#atif rafay

[son-of-traken]

Interview: Jason Flom, on the Injustice of the Rafay Murder Convictions – Part 1 (with Amanda Knox)

The Rafay Murders: An Interview with Jason Flom (Part One) Back in Capanne prison, I was lucky to receive daily correspondence from family,

Interview: Jason Flom, on the Injustice of the Rafay Murder Convictions – Part 2 (with Amanda Knox)

The Rafay Murders: An Interview with Jason Flom (Part Two) By Amanda Knox with Christopher Robinson This is Part Two of The Rafay Murders: A

[confide--nemini]

Rafay/Burns Case

I just watched Confession Tapes on Netflix and it fucking BLEW MY MIND. Like, I knew about false confessions and shady police tactics before this...but woah. The first story arc is fucking heartbreaking. It’s hard to watch but, damn does it hit hard. 

I’ve also seen a lot of other “falsely accused” documentaries but, BOY DID THIS ONE BLOW ME OUT OF THE WATER. Like, basically there is no evidence against these people who got life in prison. 

[mishapslikesinkingships]

Has anyone watche The Confession Tapes on Netflix?

Lemme tell y'all I'm on ep 2 and I'm fuckin pissed about this shit.

[timesweetenedhoney]

The Confession Tapes: Atif Rafay & Sebastian Burns (Episodes 1 & 2: True East)

There’s a new documentary series now on Netflix called The Confession Tapes.

It appears to be mainly about false confessions and interrogation tactics, something I find to be very interesting and important. Similar types of investigation have been started by and helpful to groups like The Innocence Project which help inmates who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. But the significance of this kind of inquiry and learning goes beyond that: even criminals who committed their crimes deserve to have a proper trial. We want investigations to be done in the best manner possible; we want to discover the truth. In recent years, some law enforcement tactics have been shown to work against finding the truth. Breakthroughs in DNA have pushed curious minds to inquire into how these erroneous convictions came about, even where there was an alleged confession.

I’ve watched the first two episodes of this new show. They are about Atif Rafay and friend Sebastian Burns who found Atif’s family murdered and who were subsequently convicted of the murders. Of course, it’s important to take all documentaries with a grain of salt. It’s easy to edit interviews, and many documentaries come with a bias or goal. Even so, with how it is presented, some of the interesting points came up: Just because young Atif missed the first funeral does not make him guilty. Police thought it was ridiculous Atif Rafay would have missed the first funeral following the murders. Others with him at the time explained that no one told Atif when the funeral was and that he was incredibly upset when he found out that he had missed it. An investigator essentially explained that a common Islamic tradition is burial within three days and therefore concluded Atif would have known that. But (lucky) young people don’t have to go to many funerals, let alone plan them; it’s completely reasonable for him to not have known that. And even if he did, it’s not an indicator of guilt. Having an alibi is not proof of crafting an alibi to avoid guilt. One investigator interviewed for the series explained all the places Atif and Sebastian had been that night: to a restaurant, to the movies, to a diner, to a club, AND that these places had workers who remembered the boys being there. Instead of seeing this as an alibi, it was seen as proof of Atif and Sebastian creating an alibi to cover up for the murders. Where the boys got a salad and wine it was seen as a way to be remembered for their Canadian IDs, where they left a generous tip it was another memorable moment instead of kindness, where they went to a club 20 minutes before it closed it was because they knew they would be turned away and thus remembered. But investigators should be uncovering facts first and later piecing them together, not looking for guilt in each fact they find.

Just because the actions don’t fit within your opinion or worldview, doesn’t mean they can’t fit within the opinions or worldviews of others. When there was evidence presented that there may have been a sort of terrorist or hate attack against the family based on their religious beliefs, the investigator says it’s “inconceivable” that someone would get murdered over that. But in law enforcement, they see murders over nothing; they see murders over a missing $5 bill. They want to believe that a young man is intimately familiar with burial practices, but not that someone could be so set in their faith they see variations on their faith as an abomination? When we’ve had years of wars based on those very things? Who you know is not an indicator of guilt.

An investigator asks “if you were a suspect in a murder case [would you even associate with criminals.” While, yeah, the people you spend time with certainly have the opportunity to shape you, they don’t fully make you. Knowing criminals, heck even committing one crime does not mean you committed another. Guilt by association is a dangerous road to go down. Just wait til you get to the interview tactics… and the bombshells that happen during trial. Are Atif and Sebastian innocent? I don’t know. The show certainly presents compelling evidence pointing in that direction which I’m not posting here; you watch it and come to your own conclusions. The show so far has been fascinating and worthwhile. But could this tragedy have been investigated better? I believe so.

This case was pretty interesting, so I hope to have time to look into it some more. Let me know what you think of the show!

[son-of-traken]

Rafay and Burns now have 3 innocence projects on their side | CBC News

In 2004, Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns were convicted for the murders of Rafay's parents and sister in 1994. Three innocence organizations

[resplendentgoldenwings]

How can a confession where someone’s life is threatened ever possibly be viewed as genuine?

[niggerdoodle]

If I was Atif Rafay I'd wanna fucking kill Sebastian Burns. Like this white boy roped you into his mess and fucked up your whole life.

[penamerican]

PEN Prison Writing: Atif Rafay, “Bleak Housing & Black Americans”

Atif Rafay was awarded First Place in essay in the 2012 Prison Writing Contest.

If unusual practices call for unusual explanations, then what kind of explanations will do for American criminal justice practices? The United States seems not merely to tolerate but actually to revel in inflicting barbaric human degradation upon prisoners—not just for months or years, but for decades and lifetimes—in a manner, and to an extent, unrivaled anywhere else in the Western world; and for the most part, Americans seem not to care about the cruelty. A great many, indeed, endorse it. Faced with such egregious exceptionalism, it should be no surprise that thoughtful observers have been hard pressed to find a satisfactory account of the insensibility of most Americans to the continuing irrational enormity. It may well be that the correct explanations are legion.

Michelle Alexander would certainly have had no doubts about what was going on. In her first book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the young scholar and civil rights attorney argues that criminality has become the means for legitimating and perpetuating racial control without explicitly invoking race. American criminal justice now operates against black Americans in a way analogous to the notorious Jim Crow laws of the segregated South. “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind” (Alexander 2). Bill Moyer featured her on his PBS program and her book has made quite a splash, going through several printings and garnering attention well beyond the ordinary academic audience. For her, the emergence of America’s systematic mass incarceration makes sense only when understood as a new form of racial control following the demise of segregation and the achievement of nominal legal equality for blacks in the 1960s. Colorblindness is a veneer that conceals a systematic functional racism that is mediated by a criminal justice system which operates to exclude millions of black Americans from society by permanently relegating them to the condition of pariah outcasts. America’s uniquely punitive system is best understood as a consequence of its unique white supremacist history of slavery and racial violence: it is the living legacy of a caste-based domination that has, by becoming ostensibly colorblind, become more rather than less deadly for being insidious.

It is, indeed, a powerful thesis. It may well be the most important explanation of the change in attitudes towards crime and rehabilitation of a great many Americans in the late 1970s, during the radical transformation of the criminal justice system that created the new system of mass incarceration. One need only think of the media’s description of the prisoner rioters at Attica as being “led by blacks,” the symbolism suggested by the name “Black Panther,” or the image of crime in New York (as seen in motion pictures from Taxi Driver toDeath Wish) in the late 1970s, to understand the power that the fear of blacks has exerted on many. Perhaps the most powerful component of the book is Alexander’s careful and convincing description of the myriad means by which ex-prisoners are permanently excluded from society, ordinary life-hopes, and mere human dignity, and consigned for the rest of their lives to a disfigured, menial, and subservient existence on the margins. But essential though Alexander’s explanation is to any full historical explanation of the present system, it does not work to explain all the changes in thinking about crime that occurred in the period, or to explain what sustains criminal justice policies in the present. The popular election of judges and prosecutors, the complete acceptance of incapacitation and retribution as the principal objectives of penal policy, populist resentment against intellectuals, and the preference for “fair” sentencing achieved by mechanical rules based on predetermined objective criteria rather than any individualized, subjective, case-by-case consideration—all these factors sustain the dominant criminal justice mentality with their own independent logics. The harshness of the penalties enacted recently to crack down on the meth trade, which is almost as predominantly white as crack is black, all but proves that race cannot any longer be regarded as the determinative factor.

The ugliness of American practices is deeper and broader than race can fully explain. Consequently, Alexander’s analysis has difficulties as an effective argument for reform. Something Mencken observed in the Roaring Twenties apropos the wallpaper and architecture of Westmore’s industrial heartland seems as relevant to the present impasse as race is:

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws and not as a mere act of God. What, precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere? Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem. (Mencken 392)

Mencken’s reflections in this concluding paragraph to his essay “The Libido for the Ugly” were incited by hideous houses; but they apply just as well, if not better, to the design of the contemporary American prison and jail system in which more than two million people live. What is wrong with Americans? If Mencken resorts, in characteristically inflammatory style, to racial explanation in an idiom (race and biological laws) that has lost its currency, the social and cultural pathology that he identifies remains pervasive. We may well doubt that biological laws, the melting pot, or even mere acts of God have much to do with it—Mencken is nothing if not ironical—but it remains the case that ineptitude, indifference, and even racial domination are inadequate to explain the American embrace of such ethical ugliness.

Atif Rafay was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia and Karachi, Pakistan where he attended the Karachi Grammar School. After winning First Prize in the University of British Columbia Essay Contest for “A Revaluation of Tolerance” in 1993, he was accepted to Cornell University and selected for the College Scholar Program at the end of his freshman year. Incarcerated in 1995, he maintained his innocence and is supported in the appeal of his conviction by Innocence International and Innocence Project Network, which filed an amicus brief. He is a TA for Edmonds Community College and University Beyond Bars. His essay “On the Margins of Freedom” appeared in the April 2011 issue of The Walrus, and more essays are forthcoming inJournal of Poverty and Radical Teacher.