TAIPEI, Taiwan – A South Korean court has ruled that North Korea must compensate the family of a South Korean official who North Korean forces shot dead in 2020, a killing that inflamed both cross-border tension and anger towards the South Korean government.
South Korean fisheries official, Lee Dae-jun disappeared from his patrol vessel in the Yellow Sea, near the maritime border between North and South Korea in September 2020. North Korean forces later found him adrift in their waters, shot him and burned his body. Pyongyang said these actions were part of their COVID-19 prevention measures.
At that time, the South Korean government’s response faced domestic scrutiny. Critics accused the administration of being too passive, leading to political debate and legal action against the officials involved.
Lee’s family filed a lawsuit against North Korea in April 2022, demanding compensation of 100 million South Korean won (US$70,000) each for his son and daughter, citing severe psychological distress caused by their father’s death.
The Seoul Central District Court ruled on Thursday in favor of a bereaved family member, identified as Mr Lee, in a damages lawsuit against North Korea, ordering the defendant to pay 200 million South Korean won (US$140,000).
The lawsuit, filed by Lee’s relatives, named North Korea as the defendant, with the address listed as the “Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea.”
The court did not provide detailed reasons for the ruling but accepted the family’s claim that North Korea was responsible for Lee’s wrongful death.
The verdict is largely symbolic as North Korea is highly unlikely even to acknowledge the ruling let alone pay damages.
According to South Korean military intelligence, North Korean forces found Lee in their territorial waters on Sep. 22, 2020. He was interrogated but was later shot and killed under direct orders from North Korean authorities. His body was then burned, reportedly as a precautionary measure against COVID-19.
Lee Rae-jin, the older brother of a South Korean fisheries official who was fatally shot and burned at sea by North Korean soldiers in 2020, points out where he believed his brother was killed, in a marine chart showing Northern Limit Line (NLL) during an interview with Reuters in Ansan, South Korea, Aug. 8, 2022.(Kim Hong-ji/Reuters)
A few days later, in a rare admission of fault, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent an official letter to South Korea, expressing regret over the “unexpected” and “unfortunate” incident. The North acknowledged killing Lee but denied burning his body, saying only his floating belongings were set on fire.
The international community, including the United Nations, condemned the execution. The U.N.’s special rapporteur on North Korean human rights, Tomás Ojea Quintana, said that such acts were unacceptable and he urged accountability.
The group Human Rights Watch highlighted the North’s longstanding record of rights abuses, noting that it employs violence and fear to maintain control, including arbitrary detention, torture, and executions.
In South Korea, the killing stirred criticism of the government.
Initially, South Korean authorities suggested that Lee had attempted to defect to North Korea, citing personal issues such as gambling debts. But that was met with public skepticism and criticism, as many believed the government was jumping to conclusions.
The notion of a possible defection was later dropped in the absence of any evidence, further fueling public distrust.
Critics accused the administration of then-President Moon Jae-in of attempting to play down the incident to preserve diplomatic relations with North Korea. That suspicion was exacerbated by the government’s initial reluctance to confront North Korea over the killing, leading to accusations of appeasement.
Officials in the Moon administration, including the then defense minister, Suh Wook, Coast Guard chief, Kim Hong-hee, and national security adviser, Suh Hoon, were arrested on charges related to the destruction of evidence in the case. They were accused of instructing officials to delete intelligence reports to conceal the circumstances of Lee’s death.
Prosecutors said Suh Wook erased intelligence reports suggesting that Lee did not intend to defect. Kim Hong-hee was accused of ordering the deletion of reports and distorting the results of an analysis of Lee’s suspected route to support the defection angle. Suh Hoon faced accusations of tampering with evidence and interfering with the investigation to suppress key details.
In December 2023, South Korea’s Board of Audit and Inspection, or BAI, concluded a yearlong investigation, finding that relevant government agencies under the Moon administration had neglected to act to save Lee and subsequently attempted to cover up the incident. The BAI requested disciplinary action against 13 individuals involved in illegal and unfair practices related to the case.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.
Special counsel Jack Smith filed a narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in his 2020 election case after Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
President Joe Biden’s top Middle East adviser held talks in Doha with senior Qatari leaders today, focusing on efforts to finalize a cease-fire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
More than four years after the 2020 violent police raid on Hanoi’s Dong Tam commune, two more people that were arrested that night were released from prison for good behavior.
Le Dinh Quan, 48, and Bui Van Tien, 45, had been in the fourth year of their five-year sentences, but were allowed to return home ahead of schedule.
Quan told Radio Free Asia that during interrogations after his arrest, he was beaten into signing an inaccurate confession.
“They beat me a lot, breaking all of my front teeth,” he told RFA Vietnamese over the phone. “They used their limbs and batons to hit me. They knew how to torture, leaving no trace, but the victims still suffer. Now I still endure the pain and I am not healthy at all.”
The two men were among 29 who were arrested on Jan. 9, 2020, during the attack on land rights protesters in the commune by 3,000 riot police.
The raid resulted in the death of Le Dinh Kinh, the commune’s elderly spiritual leader, and three officers. Of these, 19 were initially charged with murder, though for some, the charges were lowered to resisting police officers on duty.
Two days before the attack, Quan had returned home from a distant province where he worked to celebrate Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, with his family.
When the police started to attack the village, he got out of his home to sound the alarm and then was arrested on the way to Kinh’s home.
Quan said that at the detention facility, he was forced to admit that he was a member of the protesting faction and in charge of defending the land that was central to the dispute.
Investigators also coerced him into stating that Kinh had received money from overseas which he had shared with others, including himself.
He said he did not know the names of the investigators beating him but said that almost all defendants in this case were beaten and forced to make statements. He saw others return to their cells with bruises and other signs of torture.
This picture taken and released by the Vietnam News Agency on September 14, 2020 shows defendants involved in a land dispute attending a court trial in Hanoi. – Two villagers were sentenced to death for murder on September 14 by a Vietnam court, after a long-running land dispute spiralled into rare violence which left three police officers and a villager dead. (Vietnam News Agency/Vietnam News Agency/AFP)
During his trial, he denounced the police’s use of physical violence against him but the presiding judge ignored the accusations.
Quan said that both he and his lawyers had strongly opposed the indictment. On the fifth day, his charges were surprisingly changed from “murder” to “resisting officers on official duty.”
RFA called Hanoi Police and its Security Investigation Agency, using the numbers provided on their website to seek their comments on the allegations but no one answered the phone.
In a recent interview with RFA, Dang Dinh Manh, one of the defense attorneys for the Dong Tam case, said that numerous defendants reported being tortured and forced to give coerced confessions during their pre-trial detention but the judging panel did not pay attention to their allegations.
In addition, Quan said, throughout his stay in prison, he was forced to do hard labor continuously without pay or adequate food.
He was released eight months early for working diligently and adhering to prison rules, he said.
Six others who were initially charged with murder remain in prison. Of these, Le Dinh Cong and Le Dinh Chuc were sentenced to death.
Le Dinh Doanh has a life sentence. Bui Viet Hieu was sentenced to 16 years. Bui Quoc Tien was given 13 years and Nguyen Van Tuyen 12 years.
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese Service.
More than four years after the 2020 violent police raid on Hanoi’s Dong Tam commune, two more people that were arrested that night were released from prison for good behavior.
Le Dinh Quan, 48, and Bui Van Tien, 45, had been in the fourth year of their five-year sentences, but were allowed to return home ahead of schedule.
Quan told Radio Free Asia that during interrogations after his arrest, he was beaten into signing an inaccurate confession.
“They beat me a lot, breaking all of my front teeth,” he told RFA Vietnamese over the phone. “They used their limbs and batons to hit me. They knew how to torture, leaving no trace, but the victims still suffer. Now I still endure the pain and I am not healthy at all.”
The two men were among 29 who were arrested on Jan. 9, 2020, during the attack on land rights protesters in the commune by 3,000 riot police.
The raid resulted in the death of Le Dinh Kinh, the commune’s elderly spiritual leader, and three officers. Of these, 19 were initially charged with murder, though for some, the charges were lowered to resisting police officers on duty.
Two days before the attack, Quan had returned home from a distant province where he worked to celebrate Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, with his family.
When the police started to attack the village, he got out of his home to sound the alarm and then was arrested on the way to Kinh’s home.
Quan said that at the detention facility, he was forced to admit that he was a member of the protesting faction and in charge of defending the land that was central to the dispute.
Investigators also coerced him into stating that Kinh had received money from overseas which he had shared with others, including himself.
He said he did not know the names of the investigators beating him but said that almost all defendants in this case were beaten and forced to make statements. He saw others return to their cells with bruises and other signs of torture.
This picture taken and released by the Vietnam News Agency on September 14, 2020 shows defendants involved in a land dispute attending a court trial in Hanoi. – Two villagers were sentenced to death for murder on September 14 by a Vietnam court, after a long-running land dispute spiralled into rare violence which left three police officers and a villager dead. (Vietnam News Agency/Vietnam News Agency/AFP)
During his trial, he denounced the police’s use of physical violence against him but the presiding judge ignored the accusations.
Quan said that both he and his lawyers had strongly opposed the indictment. On the fifth day, his charges were surprisingly changed from “murder” to “resisting officers on official duty.”
RFA called Hanoi Police and its Security Investigation Agency, using the numbers provided on their website to seek their comments on the allegations but no one answered the phone.
In a recent interview with RFA, Dang Dinh Manh, one of the defense attorneys for the Dong Tam case, said that numerous defendants reported being tortured and forced to give coerced confessions during their pre-trial detention but the judging panel did not pay attention to their allegations.
In addition, Quan said, throughout his stay in prison, he was forced to do hard labor continuously without pay or adequate food.
He was released eight months early for working diligently and adhering to prison rules, he said.
Six others who were initially charged with murder remain in prison. Of these, Le Dinh Cong and Le Dinh Chuc were sentenced to death.
Le Dinh Doanh has a life sentence. Bui Viet Hieu was sentenced to 16 years. Bui Quoc Tien was given 13 years and Nguyen Van Tuyen 12 years.
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese Service.
Russians have begun a second day of voting in a presidential election that has seen sporadic protests as some, defying threats of stiff prison sentences, showed their anger over a process set up to hand Vladimir Putin another six years of rule.
By midday of March 16, Russian police had opened at least 15 criminal probes into incidents of vandalism in polling stations, independent media reported.
More than one-third of Russia’s 110 million eligible voters cast ballots in person and online on the first day of the country’s three-day presidential election, the Central Election Commission (TsIK) said after polls closed on March 15 in the country’s westernmost region of Kaliningrad.
Balloting started up again on March 16 in the Far East of Russia and will continue in all 11 time zones of the country, as well as the occupied Crimean Peninsula and four other Ukrainian regions that Moscow partially controls and baselessly claims are part of Russia.
Putin is poised to win and extend his rule by six more years after any serious opponents were barred from running against him amid a brutal crackdown on dissent and the independent media.
The ruthless crackdown that has crippled independent media and human rights groups began before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched, but has been ratcheted up since.
Almost exactly one month before the polls opened, Putin’s most vocal critic, opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, died in an isolated Arctic prison amid suspicious circumstances as he served sentences seen as politically motivated.
Some Russians expressed their anger over Putin’s authoritarian rule on March 15, vandalizing ballot boxes with a green antiseptic dye known as “zelyonka” and other liquids.
Among them was a 43-year-old member of the local election commission in the Lenin district of Izhevsk city, the Interior Ministry said on March 16.
The official was detained by police after she attempted to spill zelyonka into a touchscreen voting machine, the ministry said. Police didn’t release the woman’s name, but said she was a member of the Communist Party.
Similar incidents were reported in at least nine cities, including St. Petersburg, Sochi, and Volgograd, while at least four voters burned their ballots in polling stations.
In Moscow, police arrested a woman who burned her ballot inside a voting booth in the city’s polling station N1527 on March 15, Russian news agencies reported, citing election officials in the Russian capital.
The news outlet Sota reported that that woman burned a ballot with “Bring back my husband” handwritten on it, and posted video purportedly showing the incident.
There also was one report of a firebombing at a polling station in Moscow, while In Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, a 21-year-old woman was detained after she threw a Molotov cocktail at an entrance of a local school that houses two polling stations.
“It’s the first time I’ve see something like this — or at least [such attacks] have not been so spectacular before,” Roman Udot, an election analyst and a board member of the independent election monitor Golos, told RFE/RL.
“The state launched a war against [the election process] and this is the very striking harvest it gets in return. People resent these elections as a result and have started using them for completely different purposes [than voting].”
Russia’s ruling United Russia party claimed on March 16 that it was facing a widespread denial-of-service attack — a form of cyberattack that snarls internet use — against its online presence. The party said it had suspended nonessential services to repel the attack.
Meanwhile, Russian lawmakers proposed amendments to the Criminal Code to toughen punishments for those who try to disrupt elections “by arson and other dangerous means.” Under the current law, such actions are punishable by five years in prison, and the lawmakers proposed to extend it to up to eight years in prison.
No Serious Challengers
Before his death, Navalny had hoped to use the vote to demonstrate the public’s discontent with both the war and Putin’s iron-fisted rule.
He called on voters to cast their ballot at 12 p.m. on March 17, naming the action “Noon Against Putin.” HIs wife and others have since continued to call for the protest to be carried out.
Viral images of long lines forming at this time would indicate the size of the opposition and undermine the landslide result the Kremlin is expected to concoct.
Putin, 71, who has been president or prime minister for nearly 25 years, is running against three low-profile politicians — Liberal Democratic Party leader Leonid Slutsky, State Duma deputy speaker Vladislav Davankov of the New People party, and State Duma lawmaker Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party — whose policy positions are hardly distinguishable from Putin’s.
Boris Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old anti-war politician, was rejected last month by the TsIK because of what it called invalid support signatures on his application to be registered as a candidate. He appealed, but the TsIk’s decision was upheld by Russia’s Supreme Court.
“Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today,” European Council President Charles Michel wrote in a sarcastic post on X, formerly Twitter, on March 15.
“No opposition. No freedom. No choice.”
Ukraine and many Western governments have condemned Russia for holding the vote in regions it occupies parts of, calling the move illegal.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added his voice to the criticism on March 15, saying he “condemns the efforts of the Russian Federation to hold its presidential elections in areas of Ukraine occupied by the Russian Federation.”
His spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, added that the “attempted illegal annexation” of those regions has “no validity” under international law.
Many observers say Putin warded off even the faintest of challengers to ensure a large margin of victory that he can point to as evidence that Russians back the war in Ukraine and his handling of it.
In April 2021, Monica Palmer walked into The Token Lounge, a rock-and-roll bar outside Detroit, for a meeting of Michigan’s 13th Congressional District Republican Committee. About 75 people gathered around tables on a black-and-white checkerboard dance floor.
For three years, Palmer had filled an obscure position deep within the gears of the U.S. election system. She was a member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, appointed by party leaders to certify election results.
But that anonymity vanished after Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election became apparent and then-President Donald Trump began casting about for ways to reverse it.
The campaign to block Biden’s election was particularly intense in Wayne County, and three months after Biden had taken office, the intensity hadn’t waned for Palmer. She’d been invited to The Token Lounge by David Dudenhoefer, the committee’s leader and one of the people who had put her on the board. He wanted her to explain why she had certified the election and effectively delivered Biden the votes he needed to carry the state.
Dudenhoefer spoke first.
“Hey, if we don’t focus on what happened in 2020 and straighten that out, you can forget 2022, 2024, 2028, 2030,” he said, according to a video recording of the event. “Because right now, tens of millions of Americans feel like these elections are rigged. And I’m one of them.”
When it was Palmer’s turn to speak, she stood in front of a dark stage in a green summer dress and flip-flops and was at once defiant and contrite.
“Now I will take the heat,” she said, adding that she was “off-focus” during the highly contentious public Zoom meeting in which the certification took place. She told the group that she didn’t want to certify the election but that, legally, she had no choice.
“The only thing that the Board of Canvassers has the authority to do is to compare the statement of voters, the number of ballots that were received versus the number of ballots that were tallied and to make any mathematical corrections,” she said.
In fact, Palmer and her Republican colleague on the board, William Hartmann, had first voted not to certify the election, citing differences between the number of votes cast and the number of votes tallied in some precincts. The board was deadlocked 2-2. But the Republicans changed their votes to yes after a Democrat on the board promised that state officials would audit results down the road.
Dudenhoefer wasn’t impressed with that explanation. “You were willing to compromise your beliefs, your principles and your standards for a promise of something down the road,” Dudenhoefer told Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
When it came time to renominate Palmer for the board, he and his colleagues declined. To replace her, they nominated three candidates who all have said they didn’t trust the results of the 2020 election. Two of them were active in efforts to overturn the 2020 election before they were nominated for the canvassing board.
This isn’t just happening in Wayne County. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders in Michigan have purged GOP canvassers in eight of the largest counties, including Macomb, Washtenaw, Ingham, Kalamazoo, Livingston, Saginaw and Genesee, according to a report by The Detroit News last year. At least half of them have been replaced with people who have publicly cast doubt on the 2020 election results.
Jeff Timmer, who ran the Republican Party in Michigan from 2005 to 2009, says he’s alarmed by what’s happening to his party.
“They’ve been able to infiltrate the Republican Party right down to the precinct level in a way that I’ve been astounded by,” he said. “They have paid attention to those very obscure, small party positions, precinct delegates, getting their people in place to chair county Republican parties all across the country – not just to Michigan.”
Indeed, Republicans have mobilized against GOP officials who didn’t go along with Trump’s plan to stop the certification across the country. They’ve worked to unseat many of those officials and place election deniers in key positions, from county clerks to canvassers and up to the secretary of state, attorney general and even governor.
Altogether, the movement raises the specter that a campaign to overturn the 2024 election could be much more coordinated than 2020 and face much less resistance.
Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school said the GOP shake-up of election officials in swing states is dangerous and unpredictable.
“I would say in some ways, we are in an unchartered territory, certainly in modern history when it comes to election administration,” he said.
A county canvassing board can’t reverse the results of a national election by itself. But Norden said disputes over county election results could create enough chaos and confusion that the election is taken out of the hands of voters and given to a partisan state legislature to decide the outcome.
“It provides an opportunity to muddy the waters on what really happened in an election, provides the opportunity for more time for litigation to try to encourage state legislatures to step in to try to prevent a certification of results that that side doesn’t like,” he said.
This idea – that a legislature can step in and override the vote of the public – is known as the independent state legislature doctrine, and it has caught fire in conservative legal circles lately.
Michigan: Test Lab of the Anti-Democratic Movement
In the weeks after the 2020 election, Wayne County was one of the most politically contentious places in America.
Droves of Republicans went to Detroit’s TCF Center the day after Election Day, where poll workers were counting absentee ballots. Amped up by Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and false rumors that poll watchers were illegally being turned away, they banged on glass walls and chanted, “Stop the count!”
Michigan, a swing state, is mostly Republican and White, except for its main metropolitan area. Wayne County is predominantly Democratic. Its largest city, Detroit, is nearly 80% Black. And, if you take away Wayne County from the vote, Michigan goes from a clear Biden victory to a clear Trump victory.
But there was no fraud in Michigan, or Wayne County, that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election. A bipartisan state Senate Oversight Committee investigation led by Republican Ed McBroom spent months scrutinizing and found no evidence of widespread or systematic election fraud.
The Michigan secretary of state’s office completed 250 election audits and found no evidence of fraud or discrepancies that would have changed the results. In the end, of the 174,000 absentee ballots cast in Detroit, only 17 were found to be questionable.
Demonstrators gather at the Michigan statehouse in Lansing in October 2021, claiming they don’t believe Donald Trump lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Credit: Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images
Still, across the country, the GOP platform rests more and more on the baseless assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was harmless. A handful of swing states have become testing grounds for this movement. Much of the playbook has been written in Michigan, and it stretches back far before the election.
In April 2020, hundreds of protesters, some armed with rifles, descended on the Michigan statehouse in a failed attempt to force an end to COVID-19 restrictions.
In October 2020, 13 men were arrested on suspicion of plotting to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government.
On Dec. 14, 2020, the day Democratic electors were meeting at the statehouse to certify the election for Biden, Michigan GOP leaders showed up in person to try to stop them. Sixteen of them signed and sent documents to the National Archives falsely claiming to be the legitimate Michigan electors and casting phony votes for Trump.
On Jan. 5, 2021, Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of Michigan’s state Republican committee, helped organize a rally in Washington, D.C., for Trump supporters in advance of his Stop the Steal rally the next day. She organized buses to transport Michigan Republicans to the Capitol.
Conducting a county election canvass is usually a mundane bureaucratic process. Each of Michigan’s 83 counties has a canvassing board made up of two Republicans and two Democrats. Their job is to make sure the number of voters in each precinct matches the number of votes cast and sign off on the results.
But now those positions are being packed with 2020 election deniers, potentially setting the stage for even more election chaos in 2024.
In Macomb County, which borders Detroit to the north and is the third most-populous county in the state, the newest Republican canvasser is Nancy Tiseo, who in 2020 suggested that Trump should suspend the Electoral College so military tribunals could investigate voter fraud.
In tiny Antrim County, there’s Victoria Bishop, wife of far-right talk show host “Trucker” Randy Bishop. She moderated an event last year with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where he said the Supreme Court should remove Biden from office and reinstall Trump.
New Republican canvasser Marvin Rubingh, who sits on the Antrim County board with Bishop, said Trump’s lie that the election was stolen was a “credible allegation.”
Kalamazoo County appointed Tony Lorentz, who said he wasn’t sure Biden won the election or whether he would certify elections in the future.
Monica Palmer, the Wayne County canvasser who was ousted, declined to go on the record for this story. In the weeks after the election, she’d received death threats and text messages with photos of dead naked women. Some of the threats mentioned her daughter. She even found herself on the phone with Trump after the certification as his campaign was still fighting in courts in Michigan to overturn the election.
As a result, she gave a handful of interviews and then tried to lay low, hoping the harassment would blow over. But after she was kicked off the board, she went on “The Paul W. Smith Show,” a Detroit radio program, and described the ongoing purge as part of a new GOP election strategy.
“There are people within the state party who are getting rid of any canvasser that isn’t pulling the line of, ‘We need to stop everything,’ ” she said.
“To find out they’re doing this across the state,” she said, “what other motive would it be?”
The Guys Who Picked Palmer’s Replacement
When it was time to name who would replace Palmer, the decision came down to David Dudenhoefer and two other Republican committee leaders in and around Wayne County.
Until recently, Dudenhoefer – known to friends and colleagues as “The Dude” – was the chair of Michigan’s 13th Congressional District Republican Committee. In 2020, he ran for Congress against Democrat Rashida Tlaib and lost with 18% of the vote. His head is shaved clean and his goatee is showing gray around the chin. When he’s not running for office in a suit and tie, he can be spotted around southeast Michigan in a T-shirt that reads: TYRANNY RESPONSE TEAM. He says he can’t prove it, but he believes the 2020 election was rigged.
Joining Dudenhoefer was a young activist named Shane Trejo, head of Michigan’s 11th Congressional District Republican Committee. The day after Palmer voted to certify the election, he sent her a text message. It read: “You should quit all your GOP posts and never show your face at an event ever again.” Since then, Trejo has pushed for suppressive changes to state voting laws, such as outlawing outdoor ballot drop boxes. He writes for the far-right blog site Big League Politics and used to co-host a podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty” with a member of the White nationalist group Identity Evropa. (“Blood and Soil” was a Nazi slogan during the Third Reich.)
Shane Trejo (left) and David Dudenhoefer Credit: YouTube screen shots
Dudenhoefer and Trejo were joined by William Rauwerdink, an investment manager and the kind of behind-the-scenes political player that most voters never hear about. He’s held positions on state and local GOP committees and was indicted in 2003 on 16 felony counts related to one of the largest financial fraud schemes in Michigan’s history. He pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, conspiracy and making false statements to investigators. He served three years and nine months in prison and was ordered to pay $285 million in restitution to lenders and shareholders.
Trejo didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview, and Rauwerdink declined to speak on the record. But Dudenhoefer wanted to talk, mostly about what he sees as a quick and steady slide into authoritarianism since Trump left office. He says mask mandates, vaccine requirements and COVID-19 lockdowns imposed by Michigan’s Democratic governor have eroded his freedom and damaged the livelihoods of his family and friends.
“They’ve seen a government shut their business down,” he said. “They’ve seen a government force them to put a cotton mask around their face. They’ve seen things that they never thought they would see government do.”
He said he and his wife spent the last several months in Florida so she could work as a nurse without being vaccinated against COVID-19.
He scoffed at the idea that Republicans are threatening democracy by refusing to accept the results of the election. Or that democracy is even what the country should strive for.
“Well, the type of democracy I’m interested in is where the individual’s liberties are protected always,” he said, “and under a straight democracy that would come into question.”
That being the case, he says majority rule is not what he’s looking for in a government.
“Let’s do this then, OK? So if we got 300 million Americans and the majority of them decided to make cannibalization legal, and now we can just start eating each other,” he said. “I mean, does that make it right?”
One of the people Dudenhoefer and his colleagues nominated to replace Monica Palmer was Robert Boyd, who said publicly last year that, had he been on the board of canvassers in 2020, he would not have certified Biden’s win. Asked why he thought the results were illegitimate, he said he didn’t know because he “wasn’t there.”
Boyd declined to speak to Reveal.
He wouldn’t say whether he would certify the elections in 2022 and 2024, which will both take place during his term on the board.
“Well, Rob is somebody that’s just level-headed,” Dudenhoefer said. “I mean, he puts a lot of thought into things. And I don’t know the man well, you know, just so you understand that.”
Who Can Stop the Election Deniers?
Dudenhoefer and his colleagues can’t just install the next canvasser directly, though.
Once party leaders decide on three nominees, they submit them to their county commission. The commissioners then vote on which one to appoint to the board. But that’s not what happened in Wayne County.
In September, the Wayne County Commission met to appoint Palmer’s replacement. Fourteen of the 15 commissioners are Democrats. The lone Republican commissioner, Terry Marecki, made a motion to vote on appointing Boyd from the three candidates Dudenhoefer and company had nominated. But when commission Chair Alisha Bell asked for a second … silence.
No one spoke.
The commission could have challenged Boyd’s nomination. It was a public meeting, a chance for voters to better understand who administers their elections, how they get that power and what their motives are.
“I wanted to get that moron in front of us and put him through his paces,” said Tim Killeen, the only Wayne County commissioner to respond to an interview request for this story. “Do you even know what the job of canvasser is? Do you understand magisterial duties? Do you plan to violate your oath of office? I wanted to smoke him out under oath.”
Yet he and his fellow Democrats quietly let that opportunity die on the floor. No one protested. No one raised a concern about the future of democracy. Just silence.
Killeen believes Democrats on the commission suspected Boyd would not be an honest broker of democracy. But he argued that vocalizing that would’ve done little good. By law, if the commission doesn’t make the appointment, the task falls to the county clerk. He said his colleagues “didn’t want to get their hands dirty” by voting on his nomination.
“I caved to political peer pressure,” he said. “I wanted to extract a few pounds of flesh. That was my desire, but it wasn’t my decision.”
In the end, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett made the appointment. Boyd is now a Wayne County canvasser and will help administer the next election.
Reveal producer Najib Aminy and former Reveal reporter Byard Duncan contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and Maryam Saleh and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
According to The Guardian newspaper, 1,093 people were killed by police in the United States in 2020. Meanwhile, the website Mapping Police Violence, another well-respected source for such information, puts that number slightly higher at 1,127, and Statista claims it is 1,021. These figures reflect a consensus that has existed since around 2015 that, in general, police in the United States kill about 1,000 people per year.
This extraordinary number far exceeds that of any other wealthy country in the world. For instance, police in the United States kill 10 times the number of people per capita as those in France, 30 times those in Germany, and 60 times more than those killed in the UK. Since 2000, it is estimated that tens of thousands of people, including at least 8,000 Black people, were killed by U.S. police and more are killed almost every day. In fact, since the beginning of 2021, there have been only six days in which the police did not shoot, asphyxiate, beat to death, or otherwise kill someone.
As shocking as the numbers are, activists and critics of police violence have long believed that the actual number of people killed by police in the United States was likely much higher. And now, a new report published by the Raza Database Project at California State University, Santa Barbara (CSUSB), is challenging the 1,000-per-year narrative.
The Raza Database Project is a product of the Latino Education and Advocacy Days Group at CSUSB. To complete the database, the group enrolled more than 50 volunteer researchers, journalists, and family members of people killed by police violence to research and investigate what they suspected was a significant undercount of Black and Latino people killed by the police.
The report, which was released on May 27, shows that there has in fact been a massive undercount of police killings, particularly among Black and Latino people. The greatest number of these new deaths come from people who died while already in police custody, including many who had been falsely listed as having died from “medical emergencies.” This research shows that the number of people killed by police in the United States is likely almost double what is normally reported by the media.
According to the report, the actual number of police killings for 2020 was 2,134 — well over a thousand more than what The Guardian reported for that same year. And that same discrepancy is seen in almost all the data every year since 2014. The project also shows that the number of Latino people killed by the police has also been significantly underreported, in large part because many police departments rely heavily on surnames to classify the race or ethnicity of people in their custody.
As a result of this, the actual number of Latino people killed by police is actually about 25 percent higher than normally reported, according to the project. Meanwhile, a closer inspection of the number of victims whose ethnicity was listed as “unknown” revealed that the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders killed by Police increased by an astonishing 600 percent, from 217 to more than 1,400 since just 2014.
These numbers show that police across the United States are killing significantly more people than previously thought, and many more people of color across a much wider spectrum of ethnicities. And these numbers held steady despite a mass uprising against police violence.
While the database does not account for income or class, it is quite obvious that the vast majority of people killed by the police are also poor and working people, victims of the system of capitalist exploitation as well as the police repression it relies upon. In that respect, these numbers show the need for continued resistance, like we saw almost exactly one year ago, when young people of all colors and ethnicities rose up to march, protest, fight, strike, and organize in response to the murder of George Floyd and against the racist police. It is clear from these figures that the police cannot be reformed; they must be abolished, sooner rather than later, but that struggle cannot succeed without a struggle to also overthrow the capitalist system the police protect.
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“Reading is freedom,” says Ron Jacobsen. Mr. Jacobsen was recently released on bond after 30 years, but during his decades of wrongful incarceration he said reading provided an escape from the four walls of his prison cell.
“I started working in the library and this opened a whole new world to me — one of education through reading,” he said. Reading became his obsession. He began reading a novel a day, while also reading about the law to try to fight against his wrongful conviction. If he hadn’t become such an avid reader and found “Actual Innocence” by Innocence Project Co-founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, Mr. Jacobsen said, “I would probably still be inside those prison walls.”
Now home with his sister Gladys, Mr. Jacobsen is still awaiting justice as the district attorney in his case intends to retry him. While he continues this fight, he is enjoying spending time with his sister and the freedom to read whatever he wants, whenever he wants. And he encourages others to pick up a good book, too.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start — or a last minute gift — these are our recommended reads for the year and some staff favorites.
New Releases
Several books written by wrongly convicted people and people working the justice reform space were published this year, including one co-authored by Yusef Salaam, a member of the Exonerated Five and the Innocence Project’s board of directors. These are some of our top picks from this year’s new releases.
1. “Punching the Air” by Ibi Zoboi and activist Yusef Salaam
(Image: Courtesy of Harper Collins)
This powerful young adult novel, written in verse, tells the story of a wrongly convicted boy. Ms. Zoboi told NPR, “I write books for children, and I wanted the world to remember that Yusef was a child when this happened to him and I was a child as well.” So she knew the main character in “Punching the Air” “had to be inspired by Yusef and this story had to instill a sense of hope in the reader.”
Innocence Project supporters will receive a free shipping discount when they purchase “Punching the Air” with this link.
2. “When Truth Is All You Have: A Memoir of Faith, Justice, and Freedom for the Wrongly Convicted” by Jim McCloskey and Philip Lerman
In this riveting book, Jim McCloskey, tells the story of how he founded Centurion — formerly Centurion Ministries — an organization committed to investigating incarcerated people’s claims of innocence. Available to purchase here.
3. “Justice for Sale: A Wrongful Conviction, a Broken System, and One Lawyer’s Fight for the Truth” by Jarrett Adams
Jarrett Adams was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit at age 17. He spent eight years wrongly incarcerated and began learning about the legal system. After his exoneration, he attended law school and is now a defense attorney, fighting for justice. In this memoir, expected to be released in April 2021, he shares his inspiring journey. Available to pre-order here.
In this non-fiction work, Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author, examines systemic inequality in the United States. Called an “instant American classic” by the New York Times, the book takes a hard look at the use of violence and oppression throughout history and how that has impacted America as it stands today. Available to purchase here.
5. “Black Futures” by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew
“Hands down, ‘Black Futures’ is the coffee table book of the year,” says Alicia Maule, Innocence Project’s director of digital engagement. The book, a 500-page multimedia anthology is a work of art that brought together hundreds of Black creators, activists, chefs and more to answer the question: ‘What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?’ “This is a book you’ll be proud to hold and showcase,” says Mx. Maule. Available to purchase here.
Must Reads
If you’re interested in justice reform and wrongful conviction, these are just a few more must-reads our staff recommends.
6. “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” by Gilbert King
This Pulitzer Prize winner is a “must-read” recommendation from our new executive director, Christina Swarn. “Devil in the Grove” tells the story of Thurgood Marshall’s defense of four innocent Black teenagers who were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the rape of a white woman in Florida in 1949. Available to purchase here.
7. “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Recommended by our Sarah Chu, our senior advisor on forensic science policy, “The Condemnation of Blackness,” sheds light on how crime statistics and research have been used to create the myth of Black criminality. “This book is important for understanding how deeply the architecture of our criminal legal system is tied to painting Black people as inferior or criminal and shows us how well meaning people were complicit in advancing those false ideas,” Ms. Chu says. Available to purchase here.
8. “Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair” by Danielle Sered
Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns recommends “Until We Reckon,” which she calls an “important and fascinating read.” The book considers how draconian sentences often fail to address the needs of survivors of violent crime, and takes a look at approaches to ending mass incarceration that will also increase public safety. Available to purchase here.
9. “Solitary” by Albert Woodfox
Publishing this memoir has been at the top of Albert Woodfox’s list of dreams for many years. But Innocence Project Chief Program Strategy Officer Carine Williams, who represented Mr. Woodfox for eight years, said he was adamant that he would not write while incarcerated.
“He believed the grief and grime of lockdown would corrupt his storytelling. He said, ‘I don’t know how but it’ll get into my words,’” she recalled. Mr. Woodfox was finally freed in 2016, and three years later, he published his memoir. “All I can now say is: It was worth the wait. If Louisiana tried to bury Albert — and they did — this book is a gorgeous bouquet of blooms from the man no one knew was a seed,” Ms. Williams said.
10. “Alizah’s Story: I Stutter” by Shoshanah K. Hobson
Written by Shoshanah Hobson, the Innocence Project’s very ownEvents and Special Projects Manager, “Alizah’s Story” is an inspiring children’s book about a third grader who starts to stutter and learns that what makes her different also makes her powerful. Available to purchase here.
11. “Never Silent” by Valencia Daniels
Poetry lovers must check out “Never Silent,” written by Innocence Project case management database administrator Valencia Craig. This stunning e-book of poetry touches on themes of race and inequality and is available to purchase here.
