Major Courtroom Victory Against “Wealth-Based Human Caging”
In a sweeping order, a judge has ruled that the bail system in Harris County, Texas, including the city of Houston, is unconstitutional. Because of the decision, “we are on the road to eradicating the notion of wealth-base human caging,” said Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of the Washington-based Civil Rights Corps. The ruling affects defendants charged with low level offenses. “On any given night in this country there are about 450,000 human beings who are sitting in a cage because they can’t come up with a particular amount of money that’s been required for their release,” said Karakatsanis.
Haiti Activists Seek to Block Clinton Commencement Speech
Protesters demanded that Medgar Evers College cancel Hillary Clinton’s scheduled commencement address at the mostly Black Brooklyn institution, next month. The Clintons are a criminal family, said Dahoud Andre, of Komokoda, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti. If Medgar Evers College honors the former secretary of state, it will be condoning “the crimes of the Clinton family, and Hillary Clinton, personally, against the people of Haiti and against Black youth, who she called ‘animals’ and ‘thugs’ who should be ‘brought to heel,’” said Andre.
“Facts Don’t Matter” to U.S. Corporate Media
When the Trump administration claimed that Syria launched a chemical attack on civilians, in April, Dr. Theodore Postol conducted an investigation that debunked the official U.S. version of events. Postol is professor emeritus of science, technology and national security issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, the corporate media ignore Postol’s findings. “The facts don’t seem to matter at all to anybody,” he said. “It looks to me like a complete collapse of any kind of journalistic standards within the mainstream press.”
Mumia Remembers MOVE, Back in the Day
The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, marked the 45th anniversary of the MOVE organization with recollections of when MOVE members were undergound in Rochester, New York. There, they “lived a life of peace that was unthinkable in Philadelphia,” because “they lived out of the eye of a merciless media,” he said. “Absent the ‘zone of negativity by the media, people met MOVE as people, and loved them.” In contrast, police and media hostility to MOVE in the City of Brotherly Love led to life sentences for nine MOVE members in 1978, and the bombing of the MOVE residence in 1985, killing eleven members, including five children.
NYC Mayor is No Progressive, Says Challenger Gangi
Bill de Blasio has not earned the label “progressive,” said Robert Gangi, the former director of the Police Reform Organizing Project who has thrown his hat in the mayoral race. De Blasio has not “addressed the social, racial and economic inequities that do such great damage to large populations that live in our city,” said Gangi. “He supports ‘broken windows policing,’ which is blatantly racist policing.”
Free Mothers Day in The Bronx
Juanita Young, whose son was killed by New York City cops, is one of the organizers of a Free Mothers Day event at Hostos College, in The Bronx, this Saturday. “You’ve got people’s sons who’ve been murdered through gun violence; you’ve got young men locked up for these police raids,” said Young, whose group is called The Motherhood. “What is going on, that the system feels that our loved ones’ lives have no value?”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
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Patrick Berry is a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, where he focuses on voting rights restoration and promoting fair, diverse, and impartial courts. He joins us from New York to…
