Author: mopress

The last week of November 2008 wore signs of worry from economic authorities in Texas.

The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) on Nov. 26 announced in a press release that it will begin notifying people with unemployment benefits that they may qualify for seven more weeks of relief because of a new federal law. TWC has an online portal for payment requests and benefits. TWC will need updated address information to send out the notices.

And the Dallas Federal Reserve on Nov. 28 featured information about RAISE Texas, an “asset building project” that helps to foster savings accounts, tax preparation services, small loans, and foreclosure deterrence. RAISE Texas has been working with the Texas Foreclosure Prevention Task Force to notify homeowners about a national bilingual hotline that works around the clock to provide advice on how to deter foreclosure. The HOPE hotline is reported to be open 24/7 at: 1-888-995-HOPE.

Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Wouldn’t it be horrible to be 50 and have been in prison for the last 25 years, missing out on seeing your children mature and have children of their own?

Well, that is the story of Steven Phillips from Dallas, a new grandfather who was just freed. He had been accused of sexual assault and burglary in two different cases and convicted in two different trials. (Once the police nailed him for one, they charged him with another one.)

Phillips got 30-year sentences at both trials. While in prison he was then asked by the authorities if he would confess to nine other sexual assaults which fit the pattern, and hoping for some mercy if he cooperated, he confessed to them.

The Dallas police, 25 years ago, were so thrilled to be nailing Phillips for eleven cases of sexual assault that they didn’t pay attention to authorities in Kansas City who also had a suspect, one Sidney Goodyear. Because Phillips had been positively identified by Dallas victims, the police did not bother telling his lawyer about Goodyear and something quite important.

After the Kansas City police sent down a picture of Goodyear, the Dallas police had shown the picture to one of the victims, who said that Goodyear could be the rapist, but the police never told Phillips’ lawyer about the conflicting evidence.

Luckily, one of the cases in which Phillips was tried involved some stored material which could be DNA tested. When the tests were run a year ago, the evidence did not match Phillips’ DNA. But it did match Goodyear’s! It is now conceded by all that Goodyear was the serial rapist in Dallas and Kansas City.

Should we feel pleased that justice has finally been done and Phillips is home? Yes. Should we be pleased that the system has proven itself to work, that bad decisions of the past continue to be corrected? No. The system does not work. At least not well enough to deserve praise. There are millions in prison, but only rare cases, like Phillips’ case, have appropriate specimen material available for DNA testing. And the Steven Phillips case alone reflects three widespread and lingering problems.

First, our old nemesis: eye-witness misidentification. Some backward “red meat” prosecutors still dramatize eye-witness identification as a slam dunk. And juries fall for it. We now know that Phillips did not commit the eleven crimes, but ten witnesses identified him! The national Innocence Project which defended Phillips said in its press release, “It is impossible to know [twenty five years later] how those identification procedures were conducted or how certain the victims were in their identifications. In addition, police circulated Phillips’ name and biographical information widely in the media before most of the victims identified him — this made their identifications highly unreliable.”

Most overturned convictions in Texas have fit the Phillips pattern. Of the 32 total DNA exonerations in Texas — where there is no doubt the accused were innocent — 25 of those cases involved eyewitness identification, sometimes from multiple witnesses.

The Phillips case reflected a second pattern: overzealous prosecutors who ignore conflicting evidence. Dallas alone has had 15 DNA exonerations, and the new prosecutor there has been working with the Innocence Project to undo the damage of a ferocious and racist predecessor. (Texas Monthly, Sept. 2007)

A third pattern: plea bargainings and false confessions. The Phillips case was really bizarre: Although Phillips did not confess to the two crimes he was tried for, the prosecutor bargained him into confessing to nine other ones. Because we have the Innocence Project statistics now, we know a lot more about confessions. Of the 200 people convicted whose innocence has subsequently been completely established by DNA tests, one in four had confessed!

Why so many confessions? Well, interrogation has become a science. (Google “Reid Technique” and you will cringe.) Interrogators are taught techniques like standing too close to you, controlling your space, cutting you off anytime you start to declare your innocence. Interrogators can lie to you legally, make up evidence against you; they can yell at you, insult you, keep you a long time, and suddenly turn friendly and “understanding.” The spare interrogation room is designed scientifically to keep you off balance, while the experts — they practice the techniques and get good at them — list the things you might be charged with.

Emily Horowitz, a criminal justice professor, has a nice piece on false confessions in the latest Counterpunch; she mentions people who have become depressed, abject and “dependent” in a crisis situation. They are nervous wrecks before they are interrogated, and they are no match for scientific accusers. “Just admit you made a mistake, and maybe we can go easy on you,” can be a very enticing line at just the right moment.

Horowitz continues: “According to a raft of social science and psychology research done over the past two decades, techniques like these [check the now common “Reid Technique”] are especially likely to produce false confessions when used on juveniles, the mentally ill, the poorly schooled, immigrants, and those with impaired cognition.” (There is also some evidence that those who have been sexually abused when they were youth are quite susceptible to making false confessions, since part of their survival mechanism was to blame themselves rather than those they admired.)

Steven Phillips, now 50 years old, is fully exonerated now, and we should be joyous. But the current system of vigorous police work and prosecution is still dangerous to society, and we have a lot more work to do.

Email from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Aug. 15, 2008).

Greetings from TRAC. The latest available data from the Justice Department show that new prosecutions by Customs and Border Protection during the first eight months of FY 2008 have soared. If CBP’s prosecutions continue at the same pace for the rest of the year, the FY 2008 total will be almost twice what it was in the previous year. For details, see the TRAC Report at:

trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/191/

According to the Justice Department, the CBP enforcement surge is the result of Project Streamline, a Bush Administration policy of bringing criminal charges against undocumented aliens.

By contrast, the Justice Department data, obtained by TRAC under the FOIA, show a much less precipitous increase in prosecutions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also in the DHS. For details, see:

trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/192/

Although immigration raids in Iowa and other inland locations have been heavily covered by the media, the data show that a substantial proportion of the criminal enforcement effort — even by ICE — takes place along the Mexican border.

TRAC continues to provide free reports on the latest enforcement trends. Go to trac.syr.edu/tracreports/bulletins/ for timely information on prosecutions and convictions that occurred in May for many categories of enforcement such as immigration, terrorism, white collar crime, official corruption, drugs, etc. Free reports are also available for major agencies such as the DEA, FBI, IRS and DHS.

The May 2008 criminal data are also available to TRACFED subscribers via the Express, Going Deeper and Analyzer tools. Go to tracfed.syr.edu for more information. Customized reports for a specific agency, district, program, lead charge or judge are available via the TRAC Data Interpreter, either as part of a TRACFED subscription or on a per-report basis. Go to trac.syr.edu/interpreter to start.

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

trac.syr.edu/sponsor/

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University

Attorney Goes Looking, after Client Goes Missing during Bathroom Break

By Greg Moses

DALLAS — An asylum seeker from Kosovo faces deportation this evening after Federal agents arrested him during a bathroom break this morning in a building where he was participating in court-ordered mediation.

Bujar Osmani, an ethnic “gypsy” in his mid-twenties was in the process of suing the persons who had represented him during a failed asylum plea.

“During mediation, Bujar went to the bathroom,” explains his Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson. “He was gone a long time. I went to look for him and could not find him.”

Gibson says a short time later he was told by a secretary “that a couple of men had tied Bujar’s hands behind his back and taken him away after he came out of the bathroom.” The arrest occurred at about 10:30 a.m. Gibson has since requested his client’s release.

“Bujar’s car is still in the parking lot of the mediator’s office,” explains Gibson in an email to the Texas Civil Rights Review. “The Gestapo did not even permit him to tell me or anybody else that they were taking him away. I found out about the abduction a few hours later when Bujar called me.”

Osmani is being detained at the immigration enforcement center at 8101 N. Stemmons Freeway, says Gibson.

Bujar Osmani describes his reasons for leaving Kosovo in a 2007 affidavit::

I left Kosovo in March 2004 escape certain death at the hands of Albanian extremists, who hate gypsies. Several negative events that took place in Kosovo have impacted my life since I was very young. The Serbian military tried to recruit my father forcibly to fight against the Albanian militias and the only reason he managed to escape was that he moved in with my uncle in a different municipality.

After the war ended my father came home but we were attacked by racist Albanians. After the war, many Ashkalis were killed by Albanian extremists. They set our house on fire on February 13, 2000 while my father and I were beaten in front of the family. After the assailants left we went to the local hospital but they refused to treat us there because we were Ashkali. The only place the doctors would treat us was at a humanitarian organization in Prishtina, “Medicines sans Frontiers.”

Since my family could not afford to rebuild our house, we moved in with my paternal uncle. I was taunted and attacked by Albanian extremists on various occasions, because of my Ashkali origin and the membership in the Ashkali Party, which was established to promote the Ashkalis’ rights. On March 19, 2004 during the worst riots by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, my uncle’s house was attacked and set on fire. I left with my uncle’s wife and five children in their car, through the back gate of the house. I traveled to Bari, Montenegro and since then have had no news about my family.

I went to Genoa in Italy, and applied for asylum using a false name, to conceal my Ashkali identity. Racist prejudice against gypsies is predominant in Italy, as well as among Albanians. The Italians denied me asylum, however, after they found out I was Ashkali. In August therefore I left Genoa to come to the US. I traveled through Mexico and entered the US on September 3, 2004.

When I came to US I did not have any relatives and the only language I could speak fluently was Albanian, so I approached the Albanian community for help. [A person] who happened to be living in Dallas as a refugee and was born in the same municipality as I, provided for me until I could support myself. He helped me with food, clothes, and money, and at the same time he went around to find legal counsel for me, since he could speak English. He said friends suggested he take me to [a person], who, we believed, was a lawyer.

The affidavit goes on to describe how Osmani met with the alleged lawyer and made preparations for an asylum hearing on April 4, 2005. But outside the hearing room, Osmani was approached by a new person who introduced himself as the attorney who would represent him.

After a series of hearings resulted in a “ruined” asylum claim, Osmani sued the pair of persons in a Texas District Court for “negligence, breach of contract, fraud, and civil conspiracy.” It was during court-ordered mediation for the lawsuit that Osmani was arrested and detained by immigration authorities.

“Jury trial is scheduled for 27 October 2008,” says Gibson. “The trial may be delayed by the events today, but it will happen if Osmani is not deported before the trial.”

“The judge we have now is fair and reasonable as far as I can tell,” says attorney Gibson. “But if Bujar is deported to Kosovo he
will have a hard time testifying in the district court in Dallas.”

“I asked DHS District Counsel Paul Hunker to obtain Osmani’s release from detention on an order of supervision on whatever terms DHS think best, until after the jury delivers its verdict,” writes Gibson. “It will be interesting to see what DHS District Director Nuria Prendes decides to do.”

Update: when I called the Gov’s office at 2:28 pm the receptionist said that “the Federal District Court has issued a stay”–gm

Reposted from OpEdNews. Get more info and link to contact the Governor at: savejeffwood.com–gm

TODAY, JEFF WOOD will take his place beside my mentally ill brother, who is no. 26 on the home page of this prisoner genocide website:

geocities.com/prisonmurder

On August 21, Texas is poised to do the unthinkable: execute a mentally ill young man who the state knows killed no one. In fact, Jeff is facing execution for a murder that he was not even present to witness. He was found guilty of a murder committed by David Reneau. David killed Kriss Keeran while robbing a Texaco convenience store in Kerrville, Texas.

It happened on January 2, 1992, when Jeff was 22 years old, a mentally challenged young man. It is sad that mental patients and people with learning disabilities like Jeff are often easily led like little children. Jeff was abused during his early childhood, leaving him with a submissive personality. How hard was it for Daniel Reneau to get Jeff to accompany him to a robbery?

Wood’s defense attorneys stated in a clemency brief early this month, “Reneau — the only person inside the store and who carried a weapon — alone made the decision to take Keeran’s life. Mr. Wood was outside the store in his brother’s truck.” Daniel Reneau carried a gun that Jeff never knew he had and committed a murder that Jeff didn’t see occur.

Although Daniel Reneau has already been executed for murdering Keeran, today Jeff will also be executed. Initially, Jeff was found not mentally fit to stand trial. He was admitted into a mental hospital and a couple of weeks later was found ‘trial ready’. But one could argue whether Jeff was really competent at his trial, considering the way he tied his lawyers’ hands as they tried to defend him.

“Bowing to Mr. Wood’s emotional and irrational insistence, Mr. Wood’s appointed lawyers declined to cross-examine any witnesses or present any evidence on Mr. Wood’s behalf,” his appeals attorneys argue. “Mr. Wood’s trial attorneys called Mr. Wood’s actions a ‘gesture of suicide.’” (Quote source: Alternet )

I received a message a couple of days ago from a man who identified himself as Daniel Reneau’s brother, Ben Reneau. He implored us to save Jeff, saying Jeff’s execution is wrong. He expressed regret that his brother, Daniel Reneau, did not make a statement to clear Jeff of the murder.

The truth is that a statement from Daniel probably would not matter to Texas, as the state acknowledges that Jeff actually killed no one. Jeff was sentenced to die under the Law of Parties, which makes all parties to a crime equally guilty of the crime. Perhaps they are like the people in this satire and believe it is simply time for Texas to have another execution, because executions are fun for some folks:

Texas Pardons and Parole Board decided not to grant clemency. The fate of this condemned mental patient is now up to Governor Rick Perry. August 21 is a sad day for justice if Jeff Wood is executed.

Mary Neal
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
P.O. Box 7222, Atlanta, GA 30357