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Austin Police Chief Stan Knee requested that blood and urine
samples be seized by the district attorney for ‘safe keeping’ after a
second round of tests from a slain police suspect contradicted last
month’s findings that the 18-year-old was drug free the night he was shot in the back and killed.

"The Austin Police Department is disturbed by the inconsistent
findings," said a statement posted at the police department web
site. The statement does not say which drugs were found or in
what amounts.

"Immediately upon being notified of the results, I contacted the
District Attorney’s Office and urged them to seize the blood and urine
evidence and send it to a third party laboratory for analyses," said
the statement from the Chief. "They have agreed to do this. We have
also notified the Federal Bureau of Investigations of this event."

One television station reported that "suspicions were confirmed" when
the second test was reported, but which suspicions were
confirmed? Suspicions that the victim was involved with
drugs? Suspicions that the truth of the incident may never be
known? Suspicions concerning the pattern of police irregularities
in this case?

"Since this case remains under investigation by both the Travis County
Grand Jury and the U.S. Department of Justice, our ability to comment
is limited," concluded the statement from Knee.

For more on the incident, see Dove Springs Speaks about Rocha in our archives of June 2005.

We are T.U.L.A.-TEXAS UNITED LATINO ARTISTS.

In the year of our Lord-2005-September 17-Saturday We set out to celebrate our 6th Annual Mexican Independence Day Parade and Festival at the Texas State Capitol- fulfilling the promise of our Slogans-T.U.L.A.

Utilizing the Universal Language of Art For The Promotion Of Peace and A Better Understanding Between Us All. Seeking the Path to Equality we discovered that the means through the eyes of a Child.

On a bus ride down Congress Ave. I witnessed children of different nationalities discuss a drawing one of them had composed. We realized that the Arts community has been traditionally and historically less prone to racial, sexual, ethnic divisions than those imposed on us by society. Our second slogan-T.U.L.A – In The Spirit OF Diversity- Un Nuevo Amanecer. A New Dawn with more compassion for each other. By the mere fact that we celebrate this historic day at The Texas State Capitol demonstrates that we have all evolved. Art has been responsible for this evolution. While it is in fact a historical date we also celebrate the strength of the Human spirit, which involves all of us. T.U.L.A. is an inclusive organization.

People of all walks of life are Welcomed to participate. Within this premises we claim the Right to Self Determination. For we live in a Democratic Society. Simply Put -We Must Paint Our Own Rainbow. No one will come to save or lobby for us, but us.

In the historical context we are faced with a dilemma. A vibe which is deeply engrained in the equation of thought here in this Country. ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL. This is fine and dandy but it excludes first of all Women and people of Color. This is Racism, and horrible sins have been committed against us because of it.

As a result we are invisible in the civil human rights game. Human Rights activist can sin against us and still retain their Activist aura, as was the case when Alex Jones lead the minutemen charge against the parade.

Still, Once again we see this ancient demon raise its ugly head in the form of the minutemen. Twenty-seven years ago we saw the same character in their racist campaign. The slogans were the same. The same hatred that we saw as the minutemen that attacked our parade. The difference was that they were called the KKK.

The behavior of the minutemen was pathetic, offensive, a throw back to 1930. Shouts of wetback, go back to Mexico were the mildest insults directed at us. With out a conscience they offended us, not considering we had children in the Parade.

Equally inconsiderate were the Anglo "radicals" with their "in your face "Confrontation of the minute men which further aggravated the situation. We don’t need anyone to protect us. The irony is that they all missed the beauty of it all.

I wish to commend our Brothers and Sisters in their Beautiful Motorcycles, customized cars and their floats for showing restrain. In strength, the minutemen were no match for us. We are a Brave Proud People, Proud as an Eagle and we refuse to live in Fear.

So what do we want is a constant question. Folks, we want everything that a society that we have helped build has to offer. In this city we are 40% of the population and the major work force. We work hard to make the Dream possible. For everyone. We love our country, our children, our parents, our neighbors. And we forgive those who have exploited and oppressed us.

There are more pressing needs in this country than the hatred the minutemen demonstrate. We invite all good People to come and share a day of peace and the beauty of our Art, our Culture and our Friendship. We are good Friends. And to those who are infuriated by our quest for Equality, Think about it every time you put gas in your car or the phone rings and you have a loved one in Iraq.

We are in this together.

Un Abrazo
Joe M. Perez-Chair-T.U.L.A.

By Greg Moses

Sarah and Roxanne knew Daniel Rocha in high school, so at the press
conference called by Poder, LULAC, and the ACLU, they shared a sign
protesting the grand jury’s decision to issue no indictments against
the police officer who
killed him. Both Sarah and Roxanne say the same thing about the
situation: "Daniel was a small guy."

"Daniel was pretty cool," says Roxanne. "I had a dance class with his girlfriend, so he was always at the
door waiting for her. He always had a smile on his face. He
was always making everyone laugh. He would tell a lot of jokes." That was back in 2003 before Roxanne had her little girl,
Justice. "Her dad named her that." In fact, Sarah and Roxanne, who are cousins,
were at the courthouse Tuesday so that Justice could visit her dad
at the county jail. He’s been there for a couple of months, but
he should hopefully be getting out later this week.

Anyway, when the cousins saw what the protest was about they said to
each other, "let’s stay out here." At first there were enough
signs so that Roxanne and Sarah could each hold one, but then a guy
came to the protest who didn’t have a sign, so Roxanne gave him hers,
and after that she shared Sarah’s, all the while holding Justice on
her shoulder.

According to reports coming out of the courthouse Tuesday, the officer
told the Grand Jury how she had lost her taser while pushing Daniel to
the ground and feared that if he had the taser, he might use it against
another police officer at the scene and take that officer’s gun. "I
have been in a number of fights before and never have I felt this
scared and afraid. Instinctively, I grabbed for my gun and shot him
once. Self-preservation took over."

One news report Tuesday night stated matter of factly that Rocha "was
shot in the back as he stood over another officer who had fallen during
the fight." But witnesses reported that the officer who did the
shooting was standing over Daniel when she pulled the trigger. And Daniel was "already on the ground."

Says attorney Bobby Taylor in behalf of the Rocha family: "What we’re
being told is that the officer did not know where her Taser was, and that’s
the justification for shooting him in the back. That’s the
justification for it. That’s it. She did not see him with it. He did
not threaten her. If I were a police officer I’d feel pretty
comfortable in doing whatever the world I wanted to do."

The Police Officers Association sees it as fair warning: "I think it
tells people, ‘Don’t fight the police when we’re out there trying to do
our job.’ I think the public and the law states that you have to comply
with the officers," said the association’s rep.

Buried under Tuesday’s events was the memory that of three cop cars at
the scene that night, none of them was able to produce the required
video tape. One machine was empty, one malfunctioned, and the third car arrived too late, said police.

At any rate, says Sarah, "There were two cops there, and Daniel was a
little guy." The Grand Jury, she thinks, is "full of themselves."
Their decision to issue no indictments really, really, really upsets
her. "They have all the evidence there, but like a friend of mine
says, guns don’t kill people, police kill people. He wasn’t that
big."

"I’m not going to lie to you," says Sarah when I ask her about
Daniel. "He was a good guy, but I’m not going to say he didn’t
have some bad times. He was in and out of juvenile. Some
was for drug charges." As she sees it, Daniel drifted into hard
company in a hard neighborhood, he had no dad, but he cared.

For example, the last class she shared with Daniel was a self-paced
computer lab where students could make up for classes they had not yet
passed. Daniel was doing some math there. Sarah was doing
some history. She recalls that he was concentrating on his work, but he
would get up and start dancing now and then.

She remembers in early March that Daniel took his camera
to school and talked about pictures that he had taken of his mom. "I
love my mom so much," she recalls Daniel saying. "I know I’m
stressing her out really bad. I need to stop." But soon after that he
got into a fight, which caused him more trouble at school. They didn’t let him graduate.

Sarah senses that living in a troubled neighborhood is a double threat
to kids like Daniel. There’s the trouble they can get into, and
there’s the trouble that people will think they are up to, whether or
not they are. She thinks that because Daniel was caught in a car
that had just driven out of a poor neighborhood that "the cops took it
the wrong way."

Police say the car had been spotted in a drug transaction while under
surveillance, but Sarah asks if the car was under surveillance, why
weren’t the police better prepared for the stop? If this was a
planned drug trap in the first place, why was it handled like a
routine traffic stop, three suspects, two cops? And the missing video tapes? "Maybe
if there was one car and that video didn’t work, but all of them?
I don’t believe that."

For Sarah, there is an attitude of suspicion that cops bring to the
neighborhood that makes her angry. It also makes her worry about
baby Justice, who also lives in a troubled part of town. "What if
one day she’s at the wrong place at the wrong time. Just because
she has black in her, just because she’s Hispanic, just because she’s a
different color…"

But most of all she wants the world to know that Daniel had not yet
given up on himself. "He had dreams. He was trying to take
care of his mom. He had goals set for himself." Daniel
talked about starting his own clothing line named D-Roch that would
feature jerseys, shoes, and pants. He dressed like he cared about his
clothes.

"If it was raining," says Sarah, "and if he was wearing new shoes, he
would wear bags over his shoes." Over the telephone I hear a
little puffing sound as Sarah laughs through her nose. That was
Daniel, not too proud to wear bags on his shoes in the rain. "He
took real good care of himself. I really want you to put it out
there that he wasn’t a bad person."

I was walking on Pleasant Valley and had stopped near the fire hydrant
when I saw the police car stop in front of the stop sign. I saw
this guy run from the suburban and a white unmarked police car went
after him and brought him back after I had heard the shot. I
really didn’t get a good look at this guy but he had facial hair and
dark long hair pulled back like a pony tail. I think he was
Hispanic and may have been 22 years old.

I saw the female officer telling this other Hispanic guy to "get on the
ground." I think she told him once or twice. They were on
the passenger side of the suburban near tall grass. They were
actually between the sidewalk and the street curb. I hear the guy
say "weapon" but I didn’t see anything in his hands. I saw him
get on his hands and knees and saw the female officer with her left
hand trying to put him on the ground and she was kinda kneeling with
her left hand and knee. I saw her with a gun in her right
hand. I saw he was lying flat. I don’t know if the guy was
fighting with the officer or resisting because I did not see
that. I thought that the police were going to arrest him and put
him up. I walked off back to my house but then I heard a shot….

Signed and notarized June 10, 2005

The Texas Civil Rights Review has signed a petition asking that prisoners no longer be denied their rights to vote.

Like many folks, your editor for decades held the position that the
violation of some ‘social contract’ could serve as moral grounds for
denying convicted felons their rights to participate in elections.

But what is a ‘social contract’? And does a felony conviction
fairly count as the sole criterion for judging that someone has broken
one?

To comment on this article please go to the comment blog.

To skim an easy example from Texas headlines these days, let’s consider
the elected representatives of the legislature, and the role they are
supposed to play in the ‘social contract’, if there is such a thing.

Because, if there is such a thing as a ‘social contract’, one would think that the
state legislature would be the most likely place to look for people who
honor it.

If there is a ‘social contract’, then, state legislators would be the
ones morally obliged to say things like: ‘look, we have a "social
contract" to keep with the children of Texas, etc.’ Then they would pass an income tax, and go home for the summer.

I skim the example, not to get back into all the cruddy history of the
Texas state legislature, especially when it comes to their stewardship of
education. I just use the example of the legislature’s track record in
education
to show how, if there is a ‘social contract’, and if breaking it were
sufficient grounds to deny someone the right to vote, then how would we
begin to apply the enforcement of such a rule, fairly, across
the board?

If breaking a ‘social contract’ is grounds to revoke a person’s right
to vote, then state legislators ought to lead by example, and revoke
their own voting rights next week. How’s that for a modest proposal?

So the argument that prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because
they broke their ‘social contract’, is an argument that runs into all
kinds of Civil Rights problems, if you take the equal protection clause
of the 14th amendment to be a central premise of civil rights logic.

***

But to be honest about it, the flaw of the ‘social contract’
justification was not what really prompted your humble editor to
re-think voting rights for prisoners. More persuasive has been
the trend over my adult lifetime for lawmakers across the USA to
replace
education with incarceration as the great hope of domestic tranquility.

The first time I heard Angela Davis make the argument, I was
startled. She said (I forget exactly which time) that if you
compare the political economy of the prison population today, with the
slave population of 1860, then you get a pattern that expresses some
deep, visceral structure of American power relations.

In fact, at no time in American history have we been able to produce a
sharable system of freedom and justice for all. Seen in this light,
the legislature’s failure this summer to provide
excellent education (let’s face it, for poor kids and brown kids and
black kids) is not simply to be chalked up to conflicting personalities
between three old white men. The failure is deeply structural.

Or put it this way: let’s suppose some court declared the Texas highway
speed limits unconstitutional, and then ordered the legislature to fix the
system, or face the closure of all highways. And suppose at the end of
two regular sessions, with half a dozen special sessions in between,
the result came out that nothing had yet been resolved, and Texans were
told that come October, the highway system would be shut down.

Hang with your humble editor, dear reader. The point is just about done. Now suppose we had some political analysis
that said, well, we have three ornery white guys who just can’t get
their egos (or whatever the folks at PinkDome call that thing) lined
up. Would we be just sitting back, reading that account, and
shaking our heads?

Or even worse–would we be expecting any of these guys to be remotely considering campaigns for re-election?

At times like this I think of my cat, Princess. She is such a
bearutiful and clever creature. Sometimes, if I get busy typing
or reading, and I forget to feed her promptly on time, she has this way
of slipping. She just walks across the table and her foot slides,
ever so accidentally of course, right down onto some fleshy surface,
and ouch! Oh my god, she is such an artist when it comes to
slipping up in just the right way at the right time.

***

No, to get back to the story, the ability of the legislature to
fumble this ball over and over again, with everybody watching, shaking
their heads, and wringing their hands, speaks to our collective
character as a state population, because goddammit, it’s who we deeply
are. We are not ashamed of these guys, because we have no shame when it comes to our own faith in education.

And part of this structure of our collective personality involves the
criminalization and incarceration of the very same people who we never
believed we should share anything with anyway.

And that’s why prisoners should not be denied their right to vote.

***

But there is still one argument more. It has to do with
consequences of social drift. When public policy drifts into
criminalization, and when the felons are at the same time deprived of
their rights to vote, then the politicians who are most reponsible for
the trend have no consequences to fear, because they are busy
disenfranchising their most likely critics.

The trend is reinforced when rural, white populations compete for
prison-related opportunities, importing populations into their counties
who will have no say whatsoever in local elections. Again, as
with politicians, thinly populated rural communities might think twice
about importing swing voters, and, when it comes to prison policy,
thinking twice is really what we need more of.

So, given the incoherence of the ‘social contract’ argument, given the
visceral traditions in America (and in Texas) that continue to
perpetuate ugly structures of power, and given the one-way direction in
which these consequences tend to be dumped–these reasons give us
sufficient warrant to sign a petition asking that prisoners be restored
their rights to vote.

[PS, sorry, I realize Sunday sermons should not use the GD word.
But if we really are the collective character that our legislature is
reflecting back on us, then too many Sunday sermons have needed improvement anyway.]