France Has Broken The Back Of The Gilet Jaune Protest Movement

jacobin |  In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics. Simpere speaks of “very repressive laws that allow almost anyone, including peaceful demonstrators, to be arrested, often ‘preventatively.'” More specifically, she points out the use of two vaguely defined laws that she considers contrary to international law: one punishing the “preparation of group violence,” under which many people with protective gear like goggles have faced judicial persecution; and one forbidding “contempt toward police forces,” used more than twenty thousand times in 2019 alone. She cites the case of protesters in Narbonne prosecuted for this offense, simply because they had a banner denouncing the severe injuries caused by flash-balls.

In early December 2018, the authorities started to widely disregard their own laws. Alimi calls it “state illegality,” a concept he plans to elaborate in an upcoming book: “The state itself becomes criminal,” he explains, “as its representatives decide to deliberately violate the law to prevent the expression of civil liberties.” In addition to mass preventive arrests and illegal searches, he names the case of a state prosecutor calling on his substitutes to keep people in custody for the maximum length in order to prevent them from demonstrating, despite having no evidence against them. “France shifted from a justice system that punishes actions to a justice system that punishes intentions,” he says.

This judicial repression has led to unprecedented numbers of arrests, with more than eleven thousand detained and more than three thousand convicted. “The courts were working like a production line,” recalls Gassiot, “with speedy trials on Mondays for those arrested on Saturdays.” Alimi counts about seven hundred to eight hundred gilets jaunes currently in jail — and he has himself defended many of those arrested. “They have been victims of an incomparable judicial violence and discrimination; they’ve been treated like animals,” he says. Unusually for France, even people with no criminal records were sentenced to jail time. “They were lower-middle-class people endangered by poverty; they were simply trying to keep their head above water, but they were pushed down — and drowned.”

his swift and merciless justice against the gilets jaunes contrasted with the lack of judicial reaction to police brutality. Despite the thousands of acts of violence against protesters — many of them proven by solid video evidence — the available information reveals that only seven police officers have been convicted. All of them received suspended sentences, with no discharge. Simpere describes the cases as “largely symbolic,” expressing her “serious doubt that there will be sentences corresponding to the seriousness of injuries.” Alimi is less diplomatic, calling the few convictions “crumbs thrown to the people to calm popular anger.”

During the first months of the crisis, as blood was being spilled every week, the government maintained a hard line in denying the existence of police violence, even refusing to use the word. Challenged on the issue by a citizen during a debate in March 2019, President Emmanuel Macron snapped back: “Do not talk about repression and police violence — those words are unacceptable in a state with the rule of law!” According to widely respected French daily Le Monde, citing insider sources, this unshakable political support for repression came from a genuine fear in December 2018 that rank-and-file police might abandon their post — and let the uprising prevail.

While the climate of police impunity might be linked to the high political stakes, my interviewees note that this lack of accountability has been pervasive for decades. The “police of the police” — the infamous Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale (IGPN) — is widely derided as a “whitewashing machine,” systematically clearing up on behalf of its colleagues. Simpere points out that “there is a clear conflict of interests when police officers have to monitor other police officers, and also when magistrates who are working in close collaboration with the police are the ones who are supposed to lead investigations against the police.”

Alimi goes further, stressing the whole systemic structure enabling police impunity in France. He says it starts with police officers and their hierarchy “who never acknowledge any act of violence and put into place a set of dissimulation measures every time there is any violence, including the systematic faking of official reports.” He then goes on to point out the lack of judicial independence in France, where “prosecutors are under the authority of the Justice Ministry, and see themselves as protecting public order, which leads them to protect the police.” This translates into prosecutors lying and blocking inquiries, among other things, by reacting more than thirty days after events, once footage from public cameras has already been erased.

Despite facing this “judicial wall,” Alimi says that amateur videos are changing the game. His team has imported techniques from groups like Black Lives Matter, making online calls for videos and witnesses. “Those videos have shattered the administration’s lies and have revealed dissimulation techniques.” As for judges, Alimi also points out that some are starting to recognize the need for real investigations into police work, but he says that it is too early to make an honest appraisal of investigations into police violence against the gilets jaunes. “We will know in two to three years,” he says, “then we can make a final assessment of those investigations, and maybe even talk about a transformation of the approach to police violence.”

 

Corporations Equal Crime Without Criminals...,

counterpunch |   Crimes without criminals was not a subject for study when I was in law school. The two were seen as part of the same illegal package. That was before notorious corporate lawyers and a cash register Congress combined to separate economic, health and safety crimes from corporate accountability, incarceration and deterrence.

Lawlessness is now so rampant that a group of realistic law professors, led by Professor Mihailis E. Diamantis of the University of Iowa Law School, claim there is no corporate criminal law. I say “realistic” because their assertion that corporate criminal law, does not in fact, exist is not widely acknowledged by their peers.

Most Americans know that none of the executives on Wall Street who are responsible for the lies, deception, and phony investments they sold to millions of trusting investors were prosecuted and sent to jail. “They got away with it,” was the common refrain during the 2008-2009 meltdown of Wall Street that took our economy down and into a deep recession that resulted in massive job loss and the looting of savings of tens of millions of Americans.

Not only did the Wall Street Barons escape the Sheriff but they got an obedient Congress, White House and Federal Reserve to guarantee trillions of dollars to bail them out, implicitly warning that the big banks, brokerage firms and other giant financial corporations were simply “too big to fail.” They had the economy by the throat and taxpayer dollars in their pockets. Moreover, Wall Streeters made out like bandits while people on Main Street suffered.

All this and much more made up a rare symposium organized by Professor Diamantis last year at Georgetown Law School. (See: https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/imagining-a-world-without-corporate-criminal-law-symposium/). He wrote that the “economic impact of corporate crime is at least twenty times greater than all other criminal offenses combined,” quoting conservative estimates by the FBI. It’s not just economic, he continued: “Scholars, prosecutors and courts increasingly recognize that brand name corporations also commit a broad range of ‘street crimes’: homicide, arson, drug trafficking, dumping and sex offenses.”

The litany of corporate wrongdoing ranges from polluting the air and drinking water, dumping microplastics that end up inside human beings, promoting lethal opioids that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, providing millions of accounts or products to customers under false pretenses or without consent, often by creating false records or misusing customers’ identities, (Wells Fargo), manufacturing defective motor vehicles, producing contaminated food, allowing software failures resulting in crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX’s with 346 deaths. (See, Why Not Jail? By Rena Steinzor).

People don’t need law professors to see what’s happening to them and their children. People laugh when they hear politicians solemnly declare that “no one is above the law,” extol “the rule of law” and “equal justice under the law.”

By far the greatest toll in preventable fatalities and serious injuries in the U.S. flows from either deliberate, negligent or corner-cutting corporate crime under the direct control and management of CEOs and company presidents, many of whom make over $10,000 an hour over a 40-hour week.

dayyum brah..., petraeus a partner at KKR, you a partner in cellblock D at leavenworth...,

NYTimes |  Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he told a reporter for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

The conviction is a significant victory for the Obama administration, which has conducted an unprecedented crackdown on officials who speak to journalists about security matters without the administration’s approval. Prosecutors prevailed after a yearslong fight in which the reporter, James Risen, refused to identify his sources.

The case revolved around a C.I.A. operation in which a former Russian scientist provided Iran with intentionally flawed nuclear component schematics. Mr. Risen revealed the operation in his 2006 book, “State of War,” describing it as a mismanaged, potentially reckless mission that may have inadvertently aided the Iranian nuclear program.

On the third day of deliberations, the jury in federal court in Alexandria, Va., convicted Mr. Sterling on nine felony counts. Mr. Sterling, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1993 to 2002 and now lives in O’Fallon, Mo., faces a maximum possible sentence of decades in prison, though the actual sentence is likely to be far shorter. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court, who presided over the weeklong trial, allowed Mr. Sterling to remain free on bond and set sentencing for April 24.

Can You B'Lee They Say This Isht With A Straight Face? "This Is A Russian Disinformation Operation"

usatoday |   The New York Post story's publication prompted some to draw parallels to the runup to the 2016 election, when emails from the Democratic National Committee were hacked by Russian-affiliated operatives and released by WikiLeaks.

The FBI is now examining whether Russia is tied to the information cited by the New York Post.

Some experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.

"It is also an old Cold War disinformation tactic to pass information, especially but not exclusively when forged, to low-brow newspapers that have high circulation and low standards of investigation. Ideal for surfacing and amplification," Thomas Rid, a political scientist who focuses on disinformation and information warfare at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said in a tweet.

Russian operatives worked to sow partisan divisions in the U.S. and spread disinformation during the 2016 presidential election cycle, according to a 2017 report from U.S. intelligence services. That report found that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances," in part by discrediting his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. 

Trump's own intelligence officials have warned Moscow is interfering again in the 2020 election.

In September, the Treasury Department sanctioned Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, who met with Giuliani in December, for being an "active Russian agent for over a decade."

Bannon was indicted for fraud in August in connection to a border-wall fundraising effort that raised more than $25 million "under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction," according to prosecutors. Bannon has pleaded not guilty. 

More:How many Trump advisers have been criminally charged? Manafort, Stone and Steve Bannon makes 7

In the case of Giuliani associate Derkach, the Treasury Department's move was aimed at "exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference." It also made clear that Giuliani has engaged with Russian agents in his campaign against the Bidens.

Former Biden aides have also suggested that Russians are behind the story.

"This is a Russian disinformation operation,” Michael Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense with a specialization in Eastern Europe who now heads the Penn Biden Center, said to POLITICO. "I’m very comfortable saying that.”

 

Teixeira Just An Immature IT CHUD - MTG Is The Actual Face Of Resistance

theguardian  |  Washington lawmakers have written off Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal” after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning praise from the political right.

“He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.

Federal prosecutors allege Teixeira took secret documents from the Massachusetts air national guard base where he worked as a low-ranking cyber specialist and posted them online. They first appeared on one of the gaming messaging platform Discord’s servers in January before spreading to other social media sites and being reported on by news outlets earlier this month.

Shortly after he was taken into custody in Massachusetts on Thursday, the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has persistently called for the Joe Biden White House and Washington in general to cut off support to Kyiv – rallied to his defense.

“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” she tweeted in an apparent reference to one of the leaked documents that indicates 14 US special forces soldiers were present in Ukraine during the past two months.

“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen [sic]? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

Other documents have revealed details of how the United States gathers its information and how deeply its intelligence agencies have penetrated Russia’s military. Also among the leaked material is a pessimistic assessment of Ukraine’s prospects of recapturing territory from Russia this spring – a subject Carlson seized on.

“Ukraine is in fact losing the war,” he said, citing other documents that indicate Washington’s concerns about Kyiv’s ability to defend its airspace.

“The Biden administration is perfectly aware of this. They’re panicked about it, but they have lied about this fact to the public. Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is ‘waning’. In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime.”

Michael Forest Reinoehl: Not Just Boys - Aimless Old Men Out'Chere Looking For Meaning Too!!!

oregonlive |  A 48-year-old man who was accused of carrying a loaded gun at an earlier downtown Portland protest is under investigation in the fatal shooting Saturday night of a right-wing demonstrator after a pro-Trump rally.

Michael Forest Reinoehl calls himself an anti-fascist and has posted videos and photos of demonstrations he attended since late June, accompanied by the hashtags #blacklivesmatter, #anewnation and #breonnataylor.

Reinoehl was raised in Sandy and has had recent addresses in Northeast Portland, Gresham and Clackamas. He described himself on social media and in a video interview with Bloomberg QuickTake News as a professional snowboarder and contractor who has former military experience but “hated” his time in the army.

Sources familiar with the case but not authorized to speak said police are investigating Reinoehl. A family member also identified him as a man captured in photos and video seen leaving the shooting scene shortly before 9 p.m. Saturday.

Aaron Danielson, a supporter of the conservative group Patriot Prayer, was shot in the chest and died in the street. It was soon after most cars in a caravan of supporters of President Donald Trump had left the city’s downtown streets.

Reinoehl’s posts indicate he attended many protests in Portland that began three months ago after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis under the knee of a police officer.

On July 5 at one of the demonstrations, Reinoehl was cited at 2:10 a.m. in the 700 block of Southwest Main Street on allegations of possessing a loaded gun in a public place, resisting arrest and interfering with police

He was given a date to appear in court later that month, but the allegations were dropped on July 30 with a “no complaint,” according to court records. The documents don’t indicate why prosecutors decided not to pursue the accusations. Reinoehl spent no time behind bars.

Brent Weisberg, a spokesman for Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, said the office is still reviewing that July case involving Reinoehl.

under federal case law - overseer lying can't be used to prosecute the lying overseer?

Tribune |  Federal officials also are investigating the shooting. A federal grand jury investigation has involved more than 80 witnesses and branched into possible obstruction of justice by the officers at the scene, sources told the Tribune. In particular, the sources said, federal prosecutors are investigating the officers who made statements as well as the officers who prepared the reports of the statements.

Records show that a federal grand jury subpoenaed the Chicago Police Department for these same reports on Aug. 28.

Bringing charges against the officers for their statements could be difficult, however. Under federal case law, statements the officers were compelled to make as part of the police department's internal investigation cannot be used against them in any criminal prosecution.

The reports state investigators viewed the video and found them consistent with officers' accounts. The reports also note the 911 call after the shooting and radio transmissions from the scene "were consistent with the statements of the police officers."

The city has released information — including the video — in dribs and drabs, prolonging the scandal around McDonald's shooting. It was only after the video's release, in fact, that Emanuel fired Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, saying McCarthy had lost the public trust.

Oh SNAP!!! Mueller Can't Punk A 3-Star Like He Was An IQ-75 Softhead

thefederalist  |  On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works.

Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The next day, former assistant U.S. attorney and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy connected more of the questionable dots. York added even more details a couple of days later. Together these articles provide the backdrop necessary to understand the significance of Sullivan’s order on Friday.

What’s Happened in the Michael Flynn Case So Far

To recap: On November 30, 2017, prosecutors working for Mueller charged former Trump national security advisor Flynn with lying to FBI agents. The following day, Flynn pled guilty before federal judge Rudolph Contreras. Less than a week later — and without explanation — Flynn’s case was reassigned to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

One of Sullivan’s first orders of business was to enter a standing order, on December 12, 2017, directing “the government to produce to defendant in a timely manner – including during plea negotiations – any evidence in its possession that is favorable to defendant and material either to defendant’s guilt or punishment.” Sullivan’s standing order further directed the government, if it “has identified any information which is favorable to the defendant but which the government believes not to be material,” to “submit such information to the Court for in camera review.”

Sullivan enters identical standing orders as a matter of course in all of his criminal cases, as he explained in a 2016 Cardozo Law Review article: “Following the Stevens case, I have issued a standing Brady Order for each criminal case on my docket, updating it in reaction to developments in the law.” A Brady order directs the government to disclose all exculpatory evidence to defense counsel, as required by Brady v. Maryland. The Stevens case, of course, is the government’s corrupt prosecution of the late senator Ted Stevens—an investigation and prosecution which, as Sullivan put it, “were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence. . . .”

While the December standing order represented Sullivan’s normal practice, as both McCarthy and York noted, Flynn had already pled guilty. In his plea agreement, Flynn agreed to “forego the right to any further discovery or disclosures of information not already provided at the time of the entry of Flynn’s guilty plea.” On Wednesday, however, the attorneys in the Flynn case presented the court an agreed-upon protective order governing the use of the material — including sensitive material — the special counsel’s office provides Flynn. This indicates Mueller’s team will not fight Sullivan’s standing order based on the terms of Flynn’s plea agreement.

Why Bombshells Are Likely Ahead

With a protective order in place, Flynn’s attorneys should start receiving the required disclosures from the special counsel’s office. There is reason to believe these will include some bombshells.

assange in uk and police know his whereabouts

Video - Public Enemy movie trailer.

Reuters | Wikileaks website founder Julian Assange is in Britain and police know his whereabouts but have refrained so far from acting on an international warrant for his arrest, a British newspaper said on Thursday.

The 39-year-old Australian, who founded the whistle-blowing website that has disclosed a trove of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, supplied British police with contact details upon his arrival in October, The Independent said.

The newspaper cited police sources who said they knew where Assange was staying and had his telephone number. It added that it was believed he was in southeast England.

The international police agency Interpol this week issued a "red notice" to assist in the arrest of Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual crimes, but Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (Soca) so far has refused to authorize this, the paper said.

Citing unnamed sources, the Independent said Soca needed clarifications about the European Arrest Warrant issued by Swedish prosecutors but it described the delay as technical.

The Metropolitan Police and Soca declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

put the three day weekend to good use and start with the tier 1 and 2's already locked up...,

NYTimes |  The difficulties facing the police and prosecutors were foreshadowed by the last mass arrest of bikers in the United States. In that case, in 2002, three motorcycle gang members were killed and about a dozen others were injured in a shooting and knifing brawl in Laughlin, Nev. The brawl broke out at Harrah’s Casino and Hotel between the Hells Angels and the Mongols, all of whom were attending an annual motorcycle rally. About 120 people were detained by law enforcement. A total of 44 Hells Angels were indicted in federal court, but only seven were convicted. Six Mongols members pleaded guilty to state charges.

“Oftentimes, these mass prosecutions fail because of the overreach,” said Robert Draskovich, a Las Vegas criminal defense lawyer who represented a member of the Hells Angels in the Laughlin case. The charges against his client were dropped. In the Waco case, Mr. Draskovich predicted, “the majority of these people will walk.”

Officials, however, have defended their handling of the arrests and the $1 million bonds. “I set that bond because there was nine people killed, and I felt that was appropriate for the incident that occurred,” said Walter H. Peterson, the justice of the peace in McLennan County who made the decision.

Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, a spokesman for the Waco Police Department, said the three bikers who had been released — Juan Garcia, Drew King and Jim Harris, all of Austin — were back in custody. The three men were arrested Sunday after they rode up to the scene carrying weapons and wearing motorcyle-gang colors, Sergeant Swanton said. After their release, new arrest warrants were issued for them, and bond was set at $1 million for each, he said.

“They were not mistakenly released,” he added.

Law enforcement officials and gang experts said conflicts between two motorcycle groups, the Bandidos and the Cossacks, had led to the shooting outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in south Waco on Sunday. The shooting, which left nine bikers dead and 18 others wounded, stemmed from both petty disputes and broader tensions over the smaller group, the Cossacks, failing to pay respect, and money, to its larger rival, the Bandidos, officials said.

rule of law: no consequences for extrajudicial murder by former overseer wilson in ferguson

NYTimes |  Mr. Holder said that the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Brown’s death would be independent from the one conducted by the local authorities. While the F.B.I. and local officials conducted some interviews together and shared evidence, the analysis and decision-making were separate. Mr. Holder resisted calls from local officials to announce his conclusion alongside the county prosecutor last year, in part because he did not want it to appear as if they had reached their decisions together.

Federal investigators interviewed more than 200 people and analyzed cellphone audio and video, the law enforcement officials said. Officer Wilson’s gun, clothing and other evidence were analyzed at the F.B.I.’s laboratory in Quantico, Va. Though the local authorities and Mr. Brown’s family conducted autopsies, Mr. Holder ordered a separate autopsy, which was conducted by pathologists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s office at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the officials said.

The federal investigation did not uncover any facts that differed significantly from the evidence made public by the authorities in Missouri late last year, the law enforcement officials said. To bring federal civil rights charges, the Justice Department would have needed to prove that Officer Wilson had intended to violate Mr. Brown’s rights when he opened fire, and that he had done so willfully — meaning he knew that it was wrong to fire but did so anyway.

The Justice Department plans to release a report explaining its decision, though it is not clear when. Dena Iverson, a department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the case Wednesday.

The Ferguson investigation drew Mr. Holder into the spotlight on the issue of race, one he cares about deeply. He traveled to Ferguson, spoke of his experiences as a victim of racial profiling and emerged as a peacemaker during the tense days after the shooting, when the police used tear gas on demonstrators and the National Guard was summoned.

The shooting also inflamed longstanding tensions between Ferguson’s black residents and the police. Residents told investigators that the police used traffic citations in minority neighborhoods as a way to raise money for the city.

“These anecdotal accounts underscored the history of mistrust of law enforcement in Ferguson,” Mr. Holder said in September after returning from Ferguson, a suburb about 10 miles northwest of St. Louis.

It is not clear when the broader civil rights inquiry of the police department, known as a pattern or practice investigation, will be completed. Under Mr. Holder, prosecutors have opened more than 20 such investigations nationwide. The Justice Department recently called for sweeping changes to the Cleveland Police Department and negotiated an independent monitor to oversee the department in Albuquerque.

the people vs. goldman sachs

Rollingstone | They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

This article appears in the May 26, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive May 13.

rule of law: ferguson overseer who strong-armed reporter hog-tied and assaulted a twelve year old...,

HuffPo | A Ferguson police officer who helped detain a journalist in a McDonald's earlier this month is in the midst of a civil rights lawsuit because he allegedly hog-tied a 12-year-old boy who was checking the mail at the end of his driveway.

According to a lawsuit filed in 2012 in Missouri federal court, Justin Cosma and another officer, Richard Carter, approached a 12-year-old boy who was checking the mailbox at the end of his driveway in June 2010. Cosma was an officer with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office at the time, the lawsuit states. The pair asked the boy if he'd been playing on a nearby highway, and he replied no, according to the lawsuit.

Then, the officers "became confrontational" and intimidated the child, the lawsuit claims. "Unprovoked and without cause, the deputies grabbed [the boy], choked him around the neck and threw him to the ground," it says. The boy was shirtless at the time, and allegedly "suffered bruising, choke marks, scrapes and cuts across his body."

The 12-year-old was transferred to a medical facility for treatment, but the lawsuit says Cosma and the other officer reported the incident as "assault of a law enforcement officer third degree” and “resisting/interfering with arrest, detention or stop."

Jefferson County prosecutors "refused to issue a juvenile case" against the young child, the suit says.

The allegations against Cosma were made in September 2012, shortly after he was introduced as a new officer at a Ferguson City Council meeting. Jefferson County is south of Ferguson.

Captain Ron Arnhart of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, who is a candidate for sheriff, did not respond to The Huffington Post's request for comment on the circumstances of Cosma's departure. Neither Ferguson police spokesman Tom Zoll nor Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson responded to requests for comment.

i love it that an indian u.s. attorney is at the center of this indian runaway slave "crisis"

foxnews | U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who made the highly unusual move Wednesday of issuing a lengthy statement addressing the arrest and issues not in a criminal complaint, said diplomat Devyani Khobragade was afforded courtesies most Americans wouldn't get — such as being allowed to make phone calls for two hours to arrange child care and sort out personal matters — after she was discreetly arrested by State Department agents outside her children's Manhattan school.

Khobragade was arrested last week on charges she lied on a visa application about how much she paid her housekeeper, an Indian national. Prosecutors say the maid received less than $3 per hour for her work.

Bharara said Khobragade, who has pleaded not guilty, wasn't handcuffed, restrained or arrested in front of her children. And he said that while she was "fully searched" in private by a female deputy marshal, the move was a standard safety practice all defendants undergo.

Khobragade has been transferred to India's mission to the United Nations, according to her lawyer and a former colleague. It's unclear how such a move might affect her immunity from prosecution, and a U.N. spokesman said it hadn't received a necessary transfer request from her Wednesday evening.

External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid told reporters on Thursday that Khobragade should never have been arrested, and that the housekeeper should have been arrested instead.

Khurshid said he would speak to Kerry later Thursday.

"This is an extremely distressing and hurtful incident that needs to be addressed," he said.

Earlier Thursday, an official in India's External Affairs Ministry told the Associated Press that Khobragade claimed to Indian authorities in July that the maid had disappeared and was trying to blackmail her. According to the official, the housekeeper said she would not report Khobragade if she agreed to pay her more money and change her visa status to allow her to work elsewhere in the U.S.

Khobragade filed a complaint with New York police and New Delhi police, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. It was not clear what action was taken in the U.S., but New Delhi police issued a warrant for her arrest if she returned to India.

News that Khobragade was strip-searched has chilled U.S.-Indian relations, and Kerry called India's national security adviser on Wednesday to express his regret over what happened. India has revoked privileges for U.S. diplomats in protest.

Bharara, who was born in India but moved with his family to New Jersey, defended his case.

grabbing goldman's golden goose?

Bloomberg | Never let it be said that the Justice Department can’t move quickly when it gets a hot tip about an alleged crime at a Wall Street bank. It does help, though, if the party doing the complaining is the bank itself, and not merely an aggrieved customer.

Another plus is if the bank tells the feds the security of the U.S. financial markets is at stake. This brings us to the strange tale of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Sergey Aleynikov.

Aleynikov, 39, is the former Goldman computer programmer who was arrested on theft charges July 3 as he stepped off a flight at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. That was two days after Goldman told the government he had stolen its secret, rapid-fire, stock- and commodities-trading software in early June during his last week as a Goldman employee. Prosecutors say Aleynikov uploaded the program code to an unidentified Web site server in Germany.

It wasn’t just Goldman that faced imminent harm if Aleynikov were to be released, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal magistrate judge at his July 4 bail hearing in New York. The 34-year-old prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

How could somebody do this? The precise answer isn’t obvious -- we’re talking about a black-box trading system here. And Facciponti didn’t elaborate. You don’t need a Goldman Sachs doomsday machine to manipulate markets, of course. A false rumor expertly planted using an ordinary telephone often will do just fine. In any event, the judge rejected Facciponti’s argument that Aleynikov posed a danger to the community, and ruled he could go free on $750,000 bail. He was released July 6.

Market Manipulation

All this leaves us to wonder: Did Goldman really tell the government its high-speed, high-volume, algorithmic-trading program can be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways, as Facciponti said? And shouldn’t Goldman’s bosses be worried this revelation may cause lots of people to start hypothesizing aloud about whether Goldman itself might misuse this program?

Here’s some of what we do know. Aleynikov, a citizen of the U.S. and Russia, left his $400,000-a-year salary at Goldman for a chance to triple his pay at a start-up firm in Chicago co- founded by Misha Malyshev, a former Citadel Investment Group LLC trader. Malyshev, who oversaw high-frequency trading at Citadel, said his firm, Teza Technologies LLC, first learned about the alleged theft July 5 and suspended Aleynikov without pay.

Yo Quiero Chalupas

senate.grassley.gov |  Two Senate chairmen want to know whether the Justice Department has acquired information from Ukrainian prosecutors that may contradict the stated reasoning behind former Vice President Joe Biden’s threat to withhold U.S. assistance from Ukraine. They are also renewing an inquiry into the department’s response to reported efforts by Ukrainians, in coordination with Democratic Party associates, to acquire damaging information on Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. In a letter to Attorney General William Barr, Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are seeking additional information about the department’s review of the Russia investigation’s origins, including the DNC’s reported work with Ukraine to undermine candidate Trump.   

“Ukrainian efforts, abetted by a U.S. political party, to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored. Such allegations of corruption deserve due scrutiny, and the American people have a right to know when foreign forces attempt to undermine our democratic processes,” the Senators wrote in the letter. 

The letter follows a July, 2017, inquiry from Grassley to the department referencing reports that a DNC consultant coordinated with the Ukrainian government to acquire opposition research on Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. According to a Politico investigation, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers…” Though media reports indicate that U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating whether Ukraine played a role in the counterintelligence probe during the 2016 election, the Justice Department has yet to confirm whether it has begun an investigation into coordination between the Ukrainian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee.

Separately, a report yesterday revealed new documents that call into question the stated reasons behind a 2016 ultimatum by then Vice-President Biden to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor who had investigated a company for which Biden’s son was a board member. According to the report, Ukrainian officials have tried to forward documents related to the matter to the department, to no avail. Grassley and Johnson are requesting details on any actions the department is taking to review the material referenced in the report.

Full text of the Grassley-Johnson letter to Barr follows:

The Robots are Just Us

BostonGlobe  |  Even AI giants like Google can’t escape the impact of bias. In 2015, the company’s facial recognition software tagged dark skinned people as gorillas. Executives at FaceApp, a photo editing program, recently apologized for building an algorithm that whitened the users’ skin in their pictures. The company had dubbed it the “hotness” filter. 

In these cases, the error grew from data sets that didn’t have enough dark-skinned people, which limited the machine’s ability to learn variation within darker skin tones. Typically, a programmer instructs a machine with a series of commands, and the computer follows along. But if the programmer tests the design on his peer group, coworkers, and family, he’s limited what the machine can learn and imbues it with whichever biases shape his own life. 

Photo apps are one thing, but when their foundational algorithms creep into other areas of human interaction, the impacts can be as profound as they are lasting.

The faces of one in two adult Americans have been processed through facial recognition software. Law enforcement agencies across the country are using this gathered data with little oversight. Commercial facial-recognition algorithms have generally done a better job of telling white men apart than they do with women and people of other races, and law enforcement agencies offer few details indicating that their systems work substantially better. Our justice system has not decided if these sweeping programs constitute a search, which would restrict them under the Fourth Amendment. Law enforcement may end up making life-altering decisions based on biased investigatory tools with minimal safeguards.

Meanwhile, judges in almost every state are using algorithms to assist in decisions about bail, probation, sentencing, and parole. Massachusetts was sued several years ago because an algorithm it uses to predict recidivism among sex offenders didn’t consider a convict’s gender. Since women are less likely to reoffend, an algorithm that did not consider gender likely overestimated recidivism by female sex offenders. The intent of the scores was to replace human bias and increase efficiency in an overburdened judicial system. But, as mathematician Julia Angwin reported in ProPublica, these algorithms are using biased questionnaires to come to their determinations and yielding flawed results.

A ProPublica study of the recidivism algorithm used in Fort Lauderdale found that 23.5 percent of white men were labeled as being at an elevated risk for getting into trouble again, but didn’t re-offend. Meanwhile, 44.9 percent of black men were labeled higher risk for future offenses, but didn’t re-offend, showing how these scores are inaccurate and favor white men. 

While the questionnaires don’t ask specifically about skin color, data scientists say they “back into race” by asking questions like: When was your first encounter with police? 

The assumption is that someone who comes in contact with police as a young teenager is more prone to criminal activity than someone who doesn’t. But this hypothesis doesn’t take into consideration that policing practices vary and therefore so does the police’s interaction with youth. If someone lives in an area where the police routinely stop and frisk people, he will be statistically more likely to have had an early encounter with the police. Stop-and-frisk is more common in urban areas where African-Americans are more likely to live than whites.This measure doesn’t calculate guilt or criminal tendencies, but becomes a penalty when AI calculates risk. In this example, the AI is not just computing for the individual’s behavior, it is also considering the police’s behavior.

“I’ve talked to prosecutors who say, ‘Well, it’s actually really handy to have these risk scores because you don’t have to take responsibility if someone gets out on bail and they shoot someone. It’s the machine, right?’” says Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab at MIT.

fact-resistant deuterostems face some facts...,

newyorker |  Criminal-justice reformers like to say that if a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has served time. Nolan did not emerge from prison any less conservative, but he says he experienced a profound disillusionment, which has led him to play a central role in a cause that is only now finding its moment. These days, it is hard to ignore a rising conservative clamor to rehabilitate the criminal-justice system. Conservatives are as quick as liberals to note that the United States, a country with less than five per cent of the world’s population, houses nearly twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners. Some 2.2 million Americans are now incarcerated—about triple the number locked up in the nineteen-eighties, when, in a panic over drugs and urban crime, conservative legislators demanded tougher policies, and liberals who feared being portrayed as weak went along with them. African-Americans are nearly six times as likely as whites to be incarcerated, and Latinos are more than twice as likely. More than forty per cent of released offenders return to prison within three years.

Several Republican Presidential candidates—Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz—have been embraced by Right on Crime, a campaign to promote “successful, conservative solutions” to the punitive excesses of American law and order. In February, the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which serves as an audition for right-wing Presidential aspirants, featured three panels on criminal-justice reform, including one called Prosecutors Gone Wild. Bernard Kerik, who was Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner and served three years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, now promotes an agenda of reforms, including voting rights for ex-felons. The libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch are donating money to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to help insure that indigent defendants get competent legal representation, and they are co-sponsoring conferences on judicial reform with the American Civil Liberties Union.

In Congress and the states, conservatives and liberals have found common ground on such issues as cutting back mandatory-minimum sentences; using probation, treatment, and community service as alternatives to prison for low-level crimes; raising the age of juvenile-court jurisdictions; limiting solitary confinement; curtailing the practice of confiscating assets; rewriting the rules of probation and parole to avoid sending offenders back to jail on technicalities; restoring education and job training in prisons; allowing prisoners time off for rehabilitation; and easing the reëntry of those who have served time by expunging some criminal records and by lowering barriers to employment, education, and housing. As David Dagan and Steven M. Teles write, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Retrenching the carceral state is becoming as orthodox on the Right as building it was just a few short years ago.” They conclude that this has created a “Nixon goes to China” opportunity to reverse decades of overkill.

This conservative transformation is often portrayed in the media as a novelty, and some progressives regard it as a ploy to cut taxes and turn prisons over to the private corrections industry. Yet it has deep roots and a tangle of motives, one of which is indeed a belief that downsizing prisons promises taxpayers some relief. (Locking up an inmate for a year can cost as much as tuition at a good college.) But for many conservatives, Nolan says, reducing spending is “ancillary.” “It’s human dignity that really motivates us.”

jeffrey sterling took on the cia and lost everything...,

firstlook |  Sterling’s case has drawn attention primarily for two reasons: it was part of the Obama Administration’s controversial crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, and prosecutors had tried to force the Times reporter, James Risen, to divulge the name of his source, whom the government believed was Sterling. The case, known as United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, was treated mainly as a freedom-of-the-press issue, with Risen as the heroic centerpiece. Lost in the judicial briefs about the First Amendment was the black man in the middle. 

This is Sterling's story.

Only Fan(i)s And Her Manchild Niggolo....,

 

NYPost  |  A Georgia district attorney accused of hiring her lover to prosecute former President Trump broke her silence on the controversy, saying she and the prosecutor were targeted because they are black.

The comments were Willis’ first time addressing the allegations publicly — but she neither confirmed nor denied the claims lobbed at her and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who helped secure an indictment against the former Republican president in an election interference case.

“They only attacked one,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis Sunday at Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta. “First thing they say, ‘Oh, she’s gonna play the race card now.’

“But no God, isn’t it them that’s playing the race card when they only question one?” 

She called Wade “a great friend and a great lawyer,” along with a “superstar,” but failed to mention him by name once during her more than 30 minute speech, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The pair were accused by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of having a “clandestine” and “improper” affair when appointments were made for the 2020 election interference case.

Roman, a former official on the Trump 2020 campaign, argued in a court filing last week that the integrity of the case had been compromised by their alleged affair and asked that all charges against him be dropped.

“The district attorney chose to appoint her romantic partner, who at all times relevant to this prosecution has been a married man,” the filing read.

Roman contended in the filing that Wade used some of the $654,000 in legal fees he’d earned on the case to take Willis on vacations to “Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean.”

Willis pointed out during her speech that the other two prosecutors assigned to the case, Anna Green Cross and John Floyd, both are white, and noted that allegations have only emerged targeting the two prominent black members of the prosecution — her and Wade.

“Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?” she asked.

Roman was unmoved by Willis accusations of the charges being racially charged.