Via Rolling Stone (sorry about the commercial; this is worth it).

Pete Seeger may be 91 years old, but the iconic folk singer still has plenty to protest. On Friday night at New York’s City Winery, Seeger debuted a new song he wrote about the disastrous BP oil spill as part of a fundraising concert for the Gulf Restoration Network and Global Green USA . “It’s a strange, strange song,” said Seeger about the new tune, which featured a simple finger-picked chord progression and gravelly ominous lyrics like, “When the drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill/God’s counting on me/God’s counting on you.” Check out video of “God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You” above.

After his set, Seeger told Rolling Stone he doesn’t write many songs these days, but the oil spill inspired him to team up with folk singer Lorre Wyatt to write the track at his home in Beacon, New York. “I’m a fan of old songs that have a lot of repetition, spirituals,” Seeger said. “Some of the greatest songs in the world only have one line, like ‘This little light of mine.’ ”

It was a busy week for Seeger. On Wednesday, he traveled to Albany, New York, where he sang the new number outside the state senate chamber to protest hydraulic fracturing, a controversial natural gas drilling technique. “I performed for 40 newspaper and radio reporters,” he said. “It made sense down there, too. When there’s a great big problem lets get together and do something about it and not leave it up to the government, the rich the poor.”

Apparently there’s also a new Pete Seeger record just out!

Jermaine Williams, a 30-year-old African-American man from Bolivar County, MS, died in police custody on July 23, 2010. Little has been released about the circumstances of his death—except that the local deputy coroner is calling it a homicide by taser.

On Saturday, Bolivar County Deputy Coroner J.O. Trice said he considered the death of Williams a homicide and attributed it solely to the TASER.

“The cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia that was induced by the electrical tasing device (TASER),” he said on Saturday. “The young man was quite healthy for a 30-year-old fellow.

“Most of it is still pending,” he said. “We’re just waiting on the results from the toxicology but it has not changed my opinion about the cause of death. The toxicology report may take a month or so before we get all the results back.”

Trice’s superior, Bolivar County Corner Dr. Nathaniel Brown, has told the press that there was alcohol in Williams blood and cocaine in his urine.

“The blood/cocaine level is still pending,” Brown said. “Cocaine can cause heart arrhythmia and death by itself. The cocaine coupled with an electrical shock … that combination could have caused his death.”

Regardless, Williams’ death could still fall under accidental or justifiable homicide, according to Brown who said that was just his opinion as he is not an attorney.

It is notable that Tasers are quite new to the Cleveland, MS police department in Bolivar County. According to the Bolivar Commercial:

The Cleveland Police Department recently started using TASERs as a way to subdue resistive and combative individuals.

The department underwent training as well as having to be on the receiving end of a TASER before they were allowed to use them on the street.

The newspaper also reports that the taser used was TASER X26 Electronic Control Device (ECD), which has “a recording device built in that cannot be tampered with.” According to the 2008 Amnesty International report Less Than Lethal: The Use of Stun Weapons in U.S. Law Enforcement, the X26 is

programmed to be activated in automatic five-second bursts, although the officer can stop the charge at any time by engaging the safety switch. The charge can also be prolonged beyond five-seconds if the trigger is held down continuously. The operator can also inflict repeated shock cycles with each pull of the trigger as long as both barbs remain attached to the subject. The only technical limit to the number or length of the electrical cycles is the life of the battery, which can be ten minutes or more.

It will therefore be important to establish how many times the device was used on Mr. Williams, at what interval if more than once, and whether the electrical charge put into Mr. Williams body was prolonged beyond the 5 second default. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations is investigating, according to the local news report.

I am talking to local sources and will be reporting more information about this case soon.

Thanks to los anjalis for also transcribing important portions of Officer Dobson’s statement:

So under SB1070 I know that people will not call officers in the case of a real emergency. I could see this type of scenario: a woman is being beaten by her husband or her significant other. And, if I show up, and I develop reasonable suspicion, or LESS, even, that the person that is a perpetrator in this case, is in this country extralegally, i’m going to start heading in the direction of asking the victim of the case, are you here illegally? I will have to arrest both of them—I’ll be required to—and both will be deported. It violates our calling to serve and protect. It violates, under our Constitution, the requirement to serve and protect.

That the racist law will deter women from seeking needed protections against domestic violence and could result in victims of abuse being deported with their abuser is an important point. My Physicians for Human Rights colleagues Kathleen Sullivan and Erin Hustings have made a similar point about how the law will affect asylum seekers who have fled abuse and torture in their home countries.

In 2009, J-H- was an asylum seeker living in Phoenix, Arizona. J-H- is a survivor of female genital cutting (FGC) in her African homeland. As a victim of and activist against FGC, J-H- was targeted and violently attacked in her country, and her home was burned to the ground. Fearing for her life and safety, J-H- fled to the US without good immigration documents, and with almost no material possessions.

In Arizona, J-H- was fortunate to find a volunteer lawyer who helped her apply to the federal government for asylum. Physicians for Human Rights was able to find a physician from our Asylum Network who was willing to evaluate J-H- in support of her claim to legal protection in the US.

Based on their experiences as advocates for immigrants, Kathleen and Erin elaborate on the type of concern expressed by Officer Dobson:

Past experience with campaigns of immigration raids has shown that legally present immigrants and US family members are more reluctant to take part in civic activities, visit family members, or seek medical help for which they are legally entitled if doing so exposes them to potential questioning and arrest. If SB 1070 had been in force last year, fear of accessing community services may have prevented J-H- from seeking the legal help she needed to obtain asylum in the US. A life of fear and insecurity could have added to the physical and mental suffering she endured due to FGM.

SB 1070 is scheduled to be enacted on July 29. Earlier in July, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona to invalidate SB 1070. This past week, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a separate lawsuit to block enforcement of SB 1070 while its constitutionality is assessed in the DOJ lawsuit.

Further Reading

• DETENTION AND DEPORTATION CONSEQUENCES OF ARIZONA IMMIGRATION LAW (SB 1070) (Detention Watch).

(Photo: Thomas Hawk)

I have been trying to wrap my mind around BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s defense in the shooting death of 22-year-old black man Oscar Grant.

Mehserle’s supposed weapon confusion is at the heart of why he was not convicted of voluntary manslaughter, let alone of second degree murder. The underlying logic of the defense seems to be that drawing the gun was an illegitimate, death dealing mistake but tasing Oscar Grant would have been a legitimate course of action.

A photo of Mehserle and surveillance video of his fellow officer Tony Pirone show each of them brandishing their tasers during the events prior to the shooting on the BART platform.

We are to suppose, then, that when police arrive on a scene where fighting that they have not observed has reportedly occurred it is acceptable to brandish weapons to gain compliance from black men. We are to suppose it is proper procedure to threaten any young black man with weapons if he is suspected of having been fighting prior to the arrival of the police.

We are also to suppose that tasers are not themselves lethal weapons. Electronic Village has compiled a list 84 documented taser death incidents since the beginning of 2009. In addition to a growing body of evidence that tasers are unpredictably lethal, there is evidence that they are over-used by law enforcement and that law enforcement officers tase blacks disproportionately.

A 2008 Amnesty International study found that 90% of those struck by tasers since 2001 were unarmed. Overall, among the 2009-2010 victims on the Electronic Village list, 38% were black, though blacks are only 13% of the total US population. Furthermore, tasers seem to be especially problematic in California. According to the Amnesty study, California and Florida have the highest taser death rates in the country. Among the taser deaths recorded by Electronic Village, twenty-one—or 25%—occurred in California.

The logic that legitimates using tasers, despite data such as above, is the logic of fear. Adam Serwer recently put it this way:

To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle’s fear of Grant and his friends was ‘unreasonable.’ It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle’s fear? That was reasonable.

Serwer provides broad historical context for America’s fear of black men, from Toussaint L’Overture to Oscar Grant. In the spirit of collaboration, I’d like to add some information to Adam’s history.

In Franklin County, Mississippi, May 1964, two black 19-year-old men, named Henry Dee and Charles Moore, were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a band of Klansmen. The abductions and torture of Dee and Moore were preceded by a spate of similar kidnappings and beatings, at least 16 according to one set of government documents, all in the same small, southwest corner of Mississippi.

During that four month period, bands of Klansmen ambushed black men coming home from work at night or lured them out to deserted roads on false pretenses, brought them out into the woods or oil fields and whipped them and interrogated them. Were their victims—or other blacks the victims knew—members of the NAACP, the Klan wanted to know?

It appears that until May 2, 1964, all of the victims of these abductions got away alive; some have lived with effects of severe injuries the rest of their lives. What brought the Dee-Moore abductions to a deathly end?

There is no evidence that the instigator of the Dee-Moore kidnapping and beatings was involved in the other incidents from early 1964. But when he targeted Henry Dee, he was not worrying about the the NAACP. When Klansmen threw Henry Dee and Charles Moore on the ground, tied them up and beat them with bean poles, the torturers asked the 19-year-olds about a black insurrection instead of about the NAACP.

Henry Dee had recently been to Chicago to visit relatives there. He came back to Mississippi wearing a do-rag and exhibiting other trappings of northern city life. This, with rumors that had started circulating that black Muslims from Chicago were bringing guns into Mississippi to arm local blacks, made Dee an embodiment of much that the Klan feared and had mobilized to suppress. The Klansmen were so intent on getting Dee that when his friend Moore joined him on the street and the two started hitchhiking together from Meadeville to Natchez, the Klansmen took Moore along for the ride and killed them both.

The Dee-Moore case is rare. Unlike scores of other cold cases from the Civil Rights Era, after 43 years, it was finally brought to court. One of the Klansmen involved went to prison in 2007 on federal kidnapping charges for his role in the murders, and, more recently, Franklin County settled a landmark civil suit with the families. Yet, even here, with significant closure for the victims’ families and government being held to account for collusion with the Klan, no perpetrator has been charged with murder and no government official has admitted to any wrongdoing.

In this history of fear, self-possessed black men, who advocate for their rights and are willing to defend themselves when attacked (or are suspected of these things), are met with pathological, frenzied violence. We have not faced this history or held past perpetrators accountable. Until we do, we will continue to have Oscar Grants and we will continue to lack the will for adequate justice.

(A note of thanks to David Ridgen, who made factual corrections and shared his original research for the passages on Henry Dee and Charles Moore.)

Kimya Dawson’s song about the BP oil spill.

On June 30, the Delaware Senate passed a bill ensuring that incarcerated persons will be counted as residents of their home addresses when new state and local legislative districts are drawn in Delaware. The bill previously passed in the House, and is now awaiting Governor Jack Markell’s signature.

The U.S. Census currently counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison location. When states use Census counts to draw legislative districts, they unintentionally enhance the weight of a vote cast in districts that contain prisons at the expense of all other districts in the state. Delaware is the second state to correct this problem and adjust Census data to count incarcerated persons at their home address, joining Maryland which enacted a bill in April. Similar legislation is pending in New York.

“Delaware’s legislation recognizes that prison-based gerrymandering is a problem of fairness in redistricting. All districts — some far more than others — send people to prison, but only some districts have large prisons. Counting incarcerated people as residents of the prison distorts the principle of one person, one vote, and we applaud the Delaware General Assembly for enacting this common-sense solution,” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative.

The problem is national as well. One state assembly district in New York includes 7% prisoners; a state house district in Texas includes 12% prisoners; and 15% of one Montana state house district consists of prisoners imported from other parts of the state. Prison-based gerrymandering was not a serious problem when the prison population was tiny, but the 2010 Census will find five times as many people in prison as it did just three decades ago.

“The Delaware legislature has taken a much-needed step to reflect incarcerated populations in a more accurate way. Delaware’s action should help pave the way for other states to end the distortions caused by counting incarcerated persons in the wrong place,” said Brenda Wright, Director of the Democracy Program at Demos.

The legislation, passed as HB384, applies only to redistricting and would not affect federal or state funding distributions.

What is prison-based gerrymandering, you ask? Here’s a little video to help elucidate the subject. That’s Prison Policy Initiative’s executive director, Peter Wagner, doing the Bob Dylan thing with the cue cards.

Henry Dee

Settlement Reached in Civil Suit Charging Franklin County, MS Role in 1964 KKK Murders

On Monday, June 21, Franklin County, Mississippi agreed to a settlement in an historic civil suit with the families of Charles Moore and  Henry Dee, two 19-year-old Black men who were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan on May 2, 1964.

“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that any civil lawsuit against public officials for collaborating with the KKK has reached the point of settlement,” said Margaret Burnham, lead attorney for the family members who brought the suit against Franklin County. Klansman James Ford Seale went to prison in 2007 for his role in the murders; this landmark civil suit addressed the roles of Mississippi government officials in the double murder and subsequent cover-up of what had occurred.

“It’s a bit of a stretch to say they were ‘held accountable,’” Burnham added, “because they did not admit to the facts we presented.”

“I’m convinced there’s nothing else that I can do to get any more truth,” said Thomas Moore, brother of victim Charles. Moore said further that African Americans in his home county “are joyful that somebody brought Franklin County officials to reality and to the way they treated other people.”

Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, sister of victim Henry Dee, filed the civil suit against Franklin County, MS in August, 2008. The suit focused on the respective roles and actions from 1964 to 1967 of Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto and Franklin County Deputy Sheriff Kirby Shell, both now deceased. “In the aftermath of the killings,” according to the complaint by Moore and Collins,

Sheriff Hutto misled the Plaintiffs when they inquired of the Sheriff about their loved ones. Further, Sheriff Hutto deceived the Plaintiffs into thinking he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Moore and Dee when in fact he did.

Throughout 1964, Hutto and Shell misled investigative agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the murders, concealing their participation in the events of May 2, 1964, the day the two young men were killed.

Hutto and Shell covered up their role in these crimes, deceiving law enforcement officials as well as the Plaintiffs.  Plaintiffs did not become aware of the participation of Hutto and Shell as co-conspirators until the federal indictment was returned on January 24, 2007. Nor could Plaintiffs have discovered Hutto and Shell’s culpability before the indictment. The U.S. Justice Department immunized Charles Edwards, one of the coconspirators and, on November 3, 2006, obtained from Edwards a full statement of the crimes revealing for the first time ever the involvement of Franklin County on the day the men were slain.

Thomas Moore holds photo of his brother, Charles. (Postcard for Mississippi Cold Case, created by David Ridgen.)

“The settlement didn’t need to happen,” noted documentary filmmaker David Ridgen, “if Franklin County officials would have simply apologized to the Moore and Dee families for the actions and inactions of their officials in colluding with and in some cases participating in the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the civil rights era.”

Ridgen’s film Mississippi Cold Case documented Thomas Moore’s quest to learn the truth about what happened to his brother Charles and to Henry Dee. In their work together on the film Ridgen and Moore uncovered evidence that led to the indictment, trial and conviction of Klansman James Ford Seale.

“I am proud of Thomas Moore for being the juggernaut that pushed this civil suit forward with his lawyers,” Ridgen said, “and I am hopeful that it will lead to civil trials in the near future that will hold Mississippi and elsewhere, state and county, accountable.”

“This is a case about unconscionable crimes and unconscionable deception,” Moore and Collins charged in their complaint.

It is also a case about the systematic denial by Franklin County of law enforcement protection to African-Americans and to whites suspected of opposing the Klan’s campaign of racist terror.

It is a case about the collusive and unlawful relationship between the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Franklin County.

Franklin County officials stated in their resolution that they do not condone “the horrific deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Dee. “The county desires not to imply the deaths were anything but abhorrent.”

But the county denied any responsibility for the deaths of the two 19-year-old Black men. The officials resolved that the county had not “caused or contributed to the deaths of these two young men. These deaths are believed to have resulted solely from the criminal actions of the Ku Klux Klan.”

In their resolution, the Franklin County officials questioned the evidence in the civil complaint, drawn substantially from the evidence presented in the criminal trial of James Ford Seale that led to his conviction.

George Colllins, President of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors, who signed the resolution accepting the terms of settlement with Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, had no comment when he was reached on the phone on Tuesday night.

“What we sought to prove was common knowledge at the time,” Margaret Burnham said, “that these crimes could not have persisted without the support of local officials….There is no statute of limitations on murder, no expiration date on moral obligation, and there should be no impunity for human rights violators.”

“I am satisfied with the verdict of the criminal trial, and I’m satisfied with the settlement,” concluded Thomas Moore. “I ran the race and I fought a good fight. I am finished with this case.”

“I am at peace for the first time in 46 years,” Moore said.

(Cross-posted at Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

Podcast

Documents

• Franklin County Board of Supervisors Resolution (PDF)
• Statement, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice, Northeastern University School of Law (PDF)
• Moore v. Franklin County Complaint (PDF)

Additional Coverage

• Michele Norris, “Miss. Officials Agree To Settlement In ’64 Slayings” (NPR)
• Jerry Mitchell, “Lawsuit over ’64 deaths settled” (Jackson Clarion-Ledger)
• Jonathan Saltzman, “Justice follows decades of silence” (Boston Globe)

Killen claims God is on his side

Lawsuit filed last week alleges civil rights violations

Jerry Mitchell and Ben Greenberg
The Clarion-Ledger
March 1, 2010

Convicted Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen says there wasn’t enough legal evidence to imprison him for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers and that God is going to get whoever helped put him away.

Those written remarks are among the most recent public stirrings from Killen, who also filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI, alleging his civil rights were violated.

“Almighty God … is listening and is recording your acts, thoughts and deeds. One by one you will give account to him,” Killen wrote in a six-page letter obtained by The Clarion-Ledger from a Klansman. His lawyer confirmed the letter is indeed Killen’s.

District Attorney Mark Duncan, who along with Attorney General Jim Hood prosecuted Killen, responded, “I don’t have any trouble standing before God with my role in it.”

In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Killen, now 85, on three counts of manslaughter for his role in the Klan’s June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, commonly known as the Mississippi Burning case.

The FBI is now reexamining the killings. Four suspects are still alive in the case.

In his letter, Killen lambasted prosecutors and Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon, who sentenced Killen to the maximum 60 years in prison. Killen, a former Union sawmill operator and part-time preacher, is serving his time in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County.

Killen blamed the press and the people of Neshoba County. “You had all the news media that helped indict me for murder on three counts, which you had no legal evidence,” he wrote. “All your grand jury heard was slick tongue talk from a couple of politicians.”

Sally Beam, one of those grand jurors, said that’s not correct.

All the evidence led back to Killen, she said. “We were not out to get him, but he was the one every order went out from. The fact he’s still trying to blame somebody else just tells me his heart is still not in the right place.

“He’s still trying to cover up what needs to be exposed. If I were Edgar Ray Killen, I’d be thinking about my maker and where I’m going to be when I die. He’s a preacher. He knows about heaven and hell.”

Killen says mobster Gregory Scarpa Sr., pistol whipped “testimony” from from Clayton Lewis, a defense attorney in the 1967 federal conspiracy trial of suspects in the civil rights workers’ slayings..

The nearly 40,000 pages of FBI files in the Mississippi Burning case obtained by The Clarion-Ledger do not appear to mention Scarpa or list his informant number. Some other FBI records refer to Scarpa being brought in to help crack the Klan’s 1966 killing of Vernon Dahmer.

Killen said the FBI paid Scarpa $30,000 in reward money — an allegation FBI agents have disputed.

Retired FBI agent Jay Cochran said the reward money was delivered to Mississippi Highway Patrolman Maynard King, who told the FBI where the bodies were buried. Cochran said King was passing the $30,000 on to the person who informed King.

Philip Dray, co-author of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, said he’s not surprised Killen invoked God’s name since the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi often did that.

Killen said God knows what he did and that he is at peace with God, but Dray noted Killen never actually said he was innocent. “Convicted Klansmen have a special problem with justice,” he said. “Their ‘crimes’ were, in their minds, righteous. They were aimed at specific targets — meddlesome Yankees.”

In Killen’s mind, he said, “It will always be 1865.”

In the letter, Killen says he read many hidden Justice Department files. “I only read those of interest, as I was not hired and I was not a pimp, but I had security clearance, so I read and obtained straight evidence,” he says. “I am not putting some names in this letter as some are still living and believe it or not I am not a betrayer of anyone, especially my friends.”

Exactly who he refuses to betray he didn’t say.

Larry Ellis, a former inmate who has been interviewed by the FBI, said some of what the letter says mirrors much of what Killen told him behind bars.

Ellis told the FBI that Killen said he had access to these files because of his relationship with then-U.S. Sen. Jim Eastland and “did jobs” for Eastland around the country.

Killen said in his letter he had traveled to “most major cities in America.”

On those trips, he said he bragged about his hometown, his home county and his home state. Now, he said, he wants to retrace those steps and apologize.

The Clarion-Ledger obtained the letter from Cole Thornton, Imperial Wizard of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who attended Killen’s 2005 trial. Thornton said Killen authorized him to release the letter and shared a note that expert Thomas Vastrick of Memphis identified as Killen’s handwriting.

Thornton, whose real name is Charles Denton, said he wants to see “the scoundrels who railroaded this fine man pay up for their deceit.”

In his lawsuit in which he seeks millions of dollars, Killen is demanding all of the federal files in the case.

Hood responded that his office has given Killen’s lawyer “every document we have in our files. The federal prosecutors assured me that they gave us all of the documents in the possession of the federal government.”

Killen remains filled with venom, Hood said. “Hate will eat up a person’s soul. As with all criminals I have had to prosecute, I still hold out hope that their souls will be redeemed.”

Killen has repeatedly referred to the three victims as communists — something the victims’ families say isn’t true.

Ben Chaney, whose brother James was among the victims, said after reading Killen’s letter, “I sort of feel bad for Mr. Killen because he’s losing. The fact is he refuses to look at reality.”

Killen needs to come clean, he said. “God knows what he did, and he knows he did something contrary to what God wants. The truth will set him free.”

Documents

Download the letter we obtained from Edgar Ray Killen (PDF)