Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Martin Luther King Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 – 1968) “Over 67 years after 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. was put to death by the state of South Carolina, he may soon be cleared of the crime [...]
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My friend sent me this Huffington Post article link on facebook. “Curious what you think of this,” she writes. The article’s teaser is For the uninitiated, the dance move you’re about to see is called “daggering” (watch this Major Lazer video for a full introduction) and although we’re pretty sure “daggering” may violate some [...]
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We know the statistics because they are so very proud of them: Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, has overseen more than 230 executions, the most of any governor in modern history (his predecessor, George W. Bush, still holds the record for the executions-per-year with more than 30). For the right wing of the Republican [...]
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The state-sponsored murder of Troy Davis captured the world’s attention as a perfect storm of what’s wrong with the American (in)justice system. No murder weapon, no DNA and no credible witnesses led the average person to have far “too much doubt” about Davis’ guilt. The same couldn’t be said, however, for any of the [...]
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This post consists of twenty tweets (in chronological order) from my Twitter account late last night concerning Troy Davis. For those who may not be aware, Davis is due to die by lethal injection at 7pm EST. The evidence against him is controversial and, for many, not at all compelling, especially given the track record in [...]
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Troy Davis’ last resources to avoid the consummation of the death penalty he was sentenced to in 1991 for killing an off-duty police officer were consumed when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a last-minute plea. A convicted killer according to Georgia’s judicial system, Davis lived his last hours under the mounting shadow of doubt of [...]
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The legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites. Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the [...]
Continue reading …By Renay Patterson-Scott, Public Policy Journalist Student, The Ohio State University, While President Barack Obama is busy signing bills into law that will improve life overall for Americans, his administration is completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting African-Americans, the failed “war on drugs” — a war that has morphed into a War [...]
Continue reading …By Dick Price, originally published on LA Progressive, “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in [...]
Continue reading …When the head of the California division of the NAACP spoke out in support of that state’s Proposition 19 this summer, there seemed to be an equal amount of immediate praise and backlash. Alice Huffman labeled the drug war as a “civil rights issue” getting attention both on a state and national level and once [...]
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