New Vision for Louisiana

FastBackwards:The LOUISIANA we Hate

2011-12-28T06:00:00.004-06:00

In both audio and video devices there is a fast forward option. In Louisiana, there is a FASTBackward option! And it seems, that since 2008, the whole of the American nation has been on fast backward; in it's mechanism of hate. Racism, Institutionalized has taken a definite turn for the extreme. In the courts, in the legislature, in every area of governance.

New Roads' Victoria Gosserand is scheduled for trial in February 2012.
In 2011, Scott Nugent was let-0ff twice and dealt a plea by the "justice system"!

If, you don't recollect, Scott killed Baron "Scooter" Pikes[Collins] in Winnfield in 2008. January 2008. MLK Weekend to be specific. Richard Barrett's Nationalist's were scheduled to "march in Jena" the same weekend. The whole situation was playing out in federal court in Cenla's Alexandria.
Currently, the federal system is to status conference January 2012 on the civil suit against, the city of Winnfield and Taser international.
The Racists, were emboldened. Scott went to school with Baron. Baron was Michael's cousin. That Michael. Jena's Michael!

Furthermore, Barack Obama was the Democratic contender for the presidency of the United States. Jena Times editor/publisher Sammy Franklin would write an article referencing "jumping frogs" and the need for white activist to get busy. And did they. It is my contention, that while all eyes were on the little town of Jena, the "neuvo-conservative movement" began. The Tea Party sprouted and blossomed to a full fledged revolt, when 13 states filed suit against the Obama Administration, citing the HealthCare Plan, violated the "Commerce Clause" of the U.S. Constitution! Furthermore, a push for enough states to convene a Constitutional Convention evolved.
Listen Up!

Dates set for Supreme Court health care reform arguments

he Supreme Court has carved out a week in late March to hold oral arguments in perhaps its biggest case in a decade -- the sweeping healthcare reform law championed by President Obama.

The court announced Monday it will hear 5½ hours of arguments spread over three days March 26-28.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or ACA) was signed into law March 23, 2010, passed by a Democratic congressional majority with the support of the president. It has about 2700 pages and contains 450 some provisions.

A ruling from the court is expected by late June and regardless of the outcome, will become a major issue in a presidential election year.

The largest and broadest legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act comes from a joint filing by 26 states, led by Florida. It was that series of appeals the high court had accepted for review.

At issue is whether the "individual mandate" section -- requiring nearly all Americans to buy health insurance by 2014 or face financial penalties -- is an improper exercise of federal authority. The states also say that if that linchpin provision is unconstitutional, the entire law must be also go.

Joining Florida in the challenge are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Four issues will be addressed by the Supreme Court:

Anti-Injunction Act

First, the court on March 26 will consider whether those challenging the law be barred from making any legal or constitutional claims until the individual mandate actually goes into effect in 2014.

The AIA -- in place since the 19th century -- bars claimants from asking for a refund on a tax until that tax has been collected and paid. Judges in two federal appeals courts have made that argument, which would effectively stop the current legal fight in its tracks. Citing that law might give the court a way out of deciding the explosive issue in an election year.

The majority could decide the political branches can best resolve the conflicts, at least for now, or that the matter can be handled after the November elections. Some court watchers have called this the health care "sleeper issue." It could potentially delay a decision on the constitutionality of the individual mandate for at least four years.

Individual mandate

The court will hear two hours of arguments on this most key issue on March 27. This provision requires nearly all Americans to buy some form of health insurance beginning in 2014, or face financial penalties. May the federal government, under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, regulate economic "inactivity"? Three federal appeals courts have found the PPACA to be constitutional, while another has said it is not, labeling it "breathtaking in its expansive scope." That "circuit split" all but assured the Supreme Court would step in and decide the matter.
keep reading

State lawmaker calls for convention to amend U.S. Constitution

State Rep. Nick Lorusso, who represents Lakeview and portions of Mid-City, wants Congress to call a convention of state legislatures for the purpose of amending the U.S. Constitution.

A Republican attorney who was elected to the Louisiana Legislature in 2007, Lorusso cites Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which states that if 34 state legislatures apply for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution, Congress is required to call one.

Although it does not spell out the procedures for the actual convention, Article V limits the convention’s power to proposing amendments. Those amendments would have to be approved by three-fourths of the states, either by their legislatures or by state conventions, to be added to the Constitution.

“The Article V Convention method of proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution provides a mechanism to bypass Congress, which arguably would never vote to reduce its own power or authority,” Lorusso said.

Lorusso has formed the Rebirth of Freedom organization which supports 10 resolutions it refers to as the Liberty Bill. They specifically call for fiscal restraint and limited government at the federal level.

State Rep. Kirk Talbot, R-River Ridge, is part of Lorusso’s effort. He said Article V establishes state legislatures as a “check and balance” on the federal government.

“Even Alexander Hamilton, an ardent Federalist, stated in The Federalist Paper No. 85 that the American people could ’safely rely on the dispositions of the state legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.’”

Other lawmakers who have joined the cause are Reps. Tim Burns, R-Mandeville; Thomas Carmody, R-Shreveport; George Cromer, R-Slidell; Cameron Henry, R-New Orleans; Frank Hoffman, R-West Monroe; John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie; J. Rogers Pope, R-Denham Springs; John Schroder, R-Covington; and Jane Smith, R-Bossier City; and Sen. A.G. Crowe, R-Pearl River.

Fiscal measures in the Rebirth of Freedom agenda include a requirement for a balanced budget, a federal spending cap, a super-majority vote of Congress to raise taxes and a Presidential line-item veto and a debt reduction requirement.

The group’s resolutions on limited government include congressional term limits, a transparency in legislation requirement and limitations on Congress’s authority to pass legislation pursuant to the Commerce Clause, General Welfare Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause.

“The federal government is spending our nation deeper in debt with no end in sight,” Lorusso said. “It is time for fiscal restraint, including a balanced budget amendment.”

Lorusso and his fellow Louisiana lawmakers are grappling with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposed $24.4 billion state budget for fiscal 2010-11 and a projected $3 billion shortfall over the next two years.

In other significance.

The State of Louisiana appears to be trending toward ousting, minority employees from public sector jobs. The Department of Education appears to be allowing in multiple school districts the verbal and sometimes "physical, pyshosocial and pyschosexual harrasment" of black and poor children. Reports from responsible parties have catalogued various instances in district where black children, entire classrooms were subjected to both verbal and physical abuse. A girls basketball coach, attempted to incite a student to disobey her parents in order to participate in the coach's program. What is expected is not what is being obtained!

The "STATE" of Louisiana Justice 2010

2010-10-29T19:14:00.010-05:00

2011 No Better!? 2012 Worse! ~ Unless!~ Joint Motion all must reply

Former officer clears last criminal charge
Oct. 22, 2011, 1:15 p.m. CDT
AP
WINNFIELD, La. (AP) — Winn Parish prosecutors have dropped a malfeasance charge against a former Winnfield policeman in the death of a man who was shocked with a stun gun, and former officer Scott Nugent has agreed not to seek reinstatement or back pay.
Nugent's attorney, George Higgins, told The Town Talk (http://townta.lk/pQrixs) about the agreement Friday.
A jury acquitted Nugent last year of manslaughter in the death of Baron "Scooter" Pikes, who died in 2008 after being shocked eight times.
Higgins says the case is finally over.
However, there's still a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against Nugent and city officials. They asked Judge Dee D. Drell in September to dismiss it.
Latrina D. Thomas, the mother of Pikes' young son, has until Nov. 4 to file her response.

**all parties in the case in the Western District are required to reply by Nov. 4** LeSieur

Louisiana State NAACP Convention Sept 22-25 2011 to be held in
Ferriday/Vidalia/Natchez area.

The truth sometimes, just doesn't come out. However, when a video is played to a jury, and a man says; "you killed me" & "you're going to suffer".

Before the recording ended, Collins told Nugent, “You’re going to suffer…You killed me.”

Nugent replied: “Are you threatening us… You ain’t dead. You’re talking. You’re alive.”

The following story, should have you aware what will not happen with the finality of this case. So, sad to say but this is the "state" of Louisiana Justice. *lesieur

September 23, 2010

AG still denies release of report due to open records debate

Report on shooting death of Bernard Monroe, Sr. remains sealed

MICHELLE BATES, Editor

A lawsuit filed in New Orleans, regarding the release of a deceased’s medical records, is having a direct affect on the release of the Louisiana State Police report involving the shooting death of Bernard Monroe, Sr.

The New Orleans case revolves around Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses who allegedly gave elderly patients a lethal cocktail of drugs to euthanize them after the charity hospital flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

When the grand jury didn’t return indictments, CNN and the Times Picayune of New Orleans requested the records of five patients who allegedly died under the doctor’s hands be released.

However, two defendants, who were unnamed in the article, filed suit requesting those records be blocked from release “claiming the records are covered by grand jury secrecy rules, that they should have been considered confidential informants and that releasing the documents would violate their privacy.”

According to a CNN article published Thursday, September 9, Judge Donald Johnson of the 19th Judicial District Court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge ruled that “records of the Memorial Medical Center deaths” in New Orleans should be released because the deaths “don’t involve ‘criminal litigation which is either pending or which can be reasonably anticipated.’”

This means the records should be released under state open records laws, and the judge’s decision is now under appeal.

The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office filed suit saying the courts needed to better define open records laws. In July, the case was sent from the Supreme Court back to District Court, which made the ruling to have the records released.

Assistant District Attorney Kurt Wall said that case is now on appeal, so no records have been released. Because of this case, the Louisiana State Police report on the officer-involved shooting death of Monroe is also not being released.

In earlier editions of The Guardian-Journal, Wall said that because the New Orleans case was still under litigation, Attorney General Buddy Caldwell ordered that no reports be released to the public until a ruling on the definition of open records laws is better defined.

Monroe was shot and killed on Friday, February 20, 2009, by former Homer Police Officer Tim Cox. The shooting occurred when Cox and former Homer Officer Joseph Henry were chasing Monroe’s son, Shawn. The chase led to the elder Monroe’s home, where the events of that day took place. Police said he was shot because he allegedly engaged the two officers with a loaded handgun. Witnesses and family members say Monroe did not have a gun in his possession at the time of the shooting. Instead, he was holding a sports drink bottle.

The case caused an uproar of outrage and anger in the community. At the time of the shooting, the Louisiana State Police were brought in to investigate the case, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Justice Department. The FBI was brought in to look into whether any of Monroe’s civil rights were violated. According to Agent Sheila Thorne, media spokesperson in the New Orleans Office, the investigation is still open and ongoing.

The Americans for Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was also brought into the picture, and they found that the Homer Police Department practiced racial profiling because a majority of the arrests they made were minorities.

In December 2009, the case was turned over to the Claiborne Parish District Attorney’s Office, and District Attorney Jonathan Stewart immediately turned it over to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office. When the grand jury returned no true bills against either former officer, the Monroe family hired famed civil rights attorney Morris Dees and filed a civil suit.

Earlier this year, the Town of Homer settled with the Monroe family to prevent any further litigation in the case and release the two former officers and the town from any liability afterwards.

Ex-officer not guilty in death of man shocked 8 times with Taser

By MARY FOSTER - Associated Press

WINNFIELD, La. — It took a state court jury only three hours Friday to return a not-guilty verdict in the manslaughter trial of a former Winnfield police officer accused of applying eight Taser gun shocks to a handcuffed man who later died.

The verdict cleared Scott Nugent in the death of Baron Pikes, who was stunned repeatedly as he lay on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, for refusing to get up. After Pikes was inside the police car, he was again shocked when he did not get out as ordered.

The verdict does not, however, end the case. The mother of Pikes’ 4-year-old son has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in federal court against Nugent and city officials. A malfeasance-in-office charge is also pending against Nugent.

“We thought we put together a strong case,” Winn Parish District Attorney Chris Nevils said. “There was not a single bit of evidence we had that we didn’t put on for the jury.”

The 10 white and two black jurors voted 11-1 to find Nugent not guilty, Nevils said. Only 10 jurors were needed to reach a verdict.

Nugent was hurried from the courtroom to a waiting car after the verdict was read.His attorney, George Higgins, later said Nugent and his family were “thrilled” by the decision. “Hopefully this will end the two-year ordeal they’ve been through,” Higgins said. “You have to remember, he was only 21 when this took place.”

Higgins said he believed the district attorney would weigh pursuing the pending malfeasance charge in light of Friday’s verdict.

The defense attorney said he thought the verdict was completely supported by evidence and witnesses who testified as to how professional Nugent was and the “overwhelming scientific testimony that the Taser could not have caused Mr. Pikes’ death.”

Asked whether his client would pursue returning to the force, Higgins said, “I think Mr. Nugent wants to get on with his life. I would doubt that he would return to any police department. For the last two years, he was unjustly labeled a murderer. I would guess he has a sour taste in his mouth for serving the public in that position again.”

The trial took three weeks. The defense put on a number of expert witnesses who said the Taser gun that Nugent used and the manner in which he used it — applying so-called “drive stuns” to Pikes’ back — would not have killed him, even though Nugent shocked Pikes eight times.

“This case was never about Taser,” Nevils said. “It was about the actions of this officer.”

In closing arguments the prosecutor described Nugent’s actions as abusive and leading to Pikes’ death.

Police are trained to increase force on a noncompliant subject in steps, Nevils told the jury, beginning with verbal orders, then applying soft hand force followed by hard hand force. Nugent skipped the early steps, Nevils said.

“He didn’t follow his training,” Nevils said. “He went straight to the thing he likes the most — to hurry him (Pikes) along, and he killed him.”

The autopsy lists the cause of Pikes’ death as undetermined. An expert witness for the prosecution called it homicide. An expert for the defense said the 21-year-old died of sudden exertion sickle cell death.

Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli, whose area of expertise is sudden death caused by sickle cell trait, testified that the Taser shocks did not cause Pikes’ death.

Pikes had sickle-cell trait, which can make blood cells change from the normal round shape into a sickle shape during exertion, clog blood vessels and deprive the body of oxygen. That happened to Pikes when he ran from officers who stopped him, defense attorney Jerry Glas said Friday during final arguments.

“Did the Taser trigger exertion sickle-cell death?” Glas asked the jury. “The exertion triggered the exertion sickle-cell death.”

On rebuttal, Nevils pointed out Pikes ran only a block and a half, and had run from officers during prior arrests and “he didn’t die then.”

The courtroom was crowded for closing arguments, with extra security measures at the courthouse, but the crowd was orderly. Several women cried quietly as Nevils wrapped up his rebuttal by referring to a videotape of Pikes writhing on the floor of the police department as they awaited an ambulance and telling police officers there, “You killed me.”

Nugent sat quietly at the defense table, staring down throughout the arguments.

“This was a travesty of justice,” said Carol Powell Lexing, attorney for Latrina Thomas, who is the mother of Pikes’ son. “But that dog-and-pony show that took place in Winnfield won’t last long in federal court.”

Well

Multi-City/Town:Mass INJUSTICE Demonstrations NOW | The NEW GRASSROOTS MASSMOVEMENT2010

2010-04-22T22:16:00.005-05:00

Honest Services 24Jun10 | Enron-Skilling ruling | La. Public Defender Board
Forging of America
Injustice
Justice Needed. Now!!
Every facet of the judicial process in Louisiana is in dis-array. Jean Faria sat in a House Judiciary Committee on April 21, while State Senator Francis Thompson, floated a legislative instrument dealing with the composition of the Louisiana Public Defender Board. The instrument would have stipulated a board member from the northern part of the state. In his statements, the questions were raised as to why, the majority of the members on the La. Public Defender Board were from S. Louisiana. He stated, that the Governor was from S.La., as was the Speaker of the House and others. The Senate seat held by Thompson, was formerly held by Senator Charles D. Jones. In essence, Thompson's seat is in a minority district. Louisiana is not the only state with justice issues.

By the fact of blacks, being the majority in prison and the courts, and subsequently still disproportionately receiving stiffer sentencings, wrongful convictions, prosecutorial indiscretions and un-equal justice and ultimately "death-justice" as in the death of Baron "Skooter" Pikes in Winnfield, Louisiana, of whose trial is scheduled for June 2010 in Winn parish. When we consider, the accusations in Tensas Parish's, Waterproof, La. As we consider, the incident of un-equaled justice playing out in the home-parish of the -yet to be confirmed- Middle District US Attorney. In the Gosserand case, the defendant was allowed to absent herself from court and not held in contempt -said to be in a rehab. -31 July 2010
In Pointe Coupee - The new US Attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana turns out to be Don Cazayoux.
In Tensas parish the Mayor of Waterproof was convicted & the LASC denied his writ on July 23rd.

In Winnfield, Louisiana -Scott Nugent is scheduled for trial on August 31, 2010 in the death of Baron Pikes.

Judge delays Gosserand's arraignment hearing

Posted: Apr 08, 2010 5:38 AM CDT Updated: Apr 12, 2010 5:35 AM CDT

NEW ROADS, LA (WAFB) - A woman who faces a vehicular homicide charge in connection with a deadly crash was scheduled to stand before a judge Thursday morning to tell how she pleads in the case, but the hearing has been postponed.

According to her attorney, Victoria Gosserand is currently in a rehab facility outside of the state. The judge rescheduled her arraignment for Aug. 26.

Gosserand stands accused in the death of Terri Parker, 23. Parker was killed in a crash in December on a Pointe Coupee Parish roadway. gssc/end

When we consider all things, relating to the judicial process, equity & un-equal justice due to socio-economic status, there is no other choice but coordinated MASS DIRECT-ACTION NON-VIOLENT DEMONSTRATIONS.

THIS IS A CALL TO ACTION FOR ALL UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE & COMMUNITY COLLEGE AGE STUDENTS TO RE-CONVENE IN LOUISIANA.

The New GRASSROOTS MASSMOVEMENT AGAINST UNEQUAL JUSTICE!!

Legislation hasn't Secured Unequal justice's demise. The courts have refused to rectify the problem because the law stipulates harsh punishments, exercised at the indiscretion of prosecutors, judges & the 1844 ruling class mentality. Nothing will change, unless we move, Now.

postscript:23Apr2010 16minutes aftermidnight

Analysis:Torch Passes in Civil Rights Struggle

Analysis: Torch passes in civil rights struggle

By ERRIN HAINES (AP) – 21 hours ago

ATLANTA — The recent deaths of Dorothy Height and Benjamin Hooks, two icons of the civil rights era, nudge those who have come behind them closer to the control for which they have clamored.

It is a prospect that is at once enticing and intimidating for the movement's heirs, who have waited years for their turn and a chance to further the progress of black America. Those years have caught up with both groups, as the graying civil rights generation has no choice but to step aside.

The next generation must decide whether they will step up as the nature of the struggle is in question and the future fight takes on a new identity.

It's put up or shut up now, said the Rev. Al Sharpton.

"I remember for years we said, 'Give us a chance,'" Sharpton said. "Well, we're center stage now. What are we gonna do?"

At 55, Sharpton is considered young among civil rights activists. He was groomed by people like Height and Hooks to lead after they left.

"They knew the struggle would continue beyond them," said Sharpton, who founded his National Action Network nearly 20 years ago. "We are facing more institutional inequities. These matters are not as dramatic as they were in their time, but they're just as insidious."

For years, the heroes of the 1950s and 1960s kept us connected to a time when the battle for equality in this country was real and present for millions of black Americans, decades away from the election of the first black president.

The larger-than-life examples of Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery and John Lewis — who marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and lived to tell us about it year after year — were constant reminders that the fight is not over.

When she died Tuesday at 98, Height was one of the few female voices of the movement. Her activism stretched from the New Deal to marching alongside King before she witnessed the historic election of President Barack Obama.

Hooks led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 15 years after he was inspired to fight against social injustice and bigotry as a young soldier guarding Italian prisoners of war while serving overseas in the Army during World War II. Foreign prisoners could eat in "for whites only" restaurants but he could not. He died Thursday at the age of 85.

The struggle they leave behind is far different from the one they inherited under a segregated America. Today, the Rev. Raphael Warnock of MLK's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is carrying the mantle of social justice theology, fighting for voting rights and financial literacy and against disparities in the criminal justice system — without the permission of his elders.

"I don't know that anybody handed that generation the leadership," said the 40-year-old Warnock. "I think they took it. And the onus is on us to assume leadership and not wait on somebody to give it to us. We are clearly witnessing the changing of the guard."

This generation does not live in fear of biting dogs or the sting of a fire hose, but must still fight to ensure equal access to education and employment. Hundreds of black elected officials across the country do not eliminate the need to advocate the right to vote.

"Losing Dr. Height hurts immeasurably, but it also inspires unconditionally," said Julianne Malveaux, president of the all-female, historically black Bennett College. "When we think about the struggles she identified with and the work that she did, she's really left us with a social, economic and legislative agenda."

Malveaux said that many young people are respectful of history and may be ready to carry on with Height's mission, but others may see her labor as part of a bygone era.

"They have been seduced by our progress to feel that the civil rights movement may not be necessary," she said.

The call to action now extends not to an aging few, but to countless blacks from 18 to 70 — still young, compared to the those who were stirred to action in the last century. Already there are those who have answered. The NAACP has at its helm the youngest president and chairwoman in its 101-year history. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is preparing to install as its new leader Bernice King, the youngest daughter of King, the organization's most famous founder. And the executive director of Sharpton's National Action Network is under 30.

Whether they can rally their peers as their predecessors rallied for the betterment of a people remains to be seen. But after years of asking, they will soon get their wish.

Justice Denied:STILL-Louisiana Style

2010-02-20T13:07:00.023-06:00

Mike Thompson convicted in US Court | Hobbs Act trial Awaits

State Senator Lydia Jackson spoke on the first panel of the United States Department of Justice's Indigent Defense Symposium Feb. 18 & 19th 2010 in Washington, D.C.

Already in this state, the Louisiana Attorney General's office has presided over a grand jury in Homer, Louisiana that returned a "no true bill" in the death of Bernard Monroe, at the hands of two police officers.

The problem in Louisiana is gargantuan and requires direct intervention. The last such legal gathering of the US DOJ was in 1999-2000 according to Symposium statements.

As we write, because of legal maneuvering and shenanigans in a federal criminal case two young black state-defendants are being denied proper due process because of mechinations by a federal public defender and his 43 year old federal client. The two 20-year-olds have no idea, what is going on behind the scenes. One defendant's - public defender may be aware of the maneuvering. The federal client & the two state defendants are linked to the same alledged crime!

If someone wants to talk about systemic injustice, one must begin at the bottom. And the boot is on the foot of Louisiana. The Public Defender Office in Baton Rouge is being scrutinized, after several officials plead guilty to impropriety on federal charges. In a "Jena related" case a defendant has begun to experience Baton Rouge PDO's ineffective assistance of counsel.

In the national scene, a concerted effort has been ongoing to distance America from the "lasting affects of the 'Jena Scenario' played out in Louisiana's debacled courts".

January 17, 2008 Baron "Scooter" Pikes was supposed to have been arrested, according to Winnfield, Louisiana police. He Died!

Baron "Scooter" Pikes' Life was arrested the day the police tasered him, against his will. In affect, his civil rights were violated.

If the system of justice is to change in America, that change must begin in Louisiana.

As late as October 2009, Jean Faria, in an article in the Lake Charles, Louisiana newspaper American Press; stated that indigent defense in the state was a problem not solved yet. [ Calcasieu PDO AmericanPress.com]

Faria called the problems “systemic.” She compared the criminal justice system to a three-legged stool with one leg being the courts, a second being the prosecution and the third the defense.

Presently the stool definitely cannot sit straight because the defense “leg” is shorter than the others. First, Faria said, people have to come together.

She would like parties involved in the criminal justice system to sit down with the local legislative delegation and say “This is what it looks like here … this is the mess we are in and it’s going to take all of us good, well-intentioned people to sit together and figure out how we’re going to deal with this in Calcasieu.”

“Can you help us craft a solution?”

“The answer,” she said, “may be yes. The answer may be no. But the answer cannot be that the public defender clients suffer.”

Justice Dept. Symposium Washington,D.C.-State Senator Lydia Jackson at 102:36 mark!

Eric Holder in New Orleans 23 Feb. 2010 for National Fusion Center Conference. Conference is on Terrorism. "Instead of pursuing a narrow, ideological approach to fighting terrorism, combating crime, and protecting the safety of our people, today's Justice Department is committed to being flexible, pragmatic and aggressive. This approach is working. By focusing on improving communication and collaboration, we've helped to prevent hundreds of crimes and to protect even more lives."

Taser death could be considered Torture

JUSTICE FOR SALE PBS.org

Judge seals video tape in Taser Case Why is the tape sealed!?

Impoverished Youth Justice DOJ Symposium Feb. 17 2010 - Washington,DC

Judge puts gag order in place for Gosserand trial

Posted: Mar 11, 2010 11:02 AM CST Updated: Mar 12, 2010 6:47 AM CST

By David Spunt - bio | email

NEW ROADS, LA (WAFB) - The judge in the New Roads vehicular homicide trial has placed a gag order on all attorneys involved with the case. The gag order means attorneys from both sides are not permitted to talk to the media about this specific case.

Judge puts gag-order

New Roads Vehicular Homicide a TEST CASE. Two Judges removed from court case.
Grand Jury Indicts Woman in New Roads Case
Woman indicted in wreck WAFB

Vehicular homicide count charged

By KORAN ADDO
Advocate Westside bureau
Published: Feb 23, 2010

NEW ROADS — A grand jury indicted a Ventress woman on a count of vehicular homicide and another charge Monday in a wreck that killed a New Roads woman in December.

The grand jury also indicted Victoria Gosserand, 23, on a count of first-degree negligent vehicular injuring in the Dec. 23 wreck that killed Terri Parker, 23, and sent Kyle Riviere, 23, to a hospital with serious injuries.

The 18th Judicial District prosecutor, Tony Clayton, said Gosserand’s blood-alcohol content was 0.30, or nearly four times the 0.08 legal limit, the night of the wreck.

If convicted of vehicular homicide, the more serious of the two charges, Gosserand faces up to 30 years in prison with a minimum of five years served without the benefit of parole, probation or a suspended sentence.

She faces up to five years in prison, a $2,000 fine or both on the count of first-degree negligent vehicular injuring.

After Monday’s court proceedings, Parker’s mother, Debra Cushionberry, said the grand jury’s decision was “a relief.”

Cushionberry, along with two dozen friends and family members, spent much of Monday in the courthouse hallway waiting for the grand jury’s decision.

Many of them wore shirts emblazoned on the front with Parker’s picture with the words “In Loving Memory” and “Justice for Terri Marie Parker.”

“I feel good. It’s a relief,” Cushionberry said after the indictments were announced.

“It’s not that a burden has been lifted from me, because my daughter is dead, but this is the first step towards justice,” she said.

Justice, she said, would be for Gosserand to serve prison time.

Parker’s aunt, Rosemarie Parker, said the family will continue to fight to make sure the death of her niece, who would have turned 24 last month, will not go unpunished.

“My eyes are wide open,” Rosemarie Parker said. “We just want what’s right for Terri.”

Neither Gosserand nor her family was in court; however, her attorneys, Nathan Fisher and Jerry D’Aquila, attended the reading of the indictment.

Gosserand, 7702 Cook’s Landing, Ventress, is due back in court April 8, at which time she is expected to enter a plea, prosecutors said.

The grand jury’s decision stems from the night of Dec. 23, when a New Roads police officer saw Gosserand speed through a red light at Hospital Road and False River Drive in her 2002 Acura MDX sport utility vehicle about 11:30 p.m., New Roads police have said.

Gosserand’s car slammed into Riviere’s 1999 Toyota Camry as he was turning left at a green light onto False River Drive, police have said.

The collision threw Parker from the Camry onto the shoulder of False River Drive, where police found the young mother of a 2-year-old boy lying motionless, her neck apparently broken, the report said.

The parish Coroner’s Office pronounced her dead at the scene, police have said.

According to the police report, investigators and paramedics approached a “screaming and cursing” Gosserand in her SUV and tried to get her out of the vehicle.

Gosserand became “combative,” the report said, and authorities had to restrain her before loading her into an ambulance to be taken to Pointe Coupee General Hospital.

Riviere, also of New Roads, was taken to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge after authorities extracted him from his crumpled car, the report said.

Gosserand, 7702 Cook’s Landing, Ventress, is due back in court April 8, at which time she is expected to enter a plea, prosecutors said.

Officer: Gosserand had 'aggressive attitude'

Advocate Westside bureau
Published: Mar 11, 2010 - UPDATED: 6:30 p.m

NEW ROADS — A New Roads policeman testified Thursday that the defendant in a Dec. 23 vehicular homicide case had an “aggressive attitude” and “had to be restrained” following the wreck in which a woman was killed and a man seriously injured.

Officer Brandon Spillman said he was parked in a vacant lot while on duty around midnight at the intersection of False River Drive and Hospital Road when he witnessed Victoria Gosserand run a red light at a high rate of speed in her dark-colored sport utility vehicle.

Gosserand’s SUV crashed into Kyle Riviere’s green Toyota Camry as Riviere attempted to make a left turn onto False River Drive, Spillman said.

Gosserand did not attempt to slow down or stop her vehicle as she sped through the intersection, he said.

The impact of the crash sent both vehicles spinning, at which time Spillman said, he saw a large object, which turned out to be Camry passenger Terri Parker, 23, of New Roads, flying through the air.

When Parker landed about 30 feet from the point of impact, Riviere’s car appeared to run over her body, the officer said. Parker was pronounced dead at the scene, he said.

Monday’s hearing in 18th Judicial District Court marks the first time Gosserand, 23, 7702 Cook’s Landing, Ventress, has appeared in court in connection with the Dec. 23 wreck.

Prosecutors have said Gosserand’s blood-alcohol content was 0.30 percent, or nearly four times the 0.08 percent blood alcohol content which is considered presumptive evidence of drunken driving in Louisiana,.

The defendant is scheduled to return to the Pointe Coupee Parish Courthouse April 8 to enter a plea on one count each of vehicular homicide and first-degree negligent injuring. If convicted, Gosserand faces between five and 30 years in prison for vehicular homicide, the more serious of the two charges.

Judges puts gag-order on Gosserand trial |

Officer describes crash
Testimony offered in fatal accident

By KORAN ADDO
Advocate Westside bureau
Published: Mar 12, 2010

NEW ROADS — A New Roads police officer testified Thursday that the defendant in a Dec. 23 vehicular homicide case had an “aggressive attitude” and “had to be restrained” following the wreck in which a woman was killed and a man seriously injured.

Gosserand’s SUV crashed into Kyle Riviere’s green Toyota Camry as Riviere attempted to make a left turn onto False River Drive, Spillman said.

Gosserand did not attempt to slow down or stop her vehicle as she sped through the intersection, he said.

The impact of the crash sent both vehicles spinning, at which time Spillman said, he saw a large object, which turned out to be Camry passenger Terri Parker, 23, of New Roads, flying through the air.

When Parker landed about 30 feet from the point of impact, Riviere’s car appeared to run over her body, the officer said.

Spillman testified that he ran to Gosserand’s vehicle first because it was closer to him.

“She was laid back in the driver’s seat,” he said. “I could hear her mumbling.”

As he tried to talk to Gosserand, Spillman said, he smelled “a strong odor of alcohol” coming from her.

Spillman testified that after the wreck, Gosserand told him that she had three friends in her SUV, although he observed that Gosserand was the vehicle’s only occupant.

Moments later, Spillman said, he approached the Camry and noticed Kyle Riviere’s arm hanging out of the car’s window.

“He was conscious, but not alert. It was obvious that he was trapped in the car,” the officer said.

Spillman said he also observed “a pretty good-sized hole” in the passenger side of the Camry’s windshield.

The officer said he checked on Parker’s motionless body near a curb on False River Drive and couldn’t detect the accident victim’s pulse.

“Due to the position of her head, it was apparent that she suffered a broken neck,” Spillman said.

Paramedics on the scene determined that Parker was dead, Spillman said.

As paramedics tried to extract Gosserand from her SUV, she began yelling and cursing at them, flailing her arms around and being “very uncooperative,” Spillman testified.

“It was not like she was yelling in pain,” the officer said. “She was saying, ‘Get away from me. I don’t want you around me.’ ”

At that point, Gosserand’s father had arrived at the scene and accompanied his daughter, Spillman and paramedics to Pointe Coupee General Hospital, the officer said.

Inside the ambulance, Spillman said, Gosserand was “very uncooperative and aggressive” as a paramedic attempted to insert an intravenous tube into her arm.

During the ride in the ambulance, Gosserand yelled expletives at her father and threatened to kill him, the officer testified.

At the hospital, it took several members of the hospital’s staff, Spillman and Gosserand’s father to restrain her, Spillman said.

During cross-examination, defense attorney Jerry D’Aquila noted that Spillman filled out two accident reports in the days after the wreck but only the second report noted the odor of alcohol coming from Gosserand.

Spillman testified that he was “fatigued” when he wrote the first report on Dec. 24 and then amended the report on Dec. 28 when he remembered more details.

D’Aquila questioned how Spillman was able to witness the wreck — both cars spinning, Parker’s ejection from the Camry and note that the traffic light controlling westbound traffic was red — in such detail.

That line of questioning provoked a strong response from Assistant District Attorney Tony Clayton, who demonstrated for the court how the prosecution believes Spillman, during just a few moments, was able to mentally record key elements of the wreck.

Clayton stood at the back of the courtroom and counted to three as he walked toward Spillman seated in the witness chair.

As Clayton counted aloud, Spillman said “crash” on the count of one, “cars spinning” at the count of two and “saw the red light” at the count of three.

Monday’s hearing in 18th Judicial District Court marks the first time Gosserand, 23, 7702 Cook’s Landing, Ventress, has appeared in court in connection with the Dec. 23 wreck.

Throughout Spillman’s testimony, Gosserand kept her head down, occasionally wiping tears from her eyes.

She is scheduled to return to the Pointe Coupee Parish Courthouse April 8 to enter a plea on one count each of vehicular homicide and first-degree negligent injuring. If convicted, Gosserand faces between five and 30 years in prison for vehicular homicide, the more serious of the two charges.

Defense attorney Rob Marionneaux told District Judge Alvin Batiste, who is presiding over the case, that it is possible Gosserand may not be available for the April 8 court session because she is scheduled to enter “treatment.”

It is unclear if Gosserand would be required to appear for her arraignment.

After Thursday’s court session, prosecutors and defense attorneys both said the judge issued a gag order preventing them from discussing the case in public.

Prosecutorial Misconduct:an increasing problem or overblown hysteria?

North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission

The first Louisiana StateWide Civil Rights Conference and Forum was held October 2007 in Alexandria, Louisiana. The first "StateWide Symposium" was held in Grambling, Louisiana in February 2008.
Are you prepared for LSWCR Conference & Forum
2010-11
It is evident a StateWide Conference is necessitated. An individual was incarcerated earlier in the year, by what appeared to have been; a detaining by a "joint federal task force." On 1-7-11, the person was glared & stared at by the arresting officer, in the incident earlier this year. The arrestee has dealt with current legal matters. An amount of money will be paid to the appropriate authorities for late fees to probation and parole.

However, 'the taking' of the individual on that day by the task force, was incorrigable.

Louisiana Attorney General takes Homer, La.-Bernard Monroe CaseClaiborne DA Recuses Office

2009-12-16T14:39:00.009-06:00

Monday January 18, 2010
The eighth annual Martin Luther King Day Noon Ecumenical Observance will be noon Monday in the Ruston Civic Center.
This service follows the annual Martin Luther King Unity March and parade that will start at 11 a.m. at Louisiana Tech's Thomas Assembly Center, where marchers will meet at 10:45 a.m. The event is coordinated by the office of multicultural affairs at Louisiana Tech and produced by a committee of students, faculty, staff and local residents. The keynote speaker will be the Rev. Carmelita Pope Freeman, regional community relations director for the U.S. Justice Department and an ordained elder in the CME 4th Episcopal District.

Grand Jury to hear Racially Charged Case| Homer investigation moves forward| "What other choice do we have"|
December 10, 2009
Monroe case sent to Attorney General
Stewart recuses office from shooting investigation Dees & Claiborne NAACP Reps

MICHELLE BATES, Editor

Claiborne Parish District Attorney Jonathan Stewart has recused his office from any further involvement in the February shooting death of 73-year-old Bernard Monroe Sr.

In a press conference held Wednesday, December 2, Stewart addressed the case, saying he was sending it to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, citing conflicts of interest for his office.

“After the order of recusal is signed, my office will have no further involvement with this case,” Stewart said, “other than to turn over the entire file and investigative materials to the attorney general, which will occur at some point in time next week.”

He cited two reasons for bowing out. One, he said, is that both former Homer police officers involved in the case – Timon Cox and Joseph Henry – are witnesses in pending criminal cases, which have not been resolved. Second, he said it would put his office and the officers in a “difficult position.”

Monroe was shot and killed by Cox on Friday, February 20, in the front yard of his home. According to police, the officers were pursuing Monroe’s son, Sean. The foot pursuit ended in Monroe’s front yard where Cox allegedly chased the younger Monroe out of the house.

Initial reports say Monroe was shot when he allegedly engaged the two officers with a loaded handgun. Witnesses, family members and friends say Monroe did not have a gun in his possession at the time of the shooting.

Stewart refused to answer any questions regarding what is in the final report turned in by the state police.

“I do not want to prejudice how the attorney general presents it, and I also do not want to prejudice anybody that might be on the grand jury,” Stewart said.

Stewart said the attorney general’s office will convene a grand jury from Claiborne Parish in January 2010 in order to make a decision on whether to pursue criminal charges or not.

“I have spoken with the attorney general several times over the last month, and he has agreed to give the case his personal attention,” the district attorney said.

In the wake of the shooting, the Monroe family hired Southern Poverty Law Center heavyweight Morris Dees to represent them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit organization, and was founded as a small civil rights law firm in 1971, according to their website, www.splcenter.com.

Along with Georgia Norton, Monroe’s sister-in-law, Dees made it clear that the Monroe family wants to see justice.

“This family has suffered greatly to have their loved one shot to death in their presence, inside their house, by a police officer who had absolutely no legal rights to be in this home,” Dees said. “We have been very patient – the lawyers, the family has been more than patient. At this point, we put our faith in the grand jury and this community, and we’ll have to wait and see what happens. As the late Dr. Martin Luther King says, ‘The moral arc of justice is long, but it bends towards fairness in the end,’ and we hope that’s what we’ll see in this case.”

Asked if a civil suit would be filed, he said they would wait and see.

“We’re going to make that decision with the family and we’ll be discussing what they ought to do,” he said. “You can be assured that the facts of this case are going to come out, whether in a criminal case or in a civil case.”

Homer Town Attorney Jim Colvin said, “We’ll represent and defend the town as best we can, and we look forward to the conclusion to this investigation. As a citizen of this town and as town attorney, I look forward to the conclusion of this investigation. If there is a civil case, we’ll do our best to represent the town’s interest based on the facts revealed in the investigation to come.”

Norton spoke on behalf of the family, saying that Monroe’s widow is doing as well as can be expected.

“We’re okay,” she said, “and we’re hoping for the same thing that our attorney is – that this be fair and justice is fairly done.”

Terry Willis, communications director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), repeated her sentiments, saying he hopes the case is handled in a “very expeditious manner.”

“We need this resolved so that our community can begin to heal and that justice will be served no matter what the outcome,” Willis said.

When asked if he thought the case would go to trial, he said, “Hopefully not.”

And if the officers are cleared of wrong doing?

“We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get to it, no matter the outcome,” he responded. “This is a ‘catch 22’ for this community, for this department and our local government. We will have to settle and deal with the circumstances whatever they may be.”

Justears! Louisiana's Backwater

2009-10-25T19:01:00.007-05:00

Jeffress | Ciolino | 7th JDC PDO | Original complaint | 14th JDC PDO suit re-opened | October 15, 2009
Gov. Jindal to visit Homer October 16

Governor Bobby Jindal will be in Homer, from 2 until 4 p.m. Friday, October 16 at a Louisiana Honor Medal Ceremony. All elected officials are encouraged to attend.

For more information, please call Brandi White at 927-3077 (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), 263-7419 (Tuesday and Thursday) or cell phone at 422-2951.

DA to reach decision in Homer shooting soon

MICHELLE BATES, Editor

District Attorney Jonathan Stewart will possibly be releasing a decision on the officer-involved shooting death of Bernard Monroe Sr. soon.

That’s according to Stewart himself, who said he is still reviewing the Louisiana State Police report turned over to his office several weeks ago – but he insists there is no set deadline for his decision.

“I don’t have any deadline. We’re doing some investigating on our own as a follow up to the state police report,” Stewart said.

He said the state police report is very thorough, but there is just some follow up to do. He shares the concerns of many in the community and Monroe’s family, saying that he understands the gravity of the situation.

“All I want is the truth to come out,” he said. “That’s what we’re looking for – the truth. The community has a lot at stake, and it has hurt enough.”

Stewart will have to decide whether to send the report to a grand jury to review the evidence and decide if the shooting was justified. Or, he could turn it over to the Louisiana Attorney General’s office to handle the case. The third option would be for Stewart to actually make a decision on whether it was justified or not.

Monroe was shot and killed by two Homer Police Officers on Friday, February 20, after he allegedly engaged the two with a loaded handgun.

According to police, Monroe was armed. His family and those close to him say he was not.

In the wake of his death, much controversy has surrounded the small town of Homer. The U.S. Justice Department has been working closely with community members in an effort to buff the town’s division over the incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has also conducted its own investigation into any alleged civil rights violations. The American Civil Liberties Union has also conducted its own investigation into racial profiling, to which it concluded that there were more arrests of blacks in the Town of Homer than whites.

In response, Homer Police Chief Russell Mills and his department are putting their numbers together as well to show more accuracy, he said. The Guardian-Journal, also, has requested the same public documents requested by the ACLU in order to conduct its own inquiry.

Since Monroe’s death, former officers Joseph Henry and Timon Cox have both resigned.

System broken; no fix in sight (10/18)
Posted October 18, 2009 at 12:30 am
Filed Under News

By VINCENT LUPO
AMERICAN PRESS

Defense attorneys, judges and prosecutors say the public defender system in state district court here is broken, but no one knows quite how to fix it.

The ideal solution would be to have the Legislature allocate more money to the state indigent defender system that oversees and helps fund the local Public Defenders Office.

In light of budget cuts looming over the state in all areas, the hope of attracting more funds for an agency perceived by the public to represent “criminals” is merely a pipe dream.

Mitch Bergeron, executive director of the local PDO, says he needs about 20 more attorneys to keep up with the demands coming from local courts and for those lawyers to be effective in representing clients.

The agency employs 11 attorneys. Three other lawyers have contracts to handle specific types of cases for the agency. The PDO also pays five so-called conflict attorneys randomly appointed when the agency, because of conflicts of interest, cannot ethically represent a defendant.

There used to be six conflict attorneys, Bergeron said, but one resigned recently. Contracts with some of the other conflict lawyers will not be renewed in the near future.

About 95 percent of the cases that come through local courts are assigned to the PDO because the defendants are too poor to hire their own lawyers, Bergeron said. Each of his felony attorneys now has about 500 cases assigned at any one time. Misdemeanor attorneys have about 700 cases each.

The guidelines of the National Advisory Commission for Defense Attorneys recommend no one public defender have more than 150 felony cases assigned per year and no more than 400 misdemeanor cases per attorney per year.

Because of his staff’s present caseload, Bergeron said there are ethical and constitutional issues coming into play.

A criminal defendant has the constitutional right to representation by an attorney.

“But,” Bergeron said, “that right goes beyond just having a warm body with a law degree standing with the defendant.”

Those accused of crimes are entitled by both the U.S. and Louisiana constitutions to effective assistance of counsel.

Higher courts have said “reasonable assistance of counsel means that a lawyer not only possesses adequate skill and knowledge, but also has time and resources to apply his skill and knowledge to (the) task of defending his individual clients.”

Bergeron said with the present caseload, his staff isn’t able to meet those requirements.

His office may not be in a position to receive any more cases. If that happens, the courts may have to implement another plan to use in naming lawyers to represent indigent defendants.

Jean Faria of the Louisiana Public Defender Board said Act 307 adopted during the 2007 regular session of the Legislature, created on paper a uniform statewide system that gives poor defendants their constitutionally mandated right to effective counsel and provided for additional funds to indigent defense.
Two years later, it is obvious that that legislation is not enough to solve the problems with the indigent defense system.

Faria called the problems “systemic.” She compared the criminal justice system to a three-legged stool with one leg being the courts, a second being the prosecution and the third the defense.

Presently the stool definitely cannot sit straight because the defense “leg” is shorter than the others.

Faria noted her office requested $46 million from the state to help local jurisdictions with indigent defense. She was given $27.8 million, which funds about 40 percent of the local PDOs. The remainder of their funds comes from fines and court costs, but those are not what they should be, either.

Meanwhile, the other legs of the stool remain on an even floor because of public funding and other means.

She pointed out that district attorney offices do not have such worries as rent or health insurance payments, because these are provided by state and/or local government agencies.

Bergeron’s office, on the other hand, pays about $150,000 in rent annually and the same amount for health insurance benefits for its employees.

Savings in those areas could provide at least two attorneys to the local public defender ranks, she said.

“This (the PDO) is as much for the community as that (the D.A.’s office) is,” Faria said. “And there is not even a thought, apparently, of the responsibility of the parish to say ‘Well, we’re providing free rent here. We need to provide free rent for these fellows.’ “

Faria said with the ethics issues now involved, the local PDO “is not in a position to continue to receive cases.”

That is a decision Bergeron must make, Faria said. The state board, she said, will assist the defenders in what they have to do to function ethically because “it’s a profession, and we’re talking about people’s lives, liberty and freedom.”

“If you convict the wrong person, the perpetrator is out there still,” Faria said.

“What could be worse than an innocent person going to prison because the lawyer does not have the time and the resources to do what needs to be done?”

Many of the judges here have been ordering defendants appointed to the PDO to pay a certain amount for legal services.

Some do pay, but, as Bergeron pointed out, “It is hard to ask those people for money when you’re trying to build up a relationship of trust with them so you can better represent them in court.

“And, we don’t have a whole lot of time to start off anyway, so you don’t want that whole relationship to be about money,” he said.

“Then people who should be coming in to talk to you (about their case) are avoiding you — and they were appointed to us anyway because they are indigent.”

Faria said the judges who are ordering such payments are well-intentioned to try to help with the financial situation of the office, but “if the collection agency for that is also the same agency that is rendering the service, it’s tough.”

Bergeron said there are systemic issues in the court system here that add to the problem.

For one, Division H has been moved to Family and Juvenile Court. So now six, rather than seven, divisions of the court are handling criminal matters.

Those six judge also have civil dockets, he said, so there are only a limited number of court dates when a particular judge is in criminal court.

“We just don’t have enough court days to satisfy this caseload.”

So what is the answer? How do you fix the broke and the broken PDO?

Bergeron has considered filing motions to declare his agency ineffective and violative of the rights of the clients it represents. Those types of motions are time-consuming and tedious and would only be a last-ditch effort.

First, Faria said, people have to come together.

She would like parties involved in the criminal justice system to sit down with the local legislative delegation and say “This is what it looks like here … this is the mess we are in and it’s going to take all of us good, well-intentioned people to sit together and figure out how we’re going to deal with this in Calcasieu.”

“Can you help us craft a solution?”

“The answer,” she said, “may be yes. The answer may be no. But the answer cannot be that the public defender clients suffer.”

“Business as usual in this extraordinary caseload just can’t go on.”

Man who claims brutality found not guilty in case against him
Civil rights activist to review alleged police misconduct, school system charges
Posted October 20th, 2009
A corrections officer has been found not guilty of charges stemming from an April incident in which he claimed he was unjustly pepper-sprayed and was the victim of multiple stun gun applications.
Meanwhile, a citizens’ meeting featuring civil rights personality the Rev. DeVes Toon of the National Action Network is scheduled in Eunice Thursday to air allegations of police misconduct.
Judge Lynette Feucht found Jernell Smith, Jr., 52, not guilty of interfering with the duties of a police officer and resisting an officer in a bench trial in City Court.
Smith, represented at trial by Opelousas attorney Jarvis Clairborne, was arrested April 23 after a late-night run-in with officers near Lloyd Street.
The officers - two city police officers and a sheriff’s deputy - were investigating a stabbing that had happened a few minutes earlier at another location
The next day, Smith alleged he was the subject of excessive force, used on him, he claimed, after he had identified himself as a corrections officer and told police he was trying to get to his house.
In addition to being the victim of pepper spraying and Taser use, he alleged he was subjected to verbal abuse during and after his arrest.
Toon, according to his organization, is supposed to appear at a 3 p.m. Thursday session at St. Luke Baptist Church to look into allegations such as Smith’s and those of Josh Andrus, who claimed he was also the object of excessive force during an arrest earlier in April.
The officer accused in that instance has since resigned and the case file of a State Police investigation into the incident is in the District Attorney’s Office.
Complaints against the police began to build about a year ago, when African Americans began claiming Officer A.J. Frank, who is black, was harassing them and unjustly issuing citations.
Internal investigation determined there was no foundation for the complaints.
One concern expressed by the citizens group - overcrowding in the city jail - is indisputable. It often has 50 or more inmates in a facility built for 43.
Toon’s office also said alleged “unfairness” in the parish school desegregation plan and in school employment practices will be aired.
The desegregation plan was ordered by federal district court, after input from the Department of Justice, the School Board and a special Bi-Racial Committee.
School system employment practices are monitored by the same federal court.

Civil rights leader visits Eunice
By Judy Bastien • jbastien@dailyworld.com • October 25, 2009
The Rev. DeVes Toon of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network met Thursday with Eunice community leaders at St. Luke Baptist Church in Eunice.Toon was in the city to hear residents' complaints of alleged misconduct on the part of the Eunice Police Department, as well as objections to some of the provisions of the recently implemented desegregation plan as it affects Eunice schools submitted by community activist Clifton Lemelle.
Toon plans to carry the complaints to the office of the attorney general in Washington, D.C., said George Fisher, one of the event's organizers.
About 25 citizens braved Thursday's severe weather to attend the meeting, which had been scheduled to begin at 3 p.m.
They waited quietly in the church pews until Toon arrived at about 3:45 p.m. and was whisked into a closed-door meeting with organizers.
When the meeting began, sometime after 4 p.m., citizens were invited to come forward and present their own complaints.
At the end of the meeting, the topics of local enforcement and the desegregation plan were discussed.
Representatives of the Eunice Police Department were unavailable for comment.
When contacted, Superintendent of St. Landry Parish Schools Michael Nassif said he stands by previous statements made earlir on the subject of desegregation.
Nassif had previously pointed out that the desegregation plan, which had languished for more than 40 years, had finally been hammered out by a biracial committee and approved by the Department of Justice and federal Judge Tucker Melancon.
Fisher said that his group hopes to have the desegregation matter reopened by the Justice Department.

2008 Winter Advocate LACDL Faria Apellate Project

Reeling: Continued Infamy

2009-04-07T15:30:00.019-05:00

13Aug2009
Colfax police officer Indicted |
6Aug2009
Homer, La. officers resign |
9 July 2009| Poverty Point Fraud Trial
|Racial tensions run high in Paris after charges dropped in murder case| Charges dismissed - Paris, Tx.| Louisiana:Ex-Iberville School Board Member arrested after protest| Second Homer Forum - US ATTY press release 052209

March marks N.O. teen's killing
'This is not acceptable. Every life is important'
At Baronne Street and Washington Avenue,Raphael mentioned the shooting nearby.

The Usual Suspects show up to cry foul in situations such as the following. However, the idea of a permeable mass-movement is beyond their grasp of reasoning. They do not understand and they never will.

But, this you must understand, Tonya Littlefeather is convicted and imprisoned, Michael Cobb is still in Angola & Mychal is still in the "pawnbrokers" shop! Torture in Our Own Backyard

This isn't the first instance of trouble at this facility. Oct 08 Alex Harris Story
Trio of convictions spark outcry

Written by Tiffany Flournoy
Friday, 24 April 2009

Concerns regarding cases of alleged injustices were expressed during an “urgent” community forum Wednesday at Mt. Zion CME Church, specifically those surrounding the Minden 3.

The Community Relations Service, a component of the U.S. Department of Justice and Civil Rights Investigator Irvin Robins were on hand to offer a listening ear.

The two-plus hour meeting, hosted by Concerned Citizens for Justice, touched a number of area judicial concerns for both Webster and Claiborne parishes. However, the session revolved around what some are calling the Minden 3 — Kelton Greenard of Minden, Arthur Henderson II of Cotton Valley and Anthony Combs of Homer.

In January, the trio was ordered to serve five years at hard labor in the Louisiana Department of Correction, with two years suspended after being found guilty in October 2008, of negligent homicide and cruelty to a juvenile in the death of former Hope Youth Ranch resident 12-year-old Alex Harris.

“In this case, I had some terrible circumstances and what I found is discriminatory prosecution,” said Jena 6 Attorney Louis Scott, who was present during Wednesday’s meeting.

Scott said in regards to this particular case, many people had the same, similar or greater responsibilities as those who stood trial.

“Many people were closer to what happened than people convicted. Some were convicted and others were not,” Scott said. “This case says more to me about the prosecution than most anybody else. It (case) speaks for itself. One man treated one way and the next treated another way — a classic definition of discrimination.”

The Rev. David Brown, who was in attendance during the evening session, said the electrocution of justice didn’t need to see the shock on his face when he heard the words “guilty on all counts,” referring to the verdict of the Minden 3.

Brown said the purpose of the open session was not to point fingers at anyone, but to further point out the evidence that has already been filed — all 62 pieces.

“Ninety-two percent of the pieces show three innocent young men in a way that is so innocent, I find it hard to just sit here,” Brown said. “If they look at the appeal, I believe in my heart, justice will be wearing the blindfold.”

The case is currently under appeal at the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in Shreveport, where it will be reviewed by three judges. These judges will be responsible for deciding whether there is sufficient evidence for a finding of guilt. They will also make determinations regarding technical issues, such as whether the hearsay testimony by a Louisiana State Trooper could have been used in court.

Greenard and Henderson are currently serving time at Bayou Dorcheat Correctional Center and Combs at David Wade Correctional Center. NW-La.News

Hope Youth Ranch Trial

Three Hope Youth Ranch employees were found guilty October 15 of negligent homicide and cruelty to a juvenile in connection to the death of facility resident Alex Harris.

Following three days of testimony, District Court Judge Parker Self found former HYR direct care workers Kelton Greenard of Minden, Arthur Henderson II of Cotton Valley and Anthony Combs of Homer guilty of the above charges in relation to the 12-year-old’s death.

Throughout the trial, testimony revealed that on Sept. 13, 2005 Harris, a resident of the residential treatment facility for boys, was ordered to serve in-school suspension — a form of punishment that involves performing outdoor chores. During the morning hours Harris, along with four to five other boys, were ordered to mow grass. Afterwards, the boys were made to run a pipeline – an activity not authorized by the facility.

Testimony revealed that during the run, Harris began to experience symptoms of environmental hyperthermia — heat stroke. When Harris attempted to get water, two other residents prevented him from doing so.

Harris’ symptoms worsened throughout the day as no staff or those in supervisory positions offered the boy any assistance. The events of that day, and the lack of intervention, led to the young boy’s death.

On the day in question, Greenard and Combs were in charge of the afternoon work detail. The third defendant, Henderson, visited the work site with Supervisor Willis Doyle.

Self said testimony presented during the trial convinced him that Harris was laid in the sun on the day of his death and that the defendants took no action on the boy’s behalf.

Self ordered a pre-sentence investigation with sentencing to be held December 15; however, as the pre-sentence investigation was not complete on that date, sentencing was postponed until Jan. 26, 2008.

N0.3

Three sentenced in HYR death
MICHELLE BATES, Editor

Three men convicted of negligent homicide and cruelty to a juvenile were sentenced Monday.

Anthony Combs of Homer, Kelton Greenard of Minden and Arthur Henderson II of Cotton Valley were all sentenced to five years at hard labor on each count, all but three years suspended in the death of 12-year-old Alex Harris, a resident of Hope Youth Ranch. The sentences are to run concurrent.

The three defendants were given credit for time served. Once released from prison, they will be under active supervised probation for two years and each will pay a $1,500 fine plus court costs. These must be paid within their first year of probation.

Judge Parker Self also assigned 400 hours each of community service.

“I’ve heard no remorse and I’m going to make you put someone else above yourself,” said the judge, who handed down a guilty verdict in a trial by judge in October 2008.

All three stood before the judge with heads bowed.

On September 13, 2005, Harris was placed in in-school suspension, where he and a group of boys were taken on a disciplinary run and various work assignments. According to testimony at the trial, Harris began to lag behind the other boys and he fell to the ground. He was carried by some of the other boys, also residents at the ranch, until he vomited. A series of events followed which led to his death as a result of hyperthermia, otherwise known as heatstroke.

State Prosecutor Jack Montgomery said he felt the family was satisfied with the outcome.

“The family, I believe that they were satisfied with the sentence,” Montgomery said. “The grandfather made a victim’s statement and then he stayed because he wanted to see the three taken out of the courtroom.”

Before the sentence was handed down, the victim’s family was given an opportunity to make a statement. Charles Allen, grandfather of the victim, stood before the judge and spoke for his family – his wife Judy, and mother of the victim, Amber Harris.

“It’s impossible to put into words how this has affected my family,” he said. r would not wish this on anyone. Alex was far from perfect, otherwise he would not have been at Hope Youth Ranch, but he certainly didn’t deserve to be treated as he was. These children were in your care and you dropped the ball. You took so much from Alex – a chance to grow up and have a family of his own.”

After hearing a motion from the defense stating that the evidence presented in the pre-sentencing investigation were the same for both charges – negligent homicide and cruelty to a juvenile – Self weighed their defense. The defense alleged that these charges were double jeopardy.

Montgomery said he didn’t feel there was anything new, so the state stands by its case.

“If the sentence runs concurrent, then that will take away any motion of double jeopardy,” Montgomery said.

The judge agreed and the motion was denied.

The three defendants were given an opportunity to speak before sentencing, but all three declined.

Self said he’d spent a long time weighing the facts of the case, taking emotion and empathy out of the scenario. He said he may not make the victim’s family happy or the prosecutors happy, but he had to look at everything.

“The court takes very seriously its role in this matter. I had to look at the totality of the circumstances,” Self said. “We’re not just looking at acts, but omissions. I can’t change the events of that day, and I can’t bring Alex back.”

It was said in open court that each defendant would appeal the sentencing, and they each requested and received a $100,000 bond on each count until their appellate delays have run. According to Montgomery, the defendants are entitled to the bond after conviction at the court’s discretion. As of press time, all three defendants were incarcerated at Bayou Dorcheat Correctional Center in Minden.

Once the sentence was handed down, Combs fainted in the courtroom. An ambulance was called, but it was not clear whether he was taken to a hospital.
Scroll to Story/after click

MINDEN -- Eight people who were indicted Monday morning by a Webster grand jury in the death of a 12-year-old boy last fall at a Christian-based nonprofit juvenile facility are free on bonds of $2,500 each posted by the shelter.

The seven employees and an ex-employee of Hope Youth Ranch, 10 miles north of Minden, turned themselves in to Bayou Dorcheat Correctional Center on Monday afternoon.

Identified in separate sealed bills of indictment and charged with one count of negligent homicide are Troy Hamilton, 31, of the 1500 block of Memphis Street, Homer; Willis Doyle, 48, of the 500 block of New Friendship Road, Castor; Anthony L. Combs, 38, of the 1700 block of West California Street, Ruston; Arthur G. Henderson II, 24, of the 200 block of Greenard Road, Cotton Valley; Kelton Greenard, 26, of the 1100 block of West Street, Minden; Tasha G. Jackson, 29, of the 1000 block of Marigia Drive, Haynesville; Marcus D. Jones, 24, of the 500 block of New Friendship Road, Castor; and Jeremy Blanks, 22, of the 400 block of Hillside, Minden.

Negligent homicide carries a prison sentence of up to five years.

Bossier-Webster District Attorney Schuyler Marvin sought the indictments against the eight, whom he described as direct care workers, not teachers, because he believed they intentionally denied care to Alex Harris [HYR] during a disciplinary run in September.

An autopsy indicates Harris, of Haughton, died of dehydration and trauma to the head following a punishment run at the ranch. He reportedly was denied water during the run and was dropped on the ground when an older boy picked him up after Harris had collapsed.

Doug Pierrelee, spokesman for state police Troop G, said at one point during Harris' punishment, the eight employees locked themselves in an air-conditioned truck to keep Harris from getting inside.

Common sense and the "power of one's own conscious" should be the guide in situations where "training has failed to prepare you," Pierrelee said.

"If care of others is not your genuine motivation, then you should be responsible enough to remain unemployed," he said.

"These eight people missed the opportunity to save a 12-year-old child who was begging for his life."

The state police conducted the investigation because of a conflict of interest involving the Webster Parish sheriff's office. Sheriff's deputies routinely provide security at the site, and Chief Deputy Bobby Igo Jr. is on the governing board and serves as vice president.

Roy Martinez, the shelter's director, could not be reached at the shelter or at his residence late Monday afternoon. Earlier this month, however, Martinez said the facility's insurance company and lawyers had advised him not to discuss the case. He said Harris' death was the first at the ranch, and in a printed statement he said the staff was "heartbroken and full of grief" over Harris' death.

The nonprofit Hope Youth Ranch receives state funding because the juveniles in its care are either foster children or have been sent there by state juvenile authorities.

Marvin did not seek indictments against the ranch's corporation.

Full Court Press:Obama on the Move

2009-03-29T18:13:00.009-05:00

As Obama prepares to go to Europe. Meeting with
the G20 in London, the American ruling-class may
be attempting a coup.

April 26 Louisiana Sovereignty Resolution | US Northern Command Activates Civil Unrest Readiness | Possible Right Wing Threat 2mb/pdf | The Patriotic Resistance | Obama-Mexico-Flu Who knew what when?! | Dec '08 Washington Post Domestic Troop Deployment. |

Some of the anti-Obama groups say they will actively engage troops, when these "rights" are violated.

The opposition to President Barack Hussein Obama is at full tilt and the pressure-push by the Republican Party & its Conservative alliances is at FULL COURT-PRESS.

Judd Gregg in his domain -John Boehner in his. The U. S. House Minority Leader was in Baton Rouge with U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who was Obama's second pick for the commerce job and dropped out days later, delivered the GOP's response address today, saying that Obama's budget proposal "spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much."

Gregg, a deficit hawk who is the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said Obama's budget would triple the national debt over the next 10 years.

The address was remarkable in that it came from a man who, just seven weeks ago, stood at Obama's side and accepted a Cabinet post in the new Democratic administration. Gregg was closely observed with the smirkish look given as he stepped away from his cabinet post acceptance.

In the meanwhile Louisiana Democratic leader Chris Whittington was under-attack in a state democratic party resolutions meeting, in which New Orleans Rep. Karen Carter Petterson pushed the issue.

Leadership is alledged to have possibly given over the state to the Republicans, evidenced by the lack of a viable democratic opponent in place, against Senator David Vitter.

Alexia Thompson of Lafayette said the state party's poor showing in the 2008 elections was not one person's fault.
"We played recess," she said. "We have allowed the Republicans to come into the state and take over. We shouldn't be talking about who we should run (in 2010 against U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La.); we should already have a candidate."

Boehner visits BR, pitches GOP budget By SONIA SMITH
Advocate staff writer
Published: Mar 29, 2009

U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner met with Baton Rouge business leaders Saturday to hear their concerns about the economy, three days after he outlined his party’s alternative plan for economic recovery.

Boehner, R-Ohio, railed against President Barack Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget at a news conference at the office of U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, Saturday afternoon, saying it would “hurt jobs and hurt our economy.”

“It spends too much, it raises too much in the way of taxes and borrows too much from our kids and grandkids,” Boehner said of the Democrats’ budget.

Boehner unveiled an 18-page pamphlet titled “Republican Road to Recovery” at a news conference in Washington on Thursday.

Many in the Obama administration, including Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and White House Budget Director Peter Orszag have scoffed at the pamphlet for its lack of numbers and details.

“It’s interesting to have a budget that doesn’t contain any numbers,” Gibbs said at the White House news briefing on Thursday.

Boehner said Saturday that next week, Republicans would be laying out the details of their budget, which focuses on cutting government spending, lowering taxes and halting bailouts of financial companies.

“It clearly will let families and small businesses keep more of what they earn,” he said. “We’ll make sure the federal budget isn’t growing faster than the family budget.”

The plan’s focus on energy from a number of sources — green, oil and gas and nuclear — would help create jobs in Louisiana, he said.

Boehner admitted that, given the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, the Republicans’ proposal has little chance of success.

“I’ll never give up,” he said. “We don’t have near enough votes, but our job is to communicate with the American people about (the Democrats’) proposal and to communicate our better solution.”

Boehner would not go into detail on what he discussed in the meeting with Cassidy, Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret, James Riley of NAI/Latter & Blum and Lester McLin, owner of the Livingston based engineering and surveying company, McLin & Associates.

“People are mostly concerned that the spending spree that Washington is on is not sustainable,” Boehner said. “This giant debt is going to cause our economy to grow more slowly.”

McLin said he asked Boehner to do everything in his power to keep taxes down.

“He’s got a tough battle up there,” he said.

Boehner, who traveled to Lafayette following the meeting in Cassidy’s office, said he was in New Orleans on Friday night.

The Associated Press reported that Boehner also was attending a fundraiser for Cassidy.

GOP-Road to Recovery? Yeah! We all know about recovery in Louisiana! ICF-LRA. Road home. Are we there yet!

In the Final Throes

2008-12-31T22:15:00.012-06:00

Bayou Buzz, Sometimes its best to know what you're talking about, really. When a person is selected as perfect prey to systematicly disenfranchise a group of individuals and a "newer generation" says not so, all persons involved should think again.

Now, however; we should admit we are in, what all parties should know by now we are,
In the final throes.

Never again, will a prosecutor; over extend himself by excessively, seeking to sentence individuals to abhorent periods of time behind bars en masse. And, when one puts his foot in the water to defend against a racial taboo, the "fed upness" of the moment, may be considered more closely. Or will it?

The younger generation, at the behest of musicologist of today, have said that this generation, would not put up with what "our" parents put up with. Our parents, endured "Bloody Sunday".

So, what did we expect on that December day in 2006. And how was a sixteen year old to know it would come to this.

Now, the signification is, we're in the final throes. Don't believe it?
thurs9jul09
thurs9jul09

Between the Cops & the Courts:The DA

2008-05-06T00:17:00.015-05:00

Another man tasered in Minden, Louisiana: D'Mario Rabb Tasered by Minden, Police; some say after he was handcuffed.

The fact of a man or woman's criminal past, does not give the right to be electrocuted while he is in handcuffs with an instrument no better than the cattle prod used on animals.

Scooter!-Tasered to Death in Winnfield, Louisiana. The death of Baron Pikes aka Baron "Scooter" Collins is akin to what has happened in Queens, New York. Scooter had no prior record, though and was treated less than human by a Winnfield Police Officer. And he is now still being treated inhumanely by the judiceo-law enforcement community of Winn Parish. It is an indictment on the Jindal Adminstration's evolving of a New Louisiana.

"Absolute Immunity"
For decades, the Supreme Court has recognized two types of immunity under 42 U.S.C. 1983, the statute under which Goldstein filed his civil rights suit. When sued for money damages, most public servants enjoy “qualified immunity,” meaning charges are automatically dismissed unless the alleged conduct violated clearly established constitutional rights. Meanwhile, a small subset of officers — including judges, legislators, and prosecutors — enjoy “absolute immunity” for all conduct taken while exercising their official, traditional duties.

On appeal, a 9th Circuit panel unanimously affirmed. Citing the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Imbler v. Pachtman, the circuit panel found prosecutors only enjoy absolute immunity for conduct “intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process.” As examples, the panel wrote that immunity would apply to decisions on whether to prosecute particular cases, but not to statements made during press conferences or alleged discrimination in personnel decisions.

As opposed to rote administrative tasks, Renick maintains that locating and disseminating potentially exculpatory information falls within the type of core prosecutorial function traditionally afforded absolute immunity. Indeed, the petition notes, the Supreme Court’s decision in Imbler itself provided absolute immunity to a prosecutor alleged to have withheld exculpatory evidence from the defendant.

Whereas line prosecutors themselves cannot face suit for withholding information from defendants, Bednarski cites cases from the 4th, 7th, and 11th Circuits rejecting qualified immunity for police officers who withheld such information from prosecutors in the first place. From a larger standpoint, Bednarski argues, prosecutorial immunity was meant not to shield all employees in prosecutors’ offices from any liability, but to serve as a narrow exception to civil rights laws used only when necessary to protect the judicial process itself. Goldstein
NVL/end

Louisiana Gov Jindal Appoints Criminal Commission

Written by: BayouBuzz Staff
Article Written on: Tuesday-March-4-2008

BATON ROUGE- On Tuesday, Governor Bobby Jindal announced the appointments of twenty-seven members to the Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, including several sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, chiefs of police, sheriff’s deputies and citizens. Judy Dupuy Mouton, of Baton Rouge, will serve as executive director.

The Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice provides a forum for all elements of the criminal justice system to develop multi-agency programs which serve the needs of a wide range of criminal justice organizations. Appointments by the governor to the commission are required by statute to consist of three district attorneys, three sheriffs, two chiefs of police, one district court judge, one juvenile court judge, fifteen professionals or lay persons, and one appointment from a list of three candidates submitted by the Victims and Citizens Against Crime.
Appointments include the following:
Sheriff Mike Cazes, of Port Allen, has served as sheriff of West Baton Rouge Parish since 2004.

Paul Connick, of Metairie, has served as district attorney for the 24th judicial district since 1996.

Sheriff Austin Daniel, of St. Francisville, has served as sheriff of West Feliciana Parish since 2000.

Sheriff Larry Deen, of Benton, has served as sheriff of Bossier Parish, since 1988.

Sheriff Richard “Ricky” Edwards, Jr., of Jennings, has served as sheriff of Jefferson Davis Parish since 1992.

Hunter Grimes, of Walker, has served as chief of police since 2005.

Leland Guin, of Tullos, has served as the chief of police for Tullos since 2001.

Doug Hebert, Jr., of Kinder, has served as district attorney for the 33rd judicial district since 1990.

Bobby D. Hickman, of Leesville, has served as chief of police for Leesville since 1995.

Jerry Jones, of Mer Rouge, has served as district attorney in the fourth judicial district in Morehouse Parish since 1991.

David R. Kent, of New Orleans, has served in the area of criminal justice as a professor, security consultant, and a deputy chief with the New Orleans Police Department.

Nancy Amato Konrad, of Metairie, is the senior judge for the Jefferson Parish Juvenile Court.

Arthur Lawson, of Gretna, currently serves as the chief of police for the Gretna Police Department.

Jay Lemoine, of Dry Prong, has served as district attorney for the 35th judicial district in Grant Parish since 2002.

Sheriff Tony Mancuso, of Lake Charles, has served as sheriff of Calcasieu Parish, since 2004.

Sheriff Randy Maxwell, of Vidalia, has served as sheriff of Concordia Parish since 1990.

Sheriff Steve May, of Columbia, has served as sheriff of Caldwell Parish since 2000.

Rudolph McIntyr, Jr., of Winnsboro, currently serves as district court judge for the 5th judicial district.

Harry Morel, Jr., of Luling, currently serves as district attorney for the 29th judicial district.

Judy Dupuy Mouton, of Baton Rouge, formerly served as deputy director for the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement.

Chris Nevils, of Winnfield, has served as district attorney for the 8th judicial district since 2006. -c.nevils@fvelaw.com-
Location: [Partner-Law Firm Vilar & Elliot,LLC]3709 Masonic Drive, P.O. Box 12730, Alexandria, Louisiana 71315-2730, (Rapides Parish)
R. Christopher Nevils practices in the following areas of law: Complex Litigation; Construction Litigation; Civil Litigation
Admitted: 1996, Louisiana and U.S. District Court, Western, Middle and Eastern Districts of Louisiana; U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit; U.S. Supreme Court
Law School: Louisiana State University, J.D., 1995 R. Chris Nevils

College: Louisiana State University, B.A., 1991
Member: Alexandria, Fifth Federal Circuit and Louisiana State Bar Associations.
Biography: District Attorney, Winn Parish, Louisiana (2005—). Assistant District Attorney, East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana (1997-2004).
Born: Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Sheriff Steve Prator, of Shreveport, has served as the sheriff of Caddo Parish since 2000.

Walter Reed, of Covington, has served as district attorney of the 22nd judicial district in the St. Tammany/Washington Parish region, since 1984.

Sheriff Mark Shumate, of Sondheimer, has served as sheriff of East Carroll Parish since 1998.

Chief J.D. Thornton, of Natchitoches, has been a sheriff’s deputy with the Natchitoches Parish Sheriff’s Office since 2002.

Sheriff Jeff Wiley, of Gonzales, has served in the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office since 1988, and has served as sheriff of the parish since 1996.

Patrick Yoes, of Norco, has served as a sheriff’s deputy with the St. Charles Parish Sherriff’s Office since 1984.Goldstein

Will the Truth be told?!

2008-03-16T14:48:00.013-05:00

Time for the shambammers to exit the scene, Left!!-Special Litigation Section Civil Rights Division U.S. Department of Justice P.O. Box 66400 Washington, DC 20035-6400 (202) 514-6255

State of La.

Update 21 March 08
"Angola 3" John Conyers & Cedric Richmond "?Investigative Hearings?"

PATRICK DENNIS/The Advocate
Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, left, asks for pardons for the two remaining inmates of the Angola 3, who were still in solitary confinement at Angola penitentiary. Standing behind Richmond in this March 20 photo is one of the three inmates, Robert King, orginally of New Orleans, now free, and Attorney Scott Fleming, right.

Indepth MSNBC. Victim's Wife Doubts the Men Are Guilty!!

By JEREMY HARPER
Advocate staff writer
Published: Mar 26, 2008 - UPDATED: 2 p.m.

Two men held in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola since the 1970s were moved into a maximum-security dormitory with other inmates Monday, Assistant Warden Angie Norwood said today.

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, part of a group known as the Angola 3, have sued the state, claiming they are victims of cruel and unusual punishment for the years they spent in isolation. The two were convicted of killing a prison guard, though their attorneys argue they didn’t commit the crime.

Their move out of solitary confinement came as lawyers for the prisoners and the state are negotiating a settlement in the lawsuit, which is pending in federal court in Baton Rouge.

Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell and lawyers for the three men asked a federal judge Wednesday to delay a pretrial conference for two weeks to allow them to focus on negotiations.

“It appears at the moment that we may be able to come to an agreement, so we’re asking the court to let us continue that discussion,” said Nicholas Trenticosta, a New Orleans attorney representing the men.

Tammi Herring, a spokeswoman for Caldwell’s office, declined to comment because negotiations are ongoing.

The Angola 3 are Wallace, Woodfox and Robert King, who used to go by the last name Wilkerson.

King was placed in isolation for allegedly killing a fellow inmate, but that conviction was overturned in 2001 after he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. He spent 29 years in isolation before his release.

Wallace and Woodfox, who had formed a chapter of the Black Panther Party to fight problems inside the prison, were convicted of killing prison guard Brent Miller during a riot on April 17, 1972.

In isolation, an inmate spends 23 hours each day in a cell. The other hour is spent taking a shower and exercising alone.

Prison officials have maintained the men pose a security risk at the prison.

In addition to their claims of unjust treatment, attorneys with the national legal defense group Innocence Project have said evidence shows Wallace and Woodfox were not involved in Miller’s death. The Innocence Project recently stepped up efforts to raise public awareness of the Angola 3.

U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, visited the prison last week and said evidence suggests the two men were wrongly convicted.

Norwood said the inmates were moved to the new dormitory as part of a larger transfer of inmates who have shown good behavior.

Angola is the first state prison to open a maximum-security dormitory, the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections announced in a news release last week.

“Good disciplinary records while in maximum custody will warrant the move to the dorm setting, while freeing up valuable cell space for younger, more violent offenders,” the news release says.

Asked about the specific rules and living arrangements for the dormitory, Norwood deferred to the department’s news release, which says only that the rules for the dormitory will be set by the warden of each facility.

Trenticosta said he doesn’t know exactly how much of an improvement the dormitories will be over solitary confinement, but added that he hopes to learn more about them through the talks with the state.

“There are plenty of regulations in the various settings at Angola, and it is unclear to us today what are those regulations that are being applied in this situation,” he said.

"Revamping the Judicial Process in Louisiana"?-Will your insistance matter?

2008-03-16T10:53:00.006-05:00

March 31 2008 begins the Regular Session of the Louisiana Legislature: Who will sponsor the bill for a Study Resolution on the Judicial Process!!

Will the people count!!?
What will Governor Jindal's ad campiagn look like, Now?
Contact your Legislator-find them at-www.legis.state.la.us

Now that the two special sessions are over; one on ethics reform, the other on budget concerns, which included school tuition tax breaks. The Regular Session must tackle the bane of a corrupt Judicial process. With Jena, the 19th JDC & its DNA meltdown-inclusive of the 18th JDC & now the 7th JDC's seeming inability to operate its court and the former AG's- so-called voter fraud expense in the 7th JDC-will the new AG & the new head of LSP fix their agencies.

The DNA Lab at LSP can't seem to locate a "manufactured DNA" of Michael Jarvis Cobb. Let alone the appeal of the 19th JDC in the Phelix Parker case has set idle, while Parker waits in the EBR Prison. June08-La.FCCA ruling.

Okay, Let's tackle the really tough issues. Yet, what some legislators want is to shut this "clarion call" up.

The New World Order:North American Union

2008-01-19T07:57:00.001-06:00

Here you have it, the complete control of your life

----------
The Council on Foreign Relations
The Americus Society, Trilateral Commission

This is the beginnings of the end of the World as we know it! Divide & conquer in the American scene is the rule of the day. Maybe, just maybe a newly elected Louisiana Governor, by the name of Bobby Jindal can, someday; change America!
NVforL

The Times:Are they Really a CHANGING?

2007-12-08T07:33:00.002-06:00

Judge: Desegregation order has been violated for years

By DAVID J. MITCHELL
Advocate Florida parishes bureau
Published: Dec 8, 2007 - Page: 3B

A 1979 federal desegregation order that requires free busing for student transfers designed to promote integration in Tangipahoa Parish public schools “has been blatantly violated for years,” a federal judge in New Orleans has found.

U.S. District Judge Ivan L.R. Lemelle held Tuesday that the order was violated when transfer application forms were distributed throughout the school system saying parents were required to pay for transportation, federal online court records show.

In most cases, the 1979 order requires the opposite: students transferring under the “majority-to-minority” policy get free transportation, court records show.

The policy allows students to transfer from a school where their race is in the majority to one where it is the minority.

The ruling was one of several setbacks Lemelle recently handed the parish School Board since the dormant desegregation litigation was revived earlier this year, court records show. The plaintiffs are the class of black students in the public school system and their parents.

The transfer policy ruling is detailed in minutes from a Nov. 26 telephone conference and follow-up order filed Tuesday, court records show.

Lemelle also has granted or reaffirmed orders recently that do the following, court records show:

Strengthen the position of the court-ordered compliance officer, Arlene Knighten Guerin, and the reconstituted Biracial Committee, an advisory board that looks into desegregation matters on hiring and student discipline.
Raise the construction cost threshold that would require the school system to do court-ordered analyses of building impacts on desegregation. Lemelle set the threshold at a level far less than what school officials had sought, meaning they would have to submit to more court and plaintiff review of construction projects.
Call the entire nine-member School Board, Superintendent Mark Kolwe and Risk Management and Transportation Director Bret Schnadelbach to attend a hearing at 9:30 a.m., Dec. 18, in U.S. District Court at New Orleans.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Nelson Taylor predicted Friday that more could be in store for the board in the coming months: “It’s going to get rougher.”

School Board attorney Alton Lewis disputed the decisions as setbacks, downplaying their significance as mostly just ratifying procedures or authorities already in place.

Lewis said Lemelle called the school officials in to explain the role of and the access due to the compliance officer.

Lewis also said the School Board didn’t oppose the transfer policy corrections and that he didn’t see the decision as unexpected.

The transfer policy has been under the purview of Guerin, a point the School Board noted in its filings.

The board’s filings had prompted Guerin to complain in September that the board was using her as a scapegoat for its failures.

Guerin has acknowledged that the forms were incorrect, saying they had been that way since she took the job in the mid- to late-1980s but that she didn’t realize the problem until plaintiffs’ attorneys took note of it.

In his decision on the transfer policy, Lemelle observed that the plaintiffs’ motion, which he “granted in all regards,” calls for issuing an immediate parishwide notice of the correct policy and giving parents “ample” chance to use the transfers.

Lemelle also noted that the motion calls for having the board pay reasonable reimbursement to parents who paid for transporting children under the policy.

Lemelle also ordered both sides to come up with a “more concrete” plan for free transportation.

In addition to the transfer forms, Lemelle found the 1979 transfer order was violated when priority was given to students who live within attendance zones, court records show.

The 1979 order, in contrast, requires that students trying to transfer from outside an attendance zone be given priority if they do it before the school year starts, court records show.
gssc

Sinquefield to join AG

By ADRIAN ANGELETTE
Advocate staff writer
Published: Dec 8, 2007 - Page: 1B

John Sinquefield, the second-ranking official in the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s Office, has been named the top assistant to Attorney General-elect Buddy Caldwell.

Sinquefield, best known as the lead prosecutor in the conviction of accused serial killer Derrick Todd Lee, will trade the title of first assistant district attorney to become Louisiana’s first assistant attorney general.

Caldwell, who said he and Sinquefield have been friends since they were children growing up in Tallulah, called hiring Sinquefield a key move in getting his office moving.

“This is going to be a one-two-punch that will resonate through the entire state,” Caldwell said Friday.

Sinquefield’s job will be to serve as the administrator for more than 500 employees in criminal and civil divisions, Caldwell said.

Hiring Sinquefield was the first move in locating the best people to serve in the Attorney General’s Office, Caldwell said.

By the time he takes office Jan. 14, Caldwell said, he expects to have the upper management in place and to start searching for ways to improve operations.

“A lot of people in the office already know what the problems are,” Caldwell said. “We’ll also be consulting with respected people who have served in the office in the past.”

Sinquefield, who has worked in the District Attorney’s Office for more than 27 years, said Friday he’s ready for the new challenge.

“I’m looking forward to the chance to do some good statewide rather than being limited to East Baton Rouge Parish,” he said.

Sinquefield said he is abandoning his run for district attorney of East Baton Rouge Parish.

“That’s something I thought very carefully about, but ultimately it was a clear choice for me,” he said.

Everyone who has contributed to his campaign will be offered a complete refund, he said.

Sinquefield was one of the announced candidates for district attorney after Doug Moreau, about three years ago, talked of leaving the job early.

Sinquefield always said he would not run against Moreau. Now the possibility exists that Moreau will serve out his term, which ends late next year, and seek re-election.

“My options have been narrowed significantly,” Moreau said about leaving his job early.

Moreau said his “tentative plans” are to finish out his term. He has not thought about running for re-election.

“That’s something I have to think about,” he said.

Moreau said he was surprised by Sinquefield’s move and now he has the difficult task of filling the top assistant position.

“We’re trying to evaluate what needs to be done to shift people around,” Moreau said. “John has a unique skill set and that’s why he and I got together 17 years ago in the first place.”

“John is a very talented and experienced guy,” Moreau said. “I thought he would have been a fine district attorney.”

Two other Baton Rouge attorneys who have said they will be candidates for district attorney next year are Hillar Moore III and Dan Claitor.

Moore described Sinquefield as a friend for the past 30 years and “probably the best first assistant district attorney the office has ever had.”

As for the upcoming election, Moore said it’s too early to know what impact Sinquefield’s decision will have on the race. Moore also left open the possibility of staying in the race even if Moreau decides to run for re-election.

“I will continue to run as aggressively as I have since I started two years ago,” Moore said.

Claitor said he continues to campaign for the office, and that he’s not certain how Sinquefield’s decision will change the dynamics of the election.

“I’m sure John will find the new job to be a challenge,” Claitor said. “My plans haven’t changed.”

Sinquefield earned his law degree from LSU in 1971. He has worked as head of the special prosecutions division for the Louisiana Department of Justice and as the top assistant to former district attorneys Ossie Brown in Baton Rouge and Richard Ieyoub in Calcasieu Parish.
gssc

Ethics violations may mean jail

Jindal wants to put teeth into reform Saturday, December 08, 2007By Ed Anderson
BATON ROUGE -- Gov.-elect Bobby Jindal said Friday he will push legislation at an upcoming special session that will make it a crime punishable by time in jail to violate some state ethics laws.

Speaking to the annual meeting of the Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, Jindal did not flesh out details of when he will call lawmakers into the special ethics session or what else might be included in it. He also did not say what types of ethics violations could result in a jail term instead of the current fines and administrative sanctions.

Jindal's speech was similar to his campaign stump rhetoric in which he promised to raise the ethical bar in the state and erase its image of corruption. After his speech, Jindal did not take questions from the audience and left the Baton Rouge Hilton Capitol Center through a back door, avoiding waiting reporters. Council President Barry Erwin said at the beginning of the event that Jindal was on a tight schedule.

Jindal spokeswoman Melissa Sellers said that it is "too early to talk about" details of the session or when it will be held. She said it probably will be called "within a month after the inauguration."

Rep. Jim Tucker, R-Algiers, who is expected to be elected House speaker when the new governor and Legislature are sworn in Jan. 14, said he does not expect the session to be called until after Mardi Gras, possibly Feb. 10.

Jindal, who will be leaving Congress to become governor, he said he expects the federal government to keep its promises to help Louisiana get more money for hurricane recovery but the state is still being asked on Capitol Hill "where is the money really going? Is it going to somebody's pockets or to the victims? . . .

"I want to send a strong, loud message that enough is enough. Corruption is stealing jobs from our people (by keeping companies from locating to the state). We don't have to choose between honesty and effectiveness."

Jindal, who espoused a 31-point ethics overhaul plan during the campaign, said ethics changes made in the special session "will be the foundation on which we will build" the administration.

Jail for violators

He told the estimated 450 guests at the luncheon that ethics law violators should go to jail. "The real consequences for those who break the rules should not be slap on the wrist," he said. "They should go to jail."

Jindal said he also wants to require elected officials to disclose their income and assets because ethical government "starts with transparency in public disclosure." He also he will push for "more meaningful and specific disclosure from lobbyists," more than filing an annual disclosure statement saying who they wined and dined. "People have a right to know who is spending money" to influence public officials.

Including local officials

Sean Reilly, one of Jindal's top transition advisers, provided more details about possible ethics law changes than the governor-elect did during his address. Reilly, a former House member, is chairman of the advisory panel that will submit a report to Jindal and is a leader of Blueprint Louisiana, a consortium of business and civic groups pushing ethics law changes and other legislation.

Reilly confirmed that his panel will recommend that local officials be included in any new requirements for personal financial disclosure by public office-holders. That issue ostensibly caused a disclosure bill to die during the waning hours of the regular session earlier this year.

Legislators are not likely to accept disclosure without including at least some other politicians, Reilly said, though he added that his group is considering whether to exempt officeholders and candidates in the state's smallest jurisdictions, where disclosure is viewed by critics as a barrier to potential candidates.

Reilly said the issue that his group is struggling with most is Jindal's call to bar lawmakers from doing business with the state. While that principle sounds simple enough, Reilly said, his panel is working toward a proposal that will not unnecessarily restrict the opportunity to serve in public office. Among the examples of professionals who should not be barred from running, Reilly said, are public schoolteachers and doctors who accept Medicaid patients.

Teacher pay raises

Jindal also promised to work for additional teacher pay raises, but shied away from indicating what level of raises he has in mind. "We need to pay teachers more," he said. "But it is not only just keeping up with inflation" to keep teachers at or near the Southern regional average.

Jindal said the pay should also include "a component that rewards good teachers" such as awarding bonuses to teachers for meeting certain goals or standards. Under most circumstances, state law prohibits paying bonuses to a state worker.

He also said the state should expand educational programs to keep students from dropping out and preparing them for jobs that do not require a college degree.

Jindal said that he would like to rework the formula now used to finance state colleges and universities, basing it more "on outcome and less on enrollment" as it now is.
gssc

The Tangipahoa Moore Case:Supremes Implications

2007-11-03T06:04:00.000-05:00

Friday, November 2, 2007 5:09 PM CDT
Copyright © 2007 Hammond Daily Star - www.hammondstar.com. All rights reserved.
Lack of support for public schools is setting up the South for economic failure.

A report from the Atlanta-based nonprofit Southern Education Foundation declares economic crisis is the future of the entire region if the Southern states don't start investing more to help poor children succeed in school.

Southern schools spend less per student than do schools in any other parts of the country.

In Louisiana, 84 percent of students who attend the public schools come from low-income families. These children are not ready for kindergarten. As they grow older, they are likely to repeat grades, drop out of school and have very little chance of getting good-paying jobs.

Hammond's magnet school program, now called the accelerated program, is aimed to promote economic development through educational excellence. It is a big step in the right direction.

But here in Louisiana and all across the South, we've got a very big mountain to climb. This is not the time to invest less in the public schools by implementing tuition tax credits. The already-starved public schools of Louisiana cannot stand it.

Education excellence is important for all children, but our state's future is only as bright as the future of those children who attend the public schools.
jfal

Louisiana Supreme Court orders man back to prison
Lower courts granted new trial in murder Saturday, November 03, 2007
By Susan Finch
A 28-year-old man, freed from a life sentence for second-degree murder when a New Orleans judge ordered a new trial last fall, must go back behind bars to resume serving his time, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled Friday.

Overruling decisions by Criminal District Judge Darryl Derbigny and a state appeals court, the high court reinstated Jason Matthis' conviction and sentence in the 1999 beating death of a New Orleans man in a secluded spot near Old Gentilly Road.

Agreeing with Orleans Parish prosecutors, the high court concluded there were not sufficient grounds for Derbigny to order a new trial for Matthis in the murder of pizzeria employee Larry Balderas or for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal to uphold Derbigny's decision this year.

In a September hearing, Matthis' attorneys told the Supreme Court that his trial before Judge Leon Cannizzaro was flawed by the judge's actions after he heard all the witnesses and closing arguments.

Matthis' appeal attorney Martin Regan contended his client's rights were prejudiced when Cannizzaro went to the crime scene with the lead detective and the prosecutor but without a court reporter.

Matthis' trial attorney, Patrick Fanning, provided ineffective representation, Regan argued, because he got lost on his way to the crime scene and failed to insist that Cannizzaro repeat the field trip.

But the justices concluded there was no showing that Fanning's alleged failures rendered Matthis' conviction unfair.

"It clearly appears that details of the crime scene did not implicate any of the evidence upon which his conviction rests," they said.

Matthis, who was 20 at the time of the killing, has claimed he did not injure Balderas, 48, but was there when his friend, Jason Marullo, attacked Balderas after the two met him at an eastern New Orleans bar.

Police linked Marullo, 19, a second cousin to Criminal District Court Judge Frank Marullo, to the crime, but Marullo was never booked because he died of a drug overdose in Phoenix a month after the killing.

During the trial, prosecutors portrayed the crime as a drug deal gone bad after Balderas left the bar with the two men in search of marijuana. Matthis insisted it was Marullo who attacked the older man and that he pulled Marullo off Balderas. The two drove off, running over Balderas as they fled.

. . . . . . .

Susan Finch can be reached at sfinch@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3340.

Again, The Justice System must Address UnEqual Justice

2007-09-23T07:59:00.006-05:00

STATEWIDE LOUISIANA CIVIL RIGHTS CONFERENCE & FORUM OCTOBER 25, 26 & 27 2007

You can't keep hollering at us, what we don't want to hear!!

We must address the ISSUES OF RACE!!!

We Must Have Equal Justice!! The Problem is UNEQUAL JUSTICE!!!

Undoing Unequal Justice! Some, of the New York state of mind, screamed that we ought to boycott Louisiana! Whether they were talking about Louisiana products, or what, I don't know! What we need, is to BOYCOTT Football!

With the exploiting of the football players Mychal Bell, Michael Vick & others; the need arises to say that we as a Nation, will not stand for allowing young boys to play ball and at the same time conduct themselves unbecoming, as the powers that be pretend it is okay as long as the team keeps winning. In both of these present instances, those concerned exploited the gifts and talents of the players.

Today, 3 October 2007, there is a lack of understanding among all sorts of society's people.

October 7, 2007

Marcotte lavished gifts but paid price, he says
Friday, October 27, 2006
By Meghan Gordon
West Bank bureau

In an unusual move at Louis Marcotte's sentencing, two separate prosecuting teams asked Kazan in sealed motions to give Marcotte less than the five- to six-year range recommended by federal sentencing guidelines. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office and the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Justice Department said Marcotte was fully cooperative and helpful in their parallel investigations, which legal observers said means he has likely aided a probe of U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous, who is on medical leave and has not been charged.

Despite receiving far less prison time than the judges, Marcotte refuses to believe he was given a break. He said he has lived a miserable existence since becoming the government's No. 1 witness in Operation Wrinkled Robe.

"I think the government was very hard on me, as right they should have been," Marcotte said. "I've been doing this drill for six years and I've got 16 months to do in jail, six months in a halfway house and three years probation. It's over a decade of my life, plus I lost everything I worked for all my life. . . . I worked the hardest, I lost the most."

The Apprehender

Marcotte filled the unusually long 2 1/2 -year gap between his conviction and sentencing by managing a haberdashery of Italian designer suits and building a resume to roll out during his sentencing that includes community college classes and regular volunteer stints at Children's Hospital.

------------------------
The Political Scene
Making It
How Chicago shaped Obama.
by Ryan Lizza
July 21, 2008

One day in 1995, Barack Obama went to see his alderman, an influential politician named Toni Preckwinkle, on Chicago’s South Side, where politics had been upended by scandal. Mel Reynolds, a local congressman, was facing charges of sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. (He eventually resigned his seat.) The looming vacancy set off a fury of ambition and hustle; several politicians, including a state senator named Alice Palmer, an education expert of modest political skills, prepared to enter the congressional race. Palmer represented Hyde Park—Obama’s neighborhood, a racially integrated, liberal sanctuary—and, if she ran for Congress, she would need a replacement in Springfield, the state capital. Obama at the time was a thirty-three-year-old lawyer, university lecturer, and aspiring office-seeker, and the Palmer seat was what he had in mind when he visited Alderman Preckwinkle.

“Barack came to me and said, ‘If Alice decides she wants to run, I want to run for her State Senate seat,’ ” Preckwinkle told me. We were in her district office, above a bank on a street of check-cashing shops and vacant lots north of Hyde Park. Preckwinkle soon became an Obama loyalist, and she stuck with him in a State Senate campaign that strained or ruptured many friendships but was ultimately successful. Four years later, in 2000, she backed Obama in a doomed congressional campaign against a local icon, the former Black Panther Bobby Rush. And in 2004 Preckwinkle supported Obama during his improbable, successful run for the United States Senate. So it was startling to learn that Toni Preckwinkle had become disenchanted with Barack Obama.

Preckwinkle is a tall, commanding woman with a clipped gray Afro. She has represented her slice of the South Side for seventeen years and expresses no interest in higher office. On Chicago’s City Council, she is often a dissenter against the wishes of Mayor Richard M. Daley. For anyone trying to understand Obama’s breathtakingly rapid political ascent, Preckwinkle is an indispensable witness—a close observer, friend, and confidante during a period of Obama’s life to which he rarely calls attention.

Although many of Obama’s recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn’t. “I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors,” she told me. “I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I’m perfectly happy with it. I’m not sure that’s the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have.”

On issue after issue, Preckwinkle presented Obama as someone who thrived in the world of Chicago politics. She suggested that Obama joined Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ for political reasons. “It’s a church that would provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners,” she said. “It’s a good place for a politician to be a member.” Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama’s and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: “Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles.” As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle’s current view of her onetime protégé. “I don’t think you should forget who your friends are,” she said.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisOthers told me that Preckwinkle’s grievances against Obama included specific complaints, such as his refusal to endorse a former aide and longtime friend, Will Burns, in a State Senate primary—a contest that Burns won anyway. There was also a more general belief that, after Obama won the 2004 United States Senate primary, he ignored his South Side base. Preckwinkle said, “My view is you have to bring your constituency along with you. Granted, you have to make some tough decisions. Granted, sometimes you have to make decisions that people won’t understand or like. But it’s your obligation to explain yourself and try to do your supporters the courtesy of treating them with respect.” Ivory Mitchell, who for twenty years has been the chairman of the local ward organization in Obama’s neighborhood—considered the most important Democratic organization on the South Side—was one of Obama’s earliest backers. Today, he says, “All the work we did to help him get where he finally ended up, he didn’t seem too appreciative.” A year ago, Mitchell became a delegate for Hillary Clinton.

The same month Mitchell endorsed Clinton, the Obama campaign reached out to Preckwinkle, and eventually she signed on as an Obama delegate. I asked her if what she considered slights or betrayals were simply the necessary accommodations and maneuvering of a politician making a lightning transition from Hyde Park legislator to Presidential nominee. “Can you get where he is and maintain your personal integrity?” she said. “Is that the question?” She stared at me and grimaced. “I’m going to pass on that.”

“WHO SENT YOU?”

Obama likes to discuss his unusual childhood—his abandonment by his father and his upbringing by a sometimes single mother and his grandparents in Indonesia and Hawaii—and the three years in the nineteen-eighties when he worked as a community organizer in Chicago, periods of his life chronicled at length in his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He occasionally refers to his time in the United States Senate, which he wrote about in his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.” But his life in Chicago from 1991 until his victorious Senate campaign is a lacuna in his autobiography. It is also the period that formed him as a politician. Some Obama supporters professed shock when, recently, he abandoned a pledge to stay within the public campaign-finance system if the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, agreed to do the same. Preckwinkle’s concern about Obama—that he is a pure political animal—suddenly became more widespread; commentators abruptly stopped using the words “callow” and “naïve.”

Chicago is not Obama’s home town, but it’s where he chose to forge his identity. Several weeks ago, he moved many of the Democratic National Committee’s operations from Washington to Chicago, making the city the unofficial capital of the Democratic Party; his campaign headquarters are in an office building in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown business district. But Chicago, with its reputation as a center of vicious and corrupt politics, may also be the place that Obama needs to leave behind.

Simply moving there, as he did after graduating from Harvard Law School, was a bold decision. Chicago, where the late mayor Richard J. Daley and his son, the current mayor, have governed for forty out of the past fifty-three years, is not hospitable to political carpetbaggers. Abner Mikva, who was a congressman from Hyde Park and later the chief judge on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court, was one of the first Chicago politicians to successfully challenge the Daley machine, and it took him years to overcome people’s skepticism about his Wisconsin roots. Mikva, who is now eighty-two, tried to recruit Obama to work for him in Washington as a law clerk. Obama turned him down, replying that he was returning to Chicago to run for office. “I thought, Boy, does he got something to learn,” Mikva told me recently. “You just don’t come to Chicago and plant your flag.”

I met Mikva at the Cliff Dwellers, a private dining club atop a downtown office building. As we looked out over Lake Michigan, he told me a story that has often been repeated by others to capture the essence of politics in the city. “When I first came to Chicago, Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas were running for governor and senator,” he said. “I had heard about the closed Party, closed machine, but they sounded like such great candidates, so I stopped in to volunteer in the Eighth Ward Regular Democratic headquarters. I said, ‘I’m here for Douglas and Stevenson.’ The ward boss came in and pulled the cigar out of his mouth and said, ‘Who sent you?’ And I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.’ ”

There was another tradition in Chicago politics, the so-called Independents, which grew up in opposition to Richard J. Daley—Boss Daley—whose reign lasted from 1955 to 1976. Anchored in Hyde Park and nurtured by the University of Chicago community, the Independents brought together African-Americans and white liberals in coalitions that became the city’s main alternative to the Democratic machine. The Independents arose after the Second World War to challenge the closed patronage system that controlled the city, and became a serious political force in the mid-nineteen-fifties. Their numbers increased with a new wave of black activists energized by Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Chicago organizing in 1966, and with white liberals outraged when antiwar protesters were beaten and teargassed by Chicago police during the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

Mayor Daley died in office in 1976, at the age of seventy-four. He was replaced by a reliable and ineffectual machine candidate, Michael Bilandic, whose appointment marked the beginning of twelve years of chaotic, balkanized politics, sometimes called the “inter-Daley period.” David Axelrod, who has been Obama’s chief strategist since 2002 and is the foremost political consultant in Chicago, was a witness to all of it, first as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later as the chief consultant to two mayors: Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor and a hero of the Independents, and the current Mayor Daley, whose last name still carries negative connotations in the precincts of Hyde Park. Axelrod, who is fifty-three, is by nature subdued. He wears a mustache that curls down the sides of his upper lip in a permanent expression of melancholy. We met in a Houlihan’s, off the lobby of the building that houses the Obama campaign headquarters.

Axelrod recalled the election, in 1979, of Jane Byrne, Chicago’s first female mayor, which he wrote about for the Tribune. Byrne’s campaign, assisted by snowstorms that shut down the city and showcased Bilandic’s incompetence, was the first successful insurgency in modern Chicago history. “It was a great reform campaign,” Axelrod said. “I then chronicled, for the next four years, her systematic abrogation of every commitment she had made to reform. She became sort of a parody of a machine mayor.” In office, Byrne aligned herself with City Council officials who were hostile to the city’s black leadership, pandered to the voters of the most racist wards of the city, and purged African-Americans from key positions. On the South Side, there was a backlash; Washington, who had run a spirited campaign for mayor in 1977, was elected to Congress in 1980. In 1983, he was essentially drafted by a Hyde Park-based coalition desperate to unseat the disappointing Byrne. Washington won a three-way primary, with thirty-six per cent of the vote, and went on in the general election to defeat a white Republican who ran, briefly, on the implicitly racist slogan “Before it’s too late.” Washington’s first term was dominated by warfare with a City Council controlled by white aldermen determined to stymie every proposal. But in 1986 he took control of the council and the following year was reëlected. Seven months after his victory, he collapsed at his desk, dead of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. Axelrod saw much of this history from the inside, as Washington’s strategist; Obama saw it from the perspective of an organizer who occasionally had brushes with the powerful at political events or meetings at City Hall. “He saw the jagged edges of Chicago politics and urban politics pretty close up,” Axelrod said.

Obama spent three years in the city, from 1985, after he graduated from Columbia University, to the end of the Washington era. As a community organizer, he tried to turn a partnership of churches into a political force on the South Side. But the work accomplished very little.

“When I started organizing, I understood the idea of social change in a very abstract way,” Obama told me last year. “It was to some extent informed by my years in Indonesia, seeing extreme poverty and disparities of wealth and understanding sort of in a dim way that life wasn’t fair and government had something to do with it. I understood the role that issues like race played and took inspiration from the civil-rights movement and what the student sit-ins had accomplished and the freedom rides.

“But I didn’t come out of a political family, didn’t have a history of activism in my family. So I understood these things in the abstract. When I went to Chicago, it was the first time that I had the opportunity to test out my ideas. And for the most part I would say I wasn’t wildly successful. The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place.”

CONSTRUCTING A NETWORK

In 1988, Obama left for Harvard Law School, returning to Chicago twice for summer stints at élite law firms, including, after his first year, Sidley Austin. (Sidley Austin is where he met Michelle Robinson, whom he married in 1992.) He returned to Chicago permanently when he graduated, in 1991. In a short period, he built a notable résumé and a network of connections. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, he ran a voter-registration drive that placed him at the center of the city’s politics. That year, Illinois elected the first African-American woman to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun, and Bill Clinton became the first Democratic Presidential candidate to carry Illinois since Lyndon Johnson, in 1964. Meanwhile, Obama practiced civil-rights law at a firm admired in the city’s progressive circles, and became a popular lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago. He was on the board of two liberal foundations that spread grant money around Chicago, and he settled in Hyde Park.

It was a neighborhood in transition when Obama arrived. The Hyde Park Herald serves as a sort of time capsule. It reported that crime was rising; a series of violent robberies was another reminder that Hyde Park existed as a middle-class island in a sea of high-crime urban poverty. New data showed that white enrollment was steeply declining at one local school. During the Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrations, the newspaper noted in passing that Jeremiah Wright was scheduled to give a speech at the University of Chicago. Considerable coverage was given to two institutions: the local food co-op, where Obama shopped every Saturday, and the Independent Voters of Illinois–Independent Precinct Organization, or I.V.I.-I.P.O., one of the neighborhood’s most influential political groups. There was a new political force in Hyde Park as well. Real-estate developers were swooping in to rehabilitate low-income housing. On more than one occasion, the Hyde Park Herald reported on the rise in campaign donations from these developers to South Side politicians; in 1995, it ran a front-page article about Tony Rezko, who was then a very active new donor on the scene.

While it’s true that nobody sent Obama in the sense that Abner Mikva meant it, one of Obama’s underappreciated assets, as he looked for a political race in the early nineties, was the web of connections that he had established. “He understands how you network,” Mikva said. “I remember our first few meetings. He would say, ‘Do you know So-and-So?’ And I’d say yes. ‘How well do you know him? I’d really like to meet him.’ I would set up some lunches.”

The 1992 voter-registration drive, Project Vote, introduced him to much of the city’s black leadership. “If you want to look at the means of ascent, if you will, look at Project Vote,” Will Burns, the former Obama aide, said. In Chicago progressive circles, Burns, who is thirty-four, is described as an up-and-coming African-American legislator in the Obama tradition. Obama’s refusal to endorse Burns in his primary earlier this year infuriated and mystified a number of Chicago Democrats, though Burns himself displays no bitterness and is now an adviser to the Obama campaign.

At Project Vote, Burns said, Obama “was making connections at the grassroots level and was working with elected officials. That’s when he first got a scan of the broader black political infrastructure.” It was also the beginning of a dynamic that stood out in Obama’s early career: his uneasy relationship with an older generation of black Chicago politicians. Project Vote “is where a lot of the divisional rivalries popped up,” Burns said.

In this early foray into politics, Obama revealed the toughness and brashness that this year’s long primary season brought into view. As Burns, who has a mischievous sense of humor and a gift for mimicry, recalled, “Black activists, community folks, felt that he didn’t respect their role”—Burns imitated a self-righteous activist—“in the struggle and the movement. He didn’t engage in obeisance to them. He wanted to get the job done. And Barack’s cheap, too. If you can’t do it and do it in a cost-effective manner, you’re not going to work with him.” Ivory Mitchell, the ward chairman in Obama’s neighborhood, says of Obama that “he was typical of what most aspiring politicians are: self-centered—that ‘I can do anything and I’m willing to do it overnight.’ ”

During Project Vote, Obama also began to understand the larger world of Chicago’s liberal fund-raisers. “He met people not just in the African-American community but in the progressive white community,” David Axelrod said. “The folks who funded Project Vote were some of the key progressive leaders.” Obama met Axelrod through one of Project Vote’s supporters, Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, Philip M. Klutznick, was a Chicago shopping-mall tycoon, a part owner of the Bulls, and a former Commerce Secretary in the Carter Administration. Saltzman, a soft-spoken activist who worked for Senators Adlai E. Stevenson III and Paul Simon, took an immediate interest in Obama. “I honestly don’t remember what it was about him, but I was absolutely blown away,” Saltzman says. “I said to several people that this guy, who is now thirty years old, is someday going to be President. He will be our first black President.”

Obama’s legal career helped bring him into Chicago’s liberal reform community. In 1993, after he finished his work with Project Vote and was seeking to join a law firm, instead of returning to Sidley Austin he took a job at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a boutique civil-rights firm led by Harold Washington’s former counsel, Judson Miner. Miner had perfect anti-Daley credentials, routinely filing lawsuits against the city, and was a founding member of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, which was to Chicago’s legal élite what the Independents were to the Democratic machine.

Working at Davis, Miner enhanced Obama’s profile. “When you go work for Judd Miner’s law firm, that’s another kind of political statement,” Don Rose, a longtime Chicago political consultant, who ran Jane Byrne’s campaign, told me. Will Burns said, “I think it might have been helpful with a certain group of people that Barack may have wanted to have at his back at the outset. So you get the support of the liberals and the progressives and the reformers, and then that gives you a base to then expand to pick up other folks. And then folks would be willing to give money to the bright, shiny new candidate.” Joining Miner’s firm, like living in Hyde Park, was a way of choosing sides in the city’s long-running political battle between the machine and the Independents. Toni Preckwinkle explained Miner’s legal work this way: “They’ve shown a remarkable willingness to take on the Democratic organization and the Democratic establishment in this city and win. Which is why I like them and a lot of people hate them.”

If Project Vote and Miner’s firm introduced Obama to the city’s lakefront liberals and South Side politicians, it was his wife who helped connect him to Chicago’s black élite. One of Michelle’s best friends was Jesse Jackson’s daughter Santita, who became the godmother of the Obamas’ first child. Michelle had worked as an aide to the younger Daley—hired by Valerie Jarrett, who is now one of Obama’s closest advisers. (Jarrett, an African-American, was born in Iran, where her father, a doctor, helped run a hospital; she and Obama formed a bond over their unusual biographies.) It was also through Michelle that Obama met Marty Nesbitt, a successful young black entrepreneur who happened to play basketball with Michelle’s brother, Craig. (Nesbitt’s wife, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician, delivered the Obamas’ two daughters.) Nesbitt became Obama’s closest friend and a bridge to the city’s African-American business class.

Obama seems to have been meticulous about constructing a political identity for himself. He visited churches on the South Side, considered the politics and reputations of each one, and received advice from older pastors. Before deciding on Trinity United Church of Christ, he asked the Reverend Wright about critics who complained that the church was too “upwardly mobile,” a place for buppies. Though he admired Judson Miner, he was similarly cautious about joining his law firm. Miner once told me that it took “a series of lunches” and hours of discussion before Obama made his decision. At the time, Obama was working on “Dreams from My Father.”

Many have said that part of the appeal of “Dreams” is its honesty, pointing out that it was written at a time when Obama had no idea that he would run for office. In fact, Obama had been talking about a political career for years, musing about becoming mayor or governor. According to a recent biography of Obama by the Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, he even told his future brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, that he might run for President one day. (Robinson teased him, saying, “Yeah, yeah, okay, come over and meet my Aunt Gracie—and don’t tell anybody that!”) Obama was writing “Dreams” at the moment that he was preparing for a life in politics, and he launched his book and his first political campaign simultaneously, in the summer of 1995, when he saw his first chance of winning.

Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. When he was named president of the Harvard Law Review, in 1990, he was profiled by, among others, the Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press. Even then, the essential elements of Obama-mania were present: the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama’s frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection. (“To some extent, I’m a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made,” he told the Boston Globe in 1990.)

His work for Project Vote was similarly applauded. In 1993, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that Obama had “galvanized Chicago’s political community, as no seasoned politico had before,” and an alderman told Crain’s, “Under Barack’s leadership, we had the most successful, cost-effective and orderly voter registration drive I’ve ever been involved with.” When “Dreams from My Father” was published, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive; Booklist included the memoir in a “guide to some of the best books of 1995.”

Obama knew that Hyde Park, despite its reputation as the center of anti-machine progressives, was not exempt from other Chicago political traditions. During the first half of 1995, when he was preparing for his campaign for the State Senate, a big story in the neighborhood was a race for alderman marked by accusations of dirty tricks (endorsement flyers from a phony group of gay African-Americans were distributed the day before the election, apparently in an effort to stoke homophobia) and anti-Semitism (the campaign of one of the candidates was accused of being run by “Jewish overseers”).

THE SOUTH SIDE CHOOSES

Obama’s campaign began without much excitement. He had ties to so many of the city’s élite factions that the local press described him as “a well-connected attorney.” In August, the Chicago Sun-Times noted that Valerie Jarrett was hosting “a private autograph party” for Obama. His memoir was turning him into a figure of some acclaim. The same month, the Hyde Park Herald, which later called the book “a local indie hit,” ran a flattering profile that highlighted a theme from “Dreams”: how Chicago helped Obama end a long journey of self-discovery, a narrative that helped defuse any notion that Obama was a carpetbagger. “I came home in Chicago,” he told the newspaper. “I began to see my identity and my individual struggles were one with the struggles that folks face in Chicago.”

A month later, on September 19th, Obama invited some two hundred supporters to a lakefront Ramada Inn to announce his candidacy for the State Senate, and some of what he said sounded very much like the Obama of recent months. “Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days,” he told the crowd. “They fall somewhere lower than lawyers. . . . I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf.” Alice Palmer introduced Obama, and an account in the Hyde Park Herald quoted more from her speech than from his; it was, after all, chiefly her endorsement that certified him as a plausible candidate. “In this room, Harold Washington announced for mayor,” Palmer said. “Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district. . . . His candidacy is a passing of the torch.”

Also in attendance that day were Toni Preckwinkle and Will Burns, who was then a recent University of Chicago graduate. (He went on to get a master’s in social sciences; Obama helped persuade him to leave the university before he got a Ph.D., telling him, “You shouldn’t be too academic.”) Obama’s talk of a “renewal of morality in politics,” which previewed themes that emerged in this year’s campaign, also tapped into a desire for generational change—similarly consistent with his current rhetoric. He was able to capture the imagination of some young African-Americans frustrated by their local leadership. Burns said, “You have to understand, it’s 1995. It’s the year after the Republicans have taken over control of Congress, and in Illinois all three branches of government were also controlled by the Republicans. So it was a really dark point. I was looking to be engaged in something that would mean something, that would actually get something done and that was beyond symbols. Around the same time that I started up with Barack, volunteering on his campaign, I had gone to some of the old community groups and nationalist organizations. I respected what they had done, but I didn’t feel like that was really where I wanted to be.”

However, the campaign was no insurgency. Obama abided by the local way of doing things. He had lined up support from Preckwinkle, his alderman, and Ivory Mitchell, the local ward chairman, and Palmer’s endorsement brought with it two organizational assets: local operators and local activists. The operators helped Obama get on the ballot and handled the mechanics of his election. Two key operators were Alan Dobry and his wife, Lois Friedberg-Dobry, then in their late sixties and leaders of the Independent movement. “When you go to a political meeting, and you see a couple of guys or girls at the back of the room, and they aren’t glad-handing or anything, those are the operators,” Alan Dobry told me recently. There was a machinelike quality to the way the campaign unfolded. Palmer’s endorsement was the only signal that the Dobrys needed to start the slow, detailed organizing necessary to win a State Senate seat for Obama, whom they had never met, though they lived in his neighborhood.

Palmer’s imprimatur was also helpful with a small group of Hyde Park activists, some of whom she asked to hold fund-raising coffees for Obama. At her suggestion, Sam and Martha Ackerman, who were leaders of Independent Voters of Illinois, hosted a coffee at their home. Unlike the Dobrys, they insisted on a meeting with Obama before backing him, and their support was important enough for him to spend an hour with them in their dining room, submitting to an interview. Their reaction to him was a common one. “I don’t think he said he wanted to run for President, but he indicated that he was into public service for the long haul,” Martha Ackerman told me. “I remember very clearly I said to Sam, ‘If this guy is for real, he could be the first African-American President of the United States.’ ”

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, another activist Hyde Park couple, also held an event for Obama. Forty years ago, Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weathermen, the militant antiwar group that bombed the Pentagon and the United States Capitol. By the time Obama met Ayers, the former radical and onetime fugitive had been accepted into polite Chicago society and had been reborn as an education expert, eventually working as an informal adviser to Mayor Daley. (Those ties remain intact in the jumbled culture of Chicago politics. When Obama’s association with Ayers first became a campaign issue, Daley, whose father, in 1968, sent his police force into the streets to combat Ayers’s fellow-radicals, issued a statement praising Ayers as “a valued member of the Chicago community.”)

Obama seemed sure enough that he would win the State Senate primary, to be held in March, 1996—in Chicago, winning the primary is tantamount to winning the seat—to take time, late that summer, for a brief book tour, which started in Hyde Park and carried him as far as California. In October, he was one of the thousands of African-Americans from Chicago who travelled to Washington for the Million Man March. (Obama criticized the march, telling a local alternative newspaper that it was a waste of energy.) When he returned home, he had more immediate problems. In December, 1995, the South Side coalition that he had cobbled together began to fall apart. Palmer’s congressional campaign was eclipsed by her Democratic-primary opponents—Jesse Jackson, Jr., who had star power, and Emil Jones, a longtime leader in the State Senate. Several weeks before the primary, a group of her supporters—mostly older black activists, not unlike those Obama had tangled with when he was running Project Vote—realized that Palmer was destined for defeat and summoned him to a meeting. The Chicago Defender reported that Obama was asked “to step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment”—so that she could reclaim her State Senate seat. Obama left the meeting noncommittal.

Palmer was soundly defeated by Jackson—she got only ten per cent of the vote—and there were more insistent demands that Obama withdraw. He refused, which angered Palmer and her husband, Buzz. Buzz Palmer was a founder of the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, a reform group within the Chicago police department, and the couple had many ties to the city’s black leadership. Palmer, announcing that she had been drafted back into the State Senate race, went from being Obama’s most important supporter to his chief challenger; the woman who had launched his political career now threatened to end it. “That’s Chicago politics,” Obama told a reporter—with a sigh, the account said.

The South Side political community was forced to choose. The Ackermans went with Palmer, the Dobrys with Obama. Emil Jones announced his support for Palmer. Alderman Preckwinkle stayed with Obama. “I had given him my word I would support him,” she told me. “Alice didn’t forgive me, and she’s never going to forgive me.”

“These old nationalist guys start beating a drum—probably not the right metaphor—about how Barack should let this elder back in and how seniority’s important,” Burns said. “And they’re writing essays in the Defender and N’Digo”—another local paper covering Chicago’s black community. A comment in the Defender by Robert Starks, a professor of political science at Chicago’s Northeastern Illinois University and one of Palmer’s chief supporters, was typical: “If she doesn’t run, that seat will go to a Daley supporter. We have asked her to reconsider not running because we don’t think Obama can win. He hasn’t been in town long enough. . . . Nobody knows who he is . . . We need someone with experience.”

But, almost as fast as the threat to his campaign appeared, Obama stamped it out. The Dobrys were surprised that Palmer had so quickly gathered the signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot. They went to the Chicago board of elections and reviewed her petitions; as they suspected, they were filled with irregularities. One skill that the Independents had mastered in the years of fighting the first Mayor Daley was the machine’s tactic of challenging ballot petitions, and the Dobrys were experts at this Chicago ritual. Publicly, Obama was conciliatory about the awkward political situation, telling the Hyde Park Herald that he understood that some people were upset about the “conflict between old loyalties and new enthusiasms.” Privately, however, he unleashed his operators. With the help of the Dobrys, he was able to remove not just Palmer’s name from the ballot but the name of every other opponent as well. “He ran unopposed, which is a good way to win,” Mikva said, laughing at the recollection. And Palmer said last week, “Anyone who enters Chicago politics and can’t take the rough and tumble shouldn’t be there. Losing the seat was just that—not the end of the world.”

Instead of arriving in Springfield as the consensus candidate of his district, Obama was regarded as a troublemaker. “He had created some enemies,” Emil Jones, who in 2003 became president of the Illinois Senate, said. Burns described the fallout of the Obama-Palmer race this way: “It established a reputation that ‘you’re not going to punk me, you’re not going to roll me over, you’re not going to jam me.’ I think it established him as a threat. You have his independence with Project Vote, you have his refusal to knuckle under during the Alice Palmer thing, and so now you have a series of data points that have some established leaders in the black community feeling disrespected. And so the stage is now set for the comeuppance during the congressional race. That was their payback.”

ILLINOIS TURNS BLUE

In the political culture of 1996, two years after the ascendancy of the Gingrich Republicans, many Democrats ran as chastened and cautious politicians; among them was Bill Clinton, who turned his reëlection-campaign strategy over to Dick Morris (who had worked for Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, as well as Democrats) and the militantly centrist pollster Mark Penn (the Morris protégé who helped run Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign). By then, Bill Clinton had abandoned his effort for universal health care and was about to sign into law a welfare-reform bill that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had denounced, saying, “For the first time since it was enacted in 1935, we are about to repeal a core provision of the Social Security Act.” The bill was one of the most important factors in securing Clinton’s reëlection.

Had Obama not been running for office in one of the most liberal districts in Illinois, he would have drawn notice as a fairly bold Democrat. To judge by his public comments, he seemed both appalled and impressed by President Clinton’s political skill. In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, published a few days after Clinton said that he would sign the welfare-reform bill, Obama talked about the Presidential campaign, saying that Bob Dole “seems to me to be a classic example of somebody who had no reason to run. You’re seventy-three years old, you’re already the third-most-powerful man in the country. So why? . . . And Bill Clinton? Well, his campaign’s fascinating to a student of politics. It’s disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues. But politically it seems to be working.”

Soon, Obama began writing a regular column—“Springfield Report”—for the Hyde Park Herald. In the first one, on February 19, 1997, he wrote, “Last year, President Clinton signed a bill that, for the first time in 60 years, eliminates the federal guarantee of support for poor families and their children.” The column was earnest and wonky. It betrayed no hint of liberal piety about the new law, but emphasized that there weren’t enough entry-level jobs in Chicago to absorb all the welfare recipients who would soon be leaving the system.

In effect, while President Clinton and the national Democratic Party were drifting to the right, State Senator Obama pushed in the opposite direction. The new welfare law was one of the first issues that Obama faced as a legislator. “I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare,” he said, choosing his words with care during debate on the Illinois Senate floor. “Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems. But I’m a strong believer in making lemonade out of lemons.” Perhaps the law’s most punitive aspect was that it cut off aid to poor legal immigrants, a provision that Clinton, in his 2004 memoir, called “particularly harsh” and “unjustifiable.” The law that Obama helped pass in Illinois restored benefits to this group. (In a continuing effort to produce lemonade, Obama’s first ad of the 2008 general-election campaign says that he “passed laws moving people from welfare to work.”) Obama resisted the national rightward trend of the mid-nineties in other small ways. He sponsored an amendment to the state constitution that would have made health care a universal right in Illinois and helped pass an ethics bill that reformed Illinois’s antiquated campaign-finance system.

In hindsight, little of his legislative record seems controversial. Some of the bills that he sponsored, statements that he made, and votes that he cast could be caricatured in a Presidential campaign. (In one 1997 column, he said, “I supported Governor Edgar’s plan to raise the income tax,” and in a 1999 debate, speaking of himself and his two opponents, he noted that “we’re all on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”) But 2008 is not 1988, and Republican attacks on tax hikes and calling an opponent a liberal lack much of their formerly compelling electoral power.

Obama has benefitted from impeccable timing. As the national Party entered a period of ideological timidity, he was at the vanguard of a Democratic revival in Illinois that had begun in 1992, when Clinton and Braun won the state, and grew stronger when, four years later, Democrats took over the Illinois House of Representatives. It continued through 2002, when Democrats won the State Senate and the governor’s office. By 2004, when Obama ran for the United States Senate, Illinois was a solidly blue state.

Not all of this was due to Democratic ingenuity; during this period the state Republican Party collapsed under the weight of corruption scandals. That is something of an Illinois tradition: four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted. As Saul Bellow once remarked, “Politics are politics, crime is crime, but in Chicago they occasionally overlap. The line between virtue and vice meanders madly—effective government on one side, connections on the other.”

There were further changes under way in Chicago. Obama had won his first campaign by using old-fashioned Chicago machine tactics at a time when the notion of machine politics was increasingly anachronistic. As the political consultant Don Rose and his colleague James Andrews explain in a chapter for a book about the current Mayor Daley’s first victory, the machine literally provided voters with access to food, health care, and a job. In most American cities, that model vanished after the Second World War; by then, the blue-collar base was leaving for the suburbs and reform movements were challenging machine politics. In Chicago, Rose and Andrews say, the elder Daley updated and preserved the system by creating a modern machine that combined “big labor and big capital, blue and white collars, and minorities”—a hybrid model that died with him.

Gradually, Chicago caught up with the rest of the country and media-driven politics eclipsed machine-driven politics. “It became increasingly difficult to get into homes and apartments to talk about candidates,” Rose said. “High-rises were tough if not impossible to crack, and other parts of the city had become too dangerous to walk around in for hours at a time. And people didn’t want to answer their doors. Thus the increasing dependence on TV, radio, direct mail, phone-banking, robocalls, et cetera—all things that cost a hell of a lot more money than patronage workers, who were themselves in decline, anyway, because of anti-patronage court rulings.” Instead of a large army of ward heelers dragging people to the polls, candidates needed a small army of donors to pay for commercials. Money replaced bodies as the currency of Chicago politics. This new system became known as “pinstripe patronage,” because the key to winning was not rewarding voters with jobs but rewarding donors with government contracts.

E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. “They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest,” Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself. Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.

At the time, Obama was growing closer to Tony Rezko, who eventually turned pinstripe patronage into an extremely lucrative way of life. Rezko’s rise in Illinois was intertwined with Obama’s. Like Abner Mikva and Judson Miner, he had tried to recruit Obama to work for him. Chicago had been at the forefront of an urban policy to lure developers into low-income neighborhoods with tax credits, and Rezko was an early beneficiary of the program. Miner’s law firm was eager to do the legal work on the tax-credit deals, which seemed consistent with the firm’s over-all civil-rights mission. A residual benefit was that the new developers became major donors to aldermen, state senators, and other South Side politicians who represented the poor neighborhoods in which Rezko and others operated. “Our relationship deepened when I started my first political campaign for the State Senate,” Obama said earlier this year, in an interview with Chicago reporters.

Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obama’s funds for that first campaign. As a state senator, Obama became an advocate of the tax-credit program. “That’s an example of a smart policy,” he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1997. “The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts.” Obama and Rezko’s friendship grew stronger. They dined together regularly and even, on at least one occasion, retreated to Rezko’s vacation home, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

“WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS”

Obama’s subtle understanding of the way the city’s politics had changed—with fund-raising replacing organization as the key to victory—surely encouraged him in his next campaign. Almost as soon as he got to Springfield, he was planning another move. He was bored there—once, he appeared to doze off during a caucus meeting—and frustrated by the Republicans’ total control over the legislature. He seemed to believe, according to colleagues at the time, that he was destined for better things than being trapped in one of America’s more notoriously corrupt state capitals. Obama spent little time socializing with “the guys basically from Chicago,” the veteran senator Emil Jones said. “He hung around a lot of the downstaters. They became good friends.”

Obama’s relations with some of his black colleagues from Chicago were dreadful from the beginning. On March 13, 1997, Obama introduced one of his first pieces of legislation, a modest bill to make a directory of community-college graduates available to local employers. There was a response from Rickey Hendon, a state senator from the West Side of Chicago who had been close to Alice Palmer. After Obama explained his bill, Hendon, who has dabbled in film and television work, earning him the nickname Hollywood, rose to ask a question, and the following exchange occurred:

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I’m having a little trouble with it.

OBAMA: Obama.

HENDON: Is that Irish?

OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.

HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill’s still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?

OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn’t paying Senator Hendon any attention.

HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn’t pay it much attention either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?

OBAMA: Not—not—basically this idea comes out of the South Side community colleges. I don’t know what you’re doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won’t be including that in our directory for the students.

HENDON: . . . Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than Obama—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don’t have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And—and you don’t even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did. . . . I’m missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that makes absolutely no sense. I . . . I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

Although the exchange was part of a longstanding tradition of hazing new legislators, the tensions between Hendon and Obama were real. On another occasion, Obama voted—a parliamentary error, Obama says—to block funding for a child-welfare facility in Hendon’s district. Hendon rose and criticized Obama for the vote. The two men became embroiled in a yelling match on the Senate floor that looked as if it might become physical; they were separated by Courtney Nottage, then the chief of staff for Emil Jones. Nottage led Obama off the floor to a room that legislators used to make telephone calls. “It looked like two men that were having a serious disagreement and they had walked up to one another really close,” Nottage told me. “I didn’t think anything good could come of that.”

Hendon told me, “He’s the one that got mad, because he said I embarrassed him on the Senate floor. That’s when he came over to my desk.” Before Nottage broke them up, Obama, who had learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, supposedly told Hendon, “I’m going to kick your ass!” Hendon said, “He said something like that.” He added that more details will appear in a book that he’s written, entitled “Black Enough, White Enough: The Obama Dilemma.”

Obama’s friends were not surprised when, in 1999, he decided to challenge Bobby Rush, who has represented the South Side in Congress since 1992. Rush had run against Daley in the 1999 mayoral primary, and Obama interpreted Rush’s defeat in that citywide race as a harbinger of his declining popularity in his congressional district.

The race against Rush was the turning point in Obama’s political career. It started with a brilliant bit of oratory that alluded to Abner Mikva’s story about the insularity of Chicago politics and sought to turn Obama’s disadvantages into strengths. “Nobody sent me,” Obama said at his campaign kickoff, on September 26, 1999. “I’m not part of some long-standing political organization. I have no fancy sponsors. I’m not even from Chicago. My name is Obama. Despite that fact, somebody sent me. . . . The men on the corner in Woodlawn drowning their sorrows in alcohol . . . the women working two jobs. . . . They’re all telling me we can’t wait.” It was the best moment of his campaign.

Obama was financially outmatched. Although he raised about six hundred thousand dollars, sustained television advertising in Chicago cost between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dollars a week, according to Dan Shomon, Obama’s campaign manager at the time. A series of unusual events defined the race. A few months before the election, Rush’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey Rich, was shot and killed, which made the incumbent a figure of sympathy, and in the final weeks of the campaign Rush’s father died. Obama made a serious misstep when, visiting his grandmother in Hawaii, he missed a crucial vote on gun-control legislation in Springfield. Even worse, on the day of the vote a column by Obama about how the gun bill was “sorely needed” appeared in the Hyde Park Herald, under the headline “IDEOLOGUES FRUSTRATE GUN LAW.” Obama protested that his daughter was ill and unable to travel, and that he saw his grandmother, who lived alone, only once a year, but the press treated the trip as a tropical vacation.

Obama lost by thirty-one points—a humiliating defeat. On Election Night, at the Ramada Inn where he had begun his political career, he sounded dejected, hinting that he might leave politics. “I’ve got to make assessments about where we go from here,” he said. “We need a new style of politics to deal with the issues that are important to the people. What’s not clear to me is whether I should do that as an elected official or by influencing government in ways that actually improve people’s lives.” The defeat marked not so much the beginning of a new style of politics for Obama as the beginning of Obama’s mastery of the old style of politics.

Obama had misread the political dynamics of Rush’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign. “He thought he would get some help from Daley because Rush had run against Daley for mayor,” Mikva said. “He thought that Daley might use the opportunity to get even. That’s not the way the Daleys work. It’s not the way the machine works. When Barack went in to see the Mayor, whom he knew slightly, Daley said what his old man used to say: ‘Good luck!’ ”

Mayor Daley concurred. “Bobby Rush was very strong,” he said. “When you lose a race, you can be strong in another avenue, and he was always strong in his congressional district. It was a learning experience when I lost to Harold Washington. The next day, I endorsed him.” He added, “You learn from defeat. If you don’t learn from defeat, then you go away as a sour politician—you think that people turned on you. Barack Obama understood that. The lesson from that campaign is you can’t just run for any office saying you thought someone lost an election and you thought they were weak. He realized that and he rededicated himself.”

THE INNER SANCTUM

Obama learned the exact nature of his appeal, as well as his handicaps. Unlike Obama’s State Senate district, where the University of Chicago and the multicultural Hyde Park produced most of the votes, Rush’s congressional district extended deep into black neighborhoods where Obama was unknown. His academic background was a burden, too. Will Burns explained, “Even though the University of Chicago is one of the largest employers on the South Side of Chicago, it is seen by some, particularly black nationalists, as a bastion of white political power, as a huge entity that doesn’t take into account the interests of the community, that doesn’t have a full democratic partnership with the community, and does what it wants to the community in maintaining clear boundaries about where black people are. It’s seen as an expansive force, trying to expand into Bronzeville and into Woodlawn”—historically black neighborhoods adjacent to Hyde Park—“and put poor blacks out of the area. The University of Chicago is not a brand that helps you if you’re trying to get votes on the South Side of Chicago.”

Obama’s fund-raising success and his professional networks were also viewed with suspicion. Chicago is still a city of villages, and Obama was adept at gliding back and forth between the South Side, where he campaigned for votes, and the wealthy Gold Coast, the lakefront neighborhood of high-rise condominiums and deluxe shopping, where he raised money. One day in Hyde Park, I mentioned the name Bettylu Saltzman (the Project Vote supporter and daughter of a Bulls owner) to Lois Friedberg-Dobry (the South Side operator). “I don’t run in those circles,” she said. Later, over lunch with Saltzman at a café in a gourmet supermarket on the Gold Coast, I mentioned the Dobrys and Obama’s Independent Voters of Illinois friends, and she said, “You know, the North Side and the South Side of Chicago—it’s like two different worlds.”

A South Side operator named Al Kindle, a large man with a booming voice, was a field operator for Obama’s race against Rush. He had helped elect Harold Washington, and he saw Obama’s congressional campaign from the street level. We met one evening at Calypso Café, a Caribbean restaurant that Obama has said is his favorite place to eat in Hyde Park, and Kindle described some of the worst moments in the campaign. “The accusations were that Obama was sent here and owned by the Jews,” Kindle said. “That he was here to steal the black vote and steal black land and that he was represented by the—as they were called—‘the white man.’ And that Obama wasn’t black enough and didn’t know the black experience, the black community. It was quite deafening in terms of how they went after Alderman Preckwinkle and myself. People would say, ‘Oh, Kindle, man, we trust you, you being fooled. Obama’s got you fooled.’ And some people called me a traitor.”

The loss taught Obama a great deal about the components of his natural coalition. According to Dan Shomon, the first poll that Obama conducted revealed that the demographic he could win over most easily was white voters. Obama, who hadn’t shown any particular gift for oratory in the race, now learned to shed his stiff approach to campaigning—described by Preckwinkle as that of an “arrogant academic.” Mikva told me, “The first time I heard him talk to a black church, he was very professorial, more so even than he was in the white community. There was no joking, no self-deprecation, no style. It didn’t go over well at all.”

But, as he had in his 1996 campaign, Obama had attracted a young and zealous corps of campaign workers. “I remember one of the candidates in the race used to talk about how crazed our volunteers were, because they were passionate, energized,” Will Burns said. “You’d come by the office on Eighty-seventh Street and there’d be a bunch of guys with no teeth waiting to get their next Old Grand-dad and then these Shiraz-drinking, Nation-reading, T.N.R.-quoting young black folk. It was a random-ass mix. It was beautiful, though. When I see the crowds now, they’re very reminiscent of what was happening then.”

Emil Jones told me that, after 2000, Obama moved decisively away from being pigeonholed as an inner-city pol. During one debate with Rush, he noted that he and the other candidates were all “progressive, urban Democrats.” Even though he lost, that primary taught him that he might be something more than that. “He learned that for Barack Obama it was not the type of district that he was well suited for,” Jones said. “The type of campaign that he had to run to win that district is not Barack Obama. It was a predominantly African-American district. It was a district where you had to campaign solely on those issues. And Barack did not campaign that way, and so as a result he lost. Which was good.” Meaning, it was good for Barack Obama.

One day in the spring of 2001, about a year after the loss to Rush, Obama walked into the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, a shabby nineteen-fifties government workspace for state officials next to the regal state capitol. He went upstairs to a room that Democrats in Springfield called “the inner sanctum.” Only about ten Democratic staffers had access; entry required an elaborate ritual—fingerprint scanners and codes punched into a keypad. The room was large, and unremarkable except for an enormous printer and an array of computers with big double monitors. On the screens that spring day were detailed maps of Chicago, and Obama and a Democratic consultant named John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district. Corrigan was the Democrat in charge of drawing all Chicago districts, and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in the campaign against Rush.

Obama’s former district had been drawn by Republicans after the 1990 census. But, after 2000, Illinois Democrats won the right to redistrict the state. Partisan redistricting remains common in American politics, and, while it outrages a losing party, it has so far survived every legal challenge. In the new century, mapping technology has become so precise and the available demographic data so rich that politicians are able to choose the kinds of voter they want to represent, right down to individual homes. A close look at the post-2000 congressional map of Bobby Rush’s district reveals that it tears through Hyde Park in a curious series of irregular turns. One of those lines bypasses Obama’s address by two blocks. Rush, or someone looking out for his interests, had carved the upstart Obama out of Rush’s congressional district.

In truth, Rush had little to worry about; Obama was already on a different political path. Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

“It was a radical change,” Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. “He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic.”

Obama’s personal political concerns were not the only factor driving the process. During the previous round of remapping, in 1991, Republicans had created Chicago districts where African-Americans were the overwhelming majority, packing the greatest number of loyal Democrats into the fewest districts. A decade later, Democrats tried to spread the African-American vote among more districts. The idea was to create enough Democratic-leaning districts so that the Party could take control of the state legislature. That goal was fine with Obama; his new district offered promising, untapped constituencies for him as he considered his next political move. “The exposure he would get to some of the folks that were on boards of the museums and C.E.O.s of some of the companies that he would represent would certainly help him in the long run,” Corrigan said.

In the end, Obama’s North Side fund-raising base and his South Side political base were united in one district. He now represented Hyde Park operators like Lois Friedberg-Dobry as well as Gold Coast doyennes like Bettylu Saltzman, and his old South Side street operative Al Kindle as well as his future consultant David Axelrod. In an article in the Hyde Park Herald about how “partisan” and “undemocratic” Illinois redistricting had become, Obama was asked for his views. As usual, he was candid. “There is a conflict of interest built into the process,” he said. “Incumbents drawing their own maps will inevitably try to advantage themselves.”

The partisan redistricting of Illinois may have been the most important event in Obama’s early political life. It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the Senate in 2004: money and power. He needed to have several times as much cash as he’d raised for his losing congressional race in 2000, and many of the state’s top donors now lived or worked in his district. More important, the statewide gerrymandering made it likely that Obama’s party would take over the State Senate in 2002, an event that would provide him with a platform from which to craft a legislative record in time for the campaign.

Obama’s political activity from 2001 to 2004 reveals a man transformed. The loss to Rush drained him of much of the naïveté he once exuded. For instance, when Obama arrived in Springfield, in 1996, he was still enamored of the spirit of community organizing and determined to apply its principles as a legislator. In an interview with the Chicago Reader in 1995, he laid out this vision:

People are hungry for community; they miss it. They are hungry for change. What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.

Obama took at least one concrete step to turn this notion of the legislator as community organizer into a reality. In his first column in the Hyde Park Herald, the same one in which he addressed welfare, he announced that he was “organizing citizens’ committees” to help him shape legislation. He asked his constituents to call his office if they wanted to participate. That kind of airy talk about changing politics gave way almost immediately to the realities of the job. I asked a longtime Obama friend what ever became of the committees. “They never really got off the ground,” he said. By 2001, if there was any maxim from community organizing that Obama lived by, it was the Realpolitik commandment of Saul Alinsky, the founding practitioner of community organizing, to operate in “the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.”

In electoral politics, operating in the world as it is means raising money. Obama expanded the reach of his fund-raising. Every network that he penetrated brought him access to another. Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner’s daughter, who runs Playboy Enterprises from the fifteenth floor of a lakefront building, explained how it worked. Hefner is a member of a group called Ladies Who Lunch—nineteen Chicago women, most of them wealthy, who see themselves as talent scouts and angel investors for up-and-coming liberal candidates and activists. They interview prospects over a meal, often in a private dining room at the Arts Club of Chicago. Obama’s friend Bettylu Saltzman, a Ladies Who Lunch member, introduced Obama to the group when he was preparing his Senate run. Hefner, who declined to support Obama in 2000, was ready to help him when he came calling in 2002.

Not long ago, Hefner and I talked in her office; we were seated at a granite table strewn with copies of Playboy. “I was very proud to be able to introduce him during the Senate race to a lot of people who have turned out to be important and valuable to him, not just here but in New York and L.A.,” Hefner explained. She mentioned Thomas Friedman, the Times columnist, and Norman Lear, the television producer. “I try and think about people who I think should know him.”

THE SPEECH

One insight into the transition that Obama was making during the short period between his painful loss to Bobby Rush and his Senate victory can be gained by comparing his reactions to the two major national-security crises of the time: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war. For many Illinois state legislators, September 11th was not an event that required much response. The attacks occurred just before an important deadline in the redistricting process. John Corrigan, the Democratic consultant in charge of redistricting, told me that he spent September 12th talking to many legislators, Obama not among them. “It was like nothing had happened,” he said. “Everybody came in and all they cared about was their districts. It wasn’t any one particular legislator from any one particular community. I learned a lot about state government. Their job was not to respond to September 11th. They were more worried about making sure that they had a district that they could run in for reëlection.”

Obama’s response to the event was published on September 19th in the Hyde Park Herald:

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

A year later, Obama agreed to speak at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago, organized by Bettylu Saltzman and some friends, who, over Chinese food, had decided to stage the protest. Saltzman asked John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago—and, later, the co-author of the controversial book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”—to speak, but he couldn’t make it. “He was one of the main people we wanted, but he was speaking at the University of Wisconsin that day,” Saltzman said. Then she called her rabbi and then Barack Obama. Michelle answered the phone and passed the message on to her husband, who was out of town.

Saltzman also called Marilyn Katz, who runs a Chicago public-relations firm and is close to Mayor Daley. Katz managed to get Jesse Jackson as a speaker, and handled many of the organizing details. Katz, a petite woman who was, improbably, the head of security for S.D.S. at the 1968 Democratic Convention, described what she felt the political mood was at the time of the rally. “Professors are being turned in on college campuses, Bush’s ratings are eighty-seven per cent,” she said. “Among my friends, there hasn’t been an antiwar demonstration in twenty years. There’s huge repression, Bush has got all this legislation. They’re talking about lists, they’re denying people entry into the country. . . . Bush’s numbers were tremendously high, but we had no choice. Unless we wanted to live in a country that was fascist.”

Despite the politics of Saltzman and Katz, Obama’s now famous speech was notable for the absence of the traditional tropes of the antiwar left. In his biography of Obama, David Mendell, noting that Obama’s speech occurred a few months before the official declaration of his U.S. Senate candidacy, suggests that the decision to publicly oppose the war in Iraq was a calculated political move intended to win favor with Saltzman. The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!”

The sensitive language of his September 11th statement was gone. Instead, Obama distanced himself from the pacifist activists who were surely present. “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances,” he told the crowd. He then went further, defending justifiable wars in almost glorious terms. “The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s Army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow-troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don’t oppose all wars.” It took some nerve to tweak the crowd in this way. After all, it was unlikely that many of the protesters knew who Obama was, and in a lengthy write-up of the event in the Chicago Tribune the following day he was not mentioned. Yet the speech reads as if it had been written for a much bigger audience.

During this period, Obama also became more of a strategist, someone increasingly comfortable discussing the finer points of polls, message, and fund-raising. According to his friends, Obama does not delegate campaign planning. Marty Nesbitt, his best friend, who became a familiar presence on the campaign trail this spring, flying in to play basketball with Obama on primary days, described the first meeting in which Obama pitched the idea of running for the U.S. Senate to his closest advisers and fund-raisers. This was in 2002, and things seemed to be going his way. The incumbent Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, was unpopular, and the race was attracting a large field of Democrats.

“He didn’t start telling people he was interested in running for Senate until he figured out what the road map was,” Nesbitt said. “He had a good sense of the odds, and he knew there were certain things that had to happen. . . . The first thing he said was, ‘O.K., nobody with approval ratings like this has ever been reëlected, so it’s not gonna be him, right?’ And then he said there’s a bunch of candidates who can potentially run, one of whom was Carol Moseley Braun. And he said, ‘If she runs, I probably don’t have a chance, because there’s gonna be certain loyalty within the African-American community to her, even though she had some mistakes, and I’m probably not gonna get those African-American votes, which I need as my base if I’m gonna win. So if she runs, I don’t run.’

“Then he just laid out an economic analysis. It becomes about money, because he knew that if people knew his story they would view him as a better candidate than anybody else he thought might be in the field. And so he said, ‘Therefore, if you raise five million dollars, I have a fifty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise seven million dollars, I have a seventy-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise ten million dollars, I guarantee victory.”

That year, he gained his first high-level experience in a statewide campaign when he advised the victorious gubernatorial candidate Rod Blagojevich, another politician with a funny name and a message of reform. Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama’s, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich’s campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich’s victory. He and Obama “participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor,” Emanuel said. “We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two.” A spokesman for Blagojevich confirmed Emanuel’s account, although David Wilhelm, who now works for Obama, said that Emanuel had overstated Obama’s role. “There was an advisory council that was inclusive of Rahm and Barack but not limited to them,” Wilhelm said, and he disputed the notion that Obama was “an architect or one of the principal strategists.”

David Axelrod, the preëminent strategist in the state, declined to work for Blagojevich. “He had been my client and I had a very good relationship with him, but I didn’t sign on to the governor’s race,” Axelrod said. “Obviously he won, but I had concerns about it. . . . I was concerned about whether he was ready for that. Not so much for the race but for governing. I was concerned about some of the folks—I was concerned about how the race was being approached.” Axelrod’s unease was warranted. Blagojevich and people close to him have been tied to a seemingly endless series of scandals. The trial of Tony Rezko revealed that Rezko used his influence in the Blagojevich administration to profit from companies seeking business with the state. There is speculation that Blagojevich will be the next governor to be indicted, and the Democratic Speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan, has raised the issue of impeachment.

Part of Obama’s political success is that he has been able to exploit relationships with important yet ethically dubious figures in Illinois while still maintaining his independence. In some ways, this is an Illinois tradition. When the liberal reformer Adlai Stevenson ran for governor, in 1948, one Democratic boss reportedly noted that he would “perfume the ticket.” The earnest Lincoln scholar Paul Simon stood out in the Senate for his moral rectitude and his commitment to good government even as his state wallowed in scandal. “The political bosses knew they had to have what they used to call in business a loss leader—the showcasing,” Don Rose, the Chicago political consultant, said. “The car that you sold for under its value for advertising purposes. While you had at the top of your ticket a shining star, under that it was like turning over a rock.”

Obama has said little about the scandals in his home state. Besides the Rezko and Blagojevich cases, there have been indictments and convictions against the Daley administration concerning hiring and contracting practices. Getting close to the sullied political leadership in Illinois was probably an unavoidable cost of winning the U.S. Senate seat. Emil Jones told me that another of the lessons Obama learned after his 2000 loss was the importance of political sponsorship.

Jones and Obama have had a complicated history. As a community organizer, Obama led a protest against Jones, and in his memoir he unflatteringly describes him as an “old ward heeler.” (“I guess he figured I was part of the establishment,” Jones told me, objecting to the description. “He didn’t know too much about politics and he was very idealistic.”) Years later, Jones backed Palmer over Obama in the State Senate race. But their relationship changed dramatically after 2000. When Obama praised Jones as “my political godfather,” Jones began using the theme music from “The Godfather” as his cell-phone ringtone.

I spoke to Jones in his office minutes after he left a meeting with the Governor, a close ally whom he has defended during the recent difficulties. Jones, who is seventy-two, is a former sewer inspector and insurance salesman; he speaks in a soft rumble and practices politics in a characteristically Chicago manner. He recently explained his support for a proposal to increase the salaries of legislators by saying, “I need a pay raise.” In May, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jones “provided himself with tens of thousands of dollars in interest-free loans from his campaign fund,” which, the report noted, is not illegal in Illinois but is “highly unusual.” A spokesman for Jones said that Jones “has always made it a practice to pay back the loans and continues to do so.”

Being in the majority has proved hard for the Democrats. They were having trouble agreeing on a budget deal, and the newspapers were filled with those murmurs of impeachment. For Jones, discussing his long history with the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee—from target of the youthful Obama’s anti-establishment organizing to political patron in Springfield—seemed a welcome relief, a reminder of happier times for Democrats in Illinois.

“When he ran that race against Bobby Rush, he had no one supporting him who had political influence over others and whom people respected, so he was out there as a lone wolf in that race,” Jones said. That’s why, in 2002, as Obama planned his next campaign, he sought out Jones. “We never discussed it, but he had to analyze that race and recognize he had no other powerful elected officials supporting him,” Jones said. “And so he felt I could be very, very key if he was going to make the run for the U.S. Senate.

“In politics, you must know who is connected to whom,” Jones continued. “The Mayor of Chicago and the father of Dan Hynes”—one of Obama’s primary opponents—“when they were both state senators they shared an apartment together in Springfield, so there’s a relationship between those two. And the Governor? One of his chief financial supporters in his first run was also in the race. I work with both the Mayor and the Governor, so, by my jumping in strong behind Barack Obama, they didn’t want to alienate me and have me upset with them, so they stayed out of the race.”

In the State Senate, Jones did something even more important for Obama. He pushed him forward as the key sponsor of some of the Party’s most important legislation, even though the move did not sit well with some colleagues who had plugged away in the minority on bills that Obama now championed as part of the majority. “Because he had been in the minority, Barack didn’t have a legislative record to run on, and there was a buildup of all these great ideas that the Republicans kept in the rules committee when they were in the majority,” Burns said. “Jones basically gave Obama the space to do what Obama wanted to do. Emil made it clear to people that it would be good for them.” Burns, who at that point was working for Jones, was assigned to keep an eye on Obama’s floor votes, which, because he was a Senate candidate, would be under closer scrutiny. The Obama-Jones alliance worked. In one year, 2003, Obama passed much of the legislation, including bills on racial profiling, death-penalty reform, and expanded health insurance for children, that he highlighted in his Senate campaign.

ONE STEP AHEAD

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Obama’s establishment inclinations have alienated some old friends. During the 2004 Senate primary, Obama sometimes reminded voters of his anti-machine credentials, but at the same time he shrewdly wrote to Mayor Daley’s brother, William, who had backed one of Obama’s primary opponents, asking for his support if he won the primary. As he outgrew the provincial politics of Hyde Park, he became closer to the Mayor, and this accommodation, as well as his unwillingness to condemn the corruption scandals ensnaring Daley and Blagojevich, both of whom he supported for reëlection, have some of his original supporters feeling alienated and angry. “I am not thrilled with Barack, simply because we elected him as an Independent, and he switched over to Daley,” Alan Dobry said. Ivory Mitchell, speaking of Obama’s Senate race, said, “When he won the primary out here and he went downtown, it appears as though Daley took over the campaign for him. . . . We were excluded.” David Axelrod told me, in response, that some of the Independents on the South Side blame Daley for just about anything. “I think there’s kind of this Wizard of Oz mystique,” he said. “Daley had virtually no role in the Senate campaign.”

Another transition from primary to general election is now under way for Obama, and it is causing him a similar set of problems, all of which stem from a realization among his supporters that superheroes don’t become President; politicians do. Judging by the reaction to Obama’s most recent decisions—his willingness to support legislation to modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, his rightward shift on interpreting the Second Amendment, his decision to “refine” his Iraq policies—some voters will be crushed by this realization and others will be relieved. In another episode that has Obama’s old friends feeling frustrated, Obama recently blamed his first campaign manager, Carol Anne Harwell, for reporting on a 1996 questionnaire that Obama favored a ban on handguns. According to her friends, Harwell was furious that the campaign made her Obama’s scapegoat. “She got, as the saying goes, run over by a bus,” Lois Friedberg-Dobry said.

Obama’s rise has often appeared effortless. His offstage tactics—when he is engaged in the sometimes combative work of a politician—are rarely glimpsed by outsiders. Penny Pritzker, a friend and fund-raiser for Obama, remembers meeting with him at her office in 2006 to discuss his Presidential campaign. Pritzker, whose family, one of the wealthiest in Chicago, owns the Hyatt hotel chain, was as crucial to Obama’s next campaign as Toni Preckwinkle’s was to his first. “We were talking about whether he was ready to do this or not,” Pritzker told me. She was blunt, telling Obama, “As I see it, the two things that you’re going to need to address are your executive leadership skills, because your résumé doesn’t have that in it, and the second would be your credentials in national security.” Obama returned with an organizational chart indicating how the campaign would be structured—one of his great tactical advantages over the disorganized Clinton campaign—along with a list of advisers. Pritzker agreed to become his finance chair. Obama has frequently been one step ahead of his friends and the public in anticipating his own rise. Perhaps it is all those people he has met over the years who told him that he would be President one day. The Reverend Alvin Love, a South Side Baptist minister and a longtime Obama friend, said that Obama called him in December, 2006, seeking advice about whether to run for President. “My dad told me that you’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” Love recalls saying, and Obama replied, “The iron can’t get any hotter.”

Obama has always had a healthy understanding of the reaction he elicits in others, and he learned to use it to his advantage a very long time ago. Marty Nesbitt remembers Obama’s utter calm the day he gave his celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which made him an international celebrity and a potential 2008 Presidential candidate. “We were walking down the street late in the afternoon,” Nesbitt told me. “And this crowd was building behind us, like it was Tiger Woods at the Masters.”

“Barack, man, you’re like a rock star,” Nesbitt said.

“Yeah, if you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow,” Obama replied.

“What do you mean?”

“My speech,” Obama said, “is pretty good.” ♦

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VIDEO: Update on Barron Scooter Collins Case
By KALB Web Administrator -

July 09 2008 |

It’s been five and a half months since the death of 21 year old Barron Scooter Collins, a convicted drug dealer. News Channel 5 has learned Collins birth name is Barron Pikes. And he was first cousin to Mychal Bell, of the Jena Six. Scooter died after being in police custody and being tased. The incident prompted over 100 blacks in Winnfield to protest downtown.

The Winn Parish Coroner, Dr. Randolph Williams, actually concluded his report 3 weeks ago and for the past 3 weeks News Channel 5 has been trying to get a copy of the report. Dr. Williams has refused to release anything to the media. But Radio Talk Show Host Tony Brown has provided News Channel 5 a copy of the death certificate. Tony Brown has been in close contact with Scooters relatives. The Pikes gave Brown the death certificate—and permission for him to give it to us.

That document explains Scooter died after being tased nine times over the course of 30 minutes. He went into cardiac arrest. The certificate also confirms Collins was in restraints- in police custody when he died. And the certificate labels the death a homicide.

This is Scott Nugent, son of former Winnfield Chief of Police Gleason Nugent. Scott Nugent is the officer who tased Scooter after a foot chase. Nugent says Scooter was resisting arrest. But relatives of Scooter told NC5 that Nugent and Scooter went to high school together in Winnfield and had a bumpy personal history that they never liked each other. By the way, Nugent’s record with Winnfield PD also has a major bump. In 2007 Nugent arrested a man for DWI--while the man was in Nugent’s custody he somehow managed to steal Nugent’s police cruiser—he crashed the car and died in the wreck.

Because the coroner was taking such a long time with his investigation, the Winnfield city council held an emergency meeting back in May. Nugent had been on paid suspension since the incident. But under an officer’s bill of rights, there’s only so much time that can pass until the officer is either allowed back to work or fired. The deadline was fast approaching so the city council voted 3 to 2 to terminate Nugent.

Nugent can appeal his termination to the local civil services board to try to get his job back. But job aside, Nugent could be facing criminal charges for the death. State Police Investigators are reviewing the incident and will present a report to the Winn Parish District Attorney. After that the case could go before a grand jury and then possibly a trial. Meanwhile Scooter’s family is consulting with a lawyer about a lawsuit. Scooter had a 4 year old son named Kadarien.

The two other Winnfield Officers who were involved in the incident: Alan Marsdin and Cargyle Junior Branch-- Both are still on the force. Neither one has been disciplined as far as we know. Chief Johnny Ray Carpenter has not returned any of our phone calls. Mike Magnoli reporting News Channel 5.
Video

True Justice: In the case of Mychal Bell

2007-09-23T03:46:00.000-05:00

If all the principal players in the case against Mychal Bell would be honest with themselves, in the interest of good government and Justice, they would step aside, from the hardcore stance & would [for lack of a better phrase]; stand down.

LaSalle Parish is a strong Bush stopping place.

JacksonFreePress.com

BREAKING: White Supremacist Group posts addresses and numbers of Jena 6!
Just in case you thought we were blowing things out of proportion....again, THIS is why we're mad!

http://kentuckyanswp.blogspot.com/2007/09/addresses-of-tge-jena-6-thugsniggers.html

or

http://illinoisns.blogspot.com

or better yet it was brought to my attention today by one of my hip hop activist colleagues that you can simply google "jena 6 niggers thugs" and see a host of sites and blogs that will make your stomach turn. It should make you MAD!!!!!

By: Kamikaze on Sep 22, 07 | 4:43 pm
tools: e-mail story | printer friendly | post to del.icio.us | Digg this

COMMENTS
Progress huh? And these are just the ones who are bold enough to state it...This serves as the wake-up call!!!

Posted by: Kamikaze on Sep 22, 07 | 4:53 pm
There must be some legal action the families can take. This is ridiculous.

Posted by: L.W. on Sep 22, 07 | 4:55 pm
Horrible. and actually the bigots could site the Freedom of Information Act to justify their cowardly actions. Its chickens--t! I heard that the Nation of Islam was providing protection for them already BEFORE this hit. A radio talks show host has also offered to move the families at HIS expense. We should find and post THEIR damn addresses. Im sure its some homies in KY and Ill hat would LOVE to know where THEY live.

Posted by: Kamikaze on Sep 22, 07 | 4:59 pm
I don't see how the FOIA could work this time. They are promoting terrorist acts by posting their personal information, and that ought to be a federal offense.

Posted by: L.W. on Sep 22, 07 | 5:18 pm
This reminds me of the the anti-abortion folks posting the names and addresses of doctors who perform abortion and then crossing through their names as they were killed (like Slepian).

Posted by: ladd on Sep 22, 07 | 7:11 pm
I don't see how 'FOIA' applies here either. It's about citizens having access to government records, not about hate groups publishing records of private citizens so as to incite terrorist acts against them.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/foia/guide.html#foia

Posted by: lucdix on Sep 22, 07 | 8:19 pm
racism

Posted by: NewJackson on Sep 22, 07 | 8:37 pm
Well it would be just as easy to publish the name and address of the guy running the website, somebody is paying the bills for that.

Posted by: GLewis on Sep 23, 07 | 12:44 am

You should know that the US Justice Department, the Intelligence Division of the Louisiana State Police & others have been contacted about the recent spike in Klan, Aryan Nation & Nationalist groups. However, this must be understood.

If the boys did in fact, do the crime as described on Crosstar by Justin Barker, himself; then we are in serious trouble in America.

If they did it, then the courts still must deal with the Un-equal Justice.
------------------------------------------
Above the line are comments from JacksonFreePress.com

http://www.nationalist.org/docs/reports/2007/092101.html---

Justin Barker on Crosstar the White Nationalist website!

The ones who attacked me are getting money for beating me up. People are sending money for their defense, even though their lawyers are doing it for free, so they are getting free money. And, their mothers are now driving Jaguars, Mercedes and Envoys. They spend it as fast as they get it. It makes me upset and it makes me mad. Paying them for being criminals.

People need to realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind. I've got to work every day, while the attackers sit there on a couch, or sit on some bench, with sleeping-pants on. Something needs to be done. Robert Bailey even posts a page on MySpace stuffing his mouth with hundred dollar bills he's been sent, above a caption that there are no fifties in his stack.

I was suspended from school for a year because I had a gun in my truck. I can't even go to the ball-game. It was a hunting-rifle and was in plain-sight. I had carried it for years. It was no different than so many others do around here. I do not believe that that was right, but I take what comes my way and try to do what's right. I live out in the country from Jena, at Belah, and appreciate the encouragement that everyone has given to me. I hope that I can hear from many more people.
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Web Posting on jacksonfreepress.com by Prophet

I[Prophet] live in the country, in Louisiana also. They do things their way, here! Poor Mychal is in a triple crosshair! The Judicial System, The Klanish types & the CAPITALIST!

The Capitalist are on both sides of this story! In fact, everyone is trapped, all of America is trapped between the a false judicial system & a monetary feeding frenzy!

Morris Dees & Southern Poverty Law Center have joined with the other 4 to 5 groups to take Theo Shaw & Robert Bailey from their original attorneys! They have instructed their clients to not speak with the media; which leaves Tina Jones - Bryant Purvis' mother, the odd one out! The capitlailst have not been able to infiltrate her mind!

You see, the system wants to lock up 3 boys or 4 at the most! Why? Because the boys had the nerve to actually beat at white guy down at Gotta Go. Plus, the Klan will not allow; Theo Shaw or Robert Bailey, Jr., to live to a ripe old age. These are just the facts! But, if justice is not the same across the table, then I needed to make us aware, that we are not fighting for Mychal by happenstance or just because he's not sqeaky clean. Who is squeaky clean? The system was trying to dump all of this in this kid!

LaSalle Parish has its own dirt to deal with, in light of 50 years of suppression & stateside persecution to repress ALL THE PEOPLE, and to keep everyone confused.

The D.A. does not rejoice at the fact that Mychal Bell has to, have changed; after this ordeal, and has a mind to better equip himself for the time, in the present!

The D.A., the Judge, the Louisiana Legislature & the Congress must CALL for Mychal Bell to be released on grounds of UNEQUAL JUSTICE at once.

3 October 2007 So, Dr. Phil was attempting along with other media-ist to change the subject. Once and for all, let me say; this thing with Mychal Bell and the 6, is about equal justice. WE ALREADY KNOW THERE IS NO EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW: AND what does that say about AMERICA!!

America has let its own ideals down! America has caused many to think indifferent to the country the would love. However Mychal will become a new individual will be in the hands of God. However, this that has occurred is an international incident, and we will be contacting the United Nations, the President & the Secretary of State.

You see, Mychal Bell by the restrictions of Judge J. P. Mauffray has effectively kept Mychal from securing his basic human right to an EDUCATION!!

Only in Louisiana!! Thank you Governor, Mr. Pastorek, AG Foti, Senator Ellington, Representative Chandler & the Louisiana Supreme Court!

Judicial System must address Unequal Justice!!

2007-09-13T06:52:00.004-05:00

The Unequal Justice that exists in Louisiana must be addressed by all parties in Louisiana authority.

The individuals running for election each, must give their stance on the judicial process. Elections are October 20, 2007. The people deserve a better nation and state to live in.

B. The commission and the Louisiana Commission on
17 Human Rights shall annually study data collected pursuant to this
18 Chapter, relating to hate crimes, as defined by R.S. 14:107.2,
19 occurring within the state. The results of the study shall be
20 published in the annual report to the governor and the members of
21 the legislature as required by R.S. 15:1204.2(B)(8).
22 Section 2. R.S. 14:107.2 is hereby enacted to read as follows:
23 §107.2. Hate crimes
24 R.S. 14:107.2 is all proposed new law.
25 A. It shall be unlawful for any person to select the victim of the
26 following offenses against person and property because of actual or
27 perceived race, age, gender, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual
orientation, national origin, or ancestry of that person . ....

Now that we understand, that the leaders of this society, don't give a tinkers about, those who are left out of the society. The governments judicial system does not allow for freedom of the masses, in fact it is designed to further enslave the masses.

Keeping America in the Dark
.Sharpton response to [Germany's] Prince Frederic von Anhalt Click the Title of this post and listen to von Anhalt's statement! Week of May 15, 2008 in America the great democracy gone awry, as the president panders to the shiekhs for relief!!

Legislation to beef up investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era looked like it would breeze through Congress. The House passed it 422-2 this summer. Its Senate sponsors included some of the most senior Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., right, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill with Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., in Washington in this Arpil 6, 2006 file photo. Coburn is blocking legislation to beef up investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., right, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill with Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., in Washington in this Arpil 6, 2006 file photo. Coburn is blocking legislation to beef up investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era

But the bill has stalled since the House vote in June. Its supporters acknowledge that prospects are slim this year with just days left on the legislative calendar. The breakdown offers a case study in how even the most popular legislation can get caught up in Washington gridlock.

"The bill should have passed a long time ago," said Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, who was killed in Mississippi in 1964 along with fellow civil rights organizers Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. "Every indication is that if it were brought to the floor and voted on there would be enough votes to pass it."

The bill is named after Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. His killers were never convicted.[continued below-after the interrupt]

April 6 Interrupt-jl
The Last Wish of Martin Luther King
By TAYLOR BRANCH
Published: April 6, 2008
FORTY years ago on March 31, at the National Cathedral, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what would be his last Sunday sermon, on his way back to Memphis. That same night in 1968, President Johnson shocked the world by announcing that he would not seek re-election.

I was a senior in college. My mother was visiting four nights later when all conversation suddenly hushed in a busy restaurant. A waiter whispered that Dr. King had been shot.

Civil rights, Vietnam, Dr. King, Memphis — these are historic landmarks. Even so, this year is a watershed. Because Dr. King lived only 39 years, from now on, he will be gone longer than he lived among us. Two generations have come of age since Memphis.

This does not mean that our understanding is accurate or complete. A certain amount of gloss and mythology is inevitable for great figures, whether they be George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Honest Abe splitting a rail or Dr. King preaching a dream of equal citizenship in 1963. Far beyond that, however, we have encased Dr. King and his era in pervasive myth, false to our heritage and dangerous to our future. We have distorted our entire political culture to avoid the lessons of Martin Luther King’s era.

He warned us himself. When he came to the pulpit that Sunday 40 years ago, Dr. King adapted one of his standard sermons, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” From the allegory of Rip Van Winkle, he told of a man who fell asleep before 1776 and awoke 20 years later in a world filled with strange customs and clothes, a whole new vocabulary, and a mystifying preoccupation with the commoner George Washington rather than King George III.

Dr. King pleaded for his audience not to sleep through the world’s continuing cries for freedom. When the ancient Hebrews achieved miraculous liberation from Egypt, many yearned to go back. Pharaoh’s familiar lash seemed better than the covenant delivered by Moses, and so the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. It took 40 years to recover their bearings. Dr. King has been gone 40 years now, but we still sleep under Pharaoh. It is time to wake up.

Dr. King had been in Memphis marching in support of sanitation workers. Two of them, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed in a mechanical malfunction; city rules forbade black employees to seek shelter from rain anywhere but in the back of their compressor trucks, with the garbage. But looting had broken out from Dr. King’s march, for the first time.

When he showed up in Washington that Sunday morning, he was scarcely the toast of the United States. Headlines in Memphis called him, “Chicken à la King,” with accusations that he had run from his own fight. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat called Dr. King “one of the most menacing men in America today,” and published a wild-eyed minstrel cartoon of him aiming a huge pistol from a cloud of gun smoke, with the caption, “I’m Not Firing It — I’m Only Pulling the Trigger.”

So Dr. King stood in the pulpit a marked man, scorned and rebuked, beset with inner conflicts. Yet as always, he lifted hope from the bottom of his soul. He urged the congregation to be alive and awake to great revolutions in progress. “I say to you that our goal is freedom,” he cried, “and I believe we’re going to get there because —however much she strays from it — the goal of America is freedom!”

We face daunting precedent in history. Our nation has slept for decades under the spell of myths grounded in race. I grew up being taught that the Civil War was about federalism, not slavery. My textbooks even used a religious term, the “redeemers,” to describe politicians who restored white supremacy with Ku Klux Klan terrorism late in the 19th century. Modern Hollywood was founded on the emotional power of that myth as portrayed in “The Birth of a Nation.” Progressive forces advocated racial hierarchy with a bogus science of eugenics.

More than once, the dominant culture has turned history upside down to make itself feel comfortable. And when a civil rights movement rose from the fringe of maids and sharecroppers, making it no longer respectable to defend racial segregation, wounded voices adapted again to curse government as the agent of general calamity. We have painted Dr. King’s era as a time of aimless, unbridled license, with hippies running amok.

The watchword of political discourse has degenerated from “movement” to “spin.” In Dr. King’s era, the word “movement” grew from a personal inspiration into leaps of faith, then from shared discovery and sacrifice into upward struggle, spawning kindred movements until great hosts from Selma to the Berlin Wall literally could feel the movement of history.

Now we have “spin” instead, suggesting that there is no real direction at stake from political debate, nor any consequence except for the players in a game. Such language embraces cynicism by reducing politics to entertainment.

Democratic balance has slept for 40 years, and we face a world like Rip Van Winkle run backward. We wake up blinking at Tiger Woods, Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, while our government demands arbitrary rule by secrecy, conquest and dungeons. King George III seems reborn.

Please resist any partisan connotation. Our problem is far too big for that. Indeed, I think the most pressing challenge for admirers of Dr. King is to recognize our own complicity in the stifling myths about civil rights history. Battered, long-suffering allies of Dr. King discarded him as a tired moderate long before the reactionary campaign to make the word “liberal” a kiss of death for candidates across the country. Similarly, forces called radical and militant turned against liberal governments for taking so long to respond to racial injustice, then for the Vietnam War. Only a convergence of the political left and right could cause such lasting erosion for the promise of free government itself.

Many of Dr. King’s closest comrades rejected his commitment to nonviolence. The civil rights movement created waves of history so long as it remained nonviolent, then stopped. Arguably, the most powerful tool for democratic reform was the first to become passé. It vanished among intellectuals, on campuses and in the streets. To this day, almost no one asks why.

We must reclaim the full range of blessings from his movement. For Dr. King, race was in most things, but defined nothing alone. His appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. “We will win our freedom,” he said many times, “because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.” To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy — even as racial healers and reconcilers — is to diminish them under the spell of myth.

Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. You never heard of the Sun Belt when the South was segregated. The movement spread prosperity in a region previously unfit even for professional sports teams. My mayor in Atlanta during the civil rights era, Ivan Allen Jr., said that as soon as the civil rights bill was signed in 1964, we built a baseball stadium on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t found, and quickly lured the Milwaukee Braves. Miami organized a football team called the Dolphins.

The movement also de-stigmatized white Southern politics, creating two-party competition. It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals before the modern notion of “gay” was in use. Not for 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the meaning of equal souls. Now we think nothing of female rabbis and cantors and, yes, female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every background. Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit from the Montgomery bus boycott.

It is both right and politic for all people, including millions who are benign or indifferent toward the civil rights movement, or churlish and resentful, to see that they, too, and their heirs, stand with us on the shoulders of Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.
We recoil from nonviolence at our peril. Dr. King rightly saw it at the heart of democracy. Our nation is a great cathedral of votes — votes not only for Congress and for president, but also votes on Supreme Court decisions and on countless juries. Votes govern the boards of great corporations and tiny charities alike. Visibly and invisibly, everything runs on votes. And every vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.

SO what should we do, now that 40 years have passed? How do we restore our political culture from spin to movement, from muddle to purpose? We must take leaps, ask questions, study nonviolence, reclaim our history.

What Dr. King prescribed in his last Sunday sermon begins with the story of Lazarus and Dives, from the 16th chapter of Luke. Told entirely from the mouth of Jesus, it is a story starring Abraham the patriarch of Judaism, set in the afterlife. There’s nothing else like it in the Bible.

Dr. King loved this parable as the text for a fabled 1949 sermon by Vernon Johns, his predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Lazarus was a lame beggar who once pleaded unnoticed outside the sumptuous gates of a rich man called Dives. They both died, and Dives looked from torment to see Lazarus the beggar secure in the bosom of Abraham. The remainder of the parable is an argument between Abraham and Dives, calling back and forth from heaven to hell.

Dives first asked Abraham to “send Lazarus” with water to cool his burning lips. But Abraham said there was a “great chasm” fixed between them, which could never be crossed. In his sermon, Dr. Johns drew a connection between the chasm and segregation.

But according to Dr. Johns, Dives wasn’t in hell because he was rich. He wasn’t anywhere near as rich as Abraham, one of the wealthiest men in antiquity, who was there in heaven. Nor was Dives in hell because he had failed to send alms to Lazarus. He was there because he never recognized Lazarus as a fellow human being. Even faced with everlasting verdict, he spoke only with Abraham and looked past the beggar, treating him still as a servant in the third person — “send Lazarus.”

Dr. King’s sermons drew more layers of meaning from this parable. He said we must accept the suffering rich man as no ordinary, nasty sinner. When refused water for himself, he worried immediately about his five brothers. Dives asked Abraham again to send Lazarus, this time as a messenger to warn the brothers about their sin. Tell them to be nice to beggars outside the wall. Do something, please, so they don’t wind up here like me.

Dr. King said Dives was a liberal. Despite his own fate, he wanted to help others. Abraham rebuffed this request, too, telling Dives that his brothers already had ample warning in Torah law and the books of the Hebrew prophets. Still Dives persisted, saying no, Abraham, you don’t understand — if the brothers saw someone actually rise from the dead and warn them, then they would understand.

Jesus quotes Abraham saying no. If the brothers do not accept the core teaching of the Torah and the prophets, they won’t believe even a messenger risen from the dead. Dr. King said this parable from Jesus burns up differences between Judaism and Christianity. The lesson beneath any theology is that we must act toward all creation in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes. The alternative is hell, which Dr. King sometimes defined as the pain we inflict on ourselves by refusing God’s grace.

Dr. King then went back to Memphis to stand with the downtrodden workers, with the families of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. You may have seen the placards from the sanitation strike, which read “I Am a Man,” meaning not a piece of garbage to be crushed and ignored. For Dr. King, to answer was a patriotic and prophetic calling. He challenges everyone to find a Lazarus somewhere, from our teeming prisons to the bleeding earth. That quest in common becomes the spark of social movements, and is therefore the engine of hope.

END INTERUPT - [Dr. King's death was an assassination! Conspired by the government and the ruling class of that era. Malcom X-Identified the Southern White Co-conspirators in the speech the labelled the "Ballot or the Bullet" - jl]-The legislation is held up to continue the cover-up.

The legislation would authorize $10 million annually over 10 years for the Justice Department to rejuvenate its prosecutions of pre-1970 civil rights murders. It calls for another $3.5 million annually for Justice to provide grants and other help to local law enforcement agencies.

The man most responsible for obstructing the measure is Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican. Coburn says he supports the cause but feels the FBI can pursue the cases with existing resources.

A spending hawk, Coburn has put a hold on the legislation and dozens of other bills that would increase the federal budget without offsetting costs elsewhere.

"It's absolutely outrageous that one senator and one senator only appears to be blocking us from passing this piece of legislation," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Of course, Coburn alone can't stop the bill. He can only hold it up by forcing time-consuming debate and registering his opposition.

If the measure is so important, he asks, why not bring it to the floor?

So far, Senate leaders have declined to do that. The process could eat up several days and require a series of votes on procedural motions. It also could open the measure to amendments that could weaken the bill.

Senate Democrats say Coburn is blocking about 90 bills, and working around him on all of them would take months — leaving little room for other work.

Coburn's spokesman, John Hart, acknowledged that Coburn would try to amend the Emmett Till bill by cutting its cost. But if his efforts failed, Hart said, Coburn would simply vote against the bill and let it go.

Hart said no one — including the bill's Senate sponsor, Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who is running for president — has personally approached Coburn about a compromise for floor debate.

"It doesn't make sense for the majority leader to blame a freshman Republican for scheduling problems," Hart said. "(Coburn's) intent is not to tie up the Senate for days on this."

Democrats dismissed the suggestion that they haven't made the bill a priority. Dodd's office insisted that he tried to bring it up three times, only to be thwarted by Coburn.

Dodd's spokeswoman, Justine Sessions, said the bill is "critically important" to the senator and he will "hit the ground running" to pass it early next year if it doesn't pass before Congress adjourns this month.
Posted by Joseph LeSieur at 6:06 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Noose Displays must Go!!

Feb 12, 4:53 PM EST
Bush calls noose displays 'deeply offensive

By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Tuesday that recent displays of nooses are disturbing and indicate that some Americans may be losing sight of the suffering that blacks have endured across the nation.

"The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in American history," Bush said at a black history month event at the White House, which began with serious comments about prejudice and ended with music performed by The Temptations.

"The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice," the president said. "Displaying one is not a harmless prank. Lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest."

As a civil society, Americans should agree that noose displays and lynching jokes are "deeply offensive," Bush said.

"They are wrong," the president said, referring to such displays and jokes. "And they have no place in America today."

For decades, the noose was a symbolic part of a campaign of violence, fear and intimidation against blacks, the president said. Sometimes, he added, it was orchestrated by the law enforcement officers charged with protecting them. Bush also said the noose was a tool for intimidation and killing that conveyed a sense of powerlessness to millions of blacks throughout the country.

"Fathers were dragged from their homes in the dark of night before the eyes of their terrified children," he said. "Summary executions were held by torchlight in front of hateful crowds. In many cases, law enforcement officers responsible for protecting the victims were complicit in their deaths."

The Justice Department says it is actively investigating a number of noose incidents at schools, work places and neighborhoods around the country.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was at the White House, said he was pleased that Bush addressed the issue.

Sharpton helped organize a massive rally in September in Jena, La., to protest what marchers believed to be the unfair treatment of six black students charged with beating a white student at Jena High School. The beating came months after three other white students were suspended, but not criminally charged, for hanging nooses in a tree at the school.

"I am encouraged that the president addressed the issue that caused me to bring 30,000 marchers to Jena, Louisiana, in September and 50,000 marchers in front of the U.S. Department of Justice on November 16th," Sharpton said. He said he hoped the president has discussed specific legislation to address the rising tide of hate crimes and increasing displays of nooses.

The FBI reported in November that hate-crime incidents in the United States rose in 2006 by nearly 8 percent. Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.

At the event, Bush honored Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who was a leader of the civil rights movement and organized freedom rides, sit-ins and voter registration drives; and William Coleman, the first black American to be a clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court and who served as President Ford's transportation secretary. Coleman thus was the first black to hold a Cabinet post in a Republican administration.

Bush also recognized Ernest Green, one of the nine black students in Little Rock, Ark., who were escorted into the city's all-white Central High School following the historic Brown vs. Board of Education of the mid 1950s, and Otis Williams, a leader of the "The Temptations."

After the president's remarks, his podium was replaced with five microphones and the members of the group, sporting gray suits trimmed in black, got the packed East Room clapping in time to their music. By the end of the eighth tune, "My Girl," the group had the audience standing and singing along.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Posted by Joseph LeSieur at 6:59 PM 0 comments
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Make Up Your Mind:Where will you be January 21, 2008
"We have found no security or justice:we must speak to Hagar's children!"
January 6, 2008 1400 hours

Barker Parents denounce Barrett! Jena will become Ground Zero for HATE!!!

1524 hours January 6 2008

Jan 5, 6:59 PM EST
Another telephone conference scheduled Monday

JENA, La. (AP) -- There is no settlement between Jena and a white separatist group that wants to march through town on Martin Luther King Day, but another conference is scheduled Monday, attorneys say.

Richard Barrett, an attorney for the Nationalist Movement, Walter E. Dorroh Jr., who represents the town, and U.S. District Judge Dee D. Drell conferred by telephone on Friday.

"The settlement talks did not work out. And there is a settlement conference on Monday that covers several issues," Dorroh said Saturday evening.

He did not comment on Barrett's statement that town attorneys asked to have the case postponed from 1:30 p.m. Tuesday the following Tuesday - six days before the Monday holiday.

"We don't want a continuance, but as a courtesy when one side asks for a continuance, the judge will usually give it to them and the other side goes along with it," Barrett said Friday.

The Nationalists plan a "Jena Justice Day" rally in response to the thousands who rallied Sept. 20, supporting six black teens who have become known as the "Jena Six," who were initially charged with attempted murder of a white student who was attacked at Jena High. All charges have since been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery or second-degree battery.

The Nationalists want rulings that the town cannot impose a $10,000 bond, ask them not to bring firearms, change the parade route by one block, or require a "hold-harmless" clause exempting the town from liability.

The Nationalists say those rules governing public demonstrations are invalid and unconstitutionally over-broad.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Jena event may occur as planned
Louisiana Gannett News

A favorable ruling by a federal judge could mean the Nationalist Movement can hold its "Jena Justice Day" rally and march without the town of Jena's proposed revisions, attorneys say.
The Nationalist Movement, a group that describes itself as "pro-majority" but is widely reported to be a white supremacy organization, will be in Alexandria's federal court on Tuesday along with representatives from the town of Jena for a hearing regarding a temporary restraining order.

The Nationalists allege the town's ordinance requiring a $10,000 bond along with the parade route change and ban on firearms are unconstitutional.

"I don't believe in having a price tag for constitutional rights," said Gregory Aymond, the local attorney for the group based out of Learned, Miss.
Aymond, who has admitted past membership in the Ku Klux Klan, said he doesn't share the Nationalists' racial views but does support their rights of freedom of assembly, speech and expression and their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms.

Richard Barrett, an attorney and member of the Nationalist Movement, said Aymond's past had nothing to do with his selection as the group's attorney. Barrett said he called more than a dozen attorneys seeking local counsel but that all were unwilling to "become involved in the controversy."

A few of the attorneys recommended Aymond, he said, saying he was an "eclectic" person.

The proposed rally
"Jena Justice Day" is planned for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 21, partly to protest celebration of the civil rights leader's birthday, Barrett said, and also in response to the thousands who rallied in Jena on Sept. 20 in support of the "Jena Six."
The town's ordinance requiring proof of a $10,000 bond for possible damage is the main problem for Aymond, said Barrett.

The two attorneys said they tried to get a bond from several bonding agents but were refused.

"Whether or not we agree with the Nationalist Movement's statements or not, we do agree with their right to express (those views) and say them publicly," Aymond said.

'Willful and reckless conduct'
"I'm surprised that the town and the mayor have not dropped their objections (to the event) because the law is so clear, and the expense for the town and the mayor are potentially considerable," Aymond said.
In the past, the group has sought only court costs and attorney's fees, but in this case the Nationalists may seek additional relief in the form of punitive damages, Barrett said.

"When you are dealing with settled law, law in effect for over 15 years, that could be considered willful and reckless conduct by the town and the mayor," Barrett said, speaking of the town sticking to its ordinance.

Barrett has been down this road before and won, he said. He fought similar cases against Morris County, N.J., and York, Pa., and York currently is paying the organization about $100,000, Barrett said.

If the judge rules in Barrett's favor, the event will go on as planned, he said.

And if the ruling goes another way or is delayed with an appeal, the rally at the courthouse will go on without question, as the only issues in question are the bond required for the parade, the parade route itself and banning firearms, Barrett said.

Walter Dorroh, attorney for Jena Mayor Murphy McMillin and the town, declined to say much about the case pending the hearing.

"We're going to comply with the law," he said.
gssc
Jena will become Ground Zero for HATE!!!

Sharpton Leads Protest in Shooting Case
Barker Parents denounce Barrett!
The Real Nationalist Deal: Government sponsored terrorism!!-Barrett wants approval from the courts to bring firearms!!
Posted by Joseph LeSieur at 5:36 AM 1 comments
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Louisiana Statewide Civil Rights Conference & Forum:NE La. Symposium planned
Louisiana Statewide Civil Rights Conference & Forum
Bishop J L George
Founder
-------------
Khalid al-Sharif
special assisting liaison
one.louisianajustice@1lajustice.net

The Louisiana Statewide Civil Rights Conference & Forum met in October of 2007 at Bethel AME Church in Alexandria, Louisiana. This is a report of its findings as to the status of the civil rights apparatus in the state of Louisiana.
1.) - There is not a continuity of involvement from all areas of organized
entitites.

Solute: Advocacy Training.

2.) - The legal community is very slow in accepting certain prima fasci cases
involving the government of the state, where breeches of the law are
evident.

Solute: Self-supported Civil Law Suits filed by the victims of family
of person so victimized.

3.) - The appearances are such that, it may be that the judiciary, the prose-
cution & the defense are basicly colluded in the mass imprisonment of
all parties, across racial lines, and gender; but specifically so amongst
black males & black male youth categorically! A genocide is in place.

Solute: Civil Suits against known party(s). State Legislative hearings.

4.) - The federal government, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the State
Police of Louisiana, the Louisiana Supreme Court et al; have abandoned
the poor to fend for themselves in a untra-conservative, neocon eviron-
ment of fascist, nazi-ist white supremacist controlled society. Case
in point the McZeal-noose incident in Ruston, Louisiana; where the
government flipped the accusation against the victim-McZeal, in which
the FBI accused McZeal of planting the Noose in his locker himself. The
FBI agents in charge were out of Monroe. Mr. McZeal, along with his
mother & others turned himself in, in late November to be charged with
theft over 500 dollars: in which such, he was given at the early Novem-
ber interrogation the opportunity to confess, that he planted the noose
in his work locker himself.

Solute: Congressional Investigations

*WHO THEN NOW WOULD WANT TO TALK WITH FBI ABOUT ANY CONCERN OF A PERSON ABOUT HATE CRIMES, IF; YOU ARE A BLACK MALE!!

5.)- The Louisiana State Penal System is a serious problem that must be
addressed immediately. Inmates are being beaten, left to die in the
case of Lawrence Cole of Calcasieu parish;- in the case of Greg
"Lil Greg" Wilkins in North-central Louisiana was, now sick from
food poisoning that led to seizures. Lawrence Cole died of seizures,
that culminated
in an aneursym, that killed him! The incident occurred January 27th 2007,
in Calcasieu Parish Prison.
*Michael Jarvis Cobb remains in Angola State Penitentiary.

Solute: State Legislative Hearings in to the Penal System.

6.)- Lekeithen Shondell Harris of Glenmora represents the quintessential
problem with the so-called criminal justice system. In 2004 an attorney
"entered into an alledged stipulation with the prosecution in this case,
and the alledged stipulation apparently had the affect of waiving some
his rights, as provided for in the code of criminal procedure and/or the
criminal code itself, . . ..."
This deceitful act is in play all over the state of Louisiana. The
Louisiana Supreme Court, evidently is aware of it. The Office of
Disciplinary Counsel is the entity to curtail such actions.

This defect was in the Mychal Bell Case, in the 28th Judicial District
is possibly ongoing in the Michael Newton Jr., case of Coushatta and was
apparently practiced in the Michael Jarvis Cobb case of Pointe
Coupee's 18th Judicial District.

Solute:- Legislative Hearings pursued by the Louisiana Legislative
Black Caucus, Katrina Jackson - Executive Director; State
Legislator Juan LaFonta - Chairman
*A bill sponsored by a legislator in the Governor-elects upcoming
Special Session on Ethics.

7.)- Statewide will pursue a new cabinet level position enacted in to law, to
specificly handle Judicial Oversight from the Executive Branch. In parti-
cular, Ville Platte, Louisiana has received the purview of the US
Attorney. News accounts relate that, DoJ's CRS, will become involved.
1LaJustice is in Ville Platte, with the Laurence Wilson sentencing on
8 (eight) rapes for 35 years. A Pastor's son was shot in the face,
murdered; as the assailant pleaded down to 25 years. The Pastor's
sons murder is black on black. The 8 rape case in black on white and
decades old.

*The disparity is such that no one can deny the absolute. The Jena
situation continues with the arrest of juvenile Justin Purvis, the
boy who originally asked the question of sitting under the tree.
A 9 (nine) year old boy was brow beat, to the point of mentioning
Justin Purvis' name. There is a connect to the Jena Six
Travesty.

*This is the* December 30th final Draft of the findings of the Louisiana Statewide Civil Rights Conference & Forum - Bishop J L George Founder -&- Khalid al-Sharif special assisting liaison for global affairs & Deputy Adjutant of One Louisiana Justice.

------------------->Desperate determination------->

Queriza Lewis Convicted as Habitual Offender in Crack Case in the infamously unjust Louisiana Courts! In addition, threats have been made against his life in the notorious Angola State Penitentiary. Mr. Lewis's Mother & family are extremely aware of the disparities in the judicial process, as is the family of Michael Cobb of New Roads & the family of Michael Newton, Jr., of Coushatta. The Spears family of Bunkie, Louisiana are also aware of the desparities of the so-called, "Justice System". All of these individuals & families are held captive by a corrupt process.

-Determination-

CRACK VS. POWDER COCAINE ANALYZED:Disparity central
By DENISE LAVOIE, Associated Press Writer
Tue Dec 25, 2:33 AM ET

BOSTON - During some of the bloodiest years of the drug wars of the 1980s, crack was seen as far more dangerous than powdered cocaine, and that perception was written into the sentencing laws. But now that notion is under attack like never before.

Criminologists, doctors and other experts say the differences between the two forms of the drug were largely exaggerated and do not justify the way the law comes down 100 times harder on crack.

A push to shrink the disparity in punishments got a boost last month when reduced federal sentencing guidelines went into effect for crack offenses. Then, earlier this month, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets guidelines for federal cases, voted to make the reductions retroactive, allowing some 19,500 inmates, mostly black, to seek reductions in their crack sentences.

Many think the changes are long overdue.

Crack, because it is smoked and gets into the bloodstream faster than snorted cocaine, produces a more intense high and is generally considered more addictive than powdered cocaine.

But experts say that difference does not warrant the 100-to-1 disparity that was written into a 1986 law that set a mandatory minimum prison term of five years for trafficking in 5 grams of crack, or less than the amount in two packets of sugar. It would take 100 times as much cocaine to get the same sentence.

"There's no scientific justification to support the current laws," said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Many defense lawyers and civil rights advocates say the lopsided perception of crack versus cocaine is rooted in racism. Four out of every five crack defendants are black, while most powdered-cocaine defendants are white.

While powdered cocaine became the drug of choice for middle- and upper-income Americans in the 1970s, crack emerged in the early 1980s as a much cheaper version of the same drug.

In the mid-1980s, powdered cocaine was typically sold by the half-gram or gram for $50 to $100, while crack was sold as small rocks that cost as little as $5 to $10. Crack became popular in poor, largely minority urban areas, and it developed an image as a drug used mostly by violent, inner-city youths.

"You had politicians manipulating fear, and instead of being seen as a more direct mode of ingestion of a very old drug, it became a demonic new substance," said Craig Reinarman, a sociology and legal-studies professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who edited the 1997 book "Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice" about the rise of crack in the 1980s.

When crack first became popular, there was an increase in murders and other crimes associated with the drug. But the bloodshed was not necessarily the result of something inherent in crack.

Instead, most of that violence was typical for what happens when any illegal drug is introduced and drug dealers with guns compete for new markets, said Dr. Alfred Blumstein, a professor of urban systems and operations research at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Although there was already a great deal of concern about crack by 1986, the death of basketball star Len Bias in June of that year is seen as the pivotal event that spurred Congress to enact the much tougher sentences for crack offenses.

Bias was a star at the University of Maryland and had just been drafted by the Boston Celtics when he died. Initial news reports incorrectly said Bias died after using crack. It wasn't until months later that one of Bias' teammates testified that he had actually snorted cocaine the night be died.

By that time, the harsh penalties for crack crimes had already been passed by Congress, with a push from House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts, whose Celtic-fan constituents were up in arms about Bias' death.

"Len Bias' death symbolized just how terrible this drug was," said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice research and advocacy group based in Washington. "Here you had this promising young man on the verge of a very great basketball career and his life is taken away by the evils of crack cocaine."

The crack scare was also fueled by medical professionals who worried that pregnant women who used the drug would give birth to a generation of babies with severe neurological damage. But the "crack babies" theory has been largely debunked.

Dr. Harolyn Belcher, an associate professor of pediatrics at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, said there is no evidence that crack is biologically more harmful than powdered cocaine to the fetus or developing child.

"If I had a well-to-do family whose wife was at home snorting coke versus someone who is a mother who is out on the street using crack, the babies would look very similar," Belcher said.

Belcher said children who were exposed to crack or powdered cocaine in the uterus may be at slightly higher risks for language delays and attention deficits, but she said recent studies have shown that alcohol is far more devastating to the fetus.

John Steer, a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, said the commission first said in 1995 that the disparate punishments for crack and powdered cocaine defendants were not justified.

"The bottom-line conclusion is that for punishment purposes, they should be treated much more similarly than they are now. That's based upon the fact that in the real world, they are not as different overall as was initially thought," Steer said.

The reductions in the recommended sentences for crack offenses went into effect Nov. 1, but the guidelines do not affect the minimum mandatory sentences, which only Congress can change. House Judiciary pdf/file on the "state of the American Democratic Republic"ng/jl

;submitted on behalf of the AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION to the SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND CIVIL LIBERTIES COMMITTEE ON JUDICIARY of the U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES on the hearing on “OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE LEGACY OF THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE” DECEMBER 18, 2007Gulf South Systems, Louisiana Justice Foundation, One Louisiana Justice

-------------------
Iberia matter should be settled in court
June 27, 2008

The Rev. Raymond Brown, president of the New Orleans chapter of the National Action Network, again is injecting himself into a matter in Iberia Parish best left to the courts. Brown, who has been identified as a leading member of the New Black Panther Party, is speaking out in support of Rickey Paul, who was charged with accessory after the fact in the murder of New Iberia businessman Sydney Long Jr.

Brown has invited the Rev. Al Sharpton to make an appearance in New Iberia later this summer in support of Paul.

We have been disturbed by Brown's rhetoric in a previous case. In 2006, he condemned the use of C-S gas to disperse a crowd of black people after the New Iberia sugar cane festival. This is the statement he issued at that time:

"If he (Iberia Parish Sheriff Sid Hebert) fails to correct the wrong that he did and we hear of any more black people, or white people, being gassed, the Black Panther Party is coming here. I challenge these deputies. If you want a real confrontation, call the Black Panther Party. We know how to use weapons of warfare. You can call that inciting a riot all you want, but I know the definition of self-defense."

We do call that inciting a riot - an irresponsible effort to steer citizens away from the concept of America as a nation of laws and position it as a nation of men - of armed men.

The controversy over charges against Paul is even more inflammatory. If Sharpton accepts Brown's invitation, he will focus the national spotlight on New Iberia, and - if only by implication - will damage the community by painting it as racist.

Brown contends that Paul had nothing to do with the murder of Long. He was, according to Brown, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Police believe Paul helped Easton Francisco and Akeem Evans flee the area after they allegedly shot and killed Long in his Center Street store. The accuracy of the police claims must be judged by a jury of Paul's peers.

Brown contends that Long's daughter, Melissa Long, has made race an issue. "Because the deceased man was white, they have to turn this thing into a race issue. ... She's using race and saying I'm only out to create racial division in New Iberia, and that's not the truth."

Long says she has never made race an issue and does not plan to do so.

We are making no judgment in the case, nor should Brown. Hopefully, Sharpton will not inject himself into the matter, but will allow the legal system to work. We are content that an informed jury will issue a just verdict.
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Toon: Brown not with NAN
BY STEPHEN HEMELT
THE DAILY IBERIAN
Published/Last Modified on Thursday, June 26, 2008 2:15 PM CDT

National Action Network National Field Director the Rev. DeVes Toon said Wednesday the Rev. Raymond Brown is not affiliated with the National Action Network, and the Rev. Al Sharpton has no current plans to be in New Iberia this summer.

Brown has maintained in multiple Acadiana publications this week that he is affiliated with the National Action Network and that Sharpton would pass through New Iberia July 22 in response to charges filed against Rickey Paul, 20, of New Iberia.

Brown has been a vocal supporter of Paul, who is charged with accessory to first-degree murder in relation to the May 9 shooting death of New Iberia pawn and gun shop owner Sidney Long Jr. Brown was in New Iberia Monday when Paul’s arraignment was delayed because Paul did not have a lawyer present. Brown told The Daily Iberian Wednesday morning he was president of the National Action Network’s Louisiana chapter. However, Toon said later in the day that the National Action Network’s chapter leaders are clearly marked on the network’s Web site, www.nationalactionnetwork.net, which lists Louisiana as not having a chapter.

When asked about the irregularity later Wednesday, Brown said he was the New Orleans president and that Louisiana did not have a chapter. He said he was in the middle of an internal fight with Toon and that is why the national field director was discrediting him.

Brown went on to say the executive director of the National Action Network could confirm his standing with the civil rights organization. Brown could only say the man’s name was “Charlie” and he did not know a last name.

When contacted Wednesday afternoon, a woman who answered the phone at the National Action Network in Harlem, New York said Toon, as national field director, was the organization’s top voice for area chapter leaders.

Toon reiterated to The Dally Iberian in a second interview Wednesday that Brown was not affiliated with the organization, which is why his name is not located anywhere on its Web site. Toon dismissed Brown’s notion he was discrediting him because of a personal conflict.

“I am the national field director,” Toon said. “Did you see Raymond Brown mentioned on our Web site? No. That is the reason why you didn’t see it there.”

Wednesday’s revelations serve to discredit Brown, who has been in New Iberia several times this year, making speeches centered on Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office brutality and the poor treatment of Paul.

Paul was arrested early last month, along with 17-year-old Akeem Evans and 21-year-old Eaton Francisco, both of New Iberia. Evans and Francisco are charged with first-degree murder.

Evans faces additional charges of simple escape, simple criminal damage to property and unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after he briefly escaped custody for a few hours following his initial arrest. Evans and Francisco remain in custody without bond. Paul was released when he posted $10,000 bond.
-----------------

Civil-rights advocate may visit New Iberia
Sharpton asked to lend support to driver linked to killing
Amanda McElfresh • amcelfresh@theadvertiser.com • June 25, 2008

The Rev. Al Sharpton could make an appearance in New Iberia later this summer to lend support to one of three suspects charged in connection with the May murder of a popular pawn shop owner.

The Rev. Raymond Brown, president of the New Orleans chapter of the National Action Network, is already speaking out in support of 20-year-old Rickey Paul, who was charged with accessory after the fact to first-degree murder.

Police have accused Paul of helping Easton Francisco and Akeem Evans flee the area after the two allegedly shot and killed Sidney Long Jr. in his Center Street store. He was released last month on a $10,000 bond, outraging Long's family.

Brown was in New Iberia on Monday to support Paul during his first court appearance. According to published reports, Paul did not have an attorney with him and the hearing was postponed until July 22.

Brown said he believes Paul was simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Mr. Paul didn't do anything wrong at all. I don't really think he knew about the crime until the police asked him about it," he said. "He had nothing to do with it."

Brown said that Long's daughter, Melissa Long, has made race an issue in the case, but said he is simply standing up for a young man's rights.

"Because the deceased man was white, they have to turn this thing into a race issue. They're saying that if it was a white guy who had killed a black man, I wouldn't be here," Brown said. "That's not the truth. She's using race and saying I'm only out to create racial division in New Iberia, and that's not the truth."

But Long said she has never made race an issue in the case and does not plan to do so.

"This is not about race. I have never made a racial statement in regard to who murdered my father," Long said. "I'll stick to my original statement that the shooter and the driver had every opportunity to get jobs, earn a living and pay for what they wanted. Instead, they chose murder. There's nothing racist about this."

Brown said Sharpton is scheduled to attend the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in New Orleans in late July, and he is working on having Sharpton visit New Iberia around that time.

"We're working on it," Brown said. "As his chapter president, I would ask him to visit New Iberia. There's nothing finalized, but I don't think he would have a problem with it. We'll have to see."

Despite the matter, New Iberia Mayor Hilda Curry said she isn't worried about racial tensions brewing in the community. Many people of all races have spoken to her about the crime rate in the community in recent months, and several black community members have arranged for public prayer services beginning Thursday.

"These are going to be nondenominational services, just to try to bring the community together as a whole to pray for safety in our community," Curry said. "It's a community that's concerned. It's not black or white."
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Sharpton Is Cool Despite the Heat