Assistant District Attorney Karen Plants was head of the narcotics unit of the Wayne County District Attorney Office in Detroit Michigan when the Inkster Police Department scored a major narcotic bust in 2005. Acting on a reliable tip, officers collected 47 kilos of cocaine, the largest haul the Inkster authorities ever had in its history.
This was the epitome of the American way to carry out “the war on drugs”: A swift take down of Alexander Aceval, Ricardo “Richard” Pena, Chad Povish and Brian Hill along with the seizure of the cocaine worth millions of dollars.
While the community celebrated the bust, the subsequent investigation blew the lid off an egregious case of corruption in Michigan’s Jurisprudence. The drug bust included lies orchestrated by the prosecutor, the judge, the informant and the police. The string of charges ranged from “obstruction of justice” to perjury.
Circuit Judge Mary Waterstone, in charge of the trials against Aceval and Pena, was complicit in the perjury scheme. She told a Michigan Attorney General investigator that prosecutor Plants expressed concern for the safety of Chad Povish who set up the men to be arrested. (more…)
So far my summer “to do” list has served only as a bookmark in the Hunger Games Trilogy.
Set in a dystopian North America, the isolated and impoverished provinces serve the rich and powerful Capital. The Capital sponsors the annual Hunger Games with tributes drawn from the provinces. Two 16 year olds from each province are set down in a highly rigged and orchestrated arena of fighting to the death for the entertainment of the bored folks in the Capital and to maintain the power of fear and grief over the provinces.
The children are trained to view each other as the enemy as they vie with bloody competition for the limited resources and protections available in the arena.
Don’t think Tea Party disrespect for government; rather think Corporate Capital becoming the only person with a vote.
Think for profit prisons and schools and healthcare and security forces.
Think the imminent defunding of WIC and Headstart and Public schools.
Think dissolution of safety and health regulations.
Globally think of our unquenchable thirst for cheap goods and corporation’s ravishing pursuit of cheap labor pursued by any means necessary and always at the expense of the world’s peace and security, with starvation and homelessness of children as predictable first casualty.
On Sunday morning our pastor preached on David and Goliath. Although his sermon and the text was about how the battle belongs to the Lord and is not won with weaponry but with faith, I could only think about how every war is waged with children and “the least of these” on the front lines of harm’s way.
Suzanne Collins has crafted a story full of violence and adventure for her audience of young adults which has left this 57 year old reeling with the dark realities it reveals.
Matthew Bentley was fourteen when he shot an killed the owner of a home he thought was unoccupied
It appears I was misled by some of the early AP reporting on the Court’s ruling. Here is law professor Mark Osler’s clarification as it appeared on his blog. AGB
Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down part (but not all) of the Arizona immigration law. That gobbled up a lot of the news cycle.
Buried beneath that story was another dramatic decision. The Supreme Court also issued its opinion in Miller v. Alabama, ruling that it is unconstitutional for a state to use a mandatory sentencing scheme which mandates life without parole sentences where the defendant was a juvenile at the time of the crime. This affects a lot of cases– 29 states and the federal government have such sentencing schemes.
Unfortunately, initial reports (over the AP wire and elsewhere) said that all JLWOP sentences were struck down, but that is not true. Sentences where the judge or jury had other options available (such as life with parole) seem to survive this decision.
My commentary on this important can be found over at the motherlode of sentencing info, Doug Berman’s Sentencing Law and Policy blog.
Bryan Stephenson of the Equal Justice Institute summed up today’s ruling by the Supreme Court nicely,
“The court took a significant step forward by recognizing the fundamental unfairness of mandatory death-in-prison sentences that don’t allow sentencers to consider the unique status of children and their potential for change. The court has recognized that children need additional attention and protection in the criminal justice system.” (more…)
The Supreme Court handed the Obama administration a big win by striking down the most egregious portions of Arizona’s controversial immigration law. Stat law enforcement can determine the immigration status of detained individuals, but cannotstop and question a person on the street simply because they suspect that person may be undocumented.
Although state police officers have a greenlight to determine the immigration status of detained persons, this merely transfers this common practice from ICE, a federal agency, to state and local law enforcement. From the standpoint of the detained individual, it hardly matters whether your status is being checked by ICE officials or by a state official–the result is the same.
Arizona won some state’s rights points, in other words, but the plight of undocumented persons (and those who merely look, by virtue of language, accent and skin-hair color, as if they might be documented) hasn’t changed on iota. Under the all-but-universal Secure Communities program, local law enforcement officials are already required to place an ICE hold on any person they detain for whatever reason. The feds will then run a check and determine whether the individual is subject to deportation.
Secure Communities is well understood in the Latino community, but Anglos hardly know the program exists because, well, they don’t have to worry about it. As a result, some Anglo reporters may interpret today’s ruling as a step toward more stringent immigration practices. It isn’t.
Few understand that few of the supposedly dangerous criminals we deport every year have ever been convicted of a violence-related crime. In the federal system, any conviction stands proxy for future dangerousness.
The good news from today’s ruling is that local and state police officers will not have the right (or the obligation) to stop and question a person suspected of being Latino. This policy, if upheld, would have been a wholesale validation of racial profiling, regardless of what Arizona governor Jan Brewer has to say to the contrary. In the absence of criminal behavior, physical appearance, accent, and the use of non-standard English would have been the only cues that could lead an officer to suspect undocumented status. In other words, Arizona wanted to legalize George Zimmerman-style hunches rooted in ethnic and racial factors and the Supreme Court said no. America just dodged a bullet.
The Supreme Court on Monday said states may play a limited role in enforcing laws on illegal immigration, upholding part of Arizona’s controversial law but striking other portions it said intruded on the federal government’s powers.The justices let stand for now the part of the law that requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain or arrest if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) declared that decision, on the part of the law that had generated the most controversy, a victory.
But the ruling also in part vindicated the Obama administration, with the court rejecting three provisions that the federal government opposed.
The court ruled that Arizona cannot make it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to carry identification that says whether they are in the United States legally; cannot make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to apply for a job; and cannot arrest someone based solely on the suspicion that the person is in this country illegally.
The court also said the part of the law it upheld — requiring officers to check the immigration status of those they detain and reasonably believe to be illegal immigrants — could be subject to additional legal challenges once it is implemented.
The other major decision of the court’s term — the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care law — will come Thursday, on the final day of the term.
In a statement Monday, Obama said he was “pleased that the Supreme Court has struck down key provisions of Arizona’s immigration law.” He added that the decision makes clear “that Congress must act on comprehensive immigration reform,” since a “patchwork of state laws is not a solution to our broken immigration system.” At the same time, Obama said, he remains “concerned about the practical impact” of the part of the law that was allowed to stand.
“No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like,” Obama said. “Going forward, we must ensure that Arizona law enforcement officials do not enforce this law in a manner that undermines the civil rights of Americans, as the Court’s decision recognizes.”
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for his part, issued a statement that did not comment on the specifics of the ruling but instead said the decision “underscores the need for a President who will lead on this critical issue and work in a bipartisan fashion to pursue a national immigration strategy.”
Obama “has failed to provide any leadership on immigration,” the former Massachusetts governor said.
Romney did not speak to reporters accompanying him Monday on a campaign trip to Arizona, and aides refused to say whether he agrees with the Supreme Court’s ruling or even whether he supports Arizona’s immigration policy.
“The governor supports the states’ rights to craft immigration laws when the federal government has failed to do so,” spokesman Rick Gorka said. “That’s all we’re going to say on this issue.”
George Zimmerman has given a series of statements describing the night the shot Trayvon Martin dead. In this WP column, Jonathan Capehart compares the recently released tapes of Zimmerman’s various statements and arrives at a simple conclusion: none of this makes sense. AGB
George Zimmerman’s version of events the night he killed Trayvon Martin have never really made sense. And thanks to the release of a treasure trove of audio files last week by his attorney, we get to hear Zimmerman tell police what happened that rainy Feb. 26 night in his own voice. But what you’ll immediately notice is that what he tells the Sanford Police Department while in custody and in subsequent interviews doesn’t exactly match what he said during his infamous call to the non-emergency line at the SPD. You’ll also understand why investigator Christopher Serino, who had problems with Zimmerman’s account from the beginning, sought to arrest him for manslaughter two weeks later.
To refresh your memory, click here to listen to the phone call Zimmerman placed to the SPD. There have been break-ins in the neighborhood and “there’s a real suspicious guy” who “looks like he’s up to no good,” he told the dispatcher. “These [expletive], they always get away,” Zimmerman said before getting out of his car to pursue Martin. When he confirmed he was following the unarmed 17-year-old, the dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that.” They discuss where he would meet the police when they arrived.
Now, click here to listen to the Feb. 29 interview Zimmerman had with Serino and investigator Doris Singleton as they probe the inconsistencies in what Zimmerman said in the unredacted version of that non-emergency call and what he told Singleton hours after the shooting. A word of caution: There’s raw language in this conversation. The questions asked by the two detectives are what you would expect from seasoned homicide investigators. But they find Zimmerman’s responses unsatisfactory.
This combo made from file photos shows Trayvon Martin, left, and George Zimmerman. (AP Photo)
Serino and Singleton peppered Zimmerman with questions as they replayed Zimmerman’s four minute and 12 second call to the SPD’s non-emergency line. Why did he think Martin was suspicious? What did he think Martin was on drugs? Zimmerman would tell them he was afraid. But they focused a lot of attention on why the neighborhood watch captain would pursue Martin , “a good kid,” a “mild-mannered kid,” as Serino would describe him but who Zimmerman said made him fearful because he stared at him and walked around his car.
At one point in the call, Zimmerman says, “Oh [expletive], he’s running.” Serino asked Zimmerman to describe how Martin was running. “I don’t remember ’cause I was on the phone,” he answered. “It happened so quickly.” That was unsatisfactory to Serino. “It sounds like he’s running as to get away from you,” the detective said as he pressed Zimmerman to describe how Martin was running. “I don’t know why,” Zimmerman said in response.
On the call, the dispatcher asked him which way Martin was running. You can hear Zimmerman get out of his car and the detectives asked to confirm if he was getting out to see where Martin was going. “So, you basically jumped out of the car to see where he was going,” Serino inquired. When Zimmerman replied, “Yes, sir,” the investigator replied bluntly, “Okay, that’s not fear, all right. That’s one of the problems I have with the whole thing.”
Another area of contention was when the dispatcher asked Zimmerman, “Are you following him?” Serino asked him, “What went through your mind?” Zimmerman replied, “He’s right.” When Serino said, “You should have went back to your vehicle,” Zimmerman said, “But I still wanted to give [the dispatcher] an address.”
Martin was running in the direction of his father’s fiance’s apartment, where he was staying while on suspension from school. Serino said, “At this point, he’s gotta be hiding from you” because Martin could not have made it home and then come back to attack Zimmerman. Singleton challenged Zimmerman’s entire account for why he got out of his car. “You’re trying to catch up to him,” she said. “You’re looking for him,” Serino added. “It sounds like you’re looking for him.”
“Did you pursue this kid? Did you want to catch him,” Serino asked.
“No,” Zimmerman said, sounding exasperated.
“That’s not you,” Serino said. ‘That’s not what you’re about.”
“No,” Zimmerman said again.
Singleton questioned why at the end of the call, Zimmerman told the dispatcher to have the police call him upon their arrival and he would tell them where he was. “You’re going to be back at your car in less than 15 or 20 seconds from that distance,” she asked, “so why would they need to call you?” Zimmerman said he said this because he was frustrated he didn’t “give an adequate description” of where he was from community clubhouse. “You know what the impression would be,” Singleton said, “is that you’re going to continue to look and when they get here you’ll tell them where you’re at at that point.”
The call would end. Zimmerman and Martin would encounter each other. And Martin would be shot dead at point-blank range. Nothing about this case has made sense, nothing. What the Serino and Singleton interviews on Feb. 29 show is that the detectives didn’t think it made sense either
The Mexican cartels are known for their sanguinary wars and inexhaustible supply of narcotics. Yet, behind the bloodshed and multi-billion dollar industry exist a complex network of power, an innovative machinery for narcotic transport, and mechanisms of survival and protection that ensure the longevity of the cartel and drug production. In this article, The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe pays a detailed look at the operations of one of the richest, deadliest, and most powerful organizations in the world—The Sinaloa Cartel of Mexico. The Cartel’s operations reach not only the United States and Latin America, but also Europe and Asia, and its influence ranges everywhere from top national officials to city cab drivers. As a Drug Enforcement Administration official indicates, “They have eyes and ears everywhere.” This astonishing account of the cartel’s operations sheds light on underground tunnels, dynastic marriages, systems of bribery, and even insurance for seized drugs.
One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for “Father” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad.
Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. “Poor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. “So far from God and so close to the United States.”
The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.
Estimating the precise scale of Chapo’s empire is tricky, however. Statistics on underground economies are inherently speculative: cartels don’t make annual disclosures, and no auditor examines their books. Instead, we’re left with back-of-the-envelope extrapolations based on conjectural data, much of it supplied by government agencies that may have bureaucratic incentives to overplay the problem.
So in a spirit of empirical humility, we shouldn’t accept as gospel the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. (That range alone should give you pause.) Still, even if you take the lowest available numbers, Sinaloa emerges as a titanic player in the global black market. In the sober reckoning of the RAND Corporation, for instance, the gross revenue that all Mexican cartels derive from exporting drugs to the United States amounts to only $6.6 billion. By most estimates, though, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán’s organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion — comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook.
Leaders insist that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is not a denomination, and there is some truth to the claim. The CBF doesn’t pass resolutions, has no statement of faith, and delegates to this week’s convention in Fort Worth weren’t delegates selected by individual churches. If you wanted to attend, you could register for free on the CBF website, and over 1500 people did.
On the other hand, if you attend a church like Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship clearly fills the role of a denomination. Broadway, largely due to its stance (or lack of stance) on the gay rights issue, is no longer affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention or the Baptist General Convention of Texas. For us, the CBF serves as a denomination.
I attended as much of this weeks CBF gathering in Fort Worth as time would allow, serving as a greeter, attending work shops, chatting with the folks hawking wares and services at the Gathering Place and participating in evening worship. Still, I missed all of the business sessions and most of the workshops and my conversations were largely limited to the scattered handful of leaders and participants I know from the distant past. This was the first CBF event I have ever attended, so I don’t have a large fund of actual experience to draw from.
I was a graduate student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville when the CBF was founded in 1991. I was vaguely aware that Daniel Vestal, a conservative but not fundamentalist pastor, lost a close fight for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1989. In those days, as many as 45,000 “messengers” from across the nation would flock to the annual conventions as both moderates and fundamentalist factions tried to turn out the vote. By contrast, this year’s SBC gathering was attended by fewer that 8,000 people. Vestal lost that fight and it soon became obvious that the conservative faction had taken control of the denominational apparatus.
Although SBC presidents have little formal control, they do make critical nominations to the all-powerful “Committee on Committees” (a tribute to “organization man” bureaucracy if ever there was one). Since the Committee on Committees nominates people (usually male people) to the boards of various powerful institutions throughout the denomination, including six theological seminaries, ten years of fundamentalist presidents starting in 1980 represented a complete transfer of power.
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship came to existence as a protest movement within the SBC that functioned primarily at the state level. The fundamentalists held sway at the denominational level, but most of the money on which the denomination depended flowed through powerful state conventions. In influential states like Texas and Virginia, CBF influence was so strong at the state level that pro-SBC conventions were formed so the denomination could relate directly to the more conservative churches.
As a moderate SBC leader told me back in the day, the power struggle in Baptist land was about sociology more than anything else. The men and women of the CBF are high culture Baptists. That may sound like a contradiction in terms, and in a sense it is. How high culture can you be and still call yourself a Baptist? CBF folks like beautiful art, semi-classical music and a well-turned phrase. Well, some CBF churches use vestments, pipe organs and are slowly falling in love with the liturgical traditions of historic Christianity. The quasi-denomination is built on the institutional foundation of churches, Baptist universities like Mercer and Baylor, and the long list of seminaries and theological schools spawned by the exodus of moderates from the SBC. CBF people may be the most theologically and biblically literate Christians in America. For all that, they retain a fondness for “the old songs” like Just as I am, and I Love to Tell the Story, they talk about missions, missionaries and “the mission field” a lot, and they take the Bible very seriously.
It’s complicated.
Gradually, the CBF has surrendered the dream of retaking control of the mother ship and has developed a separate identity. The initial generation of CBF leaders is now old enough for retirement. Last night, Daniel Vestal was feted and celebrated in a two-and-a-half-hour worship service that, though deeply meaningful to old timers, seemed a tad excessive to first-timers like me.
Old guard CBF leaders like Vestal came of age in the old Southern Baptist Convention and it shows. Even during the strife of the 1980s, men like Vestal presented themselves as the true defenders of Baptist “distinctives” like world missions and evangelism. “We first lost our focus on evangelism,” Vestal lamented in 1989. “Then we lost our trust for each other. Now, we’re losing our viability as a denomination for world evangelization.”
I doubt this kind of rhetoric resonates with the scores of seminary and college students who attended the CBF gathering in Fort Worth, especially if evangelism means “saving souls” and “world evangelization” means disparaging other religions. As the CBF and the SBC have drifted apart, both groups have redefined themselves. The SBC has embraced the old “heaven and hell” Christianity so characteristic of frontier revivalism. The evangelistic mission of the SBC may have been interpreted in softer terms by moderate SBC leaders between 1950 and 1975, but the kinder, gentler evangelism had been thoroughly eradicated by 1990. Since then, preachers who believe in a literal hell, a real heaven, and a sure-’nuff Satan have had the stage to themselves.
“The light shines in the darkness,” John’s Gospel tells us, and confident Christians have always been clear about their darkness and their light. In the SBC, sinners are lost, they are going to hell, and nothing short of faith in the saving blood of Jesus will save them. That message has always been popular in the South, especially in Bible Belt states like Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.
I left Southern Baptist life in 1994, shortly after the formation of the CBF, and this week’s conference was my first opportunity to witness the semi-denomination up close and personal.
If the sermon on the glory of God Vestal preached last night is anything to go by, the CBF loves the light but would rather not talk about the darkness. Using every rhetorical tool in the preacher’s tool kit, Vestal tried to get his audience fired up about the glory of God. He was only partially successful.
The CBF has always been unsure about the darkness. Do they believe in a real Satan and a real hell? Some may and some may not; but it hardly matters since hardly anyone affiliated with the group is comfortable with these dark concepts. Every good story needs an antagonist, a villain, and the CBF story doesn’t have one. The Light of the world will be swallowed by the neon glitter of secular America unless we splash some tangible darkness onto the canvas, and I didn’t see much of that.
For too long, the unacknowledged Satan of the CBF has been the Grand Inquisitor fundamentalists who sent a generation of SBC moderates into exile (not quite an auto-da-fe, but close enough). The CBF needs to do better than that. The glory of God will have an ersatz feel until it is juxtaposed with truly dark evils like poverty, mass incarceration, global warming, anti-immigrant bigotry and the demonization of the gay rights movement. There’s lots of material out there, but a sort-of-denomination spawned in conflict and controversy naturally wants to keep the lid on Pandora’s box. Until recently, issues with any potential for controversy have been studiously avoided.
The younger generation of CBF people hunger and thirst for deep theological conversation about things like sex, the ecological crisis, justice, crime and punishment, immigration and all the other broken pieces of America. Plenty of CBF people want the light to shine into genuine darkness. Darkness-light issues found their way into some of the workshops I attended, but were addressed in the most general of terms and seldom mentioned in worship nor, I suspect, in business meetings.
This will need to change. The trauma of being rejected by Mother Church takes a decade or two to get past, but the CBF is divided into folks older than me (who have a hard time letting go of past indignities), and people younger than me (who have little living memory of these events and long to move on). Who will lead the CBF now that the beloved Rev. Vestal has retired? That is the question of the hour. For better or worse, they don’t make preachers like Vestal any more.
During a meeting of Texas Baptists, Bill Leonard, the dean of liberal Baptist historians, took us on a whirlwind tour of the state of Christian America. In a day in which denominationalism is losing its meaning, he said, Baptists need to be tell the world who we are and who we are not. I asked old church history prof if a generation of seminary students with no living memory of our Baptist holocaust might open the door to new things.
The Wake Forest professor didn’t give the yes-or-no answer I had expected. It is a great blessing, he admitted, to live without the burden of history. But the churches these students will enter are still living with these painful memories and pastors who don’t understand the historical context of their churches don’t always anticipate the trauma they can evoke with a single misplaced sentence.
I see his point. And yet I long for leaders who are free to apply the light of God to the all-too-real darkness of current events. The day is coming. The younger generation of denominational leaders longs for social justice, isn’t the least bit hung up on social evils like cussing, drinking and gambling, and takes a compassionate view of issues like gay rights, immigration rights and the criminal justice system. In time, these young women and men will be at the helm of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the self-definition Leonard calls for will begin.
Judges are generally hesitant to take matters out of the hands of a jury, but Tarrant County District Judge Dana Womack seems downright eager. The record award of $13.7 million is gone like smoke and now it is the plaintiffs who must fork over court costs.
In other words, Womack didn’t just call for a do over; she arbitrarily inserted her personal judgment for that of the jury.
If the article below is anything to go by, the case seems to turn on the judge’s doubt that statement’s allegedly made by the defendants, Shannon Coyel, Gerald Coyel, Charlie Doescher and Pat Doescher, could actually be traced to these individuals. I doubt we have heard the last of this story.
A Tarrant County judge has thrown out a jury’s nearly $14 million Internet libel verdict in a case that garnered national attention and was called the largest such award involving online defamation.
With her ruling, state District Judge Dana Womack sided with the defendants who argued that the jury’s verdict was not supported by the evidence. The judgment, signed late last week, does not explain her reasoning. Womack declined through a court official to comment.
One of the defendants said he understood that the jury had wanted to send a message with its decision.
“But if you’re going to penalize somebody for doing it, make sure you get the people who did it,” said the defendant, Charlie Doescher, who lives in Kennedale.
The case originated after a woman employed by Mark and Rhonda Lesher accused them of sexually assaulting her. They were indicted but acquitted at trial.
The Leshers later sued, saying the woman and her husband, along with their employees, smeared them in blog postings to ruin the Leshers’ reputations. The case took years to get to the jury. In April, a Tarrant County jury voted 10-2 to award the couple $13.78 million. Defendants Shannon and Gerald Coyel and Doescher, who worked for the Coyels, were ordered to pay varying amounts of the award.
In a motion filed last month, the defendants’ attorneys argued that no evidence presented to the court tied them to the posts. A review “will show the IP address allegedly tied to Gerald and Shannon Coyel’s home is nowhere to be found,” the court document said. The motion also argued that no evidence supported an award of mental anguish for the Leshers, nor was there evidence that their reputations were injured and Rhonda Lesher’s beauty salon lost profits.
Rhonda Lesher, who said she moved after the online posts wrecked her business, said Tuesday that the verdict’s reversal was a “slap in the face.” She said the couple plan to appeal.
Many of the blog posts were vile — Lesher said there were more than 25,000 entries — including that her customers engaged in sexual perversions and molestations, drug dealing and other criminal activity. Among the posts, one stated “…they got ‘HERPIES’ and ‘AIDS’!” Another read, “These are the ‘SLIMEST’ ‘LYING’ ‘PERVERTED’ ‘CHILD MOLESTING’ ‘HELPLESS WOMAN RAPING’ ‘SCUM’ I have ever heard of!”
Lesher said she and her husband had asked for $5 million in damages, but the jury went far beyond that. Though she still feels she has been vindicated, the judge’s ruling “took my breath way.”
“I just felt gut shot,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I had not spent any [of the award] money in my mind. I wasn’t counting my chickens before the eggs hatched. … We have worked for four years and have spent as much as we’ve spent to get to bottom of it to get some vindication.”
Lesher said the couple sold their ranch to pay for attorneys and have paid civil and criminal trial costs of more than $1 million. The couple still have a suit pending in Collin County against district attorney prosecutors for malicious prosecution, she said.
“The amount of torment and pain we have endured it’s really hard to put into words,” she said.
According to the lawsuit, Shannon Coyel, a former client of Mark Lesher, an attorney, accused the Leshers and one of their employees of sexually assaulting her. The criminal trial was moved to Collin County because of pre-trial publicity, and the jury acquitted all three in January 2009.
Coyel said the trial was “humiliating” and that she saw a counselor for more than two years to deal with her experiences, including the ordeal with the blog posts.
She said she copes through “My faith in God. I go to bed every night and I pray God takes my worries away,” she said.
Media reports about the jury’s verdict angered her, she said, because they came before the case was closed. Coyel said she was never worried about the money that she was supposed to pay — roughly $2 million.
“They would never get a dime from me because I don’t have a dime to give them,” she said.
She also said that the blog posts disgusted her and that her husband barely uses a computer. “Just to even read [the posts], there’s got to be something mentally wrong with you,” she said.
The judge, she said, did an excellent job and followed the law in her ruling.
“This is how the judicial system is supposed to work,” she said. “The judge … could see through all the smoke and mirrors.”
Doescher, who also had been ordered to pay money, said he did not know the Leshers and had never seen them until he walked into the courtroom.
“They were out for revenge,” he said.
Being dragged into the lawsuit was an ordeal for him, he said. “It hurt my life so much.”
In her ruling, Womack orders the Leschers to pay the defendants’ court costs.
Judge Joe Spurlock II, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, said judges have the ability to disregard jury verdicts, dismiss the case and have it retried or allow a person who wins to agree to reduce the award.
Judges in U.S. courts can set aside a verdict when they believe that it was somehow unjust, biased, prejudiced or otherwise compromised, said Spurlock, formerly a district judge in Fort Worth who also served on the appellate court.
“Judges hate to do this,” Spurlock said, noting that jury decisions are held in high regard as a foundational institution. “We only do it on those rare occasions that it’s not proper justice, it was just not properly served.”
Kung Li’s latest article in Facing Southunderscores the foolishness of believing that comprehensive immigration reform would be realized as soon as Obama and the Democrats proved they were serious about securing the border.
Getting tough simply created an appetite on the right for yet more bodies on the border, ever greater deportation stats, and an ever-expanding role for local law enforcement.
No matter how far to the right Obama moved on the immigration issue, his conservative opponents had no choice but to raise the ante.
The only way to produce credible and comprehensive immigration reform is to humanize the problem. Obama’s “we’re only deporting the worst of the worst” stance was wrongheaded and counterproductive from the drop.
First, we aren’t deporting the worst of the worst.
The federal court system uses any past felony violation as a proxy for “dangerousness” whether or not the offense involved violence or the threat of violence. Instead, federal officials are examining the immigration status of every person apprehended by local law enforcement for any reason. The assumption is that undocumented residents who have a criminal record of any kind are a threat to public safety. In most cases, the government has no good reason to believe the folks we are shipping back to Mexico are dangerous criminals.
The Obama administration was simply jacking up its deportation statistics in the unfounded hope that a show of toughness at the border would induce Republicans to embrace genuine immigration reform. When ill-informed voters hear that 400,000 dangerous criminals have been deported, they view all undocumented persons with fear and suspicion.
Republicans will oppose any measure proposed by the Obama administration unless it has overwhelming bipartisan support. The president extended an olive branch to the DREAM Act community because he realized, finally, that his original tactic could do nothing but fail.
The cover of Time Magazine released on June 14 featured Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and 35 other undocumented immigrants. The next day, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano issued a memorandum that will, when implemented, grant deferred status and possibly work authorization to between 800,000 and 1.4 million undocumented people who meet age, education, and criminal history criteria. President Obama stepped out later that afternoon into the Rose Garden to add some Presidential love — if not an executive order — to the policy. It was a significant shift for someone who had, a year earlier, insisted it would be inappropriate for him to do exactly what he is now doing. (more…)
The Southern Baptist Convention is poised to elect its first African-American president. Is this a big deal, or a cynical ploy?
Neither, really.
As this Morning Edition article makes clear, Fred Luter isn’t just a prominent African-American preacher; he’s a transformational figure who stuck with his New Orleans congregation when the sanctuary washed away with Hurricane Katrina. Luter is that rarest of preachers, a man who rose from the streets, understands poverty, and spikes his call to conversion with a strong dose of compassion.
In other words, the Southern Baptist Convention isn’t just placing a token black man in an honorary position to deflect attention from the denomination’s racist past; Luter rose to prominence the hard way and deserves all the accolades he is receiving.
But there is another side to the story embodied in the passionate minority report filed by Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. McKissic is as theologically conservative as a Southern Baptist can be. He preaches against “the gay lifestyle” with notorious gusto, but he is even more passionate about racial injustice.
Fred Luter notwithstanding, Rev. McKissic sees little evidence that the moral fervor of the overwhelmingly white SBC “messengers” who will attend this year’s convention extends to civil rights.
This impression was reinforced in a particularly painful way when Richard Land, head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, launched into a racially tinged radio rant that made him sound like the reincarnation of George Wallace circa 1962.
Land lost his radio program over his diatribe (largely because his racist comments turned out to be an unacknowledged quote from an obscure right-wing zealot), but he kept his post with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land has apologized for dismissing prominent civil rights preachers as “race hustlers” and suggesting that Barack Obama only addressed the Trayvon Martin case in a desperate attempt to improve his standing with black voters.
Is Richard Land truly repentant? McKissic is hedging his bets. And for good reason.
As law professor Michelle Alexander points out, New Jim Crow racism differs markedly from Old Jim Crow bigotry. Richard Land has renounced his denomination’s support for Old Jim Crow segregation and the overt commitment to white supremacy that was part of that package. But when it comes to the New Jim Crow realities associated with mass incarceration and the creation of a black male undercaste, the high-profile Baptist preacher is essentially clueless.
As Michelle Alexander points out, you can’t understand the dynamics of the New Jim Crow unless you are willing to sympathize with the plight of poor young black men who are making all the mistakes Fred Luter made as a young man on the mean streets of New Orleans. Luter loves these guys, even as he laments key features of their lifestyle. So does Dwight McKissic. White Baptists like Richard Land has come to terms with a long-dead Martin Luther King Jr., but isn’t ready to acknowledge the full human dignity of the pre-conversion Fred Luter.
For savvy black Baptists in the SBC like Dwight McKissic, that’s a big problem.
The Southern Baptist Convention is expected to elect its first black president on Tuesday: Fred Luter, a former street preacher who turned a dying New Orleans church into a powerhouse. His election is a milestone for the 167-year-old denomination at a time when minorities make up a growing share of a shrinking membership.
Luter, who is running unopposed for president of the nation’s largest Protestant body, is a departure from his predecessors. He was the middle child of a divorced mother, and until a motorcycle accident landed him in the hospital at age 20, he had little interest in God.
Then God changed him, he told NPR earlier this year.
“I grew up in the ‘hood, and my mom worked two or three jobs. So I hung out with a lot of bad guys, did a lot of crazy things I should not have done,” Luter said. “And so, when I gave my life to the Lord and saw what God did in my life, then I wanted all those guys I ran the street with to experience what I was experiencing.”
Soon, Luter was preaching on the streets in New Orleans. In 1986, he was invited to take over Franklin Avenue Baptist Church. Under him, its congregation grew from a couple of dozen people to 7,000 — the largest Southern Baptist church in Louisiana. Then Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, destroying the sanctuary.
“It would have been easy for Fred Luter to have said, ‘I think God’s calling me elsewhere,’ ” says Russell Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “And he could have gone to a very comfortable pastorate anywhere in the country.
“And yet, he stayed,” Moore says. “And he stood with the people of New Orleans and said, ‘We’ll be back, we’ll rebuild’ — and became a spiritual anchor.”
‘The Future Of The Country Is Urban’
Luter’s decision to stay, and his personal charisma, propelled him to national prominence in the Southern Baptist Convention, says pastor David Crosby.
Crosby leads First Baptist of New Orleans, which shared its space with Luter’s congregation while they rebuilt. He adds that Luter brings something else desperately needed to this denomination, which has seen its numbers drop: He understands how to reach the only growth area of religion.
“The future of the country is urban; the future of the Southern Baptist Convention is also urban,” Crosby says. “We’ve got to learn how to operate and do our mission and thrive in the urban environment. And Fred brings that. He knows it instinctively.”
The SBC has made some progress in that area. Two decades ago, the denomination was “as white as a tractor pull,” as one critic put it. Now it’s 20 percent minority. Richard Land, who heads the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, says Luter’s election shows how far the Southern Baptists have come from the days when they supported slavery.
“It’s as historic a moment as Southern Baptists have had,” Land says, “because the president of SBC is not just an honorific — it is a position of real power.”
Maybe — and maybe not, says Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of the largely African-American Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas.
‘A Historic Moment’
“This is a great job, but it’s somewhat symbolic and ceremonial,” he says.
McKissic says the two-year presidency is a good first step. But he says African-Americans are absent from all the real positions of power.
Some say there’s a latent racism in the denomination. And many were troubled by a recent broadcast on Land’s radio program in which he said President Obama and black leaders were using the death of Trayvon Martin for political purposes.
“This is being done to try to gin up the black vote for an African-American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for re-election,” Land said on the air.
“It was like someone took a knife and stuck it in my heart,” McKissic says. “It validated suspicions that many black Baptists have had all along, that this is how a good number, if not the majority, of Southern Baptists felt.”
Land has apologized and asked for forgiveness.
“I don’t want anything I’ve said, or any mistakes I’ve made, to detract from — in any way — from what is going to be a truly historic moment — a historic moment in which I rejoice,” he says.
Luter has forgiven Land; he says it’s time to look forward. He notes that if he’s elected, it will be because white Baptists voted for him.
“It won’t be because of the handful of black folk that’s going to be there,” Luter says. “So, it will say something to the country and to the world — that the Southern Baptist Convention is not just talking this thing, we’re actually walking this thing.”
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 