the Espionage Act violations should be easier to prove, or so my prosecutor friend says, so if Smith has the goods on obstruction, then he surely has the goods on these other crimes. Watch for the obstruction charge to be the swing count. If Smith doesn’t nail Trump on everything, it will be because the obstruction case faced unexpected new exculpatory evidence. If that happens, expect the Espionage Act case to also become shaky. But expect the records charges to stick — at least at the trial court.

That, however, brings up another issue: even if Smith can win convictions, can he preserve them on appeal. I don’t yet see any reasons why he shouldn’t be able to do so, but our SCOTUS has been particularly corrupt lately, and we can never forget Bush v. Gore when the majority openly admitted in their decision that their rationale did not hold up, and that though they were deciding the case, they did not want any lower court to use it as precedent. Things have only gotten worse at SCOTUS since, so time will tell whether they have the integrity to rule appropriately.

In the meantime, get ready for 6 to 20 months of pretrial motions and general waiting around. This is the end only of one phase, though for me it seems an auspicious beginning to the next.

Juvenile Justice in Texas: Done in our name

All the goddamned warnings for child abuse bordering on state sponsored terrorism, but if you’re in a place where you can read this, go ahead and give it a try.

So, Texas takes 11 year old Joshua Beasley Jr. from his family because it’s in his best interests to be housed in a so-called Texas Juvenile Justice Division institution.

But he doesn’t actually get better in an institutional setting. It seems certain aspects of the experience did not tend to mitigate his mental illness. Blake Crenshaw, an older kid in his mid-to-late teens, got to know Joshua when the two ended up in the same facility not long after Joshua’s 13th birthday. Crenshaw described their environment this way:

“[The staff] are constantly beating you down, beating you down, telling you you’re nothing. You’re nothing but a criminal. You’re never going to get out of there,” Crenshaw said. “And with someone like Joshua, he’s so young. He doesn’t have the maturity level to process everything that’s going on in his head. All he’s thinking is, ‘Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad!’”

Such bullying was common, and Joshua wasn’t the only one to react badly to it:

Crenshaw said the youths in the facility often acted out because of the way they were treated by staff.

One might think that if that strategy isn’t working for the kids, since the ENTIRE JUSTIFICATION of taking Joshua and others away is that it was in his or their best interest, Texas officials responsible for the care of these children would look at how they were responding and, if they weren’t getting better, try something different. As for Joshua, Crenshaw knew what to try:

He said the trick was to speak to Joshua gently rather than yelling at him. He would tell Joshua to think about his little brother and to focus on staying calm so that he could go home.

But the TJJD had a different idea. They decided to prosecute Joshua as an adult for one of the times he fought back against the guards.

Crenshaw said that the taunting [by staff] would often lead Joshua to react by mouthing off, spitting or throwing an object. …

“[Staff] would give him like two warnings. Then they’d just be through with him. Multiple staff would take him, slam him on the ground, pepper spray him, handcuff him, shackle him and they would take him to the security pod.”

It’s hard to believe that that strategy didn’t work to improve Joshua’s mental health, social skills, and relationships with staff. Still, there was always adult prison for a child who had spent, at this point, FIVE YEARS in TJJD institutions getting worse instead of better. Joshua had persistently self-harmed in what could be seen as either cries for a different kind of attention or as actual attempts at suicide. (From my own experience I doubt that he himself could always distinguish between the two motivations.) Records show that he strangled or hung himself via ligature quite frequently, sometimes more than once a week, but especially often during holidays and around his birthday each year. He pleaded to be sent home, or at least to be allowed more time visiting with his mother and little brother.

His mother, Amnisty Freelen, was of course devastated that he continued to get worse and that there seemed to be no end in sight. When Texas decided to charge him as an adult for spitting on a guard inside the system that had him for 5 years and only taught him that adults were there to hurt not help, Freelen wanted a full trial to show that her son was responding to abuse. The goal was to prove that moving him to an adult prison with less care (if you can imagine) and more violence would not be in Joshua’s best interest. Joshua’s own attorney refused to allow her input, saying he was taking his orders from the 16 year old who was years behind in his education and seemingly had zero adult coping skills, much less long-term planning faculties that would enable him to consider the risks and benefits of differing legal strategies. The lawyer insisted that he hoped that in a system with fixed terms of confinement, Joshua could go home sooner than in a system with the power to detain Joshua nearly indefinitely so long as TJJD determined it was in his best interests to be confined.

Of course, after transfer Joshua received less supervision. While this may have resulted in fewer fights with corrections officers, it also meant that his only known strategy for accessing care — tight or hanging ligatures — would deprive him of oxygen longer before guards could find him.

He died at the age of 16. The warden who supervised the prison where he died, abused and alone, unable to regularly speak to his mother (as he had while in TJJD facilities) because of his time in solitary confinement (for his own protection) retired with full honours, his record unblemished. Five of the most junior corrections officers plus one sergeant and one lieutenant at Joshua’s prison are under investigation and may be disciplined for failing to check on his condition with sufficient frequency. Reports do not include any official concerns about systemic problems, only a failure to monitor in this one particular case.

For over 5 years, about a third of his life, he was imprisoned with little and lessening contact with family because Texas insisted through the mouths of its officers and prosecutors and judges and even its public defenders that isolating and bullying a suicidal preteen was in his best interest, and then month after month, year after year, refused to admit their mistake.

Joshua Keith Beaseley Jr., you were loved by your family and friends, if not by the state of Texas, and many, many of us will miss you.

The South Carolina Convict To His Gov

Come fire at me and be my thug
and see the scales of justice shrug
that prisons, jails, and cops, and courts,
come to fail without this last resort.

And I will sit upon a chair,
blindfolded and shackled there
while priests and witnesses espy
a life removed, a gun thereby

Poor hands will dig my bed of clay.
With Justice, there I’ll always lay:
Shot by officers of state.
Death just in time, we call just fate.

I’ll be buried in a suit of wool,
a handsome cloth bought for a fool.
This late respect, required but cold,
may cover your hatred for my soul.

But this is what our laws require:
Punishment that most befits our ire.
For our justice is moral rage
Which murders to its wrath assuage.

The Christian choirs shall sway and sing.
My death knell will be Justice’s ring.
And if this form of justice voters move,
Then fire at me, and Justice prove.

How to construct a well thought out sentence

In various places on the internet, people have said that 22 years is not enough of a sentence for Chauvin after his murder of Floyd, since serving as little as 10 more years is possible. I am nearly or maybe actually a prison abolitionist in the longer term*1, but I mostly agree with this given our current laws, practices, and resources. 270 months is a LONG time. Where I differ is that (with what I know now, and understanding this might change if Chauvin himself changes) I want him in prison until at least the age of 65 for the safety of the community, and under supervision until the age of 75. That would require a sentence of over 30 years, minimum, assuming that parole boards made (what I currently think would be) appropriate decisions regarding early release. The 30 gets us supervision until age 75, but even that does not give a strong guarantee of release at or about age 65.

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Say Her Name: Ma’Khia Bryant

The details are sketchy at this point and a number of important things, including how to spell her name and even her age are being reported differently in different places, but from the best information I have right now (which could easily change later):

A foster child, 15 years old, whose name was Ma’Khia Bryant, was being bullied and attacked by other foster kids, probably other girls. She called police for protection. At some point before police arrived (possibly even before she called them?) she acquired a knife to use in self-defense. When the police arrived there was some sort of altercation between Ma’Khia and at least one other girl. At this point she may or may not have been still holding the knife. It’s even possible that someone else had taken the knife from her, but I don’t consider that likely.

Police seeing a physical altercation with a knife involved shot to kill Ma’Khia, the girl who called desperate for protection. She is dead.

I don’t give a god damn if Ma’Khia had the knife in her hand and was swinging it: she was in state custody (unless this detail is also wrong, I fucking hate how different stories are saying different things, but none seemed to say that she **wasn’t** in state custody, it’s just that some stories don’t mention foster care at all), and the state owed her better. Even if there was an immediate necessity to protect the other child because Ma’Khia was swinging the knife, that only backs up responsibility from the cops to the foster system that shouldn’t have put her in that situation to begin with.

To make matters worse, the Mayor of Columbus, Ohio where Ma’Khia was killed called her a “young woman” who “lost her life”, probably between the couch cushions.

Ma’Khia was not a young woman. She was a child, a girl. It’s bad enough that the mayor would say such a thing, but it is much worse than that in that there is a long trend of Black children being treated as adults to maximize the blame that can be placed upon them while white young adults are called “children” or “teenagers” to minimize the blame that can be placed on them. Kyle Rittenhouse is a perfect example of the latter.

I’ll keep watching things, but FUCK THIS SHIT. I’m so sick and tired police violence. I’m so sick and tired of the government killing the people it has a duty to protect.

Live Coverage of MN Protests for BLM Mon April 12: Shots fired

I’m obviously not in MN, but there’s quite a lot to see in the live coverage provided by Unicorn Riot.

Less than 5 minutes ago there was audible gunfire. The reporter was speculating that it was coming from protesters shooting bullets into the air. Obviously that’s very dangerous, since the bullets won’t reach escape velocity. I’m not entirely clear why the reporter thought it was protesters, but I’m assuming it’s because they have a general sense of distance and direction. Here’s hoping this shit doesn’t escalate further.

ETA: I thought I might add multiple updates to this as more info came in, but the protests were almost over when this happened. Everyone has gone home for the night and from where Unicorn Riot was filming there was simply no way to get any more info about the shooter, not even whether or not they were arrested. Because things ended so quickly after I wrote this post (maybe 10-15 minutes, tops) there’s simply nothing of substance to add, but I thought I had to at least write “nothing else happened” here lest the dangerous cliffhanger become needlessly alarming over the long hours of the night.

I’m not going to head to Minnesota like I went to Portland, but I’ll keep an eye on Unicorn Riot’s channel & make posts if I notice something important.

Boston PD Are Rapist Scumbags

So it has come out that Boston PD protected a pedophile rapist, and Boston officers then voted that scumbag their union president.

Now retired, the scumbag has been arrested for raping the daughter of one of his previous victims. The daughter. 25 years later.

What is the Boston PD response to this? Apparently they’re fighting like hell to prevent any records of the previous investigations from coming to light.

So it comes to this: if they aren’t able to pin this coverup, this complicity, this conspiracy on specific Boston officers, then obviously the only proper response for the general public is to treat ALL Boston officers as if they are actively supporting rapists who wear badges. How many of the cops are actual rapists and how many just support giving rapists the authority to command respect, to command obedience, to preside over the interests of police officers as union president, and even to, it nauseates me to say, even to investigate the rape of children. He literally questioned child victims of other rapists, and the police officers above him allowed that. They gave him the power to do that. They specifically assigned him to do that task.

So this is the choice you’ve given  us, motherrapists. Either you clean house, or the whole house is dirty. You even had decades to watch what happened to the Catholic church and learned nothing, did nothing. And the job of a cop isn’t forgiveness; it isn’t grace. Even in 1995 you Boston PD scumbags didn’t have the same excuse as the Catholic church had, as completely unacceptable as that excuse may have been.

You in the Boston PD must be treated socially as if scumbags guilty of conspiracy to rape children, one and all, unless and until you become an organization that doesn’t give these foul gifts to rapists.

This isn’t overreaction. This isn’t emotion. This is the position we are in. This is the position you Boston PD scumbags have put us in: we know that SOME of you are supporting rape, but we don’t know WHICH of you are supporting rape. We have to protect ourselves, and that means that until we have some certainty not just that some of you are innocent, but which exact persons are innocent and why, we simply cannot trust you with power.

Eat shit, Boston PD. Each one of you eat a copper cauldron of shit.

 

 

Minnesota: Number of days without a mass shooting … 0

Well, looks like a 67 year old man who lives not far off the route between UM-Morris and UM-Minneapolis (though closer to the latter) has decided to kill a few people because he was unsatisfied with his health care.

No one is dead yet, at least according to reports datelined 30 minutes ago, but he shot bullets into the bodies of a minimum of 5 people, more than one of whom (the number is as yet unclear) had to be evacuated from their location in a health care facility to a “level 1 trauma centers”. I have no idea what that means (my job here is to translate legal & feminist jargon, not the medical whodiddle), but it sounds kinda bad.

Meanwhile, in addition to attempting to deal with a “horrible looking scene” (quoted words spoken by the local sheriff), our evil mastermind decided to build a whole bunch of bombs and scatter them around. The Minneapolis’ police bomb squad had to be called in to deal with the terrorist’s devices. I expect that will take a while, both because the scene is fairly far from Minneapolis (36-41 miles, depending on the route) but also because there were “suspicious devices” (read: improvised explosive devices) at his hotel, as well. If he’s using a car, they’ll have to check that for bombs, too.

The name of the suspect is “Gregory Ulrich” and CNN is reporting that he has a long history of harassing the health care clinic that he shot up (though they use nicer language than “harassing”) and is “familiar” to law enforcement.

Can we have red flag laws everywhere, please? Or is trying to save lives too politicizing of tragedies even when Republicans are out of power?

While you’re thinking about that question, don’t distract yourself with questions of the shooter/bomber’s race and whether the face of US terrorism is at all racialized, because they’re not even reporting on the shooter’s race, so there, and you’re not allowed to guess! If his race was relevant, they would definitely have reported that he was Black.

 

 

 

 

You know what sucks?

What sucks is when you’ve lived more than 70 years, and not for one day have you known what accountability looks like, not for one day have you understood justice.

For you have known you were doing things for which others were punished, but celebrated your impunity, cursed accountability, fled justice.

For you have only known law, but never justice, and therefore mistook justice for the slow, institutionalized revenge your own wealth bought you in the courts of the United States.

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