In a profile in the Weekly Standard, Mississippi Governor (and presidential aspirant) Haley Barbour claimed that, back in the 1950s and 60s, the Citizens’ Council of Yazoo City, MS was a well-intentioned group of businessmen dedicated to running the Ku Klux Klan out of town.
Why would an ambitious public figure make such a patently false claim? (more…)
By Alan Bean
On December 9, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted two police officers for burning the corpse of Henry Glover, violating civil rights, obstructing justice, and misleading federal investigators. The jury also convicted an ex-officer of shooting Glover with a .223 caliber assault rifle.
Has justice been served, or does this verdict raise more questions about the New Orleans police force than it answers?
Writing for ProPublica, A.C. Thompson, prefaces his article with a troubling statement:
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice was first to bring you the troubling story of Mark and Vergil Richardson, but we certainly aren’t the last. First we had Wade Goodwyn’s excellent story for NPR’s All Things Considered, and now Jordan Smith of the Austin Chronicle is using the Richardson story as an entre into the strange world of no-knock searches for The Crime Report. Radley Balko, one of the experts interviewed for Smith’s story, reports that “the number of SWAT call-outs averaged 3,000 annual between the 1980s and 2005. Now the annual figure is roughly 50,000.”
Jordan Smith
December 15, 2010
An increase in the use of ‘no-knock’ warrants around the country has alarmed civil liberties advocates.
On Nov. 17, 2007, Vergil Richardson was sitting at a table in the house he owns in the small northeast Texas town of Clarksville, playing dominoes with several relatives, including his half-brother Kevin Calloway, when the front door exploded inward and the living room was flooded with police.
“They just broke into the house,” Vergil recalled recently. “They had guns on us and threw me down on the floor.” (more…)
I was out-of-town on a speaking engagement when “The Confessions” originally aired on Frontline. I strongly urge you to watch the entire program online. It won’t be a pleasant experience. Listening to this twisted saga kept taking me back to the recent trial of Curtis Flowers–the stories are very different in some respects, but wrongful convictions follow a familiar pattern.
Two of the attorneys representing the defendents in this case, by the way, are Des Hogan and George Kendall, key members of the legal “Dream Team” involved in the fight for justice in Tulia, Texas.
The story of the Norfolk Four revolves around aggressive interrogation, false confession, and prosecutorial tunnel vision. Once the detectives responsible for the investigation latched onto a theory of the crime, they clung to it tenaciously–facts be damned. (more…)
Nancy Lockhart has been working behind the scenes to bring the plight of Jamie and Gladys Scott to national attention. Interest in the story spiked recently but, with no recent developments, interest is beginning to flag. Nancy would like you to get personally involved. The message below tells you how.
Alan Bean
Jamie and Gladys Scott both went before the Mississippi Board of Pardons and Parole today. Results from this hearing are unknown at this time. Please continue to call and e-mail governor Haley Barbour’s Office in support of their release. Each call and e-mail is very important! (more…)
“That’s more brouhaha for the buck than we have seen anywhere”
The Fort Worth affiliate of the United Coalition of Reason is ecstatic. A $2,400 ad has the pious citizens of Cow Town in an uproar.
All it took was seven simple words, “Millions of people are good without God.” (more…)
This article originally appeared in the Texas Observer.
By Bob Moser
Back in July, when the governor’s race still looked like a race, Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News bird-dogged Democrat Bill White for a week as he hunted for votes among the Anglo conservatives of East Texas. In one especially vivid account, datelined Palestine, Slater showed White answering litmus-test gun-rights questions at the local Starbucks. The candidate answered satisfactorily, citing a B+ score from the National Rifle Association and artfully dodging a question about the right to pack heat in church. A couple of East Texans admitted to Slater that they were considering voting for this strange, surprising Democrat. But there was just one problem, Jerry Harrison of the Farm Bureau said: “The only holdback I can see is that he’s a Democrat and he’s going to be with Obama.” (more…)
This reflection originally appeared in the Huffington Post
Twelve years ago, it was a particularly bad day in Detroit. A storm came through as the temperature hovered just below freezing, and the precipitation switched between freezing rain and snow, making any outdoor movement treacherous.
At the time, I was a federal prosecutor. Ours was a tight office, and when something interesting happened in the courts, we all found out about it almost instantaneously. We were fascinated by the judges we appeared before, so any rumors about them were especially flammable.
On the day of that storm, a particularly intriguing story blasted through our offices. As I heard it, one of the magistrate judges had presided over a detention hearing, in which he considered whether a defendant should be held in jail or released prior to trial. The magistrate heard evidence and argument, and finally ruled against us: He held that the defendant should be released on bond. The man likely was not a big-time criminal, but a drug addict involved in low-level crime to support his habit.
That was not the end of the story, though. (more…)
In the late 1960s, schizophrenia became a black man’s disease.
In late 1963, Malcolm X was asked to comment on the assassination of president John Kennedy. He called it a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” Outraged by this comment, the Nation of Islam prohibited their rising star from speaking publicly for 90 days. When that period expired, Malcolm announced that he was severing ties with the nation.
In August of 1965, rioting broke out in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Before order was restored, 34 people were dead, 1,032 were injured, and 3,438 had been arrested.
At a civil rights rally in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 17, 1966, Stokely Carmichael the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), introduced the term “black power” into the American lexicon.
Four months later, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton organized the Black Panthers in Oakland.
The mainstream civil rights movement, though seemingly triumphant, hadn’t addressed the economic misery and building anger within the black urban ghetto. Martin Luther King achieved unparalleled success by adapting his protest language around the perceptions of middle class white moderates. The Black Power movement got up in the face of white America, demanding radical and immediate change.
How did white folks respond to this challenge? Not well. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 on the strength of a “law and order” message. Everybody knew what the Republican candidate was talking about. (more…)
We’re talking Texas, of course.
As the old saying goes, “When three different people tell you you’re drunk, it’s time to sit down.”
Or, When Fox News suggests you’re a bigot, it’s time for some honest reflection.
It helps, of course, that Joe Straus, the embattled Speaker of the Texas House, is a Jewish Republican as opposed to being a black Democrat. But the principle applies.
“Over the past month,” the article notes, “in a spate of e-mails and political pitches, conservative opponents of incumbent Speaker Joe Straus have said they want him replaced not because of his Jewish religion, but because of his betrayal of Republican principles.”
But in a November 30th email, John Cook of the Texas Republican Executive Committee reminded his readers that, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.”
If you read enough of these statements, you will notice that the words “Republican,” “conservative,” and “Christian” are used more or less interchangeably. In Texas it is generally assumed that orthodox Christianity teaches conservative economic and social principles. It thus follows, as the night the day, that real conservatives are Christians who vote Republican. (more…)
Friends of Justice 