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Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Down on Murder Charges |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33125"><span class="small">Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept</span></a>
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Thursday, 23 October 2014 12:37 |
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Scahill writes: "A federal jury in Washington, D.C., returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007."
(photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
ALSO SEE: Blackwater Guilty Verdict Long Overdue
Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Down on Murder Charges
By Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept
23 October 14
 federal jury in Washington, D.C., returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007.
The jury found one guard, Nicholas Slatten, guilty of first-degree murder, while three other guards were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter: Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard. The jury is still deliberating on additional charges against the operatives, who faced a combined 33 counts, according to the Associated Press. A fifth Blackwater guard, Jeremy Ridgeway, had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and cooperated with prosecutors in the case against his former colleagues. The trial lasted ten weeks and the jury has been in deliberations for 28 days.
The incident for which the men were tried was the single largest known massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of private U.S. security contractors. Known as “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday,” operatives from Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians at a crowded intersection at Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. The company, founded by secretive right-wing Christian supremacist Erik Prince, pictured above, had deep ties to the Bush Administration and served as a sort of neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
While Barack Obama pledged to reign in mercenary forces when he was a senator, once he became president he continued to employ a massive shadow army of private contractors. Blackwater — despite numerous scandals, congressional investigations, FBI probes and documented killings of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan — remained a central part of the Obama administration’s global war machine throughout his first term in office.
Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries. Prince now has a new company, Frontier Services Group, which he founded with substantial investment from Chinese enterprises and which focuses on opportunities in Africa. Prince recently suggested that his forces at Blackwater could have confronted Ebola and ISIS. “If the administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job,” he wrote.
None of the U.S. officials from the Bush and Obama administrations who unleashed Blackwater and other mercenary forces across the globe are being forced to answer for their role in creating the conditions for the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly incidents involving private contractors. Just as the main architect of the CIA interrogation program, Jose Rodriguez, is on a book tour for his propagandistic love letter to torture, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, so too is Erik Prince pushing his own revisionist memoir, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror.
While the Blackwater verdict is an important and rare moment of accountability in an overwhelmingly unaccountable private war industry, it does not erase the fact that those in power—the CEOs, the senior officials, the war profiteers—walk freely and will likely do so for the rest of their lives.
What is so seldom discussed in public discourse on the use of mercenaries are the stories of their victims. After the Nisour Square massacre, I met with Mohammed Kinani, whose 9-year-old son, Ali, was the youngest person killed by Blackwater operatives that day. As he and his family approached the square in their car:
“[T]hey saw one armored vehicle and then another, with men brandishing machine guns atop each one,” Mohammed recalls. The armored cars swiftly blocked off traffic. One of the gunners held both fists in the air, which Mohammed took as a gesture to stop. “Myself and all the cars before and behind me stopped,” Mohammed says. “We followed their orders. I thought they were some sort of unit belonging to the American military, or maybe just a military police unit. Any authority giving you an order to stop, you follow the order.” It turns out the men in the armored cars were neither U.S. military nor MPs. They were members of a Blackwater team code-named Raven 23.
As the family waited in traffic, two more Blackwater vehicles became visible. Mohammed noticed a family in a car next to his—a man, woman and child. The man was staring at Mohammed’s car, and Mohammed thought the man was eyeing Jenan. “I thought he was checking my sister out,” Mohammed remembers. “So I yelled at him and said, ‘What are you looking at?’” Mohammed noticed that the man looked frightened. “I think they shot the driver in the car in front of you,” the man told him.
Mohammed scanned the area and noticed that the back windshield of the white Kia sedan in front of him was shattered. The man in the car next to Mohammed began to panic and tried to turn his car around. He ended up bumping into a taxi, and an argument ensued. The taxi driver exited his car and began yelling. Mohammed tried to break up the argument, telling the taxi driver that a man had been shot and that he should back up so the other car could exit. The taxi driver refused and got back into his vehicle.
At that point, an Iraqi police officer, Ali Khalaf Salman, approached the Kia sedan, and it started to slowly drift. The driver had been shot, and the car was gliding in neutral toward a Blackwater armored car. Salman, in an interview, described how he tried to stop it by pushing backward. He saw a panicked woman inside the car; she was clutching a young man covered in blood who had been shot in the head. She was shrieking, “My son! My son! Help me, help me!” Salman remembered looking toward the Blackwater shooters. “I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting.” He said he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.
“As the officer was waving, the men on the armored cars started shooting at that car,” Mohammed says. “And it wasn’t warning shots; they were shooting as in a battle. It was as though they were in a fighting field. I thought the police officer was killed. It was insane.” Officer Salman managed to dive out of the way as the bullets rained down. “I saw parts of the woman’s head flying in front of me,” recalled his colleague, Officer Sarhan Thiab. “They immediately opened heavy fire at us.”
That’s how the Nisour Square massacre began.
“What can I tell you?” Mohammed says, closing his eyes. “It was like the end of days.”
Mohammed would later learn that the first victims that day, in the white Kia, were a young Iraqi medical student, Ahmed Haithem Al Rubia’y, and his mother, Mahassin, a physician. Mohammed is crystal clear that the car posed no threat. “There was absolutely no shooting at the Blackwater men,” he says. “All of a sudden, they started shooting in all directions, and they shot at everyone in front of them. There was nothing left in that street that wasn’t shot: the ground, cars, poles, sidewalks; they shot everything in front of them.” As the Blackwater gunners shot up the Rubia’ys’ vehicle, Mohammed said, it soon looked like a sieve “due to how many bullet holes it had.” A Blackwater shooter later admitted that they also fired a grenade at the car, causing the car to explode. Mohammed says the Blackwater men then started firing across the square. “They were shooting in all directions,” he remembers. He describes the shooting as “random yet still concentrated. It was concentrated and focused on what they aimed at and still random as they shot in all directions.”
One of the Blackwater shooters was on top of an armored vehicle firing an automatic weapon, he says. “Every time he would finish his clip, he would throw it on the ground and would load another one in and would start shooting again, and finish the new one and replace it with another.” One young Iraqi man got out of his car to run, and as he fled, the Blackwater shooter gunned him down and continued firing into his body as it lay on the pavement, Mohammed says. “He was on the ground bleeding, and they’re shooting nonstop, and it wasn’t single bullets.” The Blackwater shooter, he says, would fire at other Iraqis and cars and then return to pump more bullets into the dead man on the ground. “He sank in his own blood, and every minute the [Blackwater shooter] would shoot left and right and then go back to shoot the dead man, and I could see that his body would shake with every bullet. He was already dead, but his body was still reacting to the bullets. [The shooter] would fire at someone else and then go back to shoot at this dead man.” Shaking his head slowly, Mohammed says somberly, “The guy is dead in a pool of blood. Why would you continue shooting him?”
In his vehicle, as the shooting intensified, Mohammed yelled for the kids to get down. He and his sister did the same. “My car was hit many times in different places. All I could hear from my car was the gun shots and the sound of glass shattering,” he remembers. Jenan was frantic. “Why are they shooting at us?” she asked him. Just then, a bullet pierced the windshield, hitting Jenan’s headrest. Mohammed shows me a photo of the bullet hole.
As gunfire rained on the SUV, Jenan grabbed Mohammed’s hair, yanked his head down and covered him with her body. “My young sister was trying to protect me by covering me with her body, so I forced myself out of her grip and covered her with my body to protect her. It was so horrific that my little sister, whom I’m supposed to protect, was trying to protect me.” Mohammed managed to slip his cellphone from his pocket and was going to call his father. “It’s customary that when in agony before death, you ask those close to you to look after your loved ones,” he says. Jenan demanded that Mohammed put down the phone, reminding him that their father had had two strokes already. “If he hears what’s happening, he’ll die immediately,” she said. “Maybe he’ll die before us.”
At that moment, bullets pierced the SUV through the front windshield. A bullet hit the rearview mirror, causing it to whack Mohammed in the face. “We imagined that in a few seconds everyone was going to die–everyone in the car, my sister and I and our children. We thought that every second that passed meant one of us dying.” He adds, “We remained still, my sister and I. I had her rest her head on my lap, and my body was on top of her. We’d sneak a peek from under the dashboard, and they continued shooting here and there, killing this one and that one.”
And then the shooting stopped.
Kinani thought his family had somehow miraculously survived the massacre. But then the silence of the aftermath was shattered by relatives in his car shouting, “Ali is shot! Ali is shot!”
Mohammed rushed around to Ali’s door and saw that the window was broken. He looked inside and saw his son’s head resting against the door. He opened it, and Ali slumped toward him. “I was standing in shock looking at him as the door opened, and his brain fell on the ground between my feet,” Mohammed recalls. “I looked and his brain was on the ground.” He remembers people yelling at him, telling him to get out while he could. “But I was in another world,” he says. Then Mohammed snapped back to consciousness. He put Ali back in the car and placed his hand over his son’s heart. It was still beating. He got in the driver’s seat of his car, tires blown out, radiator damaged, full of bullets, liquids leaking everywhere, hoping still that he could save [Ali’s] life. Somehow he managed to get the car near Yarmouk Hospital, right near the square. He picked up Ali and ran toward the hospital. He nearly collapsed on the road, and an Iraqi police officer took Ali from his arms and ran him into the hospital.
Mohammed checked that the other children were safe and then dashed to the hospital. “I entered the emergency room, and blood was everywhere, dead people, injured people everywhere,” he remembers. “My son was in the last bed; the doctor was with him and had already hooked him with an IV line.” As Mohammed stood by Ali’s bed, the doctor told him that Ali was brain dead. “His heart is beating,” the doctor said, “and it will continue to beat until he bleeds out and dies.” The doctor told him that if there were any hope to be found, it would require taking Ali in an ambulance to a neurological hospital across town. The fastest route meant that they had to pass through Nisour Square. Iraqi police stopped them and told them they could not pass. “The US Army is here and won’t let you through,” the officer told them. The driver took an alternate route and was going so fast the ambulance almost crashed twice. When they got to the hospital, Mohammed offered to pay the driver–at least for the gas, which is customary. The driver refused. “No, I would like to donate blood to your son if he needs it,” he told Mohammed. A few moments later, Mohammed stood with a doctor who told him there was nothing they could do. Ali was dead.
Filmmaker Richard Rowley and I produced a 30 minute documentary on the Nisour Square massacre and the story of Ali Kinani for Democracy Now! and The Nation magazine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68jAnTh18TY
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What Your 'Fill Her Up' Really Buys -- Our Elections |
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Thursday, 23 October 2014 12:18 |
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Pope writes: "When you last filled up your gas tank, you may have thought about where the oil came from. Today let's think about where the money you paid went."
File photo, gas station. (photo: Getty Images)
What Your 'Fill Her Up' Really Buys -- Our Elections
By Carl Pope, Reader Supported News
23 October 14
 hen you last filled up your gas tank, you may have thought about where the oil came from. Today let's think about where the money you paid went. Some of it, indeed, went to the salary of the trucker who delivered the gasoline, the woman behind the cash register, or the steel company that forged the drilling bit. And some of it went to long-running ad campaigns like Chevron's "We Agree," designed to make you feel as good as possible about paying too much for long dead algae. But much of it went less savory places. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, for example, take a huge cut. Even if your last tank didn't come from one of those countries, your purchase helped the keep the price of global oil high enough that even with the current price slump the Saudis have nothing to worry about. At last year's prices, 3 percent of global GDP went as unearned rents to the countries (and companies) that own low-cost oil reserves -- an amount equal to the entire economy of Great Britain.
Those global numbers are really too big to fathom. But locally our gasoline and diesel purchases are the most lethal toxin in American politics. Just a couple of weeks out from the election it's good to remind ourselves -- lots of voters may not think the ballot counts, but big oil knows better.
Just up the road from my San Francisco home, in Richmond, California (population 107,000 people), for example, Chevron is making sure that democracy doesn't get too rambunctious in the home town of its biggest refinery. The company, whose revenues amount to $200,000 for every resident of the town, doesn't like Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, the city's first Green Party mayor, for her efforts to restore the city's shoreline as public open space, and protect its residents from the fires and explosions that have rocked Chevron's facility. So they are backing an opposing slate. Not content with spending $2.9 million on the election (about $100 per vote cast) Chevron also launched a fake "community" website to carry its point of view, the Richmond Standard. (Your tank of gas may have paid for this doozy.)
Moving down the California coast, sparsely populated San Benito County has only half the population of Richmond, and no major refinery or indeed any significant oil industry presence. Farmers, however, were worried about water quality threats from untested oil technologies like acid injection that might be used to try to squeeze heavy oil out of the county's segment of the Monterey Tar Shale. So they put Measure J on their ballot banning such extreme oil extraction techniques.
Since the oil industry is not currently extracting any significant oil in San Benito County, you might think this would not be a major threat. But so far Chevron and others have poured $2 million into a campaign against Measure J, about $200 per likely vote cast. (To be quite honest, as someone who has run political campaigns, it is difficult to fathom how you could spend $2 million on a campaign in San Benito. The national equivalent would be a presidential campaign that spent $12 billion!)
And even further south, where the first big clash between environmentalism and big oil took place, in Santa Barbara County, a similar ban on extreme oil extraction techniques like acid injection is being fought by the same oil industry coalition, and in larger Santa Barbara they have spent $5 million so far, making this the most expensive local ballot measure in the nation. Here again, the ballot language allows existing oil and gas operations (which are significant in Santa Barbara) to continue, banning only new operations using extreme technology.
But the oil industry's toxic dollar spigot has been directed outside of California as well. In North Dakota, conservation groups, hunting and fishing interests and recreational advocates have proposed that a tiny 5 percent of the state's oil and gas revenues be used for long-range landscape conservation efforts. Even though the bill raises no taxes and places no burdens on the oil industry, the American Petroleum Institute, alarmed that it might pass, has kicked in $1 million to fight it, and total spending is expected to exceed $2 million on both sides. Why might the industry care? Because, just as in non-oil producing San Benito, any vote that suggests that oil and gas have obligations to the broader public good and limitations on their ability to exploit the land in any way they choose have become, powered by unlimited campaign largesse, more than the industry can accept.
As you read in the media about the huge sums of money that oil and gas interests like the Koch brothers are pouring into campaigns around the country, remember that Big Oil is not only worrying about the US Senate -- the oily sheen of their dollars can be found everywhere -- and you and I provided them with those funds, because we don't (mostly) have a way to get around without using their monopoly.
Monopolies create power. "Power corrupts," Lord Acton said. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The Supreme Court's recent campaign spending decisions have created such absolute power -- a flood of campaign spending by Big Oil that only shows just how right he was. If we don't break oil's monopoly at the gas tank, we won't break their power at the ballot box.
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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FOCUS | Everyone in America Would Be Better Off if We Soaked the 1 Percent |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=25409"><span class="small">Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress</span></a>
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Thursday, 23 October 2014 11:13 |
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Covert writes: "A 90 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent of American earners wouldn’t just significantly reduce income and wealth inequality and boost government tax revenues. It would also be the optimal level for Americans’ welfare."
The one percent. (photo: Shutterstock)
Everyone in America Would Be Better Off if We Soaked the 1 Percent
By Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress
23 October 14
90 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent of American earners wouldn’t just significantly reduce income and wealth inequality and boost government tax revenues. It would also be the optimal level for Americans’ welfare, according to a new paper from economists Fabian Kindermann and Dirk Krueger.
They find that the top marginal tax rate that maximizes government revenues before being so high as to discourage the wealthiest from earning more is very high, or 95 percent on those who are among the top 1 percent of earners. They also find that a 90 percent tax rate on the richest 1 percent could significantly reduce the Gini index, a measure of income inequality, and wealth inequality would also steadily decline.
But these effects aren’t worth the policy change in and of themselves, they argue. In an email to ThinkProgress, Krueger wrote, “One could certainly reduce inequality in the economy to zero, by the government confiscating all income and wealth and redistributing it equally among all households… Of course people would stop working and saving and the outcome would be disastrous.” But the interesting finding in their paper is that the same tax rate that would maximize revenues and drive down inequality is nearly the same one that would make everyone better off, or what they call the optimal top marginal tax rate.
Everyone’s welfare is improved if a tax change allows the government to compensate them with enough wealth so that they are at the same level they were before the change, but the government still has money left over. “The more is left over, the better is the reform,” Krueger said. Everyone’s welfare improves or stays steady, including that of the 1 percent, under a 90 percent top tax rate. In fact, the welfare gains are “very substantial,” they note in the paper.
There are trade offs to such a policy change. About 10 percent fewer people would enter the labor force and consumption would decline in the long run by about 7 percent. But most of this would happen at the very top and not impact most Americans. Average consumption for people who don’t make it to the top 1 percent would actually be higher. Most of the labor force reduction is also among the richest. “Not knowing whether one would ever make it into the top 1% (not impossible, but very unlikely) households would be eager to accept a life that is somewhat better most of the time…and significantly worse in the rare case they climb to the top 1%,” Krueger noted.
The top 1 percent paid an average tax rate of 23.5 percent in 2011, below a peak of 27.6 in 2001. The rate had been dropping for many years, although what they’re paying now represents a slight increase. Either way, though, the rate is much lower than 90 percent.
While conservatives warn that higher tax rates on the wealthy will hurt so-called “job creators,” economists point out that higher taxes and economic growth can go hand-in-hand. After World War II, higher economic growth occurred alongside higher top tax rates, averaging 2.23 percent while the top rates were above 70 percent between 1950 and 1980 but just 1.68 percent when the rates were lower between 1980 and 2010. Job growth has been weakest when the top rate was lowest and stronger when it was higher.
Without any policy change, however, income and wealth inequality are set to keep growing. Income inequality has been growing steadily since the 1970s and the recession has made it even worse, while wealth inequality is now where it was in the 1920s and continues climbing.
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FOCUS | Cops' Killing of Homeless Preacher to Cost Denver $4.6 Million |
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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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Thursday, 23 October 2014 09:45 |
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Boardman writes: "On October 14, the jury found that the cops had acted with 'evil motive' toward Rev. Marvin Booker, and the city is ordered to pay $4.6 million to the victim's family."
Marvin Louis Booker. (photo: AP)
Cops' Killing of Homeless Preacher to Cost Denver $4.6 Million
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
23 October 14
Federal jury’s three-week trial verdict: police had “evil motive”
 urveillance video shows the large, open booking room of Denver’s brand new Downtown Detention Center, shortly after 3:30 a.m. on July 9, 2010. It shows Denver County sheriff’s deputies grabbing and killing an unarmed, shoeless black man in a public place for no good reason. More than four years later, an all-white, seven-member federal jury has now delivered a verdict against the cops and the city of Denver. On October 14, the jury found that the cops had acted with “evil motive” toward Rev. Marvin Booker, and the city is ordered to pay $4.6 million to the victim’s family.
Despite the evidence of police murderousness so clear on surveillance video from several angles, the city prosecutor refused to bring any charges in the case, and the city hierarchy has stonewalled acceptance of any responsibility for four years. A federal judge has twice sanctioned the city for withholding evidence. The city’s “defense” in court consisted largely of character assassination of the dead victim. The city has not yet said whether it will appeal the jury verdict.
Denver is broken, as this case illustrates. Denver officials from the top down have shown a stunning willingness to deny obvious factual evidence, and an even more disheartening lack of empathy for the victim and his family that continues to the present. From 2004 to early 2014, Denver paid more than $16 million in settlements for the behavior of its police and sheriff’s department, mostly for violence of civil rights abuses. That was after things started to get better. From 2000 to 2002, Denver paid $14.4 million to settle similar lawsuits. In 2013 alone, the Denver district attorney spent $616,100 hiring outside counsel to help with the caseload.
Now the city owes another $4.6 million for a killing. In August, Denver settled a jail brutality case for $3.25 million. What’s wrong with Denver is not unique. From New York to Los Angeles, from Chicago to New Orleans, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Thetford, Vermont, outbreaks of police violence leave innocent people dead and the killings unredressed. In late 2011, the U.S. Justice Department was in the midst of investigating 17 different police departments, “more than at any time in the division’s history,” according to a Civil Rights Division attorney. Three years later, the numbers are worse.
Police reality is different from everyone else’s reality
While the Booker trial was in progress, Denver Sheriff’s deputies rallied outside the downtown jail, blaming city officials for making them afraid to use force, “creating a dangerous climate behind bars.” According to a 22-year veteran sergeant, “The deputies are afraid to do their jobs.” Rally organizers also blamed the media.
The distance between the reality perceived by the federal jury in the Booker case and reality as perceived by police is huge and apparently unbridgeable. The day after the jury verdict in the Booker trial, the Colorado State Lodge, Fraternal Order of Police, had nothing to say about the verdict or the recklessly lethal behavior of the deputies involved. Instead it posted a paean to self-pity by a Wisconsin police lieutenant that began:
Today, I stopped caring about my fellow man. I stopped caring about my community, my neighbors, and those I serve. I stopped caring today because a once noble profession has become despised, hated, distrusted, and mostly unwanted. I stopped caring today because parents refuse to teach their kids right from wrong and blame us when they are caught breaking the law. I stopped caring today because….
Another current aspect of police response to instances of police wrongdoing is a scare campaign called “Save Public Safety,” with a rationale that says: “special interest groups are using Public Employees as scapegoats…. The safety of every citizen of the United States is threatened as Public Safety jobs are eliminated….”
In the context of the Marvin Booker case, this perception is factual nonsense, but the feeling behind it may be a sincere emotion. They need to be sorted out.
Rev. Marvin Booker was the “different one” in a family of ministers
The July 9, 2010, surveillance video that is publicly available exists in several versions, from different cameras at different angles, lasting almost 20 minutes. The city has “lost” some of the video that should exist. The entire event, from the time that Marvin Booker is called to the desk to the time he is left unconscious or dead in his cell is less than six minutes.
In 2010, Marvin Booker was well known to Denver police and jail personnel, that’s why they called him a “frequent flier.” They knew him as street preacher with a number of arrests, they knew him as a 56-year-old homeless man who was hostile to police, and they knew him as a 5-foot 5-inch, 135-pound black man with a long-standing crack cocaine habit. He also had a heart condition, an enlarged heart, and emphysema. Booker was in the holding pit of the booking area that early morning, having been arrested on a warrant issued when he had failed to show up for a court appearance to answer a charge of drug possession. By the time the last six minutes of his life began, he had been waiting for hours, he had taken off his shoes, and he had fallen asleep, waiting to be called.
According to the Denver Dept. of Safety, “Marvin Booker had over 60 arrests in the City and County of Denver.” The public arrest record provided by the department lists precisely 60 dates when Marvin Booker was charged with one or more offenses. The first is a single charge of threatening to injure persons or property in 1938, roughly 16 years before Booker was born. The other 59 dates are within his lifetime, starting in 1976. The three most recent, in 2010 (tw0) and 2008 (one), are single charges for possession of drug paraphernalia, as is the next most recent charge in 2002, which was dismissed. Before that, Booker was arrested six times in 2000; three times on drug charges, two of which were dismissed.
More than half of Booker’s arrests, 40 in all, occurred between 1988 and 1994. In addition to drug charges on 15 occasions beginning in 1988, Booker was also charged with loitering (8 times), trespass (8), and disturbing the peace (12). It is clear from the record that a number of these arrests were not prosecuted, but the Denver Dept. of Safety does not keep track of whether arrests result in conviction. However, public information of this sort was enough to persuade at least one Denver Post reporter to refer to Booker, soon after his death, as a “habitual criminal,” a term of art that appears in the Denver PD rap sheet three times in 2000 and 2002, but not later. The reporter also referred to Booker as “an ordained minister who served the poor,” mentioning that Booker helped distribute food and worked in soup kitchens as a volunteer.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. changed Marvin Louis Booker’s life
Rev. Marvin Louis Booker spent much of his childhood in Memphis, Tennessee, part of a family of southern preachers who were active in the civil rights movement. His father, Rev. Benjamin Roosevelt Booker Sr., (1920-2013), was 82 at the time of Marvin’s death and said then: “It seems like the officers have a license to kill. The officers ought to protect you, not kill you.” Rev. Booker was arrested himself in 1968, for an act of nonviolent civil disobedience in support of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. At the time, the African Methodist Episcopal pastor headed the historic Clayborn Temple AME Church, which served as a strategy center for the striking Memphis workers and for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others who came to support them.
Marvin Booker grew up in a family with his four brothers and two sisters. He was 14 when King was shot and killed in Memphis. In response to that trauma, Marvin Booker started memorizing King’s speeches and performing them publicly, including the “I Have A Dream” speech. He wrote a book about King and sold it on the street. He was once arrested for collecting money for reciting King’s speeches at the site of his assassination in Memphis. He eventually became a minister, as did three of his four brothers: Rev. Calvin Booker of Memphis, Rev. David Booker of Nashville, and Rev. Spencer Booker of Kansas City, Missouri. As reported by Susan Greene in the Colorado Independent:
Booker spent much of his youth and early adulthood reciting King’s speeches at churches and civil rights events throughout the South. His brothers, like their father, became pastors of large congregations. But Booker took a decidedly different path – preaching, and living, on the streets. It’s the way Jesus did it, he explained to the large, supportive family who did what they could to give him a home, help him kick his drug habit and earn a steady paycheck. But Booker wanted none of it. No address. No pulpit. So he spent years on the streets, where he felt the message of the gospels were needed most.
Surveillance video unambiguous: cops pile on helpless man, kill him
Officer Douglas Grove arrested Marvin Booker at approximately 7:30 p.m. on July 8, 2010, and took him to the District 2 police station. Grove said Booker was “very agitated” during that transport, but there was no incident. Later police took Booker to the jail, where he waited for several hours. During that time, no one said he was “agitated” or otherwise noteworthy. During photographing and fingerprinting, Booker was being a “’smart Alec,” according to Deputy W. Lovato, who jollied Booker along and got him to laugh. During medical screening, Booker was hostile and uncooperative, so Nurse Gail George left the screening unfinished. She told Booker that he should tell her about any medical condition. She said Booker’s reaction was not unusual.
At about 3:34 a.m. on July 9, 2010, Deputy Faun Gomez called Booker’s name, apparently waking him up. Surveillance video shows Booker getting up from his chair in the booking pit and walking with all deliberate speed to the booking desk where Gomez is waiting. Booker’s shoes are clearly visible on the floor in front of the chair where he was sitting, directly in Gomez’s line of sight and not 15 feet from her.
There is no sound on the video. Reportedly Gomez asked Booker to sit. He remained standing, possibly cursing, looking in his pockets for something, but making no threatening gestures. In less than ten seconds, Gomez was bolting from her seat and ordering him into a cell at the side of the large room. Booker gestured toward Gomez and started walking back the way he had come. Witnesses later said that he said he was going back to get his shoes. Gomez, who has a record of violently over-reacting, said she didn’t notice he was in his socks.
She rushed after him, her left hand grabbing Booker as he was going down the two steps into the holding area, almost knocking him over. She kept him from falling by grabbing his jacket with both hands. Blindsided from behind, Booker pulled away from Gomez and defensively resisted her continued grabbing at him. He did not strike out at her. Within five seconds of the first grab by Gomez, a second deputy had grabbed Booker and a third and a fourth and a fifth quickly followed. Less than 20 seconds after the first grab, Booker was helpless on the floor, obscured from the camera by the four deputies on top of him.
During the next four minutes, one deputy put Booker in a chokehold and held it most of that time. Face down on the ground, Booker, who had emphysema, gasped for breath. Other deputies handcuffed him. Another used a nunchuck on his legs, causing abrasions. Then someone got a taser and a deputy tasered him. Booker had stopped moving much earlier.
Less than five minutes after Deputy Gomez grabbed Rev. Booker, four deputies carried his limp body, head first and face down, into the same cell he was headed for after he got his shoes. In the cell, a deputy sat on him for another minute or two. His shoes were still by his chair. Reportedly, the deputies (off camera) high-fived each other and went outside to smoke. When medical help was eventually called, Booker was already dead. Booker was pronounced dead at 4:33 a.m., at Denver Health and Medical Center.
After this killing, the Sheriff’s department stopped using the chokehold.
Law enforcement stonewalling started at once, with official silence
The Denver Police Department promptly started an “investigation” that served as a credible basis for officials to refuse to comment on the killing-by-cop. The Denver Post soon found two witnesses, men who were also waiting to be booked at the time and who had not been interviewed by police investigators. Each of the witnesses was within a few feet of the deputy pile on Booker. The police refused to release the video, but the two witness accounts described what the video would later show.
Denver went into denial mode, blaming the victim and leaving the perpetrators in their jobs while the “investigation” proceeded. Shortly before the release of the coroner’s report, the deputies were placed on paid leave. The coroner’s report on August 20, 2010, ruled that Booker’s death was a homicide, meaning that he died because of other people’s actions, not of natural causes. The coroner’s report described the video (still being withheld from the public) and his description matched up with eyewitness accounts. The coroner observed that Booker was “well muscled like a boxer.” The coroner found cocaine in Booker’s system, but below a toxic level.
Confronted with a coroner’s report of a homicide, Denver district attorney Mitch Morissey took another month to decide not to file any criminal charges against any of the deputies who had taken part in Booker’s killing. In a 13-page statement released September 28, the D.A. blamed Booker’s death on Booker, and found that all the force used against him was justified. In an exercise worthy of Rashomon, where different witnesses describe the same event radically differently, Morrissey wrote in part:
This incident occurred in the open-seating area of the new Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center, where forty-six arrestees were waiting to be processed into the jail…. Uncooperative, non-compliant, and hostile arrestees pose a risk to all jail personnel and arrestees in this open-seating area…. This is not an environment in which arrestees can disregard directions and do as they please….
Mr. Booker was described, and is shown on the videos of the event, to be non-compliant, hostile, profane, and violent toward the female deputy who was attempting to process him into the facility. Mr. Booker made the specific choice not to follow the deputy’s lawful and proper orders, loudly raised his voice and cursed at her—“You F__ing Bitch”, ignored her directions, and walked away from her toward the open seating area. Then, for reasons known only to Mr. Booker, he chose to violently resist the female deputy when she tried to contact, control and guide him to the secure cell away from the other arrestees in the open-seating area. It was the combination of these aggressive, non-compliant behaviors by Mr. Booker that drew the attention of other sheriff deputies who came to her aid to control Mr. Booker. His continued hostility, non-compliance and resistance, of necessity, caused the deputies to apply physical force on him in an effort to control him, move him to a secure cell and restore order….
The district attorney does not address the possibility that the best way to have maintained order would have been for Deputy Faun Gomez, with a record of volatile hostility, not to have been booking arrestees at all. Or for Gomez to have simply let Booker get his shoes. Or for Gomez not to have grabbed Booker, almost knocking him down the two steps to the holding area. Even though this new jail was designed as a new style “soft intake” facility, Morrissey continues to bring an old style hard-nosed attitude to it, a hard-nosed attitude embodied in Deputy Gomez’s rigid and angry inflexibility.
Denver managed to drag out the court process three and a half years
In February 2011, the Booker family filed its federal lawsuit, hoping a jury would view the surveillance video differently from the district attorney. By then the deputies who killed Marvin Booker were still on paid leave. By then the sheriff had made it clear that he was taking no internal disciplinary action as a result of the in-custody death. By then the city had still not turned over the surveillance video, and the Bookers’ attorney was calling on the court to end the “coverup.”
On May 9, 2011, the Denver Dept. of Safety issued a 40-page “PUBLIC STATEMENT OF THE MANAGER OF SAFETY REGARDING THE IN-CUSTODY DEATH OF MARVIN L. BOOKER AT THE VAN CISE-SIMONET DETENTION CENTER ON JULY 9, 2010,” the essence of which was that nobody working for Denver did anything wrong, it was all Booker’s fault. This was the final clearance of criminal charges for the deputies, allowing them to return to work. The city also released most of the surveillance tape. In response to this report, the Booker family asked the FBI to investigate Marvin Booker’s death. The May 9 statement is one of 24 statements the Dept. of Safety has issued since 2004 relating to Denver shootings and other in-custody deaths.
As the Bookers’ lawsuit proceeded, Denver continued to stonewall, refusing to settle, and refusing to respond to court orders to turn over evidence. Eventually Denver turned over 15 CDs of evidence to the Bookers on the day the trial began. The city sought declaratory judgment in its favor, which a federal district court denied.
Federal appeals court to Denver: you have to prove your case
Denver appealed that decision to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court’s ruling against the city. In the course of a 59-page decision on March 11, 2014, the court wrote, among other things:
Our analysis therefore accepts Mr. Booker did not resist during the vast majority of the encounter. The Defendants argue the video evidence belies this conclusion, but they are mistaken. In fact, the video, which shows Mr. Booker motionless on the floor while the deputies subdue him, contradicts the Defendants’ assertion that Mr. Booker consistently resisted them….
First, all Defendants actively participated in a coordinated use of force on Mr. Booker…. Because the Defendants here engaged in a group effort, a reasonable jury could find them liable for any underlying finding of excessive force….
Second, even if a single deputy’s use of force was not excessive, “a law enforcement official who fails to intervene to prevent another law enforcement official’s use of excessive force may be liable…. Thus, even if one of the defendant deputies did not use excessive force, a reasonable jury could nonetheless find on this record that he or she violated Mr. Booker’s clearly established rights by not taking steps to prevent other deputies’ excessive force….
The evidence, when viewed in the light most favorable to the Plaintiffs, shows the deputies used various types of force—including substantial pressure on his back, a taser, and a carotid neckhold—on Mr. Booker while he was not resisting. Because Mr. Booker was handcuffed and on his stomach, we conclude the force was not proportional to the need presented….
In light of the foregoing, a reasonable jury could conclude that the Defendants’ use of substantial pressure on Mr. Booker’s back, a two-minute carotid hold on his neck, and a taser while Mr. Booker was subdued and struggling to breathe in a prone position demonstrated the requisite level of culpability for a due process violation….
To be clear, our decision is based on what a reasonable jury could find, not what a reasonable jury will find. As the district court found, this case is rife with disputed fact issues—many of which surround the Plaintiffs’ claim for failure to provide medical care.
On October 14, Denver learned what at least one presumably reasonable jury made of the evidence: that it should cost the city $4.6 million, but not the $$15 million the Booker family had sought.
As to the larger question of police behavior in general, one assumes it’s true that the majority of cops are as good and decent people as anyone else, but that’s not really good enough for people armed with guns, trained to kill, and too rarely held to account when they make a mistake. There are too many examples of cops who don’t know what they’re doing, or who they’re doing it to, and if good cops truly want to be honored and respected again, they need to take some responsibility for seeking justice when their peers kill people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKrj-xO01xY
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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t’s always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn’t their intention. So we should be grateful to Leung Chun-ying, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, for blurting out the real reason pro-democracy demonstrators can’t get what they want: With open voting, “You would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies” — policies, presumably, that would make the rich less rich and provide more aid to those with lower incomes.
