#marshall project

[onlytiktoks]

[tealmasc]

Thank you to everyone who helped get Julius Jones off of death row. Black people are disproportionately targeted by police and given harsher sentences. Julius is far from the only innocent person to end up on death row. We must pay attention to all death sentences in order to save lives.

The Marshall Project watches death row:

The Next to Die

Examining executions in the United States.

Here are some individual people you can help:

Marvin Guy

Melissa Lucio

Rodney Reed

If anyone knows of anyone else who needs help put their name and a link to their petition in a reblog!

[ngadismart]

                 Illustrations for The Marshall Project: 

                       On Racism and Police Brutality

Various black & white Illustrations and gifs for the Marshall Project, illustrating victim accounts of police brutality and racism in the U.S.A.:

Article 1: Police Hurt Thousands of Teens Every Year. A Striking Number Are Black Girls.

Article 2: She Was Having a Seizure. Police Shocked Her With a Taser.

[pearlsofme]

Important Links

Hi Everyone!

I’m working on building out a Navigation for my blog, and wanted to include some links to resources and causes that I care about. While not Potter-related, I think everyone can agree the Harry Potter series dabbles with social justice, thus it makes sense to link organizations and groups actively working towards establishing justice in our world. These aren’t the end-all be-all for any of the issues/resources these pages provide, but they’re a good starting point for education and getting involved. Most of these links are to US-based groups, but I will be continuously updating this page and adding more global resources the more I learn. If any of the links don’t work, please send me a message/ask and I’ll fix them!

Therapy for Black Girls

Black Trans Advocacy Coalition

GLAAD Transgender Resources

Informed Immigrant: COVID resources for Undocumented Peoples

Immigrant Defense Project: Provide legal resources for immigrants 

Their assistance is legal advice, they do not provide legal representation

Impact Fund: An NPO providing funding, representation and legal support for marginalized peoples 

Fair Fight: to learn more/help fight against voter suppression in the US

Anti-Asian Violence Resources

Yemeni Liberation card

Planned Parenthood

Survived and Punished

An org dedicated to helping survivors of domestic and sexual violence who’ve been imprisoned

Free Palestine Card

Decolonize Palestine

African American Intellectual History

Student/Farmworker Alliance: This is an org via which students can support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Human Rights group made by agricultural workers for agricultural workers--most of whom are Latin/x. 

The exploitation of agricultural workers in the US was something I studied in college, and had previously known nothing about. The documentary Food Chains is a great intro to the CIW and The Campaign for Fair Food, the CIW’s ongoing efforts for equity in the pay and working conditions of agriculture workers. 

The Marshall Project: Criminal Justice Journalism from an NPO (hence police abolition, prison abolition, the abolition of ICE)

Black Lives Matter really surged last summer, but the org itself is fairly problematic when it comes to making celebrities out of activists, and failing to redistribute wealth/donations to better serve the black community and our liberation efforts. I highly suggest heading to the Marshall Project/other NPOs to learn, get informed about current events, and find activists to follow in regards to police brutality, and the role the US Criminal Justice system plays in perpetuating and upholding institutional racism.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Dog bites and racism in Indianapolis

Every five days, a police dog bites someone in Indianapolis

By Stephen Millies

Every five days, a police dog bites someone in Indianapolis. Just as Black people are twice as likely to be unemployed, 55 percent of those bitten in Indianapolis are African American. That’s double their percentage of the city’s population.

These and other facts were revealed in a remarkable investigation by the Marshall Project, named for the human rights attorney and first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“From the first day I stepped into my cell, anger took control of me. I was 28 years old. I was going behind bars for the rest of my life. No one in prison gave a damn if I was innocent or not.

I talked back to guards and broke rules, not realizing I was only hurting myself. That meant I spent a lot of time in segregation—called “seg” by prisoners. Alone in a cell, I passed the time smoking, reading, and pacing.

I fought the system for about five years. The message I wanted to send was, “You can’t break me.” I must admit, though, it ain’t easy sitting behind bars alone, especially when you know you’re innocent.

Eventually, I realized that if I didn’t change my attitude, not only would I continue to do time in seg, but if my case went back to court, officials wouldn’t give me any sympathy.

So I worked to turn my prison life around. I got a GED. I earned an associate of applied science certificate and a certificate for building maintenance. I took courses in carpentry, electrical installation, typing, and welding.

I also spent a lot of time just trying to survive. Prison, after all, is a place where fights break out constantly, guards are beaten to within an inch of their lives, and prisoners are killed. I kept a homemade metal shank with me always, even tucking it under my pillow while I slept.

Periodically, of course, my anger would return. Like when prison officials refused to let me attend my grandmother’s funeral.

Or when my mother was dying of breast cancer and the authorities offered me a choice: Visit her—for all of 15 minutes—before she died, or attend her funeral. I was furious. My aunt urged me to see her one last time. She was right, of course.

I was shackled like a dog when guards brought me to the hospital. My hands were cuffed, and the cuffs were attached to a chain around my waist. My legs were bound. That is how I saw my dying mother. She urged me to keep my hopes up, and, after 15 minutes, I returned to prison. She died two weeks later.

Before she died, my mother told me over and over again that one day, truth would prevail. I shared her faith that someone, sooner or later, would come forward and say something to free me.

Finally, in November 2007, I got that break.

Andrew Wilson, who was serving a life sentence for the killing of two police officers, died in prison. Soon after, one of Wilson’s attorneys, Jamie Kunz, met with my lawyer, Harold Winston, to discuss my case. Kuntz told Winston about the signed affidavit containing Wilson’s confession. The document had been hidden away for years in a fireproof strong box at the home of another attorney of Wilson’s, Dale Coventry. At one point, he stored it under his own bed.

When Winston called me with the news, I wasn’t initially all that confident the affidavit would help me. Yes, it sounded good. But I had been through too much.

I was also upset from the jump. If these lawyers had evidence that I was innocent, how could they not have said anything? While I slept on a prison bunk for 26 years, Coventry was sleeping above a box that might have spared me years in hell.

As word of the confession got out, my case started attracting local media interest. Then 60 Minutes aired a segment. The public was outraged. Many people demanded Kunz and Coventry’s disbarment, others recommended they be fined, and some suggested that they be imprisoned for 26 years. Years after my release, Kunz said he never expected such a hostile reaction.

One April morning, I boarded a prison bus to the Cook County Jail, and from there was taken to the courtroom for a hearing on the new evidence in my case. If all went well, by the end of the day, I was going home.

I was elated—and shed many tears—when the judge vacated my convictions and ordered a new trial. I was to be released on bond.

Before entering the free world again, I changed into clothes my family brought me. But the pants, which belonged to my brother Tony, were about three sizes too big, and I didn’t have a belt. As we left court, my aunt held up the pants from the back so they didn’t fall around my ankles.

I got into a car for the first time in 26 years and went to my aunt’s house, where we celebrated with about 50 people. I walked around all night with a bottle of champagne. Life outside was easy to take. But the final decision in my case had yet to be made.

Five months later, I got the resolution I had sought for more than two decades. At a hearing in September 2008, the state dismissed the charges against me. “Your long personal nightmare is over,” said Cook County Circuit Court Judge James Schreier. “Hopefully, you will live a long life as a free man.”

Finally, my wrong had been righted. Of course, I was still pissed, especially when I thought of the things police and prosecutors did to have me convicted. Six days after my arrest, police had matched a shell found at the McDonald’s to a shotgun confiscated while seeking Wilson for the murder of the two cops. But the police hid this from my lawyers. My life would have been very different if the cops and “officers of the court” had done their jobs honestly. Even after we got ballistics tests matching the gun to the shell casing, Cook County Chief Criminal Court Judge James Bailey refused to admit the evidence.

But there was no use reliving the past.

Under state law, I was able to petition the court for a certificate of innocence—an official recognition of my exoneration. Most importantly, I could receive compensation. Because compensation is capped at $199,150, I was eligible for an average of $7,659.61 per year for the time I was imprisoned.

On April 17, 2009, I was formally declared innocent. A few months later, we filed a federal civil rights suit against the city of Chicago and several detectives, including the notorious former police commander Jon Burge, who I argued had conspired to build a false case against me irrespective of my guilt or innocence. (For decades, Burge used torture on dozens of mostly African-American suspects, usually to extract false confessions. Even though he had committed the crime for which he was convicted, Andrew Wilson sued him for torture, eventually winning a settlement from behind bars. Burge was fired and convicted of perjury for lying about torturing suspects.)

I believed the government owed me something, even if it would never make up for the years I lost. Just before the December trial date—about 30 years after I was arrested—we settled out of court for $10.25 million. After paying lawyers’ fees, loans and other family obligations, I was left with about half.

The city paid the money, but no one in power apologized.”

- Alton Logan & Berl Falbaum, “I Served 26 Years for Murder Even Though the Killer Confessed.” The Marshall Project, October 19, 2017.

[onlytiktoks]

[immortalremnantriver]

This entire thing is trying to encourage sympathy for people on the sex offender list and for some of the people featured there's just so few details included that you're kind of put off by it. I mean, conflating people who peed in public with those who are actual predators and a threat to people is obviously unfair but why is it happening? And this woman apparently had sex with a 14 year old when she was drunk out somewhere and has been on the sex offender list since then which has negatively affected her life to say the least.