Mumia Abu-Jamal speaks with Democracy Now! about Pennsylvania’s new law that authorizes the censoring of public addresses of prisoners or former offenders if judges agree that allowing them to speak would cause “mental anguish” to the victim.
Source: www.democracynow.org
The ‘victim’ could choose to not listen.
And the convicted are not always guilty.
What happened to the liberty of free speech?
AMY GOODMAN: Just miles down the road from the scene of protests in Ferguson, we’re hearing a lot about Florissant. Just down Florissant is the grave of Dred Scott, who’s buried in the Calvary Cemetery on West Florissant Avenue. Born a slave in Virginia, Dred Scott sued in a St. Louis court for his freedom. The case went to the Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision that’s called the worst ever. In 1857, the court ruled African Americans were not citizens of the United States, and therefore had no rights to sue in federal courts. The court described blacks as, quote, “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” unquote. Again, the Dred Scott decision, considered the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court, in the slave state of Missouri, the seven-to-two decision. The chief justice was a slave owner himself. In fact, a number of the Supreme Court justices were slave owners themselves.
To talk more about the significance of this case today, we’re joined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, founder of the African American Policy Forum.
Kimberlé, thank you for joining us. Professor Crenshaw, talk about the significance of Dred Scott’s body just lying down the road on Florissant, the road we’ve heard so much about, as these protests continue and escalate.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, really couldn’t be more symbolic. As you point out, Dred Scott is widely regarded as being one of the worst cases ever. And there are two ways in which we might see its relevance in this particular moment. One, when the Supreme Court was trying to decide whether African Americans could be citizens, what they considered was the way African Americans were treated. They weren’t necessarily looking at formal law. In a lot of ways, free blacks had more rights than white women did. But the overall idea was that they could be enslavable. The overall idea is that they weren’t seen as having the same social worth as white Americans and could be enslaved for their own good. So the very possibility of their enslavability meant that, at least as far as the founders were concerned, they were going to be forever and permanently a stateless people. And that would have likely been the case had the case not led to a civil war.
Source: www.democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue to look at the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, we’re joined by the executive director of Amnesty International USA, which has taken an unprecedented step in sending a 13-person delegation to monitor the developments in Ferguson. Amnesty has never before deployed observers inside the United States.
We’re joined here in our New York studio by Steven Hawkins, who has also worked as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he represented African-American men facing the death penalty throughout the Deep South in the United States.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Steven.
STEVEN HAWKINS: Pleasure to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this decision.
STEVEN HAWKINS: Well, Amnesty saw a human rights crisis in Ferguson, and it’s a human rights crisis that is escalating. We sent observers down because there was a need for human rights observers. Clearly there are violations of international human rights law and standards, in terms of how the policing is being done on protests. So, for example, we’ve issued reports on, for example, Israel and the Occupied Territories, how tear gas is supposed to be administered—never in an indiscriminate way where children and the elderly could be subject to very harmful effects, even death, from tear gas. So, we sent down observers to be on the ground. We have been thwarted in our efforts to be able to go out on curfew with the police, which would be a clear standard in these circumstances, as well as the opportunity for the press to be able to be in the space. So, we also went down to make sure that the citizens in Ferguson understood that the eyes of the world were watching, that Amnesty is deeply supportive, and we will be continuing to monitor the situation.
Source: www.democracynow.org
DANA FRANK:
Yeah, when we talk about the fleeing gangs and violence, it’s also this tremendous poverty. And poverty doesn’t just happen. It, itself, is a direct result of policies of both the Honduran government and the U.S. government, including privatizations, mass layoffs of government workers, and a new—in Honduras, a new law, that’s now made permanent, that breaks up full-time jobs and makes them part-time and ineligible for unionization, living wage and the national health service. And a lot of these economic policies are driven by U.S.-funded lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which itself is funding the corrupt Honduran police. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is the other piece of this. Like NAFTA did for the U.S. and Mexico, it opens the door to this open competition between small producers in agriculture in Honduras, small manufacturers, and jobs are disappearing as a result of that.
So, with this poverty that we’re seeing that people are fleeing, it’s not like people are like, “Let’s go have the American dream.” There are almost no jobs for young people. Their parents know it. And we’re talking about starving to death—that’s the alternative—or being driven into gangs with tremendous sexual violence. And it’s a very, very tragic situation here. But it’s not like it tragically just happened. It’s a direct result of very conscious policies by the U.S. and Honduran governments.
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Source: www.democracynow.org