Tag Archives: samuel

Cincinnati Cop Charged With Murder in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Black Man

by EverettUHF Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here are the latest developments:

Officer Ray Tensing’s body-cam footage has been released (see above).
The University of Cincinnati fired Tensing following the indictment. Tensing, who has turned himself in, is due to appear in court Thursday morning. Hamilton County sheriff’s spokesman Michael Robison has told Associate Press that Tensing will be jailed overnight before his court appearance.
Samuel DuBose’s family held a press conference in which his mother, Audrey DuBose, said, “I can forgive him. I can forgive anybody. God forgave us.”
Mark O’ Mara, an attorney representing the DuBose family, has asked the community to respond in a “peaceful and nonaggressive” manner to the news of Officer Tensing’s indictment. In 2013 O’Mara represented George Zimmerman when he was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin.
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said in a statement, “We wanted the just, fair thing to be done, we wanted the truth to come out.” He also noted that the Hamilton County Prosecutor was “not pushing an agenda, but doing the right thing.” Cranley told reporters Tuesday that “everyone has the right to peacefully protest, but we will not tolerate lawlessness.”

Officials in Hamilton County, Ohio, released body-camera footage on Wednesday that shows the shooting death of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man pulled over by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing on July 19 for driving without a front license plate.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Video Shows Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in Texas Jail


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

The video was released as Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters announced that Tensing would be indicted on a charge of murder.

“I mean, it was so unnecessary for this to occur,” Deters said when he announced the indictment. “This doesn’t happen in the United States…People don’t get shot for a traffic stop unless they’re violent toward a police officer. And he wasn’t.” Later, Deters added that what happened was “without question a murder.”

According to reports, the 43-year-old DuBose didn’t produce identification after the traffic stop, and a scuffle ensued. Tensing had claimed he was dragged by DuBose’s car, but Deters said in his press conference that wasn’t the case.

DuBose’s death comes on the heels of increased national scrutiny around police brutality. According to the Washington Post’s analysis of police shootings, 555 people have been killed by police in 2015 thus far. The arming of campus police officers has also been on the rise: Seventy-five percent of four-year private and public colleges had armed officers during the 2011-12 school year, up from 68 percent in 2004-05, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

At one point Deters said the city should provide police services for the university.

“I just think the Cincinnati Police Department would be better suited to do this than university police,” Deters said. “When you led to a murder like this, a shooting in the head where your stop was no front license plate—I mean, that’s crazy. And if you see this family, how they’re suffering from this, it’s ridiculous that this happened.”

Meanwhile, the University of Cincinnati canceled all classes on the Uptown and Medical campuses starting at 11 a.m. Wednesday, bracing for a protest even before the grand jury decision was announced and the video was released.

Lindsay Scribner, a member of the UC Students Against Injustice, says her group is taking protest cues from the community and Black Lives Matter Cincinnati.

“The community isn’t planning anything violent, but the police are expecting, waiting and provoking,” Scribner told Mother Jones. “They are criminalizing the community, especially black members before they even do anything wrong. I’ve seen SWAT members, university police, Cincinnati Police, and Ohio State patrol men. They have everyone out here waiting for some black person to screw up.”

Source:  

Cincinnati Cop Charged With Murder in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Black Man

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Scribner, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cincinnati Cop Charged With Murder in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Black Man

The Supreme Court Just Stopped Texas From Closing Almost All Of Its Abortion Clinics

by EuniceT24vtxxf Posted on June 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Supreme Court on Monday halted key portions of Texas’s anti-abortion law from going into effect that would have shutdown all but nine abortion clinics in the state. The stay will remain in place while abortion rights advocates prepare to take their case seeking to overturn portions of the Texas law to the Supreme Court.

The court’s four most conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the order, indicating they would have let the clinics close.

From the New York Times:

The case concerns two parts of a state law that imposes strict requirements on abortion providers. One requires all abortion clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers,” including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Other parts of the law took effect in 2013, causing about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close.

Read the order:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/2120406-the-supreme-court-just-stopped-texas-from.js”,
width: 630,
height: 420,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-2120406-the-supreme-court-just-stopped-texas-from”
);

This article is from – 

The Supreme Court Just Stopped Texas From Closing Almost All Of Its Abortion Clinics

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Supreme Court Just Stopped Texas From Closing Almost All Of Its Abortion Clinics

Unions Should Brace Themselves for a Major Supreme Court Loss

by KianHeinrich Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s official: The Supreme Court will wait until Monday, the final day of the current term, to issue its decision in Harris v. Quinn. As I explained in May, Harris is a blockbuster case that could, in a worst-case scenario, wipe public-employee unions such as SEIU and AFSCME off the map. And the chances of a damaging decision in Harris just increased—here’s why.

Heading into Thursday, the Supreme Court had Harris and three other cases left to decide. The justices chose to issue their opinions concerning presidential recess appointments (Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board) and so-called buffer zones keeping protesters at a distance from abortion clinics (McCullen v. Coakley). Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal member of the court, wrote the Canning opinion; Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, took the lead in McCullen.

This makes it more likely that Justice Samuel Alito, who we’ve yet to hear much from, will write the opinion in Harris, which points to bad news for public-employee unions. “There’s almost no question Justice Alito has this opinion unless he lost his majority along way,” tweets Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine law professor. “Anti-union is his signature issue.”

Labor officials can only hope Hasen is wrong. Alito is strongly anti-union. In the 2012 case Knox v. SEIU, Alito essentially invited labor’s foes to challenge the basic model of public-employee unionism, in which non-union employees can be made to pay dues to a union for bargaining on their behalf, representing them in grievance issues, etc. Harris makes such a challenge; it’s what Alito asked for.

Unions like to call those non-member payments “fair share” dues. If it’s the union’s job, they reason, to represent all members and nonmembers in a unionized workplace, then all those workers should pay their fair share for that representation. Conservatives—and Alito—say fair-share fees violate the First Amendment rights of non-union workers.

The outcome in Harris could cut a number of ways. The Supreme Court could uphold the lower court’s decision dismissing the suit—a big union victory. It could strike down fair share fees—the equivalent of Congress passing a national right-to-work bill. (Right-to-work laws ban unions from collecting those fair-share fees from non-members.) Public-employee unions would survive that decision, but it would be a blow. The court could also effectively enact right-to-work nationwide and kneecap a union’s ability to exclusively represent employees in a unionized workplace. That would be catastrophic for public-employee unions.

If there’s any judge who might go that far, it would be Samuel Alito.

Link to article:

Unions Should Brace Themselves for a Major Supreme Court Loss

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Unions Should Brace Themselves for a Major Supreme Court Loss