Delaying Miranda warnings under the “public safety exception” - including under the Obama DOJ’s radically expanded version of it - is one thing. But denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is another thing entirely: as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined Glen Greenwald, ‘Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored’(Source: Guardian)
Cambodia’s women activists are redefining the housewife
By leading a sustained campaign of nonviolent protest against forced evictions, Cambodian housewives are changing the country’s political map. Excerpt:
Western feminists should not lose sight of the fact that in many countries around the world, women’s role as wife and mother remains central to their family and societal status. When homes are threatened with destruction, it is women who are disproportionately affected. While women are commonly framed as defenceless “soft targets” in forced evictions, Vanny and her fellow housewives complicate this assumption. Harnessing softness as a strategy rather than a hindrance, these women have committed themselves to a sustained campaign of nonviolent protest. Worried that involving men would only encourage violence, “turning men into goldfish clashing with each other”, they are using their positions as wives and mothers to co-opt riot police through their songs of suffering and to morally shame them when they are publicly beaten.
Photograph: Erika Pineros/Demotix/Corbis
In 2007, a 17-year-old girl called Cora Fletcher was charged with retail theft. Over a year later, after she missed a court date, she was sent to the Cook County jail, in Illinois. She was eight months pregnant at the time.
During a pre-natal check-up at the facility, her baby appeared to have no heartbeat, so she was sent to the county hospital. As the medical team tried to induce her, Fletcher claims that both her hands and both her feet were shackled to either side of the bed. Only when she finally went into labor, three days later, was one hand and one foot released. It’s hard to imagine a more crucifying way to force a woman to try to give birth.
Sadly for Fletcher, there was no payoff for the trauma and humiliation she was forced to endure, as her baby was born dead.
Read the rest here
Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off.
I have watched male police and TSA members standing by side by side salaciously observing women as they have been “patted down” in airports. I have experienced the weirdly phrased, sexually perverse intrusiveness of the state during an airport “pat-down”, which is always phrased in the words of a steamy paperback (“do you have any sensitive areas? … I will use the back of my hands under your breasts …”). One of my Facebook commentators suggested, I think plausibly, that more women are about to be found liable for arrest for petty reasons (scarily enough, the TSA is advertising for more female officers).
Naomi Wolf on how the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses
In a grim irony which marks a new low even for the lethal injection business, drugs that were meant to save lives in one of the world’s poorest countries are set to be used to kill in US.
Nebraska is fighting to be allowed to carry out an execution using drugs manufactured in India, which the manufacturer believed were bound for sub-Saharan Africa for legitimate medical use. When this event takes place it will be the first execution in Nebraska since 1997, and the first ever in the state by lethal injection. You’d think the Nebraska department of correctional services would be anxious to see all go smoothly. That they’d leave no room for error, no reason to query their new execution procedure. Not so. Their blundering attempts to procure execution drugs over the past 12 months have drawn criticism from the courts, sanctions by the drugs enforcement agency, public opprobrium and ridicule from the press. It would be farcical were it not so tragic.
Maya Foa on how a drug made in India to save lives is to be used for the lethal injection of Michael Ryan in the US, against the company’s will
I became disabled in 2009. My new condition left me unable to work, and I also had to start using a wheelchair – but one change I didn’t expect was the constant abuse, the most humiliating being drunk men trying to grab my breasts and face on evenings out. I’m an easy target – if my brakes are on I can’t turn away – and, anyway, who would believe someone would grope a wheelchair user? I don’t often talk about it because I feel ashamed, something made worse by the reactions I received when I complained – like I am either making it up or should be grateful. We asked disabled readers to write about how they are perceived by the general public. A heartbreaking panel.
Photograph: Ric Francis/AP
On MLK day, one set of data to remember: Almost one in 10 young black men are behind bars.
California spends $47,102 per inmate per year. It is a national disgrace. The mass incarceration of African-Americans is the civil rights issue of the day. The statistics are horrific.
One in three African-American boys born in 2001 stands a lifetime risk of going to jail, according to the American Leadership Forum.
In 2007, one in every 15 black children had a parent in prison. According to Ohio State University law professor and author Michelle Alexander, there are more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole in the US now than there were enslaved in 1850.
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