After Davino Watson was released, he filed a complaint. Last year, a district judge in New York awarded him $82,500 in damages, citing “regrettable failures of the government.”
On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is “disturbing,” the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.
Janae Bonsu & Montague Simmons say their demands for black power, freedom and justice go beyond reform and require transformative change
The U.S. has a patchwork of civil rights protections for LGBT people and in most states it's legal to discriminate people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The #JournoList
March 9, 2015
Thousands of people crowded an Alabama bridge on Sunday, many jammed shoulder to shoulder, many unable to move, to commemorate a bloody confrontation 50 years ago between police and peaceful protesters that helped bring about the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Echoing a speech given by President Obama a day earlier, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Sunday that access to the polls was “under siege” by a flurry of recent state laws, and by a 2013 United States Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act.
Wisconsin police fatally shot an apparently unarmed African-American teenager on Friday, prompting dozens of people to protest at the site of the killing, according to police and videos published on social media.
Activists protested for a third day in Madison, Wisconsin, on Sunday over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman, the latest in a string of killings that have intensified concerns of racial bias in U.S. law enforcement.
Within hours of a white officer shooting an unarmed black man, the police chief of Wisconsin’s capital city was praying with the man’s grandmother, hoping to strike a conciliatory tone and avoid the riots that last year rocked Ferguson.
An Iraqi man who recently moved with his wife to the United States for safety reasons was shot and killed in Texas while watching snow fall for the first time.
The Department of Veterans Affairs' chief watchdog has not publicly released the findings of 140 health care investigations since 2006, potentially leaving dangerous problems to fester without proper oversight.
A law that allows rural hospitals to bill Medicare for rehabilitation services for seniors at higher rates than nursing homes and other facilities has led to billions of dollars in extra government spending, federal investigators say.
There's been a significant increase in suicides among middle-aged and older adults, and it appears a portion of the rise can be attributed to the Great Recession.
The Islamic State appears to be starting to fray from within, as dissent, defections and setbacks on the battlefield sap the group’s strength and erode its aura of invincibility among those living under its despotic rule.
In those areas of Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State, residents are furtively recording on their cellphones damage done to antiquities by the extremist group. In northern Syria, museum curators have covered precious mosaics with sealant and sandbags.
The U.S. Peace Corps said it is temporarily suspending its program in Jordan because of the "regional environment," highlighting growing security concerns among some foreigners after Jordan raised its profile in the battle against Islamic State militants.
Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Mark Kirk and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker are among 300 Republicans who signed onto a friend of the court brief at the Supreme Court in support of gay marriage.
A University of Oklahoma fraternity will close and its members will be suspended after the group's national headquarters says a video of members participating in a racist chant was posted online.
Photo: The El Pias newsroom.
When police police officers in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, forced 27-year-old Muslim woman Malak Kazan to remove her hijab while being arrested for driving without a license, she believed they violated her First Amendment rights.
Now she’s fighting back with a lawsuit that seeks to prevent officers from doing the same while processing suspects in Dearborn Heights, near one of the largest Muslim communities in America.
Hundreds of items that belonged to civil rights icon Rosa Parks and have been sitting unseen for years in a New York warehouse were sold to a foundation run by the son of billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett, the younger Buffett said Thursday.
Howard G. Buffett told The Associated Press that his foundation plans to give the items, which include Parks' Presidential Medal of Freedom, to an institute or museum he hasn't yet selected. Buffett said the items belong to the American people.
"I'm only trying to do one thing: preserve what's there for the public's benefit," he said. "I thought about doing what Rosa Parks would want. I doubt that she would want to have her stuff sitting in a box with people fighting over them."
The American Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Council, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Public Counsel, and K&L Gates LLP today filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of children who are challenging the federal government's failure to provide them with legal representation as it carries out deportation hearings against them. The Obama administration recently called an influx of children coming across the Southern border a "humanitarian situation." And yet, thousands of children required to appear in immigration court each year do so without an attorney. "If we believe in due process for children in our country, then we cannot abandon them when they face deportation in our immigration courts," said Ahilan Arulanantham, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. "The government pays for a trained prosecutor to advocate for the deportation of every child. It is patently unfair to force children to defend themselves alone." While the Obama Administration recently announced a limited program to provide legal assistance to some youth facing deportation hearings, advocates say this proposal does not come close to meeting the need for legal representation for all children whom the government wants to deport. And there is no guarantee that additional funding proposed by the administration Tuesday will materialize or meet the overwhelming need. The complaint charges the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Health and Human Services, Executive Office for Immigration Review, and Office of Refugee Resettlement with violating the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause and the Immigration and Nationality Act’s provisions requiring a "full and fair hearing" before an immigration judge. It seeks to require the government to provide children with legal representation in their deportation hearings. "Deportation carries serious consequences for children, whether it is return to a country they fled because of violence and persecution or being separated from their homes and families. Yet children are forced into immigration court without representation – a basic protection most would assume is required whenever someone’s liberty is at stake. Requiring children to fight against deportation without a lawyer is incompatible with American values of due process and justice for all," said Beth Werlin, deputy legal director for the American Immigration Council.
"When the Supreme Court overturned that part of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, that same day Mississippi and Alabama and North Carolina and Texas all announced that they were moving ahead, immediately, with new restrictions on voting. Restrictions they had wanted to institute before but they had been blocked by the old voting rights law that banned any changes that would be too racist, too racially discriminatory in their impact. With that law out of the way they went ahead with those changes on the first day they could." - Rachel Maddow, U.S. civil rights legacy tested 50 years after ‘Freedom Summer’
Luci Baines Johnson, daughter of former President Lyndon B. Johnson
What would LBJ say about gay rights? Click here.
(via usnews)
Within 20 minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning a portion of the Voting Rights Act, the attorney general of Texas tweeted a message signaling that strict voter-ID laws would go into effect there immediately.
“I’ll fight #Obama’s effort to control our elections,” Greg Abbott, who just announced he’s running for governor of Texas, tweeted June 25, the day the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder was released. Unless the law can be successfully challenged in court, Texas residents will now have to show a state- or federal-issued form of photo identification to vote. The list of acceptable forms includes a concealed-handgun license but not a state university student ID. The omission suggests it is not voter fraud but voters unfriendly to the GOP that Abbott and other Texas Republicans are trying to thwart.
Other states — like Mississippi and Arkansas – that have GOP-controlled legislatures and a history of racial discrimination, and whose election laws have been supervised by the Department of Justice since the VRA’s passage in 1965, have also wasted no time moving forward with new voting restrictions in the wake of the Shelby County decision.
Read more. [Image: Gerry Broome/Associated Press]
My report for Free Speech Radio News:
The state of Texas will soon carry out its 500th execution since reinstating the death penalty in 1976. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court ordered further review of seven of the state's death row inmates' cases. FSRN’s Teddy Wilson has more.
The Supreme Court yesterday sent six Texas death penalty cases back to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals for review. The high court said that the men have the right to claim ineffective counsel, even though Texas state law has no such legal provision. The lower court will now determine if the defendants’ attorneys failed to provide an adequate defense for their clients. The ruling followed a similar case last week in which a split court ruled that death row inmate Carlos Trevino had been denied a “meaningful opportunity” to claim ineffective counsel in his 1996 conviction of the gang rape and fatal stabbing of 15-year-old Linda Salinas. None of the seven men were currently scheduled to die. Teddy Wilson, FSRN, Texas.
May 10, 1963: Birmingham Campaign Ends in Victory
On this day in 1963, the Birmingham Campaign ended with a victory. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth signed a truce agreement with local officials to outline a ‘limited desegregation plan,’ which promised to:
Desegregation, however, would take place slowly over the next few months. Learn more about the Birmingham Campaign with PBS Black Culture Connection.
Photo: Martin Luther King Jr. gives a press conference regarding an agreement reached on a ‘limited desegregation plan’ outside the Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama (Photo by Ernst Haas/Ernst Haas/Getty Images)
Today (May 9, 2013) is the 66th anniversary of the start of the first Freedom Ride.
It was called the Journey of Reconciliation, and white & black activists rode (otherwise) segregated buses through four southern states.
The interstate bus ride, lasted from April 9-23, and was designed to test the June 3, 1946 Supreme Court ruling that said Black passengers could not be forced to sit at the back of the bus. Bayard Rustin, a 101 Changemaker, participated in and helped to organize the ride. The riders were arrested several times.
Later rides and riders would be violently attacked by racist mobs.
Read more in: 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History.
