Infographic by Niall McCarthy for Forbes. Click to view on Forbes website.
[Highlights from the week’s juvenile justice and justice related articles, videos and more that are worth your time.]
Az ISIS emberei bírósági tárgyalás után végeztek Moszulban Szamira Szalih el-Nuaimivel:
Az ISIS emberei bírósági tárgyalás után végeztek Moszulban Szamira Szalih el-Nuaimivel: a saját szabályaik szerint ítélkező testület hitehagyásban találta bűnösnek a fiatal nőt. A kivégzés nyilvános volt, a tárgyalás előtt öt napig kínozták az ismert emberi jogi aktivistát – közölte az iraki ENSZ-mi…
WATCH: NYPD Officers Slam Pregnant Woman on Street—Belly First
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
WATCH: NYPD Officers Slam Pregnant Woman on Street—Belly First
September 24, 2014 |
Early Saturday morning, the NYPD’s 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn was attempting to arrest Sandra Amezquita’s 17-year-old son, Jhohan Lemos. Amezquita, who is five months pregnant, intervened in the police altercation because she believed they were unfairly targeting her son and using excessive force. Police quickly manhandled her, eventually shoving her to the ground, belly first.
The incident was captured on video with a cell phone. You can see officers take down Amezquita and then throw another woman, who was rushing over to her, to the ground.
Dennis Flores, a member of a local police watch group El Grito de Sunset Park, told [3] ABC News:
“What we see is a woman who’s trying to protect her son, who is being stopped and frisked by police, and she became a victim. Slammed onto the floor … Her belly is now with black and blue bruises. She’s bleeding and she’s having complications.”
Amezquita’s lawyer Sanford Rubenstein told [4] the Associated Press that there’s “no way to tell” if the baby is harmed. He added that “It’s clear to me when an incident like this occurs you understand why police community relations are at an all-time low.”
The incident comes less than a week after the same NYPD Precinct was caught [5] on video kicking a street vendor on the ground. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton eventually admitted [6] that the use of force was “totally unprovoked.”
And in terms of using force against pregnant women, this is surely not an NYPD first. Just last month, officers were caught [7] putting a woman who was seven months pregnant in a chokehold. This is despite the fact that chokeholds have been banned [7] in the NYPD for 20 years.
Police said Lemos was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, resisting arrest, and harassment. Amezquita was charged with disorderly conduct. Her husband was charged with assaulting an officer while trying to intervene.
A video of taken of the family a day after the incident shows [8] scrapes on Amezquita’s belly and bruises on Lemos’ face. Chief Police Spokesman Steve Davis told [4] the Associated Press that internal affairs will be investigating the incident.
See more stories tagged with:
California Women Prisonerz – SHU Deathz and Suicidez – Support Investigation
California Women Prisonerz – SHU Deathz and Suicidez – Support Investigation
Please contact the politicians and CDCR representatives listed at the end of this press release to
FAMILIES AND ADVOCATES CALL FOR INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION INTO MULTIPLE 2014 DEATHS AND SUICIDES AT CALIFORNIA INSTITUTION FOR WOMEN (CIW)
Being in physical distress locked in a cell turns into a truly terrifying experience when you can hear the cops banter with each other about you being a “crybaby”…and “they’ll get to it” when they have finished cutting it up with each other. It’s especially terrifying when you are experiencing symptoms you don’t understand & you have witnessed others calling for help only to learn that person didn’t survive.
-Sonja Marcus, formerly incarcerated woman, survived 18 years in prison
On July 30, 2014 a woman committed suicide in the Solitary Housing Unit (SHU) of the California Institution for Women (CIW), in Corona. According to information gathered by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), there have been seven preventable deaths at CIW so far in 2014 and three attempted suicides since July alone. None of these deaths have been made public by CIW or CDCR although they signify a state of crisis in the prison.
Prison officials have failed to inform bereaved family members of these deaths in a timely and respectful manner. Margie Kobashigawa, the mother of 30-year-old Alicia Thompson, who died of an alleged suicide on February 24, 2014 in the SHU, was ignored by prison staff. “Nobody from the prison would call me back, nobody would talk to me. I was planning to pick up my daughter’s body and suddenly CIW was trying to cremate her again, and quickly. To me it’s like they’re trying to hide everything,” said Margie. As she prepared her daughter for burial, she found no signs of hanging trauma to her body and has reason to believe her daughter died from some other type of violent force. On March 13, 2014 Shadae Schmidt, a 32-year-old African American woman, died in the CIW SHU. Shadae had a stroke in February 2014 and was prematurely returned to the SHU. She was given medication that made her sick but her requests for a change in prescription fell on deaf ears; and then she died.
CCWP received information regarding these two deaths from friends and family members, but other deaths, suicides and attempted suicides remain shrouded in mystery. The majority of people in the SHU have some type of mental health problem, which is exacerbated by solitary confinement. CCWP continues to hear reports that there is no medical staff to monitor people’s vital signs and mental states when physical and mental health crises occur. People scream for help and get no response at all.
Since the closure of Valley State Women’s Prison in January 2013, overcrowding at CIW has skyrocketed. Medical care has significantly deteriorated and there has been a dramatic increase in the population of the SHU and other disciplinary segregation units. Overcrowding has aggravated mental health issues causing an increase in the number of mentally disabled people in the SHU even though this is the worst place to put them.
In August 2014, in response to a court order, the CDCR released revised policies to reduce the number of people with mental health diagnoses in isolation. Policy changes are only useful if they are implemented. It is crucial for the CDCR to transfer all people with mental health issues out of the CIW SHU as soon as possible in accordance with the court order.
Despite decades of lawsuits to remedy prison health care and court orders to reduce prison overcrowding, the inhuman conditions inside CA women’s prisons continue and have led to these tragic, violent and untimely deaths. In order to reverse the crisis atCIW,CCWP calls for the following immediate actions:
- Immediate transfer of all prisoners with mental health issues from the SHU and implementation of care programs.
- Increased healthcare staffing and care for people in the SHU.
- An independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding all deaths at CIW in 2014.
- Reduction of overcrowding through the implementation of existing release programs rather than transfers to other equally problematic prisons and jails.
For more information contact: California Coalition for Women Prisoners at (415) 255-7035 ext. 314 or info@womenprisoners.org
PLEASE CALL, EMAIL, WRITE or FAX these people with the demands above:
Sara Malone, Chief Ombudsman
Office of the Ombudsman
1515 S. Street, Room 124 S.
Sacramento, CA 95811
Tel: (916) 327-8467 Fax: (916) 324-8263
sara.malone@cdcr.ca.gov
Kimberly Hughes, Warden CIW
Tel: (909) 597-1771
Senator Hannah Beth-Jackson
District 19, Senate Budget Committee
Vice-Chair of Women’s Caucus
(916) 651-4019
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner
District 15, Women’s Caucus
(916) 319-2015
Assemblymember.Skinner@outreach.assembly.ca.gov
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano
District 17
(916) 319-2017
Assemblymember.Ammiano@outreach.assembly.ca.gov
Senator Mark Leno
Senator Loni Hancock
Senator Holly Mitchell
District 26, Women’s Caucus
Public Safety Committee (916) 651-4015
http://sd26.senate.ca.gov/e-mail-holly
Senator Jim Beall
District 15, Senate Budget Committee
(916) 651-4026
Jay Virbel, Associate Director of Female Offender Programs & Services
(916) 322-1627
PO Box 942883
Sacramento, CA 95811
Jeffrey Beard, CDCR Secretary
(916) 323-6001
PO Box 942883
Sacramento, CA 95811
Sex slavers arrested in Orlando for trafficking women from prison, MBI says
Sex slavers arrested in Orlando for trafficking women from prison, MBI says
A Mother Landed in Jail for Trying to Help Her Daughter, and She Might Not be the Last
A Mother Landed in Jail for Trying to Help Her Daughter, and She Might Not be the Last
A Mother Landed in Jail for Trying to Help Her Daughter, and She Might Not be the Last
A single mother in Pennsylvania was recently sentenced to up to a year and a half in prison for helping her 16-year-old daughter end a pregnancy. (Photo: Jenn Vargas)
Earlier this month, a judge sentenced a Pennsylvania mother to up to a year and a half in prison for helping her 16-year-old daughter end a pregnancy by purchasing abortion medication online. The single mother, who has a low-paying job, ordered the medication online because there was no health center that provides abortions nearby, and she lacked health insurance to pay for an abortion at a hospital. She was sentenced after pleading guilty to performing an illegal abortion.
My heart goes out to this mother, who was doing the best she could to do right by her daughter. But what really keeps me up at night is the knowledge that because of the barrage of restrictions politicians are passing, more and more families are facing the same dilemma.
To be sure, I wish this mother and her daughter did not have to resort to ending her pregnancy without the help of medical professionals. I have no doubt that they wished there was another way too. But faced with the prospect of continuing the pregnancy and inducing the abortion on their own, the family did what thousands and thousands of women did before Roe. They took matters into their own hands. And they won’t be the last family to do so.
It’s no secret why this is happening. Across the country, extreme politicians have passed a rash of laws that single out doctors and health centers that provide abortions in a transparent effort to prevent a woman from getting a safe and legal abortion.
In Texas, these types of laws threaten to leave only seven clinics for the more than 5.5 million women of reproductive age in the state. Similar laws threaten to shutter the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, all but two of the clinics in Alabama, and force women in Wisconsin to wait up to 10 weeks to get an abortion. Louisiana and Oklahoma recently passed similar laws and we can expect to see even more states attempt to pass these laws in the next legislative session.
Pennsylvania, where the family lives, has a law that requires a woman seeking an abortion to make an extra, medically unnecessary trip to the clinic before she can get an abortion. Just last week in Missouri, state legislators overrode a governor’s veto to institute a 3-day forced delay for abortion, even though Missouri voters clearly said they don’t want this law. The mandatory delay applies no matter how long a woman has considered her decision before coming to the health center. Now, a woman will have to wait 72 hours for an abortion, after talking to a healthcare professional, no matter how firm she is in her decision.
Leading medical groups, like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have opposed these laws. So why are politicians still passing them? To shame women and abortion providers and end access to safe, legal abortion.
Sadly this means this mother likely won’t be last mother to face a difficult dilemma when she’s only trying to help her daughter.
© 2014 ACLU
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Gruesome Buddies: ISIS Beheadings and the American Death Penalty
Gruesome Buddies: ISIS Beheadings and the American Death Penalty.
“What is certain is that we, too, execute innocent people. We just do it after spending a lot more money to cover our asses.” (Photo: Truthout.org)
We are going to war again in Iraq and expanding the bombing to Syria, the seventh country in the Middle East to be graced with American bombings since 2001 (not including Gaza-Palestine, where American bombs are piloted by Israeli largesse). We’re doing this why? Because two Americans and a Brit were beheaded and American media whipped public opinion into a frenzy over it. The same media shrugged when 200,000 Syrians were butchered over the past three years, most of them by the same guy to whom the U.S. Air Force is about to give aid and comfort. The same media chest-thumped and encouraged the butchery of 2,000 Palestinians in July, about a quarter…
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Guardian – Lisa Coleman executed by lethal injection after final appeal rejected
R.I.P.
Texas executes Lisa Coleman
Fri Sep 19, 2014 12:28
78.35.99.80
NC Innocence Inquiry Commission a lifesaver for innocent, death row inmates
NC Innocence Inquiry Commission a lifesaver for innocent, death row inmates
By Lyle C. May
…..Christine Mumma, executive director of the N.C. Center for Actual Innocence, mentioned some lessons learned from the exoneration of Henry McCollum. What the public needs to be aware of is that the horrible circumstances of injustice in the Buie case are a culture in North Carolina death penalty cases, not some isolated event. Maybe, if the Innocence Commission were to work in conjunction with appellate attorneys to defend their clients, 31-year prison terms by innocent men can be avoided. At the very least the commission can demonstrate what it means to be true representatives of justice.
Lyle C. May is a death row inmate at Central Prison in Raleigh. He received two death sentences for the 1997 double murder in Asheville of Valerie Sue Riddle and her son, Kelly Mark Laird Jr. ….
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Death Row News to fight the Death Penalty – TX: Lisa Ann Coleman Executed
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Inmates Aren’t the Only Victims of the Prison-Industrial Complex
Inmates Aren’t the Only Victims of the Prison-Industrial Complex
The Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas (Courtesy of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice)
The worst part of Dave’s job as a death-row guard happened early morning on the day of an execution. After taking the inmate for his final shower and instructing him to change his clothes for his last visit with his family, Dave would bring him back to his cell. Officers would then escort him in handcuffs to a prison van, which would take him from the Polunsky Unit in the east Texas town of Livingston to the death chamber at another prison in Huntsville, forty miles away. …
http://www.thenation.com/article/181607/inmates-arent-only-victims-prison-industrial-complex#
For These Incarcerated Women, Print Sure As Hell Ain’t Dead
For These Incarcerated Women, Print Sure As Hell Ain’t Dead
Cover of Issue 31 by Jenni Gann
In the early 2000s, a group of women at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon were reading over prison zines created by men. They identified with some topics—racist treatment, guard brutality, human rights violations—but began to realize that the zines failed to address specific issues that women faced on the inside, things like sexual harassment and assault by prison employees, being pregnant in prison, and losing custody of their children on the outside. Thus, Tenacious: A Zine of Art & Writing by Women in Prison was born.
Artwork by Nicky Riley, a trans woman incarcerated in a men’s prison in Texas
“Being inside prison, there’s no way to produce your own zines. There’s no access to, say, a copying machine, or the ability to write mail freely to [people] in other prisons to solicit work, or the ability to mail off lots of copies of zines,” says Tenacious editor Victoria Law, a freelance journalist and editor who writes about prison culture for publications like The Nation and Truthout. “So these women approached me and said, ‘We can’t do this because we’re in prison, so would you be willing to be that outside person who collects submissions, prints them up, puts them together, and then sends them back out into the world?’”
Prison Is Pain by Sylvia Sierra, who was released shortly after the publication of this artwork
Law has been doing just that since the inaugural issue in 2002—and the zine just sent off the 32nd issue. While in the early days, Tenacious was almost entirely written by Oregon State inmates, the zine has expanded its scope significantly since. “This issue has pieces by women incarcerated in California, Oklahoma, Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois,” says Law. “One woman recounts her experience being pregnant in Mississippi and the challenges to having any sort of healthy pregnancy while incarcerated. [Problems] range from inadequate nutrition to not being able to see the doctor regularly—her last pre-natal visit before she was due to give birth was cancelled. When her water started leaking, the prison medical staff decided she wasn’t ready to go to the hospital, and they kept her a lot longer than they should have. These are the challenges people who are pregnant inside face.”
Other articles in the current issue cover “dispelling myths about murderers,” living with Celiac disease in prison, and even a piece written by a woman on death row.
Artwork by Tabitha Swords
The wider distribution of Tenacious has allowed it to become a useful forum for women in prison. Law recalls publishing an article by a woman from New Jersey about crackdowns on personal property and ramped-up searches in her prison around election time, all so that prison staff could boast high confiscation numbers to politicians. “And a woman in Colorado read that and wrote a piece in response to that saying, ‘It’s not just New Jersey,’” says Law. “So in a way Tenacious connects women with each other, even if they can’t meet face-to-face, to show each other that the experiences aren’t unique, that the problems are more systemic.”
Drawing of Dessie Woods by Rachel Galindo. Dessie Woods was a Black woman incarcerated during the 1970s for defending herself against sexual assault by a white man. Her case drew national and international attention, leading to greater support both during her trial and imprisonment.
Tenacious has been an important tool for inmates in more tangible ways, too. In one particular issue, a woman wrote about a pattern of assault at Oregon State. That issue then made it into the hands of an outside group who began a letter writing campaign, which eventually led to an investigation. But because of the sensitive nature of complaints and accusations against prison administration, Law admits that Tenacious has also had a run-in or two with officials—one article claimed that a prison officer had been continuously assaulting a prisoner, which led to the banning of that specific issue by that prison. In fact, the recent cover of issue 31 contained imagery that might have gotten some prisoners in trouble. “The image that might cause a problem for people in California is of a dragon,” says Law. “California has a whole bunch of images that they consider gang-related. Until recently, having anything with an image of a dragon could be used as proof that you are part of a prison gang and could land you in indefinite solitary confinement. That was something that I thankfully thought of before sending out copies of the publication.”
Tenacious is free to women in prison and jails, while incarcerated men seeking the zine are asked to send two stamps to cover postage costs, and $3 is requested of those on the outside.
…
http://magazine.good.is/articles/tenacious-zine-women-in-prison
Pennsylvania nurse sentenced to prison for giving teen daughter abortion pills she bought online
Pennsylvania nurse sentenced to prison for giving teen daughter abortion pills she bought online
Jennifer Whalen was imprisoned for up to 18 months for giving her 16-year-old daughter abortion pills she bought online, which resulted in a trip to the hospital for cramps and bleeding from the girl’s miscarriage.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Sunday, September 7, 2014, 10:10 PM
Updated: Sunday, September 7, 2014, 10:10 PM
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