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Reclaiming Abortion |
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Sunday, 14 June 2015 08:16 |
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Filipovic writes: "In this new moment in history, 'abortion' is back. The coded language of the older guard is giving way to frank talk from a younger generation of activists, who cut their teeth in LGBT work and online feminist spaces."
(illustration: iStockphoto images/WP)
Reclaiming Abortion
By Jill Filipovic, The Washington Post
14 June 15
 n 2013, Lucy Flores, then 33, told a remarkable story to her colleagues in the Nevada legislature. As one of 13 children born into an impoverished Hispanic family, she had joined a gang, gone to juvenile detention and dropped out of high school. “At 16, I got an abortion,” she told lawmakers. “I don’t regret it.”
When Flores ran for lieutenant governor the next year, what captured the attention of Nevada voters — and the national media — wasn’t that she had transformed herself from a teenage gang member into a law student who won her first election to the state assembly just after graduating. It was that she spoke openly and remorselessly about one of the most controversial acts in American social life. She didn’t sprint away from the topic, as generations of politicians have done.
Even more surprisingly, pro-choice and Democratic electoral groups cheered Flores instead of advising her to keep quiet. She faced a brutal antiabortion backlash — she received death threats and lost the lieutenant governor’s race by 26 points — but she did so with enthusiastic endorsements from Emily’s List, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Harry Reid, who was then majority leader in the U.S. Senate.
That’s a turnaround from a decade ago, when elected officials and even abortion rights groups shunned the word “abortion” in favor of euphemisms such as “pro-choice” that they thought might earn broader voter support. Even popular culture seemed squeamish. The 2007 teen-pregnancy film “Juno” depicted just a few slightly traumatic minutes at a clinic, and “Knocked Up,” released the same year, tried so hard to avoid using the A-word that it subbed in “shmashmortion.” Both Barack Obama and John McCain evaded the issue in their 2008 presidential campaigns. And in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, the National Abortion Rights Action League, one of the largest reproductive rights advocacy groups in the country, changed its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America, stripping out “abortion” altogether. Its then-president, Kate Michelman, told the New York Times, “It is the right name for this moment in history.”
But in this new moment in history, “abortion” is back. The coded language of the older guard is giving way to frank talk from a younger generation of activists, who cut their teeth in LGBT work and online feminist spaces. Advocating “choice” didn’t stop the recent wave of losses for reproductive rights. Today, activists are realizing that the only way to erase the stigma is to talk about it.
Since the tea party sweep in the 2010 midterm elections, abortion rights have been rolled back aggressively. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, more abortion restrictions were passed in the three years after the 2010 midterms than in the previous decade, and almost entirely at the state level. “What we’re experiencing right now is the peak of a 40-year plan on the part of the anti-choice movement to get what they want,” NARAL President Ilyse Hogue says. “I think that has caused a reckoning within organizations and the movement to say, we can suffer death by a thousand cuts, or we can actually create our own long-term plan.”
Younger activists are shaping the dialogue, taking cues from the Internet, where conversational norms reward unabashed honesty about the female experience — sometimes to maximal shock value — whether with a dozen “this is so brave” retweets or a byline in the “It Happened to Me” section of XO Jane. To them, excising the word “abortion” from abortion rights work makes little sense. “I am very deliberate about using the word ‘abortion’ versus saying I am pro-choice,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, a 29-year-old NARAL board member who has written a guide to abortion story-sharing . “I didn’t have a pro-choice. I had an abortion.”
That intentional rhetorical shift has left the confines of movement boardrooms. In the 2014 midterms, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) put abortion rights at the center of his unsuccessful reelection bid, using his first campaign ad to criticize his opponent’s “history [of] promoting harsh anti-abortion laws” and dedicating close to half his ads to women’s issues — his emphasis on reproductive rights earned him the nickname “Mark Uterus.” In January, President Obama used the word “abortion” in one of his State of the Union addresses for the first time. A Planned Parenthood video from 2013, titled “Moving Beyond Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Labels,” rejects the “pro-choice” moniker that the abortion rights movement has used for decades, while its narrator says the word “abortion” six times in less than two minutes.
Advocates and politicians are also putting a human face on the procedure: Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards wrote about her abortion for Elle magazine; Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis (D) told her abortion story in her memoir; clinic counselor Emily Letts filmed her own procedure. Organizations that encourage abortion story-sharing, including Exhale, Advocates for Youth and the Sea Change Program, have created platforms and guides for women who want to speak out. So many women told their abortion stories in 2014 that several journalists and commentators deemed it “the year of the abortion story.”
The shift is not just political; it’s cultural, too. Instead of “smashmortion,” moviegoers in 2014 got “Obvious Child,” a romantic comedy with an honest and decidedly un-tragic portrayal of abortion at the heart of the plot. In 2013, New York magazine featured 26 women’s abortion stories. A year later, Elle had a multimedia “abortion issue.” And while sitcoms are notorious for dealing with characters’ unintended pregnancies with convenient miscarriages, the new CW show “Jane the Virgin” included a frank discussion about abortion as an option for Jane’s pregnancy. Today, the percentage of Americans who say they’re pro-choice is at a seven-year high.
Activists now have a new set of digital tools at their disposal. “Stories that would never get into the New York Times or The Washington Post really came alive through social media, and then were forced onto the front pages of those more mainstream publications,” says Planned Parenthood’s Richards.
The wedding column in the Times, for example, mentioned a couple’s abortion and how it strengthened their relationship . Author Merritt Tierce told her own thoroughly normal story of having two abortions for the Times’ op-ed pages, writing that “the most common abortion is a five-to-15-minute procedure elected early in the first trimester by someone who doesn’t want to be pregnant or have a child.” And Bracey Sherman told her abortion story on video for Fusion’s digital memoir project called #nofilter. Having an abortion at 19, she said, “was the best decision of my life.”
While advocacy organizations have long used the horrors of dangerous pre-Roe abortions and particularly tragic stories of rape or severe fetal abnormalities to illustrate the need for abortion rights, younger women are pushing back on what they call the narrative of “the good abortion.” Instead, they’re talking about the whole range of their experiences, including the nearly 90 percent of elective abortions that occur during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Most women who terminate pregnancies aren’t facing life-threatening tragedies but rather more mundane ones: The most common reasons women give include not being financially ready, poor timing for a baby, issues with a partner and the need to care for the children they already have. Activists say playing down that reality — and the importance of abortion services for all women — contributes to the stigma that keeps abortion shameful and politically contentious.
The question of how much space to give abortion in the broader context of other reproductive-health issues, not to mention the many other issues women face in their lives, remains a tough one for the pro-choice movement. The same activists pushing for the word “abortion” are part of the most diverse cohort of young adults in American history, and they came up as activists at a time when “intersectionality” — the idea that different forms of oppression and discrimination overlap — gained currency in the feminist movement. At the same time, women of color were pushing the concept of reproductive justice, which Monica Simpson, the executive director of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, defines as “the human right of every individual to have a child, to not have a child, to parent the children they have in healthy and sustainable environments, and the human right to bodily autonomy.”
With America becoming more racially diverse, Simpson says more traditional pro-choice organizations are realizing that they need to appeal to a wider demographic in order to survive. And the model pioneered by reproductive-justice groups — talk about abortion honestly, contextualize it as one piece of women’s lives, focus on the most vulnerable — is one that mainstream reproductive rights and health groups increasingly seem to employ.
“We are very focused on making sure that abortion access is central to a spectrum of rights that make up the definition of reproductive freedom,” NARAL’s Hogue says. “What does a policy package look like that matches our own lives, and doesn’t put abortion over here as a social issue and economic equality over here? Because that’s not the way real people experience it. We have a generation of women who have every expectation that they’ll be in the workforce their entire reproductive lifetimes, and we need a story and a policy agenda that talks about that, with abortion and the ability to control what happens to your own body and therefore your own life at the center of it.”
No “shmashmortion” necessary.
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US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine |
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Saturday, 13 June 2015 14:06 |
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Parry writes: "The U.S. House of Representatives has admitted an ugly truth that the U.S. mainstream media has tried to hide from the American people - that the post-coup regime in Ukraine has relied heavily on Nazi storm troopers to carry out its bloody war against ethnic Russians."
Paramilitary troops in Ukraine holding Neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf's Hook) symbol banner. (photo: BBC)
US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
13 June 15
The U.S. House of Representatives has admitted an ugly truth that the U.S. mainstream media has tried to hide from the American people – that the post-coup regime in Ukraine has relied heavily on Nazi storm troopers to carry out its bloody war against ethnic Russians, reports Robert Parry.
 ast February, when ethnic Russian rebels were closing in on the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, the New York Times rhapsodically described the heroes defending the city and indeed Western civilization – the courageous Azov battalion facing down barbarians at the gate. What the Times didn't tell its readers was that these "heroes" were Nazis, some of them even wearing Swastikas and SS symbols.
The long Times article by Rick Lyman fit with the sorry performance of America's "paper of record" as it has descended into outright propaganda – hiding the dark side of the post-coup regime in Kiev. But what makes Lyman's sadly typical story noteworthy today is that the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has just voted unanimously to bar U.S. assistance going to the Azov battalion because of its Nazi ties.
When even the hawkish House of Representatives can't stomach these Nazi storm troopers who have served as Kiev's tip of the spear against the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine, what does that say about the honesty and integrity of the New York Times when it finds these same Nazis so admirable?
And it wasn't like the Times didn't have space to mention the Nazi taint. The article provided much color and detail – quoting an Azov leader prominently – but just couldn't find room to mention the inconvenient truth about how these Nazis had played a key role in the ongoing civil war on the U.S. side. The Times simply referred to Azov as a "volunteer unit."
Yet, on June 10, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bipartisan amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act – from Reps. John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan, and Ted Yoho, R-Florida – that would block U.S. training of the Azov battalion and would prevent transfer of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to fighters in Iraq and Ukraine.
"I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions," said Conyers on Thursday.
He described Ukraine's Azov Battalion as a 1,000-man volunteer militia of the Ukrainian National Guard that Foreign Policy Magazine has characterized as "openly neo-Nazi" and "fascist." And Azov is not some obscure force. Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who oversees Ukraine's armed militias, announced that Azov troops would be among the first units to be trained by the 300 U.S. military advisers who have been dispatched to Ukraine in a training mission codenamed "Fearless Guardian."
White Supremacy On Friday, a Bloomberg News article by Leonid Bershidsky noted that "it's easy to see why" Conyers "would have a problem with the military unit commanded by Ukrainian legislator Andriy Biletsky: Conyers is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Biletsky is a white supremacist. …
"Biletsky had run Patriot of Ukraine [the precursor of the Azov battalion] since 2005. In a 2010 interview he described the organization as nationalist 'storm troops' … The group's ideology was 'social nationalism' — a term Biletsky, a historian, knew would deceive no one. …
"In 2007, Biletsky railed against a government decision to introduce fines for racist remarks: 'So why the "Negro-love" on a legislative level? They want to break everyone who has risen to defend themselves, their family, their right to be masters of their own land! They want to destroy the Nation's biological resistance to everything alien and do to us what happened to Old Europe, where the immigrant hordes are a nightmare for the French, Germans and Belgians, where cities are "blackening" fast and crime and the drug trade are invading even the remotest corners.'"
The Bloomberg article continued, "Biletsky landed in prison in 2011, after his organization took part in a series of shootouts and fights. Following Ukraine's so-called revolution of dignity last year, he was freed as a political prisoner; right-wing organizations, with their paramilitary training, played an important part in the violent phase of the uprising against former President Viktor Yanukovych. The new authorities — which included the ultra-nationalist party Svoboda — wanted to show their gratitude.
"The war in the east gave Biletsky's storm troopers a chance at a higher status than they could ever have hoped to achieve. They fought fiercely, and last fall, the 400-strong Azov Battalion became part of the National Guard, receiving permission to expand to 2,000 fighters and gaining access to heavy weaponry. So what if some of its members had Nazi symbols tattooed on their bodies and the unit's banner bore the Wolfsangel, used widely by the Nazis during World War II?
"In an interview with Ukraine's Focus magazine last September, Avakov, responsible for the National Guard, was protective of his heroes. He said of the Wolfsangel: 'In many European cities it is part of the city emblem. Yes, most of the guys who assembled in Azov have a particular worldview. But who told you you could judge them? Don't forget what the Azov Battalion did for the country. Remember the liberation of Mariupol, the fighting at Ilovaysk, the latest attacks near the Sea of Azov. May God allow anyone who criticizes them to do 10 percent of what they've done. And anyone who's going to tell me that these guys preach Nazi views, wear the swastika and so on, are bare-faced liars and fools.'"
Though the House vote on June 10 may have shined a spotlight into this dark corner of the U.S.-embraced Kiev regime, the reality has been well-known for many months – though played down in most of the Western news media, often dismissed as "Russian propaganda."
Even the Times has included at least one brief reference to this reality, though buried deep inside an article. On Aug. 10, 2014, a Times' article mentioned the Nazi taint of the Azov battalion in the last three paragraphs of a lengthy story on another topic.
"The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat," the Times reported.
"Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag." [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Discovers Ukraine's Neo-Nazis at War."]
A Shiver Down the Spine
The conservative London Telegraph offered more details about the Azov battalion in an article by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: "Kiev's use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk 'people's republics'… should send a shiver down Europe's spine.
"Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf's Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites."
Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the reality of the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
Biletsky, the Azov commander, "is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly," according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: "The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen."
In other words, for the first time since World War II, a government had dispatched Nazi storm troopers to attack a European population – and officials in Kiev knew what they were doing. The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Ignoring Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers."] But a rebel counteroffensive led by ethnic Russians last August reversed many of Kiev's gains and drove the Azov and other government forces back to the port city of Mariupol, where Foreign Policy's reporter Alec Luhn also encountered the Nazis. He wrote:
"Blue and yellow Ukrainian flags fly over Mariupol's burned-out city administration building and at military checkpoints around the city, but at a sport school near a huge metallurgical plant, another symbol is just as prominent: the wolfsangel ('wolf trap') symbol that was widely used in the Third Reich and has been adopted by neo-Nazi groups. …
"Pro-Russian forces have said they are fighting against Ukrainian nationalists and 'fascists' in the conflict, and in the case of Azov and other battalions, these claims are essentially true."
SS Helmets
More evidence continued to emerge about the presence of Nazis in the ranks of Ukrainian government fighters. Germans were shocked to see video of Azov militia soldiers decorating their gear with the Swastika and the "SS rune." NBC News reported: "Germans were confronted with images of their country's dark past … when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.
"The video was shot … in Ukraine by a camera team from Norwegian broadcaster TV2. 'We were filming a report about Ukraine's AZOV battalion in the eastern city of Urzuf, when we came across these soldiers,' Oysten Bogen, a correspondent for the private television station, told NBC News. "Minutes before the images were taped, Bogen said he had asked a spokesperson whether the battalion had fascist tendencies. 'The reply was: absolutely not, we are just Ukrainian nationalists,' Bogen said."
Despite the newsworthiness of a U.S.-backed government dispatching Nazi storm troopers to attack Ukrainian cities, the major U.S. news outlets have gone to extraordinary lengths to excuse this behavior, with the Washington Post publishing a rationalization that Azov's use of the Swastika was merely "romantic."
This curious description of the symbol most associated with the depravity of the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II can be found in the last three paragraphs of a Post lead story published in September 2014. Post correspondent Anthony Faiola portrayed the Azov fighters as "battle-scarred patriots" nobly resisting "Russian aggression" and willing to resort to "guerrilla war" if necessary.
The article found nothing objectionable about Azov's plans for "sabotage, targeted assassinations and other insurgent tactics" against Russians, although such actions in other contexts are regarded as terrorism. The extremists even extended their threats to the government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko if he agrees to a peace deal with the ethnic Russian east that is not to the militia's liking.
"If Kiev reaches a deal with rebels that they don't support, paramilitary fighters say they could potentially strike pro-Russian targets on their own — or even turn on the government itself," the article stated.
The Post article – like almost all of its coverage of Ukraine – was laudatory about the Kiev forces fighting ethnic Russians in the east, but the newspaper did have to do some quick thinking to explain a photograph of a Swastika gracing an Azov brigade barracks. So, in the last three paragraphs of the story, Faiola reported: "One platoon leader, who called himself Kirt, conceded that the group's far right views had attracted about two dozen foreign fighters from around Europe.
"In one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But Kirt … dismissed questions of ideology, saying that the volunteers — many of them still teenagers — embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of 'romantic' idea."
Despite these well-documented facts, the New York Times excised this reality from its article about the Azov battalion's defense of Mariupol last February. But isn't the role of Nazis newsworthy? In other contexts, the Times is quick to note and condemn any sign of a Nazi resurgence in Europe. However, in Ukraine, where neo-Nazis, such as Andriy Parubiy served as the coup regime's first national security chief and Nazi militias are at the center of regime's military operations, the Times goes silent on the subject.
Rather than fully inform its readers about a crisis that has the potential of becoming a nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia, the Times has chosen to simply be a fount of State Department propaganda, often terming any reference to Kiev's Nazi storm troopers to be "Russian propaganda." Now, however, a unanimous U.S. House of Representatives — of all things — has acknowledged the unpleasant truth.
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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
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I Applaud the Vote That Killed TPP Fast Track |
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Saturday, 13 June 2015 14:05 |
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Sanders writes: "I applaud the House of Representatives for the vote today. While the fight will no doubt continue, today's vote is a victory for America's working people and for the environment. It is clearly a defeat for corporate America, which has outsourced millions of decent-paying jobs and wants to continue doing just that."
Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: berniesanders.com)
I Applaud the Vote That Killed TPP Fast Track
By Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders' Website
13 June 15
 en. Bernie Sanders issued the following statement after the House scuttled a trade bill on Friday:
"As one of the Senate leaders in the fight against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, I applaud the House of Representatives for the vote today. While the fight will no doubt continue, today's vote is a victory for America's working people and for the environment. The trade deal pushed by corporate America and Wall Street is the continuation of disastrous trade policies which have cost us millions of decent-paying jobs as large corporations shut down in this country and move to low-wage countries abroad. We need a new approach to trade, an approach which benefits the working families of our country, and not just the CEOs of multi-national corporations. The House vote is an important step in the right direction."
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FOCUS: "Justice" System Abuses Young Man Until He Lynches Himself |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 13 June 2015 11:31 |
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Boardman writes: "Officially, Kalief Browder committed suicide when he hanged himself with an air conditioner power cord on June 6. Actually Kalief Browder's death at age 22 is a state killing with uncounted accomplices among police officers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, prison officials, legislators, mayors, governors, and all the rest of the state justice apparatus that was utterly incapable of providing anything close to decent, just procedures in dealing with a wrongly-accused, innocent, 16-year-old black man."
Kalief Browder. (photo: ABC)
“Justice” System Abuses Young Man Until He Lynches Himself
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
13 June 15
Deniers call it “tragedy,” but it’s crime upon crime upon crime
 fficially, Kalief Browder committed suicide when he hanged himself with an air conditioner power cord on June 6. Actually Kalief Browder’s death at age 22 is a state killing with uncounted accomplices among police officers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, prison officials, legislators, mayors, governors, and all the rest of the state justice apparatus that was utterly incapable of providing anything close to decent, just procedures in dealing with a wrongly-accused, innocent, 16-year-old black man.
Anyone who pays the slightest attention soon learns that the “justice system” is an oxymoron. It is a system that colludes with the rich, powerful, and guilty as they loot the country with impunity. It is a system with its own institutional impunity that brutalizes the poor, powerless, and sometimes innocent with a cruel and careless indifference that leaves its participants mostly dehumanized and often dead – either on the street with the limited due process of a police shooting, or at home by suicide after experiencing the full effects of the corrections process. All this has been true for decades.
Metaphorically, Kalief Browder was one more victim of the way American justice has become more and more the mirror of Guantanamo, a legal black hole where mere captivity is sufficient evidence of guilt and actual innocence is irrelevant.
Some call Kalief Browder’s suicide a tragedy. It’s not. It’s the logical if not inevitable result of the deliberately cruel punishments of a deranged culture of “law-and-order.” Kalief Browder’s death is the result of a chain of official crimes for which none of the official perpetrators are likely ever to face any day of reckoning.
Commissioner says ugly history has no part in “reform” process
The commissioner of New York City’s Department of Corrections, Joseph Ponte, is just one of hundreds of office-holding perps who have contributed to the creation of a criminal “criminal justice system,” and he is mentioned here only out of sheer bad luck because he’s current. On June 9, at a meeting where proposed official reforms were postponed after objections from reformers, Ponte defended official delay in an odd way. These reforms were aimed at the horrendous New York prison, Rikers Island, which is likely to be scapegoated (quite justly) to take the heat off the rest of the system (quite unjustly). Rikers is the epicenter of the state’s systematic five years of torture of the innocent Kalief Browder.
“As tragic as that death is, it did not play any part in this process,” Ponte said at a news conference, revealing perhaps more than he realized. He calls the death “tragic,” as if it happened by an act of the gods, without context. Calling it “tragic” is a useful distancing tactic for a commissioner of a homicidal Department of Corrections. But to say out loud (publicly!) that three recent years of well-known, documented, incontrovertible, systemic brutality played no part in the process of reforming the criminal system – that suggests a level of denial and fecklessness that can only perpetuate conditions that should never have been allowed to come into existence in the first place.
Five years of state torture worked like a death penalty – for no crime
The state’s obliteration of Kalief Browder’s person had begun even before May 15, 2010, when it took on Kafkaesque aspects: he was falsely accused of stealing a backpack, arrested on a flimsy complaint, charged on inadequate evidence, and sent to Rikers to await a trial that would never take place. He would spend almost three years in brutal conditions in the juvenile section of Rikers, where 50 young men slept in one large dormitory room. For two thirds of that time he was in solitary confinement. The longer he maintained his innocence, the longer the state punished him. Prison surveillance video shows other prisoners beating him on one occasion. In a video two years later, a guard beats him while he is handcuffed. After prosecutors finally faced reality in the 31st court hearing in the case on May 29, 2013, the state withdrew the charge, the court dismissed the case, and Kalief Browder was free to recover from intolerable injustice on his own, without support or recompense from his persecutors.
The only reason Kalief Browder ended up in Rikers was the result of a prior arrest during which he had failed to maintain his innocence. A few months before his 2010 arrest for alleged backpack-stealing, Kalief Browder had pleaded guilty to being part of taking a delivery van for a joyride that ended in hitting a parked car (he was not the driver). The judge sentenced him to probation and “youthful offender” status, something of a legal fiction that was supposed to mean he would have no criminal record. It didn’t work out quite that way
In May 2010, another judge used Kalief Browder’s probation as the basis for sending him to Rikers and setting his bail at $3,000, more than his family could afford. Kalief Browder was the youngest of seven siblings (five adopted, including him) in a household where his mother also took in foster children, raising 34 children in all. Unable to make bail, unable to afford a lawyer, Kalief Browder was assigned an over-committed, solo-practice, court-appointed attorney who worked in Westchester County as well as the Bronx and who apparently never managed to meet his client face-to-face.
No one working for the state did his job, and some acted criminally
The court-appointed lawyer’s failure to get his client released, when that’s all his client was asking for, is despicable. It’s also a common result in a system that makes no serious effort to assure the accused of any reasonable hope of seeing his constitutional rights enforced. Kalief Browder’s court-appointed attorney certainly failed to get the state to honor his client’s Fifth Amendment right to due process of law, or his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy and public jury trial, or his Eighth Amendment protection against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment.
But the court-appointed attorney’s failing pales in comparison to that of the state actors at every level, state actors whose responsibilities include, first and foremost, upholding the Constitution without anyone having to nag them to do it. For almost everyone in the system involved in this case, the Constitution was not just ignored, it was treated as a joke and an irrelevancy. At the lowest levels, that’s a clear reflection of what higher officials want and expect:
- The arresting officers failed to establish probable cause, basing their arrest on the changing story of an unreliable accuser who eventually went back to Mexico;
- The initial judge and all the judges till the last simply failed to be judges, failed to look at the case and see it for the unsustainable accusation that it was, failed to give any consideration to the defendant’s adamant insistence on his innocence; only Judge Patricia DiMango treated the case rationally and humanely, finally releasing Kalief Browder a week earlier than she had to after the state had held him 33 months;
- The prison guards either committed crimes like assault or tolerated the guards who assaulted prisoners;
- Prison officials haven’t cared for years that prisoners in their care are routinely destroyed;
- Mayors and governors have chosen to pretend not to know that the system was broken and breaking everyone in it, because these people have no constituency and running a constitutional government is hard work that requires integrity;
- And legislators have spent dishonest decades posturing as “tough on crime” when what they were really up to was tantamount to institutionalizing torture and vitiating the constitution.
Kalief Browder’s case illuminates all these failings, and there is talk of “reform,” but the talk is thin and the reform is limited, mostly aimed at Rikers, which desperately needs reform. But police reform, judicial reform, political reform – all are national problems, all are required by a constitutional government, all seem likely to go begging in the long, dark night of American decline.
Outside the justice system, Kalief Browder got some help
Although his family was supportive throughout, they were over-matched against the state. And when Kalief Browder was released, and came to live at home again for the first time since he was sixteen, his room was too much like a cell and his life a constant struggle to catch up with all the state had taken from him.
A relative called Paul V. Prestia, an attorney with a history of fighting hard cases and sometimes winning them. After hearing Kalief Browder’s story, Prestia was appalled, especially by the casual incompetence of uncaring prosecutors. He filed a suit in early 2014 seeking damages from the N.Y. Police Dept., the Bronx District Attorney, and the Department of Corrections. Presumably the lawsuit will continue on behalf of Kalief Browder’s estate.
While there were scattered, largely sympathetic media stories about Kalief Browder’s experience and lawsuit, New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman provided the first comprehensive, detailed reporting of his life in October 2014 (and a principle source for this article). Gonnerman said she first heard about Kalief Browder through news coverage of Paul Prestia’s lawsuit:
… it got a tiny bit of attention here in New York City, and at first I thought maybe there wasn’t a need to write anything more. But then when I actually read the lawsuit and realized some of the specifics of what [Browder] had endured, I realized there was a much larger story and that’s when I started digging into it….
Gonnerman’s 7000-word piece is subtitled: “A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.” This New Yorker-esqueunderstatement rather minimizes the official outrages visited on Kalief Browder, but The New Yorker doesn’t docri de coeur. All the same, its quietly methodical, devastatingly detailed style takes the reader deep into systemic injustice that cries out for radical change and meaningful, official accountability. As Gonnerman quotes Attorney Prestia:
Kalief was deprived of his right to a fair and speedy trial, his education, and, I would even argue, his entire adolescence…. If you took a sixteen-year-old kid and locked him in a room for twenty-three hours, your son or daughter, you’d be arrested for endangering the welfare of a child.
None of the dozens of people whose behavior contributed to the death of Kalief Browder are likely ever to be arrested for their criminal acts or negligence. Kalief Browder was subjected to criminally negligent and criminally abusive treatment by every level of the “justice” system, from cops to prosecutors to defense attorneys to judges to guards to prison administrators to mayors to governors and most culpable of all, legislators who “save” money by taking people’s lives.
Obama deploys one of our most treasured cultural lies: “equality”
The same day Kalief Browder ended his tortured life, there was something of a state funeral for the late son of Vice President Joe Biden – Beau Biden, who died last week of brain cancer at the age of 46. Beau Biden’s death is as sad as any, but he also lived a life of privilege beyond the reach of anyone like Kalief Browder. Nevertheless, President Obama said, in his eulogy for Beau Biden: “He learned that he was no higher than anybody else, and no lower than anybody else.”
In saying that, the president embraced one of the profound cultural lies that the privileged chronically ask the rest of us to believe. We are conditioned to be polite and not call out its absolute dishonesty in masking the injustice that is the highest privilege of the privileged. The reality is that some are born “higher” than most people and enjoy that undeserved advantage regardless of how well or poorly they live their lives.
By all accounts, Beau Biden lived an honorable and decent life. At the same time, he was undoubtedly always “higher” than Kalief Browder. He was always immune from even the possibility of spending three brutal years in Rikers on a flimsy charge just because he couldn’t make bail.
By contrast, the life of the younger brother, Hunter Biden, illustrates how being higher than others matters. Hunter Biden’s cocaine use led to his resignation from the Navy reserve, not the jail time the Kalief Browders of the world could expect for the same behavior. And it’s all but unimaginable that a Kalief Browder would be cut in on the imperial looting of Ukraine by getting a seat, like Hunter Biden, on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Both Biden brothers enjoyed lives much higher than Kalief Browder’s, about whom President Obama has yet to say a mumbling word. That very reality – rather pleasant for the Bidens, very harsh on those who are lower – that reality is where systemic corruption starts to take its relentless toll on the lives of the unprivileged.
Kalief Browder’s last entanglement with the law began April 20, when he and his brother were involved in a fight with some neighbors over an alleged mugging. Police arrested Kalief Browder and his brother, held them overnight, and released them the next day on their own recognizance, with no bail. Attorney Prestia called the charges – failing to move along, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest – “baseless…. They will never prove this case, they’ll never try this case, they’ll never win this case.”
The first court hearing in this new case took place June 10. By then Kalief Browder had hanged himself. Nevertheless the prosecutors refused to dismiss the charges without a death certificate, and the judge went along.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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echnology has always been instrumental to movements for social and political change, but recently, it’s been getting too much credit for the success of those movements.
