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Email from Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr. (Nov. 13, 2007)

Hola y’all…

I arrived back from the UN endorsed Border Summit of the Americas sponsored by the International Indigenous Treaty Council. I’m going to give a brief report of that Summit as well as include some pics and other tid-bits about what’s happening with the wall.

First, to attend and be a presenter at the Summit was a deep honor and privilege. It was held on the tribal lands of the Tohono O’odham nation. You can read updates on the Summit by Brenda Norrell here.

http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

The indigenous still find themselves profiled and victimized by the ruling supremacists. We went to the imaginary border between the US and Mexico and saw the border wall under construction. It was a horrifying experience to see the wall cutting across these people’s sovereign wilderness land. (see pics) We heard from experts how literally hundreds of women and children have died going across this stretch of desert. We saw first hand when women and children were arrested. And we realize that the sinister plot of Chertoff & the ICE company is to direct them even farther into remote desert areas…which would most inhumanely cause even more deaths. We’re not talking terrorists here. We’re dealing with poor starving people. What’s more sinister is that the ruling elite have planned it that way. These elitists only want to preserve the US racial landscape…and pad it with well educated minorities that have some money to deposit in their banks.

Some miles away from the border, we also went by the Border Patrol site where these poor indigenous are literally caged…not like but as animals. Rising above the “cage” is the private Israeli surveillance company spy tower…that spies on the Tohono O’odham who reside on the US side.

While we were holding the Border Summit, a group of young people held their own border wall protest, called No Border Camp at the wall in the sister city Mexicali-Calexico, CA crossing…just south of El Centro, CA. Check this link out. ( http://www.noborderscamp.org ) Like our border protests in Texas, this one will not get presented to the people of the US by the national network accomplices. Here’s a sample of what went on there just these past few days.

“No Border Camp” marchers were attacked in Calexico, CA.

Police Use Pepper Gas, Batons on Peaceful Demonstrators – Dozens Detained and Released, at Least 2 Arrested At the end of a bi-national march from the site of the No Borders Camp and rally at the Mexicali/Calexico port of entry, Border Patrol swarmed a group of about 30 demonstrators on the U.S. side and attacked them with pepper pellets and batons. 2-3 people severely beaten. Mass detentions. People being let go five at a time. In one case, a person badly injured by pepper pellets shot at close range was pursued away from the conflict, pulled away from a companion wanting to treat his wounds, surrounded and beaten in the head with batons by about 10 Border Patrol agents. Most who were detained have now been released. Two people have been taken into a Border Patrol vehicle. Further information forthcoming…

This is serious friends. If we aren’t courageous enough to stop the wall in Texas, look at what our kids and grandkids will be faced with. Right now, someone’s kids and grandkids out in CA are standing up to this ruling supremacist regime. This insanity must be stopped….NOW! Once the wall is in place…any scratch put upon it will be a felony…”damage to federal property”. Let’s damage the architectural schematic…and destroy the concept of something so dehumanizing and vile.

Whether one believes is God or not…or in Nature…or both…we must agree. Neither God nor nature would approve of this violation of natural harmony. The US has morphed into what we all detested at one time. At one time, the Berlin wall symbolized all that we detested. Now the racist-supremacists…nativists…want 700 miles of it. And they are picking on the most vulnerable peoples of this continent. The indigenous. Just look at what they are doing on the reservation in Arizona…and project that image all along the banks of Rio Grande.

Which brings me back to Texas. As reported in the Rio Grande Guardian, we have another sell out. Judge Carlos Cascos. He is seen here in this video proposing to the pro-wall/anti-immigrant, Texas Senator, John Cornyn…that a wall to be built on reinforced levies all along the banks of the Rio Grande in South Texas…especially around Brownsville. The levies would be steeply banked with the border wall on top…which would also provide a border patrol road on the top of the levy.

Cascos is certainly walking on thin ice here on the border. His friendship and representation of the No Border Wall alliance is in grave question. He certainly is no friend of our neighbors on the other sider of the river…if he presents his own border wall proposal to the US Senate. Without question he is alienating our environmental allies. By proposing such a heinous idea, he is a long ways off from representing the voice of the people. Is his proposal self serving? Is he seeking the admiration of his ruling elitist?

Meanwhile, Kay Bailey-Hutchison, another ruling elitist, who voted for the wall after saying she wouldn’t…and then co-sponsored with Cornyn the funding of the wall…is standing back and letting Cornyn take the heat. She well knows that Cornyn is up for reelection and knows that he will pay for his complicity in this totalitarian scheme. She well recognizes that her aspirations of becoming the next Texas governor could be harmed if the Hispanic/Latin/Border voters associated her with the wall. Well…Duh! We shall never forget her betraying cheap politics!

Just out today is the following…chilling…expose of yet another step to purge America of immigrants. Please read this news coverage of HR 4088…the supposed SAVE ACT…which will guarantee the most cruel and inhumane treatment of anyone not yet a citizen of the US.

Finally, we would like everyone to remember February 2, 2008. On that date, we will be holding a Winter Texans festival on the banks of the Rio Grande at Pepe’s on the River in Mission, TX. We will be deputizing our Winter Texans as Border Ambassadors…giving them a farewell as they return to their their northern residences where they are registered voters…to represent our mutual love of the border and the border culture…and our friends across el Rio Grande.

In solidarity…

Jay

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BorderAmbassadors.com
FreedomAmbassadors.com
Connecting the Dots…Making a Difference
jay@villadelrio.com
Please read my column: Inside the Checkpoints:
http://www.riograndeguardian.com/columns3.asp

Note: the following item was originally posted as a message at the Texas Civil Rights Review.

Houston Activists Converge on Austin Protest

July 20 at the Austin offices of Corrections Corporation of America:
see report from Houston Sin Fronteras

By Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA)
Congressional Record
June 12, 2007 (H6272)

[The DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008] appropriates a record amount of spending, $36.3 billion. What we tried to do in the committee, and I want to commend Mr. Rogers and Mr. Price, was starting out asking what are the risk issues that we really need to face in the Nation. This whole emphasis has been essentially an antiterrorism effort, when, in reality, in creating this huge, huge bureaucracy and moving the Department of Agriculture and everybody else into it, what we have found from a lot of experts is that you really have to deal with issues such as the first responders would be the same for a terrorist activity as they would be for a natural disaster, and that we really have to base our decisions on risk-based management.

It was no more clear than in a place that we are just sort of throwing money at, which is the >border between Mexico and the United States. In testimony, we found that there are more terrorist incidents–in fact, there have been none on the Mexican-U.S. border, but there have been several on the U.S.-Canadian border where we have very little security whatsoever. So if you were acting just on risk management, you would put more assets on the Canadian border than on the Mexican border. But the emphasis here isn’t about homeland security; it is more about immigration.

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Released on May 31st, Curtis McCarthy was driven in an Oklahoma County van to meet his family and friends. But at 44, he does not know many people outside of prison, having been incarcerated, mainly on death row, since he was 22. He even has an eight-year-old granddaughter he has never hugged.

He is the third person released from custody in Oklahoma after the revelations about an overzealous (corrupt) civilian employee in the police forensics lab there in the 1980s and ‘90s. Joyce Gilchrist, a forensics expert worked with the police for 20 years and was apparently an extremely convincing and engaging prosecution witness.

The attractive, articulate woman was teasingly referred to in the prosecutor’s office as “Magic” for helping them win convictions. (There was a CBS, “60 Minutes II,” story on her in 2001, and CBS News did some follow-ups on it.) She could, for instance, be a bit over-dramatic in her testimony, implying a greater certainty about hair samples matching each other than there really was, or perhaps she could just lie outright, as she apparently did in McCarthy’s case.

A district judge released McCarthy after deciding that Gilchrist had destroyed evidence. McCarthy’s lawyers claim that she had even switched samples to get a match, and the national Innocence Project took up McCarthy’s case(New York Times, May, 27, 2007).

The Times quoted the district judge: “Frankly all of the evidence that Joyce Gilchrist collected, if she inventoried it, if she stored it, if she analyzed it, I believe is so questionable that it is difficult to determine if it has any evidentiary value.”

I teach ethics and enjoy analyzing these sorts of cases with my students. One response I initially get is the “bad apple” response: There are some bad people in every profession. But I tell the students that it is not adequate ethical thinking to simply point out the bad apples and say everything will be better after we get the bad ones out of the barrel. Look, rather, at the whole criminal justice culture. If we can change the culture, we will get rid of most of the bad apples — not the other way around.

Jocye Gilchrist was a problem — surely. But how does someone like her function smoothly (receiving commendations) for twenty years? Doesn’t that imply a wider problem than just one bad apple in the police crime lab? Was not something wrong with the prosecutors who were so anxious to get their “magic” Gilchrist on the stand to testify, case after case, year after year? (There were plenty of signs her work was too good to be true.) And here is another clue that there is a wider culture problem: True, she was fired, but she was never prosecuted for a crime. Perhaps “overzealousness” like hers was institutionally tolerated, even though it meant someone like McCarthy would spend years on death row.

A book I am re-reading, Police Ethics: The Corruption of Noble Cause, tries to look at the barrel and not each apple separately. The author thinks most police and criminal justice misconduct is not rooted in money scams, but in a strange cultural problem: a strong certitude that police work is a “noble cause.” It is such a noble cause that one can bend the rules, lie, use any means, to serve it. Look at Joyce Gilchrist in the police lab. No one bribed her to fudge evidence. She would never take a bribe from a criminal. But she apparently could lie to put “bad guys” in jail and help the “good guys.” Our side is noble; why fuss about tactics?

This noble cause tradition is handed down to new recruits from older officers and other leaders in the criminal justice world decade after decade, building a sort of culture that second-guesses ethics in order to achieve grand purposes. The values of the whole system start changing, even if the written rules do not.

The book I’m reading makes an excellent point on institutional acceptance of misconduct. It references a study by the Chicago Tribune, “Break rules, be promoted.” (The title reflects the Joyce Gilchrist story well: she was promoted to be head of the lab.) The Tribune examined 381 cases of prosecutor misconduct in homicide cases since 1964.

These were serious cases of misconduct that ended with convictions being overturned. For instance, one prosecutor won convictions against two Afro-Americans and did not tell the defense about one witness who said the perpetrators were white. Another prosecutor knew evidence was planted. But in these 381 cases, not one of the prosecutors was convicted of a crime. And many went on to be district attorneys or judges.

For 22 years Curtis McCarthy was a victim of a culture condoning some misconduct, because it serves the “noble cause.”