Author: Linn Washington

Although Pennsylvania’s new Governor Tom Wolf, who last November unseated Republican incumbent Tom Corbett, cited more than 315 million solid reasons to back his surprise order putting an immediate moratorium on executions in Pennsylvania, law enforcement organizations in the state still castigated his action, calling it an outrageous assault on a criminal justice system that they contend works well.

When Wolf announced his imposition of a moratorium on executions due to a disturbing history of abuses and errors in death penalty prosecutions in the state with the fifth largest death row in the country, he cited a damning statistic overlooked in most news media accounts of his recent action.

Operating the death penalty in Pennsylvania over the course of the past thirty-plus-years has cost the state’s taxpayers between $315-to-$600-million, Wolf noted in a memorandum his office released that detailed why he halted executions.

The Pennsylvania “has received very little, if any, benefit from this massive expenditure,” Gov. Wolf said. An exact cost figure for death penalty prosecutions in Pennsylvania remains elusive because state legislators and top officials in its court system have to date resisted compiling specific such figures.

The enormous expenses associated with the death penalty, from trial through appeals to execution, is a reason why many other states that have halted executions. Death penalty prosecutions cost three times as much or more than non-capital murder prosecutions, repeated studies nationwide have documented.

Pennsylvania's at least temporarily stilled death chamber, and Gov. Tom Wolf, who issued a moratorium on all executions
 

Tinduf, Algeria — News about the historic change of relations between the United States and Cuba triggered cheers across the five Sahrawi refugee camps located near this Sahara Desert city located 1,100-miles southwest of Algeria’s capital of Algiers on the Mediterranean Sea.

That news elevated hopes among many Sahrawi that the major changes in relations between the U.S. and its longtime, bitter enemy Cuba would lead to the U.S. pushing for changes with its longtime ally – Morocco.

Morocco is the country that has illegally occupied the Western Sahara, the ancestral homeland of the Sahrawi, since a 1975 invasion. Morocco controls 80+ percent of the Western Sahara, including its mineral rich inland region and coastal fisheries that generate billions of dollars in exports annually -– money that helps fund Morocco’s expensive occupation.

Since 1991, when Morocco and the Polisario Front (which represents the Sahrawi) ended a 16-year long war over Morocco’s invasion, America’s major ally in North Africa has repeatedly reneged on its agreement with the United Nations to hold a voter referendum in the Western Sahara where residents would decide their future through a democratic vote.

“We woke up very happy with the historical announcement of President Obama establishing new relations with Cuba. We hope that Mr. Obama will take another historic position and enforce international law on the Western Sahara. We are tired of waiting,” Adda Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim is the governor of Smara, the largest of the five Sahrawi refugee camps surrounding Tindof. Over 160,000 Sahrawi live in those camps, many ever since they fled Morocco’s 1975 invasion. Other camp residents were forced to flee over the years from Morocco’s brutal occupation of the Western Sahara. All camp residents live in bleak conditions on barren desert land where summer temperatures frequently hit 130 degrees.

Sahrawi refugee camp in Algeria, and Morocco's not-so-great wall fencing of the Polisario-controlled zone in Western Sahara
 

Last fall an apparently unbalanced survivalist steeped in anti-government paranoia murdered a Pennsylvania State Trooper and seriously wounded another Trooper during a sniper attack. Recently an apparently unbalanced man with a criminal past murdered two New York City policemen as they sat in their patrol car hours after he allegedly shot a former girl friend.

Authorities said Eric Frien, the man now charged with attacking the State Troopers, acted out of anti-government beliefs to “wake people up” because he wanted to make a “change in government.”

Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man who executed those two New York City policemen before he shot himself on a subway platform acted out of beliefs opposed to police brutality according to announcements from authorities based on Brinsley’s Internet postings.

Brinsley shot the officers as revenge for the police killings of Eric Garner in the Staten Island section of New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, authorities claimed, based on his internet messages. He reportedly rode a bus from Baltimore to NYC, authorities said. After shooting his former girl friend. In NYC, he then went to Brooklyn, where he randomly shot Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who were on a temporary assignment there in a squad car.

The murderous act of the unbalanced Eric Frien, who is white, and the murderous act of the unbalanced Brinsley, who is black, however, have triggered starkly different responses from law enforcement supporters.

Few of those law enforcement supporters publicly berated the entire anti-government movement during or after the 48-day search that ended in the capture of Frien -– a manhunt that cost Pennsylvania over $10-million.

Yet, shortly after those brutal murders by Brinsley, many supporters of law enforcement unleashed a barrage of caustic barbs at the anti-brutality movement and persons targeted by law enforcement supporters for backing anti-brutality protests. Law enforcement supporters have been incensed by the anti-brutality protests that have roiled cities across the country during the past few weeks.

Those law enforcement supporters that linked the lone act of Brinsley to all critics of police brutality significantly did not link the lone act of Frien to all critics who consider government to be the enemy. While anti-brutality protests have been predominately peaceful although sometimes raucous, anti-government activism includes vocal proponents whose adherents have a long history of violent and often murderous attacks police and prosecutors, and even on the public, terrorism actions that have killed dozens, including children.

Ismaaiyl Brinsley and Eric Frien, two crazed cop-killing self-styled vigilantes, two completely different responses from media and police defenders.
 

When discredited Missouri prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch recently defended his calculated manipulation of a grand jury which led jurors to free the policeman who fatally shot Michael Brown last summer, McColloch declared piously that eyewitness accounts must “always match physical evidence.”

McCulloch, however, did not apply that ‘always match’ standard in the case of Antonio Beaver, a St. Louis man wrongfully convicted by in 1997 of a violent carjacking case tried by McColloch.

That carjacking victim had told police her attacker wasyounger, shorter and weighed less than Beaver. McCulloch’s office secured a first-degree robbery conviction and 18-year sentence for Beaver despite those and other salient facts pointing to Beaver’s innocence. Fingerprints from the carjacked vehicle did not match Beaver’s. Further, Beaver had a full mustache unlike the assailant, whom that victim described as having had no facial hair. The victim also said her assailant had a cut on his arm from their struggle, yet Beaver had no such arm injury when he arrested one week after that carjacking.

McCulloch’s office initially fought against Beaver’s request to test the DNA evidence that later freed Beaver from prison in 2007, according to an account by the Innocence Project, the respected organization that won Beaver’s release. That Innocence Project account of Beaver’s 2007 release stated he was then at that point the sixth man in St. Louis County to be exonerated by DNA for a conviction based largely on eyewitness misidentification. Five of those six exonerations occurred between 2002 and 2007 that Innocence Project account noted.

Those wrongful convictions cited by the Innocence Project (plus other wrongful convictions in St. Louis County) occurred during the 28-year tenure of Robert P. McCulloch as head of that county prosecutors office. In all those wrongful convictions, prosecutors working under McColloch either sanctioned misconduct by authorities or fought against appeals where inmates challenged flawed evidence used in their respective convictions. Beaver spent ten years in prison. McCulloch became head prosecutor for St. Louis in 1991, six years before the wrongful conviction of Beaver.

Wrongful convictions coupled with other nearly daily abuses by police and prosecutors are what triggered the reactions nationwide to McCulloch’s clearing of Ferguson city policeman Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.

Michael Brown, his killer, Fergusson Police Officer Darren Wilson, and St. Louis County DA Robert T McCulloch, the man who orchestrated Wilson’s exoneration for the shooting
 

Nasheeba Adams was both ecstatic and sad as she stood outside of Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center courthouse recently hugging her son Tomayo McDuffy.

She was ecstatic because minutes earlier Philadelphia’s District Attorneys Office had withdrawn highly suspect charges against her nineteen-year-old son — charges that could have stuffed him in a prison cell for 80+ years. McDuffy, who wants to study engineering in college, experienced his eighteenth birthday while held in Philadelphia’s most violent adult pre-trial prison, as he was unable to post an onerous $500,000 bail for attempted murder and nine other charges.

Adams, while ecstatic that prosecutors withdrew as groundless all charges against her son, was also sad though, because the nearly two-year long battle to free her son forced her into bankruptcy and drove her family from their home thanks to lawyers fees and other expenses related to the effort to free McDuffy..

“I fought for his freedom and I got it! This taught me that you don’t ever give up,” Adams said at the courthouse. “From now on, every day will be Mother’s Day for me!”

Despite her joy, Adams carried a sinking feeling from the fact that Philadelphia police and prosecutors had repeatedly rejected strong evidence that the crime causing her son’s arrest never occurred –- evidence that was clear and compelling withing just weeks following McDuffy’s May 3, 2013 arrest.

The ordeal of Tomayo McDuffy is yet the latest example of the egregiously overzealous prosecutions that fuel mass incarceration across America. All too often prosecutors disregard their legal and ethical duty to ‘seek justice,’ and instead engage in relentless and unprincipled efforts to secure convictions irrespective of compelling evidence of innocence. Prosecutors recklessly ignore evidence of innocence because convictions –- not exonerations -– are the currency for promotions and other job performance perks.

Tamayo McDuffy and his mother Nasheeba Adams (l) and Philadelphia's not so new (and not so ethical) DA Seth Williams
 

Repeated lies and law-breaking forced the 1974 resignation of then U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, leading to Nixon’s subsequent, and continued inclusion on the list of the “Worst Presidents” in American history.

Despite Richard Nixon, a Republican, being widely denounced, legions of legislators nation-wide still maintain lockstep support for the debacle he unleashed in June 1971 known as the “War on Drugs,” a war that since 9-11 has increasingly come to resemble a real war, with military-clad SWAT teams raiding homes with assault rifles and grenades, arriving in military surplus armored vehicles, and ignoring such niceties as serving of warrants or reading of Miranda rights.

Legislators – Republican and Democrat – continue backing Nixon’s anti-drug onslaught, and especially its attacks against cannabis users, despite Nixon’s own lies and criminal behavior.

Nixon’s ‘War on Weed’ is a case study of malicious subversion of the democratic process, and comprises a compendium of legal and ethical violations that should spark outrage among even the most ardent Drug Warriors on Capitol Hill and beyond who persistently posture themselves as forceful proponents of the rule-of-law., and often of libertarian concern for personal freedom and privacy.

The recent overwhelming voter approval of a referendum in Washington, DC legalizing marijuana for adult use presents a critical test for the now Republican-controlled Congress.

Will Congress continue to support the flawed ‘War on Weed’ initiated by the reviled Nixon or will it support the majority of DC residents who approved the legalization measure?

Nixon and the cynical and wrong-headed Drug War he launched
 

Part II of II
 

The serious injustice endured by Pennsylvania prison inmate Lorenzo ‘Cat’ Johnson, detailed yesterday in Part I of this series, is the subject of a website and numerous other postings on the Internet. Those Internet postings detail gross misconduct by police and prosecutors that have kept Johnson imprisoned for a murder that evidence indicates he neither committed nor had anything to with.

Johnson served 16-years of a life sentence before a federal appeals court ordered his release in October 2011 after ruling insufficient evidence existed to maintain his conviction. Prosecutors never claimed Johnson was the killer only that he was present when the killing occurred.

However, a perverse appeal by Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office prosecutors forced Johnson’s return to prison in June 2012 –- following six-months of freedom.

Those websites supporting Johnson’s release, which contain documents and other evidence detailing Johnson’s wrongful conviction, are in danger of being wiped under terms of legislation recently approved by Pennsylvania’s Republican-dominated House and Senate.

That legislation, fast-tracked through the legislature in an election-timed attempt to boost the hugely unpopular Republican Gov. Corbett’s flagging re-election bid, allows victims of crime to go to court for an injunction against the conduct of convicts “which perpetuates the continuing effects of the crime on the victim.” This new law applies to all convicts: those currently incarcerated and even those who have completed their sentences.

This law gives prosecutors (state and country) the power to act on behalf of victims who simply claim they are suffering “mental anguish.”

In the case of Lorenzo Johnson, the state AG’s office whose misconduct perpetuates his unjust incarceration is empowered under this new law to silence the websites that detail the misconduct of AG office prosecutors.
Successful pressure by the Fraternal Order of Police to get Pennsylvania's Republican-led government to pass legislation gagging imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, threaten the First Amendment rights not just of all prisoners and ex-prisoners, but of all Americans
 

(Part I of II)
 

Obscured by a current scandal involving pornographic emails currently rocking the top reaches of Pennsylvania’s state government, a scandal that has cast a shadow over embattled Pennsylvania Governor and former state’s attorney general Tom Corbett and the state’s judiciary, including a state Supreme Court member, is another explosive scandal.

That hidden scandal involves the persecution of Lorenzo ‘Cat’ Johnson. a Pennsylvania inmate, by prosecutors from the state’s attorney general’s office -– the same office that has exposed the chain of pornographic emails dating from Corbett’s tenure as AG.

The Johnson had won a court-ordered release from a deeply flawed murder conviction after having wrongfully served 16-years of a life sentence. But he was nonetheless forced to return to prison due to actions by state’s current Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, a Democrat who succeeded Corbett in that office.

Gov. Corbett had headed the state AG’s office when that office handled initially handled Johnson’s prosecution in this badly tainted murder trial. Corbett later served as AG when that office vigorously opposed Johnson’s appeal of that his verdict and sentence..

This hidden scandal exposes a pattern of state government officials who blithely tolerated this and other outrageously unjust criminal convictions. This hidden scandal also exposes the penchant of prosecutors to fight to preserve convictions they know to have been tainted by official misconduct.

Too many false convictions in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the US involve documented misconduct by police and/or prosecutors –- misconduct often covered-up for decades by courts and prosecutors. This misconduct includes authorities improperly withholding evidence of innocence at trial –- a gross violation of constitutional fair trial rights as well as professional conduct standards. Withheld evidence is a core issue in the case of this particular inmate persecuted by the AG’s office.

The porn scandal, initiated by AG Kane’s office, and now rocking state government in Pennsylvania, involves emails containing sexually explicit images (often accompanied by raunchy commentary by email senders and recipients) exchanged over state-owned computers by then ranking members of the state’s Attorney Generals office as well as several state judges, including one member of the state’s Supreme Court.

Conservative Republican Gov. Corbett headed the AG’s office when ranking subordinates in that office engaged in enthusiastic exchanges of those pornographic emails. (No evidence released to date links Corbett himself to the pornographic emails.)

Two Pennsylvania Attorneys General, Tom Corbett and Kathleen Kane, have conspired to knowingly keep prisoners like Lorenzo Johnson (left), wrongfully convicted by AG’s office prosecutors, unjustly locked up and facing life sentences
 

Police carp about college students’ selection of a prison inmate for their commencement speaker. It must have something to do with Mumia Abu-Jamal…the man that cops across America love to hate.

Chuck Canterbury, National President of the Fraternal Order of Police, issued a statement on October 1 that blasted Goddard College for its failure to block the commencement speech scheduled for Sunday (10/5) by Abu-Jamal, an alum of the small liberal arts institution in Vermont.

Canterbury castigated the fact that the group of 23 Goddard students who chose Abu-Jamal to address their boutique commencement ceremony “will be addressed by a remorseless killer who murdered Philadelphia Police Officer Danny Faulkner.”

Abu-Jamal’s controversial 1982 conviction for killing Officer Faulkner has been upheld by state and federal courts. However, that conviction is widely condemned by entities as diverse as Amnesty International, the European Parliament and the NAACP as fraught with misconduct by Philadelphia police and prosecutors that crippled Abu-Jamal’s fair trial rights.

Abu-Jamal briefly attended Goddard in the early 1970s. He obtained a B.A. degree from that institution 1996 through correspondence courses taken while on death row awaiting execution for Faulkner’s murder.

Mumia Abu-Jamal serving life without parole, his alma mater Goddard College, and an image from an FOP website showing a police riot squad
 

Two acts of ugly terrorism occurred in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963.

One act was widely abhorred. The other act ignored.

Many across America know about the 9/15/63 Birmingham murders of four little girls slain in the bombing of a black Baptist church 18-days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his stirring “I Have A Dream” speech.

However, few know about the Birmingham murder of Johnny Robinson, a 16-year-old shot in the back by a policeman hours after that church bombing.

If the deaths of those four children inside that Birmingham church catalyzed the 1960s-era Civil Rights Movement contributing to the racial progress America now praises itself for achieving, the death of Johnny Robinson represents yet another instance of the regression across America on the issue of effectively addressing lawlessness by law enforcers – lawlessness that most often evades legal accountability.

Historically, America has a history of downplaying brutal behavior by police.

Police abuses – from fatal shootings through false arrests to the gratuitous use of foul or threatening language – are dismissed as isolated acts of a ‘few bad apples’ instead of as an endemic scourge historically impacting minorities and increasing impacting non-minorities. Top policy-makers and even much of the public embrace this dismissal dynamic.

Michael Brown, murdered by a Fergusson cop while surrendering, and two images of modern US policing at work