Category: Legal System

  • Judge Loretta Preska, an adviser to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York. 

    Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!” 

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  • In a setback to migrant rights advocates in the United States, a federal appeal court has allowed the forcible expulsion of apprehended undocumented migrant families to continue. The ruling was passed by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on Thursday, September 30. It was a last minute ruling which blocked a prior ruling by a federal judge against the expulsions before it went into effect.

    Thursday’s ruling was in response to the appeals filed by the administration of president Joe Biden against the order by district judge Emmet Sullivan of the US District Court for DC (District of Columbia) on September 16. The district judge’s order was stayed as a case against the current immigration policy is ongoing.

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  • The sentence, delivered by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in New York City, represents “an international outrage,” tweeted journalist Emma Vigeland following its announcement.

    Donziger’s sentence came a day after the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said it was “appalled” by the U.S. legal system’s treatment of the former environmental lawyer and demanded the U.S. government “remedy the situation of Mr. Steven Donziger without delay and bring it in conformity with the relevant international norms” by immediately releasing him.

    Donziger represented a group of farmers and Indigenous people in the Lago Agrio region of Ecuador in the 1990s in a lawsuit against Texaco—since acquired by Chevron—in which the company was accused of contaminating soil and water with its “deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing waste into the Amazon.”

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  • The world’s top human rights legal body just offered a crucial show of support for Steven Donziger, the attorney who won a landmark multibillion-dollar case against an oil giant over pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. The ruling came on the eve of his sentencing in a criminal trial.

    On Wednesday, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights ruled that Donziger’s home detention is illegal under international law and called on the U.S. to release him. Donziger will have spent an unprecedented 787 days on house arrest as of Friday in what is one of the most winding and wild court cases that spans multiple countries and involves Chevron and thousands of Indigenous people in the Amazon.

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  • Washington, DC – After months of fighting for justice in the police murder of Karon Hylton-Brown, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. announced the indictment of Terence Sutton for second-degree murder, one of the DC Police officers involved with this gross negligence of their duties and complete disregard for this young man’s life. He was also indicted with federal charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, along with his supervisor Andrew Zabavsky.

    We stand in solidarity and full support of Karon Hylton-Brown’s family as they continue their fight for justice and accountability for all. Since his death on October 23rd, 2020, organizations, volunteers and supporters of his family have pushed for an investigation into his death. Not only demanding MPD exercise their due diligence as required by law to investigate, but to hold the officers accountable for their behaviors that caused his death.

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  • Currently in Honduras, medical anthropologist Adrienne Pine is closely involved with the Espinal and Álvarez trial.

    Pine said today: “This Monday and Tuesday, former political prisoners Edwin Espinal and Raúl Álvarez will go on trial in Honduras on trumped-up charges related to their participation in protests during the 2017 Honduran electoral crisis.

    “Protests had erupted nationwide after the blatant theft of the November 2017 presidential elections by Juan Orlando Hernández, who had previously orchestrated an illegal takeover of the country’s Supreme Court in order to obtain permission to run for a consecutive second term, in violation of the Honduran constitution. State security forces shot into crowds.

    The post Activists Go On Trial For Protesting Power Grab In Honduras appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Human rights attorney Steven Donziger has now been under house arrest in his New York City apartment for two years. The reason for his detainment, as Lee Camp puts it in this clip from “Redacted Tonight,” is that Donziger made it his business to hold Chevron accountable for how the Big Oil megacorp “harmed, sickened and killed tens of thousands in Ecuador” and tried to avoid paying “billions of dollars” in restitutions.

    Donziger’s battle against American oil companies and on behalf of indigenous communities and farmers in Ecuador spans nearly three decades. He was part of an international legal team that represented indigenous groups in Northern Ecuador where, as he tells Camp, from the 1960s to the ’90s Texaco (now Chevron) deliberately “dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing toxic waste” into local waterways, costing thousands of people their health, livelihood—even their lives.

    The post Chevron Used The Legal System And FBI To Target Steven Donziger appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Michael admired courageous people who live their lives without contradictions.  John Brown was one such person. Brown and his band of 19 men captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia hoping to spark a slave uprising and arm themselves with the captured weapons. It didn’t work. Brown was surrounded, wounded, captured, tried for treason, and hanged.

    Michael admired Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who helped lead the 1917 Russian Revolution which overthrew capitalism.  Lenin had hoped that the revolution would spread to the rest of Europe and prevent a capitalist restoration.  We know what happened in 1991. 

    Michael admired Che Guevara. Che lead a division of rebel troops in Cuba 1959. They captured a military supply train in the famous battle of Santa Clara. The island was cut in half and the Americans supported puppet dictator Fulgencio Batista fled to the Dominican Republic.

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  • The unthinkable, unconscionable, immoral, racist, and illegal is occurring in Bethesda, Maryland located in Montgomery County. For those who thought the buying and selling of Black bodies was made illegal by the 13th amendment, Montgomery County, Maryland is challenging that notion. To paraphrase Frederick Douglas, the 21st century selling and buying of Black flesh in Montgomery County, Maryland should “disgrace a nation of savages.”

    For more than 350 years, Montgomery County has displayed a history of kidnapping, raping, and murdering of Africans. The County, in collusion with a private investor, has placed Black people back on the auction block and plans to sell over 500 Black remains along with a high-rise building to Charger Ventures.

    The post Descendants Sue County To Stop The Human Trafficking Of Black Bodies appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, released on Monday, contained some of the group’s strongest language yet affirming the link between human activity and global warming. Humans have “unequivocally” warmed the planet, the IPCC report said, making heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires more extreme in the process. While that might seem like a no-brainer to some, it’s a finding that could have big implications for lawsuits seeking to hold polluters accountable for disaster damages.

    “The IPCC report should be a sort of rallying call to lawyers,” said Rupert Stuart-Smith, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, “to ensure that they are making use of the most up-to-date developments in climate science.”

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  • On the show this week Chris Hedges talks to investigative journalist Nick Bryant about the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell.

    The British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center and denied bail, will be tried this fall on sex-trafficking charges for allegedly recruiting and grooming teenage girls to engage in sex acts with the late American financier Jeffrey Epstein. She is reputed to have procured teenage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004 and allegedly paid the girls hundreds of dollars in cash after each encounter with Epstein. Epstein died in a New York jail cell in August 2019 in what authorities ruled was a suicide, although a doctor hired by Epstein’s family to conduct an independent autopsy has disputed that conclusion.

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  • On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was removed from his post after he made public the widespread use of torture by the Uzbek government and the CIA.

    Murray has since become one of Britain’s most important human rights campaigners, a fierce advocate for Julian Assange and a supporter of Scottish independence. His coverage of the trial of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, who was acquitted of sexual assault charges, saw him charged with contempt of court and sentenced to eight months in prison. The very dubious sentence, which upends most legal norms, was delivered, his supporters argue, to prevent him from testifying as a witness in the Spanish criminal case against UC Global Director David Morales.

    The post On Contact: Judicial Lynching appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Organized by Assange Defense, John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s father and brother, will begin the #HomeRun4Julian tour in Miami on June 6 via a live-streamed event. The Shiptons are scheduled to make stops on both coasts and the Midwest before concluding the tour in the nation’s capital.

    Assange’s family members will meet with activists, press, and policymakers to raise awareness of the importance of protecting whistleblowers and journalists, and to advocate for the release of Julian Assange, whom the United Nations has declared “arbitrarily detained” since 2010. 

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  • A federal appeals court has upheld a $25 million verdict against the maker of Roundup, a weed killer that thousands of litigants blame for causing their cancers.

    The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal by Monsanto Co., the manufacturer of the herbicide, ruling 2-1 that $20 million in punitive damages, “while close to the outer limits,” was constitutional.

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  • Hale is a veteran of the US Air Force. During his military service from 2009 to 2013, he participated in the US drone program, working with both the National Security Agency and the Joint Special Operations Task Force at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. After leaving the Air Force, Hale became an outspoken opponent of the US targeted killings program, US foreign policy more generally, and a supporter of whistleblowers. He publicly spoke out at conferences, forums, and public panels. He was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary National Bird, a film about whistleblowers in the US drone program who suffered from moral injury and PTSD. Hale based his criticisms on his own participation in the drone program, which included helping to select targets based on faulty criteria and attacks on unarmed innocent civilians….

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  • Former UK diplomat-turned whistleblower Craig Murray was sentenced to eight  months in prison at the High Court in Edinburgh for contempt of court resulting from his coverage of the trial of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond.

    A three-judge panel determined on March 25, 2021—following a two-hour trial in January—that information published by Murray in a number of his blog posts was likely to lead indirectly to people being able to identify witnesses in Salmond’s sexual assault trial.

    This process, known as “jigsaw identification,” refers to the possibility that a person may piece together information from various sources to arrive at the identification of a protected witness.

    In doing so, the judge ruled that Murray violated a court order prohibiting the publication of information that could likely lead to the identification of the alleged victims in Salmond’s case.

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  • Emily Arnott from the group Palestine Action told The Electronic Intifada that she found the suggestion “absolutely ridiculous.”

    Arnott confirmed that members of London’s Metropolitan Police recently interviewed her in a Manchester police station. A Metropolitan Police officer “implied that what Palestine Action is doing could be considered [to be] terrorism and that we could be charged under terrorist offenses,” she said.

    The interviewing officer said the amount of damage allegedly caused by Palestine Action “could possibly push it into the remit of alleged terrorist offenses, but they would not be considered terrorist offenses at that time,” Arnott explained.

    Arnott has been charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage against property belonging to Israel’s Elbit Systems in the UK and its property manager Jones Lang LaSalle.

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  • It was April 1, and Jestin Dupree had driven more than 400 miles from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana to the state’s capital, Helena, to testify against legislation that could be used to jail environmental protesters. For years, his tribe had been protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, which was to cross the Missouri River, their main source of water. Their efforts seemed to be vindicated when the project was cancelled by President Joe Biden during his first day in office.

    Montana’s new legislation, however, would allow environmental protesters to be jailed for up to 18 months if they obstruct operations at oil and gas facilities — and up to 30 years if they damage equipment. It seemed to be a direct rebuke to the Indigenous activism that had helped stop Keystone XL.

    The post More States Enter The Race To Criminalize Protest appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • A federal judge ordered drone whistleblower Daniel Hale’s arrest, and United States authorities took him into custody.

    On April 23, Judge Liam O’Grady signed an order suggesting Hale violated the terms of his supervised release. An arrest warrant was issued, and on April 28, he was jailed. 

    Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan, a different judge than the one who has presided over his case, held a hearing on the alleged “pretrial release violation.” Hale maintained no violation had occurred, yet the court scheduled a bond revocation and detention hearing for May 4.

    The chain of events came after a “special condition” was added to Hale’s conditions of release—that he submit to “substance abuse testing and/or treatment as directed by pretrial services.”

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  • United Kingdom – Last month, six people stood trial in Southwark Crown Court, charged with causing criminal damage to Shell’s London headquarters on April 15, 2019. The trial received little coverage at the time: although all six pleaded not guilty, it appeared to be an open and shut case. That the building was damaged was not in doubt; nor was the identity of the perpetrators.

    But then, surprisingly, all six Extinction Rebellion activists were acquitted. This verdict deserves attention as it raises big questions about how far the law can protect companies that do not take real action to deal with the climate emergency.

    The defendants were instructed by Judge Gregory Perrins that they could enter as evidence only who they were, what they had done and a brief explanation why.

    The post Courts Can No Longer Protect Companies Over Climate Flak appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Philadelphia public broadcaster WHYY (4/24/21) was one of the few outlets to report on an April 24 rally seeking the release from prison of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The story included important information on Abu-Jamal, who is serving a life sentence for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

    It noted that the case has “drawn scrutiny” over claims of police, prosecutorial and judicial bias and misconduct. It cited new evidence released as part of the appeal process, including a note from a key prosecution witness asking the prosecuting attorney for money—the sort of evidence that Johanna Fernandez, a history professor and part of Abu-Jamal’s legal team, notes has in other instances led to a defendant either being set free or getting an immediate new trial.

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  • A federal judge has ordered police in Columbus, Ohio, to stop using force including tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets against nonviolent protesters, ruling that officers ran “amok” during last summer’s protests of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

    Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio described the actions of the Columbus police as “the sad tale of officers, clothed with the awesome power of the state, run amok.”

    He opened his 88-page opinion with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.”

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  • Chris Hedges discusses police abuse and torture with civil rights attorney Flint Taylor. Taylor’s new book is ‘The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago’. With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office, Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases exposing the corruption and cover-ups within the Chicago Police Department and throughout the city’s political machine, from the alderman to the mayor’s office. The book takes the reader from the 1969 murder of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark – and the historic 13-year trial that followed – to the pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the Chicago Police Department that used barbaric methods including electric shock and suffocation to elicit false confessions…

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  • The depth of public connection with George Floyd was clear on the day the verdict of his police killer was announced. The moment was awaited with trepidation and the guilty verdict was met with enthusiasm and in some cases outright joy. But at the same time that the world learned the perpetrator’s fate, a 16-year old named Ma’Khia Bryant was also killed by the police.

    Police in the United States kill more than 1,000 people every year, an average of three every day. Had young Ms. Bryant been killed on any other date, it is probable that no one outside of her immediate circle would know her name either.

    But demands for justice must be expanded beyond the latest police lynching that the media may choose to expose.

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  • Berlin – Germany must update its climate law by the end of next year to set out how it will bring carbon emissions down nearly to zero by 2050, its top court ruled on Thursday, siding with a young woman who argued rising sea levels would engulf her family farm.

    The court concluded that a law passed in 2019 had failed to make sufficient provision for cuts beyond 2030, casting a shadow over a signature achievement of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s final term in office.

    “The challenged provisions do violate the freedoms of the complainants, some of whom are still very young,” the court said in a statement. “The provisions irreversibly offload major emission reduction burdens onto periods after 2030.”

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  • Over thirty years ago, James Baldwin was the subject of a PBS documentary The Price of the Ticket (1989) in which he reflected on what he considered a lack of progress in combatting racism in America:

    “What is it that you wanted me to reconcile myself to. I was born here more than 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me that it’s going to take time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces and my nephew’s time. How much time do you want for your progress?”

    Sadly, his comment remains vital today. On April 21, 2021, a jury found Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. There has been much written regarding whether the verdict represents justice for Floyd…

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  • Washington, DC – The ACLU of the District of Columbia, the Law Office of Jeffrey Light, and the District of Columbia today filed court papers stating the District will pay $1.6 million to settle two demonstrators’ rights lawsuits—one brought by the ACLU-DC and the other by Jeffrey Light. The two lawsuits, filed on behalf of journalists, legal observers, and demonstrators who protested the inauguration of President Trump in January 2017, charged that former Metropolitan Police Department Police Chief Peter Newsham and more than two dozen MPD officers engaged in or supervised constitutional violations including mass arrests of demonstrators without probable cause, unlawful conditions of confinement for detainees, and/or use of excessive force.

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  • During the trial of Derek Chauvin, one key issue was a dispute over the cause of George Floyd’s death. While the prosecution was pointing out that Floyd had suffocated because of neck restraint by police, the defense suggested that there were additional factors that contributed to his death, including Floyd’s reported heart disease and drug abuse.

    Autopsy conclusions of in-custody deaths made by forensic pathologist Dr. David Fowler during his 17 year career as a chief medical examiner in Maryland, who testified in Chauvin’s trial, will be re-examined, the Baltimore Sun reported on Friday, citing state officials.

    The decision was made after Fowler, a former chief medical examiner in Maryland from 2002 to 2019, testified in court as a defense witness, stating that Chauvin’s neck compression was not a “substantial contributor” to Floyd’s death.

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  • California -On Tuesday, April 20, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter of the Central District of California issued a ruling that is likely to become a watershed moment in the United States’ response to homelessness.

    In March of last year, the LA Alliance for Human Rights and several individuals sued the City and County of Los Angeles, alleging that they had not only fundamentally failed to address the homeless emergency in Los Angeles but had in fact contributed to creating it over the course of several decades. The complaint they filed reads more like what we might imagine the authors of the “Seattle is Dying” video would have written about Los Angeles: public health hazards, accumulating trash, rising crime, blocked sidewalks, local government leaders unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge of dealing with it.

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  • Canada’s highest court has upended the federal government’s 65-year-old claim that an Indigenous nation from British Columbia’s Interior no longer exists.

    In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada said the Sinixt Nation, whose reservation is in Washington state, has constitutionally protected Indigenous rights to hunt in their ancestral territory north of the border. 

    The ruling means that if Indigenous groups outside of modern-day Canada can prove they descended from a pre-contact society in what is now Canada, they can claim Section 35(1) rights under the Constitution, which recognizes and affirms the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

    “Persons who are not Canadian citizens and who do not reside in Canada can exercise an Aboriginal right,” the decision said. 

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