torture

Illinois Cop Maces Handcuffed Jailed Teenagers

Evgen — Wed, 13 May 2015 08:40:07 +0000

State authorities said they are investigating after a video surfaced showing an Alton police officer macing two teens in handcuffs at Alton Police headquarters.

The video, dated January 26, 2015, shows two teens sitting in a holding area at the Alton Police Department. An officer then walks in, says something, and then pulls out what appears to be a can of pepper spray and sprays both teens. One of the teens then twitches and shakes for several minutes.

“It’s infuriating to me to see this officer coming in and spraying these kids who are handcuffed,” said James Gray, President of the Alton NAACP.

Gray showed the video to News 4 after receiving it in the mail. Gray said he does not like the way Alton Police Chief Jason Simmons is running the department. Simmons future will soon be by the Alton Board of Aldermen, who will decide whether to re-appoint him.

“He’s up for re-appointment but I do not think he should be reappointed, he has to know about this and possibly many more things like this they haven’t sent to me,” Gray said.

Simmons said he has known about the incident since March when a high ranking officer told him what took place. Simmons said it then took two months for officers to write a report on the incident, which he said he received May 6.

“It raised a red flag and appears to be a very serious issue. However, it will be investigated by internal affairs and everything will be looked over before any type of discipline will be issued,” Simmons said.

Simmons told News 4 he is upset that his officers were slow in reporting the incident to him. He believes the delay may be due to the fact that many officers do not like some of the reforms he has put in place, and are therefore trying to find a way to oust him from his post.

KMOV.com

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The Supreme Court is Not Sure if Jail Guards Should or Should Not Torture Innocent Inmates

Evgen — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 10:25:17 +0000

In the eyes of the law, Michael Kingsley was an innocent man. Although he had been arrested in April of 2010, Kingsley had been convicted of no crime. He was awaiting trial at a small county jail when the guards came to his cell and demanded he remove a sheet of paper covering a light. Kingsley refused, insisting that someone else covered the light. So the officers moved him to a new cell, placed him face down on a cement bunk, and crowded around him, blocking the cell’s only camera. Then, later claiming that Kingsley resisted the removal of his handcuffs, the officers shocked him with a stun gun for a full five seconds. They then exited the cell, leaving Kingsley alone on the cement with his hands still cuffed, writhing in pain.

Kingsley filed a lawsuit against two of the guards, asserting they violated his federal civil rights by using excessive force against him. A jury sided with the guards, and an appeals court affirmed the decision. On Monday, the Supreme Court heard the case of Kingsley v. Hendrickson to decide what rights are owed to “pretrial detainees”—that is, people who’ve been arrested but not tried. Technically, the justices took the case to decide a narrow issue of law. But the legal jargon that dominated Monday’s argument barely concealed a broader battle among the justices over an astonishingly topical topic: police brutality and abuse of power.

Unfortunately, as soon as arguments begin, it’s clear that Kingsley’s case turns out to be a mess. The first problem is that nobody seems quite certain where Kingsley’s constitutional right to be free from excessive force comes from. If you’re a free person walking the streets, the Fourth Amendment protects you from “unreasonable” police abuse. If you’re a convicted prisoner, the Eighth Amendment protects you from “cruel and unusual punishment.” But what if, like Kingsley, you’re stuck in between—already arrested, still in jail, but not convicted?

Both sides seem to agree that the 14^th Amendment’s due process clause protects these people, which is a problem, because the due process clause doesn’t say very much. Kingsley thinks it gives him the same rights as a free person, meaning he need only prove an officer used objectively unreasonable force to win his case. The officers think it gives Kingsley the same rights as a convicted inmate, meaning he must prove his punisher acted with malice, or at least recklessness—both mental states that focus on the officer’s subjective intent.

Justice Anthony Kennedy immediately spots a weakness in Kingsley’s argument: Pretrial detainees are often housed in the same prisons as convicts. Do detainees mixed in with the general prison population maintain constitutional rights that convicts don’t?

Well, yeah, responds Kingsley’s lawyer Wendy M. Ward (in so many words). Convicts have been found guilty of a crime; pretrial detainees haven’t. Shouldn’t legally innocent detainees maintain a freedom from punishment that other inmates lose when they’re convicted? A concerned-looking Kennedy then leads Ward into a pointless word game about the difference between “discipline” and “punishment,” from which Justice Sonia Sotomayor saves her. What the court is really looking for, Sotomayor reminds Ward, is a standard for the jury to use to decide when guards inflict unconstitutionally excessive force against a pretrial detainee. Ward thinks any use of force that is “objectively unreasonable” is unconstitutional, while her opponents think a guard must also have a “subjective intent” to harm.

Justice Samuel Alito—who is sleepy all morning and appears to doze off at one point—wonders if this distinction makes any sense in practice.

“It doesn’t seem to me that there are going to be very many cases where the difference between these two standards will result in a different outcome,” he tells Ward. “Am I wrong?”

“I think you are wrong,” Ward responds, but struggles to describe a case, aside from Kingsley’s, where the distinction matters. So Justice Stephen Breyer dreams up one for her. What if one officer tells another that a gun is actually a Taser, and the officer, intending to hit a detainee with a stun gun, accidentally shoots him? Objectively, shooting an inmate with no justification is unreasonable and unconstitutional. Subjectively, accidentally shooting a detainee may be excusable.

“I’m rather worried,” Breyer says of his bizarre scenario, “about holding the policeman in this weird case [guilty], where his state of mind is 100 percent innocent.”

Ward, a painfully inept oral advocate who skittishly concedes her most crucial arguments in between long gaps of awkward silence, has no real answer except that holding Breyer’s imaginary (and possibly blind) cop accountable is “more faithful to the Constitution.” She sits down and is replaced by John F. Bash, representing the United States. (The Justice Department decided to weigh in on the case, supporting Kingsley’s standard and the verdict against him. This confuses everyone and helps no one.) Bash, with his handsome features and baritone voice, looks like he hopped out of some TV legal procedural—but he can’t seem to lay out a clear distinction, either. He tries to tell the justices that guards can use more force against convicts than detainees, but Sotomayor pushes back.

“I’m not sure why that’s right,” she tells Bash. “What, the Constitution permits you to get a free kick in? If I walk by a prisoner and I want to establish discipline, I can freely kick them any time I want?”

Bash, delightfully burned by an irritated Sotomayor, soon stands down. Paul Clement, the conservative superlawyer, rises to argue on behalf of the guards who hit Kingsley with a stun gun. Clement wants the court to hold that guards must punish detainees “sadistically or maliciously” in order to violate their constitutional rights, and that jolting a prisoner with electricity while he is handcuffed and face-down in a cell is neither. Even worse, he thinks convicted felons and pretrial detainees should receive the exact same rights behind bars. In other words, a legally innocent detainee doesn’t have the reasonable expectation to be free from police abuse that a free person walking the streets does.

Suddenly Justice Elena Kagan jumps into the ring to deliver a sucker punch. Imagine two people are indicted for the same offensive, she tells Clement. One makes bail; the other does not.

“The one who’s out on the street has some kind of encounter with a police officer,” she says, “and he reaches into his pocket to take out something, and the police officer shoots him.” That person will almost certainly have a constitutional case against his shooter. But imagine his peer—indicted for the same crime—is shot for the same reason in prison. Under Clement’s standard, he likely wouldn’t have any constitutional recourse, because he couldn’t prove the officer acted sadistically. “Why,” Kagan asks with her trademark quizzical head-tilt, “should that be so?”

Kagan, who specializes in tripping up Clement, lands her point perfectly, saving the case from musty legal doctrines and placing it in the context of today’s realities. (Her hypothetical doesn’t sound very hypothetical at all.) Kagan and Sotomayor appear to be the only justices aware of the fact that police officers shoot innocent people—and that the last thing their victims need is yet another judicial barricade to block them from pursuing justice.

Clement fires back, declaring that “the fact of incarceration is really a game-changer.” But Sotomayor keeps him in trapped in the corner.

“You’re loading the deck completely,” she tells him. Under his rule, the jury would be told to “give police officers deference,” then be told that “whatever they do” to detainees (short of assaulting them with demonstrably sadistic and malicious intent) is OK.

This final act of tag-teaming puts some urgency back in the arguments, reminding everyone that this case could have very serious—and dire—results for people whose safety is left at the mercy of cops. At the same time the Supreme Court heard Kingsley’s case, thousands attended the funeral of Freddie Gray, who was fatally wounded in police custody. As demonstrations broke out across Baltimore to protest his death, the justices debated whether another man abused in police custody must prove his abuser acted “maliciously” before he can pursue his constitutional rights. The answer to this question should be obvious—yet the court may well decide that innocent people can be treated like convicted criminals if they’re too poor to make bail. That unfortunate fact suggests the justices’ recent reckoning with police overreach was nothing more than a fleeting encounter with reality.

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The US Government’s War On Hackers Includes Torture

Evgen — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 10:03:00 +0000

Fidel Salinas Jr is being tortured by the US government right this very moment.

Salinas, a 29-year-old computer expert, was accused of disrupting the normal operation of the web server at co.hidalgo.tx.us in January 2012. In response, the Hidalgo County government claimed Salinas caused a ludicrously inflated figure of $10,000 in damages. The damages were based on slowing down access to human resources data on the website for a day.

What Salinas allegedly did was referred to by the mainstream media as a “brute force SQL injection attack.” In reality, it was a single instance of Salinas submitting “junk text” in a contact form to the Hidalgo County website. The depiction of Salinas’s alleged crime was deliberately used to paint his actions in a negative light to those without a background in computer security.

Salinas was also reported by mainstream media as “having ties with Anonymous” after an FBI raid of his computer turned up IRC chat logs with the hacker group AntiSec. Although no conversation with the group involved the discussion of hacking the Hidalgo County website, this was used as evidence in court to demonstrate criminal intent.

Salinas was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which many have criticized for being vague and overreaching. In 2013, a set of failed reforms to the law were proposed following the suicide of famed computer programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, who was prosecuted under the act.

Instead of counting the alleged hacking incident as one crime, Salinas was charged with 44 separate felony counts of computer fraud, based on a technicality in the method that was used. Even more ludicrous than the damages that were claimed by the Hidalgo County government was the potential 440 year prison sentence if Salinas was convicted. The state leveraged its position against Salinas by making use of a bogus method of prosecution, coercing him into accepting a misdemeanor plea deal. The deal, which Salinas no doubt agreed to in the hopes that it would be best for him and his family in the face of his outrageous circumstances, resulted in a six month prison sentence and a $10,600 fine.

It is unlikely Fidel Salinas Jr, his family, or friends, expected the six months of prison time to be a literal torture sentence.

Andrew Auernheimer, better known to the Internet as “weev,” faced similarly unfair and dehumanizing conditions in 2012 after being convicted of violating those same laws for allegedly “hacking” an AT&T website by exposing (without maliciously capitalizing on) a security flaw that put over 100,000 AT&T customers at risk. In Auernheimer’s trial, the judge who sentenced him was the wife of a former AT&T lawyer. Auernheimer spent much of his sentence alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, held in what the prison refers to as “administrative segregation” — a euphemism for solitary confinement.

Since his release from prison after being vacated in federal appeals court, Auernheimer has made it a personal mission to help prison inmates and expose solitary confinement for the torture that it is.

Confinement in Special Housing Units causes neurological damage that is so profound you can see it on a CT scan. It atrophies your hippocampus. From the perspective of longterm effects on your life, solitary confinement is orders of magnitude worse for you than having blades shoved underneath your fingernails, or being shocked with a car battery.

— Andrew “weev” Auernheimer

Auernheimer reportedly spent weeks searching for Fidel Salinas’s inmate number, 52306-379, on the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, with no success. He discovered Salinas was being shuffled in and out of county facilities, being held exclusively in solitary confinement with no access to medical necessities or correspondence of any kind. Given these circumstances, it is possible not even Salinas’s own family knows his whereabouts.

Holding prisoners in solitary confinement is widely criticized by many, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, as both torture and infringement of human rights. In addition to its recognition as psychological torture, solitary confinement is also seen as a violation of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment, as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and as an ethical issue because of the limits to health care that it imposes.

More and more evidence shows that the US government is at war with hackers — technically-savvy, creative thinkers — especially those who dare question its authority. Auernheimer points out that, given how relatively few there are, hackers are subject to violence and death at the hands of the state at a rate that rivals the worst governments on Earth. This war shows no signs of stopping, especially in light of President Barack Obama’s most recent proposal for expanding federal regulation.

In furtherance of this war, the state uses torture against its “enemies” — perhaps one of the most important segments of the population when it comes to exposing its tyranny. The systematic inflated prosecution of hackers and use of torture against the convicted is evidence of nothing less. If the state tortures Fidel Salinas Jr for six months because they believe he disrupted the normal operation of a small county web server for a day, one has to wonder what they would do to someone like Edward Snowden for exposing their campaign of mass surveillance.

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