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I Met the White Nationalist Who "Falcon Punched" a 95-Pound Female Protester

by WHRJacquie Posted on May 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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Punching a 95-pound woman in the face might be the best thing that ever happened to Nathan Damigo. The 30-year-old Marine veteran and leader of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa was until recently an obscure ex-con and member of a marginal hate group, but in the past three weeks he’s suddenly became an icon to the alt-right for being the man behind the fist that clocked anti-fascist protester Emily Rose Marshall at a rally of far-right groups on April 15 in Berkeley, California. 4Chan users created memes celebrating him for his “falcon punch.” The neo-nazi site Daily Stormer hailed him as a “true hero.” Berkeley police, meanwhile, have declined to state whether they are pursuing charges against him.

Twelve days after that encounter, at another far-right gathering—billed as a “fuck antifa” rally—admirers approach Damigo, who is dressed in a white hoodie, to shake his hand and pat him on the back. “You’re sort of famous now,” says Faith Gold from the anti-semitic Canadian website Rebel Media.

A video of Nathan Damigo (top) and Emily Rose Marshall (below) during the street fighting in Berkeley on April 15 went viral. Stephen Lam/Reuters via ZUMA Press

“I’ve just been really humbled,” Damigo tells Gold. “A lot of people have shown support and come up to me today and said thank you for fighting for our ability to come here and speak.”

The rally, held in MLK Civic Center Park, includes speakers Brittany Pettibone, a writer for AltRight.com who promotes the conspiracy theory of “white genocide,” and Vice cofounder Gavin McInnes, head of the Proud Boys, a “Western Chauvinist” street brawling fraternity. Large white men in motorcycle helmets, carrying sticks and bats, guard the stage. There are a surprising number of people of color in red MAGA hats including “Latina for Trump” Irma Hinajosa. Anti-fascist counter-protesters like Marshall are, for the most part, nowhere to be seen.

When I approach Damigo and ask him about the response he’s received to the video of the assault, he says it’s been “great.” Recruitment for Identity Evropa has “gone through the roof” since Trump’s inauguration, he adds, growing from just 12 people last year to more than 450 members across dozens of campuses. Cal State Stanislaus, where Damigo is a social sciences major, launched an “immediate investigation” after the video was posted online. Damigo says he thinks the investigation is “funny.”

After the punching video went viral, the alt-right unleashed a doxing campaign against Marshall and her family, publishing their home addresses and phone numbers online. Marshall received rape threats and other abusive messages and images of pornography work she’d done were turned into memes and posted to her grandmother’s Facebook page. Damigo tells me these actions were justified. “I think we’re engaged in cultural warfare right now,” he says. Anti-fascists, he claims, doxed him and his family last year. “This is part of that culture war.”

Damigo’s assault and the adulation that followed may indeed be new battles in a long culture war, but his story also shows how a young man from California has slowly been radicalized—in the military, in prison, and on the internet—and in turn how he’s helping “racialize,” or make racially conscious, a new generation of young white conservatives.

Damigo tells me he has returned to Berkeley because he supports free speech, which he’d like to exercise in order to promote Identity Evropa’s message that white people should take pride in their race and resist being “ethnically cleansed.”

As we talk, he forces a smile, but his quivering lip betrays an underlying frustration. He repeats catchwords like “radical diversity,” “radical inclusion,” and “multiracialism” throughout our interview. He speaks like someone who has practiced his talking points—a skill he teaches other white nationalists—but he hasn’t quite learned how to integrate them into a back and forth with a reporter.

I ask Damigo whether the free speech he is advocating for in Berkeley applies to everyone and not just white people, especially given the fact that he promotes the creation of an ethnically pure, white “ethnostate.” He pauses. His lip quivers. “We have a right to exist,” he says. “We have a right to an identity.”

When I press him and ask what measures he would go to in order to create that ethnostate, he admits that violence might be needed. “Politics,” he says, “is essentially the use of force and power.”

Damigo is a product of the rapidly growing right-wing ideology known loosely as “identitarianism,” and his current 15-minutes of fame has, in turn, made him one of its newly anointed popularizers. Born in Lewiston, Maine, to parents he describes as “fundamentalist Baptists,” his family later moved to San Jose, California, where Damigo attended a “small, private Christian school.” White people make up about half of San Jose’s population but for Damigo, it felt like “everybody was kind of a minority,” as he once told Countercurrents TV, a white nationalist YouTube channel. Many of his friends were Filipino and Latino and he noticed that they “had a very tight-knit group thing going on. I would go and I would hang out and there was always something that was kinda off, that wasn’t really fitting.”

Damigo’s parents imparted on him their “hawkish, neocon views,” and in 2004, at age 18, Damigo joined the Marine Corps and completed two tours in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province. “For the first time in my life, I was around a lot of white people,” he said. “I noticed that they seemed to share a lot of my views.” His friends of color back home were never mean to him, but he felt an ease with his new white comrades that felt much more “natural.” With his friends of color “it seemed like on every single issue politically we disagreed. No matter how hard I tried to convince them of the logic of the views I was espousing, it just didn’t seem to sink in and I couldn’t understand why.”

Damigo lost several friends in combat and when he returned home, “There were a lot of demons I was facing,” he said. “I felt betrayed by the government.” He found it hard to reintegrate and began drinking heavily. About a month after returning from his second tour, he went on a binge and held up an Arab taxi driver at gun point, robbing him of $43. He was convicted of armed robbery and spent a year in county jail followed by four years in prison.

Damigo was featured in Wartorn 1861-2010, a 2010 HBO documentary about PTSD coproduced by Sopranos star James Gandolfini. The film follows Damigo as he awaits sentencing. When Damigo’s brother asks him if PTSD made him do it, he replies, “I know it was PTSD.” His mother says that at the time of the crime, “he was drunk, he was confused, he was probably suicidal. And when he came up on this guy, all of a sudden he went into combat mode. He was back in Iraq in a heartbeat.” After Damigo was sentenced to six years in prison, his mother told the film crew, “They took him when he was 18 and put him through a paper shredder and then sent him back to us. We get to try to put all the pieces back together. Sometimes it’s like Humpty Dumpty: they don’t go back together.”

Prison, Damigo told Countercurrents TV, ended up “perhaps being the best thing that ever happened to me.” While locked up, he became “racialized.” Because California was under a federal court order to depopulate its prisons, Damigo was sent to a private facility in Oklahoma run by the Corrections Corporation of America. In prison, he told me, “everybody kind of breaks down on race. It’s constantly present.” He took to a white man who seemed to have a deep interest in politics, and who recommended Damigo read My Awakening by former KKK leader David Duke. This in turn led him to more serious sociological works like Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society and esoteric white nationalist texts like Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance. “From there,” Damigo said, “I think the rest is history.”

Damigo’s activism started after he was released in 2014. He became enamored with the French nativist movement Bloc Identitaire, whose so-called identitarian ideology aims to extend the insights of identity politics to white people in order to preserve and promote “white” culture. Identitarianism was a far-right, anti-immigration movement, but it was influenced in part by socialist ideas. It opposed “imperialism, whether it be American or Islamic.” But most of all Damigo was impressed by the movement’s “professionalism” in advocating for the “interests” of white Europeans. “They have mastered this branding, this aesthetic. They’ve really done an amazing job with it.”

Around the same time, Damigo came across YouTube videos by a man named Angelo Gage, another white nationalist Iraq veteran who has struggled with severe PTSD. Damigo commented on Gage’s videos and the two struck up a friendship online. Damigo eventually assisted Gage in founding the National Youth Front (NYF), a youth-oriented offshoot of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The NYF’s main tactic was to wage provocative, media-courting campaigns against college instructors. “A lot of what we were going after were…professors…teaching these cultural Marxist, anti-white theories like white privilege theory and critical race theory, who were publicly making anti-white statements on social media.” They posted flyers on campuses with professors’ pictures, branded with the term “anti-white.” At Arizona State University NYF members pressured administrators to discontinue a class called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Damigo seems to see no contradiction between his claim to defend free speech and his efforts to silence a professor. “I’m pretty big on freedom of speech obviously…but right now in the school system what they have is really just indoctrination…We had an issue with that.”

When another organization named Youthfront threatened to sue NYF for using its name, NYF fell apart. Damigo saw it as an opportunity. He had wanted NYF to be more overtly “pro-white.” At the same time, a broader, loosely knit movement was forming called the alt-right, which mostly existed on the internet. Damigo thought it was “the next natural step to take this decentralized internet-based movement into the real world. We’re trying to create a fraternity and brotherhood for people who have awakened and who see the world in a different light. We want to get the normies’ attention.”

Identity Evropa, formed in 2016, is an exclusive organization with a stringent interview process for membership. “We want people who represent us with their presence,” Damigo said. The organization tries to challenge stereotypes about white nationalism, which is part of its seduction. There are no skinheads or white hoods or swastikas. Its members wear suits and focus on debate and rhetorical strategy. Its main focus over the past year has been branding. Members hang posters and put stickers around campuses and busy downtown areas, trying to build name recognition and “bring attention to the concept of becoming racialized.”

The biggest obstacle to getting that attention, according to Damigo, is restrictions imposed by online platforms. Google began cracking down on alt-right YouTube accounts after companies threatened to pull advertisements. White nationalists, in turn, have migrated en masse to Twitter, where they are relatively unrestricted. Damigo says when he joined Twitter a couple years ago, there were “perhaps only 20 pro-white accounts and I just watched it blossom over the last couple years.”

“We are exponentially growing right now,” Damigo said. “Next semester, Identity Evropa is going to have much more of a face than we’ve had over the last semester. We’re going to be going to schools, setting up tables. Our members are going to be out there talking to students.”

At the rally in Berkeley, an argument has erupted. A black woman is yelling at a group of white men on the right-wing side. “You’re racist!” she shouts.

“She’s pulling the black card,” someone mutters.

“You’re racist!” she repeats.

“Fuck Donald Trump!” a Latino man standing next to her shouts.

Damigo is off standing at a distance by himself, aloof. One of the white men goes and finds a black woman with a Trump shirt and brings her back to argue.

I later ask Damigo what he thinks about the fact that there are people of color at the rally on his side. “I’m fine with it,” he says. “It’s not the same movement, but this is a big tent coalition.” He says he is okay making strategic alliances with everyone on the far right, even if they aren’t white, united by shared issues like pressuring Trump to build a border wall or end the amnesty program for illegal immigrants. But none of this, he makes clear, amounts to a belief in racial equality. “No one’s really equal to anyone else in a biological sense,” he says.

“We have a right to preserve our heritage,” he adds. “And part of that requires having a nation and having a country where we can preserve ourselves.” He recognizes that a whites-only ethnostate is a “utopian idea”—or a dystopian one, to everyone else—that will take many steps to achieve. For now, he’s content to focus on “racializing” white people and stopping immigration. “It’s not a human right to live in a white country,” he tells me, “or live next to white people.”

Two white women in Trump t-shirts stand by politely as we talk. When Damigo looks over, one mouths, “I support you.” She holds her phone forward, asking for a picture. Damigo excuses himself from me. The woman thanks him for punching Emily Rose Marshall. They take a selfie together. Damigo smiles wide.

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I Met the White Nationalist Who "Falcon Punched" a 95-Pound Female Protester

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Here’s What It’s Like To Be a Defense Investigator in a Rigged Criminal Justice System

by LeeDartnell06 Posted on August 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Once upon a time I was a journalist, covering wars in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East. I made it my job to write about the victims of war, the civilian casualties. To me, they were hardly “collateral damage,” that bloodless term the military persuaded journalists to adopt. To me, they were the center of war. Now I’m a private eye. I work mostly on homicide cases for defense lawyers on the mean streets of Oakland, California, long viewed as one of America’s murder capitals.

Indeed, on some days Oakland feels like Saigon, Tegucigalpa, or Gaza. There’s the deception of daily life and the silent routine of dread punctured by out-of-the blue mayhem. The city’s poorest neighborhoods are sporadic war zones whose violence sometimes explodes onto streets made rich overnight by the tech boom. On any quiet day, you can drive down San Pablo Avenue past St. Columba Catholic Church, where a thicket of white crosses, one for every Oaklander killed by gun violence in a given year, crowds its front yard.

~dgies/Flickr

Whenever I tell people I’m a private eye, they ask: “Do you get innocent people off death row?” Or “Can you follow my ex around?” Or “What kind of gun do you carry?”

I always disappoint them. Yes, I do defend people against the death penalty, but so far all my defendants have probably been guilty—of something. (Often, I can only guess what.) While keeping them off death row may absolve me of being an accessory after the fact to murder, it also regularly condemns my defendants to life in prison until they die there.

And I find spying on people their ex-spouses fantasize about killing much sleazier than actual murder. Finally, I’m a good shot, but I don’t carry a gun because that’s the best way to get shot. I work on the low-profile cases: poor people charged with murder, burglary, or robbery, who don’t have the money for a lawyer or their own P.I. (I’m paid, if you can call it that, by the state.)

Then people invariably want to know, “How can you help defend a murderer?” The law school answer is: The constitution guarantees everyone a fair trial. For me, however, if it’s a death penalty case, it’s simple: I’m against the death penalty no matter what the accused did (or didn’t do). But in this age of stop and frisk, racial profiling, mandatory sentencing, the death penalty, and life without parole—not to mention execution-by-cop—the real answer is: I can’t. Defend anybody, that is. Not really.

I’m just a tiny cog in America’s vast Criminal Injustice System. One of the lawyers I work for sometimes calls himself “just a potted plant.” My defendants may be guilty—but seldom of what they are charged with. They are rarely convicted of what they actually did and are never sentenced fairly.

One day recently, I was getting ready to hit the streets in search of a witness to a murder when I found in my email Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the Supreme Court Case of Utah v. Strieff. It had been forwarded by a psychologist with whom I once worked on a death penalty case.

Anyone lulled into thinking the new coalition of liberals and conservatives who hope to reform the criminal justice system will actually get somewhere should read Strieff. The facts are the following: A Salt Lake City cop was watching a home rumored to house methamphetamine dealers. When Edward Joseph Strieff left the house, the cop stopped him, questioned him, and checked his record. When the cop found a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket, he searched Strieff, found meth in his pockets, and arrested him for possession.

In Strieff and other cases leading up to it, the Supreme Court has now decreed that evidence gathered in an illegal search isn’t “the fruit of the poisoned tree” as Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in 1939, and so no longer must be suppressed. Even though gathered illegally, evidence can be used at trial against a defendant. In short, stop-and-frisk policing and racial profiling, key targets of the new civil rights movement, just got a stamp of approval from the highest court in the land.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented. But it was Justice Sotomayor who sounded the alarm in an opinion evoking nothing less than James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and adding quotations from W.E.B. Du Bois, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Michelle Alexander for good measure. She wrote:

“The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: this case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic war­rants—even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arrest­ing you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent.”

Sotomayor concluded:

“This case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.

“We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated.’ They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.”

Her dissent describes daily existence for my defendants. Too poor to buy car insurance, fix broken tail lights, pay parking tickets, or get green cards, they are always on high alert for the police. (Alice Goffman’s brilliant study, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, describes just how it works in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods). My defendants have been sentenced to life in a war zone even before they find themselves charged in court. They have been sentenced to a life without parole or sometimes to death, caught as they are in a crossfire between cops and warring neighborhood gangstas.

A warrant for, say, unpaid parking tickets discovered in a Strieff-approved stop gets you a search of yourself and your car by police and maybe a bust for weed, the intoxicant of choice for many of the poor. If you object or run or the arresting officer is having a bad day, it may get you dead. (Refusing to pay protection money to your neighborhood punks or standing on the wrong corner at the wrong time may do the same.)

Once you’re arrested, if you say you want a lawyer, you get a public defender with so many cases she or he may not even be able to meet you or read the complaint against you before you appear in court. You may serve weeks or months in jail, even if you’re innocent, before your case is heard, and years before you are tried.

A district attorney has a whole police department to use to investigate a crime (although the Oakland Police Department, which I’m often up against, solves only 27 percent of its murder cases, and so is not exactly the most formidable of foes). (A recent investigation by the East Bay Express suggests that some Oakland cops are too busy hooking up with underage prostitutes to solve murders.) But if a DA needs to find a witness, the OPD’s army of street cops can often locate him through their confidential informants. Or they can pull him in on a warrant for those unpaid parking tickets, threaten a drug bust or revocation of his parole or probation, or hold him as a material witness if he resists cooperating.

At best, a defendant gets just me—and most of the accused don’t get an investigator at all. The landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright may have given poor defendants the right to an attorney, but there is no legal right to an investigator (except in death penalty cases). And unlike a DA, no one has to talk to me or face trouble with the law. I have no muscle. But I have been known to find a witness who doesn’t want to be found and nag him or her into submission.

In the last 10 years, in cases mostly in Northern California, among scores of people I’ve helped defend, only three have been white—and they were as destitute as the poor blacks and Latinos who jam American jails and prisons.

Defense teams I’ve been on start off by guessing if and why the accused might have done what he’s charged with. It’s human nature to do so. But if the accused is pleading not guilty, it’s better not to know. “I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t there,” one death penalty lawyer I work with regularly says to shut off such speculation. As for the why, the shrinks often can’t help, even if you call on them to testify. Decades of research into the criminal mind often comes down to: “He snapped.” That’s not a good line for a jury, but it’s the kicker to many a defense meeting.

In a real trial, the truth of what actually happened doesn’t matter anyway. Only the truth of the evidence counts.

Are poverty, racism, and a desperate childhood a defense? Prosecutors love to face this argument. They get on their high horses and trot out the American dream and all the poor people who suck up their rage and despair and don’t murder someone. All the folks who don’t snap.

But in California, what might have caused someone to snap isn’t admissible at trial anyway, except in death penalty cases. A “diminished capacity” defense was abolished in 1981 after ex-San Francisco Supervisor Dan White used one to beat a murder rap for killing Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The jury bought his lawyer’s argument—which came to be known as the “Twinkie defense”—that White was addled by junk food when he killed the two of them. It ignored evidence that White intended and planned the murder, taking his gun to City Hall, climbing through a window to avoid metal detectors, and reloading it after first shooting Moscone.

These days, only in the penalty phase of a death penalty case—when the jury decides whether the defendant they’ve just found guilty will face capital punishment or life in prison without parole—can defense lawyers present evidence of the tragic facts of the defendant’s life. The jury may then hear of his years in foster care, his mom the crack addict, his dad absent in prison, and the older brother who initiated him into street life. Only then will the jury be asked to see the accused as a person with a life beyond the crime with which he is charged. The defense will finally replace a prosecutor’s blown-up mug shot of the defendant and Facebook screen shots of him showing off a gun with family photos of him at his sixth birthday party decked out in a silly hat and others of his toddler and baby mama.

Most jurors don’t much like this defense. They assume it’s just an excuse. But it’s not. It’s an explanation.

Take Larry. He’s an OG (original gangsta, or old guy), a 50-year-old African-American man who grew up in dire poverty in Deep East, Oakland’s most murderous neighborhood. Larry has symptoms of schizophrenia but has never been able to get real mental health care. He’s been living, on and off, with his mother who is also schizophrenic in Acorn (“The ‘Corn”), one of the toughest housing projects in West Oakland. His mother is too afraid of its gangbangers to leave her apartment. Larry recently told a counselor at a walk-in clinic for the poor that he thought he had PTSD from all the shooting and killing he’s witnessed.

Like many poor Oaklanders, he makes his meager living in the underground economy, dealing small amounts of weed to regular customers who phone him on his cell. While cell phones have made it possible to sell drugs without the turf battles of the past, The ‘Corn is ruled by a gang of young punks called The Acorn Mob and their rivals, The Gashouse Team. The Mob doesn’t just support itself moving guns or drugs. It also makes money ripping off small-time dealers like Larry, demanding protection money from neighborhood people, and robbing the elderly when they cash their social security checks.

Like many poor people living on such mean streets, Larry is always looking over his shoulder. A simple walk down the block might mean being rolled by The Mob, accosted by police, or caught in the crossfire of someone else’s feud.

In early 2012, Larry’s life dropped off a cliff. His brother died of cancer; his daughter died in a freak case of emergency room malpractice; he witnessed a friend gunned down in a gang battle; and he was robbed at gunpoint on a street near The ‘Corn. Meanwhile, the Acorn Mob was stepping up pressure on OGs like Larry to pay them protection money.

As Larry tells it, one morning that August, two of the most vicious Mob gangbangers dogged him on the streets around The ‘Corn, demanding to know when he’d take up a collection from his OG buddies to pay them off. He took shelter along with his crew in a friend’s apartment in one of the project’s towers. When he told his friends about the latest threats, the group debated what to do, damping their fears by smoking weed and drinking mai tais.

Later, near dark, Larry and his friend Arthur wandered over to the local liquor store to buy the cigarillos they filled with weed to make blunts. On the way, the same two Acorn Mob punks who had accosted them earlier that day threatened to kill Larry if he didn’t come up with some money fast. Larry and Arthur sought refuge in the store, but one of the young thugs followed them inside. The other waited outside the door.

Larry had had enough. He snapped. He grabbed an old handgun Arthur carried for protection and ran out of the store. He says he fired once, hoping to scare off the two of them. That started a volley of wild shots. When Arthur’s gun jammed, Larry ran back inside the liquor store. As soon as the shooting stopped, Larry and Arthur split the neighborhood. Somehow in the melee, one of the Acorn mobsters was shot and later died at the county hospital.

Larry and Arthur were arrested some months later. Larry was charged with murder and Arthur with being a felon with a gun and an accessory with knowledge of a crime. Word on the street was that the victim had been killed accidently by his own cousin, the gangsta who had followed Larry into the liquor store. Even the victim’s stepfather told me he believed that. But no witness—and there were many standing outside the liquor store during the melee, including several of Larry’s buddies—would come forward. They all had records, were doing drugs, and were afraid of the police.

Six cartridges from one gun and a single cartridge from another were found in the street near the body. Neither gun was ever found. The victim had suffered a “through and through” wound, which meant there were no bullet fragments to match to a particular gun anyway.

California’s self-defense and provocation laws—unlike Florida’s “stand your ground law,” which figured in George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin—are very strict. Larry’s lawyer worried that a judge would rule self-defense couldn’t be justified because Larry had fired the first shot (even if it was, as he claimed, in the air). His possible PTSD, the recent dire tragedies in his personal life, the pressures of Oakland’s mean streets, the fact that his mind was addled by weed and mai tais—all would be irrelevant in a California trial.

So Larry didn’t have the luxury of a Twinkie defense. He feared a jury. No poor person gets a jury of his or her peers. Few poor people are called for jury duty because the lists of potential jurors are made up from voter and drivers’ license records; few poor people living the fugitive life vote and many don’t have a driver’s license. Coming to court might mean being stopped and frisked by the police. (I’ve had a defense witness arrested on a warrant while waiting to testify outside court and others who have been followed home by the police after they showed up to support a family member on trial.) No prosecutor would permit anyone on a jury who’s led the kind of life Larry has — someone with a drug record (even if 20 years old), or who understood life and death in Oakland’s war zones firsthand.

Larry feared mandatory sentencing, which severely restricts a judge’s ability to vary a sentence by taking into consideration mitigating facts in a particular person’s life like Larry’s clean record for the last 20 years, his possible PTSD, or the daily grind of violence in The ‘Corn. That meant he was facing 25 years to life if convicted of murder. For defending himself. For firing one shot when it wasn’t even clear who had killed the victim.

Larry took a plea to a killing he may not have done. Voluntary manslaughter with a mandatory sentence of 12 years in prison.

The Acorn Mob youngster who threatened Larry in the liquor store that August night and probably fired the fatal round was soon arrested for many armed robberies and sent to prison for 15 years.

I saw Larry right before he left the county jail for prison. I apologized for not being able to defend him. He thanked me for trying and added, “It ain’t just, but that’s how they do.”

Former journalist Judith Coburn, who has written for Mother Jones and many other outlets, became a P.I. 10 years ago.

Original article: 

Here’s What It’s Like To Be a Defense Investigator in a Rigged Criminal Justice System

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When You See the Film of These Brave Veterans in Therapy, It Will Change How You Think About PTSD

by Nilda0140pi Posted on May 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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As millions of Americans around the country fire up the grills on Memorial Day and welcome the arrival of summer, it might be easy to forget what the holiday is supposed to commemorate. That’s why on Monday, the POV (Point of View) series on PBS will air Of Men and War, a documentary years in the making that chronicles the stories of American combat veterans as they undergo therapy to cope with their traumatic memories of war.

French filmmaker and producer Laurent Bécue-Renard spent 10 years working on the project, conceptualizing it, scouting locations, finding veterans who would be willing to participate, and then filming their therapy sessions. He focused much of the film on the Pathway Home, a therapy and service center for veterans in Northern California that offers an immersive residential treatment setting for veterans. Bécue-Renard and his cinematographer spent 14 months filming therapy sessions and then checked in on the veterans over the course of four years, filming their family lives after treatment.

“Rage and anger carried me through everything,” one veteran says as the cameras roll. Another describes killing somebody. “I leveled my weapon, led my target, and I pulled the trigger,” he says, adding that while subsequently moving the body, “a big chunk of his brain fell on my foot.” As he starts to tear up, he describes the blank stare on the corpse’s face. “He just kept looking at me.”

The film originally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and went on to win the award for best feature-length documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam later that year. Monday’s airing is the US television debut. Bécue-Renard’s first war documentary, War Wearied, was released in 2003 and chronicled the lives of three war widows in Bosnia. Of Men and War is the second film in this trilogy; the third will focus on the children of veterans and how their parents’ military service shapes their lives.

Bécue-Renard spoke with Mother Jones about the process of making the film, how it affected him, and what he thinks people should take away from it.

Mother Jones: This film deals with some pretty heavy stuff. How did the material affect you?

Laurent Bécue-Renard: I had a specific quest while doing this project. Both my grandfathers fought in World War I, but they never spoke about it to their wives, nor to their kids, or to their grandkids. So I always felt that there was something that wasn’t being told in the family and that I definitely wanted to access. I also have my own experience of war as a civilian, since I spent the last year of the war in Bosnia as the editor of an online magazine. That experience determined my career as a filmmaker, and I first made a film called War Wearied, where the question of being a war widow was addressed. After that film, I really felt the need to have access to what it is to be a young man sent to war, survive it, come back home, and start a family, or live with a family, and raise kids.

I was ready to hear what I was going to hear while I would be shooting. Besides that, for three years before starting to shoot, I did extended scouting, mostly in California, with combat veterans and their families and therapists. All that I heard, including what I heard afterward while shooting, sounded very familiar. It’s not only about death, it’s about surviving. The film itself is a journey toward life, which makes it a rather positive outcome. Although it’s tough. There are a lot of difficulties for each of these young men to survive. On the daily basis when you’re sitting in the therapy room, it’s mostly about death.

So I won’t be hiding that. At times it was tough to hear, because when you’re in the editing room for four years, you keep hearing it, day after day after day after day, and we had so much material, 500 hours to edit, so it takes a toll on you, of course. But again, I had a quest, and also, as the therapist is doing in the therapy room, I was seeking to show their quest to regain life. And that also helped not only me, but also my editors and my cinematographer.

MJ: Less than 10 percent of the US population has served in the military. What do you want Americans to take away from this film?

LBR: There’s a huge amount of young men and women deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan that are paying a high price, and this is the real cost of the war. It can’t be only when we talk “this war” or “that war,” or “going to war there or there,” and we are in favor or we are against. It can’t be only a discussion over the idea or the concept or the politics of the war. It has always to bear in mind the high price that will be paid by these young men and women and their families. That’s one thing.

The second thing is, you’re right, people have no idea, consciously they have no idea. But all our families in the Western world have gone through two world wars in the course of the 20th century and subsequent wars in the post-colonial world. You’re talking about the US—all families were touched one way or another by World War II. So what these guys are saying, and what I was saying earlier about my grandfathers, it’s something that did touch their family at one stage or another, and it did shape the psyche of the family in one way or another.

I’m always amazed in America, when I write the subject and say it’s not really about now—of course it’s about now because I shot now—but it’s also about your father or your grandfather or your great grandfather. And you know, they would have said most probably the same thing as these men in the therapy room had they been in a position to talk about their experience, to talk about what they felt and how war affected them.

MJ: You point out the generational aspect of this, and it’s certainly apparent in the film. Why are generations so important in this story of war?

LBR: In the film you see a few kids who are growing up next to their father, who has been traumatized by the experience of war. And these kids that we see on screen, to some extent it is us, or it is our parents, who grew up next to a father or a grandfather that was strongly affected by the experience of war.

So it’s not that far away. You just need to think a little bit. If we, the democracies, go to war, of course it’s always a failure because we didn’t manage to solve our problem through diplomacy or politics or economics or culture or whatever. But there’s a high price that will be paid by a few young men and women, and we should always have that in mind.

It is already in our family. We might not know it consciously, but it’s there. It’s been experienced in the past and it has shaped our families.

I’m deeply convinced that most modern neuroses find their roots in the experience of war in the previous generation in the 20th century, and sometimes we don’t know why we have that kind of neurosis in our behavior, and in one way or another there’s a link to some extent with the experience of the war.

MJ: There has been a lot of PTSD coverage in the US in various mediums. What makes this film different?

LBR: The camera is, from scratch, embedded in the therapy process. And it’s part of the therapy process. Meaning that you, the viewer, you’re part of it. And you’re in this room from the very beginning of this journey that each of these guys is going through in therapy, and they want you to be there; otherwise they would not accept the camera. It is, for them, very important to be acknowledged, and that their trauma and their experience be validated by not only the community they belong to, but the community of mankind that they feel separated from because of their experience with war. I know a lot of programs have addressed the question of…what is PTSD, what are the consequences of PTSD? But here you’re part of the process.

MJ: It seems as if the role of narrative in all this is really important.

LBR: Part of the trauma and part of the consequences of the trauma is that they feel so lonely. Not only within the family, but within the community. The premise of the film is also that this story they’re working on and their work as a patient in therapy is something that is going to be shared. The process itself, not only the story, but the process of how difficult it is to find a way to tell a meaningful story about what happened to you in the context of the war. That’s what you’re witnessing on screen.

It’s not a depressing process. This is the difference between just interviewing people with trauma. Here they are in a survival process. They want to survive, they want to live. So what you’re witnessing is their fight for survival, even though it’s tough, and things you’re going to be hearing are tough things. Even though these guys went through very, very difficult things, they’re fighting to survive psychologically. And that’s what you’re witnessing, and you’re part of their survival journey.

MJ: What do you think about the Memorial Day timing of your film’s first screening in the United States?

LBR: I’m very happy and honored that POV and PBS chose Memorial Day to broadcast the film. It’s not only about the Afghanistan or the Iraq war. It’s about all the men and women who went to war and experienced it and were traumatized by it and survived it and lived with the experience of the war. I think if people can bear that in mind, always, it will help them, even in their daily life. That’s where we come from. At one stage or another we have to face it, and it’s better than avoiding it.

I’m also very happy for the characters in the film, because for them it was not only a courageous journey to go through therapy. Very few men and women go to such a residential therapy program during which, for three to four months on average, you go to sessions and you’re really working hard on your psychological wounds. It’s a very courageous journey—but it’s all the more courageous to do it and publicly accept the camera in the room and to stick to it. They never asked us to leave the room or stop filming. They really wanted it and they did it very courageously.

And when they eventually saw the finished film, they realized and they told us how important it was for them. They realized that the film was giving a voice not only for them, but for all the guys and women who would never go to therapy or would never be heard by not only their families, but the community. So I’m so proud that it’s broadcast on Memorial Day.

Original article:  

When You See the Film of These Brave Veterans in Therapy, It Will Change How You Think About PTSD

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An Ex-Marine Killed Two People in Cold Blood. Should His PTSD Keep Him From Death Row?

by CarsonBrownell Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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At 12:44 p.m. on March 6, 2009, John Thuesen called 911. “120 Walcourt Loop,” he told the dispatcher, breathing hard. “Gunshot victims.”

The dispatcher in College Station, Texas, asked what had happened. “I got mad at my girlfriend and I shot her,” he said. “She has sucking chest wounds…”

He’d not only shot Rachel Joiner, 21, but also her older brother Travis. Thuesen had broken into the house after midnight, not sure what he’d do but wanting to see his estranged girlfriend. She was out with her ex-boyfriend, but when she returned later that morning, things “got out of hand.” Thuesen, a 25-year-old former Marine reservist, called 911 and almost immediately expressed remorse. When he was arrested, he repeatedly asked the police about the victims and tried to explain why he’d kept shooting Rachel and her brother: “I felt like I was in like a mode…like training or a game or something.”

The prosecution in the case gave it’s opening statement on May 10, 2010. With DNA evidence and no other suspects, it only took prosecutors three days to make their case. Over the next week, the defense team touched on the facts that Thuesen suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his service in Iraq, but pleaded for leniency in his sentence. None of that swayed the jury: On May 28, 2010, he was sentenced to death.

While on death row, Thuesen was given new lawyers, death penalty experts from the state’s Office of Capital and Forensic Writs. In Texas, there are often two trials, one to determine guilt or innocence and the second to determine sentencing. Lawyers argued in their 2012 petition to have both the death penalty and the conviction vacated, and for a new sentencing trial, arguing that if his lawyers had served him adequately, “John Thuesen would not be on death row today, awaiting an execution date.” In July 2015, Judge Travis Bryan III—the same judge who had presided over the criminal trial—agreed, and ruled that Thuesen’s lawyers hadn’t adequately explained the significance of his PTSD to jurors, and how it had factored into his actions on the day of the murders. Bryan also ruled that Thuesen’s PTSD wasn’t properly treated by the Veterans Health Administration. He recommended that Thuesen be granted a new punishment-phase trial. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could rule on Bryan’s recommendation at any time.

John Thuesen shortly after his arrest in 2009 Brazos County Sheriff’s Office

The ruling on his case has implications for a question that has concerned the military, veterans’ groups, and death penalty experts: Should service-related PTSD exclude veterans from the death penalty? An answer to this question could affect some of the estimated 300 veterans who now sit on death rows across the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But it’s unclear how many of them suffer from PTSD or traumatic brain injuries, given how uneven the screening for these disorders has been.

Experts are divided about whether veterans with PTSD who commit capital crimes deserve what is known as a “categorical exemption” or “exclusion.” Juveniles receive such treatment, as do those with mental disabilities. In 2009, Anthony Giardino, a lawyer and Iraq War veteran, argued in favor of this in the Fordham Law Review, writing that courts “should consider the more fundamental question of whether the government should be in the business of putting to death the volunteers they have trained, sent to war, and broken in the process” who likely would not be in that position “but for their military service.” In a Institute of Medicine study estimated that between 13 and 20 percent of the 2.6 million Americans who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan showed at least some of the symptoms of PTSD.

Add to that the training these soldiers receive. “The current efficacy of military training means we are sending to war the most proficient and lethal killers in our nation’s history,” Joshua London, a veterans’ defense lawyer and advocate for reformed judicial treatment of veterans, wrote in a 2014 law journal article, “Why Are We Killing Veterans?” “Likewise, the warriors that return home to our communities are conditioned in a manner that makes them more dangerous, volatile, and amenable to violence than any previous generation of veterans.” If a soldier seems troubled, some psychiatrists have noted, often the preferred treatment option is to provide psychotropic drugs without additional follow-up. For some, especially when combined with other drugs or alcohol, this can result in difficulty with self-control. In April 2014, journalist Ann Jones documented dozens of killings by veterans since 2002.

During his trial, the jury was presented two stark versions of Thuesen. The first was of a cold-blooded murderer. The night before the murders, Thuesen went to see Rachel, but she told him to leave her alone. He broke into her house and lay in her bed, and after she got home he shot her, then Travis, three times each. But Thuesen was also presented as a deeply traumatized soldier who, one of his fellow Marines testified, was forced to fire a heavy machine gun into a car carrying several people and at least one child. Several experts agreed that Thuesen suffered from PTSD and had tried to seek treatment over the course of at least two years. Six months before the murders, Thuesen was suicidal and taken by the police to the VA Medical Center in Houston. He stayed just a few days while he detoxed from alcohol abuse, and he was given anti-depressants and referred to counseling sessions at his local VA clinic.

Tim Rojas, the Marine who’d served with Thuesen and testified about the time he shot up the car, finds himself somewhere in the middle. “People are going to say, ‘Well then, post-traumatic stress does not give you the license to shoot or kill,” he says. “I agree with that. Of course not. But in this case, does John deserve to be on death row? No. Absolutely not. Does he need to be accountable for his actions? Yes. But there’s no way, no way, he needs to lose his life. No way.”

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An Ex-Marine Killed Two People in Cold Blood. Should His PTSD Keep Him From Death Row?

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Native Children Have the Same Rate of PTSD as Combat Veterans

by JonGulatxogkynj Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the most sobering statistic you’ll see today: American-Indian and Alaskan Native children experience PTSD at the same rate at veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a new report from a Department of Justice advisory committee, 22 percent of American-Indian and Alaskan Native juveniles have PTSD—three times higher than the national rate. Among other proposals, the committee recommends Congress grant tribes the ability to prosecute non-Indians who abuse children. Under the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress empowered tribes to prosecute non-Indians who commit domestic violence, but left other crimes, like sexual abuse, untouched.

You can read the full report here:

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Native Children Have the Same Rate of PTSD as Combat Veterans

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