Dissident Veteran For Peace

American society has never upheld or realized truth and justice in a manner fully consistent with American rhetoric. Yet, for most of my life I thought our society was at least headed in the right direction. No more.

In the flurry of non-stop anti-Trump (someone I never supported) lies I finally realized that somewhere, in my lifetime or before, the country took a wrong turn. It's tempting to say it happened in the last ten years but it may be more accurate that it was during the 1991 Rodney King police brutality/racism hoax and subsequent rioting when politicians and the media openly abandoned truth, justice, and integrity. The American public, in general, then showed itself to be too gullible and lazy to know or care that vital principles were being gutted.

Don't get me wrong, politicians and the media were not paragons of virtue before then but it does seem like we as a society turned the corner down into dangerous alley back then and things have gotten steadily worse ever since. Academia and the clergy have followed suit or, perhaps, helped lead the way.

In any case, I followed the prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin very closely. Before the verdict I had estimated the outcome in order of probability (most to least) was as follows:

1. Hung jury
2. Full acquittal
3. Partial acquittal
4. Guilty on all charges

It's obvious I couldn't have been more mistaken. My estimation was based on the clearly erroneous assumption that the jury included at least one intelligent, rational, and principled juror. I don't have a lot of hope that Chauvin will get justice in the appellate courts.

I wish I knew what to tell people to do to turn this country away from the abyss but I don't. I can say there's no hope in Biden or Trump or most of the other denizens of the two wings of the political uniparty. What I do know is that defeatism is a faster path to destruction.

Here are a few more perspectives on the Chauvin trial and verdict:

• "It's a lie: 'Systematic police racism' and the Derek Chauvin Trial" on LawOfficer.com
• "The Derek Chauvin Trial: Reasonable doubt exists" on LawOfficer.com
• "Chauvin Guilty Verdict Completes the Total Collapse of Law, Order, and Due Process in Biden’s America" on Revolver.news
• "Candace Owens: 'This was not a fair trial. No person can say this was a fair trial.' " on Tucker Carlson Tonight via Twitter
  
• "After the Derek Chauvin Verdict: Initial Thoughts and What Comes Next" on RedState.com
• "The Chauvin verdict" on AmericanThinker.com
• "The American Crisis" by Ben Domenech via Twitter

If there were any Left-wing writers who care about truth and justice in the matter of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin then I would link to them but I am unaware of any.

21 April 2021 Addendum: In "George Floyd's Death: Test Your Knowledge" I mentioned that "the written report of the unofficial autopsy of George Floyd requested by Floyd's family and performed Michael Baden, MD, and Allecia Wilson, MD" had never been publicly released. They and their findings were much in the news last summer but unless I'm mistaken neither of them testified in the trial of Derek Chauvin nor was their report offered in evidence by the prosecution. If true, then this suggests that the "family autopsy" was primarily a media prop to advance the financial interests of George Floyd's family and lawyers in extracting a sweet financial payout.

Labels: Biden, crime, critical thinking, George Floyd, Justice, media, police, politics, race, Trump

The prosecution in State v. Chauvin has presented, through its witnesses, an incoherent theory as to how Derek Chauvin allegedly killed George Floyd. Except for an opening statement, the defense has not yet presented it case.

Yet, the prosecution's witnesses have repeatedly given testimony that fundamentally undermines the prosecution's case against Chauvin. For instance, some witnesses testified Floyd died of "positional asphyxia" yet the only witness to perform an autopsy on Floyd testified there was no evidence of asphyxia (see also here). If the state cannot settle on how Chauvin supposedly killed Floyd then how can they honestly argue he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

Minneapolis Police Dept. Excited Delirium training slide (cropped)

Judging by the currently available evidence, the Chauvin prosecution is a political show trial orchestrated by corrupt politicians and a corrupt mainstream corporate media. From the point of view of race grifters and their corrupt enablers the trial is a win no matter what happens. If Chauvin is convicted then they will argue that affirms the false narrative of state-sanctioned routine, deadly, racist police violence against Black people. If Chauvin is not convicted or not convicted of the most serious charge(s) then they will claim that proves Black people cannot get justice and you can expect more of the rioting, looting, arson, and violent crimes that we saw last summer and fall.

However, unless there is some smoking gun soon presented by the prosecution Judge Cahill should dismiss the charges "in furtherance of justice" pursuant to Minn. Stat. § 631.21 after the prosecution finishes presenting its case. Since it is extremely unlikely that Cahill, given his past performance, will do this defense counsel Eric Nelson should consider filing a motion for a judgment of acquittal pursuant to Minn. R.Crim. P. 26.03, subd. 18(1)(a).

It's unlikely that Cahill would grant such a motion on any of the three counts but it's not impossible that he might acquit on one or two of the counts against Chauvin and, from my armchair, non-lawyer perch, I don't see that the defense has a lot to lose by filing the motion. The calculus, of course, includes weighing the time and energy involved in preparing the motion and what possible impact a ruling by Cahill might have on the jury. If Cahill acquitted on one of the murder counts would the jury be more inclined to convict on manslaughter?

See also:

• Prosecution Opening Statement
• What was Derek Chauvin Thinking?
• George Floyd's Death: Test Your Knowledge

Labels: George Floyd, Justice, law, media, police, race

In the last couple of weeks I've discussed the death of Ahmaud Arbery with two people. Both of them had some familiarity with the matter and had seen William Bryan's video of the last few seconds of Arbery's life.

What was initially stunning to me is that their recall of the video was that the McMichaels were in motion in their vehicle and simply gunned Arbery down. I asked them if they had noticed that, in reality, the video clearly shows that at the time of the shooting the McMichaels were stopped with no one in the driver's seat. And that Arbery had run/jogged toward them and then alongside the passenger side of the McMichaels' truck before suddenly veering in front of it to attack Travis McMichaels, who was on the other side. They both denied noticing or recalling any of this.

The second person, I'll call her P., lives far south of the Mason-Dixon Line in a state where slavery was legal until 1865. P. is, arguably, herself of "redneck" stock. Nevertheless she reflexively denounced the McMichaels as vicious "rednecks". In all the years I've known she has never used that word, as she later acknowledged to me.

She also got angry that I characterized Arbery's final actions as "attacking a man armed with a shotgun". She objected to the word "attacking" even though, as I pointed out, that the word is neutral and if Arbery was engaged in actual self-defense, as she contended, he would have every legal right to attack the McMichaels.

Above I indicated I was initially stunned by the perspective of my friends. However, given the mainstream media's aggressively dishonest agenda-pushing it would be surprising if most people didn't accept the dominant narrative of the shooting. To be clear, my point is not that the McMichaels (and William Bryan) are innocent of any crime—although that seems to be the case based upon the evidence I've seen so far—but rather that the actual facts and the video alone paint a more complex picture of events than the simplistic characterizations of most mainstream and fringe Left/Right media outlets.

The McMichaels have both been arrested for aggravated assault and felony murder. The key charge the prosecution must prove is aggravated assault. If they are found guilty of that then perforce—because Ahmaud Arbery is dead—they must be guilty of felony murder (O.C.G.A. § 16-5-1). I was surprised that they were charged with aggravated assault (O.C.G.A. § 16-5-21) because, in my reading of the Georgia statute, I think the prosecution will have a more difficult time convincing a jury of that than of the charge of criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment (O.C.G.A. § 16-5-41), which is one of the charges against Bryan.

Going out on a limb here, I predict that, before they go to trial (assuming, as I do, that there will be a trial), the prosecutors will charge the McMichaels with criminal attempt to commit unlawful imprisonment in place of or in addition to aggravated assault. If they don't do that then I think the McMichaels will almost certainly be acquitted.

In any event, everyone interested in this case should critically scrutinize media and activist motives and narratives, consider the available evidence, and make up their own minds. Also ask yourself why some killings become national new stories with frequent updates and others get mostly ignored, nationally (see also here and here). Below is the best video (although the accuracy of the narration is spotty) of which I am aware of the events leading up to the shooting and some links to additional key case documents or sources.

• Glynn County Police Report of the Shooting
• Autopsy Report of Ahmaud Arbery
• DA George Barnhill's letter to Glynn County Police Department
• Ahmaud Arbery Murder Investigation | Georgia Bureau of Investigation

Labels: crime, critical thinking, guns, Justice, law, media, politics, race

Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X, was born on this date in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska.

I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think that it will be based upon the color of the skin ...

Source: Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz a.k.a. Malcolm X, Toronto, January 19, 1965.

Labels: freedom, Justice, Malcolm X, quotations, race, resistance

So you want to be king? You want to control the greatest nation in the world--perhaps control the world as well? As we’ve seen, you must first own the people, own their minds. You must be able to command their prejudices like one can toot a boy's horn. And, if you are to be king, you must also destroy their warriors.

The people are always the enemy of the king, "the stupid mob," as Hitler called them. The people can rise up. They always do in the end. It is only a question of when.

But how can the people fight against the king without their warriors, without champions to fight for their causes? Destroy their warriors and the people can holler and foam but they can do no harm, for even they who are aware enough to shake off the king's propaganda like a dog shakes off fleas, even they are helpless against the king if there are none who can enter the fight for them.

The warriors for the people are trial lawyers--those villains who are not to be trusted, not even when they are shackled and held helpless in those strait jackets of hate. And we have learned to hate them because every day through the King's media we are told outrageous stories of how trial lawyers have aborted the fetus of justice, and we hear malicious jokes so that we have come to believe that the cause of every ill that befalls us lies at their feet.

Source: Gerry Spence. "Kill All the Lawyers" (PDF).

Labels: Justice, law, quotations

Laws are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing fall into them, they hold it fast, but if a thing of any size falls into them it breaks the mesh and escapes. --Anacharsis (ca. 600 BC).

Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy. --Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Source: Epigraphs to ch. 12. of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (Paddington, Queensland, Australia: Eddie Campbell Comics, 1999).

Labels: art and literature, Justice, law, quotations

Not long ago I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's June 1978 commencement address to Harvard University entitled A World Split Apart. Solzhenitsyn's obvious strength was his writing on life in Russia. And while he was also a keen observer of the West, he did not always see it so clearly. His understandable anti-Communism sometimes blinded him to the reality of American imperialism.

For instance, he chastised the "American intelligentsia" for the US defeat in Vietnam never understanding that the US role was indefensible by his own standards. Sounding the alarm, he claimed, "a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over [America]." He decried the materialism, irresponsible freedom, and humanism of the West and the US, in particular, never understanding that these were, in large part, symptoms not causes.

At least in 1978, he failed understand that Americans are not free but the unwitting slaves of a sophisticated and pervasive propaganda system. Which is, in turn, part of a larger system or constellation of systems which are life-destroying on scales large and small and manifest in America's culture of death and the "The Combine" of Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or the "Domination System" described by Walter Wink.

In any case, the passage below from A World Split Apart has much to commend itself in terms of understanding the law in America. It is noteworthy that his examples of the failure to exercise "Voluntary self-restraint" are not individuals as one would expect to hear from many American commentators but they are corporations.

Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.

Source: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A World Split Apart. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) pp. 15-19.

Labels: art and literature, communism, critical thinking, Empire, Justice, Ken Kesey, law, quotations

Once in Conference the vote was close on a case and [Justice Stanley F.] Reed could not make up his mind. "I am inclined to reverse Chief Justice," Reed said deferentially. [Charles Evans] Hughes replied with his customary twinkle, "Brother Reed, I will enter you in the docket as voting to reverse. For my experience is that if a Justice inclines a certain way, he has the facility and resourcefulness to marshal the reason to back his inclination."

It was shortly after that episode that Hughes made a statement to me which at the time was shattering but which over the years turned out to be true: "Justice Douglas, you must remember one thing. At the constitutional level where we work, ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reason for supporting our predilections."

I had thought of the law in the terms of Moses-principles chiseled in granite. I knew judges had predilections. I knew that their moods as well as their minds were ingredients of their decisions. But I had never been willing to admit to myself that the "gut" reaction of a judge at the level of constitutional adjudications, dealing with the vagaries of due process, freedom of speech, and the like, was the main ingredient of his decision. The admission of it destroyed in my mind some of the reverence for the immutable principles. But they were supplied by Constitutions written by people in conventions, not by judges. Judges are, after all, not creative figures; they represent ideological schools of thought that are highly competitive. No judge at the level I speak of was neutral. The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people, and no wiser man than Hughes ever sat on our Court. I say that although his predilections, drawn from a different age, were not always mine.

Source: William O. Douglas. The Court Years, 1939-1975. (New York: Random House, 1980) p. 8. Charles Evans Hughes was appointed as an Associate Justice to the US Supreme Court by Republican President William Howard Taft; he served in that post from 1910 until he resigned from the Court to become the 1916 Republican Party presidential nominee. Hughes was appointed as the Court's Chief Justice by Republican President Herbert Hoover; he served in that post from 1930 until 1941. William O. Douglas was appointed as an Associate Justice to the Court by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt; he served in that post from 1939 until 1975.

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. I wholly disagree with the argument of the Government that the First Amendment left the common law as to seditious libel in force. History seems to me against the notion. I had conceived that the United States, through many years, had shown its repentance for the Sedition Act of 1798, by repaying fines that it imposed. Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." Of course, I am speaking only of expressions of opinion and exhortations, which were all that were uttered here, but I regret that I cannot put into more impressive words my belief that, in their conviction upon this indictment, the defendants were deprived of their rights under the Constitution of the United States.

Source: Dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630-631 (1919). Part of this passage is also quoted in Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001) p. 430.

Note: It would be a mistake to think that Holmes was a consistent civil libertarian. He wrote the infamous majority opinions in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919) and Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.

Source: Anatole France (1844–1924), French author. The Red Lily, ch. 7 (1894)

Every time I repeat, as though by rote, my maxim, 'But justice will ultimately win', I cannot help twitching. Because I know it's a lie and I twitch when I lie.

Justice, alas, is not a benevolent God who will descend when all human efforts fail to salvage his name. The cases in history of grave injustices are well known. The Turks murdered a million and a half Armenians; have they been made to pay? The American Indians were crushed and dispossessed: do they stand a chance of justice? Of course, some may answer that this was before 1948 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Right. All men are equal but only as long as those who have do not have to sacrifice anything to those who have not.

Source: Raja Shehadeh. The Sealed Room: Selections from the Diary of a Palestinian Living Under Israeli Occupation, September 1990-August 1991. (London: Quartet Books, 1992) p. 161. Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and a founder of the human rights organization al-Haq. Sotomayor

Labels: critical thinking, Justice, law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, politics, quotations, Supreme Court

Here's are a few timely selections from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary:

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

DISTANCE, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

PRECEDENT, n. In Law, a previous decision, rule or practice which, in the absence of a definite statute, has whatever force and authority a Judge may choose to give it, thereby greatly simplifying his task of doing as he pleases. As there are precedents for everything, he has only to ignore those that make against his interest and accentuate those in the line of his desire. Invention of the precedent elevates the trial-at-law from the low estate of a fortuitous ordeal to the noble attitude of a dirigible arbitrament.

REVOLUTION, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment. Specifically, in American history, the substitution of the rule of an Administration for that of a Ministry, whereby the welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch. Revolutions are usually accompanied by a considerable effusion of blood, but are accounted worth it — this appraisement being made by beneficiaries whose blood had not the mischance to be shed. The French revolution is of incalculable value to the Socialist of to-day; when he pulls the string actuating its bones its gestures are inexpressibly terrifying to gory tyrants suspected of fomenting law and order.

TRIAL, n. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors. In order to effect this purpose it is necessary to supply a contrast in the person of one who is called the defendant, the prisoner, or the accused. If the contrast is made sufficiently clear this person is made to undergo such an affliction as will give the virtuous gentlemen a comfortable sense of their immunity, added to that of their worth. In our day the accused is usually a human being, or a socialist, but in mediaeval times, animals, fishes, reptiles and insects were brought to trial. A beast that had taken human life, or practiced sorcery, was duly arrested, tried and, if condemned, put to death by the public executioner. Insects ravaging grain fields, orchards or vineyards were cited to appeal by counsel before a civil tribunal, and after testimony, argument and condemnation, if they continued in contumaciam the matter was taken to a high ecclesiastical court, where they were solemnly excommunicated and anathematized. In a street of Toledo, some pigs that had wickedly run between the viceroy's legs, upsetting him, were arrested on a warrant, tried and punished. In Naples an ass was condemned to be burned at the stake, but the sentence appears not to have been executed. D'Addosio relates from the court records many trials of pigs, bulls, horses, cocks, dogs, goats, etc., greatly, it is believed, to the betterment of their conduct and morals. In 1451 a suit was brought against the leeches infesting some ponds about Berne, and the Bishop of Lausanne, instructed by the faculty of Heidelberg University, directed that some of "the aquatic worms" be brought before the local magistracy. This was done and the leeches, both present and absent, were ordered to leave the places that they had infested within three days on pain of incurring "the malediction of God." In the voluminous records of this cause celebre nothing is found to show whether the offenders braved the punishment, or departed forthwith out of that inhospitable jurisdiction.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Labels: art and literature, critical thinking, history, Justice, law, patriotism, politics, United States, voting, words

Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces. --Eduardo Galeano, "Divorces"

Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. --Wendell Berry

Source: Epigraphs to Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer.

Labels: critical thinking, Justice, law, repression

Dr. Sami Al-Arian--a Palestinian activist and US political prisoner for 1,491 days--has now been on a hunger strike for 60 days, he has lost 53 pounds, and is now in a prison medical facility. Al-Arian is protesting his imprisonment on contempt charges stemming from his refusal of the government's demand that he testify before a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

The Tampa, FL-based Friends of Human Rights is calling for a "rolling hunger strike" in solidarity with Al-Arian. Those who would like to join are asked to please send an e-mail to tampabayjustice@yahoo.com with the day they will fast.

Also, keep an eye out for, or better yet arrange a showing of, the new Norwegian documentary film, USA vs Al-Arian.

Labels: Al-Arian, Justice, Palestine, political prisoners, Zionism

Last night I watched the documentary film Paradise Lost (checked out from my local library) about the trial of three young men convicted for three murders in West Memphis, Arkansas. The film is long and a bit slow-paced but engrossing nevertheless. It is hard to believe that anyone can watch it and come away thinking these guys (pictured above right) got a fair trial, let alone that they are actually guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here's a synopsis of their story from a West Memphis Three support web site:

Shortly after three eight-year-old boys were found mutilated and murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas, local newspapers stated the killers had been caught. The police assured the public that the three teenagers in custody were definitely responsible for these horrible crimes. Evidence?

The same police officers coerced an error-filled "confession" from Jessie Misskelley Jr., who is mentally handicapped. They subjected him to 12 hours of questioning without counsel or parental consent, audio-taping only two fragments totaling 46 minutes. Jessie recanted it that evening, but it was too late— Misskelley, Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols were all arrested on June 3, 1993, and convicted of murder in early 1994.

Although there was no physical evidence, murder weapon, motive, or connection to the victims, the prosecution pathetically resorted to presenting black hair and clothing, heavy metal t-shirts, and Stephen King novels as proof that the boys were sacrificed in a satanic cult ritual. Unfathomably, Echols was sentenced to death, Baldwin received life without parole, and Misskelley got life plus 40.

For over 13 years, The West Memphis Three have been imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. Echols waits in solitary confinement for the lethal injection our tax dollars will pay for. They were all condemned by their poverty, incompetent defense, satanic panic and a rush to judgment.

But there’s still hope for them, and you can help.

Labels: Justice, video, West Memphis Three

Excerpt from "Not Guilty. The Pitstop Ploughshares All Acquitted on All Charges" on Indymedia Ireland, July 25, 2006:

The verdict was given at aproximately 11.50 a.m. this morning at this significant trial in The Four Courts. Since their action on the 3rd February 2003 the five defendants have waited three years for todays verdict, under onerous bail conditions, with two other trials collapsing. In a statement released immediately after the verdict the Pitstop Ploughshares said:

"The jury is the conscience of the community chosen randomly from Irish society. The conscience of the community has spoken. The government has no popular mandate in providing the civilian Shannon airport to service the US war machine in it's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"In 1996 in Liverpool the Jury acquittal of the four 'ploughshares' women contributed to the end of arms exports to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia and the independence of East Timor.

"The decision of this jury should be a message to London, Washington DC and the Dail that Ireland wants no part in waging war on the people of Iraq. Refuelling of US warplanes at Shannon Airport should cease immediately. " - Ciaron, Damien, Karen, Deirdre and Nuin.

Here's what they were on trial for:

In the early hours of Monday 3 February 2003, five members of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement cut their way into Shannon Airport, Ireland. The peace activists poured human blood on the runway that has been servicing U.S. military flights, troop and munition deployments to U.S. military bases in Kuwait and Qatar.

They constructed a shrine on the runway to Iraqi children killed and threatened by U.S./British bombardment and sanctions. The shrine consisted of copies of the Bible and Quran, rosary and muslim prayer beads, flowers, photographs of Iraqi children and Brigid's crosses. They then began to take up the runway, working on its edge with a mallet.

The activists approached the hanger housing a US Navy plane under repair. They painted ''Pit stop of death'' on the hanger's roller door, and began the dismantling of the hanger. They then entered the hanger to disarm the repaired US warplane. The plane in question according to Ciaron was the same plane as Mary Kelly hit with a hatchet in the recent past. They then prayed together.

Here are the first four paragraphs of the July 27, 2006, article " 'We'll use people power to shut down Shannon' " by Mary Regan in the Irish Examiner:

ANTI-WAR protesters are plotting to trespass at Shannon Airport, occupy a runway and blockade American air craft carrying troops to Iraq.

The warning, to "demilitarise" or shut down the airport through non-violent measures, came yesterday.

One of the five activists, acquitted this week on charges of causing an estimated €2 million worth of damage to a United States Navy aircraft three years ago, said every effort would be made to close down the airport through "people power".

Ciaron O'Reilly, 46, said: "We're going to analyse how many people it will take to close down Shannon Airport until it's demilitarised. In doing that we'll be in discussion with student groups, human rights peace groups, environmental groups and community groups, to see — in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Ghandi — if we can initiate a process of non-violent direct action and close the airport down until it's demilitarised."

Labels: anti-war movement, Iraq, Ireland, Justice, resistance