Getting a Handle on What Sexual Misconduct Actually Means

I think everyone except white-wing evangelicals agrees that a forcible sex act is rape.

But what about a coworker looking at another and saying “Damn, she’s fine”?

Stealing a kiss in what you think is a romantic moment to find out she/he isn’t that in to you? I mean, in the old movies, that always seemed infamously to lead to slap a la Cary Grant and Doris Day.

Trying to force a coworker into a sexual encounter? No question this is wrong.

Can a woman be accused of sexual misconduct in attempting to coerce an unwilling male?

So where exactly are the lines?

And what can we do as a society to make sure everyone is on the same page? What is and is not acceptable is rapidly changing. As well as out view of “who” is believable. Misconduct isn’t going to be swept under the rug (unless you are a Republican).

 

What Does ‘Sexual Misconduct’ Actually Mean?

The almost infinite shades of creepy misbehavior on display are challenging the legal and cultural categories used to describe them.

“Enough is enough,” proclaimed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a December 6 press conference. Whatever the details of her colleague Al Franken’s sexual misbehavior, said Gillibrand, who has been aggressively pushing for Congress to tackle its harassment problem, he needed to step down. “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say: None of it is OK. None of it is acceptable.”

It most definitely is not. But as the public outrage over sexual misconduct gains force, it is swallowing up an increasingly diverse range of allegations, from the relatively petty (such as those lodged against Franken) to the truly monstrous (such as the claims regarding Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes). In between those poles exist almost infinite shades of creepy—which, sadly, will necessitate a great many discussions about how to deal with, and even talk about, the different types of offenses and offenders.

This is, in some ways, uncharted territory. In the past, questions of culpability were largely left to the legal realm: As long as a man didn’t get arrested or lose a lawsuit—and sometimes even if he did—he could get away with an awful lot while suffering little more than a bad-boy reputation. But the current reckoning is different, a rising tide of public shaming driven in part by shifting attitudes and expectations among younger women. Going forward, it’s hard to tell how the new lines will be drawn, much less where.

Women should be respected. Period. But not all offenders are created equal. The pattern of coercive harassment of employees allegedly perpetrated by chat show host Charlie Rose or former Representative John Conyers is not the same as the fumbling, drunken stupidity of which The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush stands accused. Thrush may or may not deserve to lose his current job for having made booze-fueled passes at, and subsequently talked smack about, female colleagues at his previous job. But his alleged offenses pale when compared to, say, ex-ABC pundit Mark Halperin’s alleged practice of groping, rubbing his erections against, and even masturbating in front of junior staffers—and then threatening to kill the careers of those who rebuffed him. (Like many of the men caught in this whirlwind, Halperin disputes at least some of the allegations against him.)

Some of the misbehavior being detailed is flat-out bizarre. Comedian Louis C.K. admitted to being a nonviolent but nevertheless intrusive exhibitionist-masturbator. It remains a public mystery precisely what Garrison Keillor did to get his radio show killed. (Something about touching a woman’s bare back when her shirt fluttered open?) Representative Joe Barton had every right to text naked pics of himself to one of his girlfriends, but threatening to use the Capitol Police to keep her quiet about their relationship was a no-no. As for former Representative Trent Franks, who felt it appropriate to pressure multiple young aides to serve as surrogate mothers for him and his wife: Someone needs to explain that The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian fiction, not a how-to guide.

Then, of course, there are the many and varied accusations circling President Donald Trump, not to mention his own boasts in this area—none of which he has addressed in a remotely coherent, much less persuasive fashion. (The Access Hollywood tape is empty locker room talk! No, wait, it’s a fake! He has never met these women! Not even the ones he’s been photographed with! Or the one who was on his show!) But that, alas, is a special topic to be saved for another day.

It is precisely because this movement is so powerful that it’s important to avoid (through frustration or disgust, exhaustion or confusion) sweeping every bad act and actor into the same mushy heap. That kind of sloppiness breeds excess and backlash. Right now, even our language is inadequate to the moment. Shoving Weinstein and Ailes under the same umbrella of sexual “misconduct” or “misbehavior” as Franken or Thrush renders such terms all but meaningless. Weinstein terrorized scores of women—psychologically, professionally, and physically—for multiple decades and is currently under investigation for rape. That’s not “misconduct” or “harassment.” It’s an atrocity, possibly wrapped in multiple felonies. Both genders need to find a way to address some of these qualitative distinctions without sounding like anyone is being let off the hook.

This may sound obvious, until, for instance, you wander into an angry Twitter mob of John Conyers supporters demanding to know why the ex-congressman’s sins are seen by many to be worse than Franken’s. Well, for starters, Franken didn’t use tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to secretly settle an aide’s harassment claim. As for the underlying misconduct, if one believes the accusations, Conyers’s transgressions—committed repeatedly against his own employees in direct abuse of his power over them—were empirically more egregious and revolting. (Asking an aide to touch his junk or else find him another woman who would? Come on.) This isn’t to say that Franken didn’t behave like an entitled pig. But, until the drip, drip, drip of low-level grope-and-slobber stories accumulated, the case for his being pushed from office was not nearly as clear as the one against Conyers….More...

 

Black Police Officer Shoots White Woman…About the Only Time An Officer Will Be Convicted in Minneapolis

A cop in Minneapolis has shot the wrong person. The victim in this case was an attractive, blond white woman from Australia…

The Cop in this case is being reported to be a Somalian (black).

What do you want to bet his “Philandro Castille Get Out of Jail Free for Murder” card gets revoked?

You see, it is OK for a white Cop to shoot a black man in a car with his family, including small child in Minneapolis…

Black Cop shooting an unarmed white woman?

The lynching will be held at the local courthouse at noon. AG Jeff Sessions will be flying in the rope.

 

 

Why Black Children Run Away From Home…

Yeah, a lot of black children run away from home or go missing. One of the reasons the Police and media don’t take it as seriously as they could is this…

Many of these children have reasons to run away.

Want to keep black kids from running away from home? Stop hitting them.

We need to pay attention to the home lives that missing kids are fleeing from.

Last month, a rumor that more than 500 mostly black and Latino children from the District of Columbia had been abducted and sold into sex slavery went viral on social media. A new decision by D.C. police to alert the public whenever children were reported missing had backfired; most of the kids had been found safe within 24 hours, but those updates never spread as far as the initial reports. Worried people, from the Congressional Black Caucus to LL Cool J, raised alarms over what looked like a sudden epidemic that was being ignored in ways that would be unimaginable with white children.

Hoping to quell the outrage, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser assured the public that there has been no surge of missing kids. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t children that need our help,” she said March 24 as she unveiled plans to create a task force to work with vulnerable teenagers.

Hundreds of children of color have been reported missing in D.C. at some point since January, but those numbers aren’t higher than usual. The police say 2,242 children were reported missing in 2016, down from 2,433 in 2015. Virtually all of them were found unharmed within 24 hours; in many cases the children, who showed no evidence of being exploited by sex traffickers, had repeatedly run away from home, according to a spokesman for the mayor.

Which means many children do indeed need our help — and we need to pay more attention to the home lives that they might be running away from.

Rates of reported child abuse are disproportionately high for black children. According to the Justice Department , black children ages 12 to 19 are “three times more likely to be victims of reported child abuse or neglect.” As many as 7,354 young people ages 12 to 24, most of them black, experience homelessness each year in D.C., and more than 2 million children nationwide do. In one national survey, nearly half reported intense conflict, neglect or physical harm by a family member as a major factor in their homelessness. Others experienced family instability due to unaffordable housing, or left the juvenile-justice system or the foster-care system without enough education or support to make it on their own. Research from the Administration for Children and Families shows that up to 42 percent of runaway and homeless youth are sexually abused before they leave their homes.

Black children are also disproportionately likely to suffer treatment at home that’s so bad that they want to flee. In 2015, black kids had the highest rate of abuse and neglect, at 14.5 per 1,000 children, compared with 8.1 per 1,000 for white children, according to the Children’s Bureau, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 3,600 black children in the United States have died as a result of maltreatment in the past decade, a rate three times higher than for all other racial groups. Suicide rates among elementary-age black children have nearly doubled since the 1990s, while the rates for white children have fallen, according to a 2015 report from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A disturbing number of children in D.C. and elsewhere are gambling that life on the street could not be worse than their abusive homes. I made the same choice in 1987 and in 1991 while growing up in Trenton, N.J.

I ran away from my adoptive family when I was 9 and again when I was 12. After the second time, I refused to go back, and I ended up yet another black child in New Jersey’s foster-care system. A warm bed and steady meals in my adoptive home were not worth constant “whuppings” and verbal abuse — which my adoptive parents and the wider black community said were love, discipline and protection from the police or white racists. I felt safer on my own, even if that meant living on the street. From age 12 to 14, I was shuttled between foster homes, youth shelters and group homes, until I was fortunate enough to win an academic scholarship to the Lawrenceville Prep School. So I understand where many of these kids are coming from.

My own experiences helped shape my role as an advocate for children, and it’s painful to see how common such abuse still is in my community. Without question, the toughest part of my work is convincing black people that a “no hitting” zone at home is crucial to helping children feel and be safe. Whupping kids is not “a black thing.” But parents argue that without whuppings, their children will end up in prison, even though we’ve been having national conversations about mass incarceration for decades. They cherry-pick Old Testament scriptures to justify hitting. They argue that there’s a difference between spanking and abuse, as if a child’s body experiences pain differently based on what parents call a swat or the intent behind it. And many people proclaim that they were whupped as children and “turned out fine,” even though they’ve grown up to see striking a child’s body as normal behavior. It’s a violent, unnecessary parenting practice planted in our culture through colonialism, slavery, forced indoctrination into Christianity and centuries of racial trauma.

If we are going to talk about missing children in D.C., we must look at beating kids as one of the root issues. Yes, sex trafficking does happen, and yes, the types of children who go missing in Washington and other cities — mostly black; mostly poor; disproportionately lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer — are more vulnerable than other kids. But neglect and abuse are among the most commonfactors.

So much of our national focus on black children is on how “bad” they are: how they need more physical punishment, zero tolerance at school, harsh sentences from the courts. They are blamed for their own deaths at the hands of adults who claimed they were afraid of them. That systemic devaluation of black children even extends into classrooms. In 19 states, students are still subject to corporal punishment; a disproportionately higher number of black children receive it. According to reports by the Education Department’s office of civil rights and Human Rights Watch, racial bias contributes to this problem, along with black parents signing opt-in forms empowering teachers and administrators to hit their children.

These messages have consequences. When black children are constantly told that they are a problem, that they are unworthy and undeserving of empathy and kindness, that they can be beaten in schools, in the streets, by cops and by the people who love them, running away from home doesn’t seem like such an extreme choice. If home so often isn’t a safe haven, should we be surprised?…Read the Rest Here…

 

 

Rapper Concert Cancelled for… “Unforeseen Incarceration”

“I’m sorry, but the concert has been cancelled due to unforseen incarceration. However, your tickets will be honored at a make-up concert as soon as we can schedule it.”

“Great! When can  I expect that to be?”

“10-20 years…”

In yet another case of Trump white boy justice being different for “some” folks…the black rapper got a 3 times longer sentence than a white child rapist.

Rapper’s concert performance cancelled due to ‘unforeseen incarceration’

Publicists for a festival in Louisiana say rapper Kevin Gates has cancelled his performance due to “an unforeseen incarceration.”

The Baton Rouge singer was sentenced Wednesday to 180 days in jail after being convicted of kicking a female fan at a Florida concert last year.

Organizers of the 2016 Voodoo Fest said in a tweet that the artist scratched his performance “due to an unforeseen incarceration.”

News outlets report a Polk County jury found Gates guilty of battery after he was captured on cellphone video kicking 19-year-old Miranda Dixon at Lakeland’s Rumors Nightclub, where he performed last August.

Dixon, who was in the crowd, testified that she tugged on Gates’ pants twice to get his attention for her friend. After the second time, she says Gates kicked her so hard that she fell back and passed out.

Gates’ attorney, Jose Baez, argued his client was battered by the woman before he kicked her and that Dixon has a financial motive in the case, saying that she had a civil lawyer.

The New Orleans Advocate reports Gates was slated to perform on Voodoo’s Pepsi Stage at 8:45 p.m. on Friday. No word yet on who, if anyone, will replace him. He has presumably also scrapped his post-fest show at the House of Blues, which was slated for later Friday night.

 

Pre-School Is Where the Hatred Is

The School to Prison pipeline begins early…

Black preschool kids still get suspended much more frequently than white preschool kids

Schools suspend minority students at much higher rates than their peers, sometimes starting from the beginning — preschool.

The Civil Rights Data Collection, a national survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, surveyed over 50 million students at more than 95,000 schools and found that while suspensions decreased by almost 20 percentage points between the 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 school years, gaps between the suspension rates of different groups of students remained, according to results released late Monday.

The survey included 1,439,188 preschool students enrolled in 28,783 schools. Of those,6,743 preschool students or .47% were suspended out of school once or more than once. While black girls represent 20 percent of preschool enrollment, 54 percent of preschool girls suspended once or more were black. And black preschool children overall were 3.6 times as likely to be suspended as young white children.

The results don’t “paint a very good picture,” said Liz King, senior policy analyst and director of education policy at the Leadership for Civil and Human Rights. She called parts of it “startling.”

Across all grades, 2.8 million students were suspended once or more than once. Black students were nearly four times as likely to be suspended and almost twice as likely to be expelled as white students. Students with disabilities were also twice as likely to be suspended as general education students.

The disparity “tears at the moral fabric of the nation,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr. “We will not compromise away the civil right of all students to an excellent education.”

The findings come amid a major nationwide debate over school discipline, and just what statistics like these mean.

School districts across the country have reexamined the way they chastise students for misbehaving, in part because of previous civil rights survey results.

In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for “willful defiance.” As a result, the district’s suspension rate dropped to .55 percent last school year from eight percent in 2007-2008. Instead, teachers were supposed to use “restorative justice,” tactics that include conflict resolution, to keep their classrooms orderly. But teachers have saidthat they haven’t been trained in these techniques sufficiently.

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, a new law, states are required to review schools disciplinary statistics to reduce an “overuse of suspension.”

The disparities invite further investigation, said Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education responsible of the Office for Civil Rights. “Data by itself is not a reason to think there’s intentional discrimination, but they are a reason to ask further questions,” she said.

So why are there major disparities in school discipline?

Jason Okonofua, a social psychologist at Stanford University, began trying to answer this question in his research after reflecting on his own experiences. As a kid growing up in Memphis, Tenn., he attended seven different public schools and noticed that in some schools, teachers were more rigid; in others, they were more supportive. After tenth grade, though, came a bigger difference: he won a scholarship to an East coast prep school, where he was one of just several black kids, compared to the majority black schools he attended in Memphis.

At the prep school, he said, teachers treated students like adults. “Seeing how different school atmospheres can bring about different outcomes got me interested in this particular topic,” he said.

Okonofua found in his studies that the disparities stem from problems in the relationships between teachers and students. Minority students, he found, expect to be the victim of bias — which leads them to be less cooperative. On the other hand, he said, if a teacher feels disrespected, and as if the student is a troublemaker, the student will get punished more severely, causing the cycle to continue….More…

 

Georgia Judge Delivers a Message

Hopefully she gets through to a few of the hardheads…

Bibb County Superior Court Judge Verda Colvin

 

Charter School Violence

Not only are Charter Schools educationally lagging the Public School Districts which they supposedly serve, new evidence is emerging that their sometimes strict, and in some cases severe discipline is resulting in up to 8 times the violent incident level than hat experienced in Public Schools.

Differences in violent incidents in schools between 2014 and 2015

Why Has Charter School Violence Spiked at Double the Rate of Public Schools?

Meanwhile, charter advocates continue to criticize the safety of traditional public schools.

A few weeks after The New York Times released a controversial video of a Success Academy Charter School teacher lashing out at a student, New York City’s deep-pocketed charter school advocates are looking to shift the public narrative on who is committing violence in city schools.

Over the last few weeks, Families for Excellent Schools, a charter school lobbying and advocacy group with close ties to Success Academy, has placed TV ads, held a press conference, and taken to social media, claiming New York City public schools are in a violent “state of emergency.” The charter school campaign appears to be a response to the public backlash that Success Academy has received for its controversial disciplinary approach.

Taking state data, which includes “violent” incidents not involving the police, Families for Excellent Schools asserts that between 2014 and 2015 schools suffered a 23 percent uptick in violence. The public action was meant toundermine New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who recently claimed school violence has gone down, thanks to his administration’s softer disciplinary approach.

A Nation analysis of the charter school group’s data, however, suggests the move may backfire, since the numbers also show that charter schools themselves reported a far higher spike in incidents of school violence, 54 percent, more than double that of the public school average between the 2014 and 2015 school years.

Breaking the data down further, The Nation also found that while NYC public schools, perhaps responding to the district’s disciplinary reforms, actually dropped in nonviolent offenses like “criminal mischief” and “other disruptive incidents” at -6 percent and -23 percent, respectively, charter schools had a 65 percent surge in reported incidents of “criminal mischief” and a 33 percent surge in “other disruptive incidents.” Notably, charter schools also had far higher reported surges in drug and weapons possession incidents, at 53 percent and 27 percent respectively, whereas public schools only had 5 percent and 9 percent jumps for the same categories.

New York City charter school students represent a relatively small amount of the city’s overall population, and therefore make up only 4 percent of total violent incidents in New York City schools, but these drastic disparities raise questions about how charter schools’ controversial disciplinary cultures relate to the dramatic increase in reported school violence.

Brenda Shufelt, a recently retired librarian who served public school and Success Academy Charter School students at a colocated school library in Harlem, said that as charter schools rapidly expand, they may be taking in more high-needs kids, many of whom cannot conform to one-size-fits-all disciplinary approaches.

“In my experience, what would often happen is that charter school students would be so rigidly controlled that the kids would periodically blow up,” says Shufelt. “At PS 30, some of our kids would have meltdowns, usually because of problems at home, but I never saw kids melt down in the way they did in charter schools. They were just so despairing, feeling like they could not do this. I was told by two custodians, they had never had so much vomit to clean up from kindergarten and elementary classes.”

Examining the 10 charter schools with the highest reported incidents of violence in 2014 and 2015, The Nation also found that reported incidents escalated 485 percent last year over the previous year, more than four times faster than the growth of violent incidents for public schools of the same category.

Of the top six charter school sites with the most reported growth in incidents of violence from 2014 to 2015, four were KIPP charter schools, part of a nationally heralded charter chain that has 11 locations in New York. In recent years, KIPP has drawn headlines for its disciplinary regimen, which often includes precise control of students’ physical movements, intricate behavioral systems of reward and punishment, and enforced silence throughout school hallways. In 2013, a KIPP school in Manhattan made news, after a kindergartner and first grader had anxiety attacks, triggered by the school’s practice of repeatedly locking students in custom-designed time-out closets. KIPP refused to end the practice after the controversy and did not respond to Nation inquiries about the spike in reported incidents.*

 

 

 

Baltimore…Again

A Baltimore School Officer slaps and kicks a student on video…

Looks really bad, and there is an uproar of indignation rising from a bunch of folks. However we have no idea what led up to this confrontation. I rode our local subway system into and all through the city for the past 3 1/2 years and certainly saw incidents of misbehavior which warranted a bit of old style attention-getting by the Transit Police. Whether such prevented any of the young folks on the receiving end from devolving further into being little sociopaths, I have no idea. It certainly had the effect of reducing petty misbehavior and petty violence on the trains. By the time those that get to major violence and robbery – you are not going to turn them around.

My father was variously a Principal and teacher back in the days of segregation in black High Schools. As a little tyke, who would be dropped off in the afternoon by the sitter, I certainly witnessed an occasional “reeducation” of a hardhead by one of the teachers or the Vice-Principal who also happened to be the football coach. One of the things I never will forget after moving into integrated schools was the level of vandalism and destruction of school property that was tolerated in the integrated schools. We certainly had kids who would sneak cigarettes into the boys or girls rooms – but I never witnessed anyone tearing the sinks or toilets off the wall, or writing graffiti over everything. Perhaps it was the impact of not having much but hand-me-downs from the white schools (“equal” in those days meant you had the same desks and books as the white schools, shortly after they had been used by the white schools for 10 years), and knowing anything that was broken would take a long time, if ever to be replaced.

I remember conversations among the black teachers when they would get together socially. When I grew up, black schools practiced corporal punishment as the norm. My third grade teacher, an older lady probably in her late 50’s or early 60’s at that time was real Old School. She gave a whack across the knuckles with a ruler for each word missed on the daily spelling test or math test…

As a poor speller, I got a lot of whacks. I was saved by the fact I was very good at math.

 

 

Black Panther Released After 43 Years in Solitary

Amazing story… Albert Woodfox was one of the Angola 3, and the last of the three political prisoners to be released.

Albert Woodfox released from jail after 43 years in solitary confinement

US’s longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner set free in Louisiana after more than four decades in form of captivity widely denounced as torture

Albert Woodfox, the longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner in the US, held in isolation in a six-by-nine-foot cell almost continuously for 43 years, has been released from a Louisiana jail.

Woodfox, who was kept in solitary following the 1972 murder of a prison guard for which he has always professed his innocence, marked his 69th birthday on Friday by being released from West Feliciana parish detention center. It was a bittersweet birthday present: the prisoner finally escaped a form of captivity that has widely been denounced as torture, and that has deprived him of all meaningful human contact for more than four decades.

For the duration of that time, Woodfox was held in the cell for 23 hours a day. In the single remaining hour, he was allowed out of the cell to go to the “exercise yard” – a small area of fenced concrete – but was shackled and kept alone there as well.

Last November James Dennis, a judge with the federal fifth circuit appeals court, described the conditions of Woodfox’s confinement. “For the vast majority of his life, Woodfox has spent nearly every waking hour in a cramped cell in crushing solitude without a valid conviction,” he said.

In a statement released by his lawyers, Woodfox said that he would use his newfound liberty to campaign against the scourge of solitary confinement that at any one moment sees 80,000 American prisoners being held in isolation. “I can now direct all my efforts to ending the barbarous use of solitary confinement and will continue my work on that issue here in the free world.”

The prisoner’s release came after the state of Louisiana agreed to drop its threat to subject him to a third trial for the 1972 killing. Woodfox in turn pleaded no contest to lesser charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary.

The “no contest” plea is not an admission of guilt, and Woodfox continues to be not guilty of the main murder charge. He said that “although I was looking forward to proving my innocence at a new trial, concerns about my health and my age have caused me to resolve this case now and obtain my release with this no-contest plea to lesser charges.”

Woodfox was one of the so-called “Angola 3”: three prisoners initially held in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison, and who subscribed to the Black Panther movement and campaigned against segregation within the institution in the 1970s. His supporters contend that he was framed for the 1972 killing of the prison guard Brent Miller as revenge for his political activities.

His murder conviction was twice overturned – once in 1992 on grounds that he had received ineffective defense representation, and again in 2008 because of racial discrimination in setting up the grand jury that indicted him. Last year, Louisiana announced it would put him through a third trial despite the fact that all the key witnesses to the killing have since died. Woodfox’s lawyers argued the lack of witnesses would render such a retrial a legal mockery.

His two fellow Angola 3 allies were already freed. Robert King was released in 2001 after having his separate conviction overturned, and Herman Wallace, who spent almost 30 years in solitary confinement, was only allowed out of prison two days before he died in 2013.

“There was no logical reason that Louisiana kept him in solitary for so many years, for a crime in which all the evidence was undermined,” King told the Guardian.

“They did it as a war against the ideology of the Black Panthers and because they didn’t want to be seen to have been wrong all this time.”

Scientists have long warned about the dire effects caused by solitary confinement on prisoners even after a few days of such treatment, and several international bodies including the UN have called for it to be banned as a form of torture. The supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy has also spoken out about the practice, remarking that the side-effects of prolonged isolation include anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hallucinations, self-mutilation and suicidal thoughts and behavior.

George Kendall, Woodfox’s attorney with Squire Patton Boggs LLP, said his client’s decades-long isolation was indefensible. “Albert survived the extreme and cruel punishment of 40-plus years in solitary confinement only because of his extraordinary strength and character. These inhumane practices must stop. We hope the Louisiana department of corrections will reform and greatly limit its use of solitary confinement as have an increasing number of jurisdictions around the country.”

Amnesty International USA, which long campaigned for his release, said that “nothing will truly repair the cruel, inhuman and degrading solitary confinement that the state of Louisiana inflicted upon him. But this belated measure of justice is something he has been seeking for more than half his life.”

In 2014, Woodfox described to a blogger the fear that wells up in him from being constantly alone. “I’m afraid I’m going to start screaming and not be able to stop,” he said.

“I’m afraid I’m going to turn into a baby and curl up in a fetal position and lay there like that day after day for the rest of my life. I’m afraid I’m going to attack my own body, maybe cut off my balls and throw them through the bars the way I’ve seen others do when they couldn’t take any more.

“No television or hobby craft or magazines or any of the other toys you call yourself allowing can ever lessen the nightmare of this hell you help to create and maintain.”

Woodfox’s release was raised at the White House press briefing on Friday. The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said: “Scientists tell us that prolonged incarceration in solitary confinement can have a debilitating and long-term impact on an individual’s mental health. If our ultimate goal in the criminal justice system is to give people a second chance after they’ve paid their debt to society we are basically setting them up to fail.”

Last month Barack Obama used his executive powers to ban solitary confinement for juveniles in all federal prisons. He has also commissioned a review into the use of solitary in the US.

 

Pill Mill Doctor Goes Down for 30 Years

After the Vietnam War tens of thousands of injured soldiers came home, some with major long term injuries. An unusually high number became addicted to opioids. As a result, thinking on the prescribing of pain medication shifted towards very conservative provision of pain meds. In the early 2000’s medical research found that pain actually inhibited healing and recovery. Patients who were under-prescribed pain medication took substantially longer to recover than patients receiving larger doses. This led to new pain management strategies, and an admission by the medical profession that it really didn’t make any difference if a dying cancer patient became an addict.

This new rationality has helped.  BTx3 had major open heart surgery a few years ago. I can tell you from time spent in that recovery ward that it is amazing people get up from that. The morning after the operation they get you up and walk you around (complete with a couple of carts of tubes and IVs attached to your body trailing along). Of course you are so zorked out from the pain medication you can’t feel the pain. After four days of that, I refused to take the pain meds anymore. The effects of the meds bothered me worse than the pain from a 12″ hole in my chest and other assorted holes for tubes in my stomach, thigh, and legs. Yeah it hurt, but it wasn’t debilitating. Which makes me believe that some folks may be less susceptible to pain medication addiction than others, and such may just be genetic. Science knows that alcohol addiction is passed down by generation – perhaps the same is true for other types of addiction? They sent me home with a bottle full of Oxycontin. I never opened it and threw it away.

The following remarkably sympathetic article about a Dr in LA whose patients were overdosing and dying on pain meds misses one key point. Over-prescription may result ina Dr’s patients becoming addicted. It is a known risk in any aggressive pain management strategy. Prescribing large quantities of drugs to addicted users far beyond that needed to support their well being, and or people who are going to sell those drugs on the illegal market…Is a crime just like that of any street corner drug pusher.

The only differences being, the Drug Pusher doesn’t have a fancy degree from a top University, and nobody claims the Pusher isn’t in the business of crime. They are both i it for the money!

Dr. Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng, unidentified heroin dealer…One and the same.

Doctor gets 30 years to life for murders in L.A. case tied to patients’ overdoses

A Judge on Friday sentenced a Rowland Heights doctor to 30 years to life in prison for the murders of three of her patients who fatally overdosed, ending a landmark case that some medical experts say could reshape how doctors nationwide handle prescriptions.

The sentence came after a Los Angeles jury last year found Dr. Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng guilty of second-degree murder, the first time a doctor had been convicted of murder in the U.S. for overprescribing drugs.

Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli said before sentencing Tseng that she had attempted to blame patients, pharmacists and other doctors rather than take responsibility for her own actions.

“It seems to be an attempt to put the blame on someone else,” he said. “Very irresponsible.”

Tseng, wearing blue jail scrubs, apologized to the victims’ families, her family and “medical society.”

“I’m really terribly sorry,” she said, before addressing the courtroom audience, which was crowded with victims’ relatives. “I have been and forever will be praying for you. May God bless all of you and grant comfort to all who have been affected by my actions.”

The 46-year-old former general practitioner is among a small but growing number of doctors charged with murder for prescribing painkillers that killed patients. A Florida doctor was acquitted of first-degree murder in September.

Some experts fear that Tseng’s conviction will usher in a precarious new reality – a scenario in which doctors fearful of prosecution are hesitant to prescribe potent painkillers to patients who need them.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

Attorney Peter Osinoff, who represented Tseng before the state medical board, told the judge during Friday’s hearing that the doctor no longer represents a danger to society since she surrendered her medical license in 2012.

The trial had already had a “deterrent effect” on other doctors and has captured the medical community’s attention.

“More primary care physicians no longer accept or treat chronic pain patients in their practice,” he told the judge.

Outside the courtroom, Osinoff said Tseng’s prosecution has had a negative impact on physicians and patients.

“The doctors are scared out of their minds,” he said. “The pendulum has swung so far. The people who need [pain medication] can’t get it now.”

Other medical experts have echoed his concerns since Tseng was charged in 2012.

“When you use the word ‘murder,’” said Dr. Peter Staats, president of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, “of course it’s going to have a chilling effect.”

Staats said he believes an aggressive medical board – not prosecutors – should go after reckless doctors. But, he added, any doctor who is prescribing pills knowing that they are being abused or diverted shouldn’t be called a doctor.

“That’s not the practice of medicine,” Staats said.

Dr. Francis Riegler, a pain specialist who works in Palmdale, said he has followed Tseng’s case and talked about the prosecution with fellow doctors across the country.

“We agree,” he said, “that if you’re doing the right thing – if you’re one of the good guys, if you will – you don’t need to worry about being prosecuted for murder.”

During Tseng’s trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Niedermann told jurors that there were “red flags” in her prescribing habits.

More than a dozen times, the prosecutor said, a coroner’s or law enforcement official called with the same stark message: “Your patient has died.”

Her prescribing habits, Niedermann said, remained unchanged.

The prosecutor told jurors that Tseng wrote a man’s name on prescriptions so his wife could get twice as many pills, openly referred to her patients as “druggies” and sometimes made up medical records.

Her motivation, Niedermann said, was financial.

Between 2007, when Tseng joined the Rowland Heights clinic where her husband worked, and 2010, tax returns show that their office made $5 million, he said.

Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey said the conviction sent an unflinching message to medical professionals.

“In this case,” Lacey said, “the doctor stole the lives of three young people in her misguided effort to get rich quick.”

Tseng was convicted of murder for the deaths of Vu Nguyen, 28, of Lake Forest; Steven Ogle, 25, of Palm Desert; and Joey Rovero, 21, an Arizona State University student who prosecutors say traveled more than 300 miles with friends from Tempe, Ariz., to obtain prescriptions from Tseng at her Rowland Heights clinic.

The jury also found Tseng guilty on more than a dozen illegal-prescribing counts.

 

 

Scary 5 YO Black Boys in Kindergarten

There are disparate discipline rates of black vs white children…

We know that in the 13 states which allow corporal punishment in schools, black girls bear a disproportionate level of punishment

Black Parents favor spanking as punishment

A map of states which allow corporal punishment includes all but one the states of the confederacy, and is similar to a map of the current blue-red political divide…

It starts in pre-school…

Racism in the Kindergarten Classroom

New research finds faces of five-year-old black boys put whites in a more threat-conscious state of mind.

If the current election cycle hasn’t convinced you that racism has yet to be eradicated, consider this: The mere image of a black man is enough to stimulate an automatic threat response in whites. Research has found faces of African-American males are more likely to be perceived as angry, and can trigger neural activity associated with rapid detection of danger.

While even pre-teens can stimulate this reaction (which helps explain the tragic shooting of a 12 year old holding a pellet gun in Cleveland two years ago), it presumably doesn’t apply to very young black boys. It’s hard to believe they are perceived as dangerous as they emerge from the womb.

So when do they start coming across as threatening? Newly published researchprovides a depressing answer: by the time they enter kindergarten.

Participants misidentified safe words as threatening more often after seeing a black face.

In a series of studies, a University of Iowa research team led by Andrew Todd finds images of the faces of five-year-old black boys are sufficient to trigger whites into heightened-threat mode. “Implicit biases commonly observed for black men appear to generalize even to young black boys,” the researchers write in the journal Psychological Science.

The first of their experiments featured 63 college undergraduates, who “completed a categorization task in which two images flashed on the monitor in quick succession. Participants were instructed to ignore the first time, which was always a face; it merely signaled that the second image was about to appear. Their task was to quickly and accurately categorize the second image (the target object) as a gun or a toy, by pressing one of two response keys.”

In fact, the faces—all of five-year-old boys with neutral facial expressions—were a key component of the experiment. Six of them featured black children, and six white. Researchers wanted to know whether the race of the child would affect the speed and accuracy of the white participants’ responses.

It did. “Participants identified guns more quickly after black-child primes than after white-child primes,” the researchers report, “whereas they identified toys more quickly after the white-child primes than after black-child primes.”

Subsequent experiments found black five-year-old faces produced just as strong an effect as photographs of adult black males. This held true when white participants were labeling images as guns or tools, and when they were shown a list of words (including “criminal” and “peaceful”) and asked to categorize each as “safe” or “threatening.”

In that last experiment, participants misidentified safe words as threatening more often after seeing a black face, and misidentified threatening words as safe more often after seeing a white one—child or adult.

“These racial biases were driven entirely by differences in automatic processing,” Todd and his colleagues write. In other words, no conscious thought was involved; whites simply saw a black male face and reacted in ways that indicated a heightened level of perceived threat.

Even when the face was that of a five-year-old.

 

Problems In McKinney Texas More Insidious Than Just a Pool Party

In case you forgot –

Like Ferguson, Mo. there are many underlying problems in the town.

Racial Disparities In McKinney, Texas, Extend Well Beyond Pool Parties

A troubling new report on youth and policing in McKinney, Texas — the Dallas suburb where an officer was filmed shoving an African-American girl to the ground at a June pool party — found that police officers in the McKinney Independent School District ticket and arrest black students at much higher rates than other students.

The report, released Wednesday, reveals a startling racial disparity in the way local authorities handle school discipline. Though black students only comprise 13 percent of the district’s student population, they received about 36 percent of all tickets issued by school resource officers — who are chosen from the ranks of the McKinney police force — and accounted for 39 percent of all arrests.

The nonprofit group Texas Appleseed compiled the school discipline data by using open records requests, tracking disciplinary actions taken between January 2012 and June 2015.

African-Americans were also suspended at a much higher rate than white students during the 2013-2014 school year. Black students received 30 percent of in-school suspensions and 38 percent of out-of-school suspensions in the district that year, the report revealed. Research has long shown that being suspended from school, even just once, greatly increases the chances that a student will drop out of high school.

“McKinney’s extreme and inequitable school discipline measures mirror the larger problems sweeping communities throughout the nation where inadequate training and racial bias have led to inappropriate and even deadly responses by police in response to minor incidents,” wrote Deborah Fowler, executive director of Texas Appleseed, in a statement on Wednesday after the report’s release…

 

 

Really Bad week for Congressmen in DC

First we have the Tea Party Republican from Florida buying cocaine…

Federal law enforcement officials released new details this morning of U.S. Rep. Trey Radel’s arrest on charges of buying cocaine in Washington, D.C. earlier this fall.

In a press release put out just moments ago, agents indicate that the FBI and DEA had been watching Radel because they had learned he “would purchase cocaine for his personal use and sometimes share it with others.”

Radel, R-Fort Myers, entered a guilty plea this morning in court.

U.S. Rep. Trey Radel was sentenced to a year of probation after pleading guilty Wednesday to misdemeanor cocaine possession — a charge that authorities say came after he bought a small amount of cocaine in a sting in the nation’s capital last month.

Radel, a 37-year-old first-term Republican from Florida, said at his sentencing in D.C. Superior Court that he plans to enter an inpatient drug treatment program in Naples, Florida. It wasn’t immediately clear how long he would be in treatment.

The plea and sentence were part of a deal that Radel’s attorney struck with federal prosecutors. He could have received a maximum sentence of 180 days imprisonment or a $1,000 fine, or both. Instead, he was placed on one year probation, and if it is “successfully completed,” his guilty plea will be cleared from his record.

Then the brutal case of Congresswoman Grace Meng who was mugged last night on the way home –

Rep. Grace Meng attacked, robbed

Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), a freshman lawmaker from the New York City area, was attacked and robbed Tuesday evening in the Eastern Market area.

Meng said she had just said goodnight to a friend she had dinner with in the neighborhood about 8:30 p.m. when she was attacked from behind.

Responding police officers found Meng disoriented at 2nd St. and Independence Avenue SE with bruising and swelling to the back of the left side of her head, and injuries to her left knee, hand and face. Meng was not able to remember where she was robbed or describe her assailant or assailants, according to a D.C. police report.

All Meng could tell police was that she had dinner on 8th Street SE and her black Gucci tote bag was stolen during the attack. Medics evaluated her at the scene then took Meng to George Washington University hospital. The report described her injuries as abrasion, swelling, bruises and unconsciousness.

No arrests have been made in the case, but an “active, open investigation” is underway, according to U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman Lt. Kimberly Schneider.

By Wednesday, she was back on Capitol Hill for a series of procedural votes in the afternoon. She missed the first two votes of the day in the 1 p.m. hour, but arrived in time to cast votes all afternoon. As she left the House Chamber Wednesday evening, she told reporters she was “just taking it a little slower today.”

“I’m from New York City and I have not been mugged like that. But the Capitol Police were great, the D.C. Police Department was very helpful,” she said.

 

 

 

Southern Baptists Punish Racist Hayta

Well…At least someone in these here United States has the courage to stand up to the anti-Christian haytas and bigots!

The Southern Baptist Church, the largest evangelical denomination in the country – decided that it had heard enough racist moron talk – and lowered the proverbial boom…

From the Southern Baptist Covenant –

We further engage to watch over one another with brotherly love, to remember each other in prayer, to aid each other in sickness and distress, to cultivate Christian sympathy in feeling and courtesy in speech, to be slow to take offense, but always ready for reconciliation, and mindful of the rules of our Savior to secure it without delay.

Southern Baptists reprimand top official over Trayvon Martin remarks

The country’s largest evangelical Christian denomination on Friday announced it is reprimanding one of its top officials over comments he made regarding the Trayvon Martin case, pledging to cancel the official’s national radio show.

The trustee committee of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission announced two reprimands on Friday for Richard Land, who leads public policy efforts for the Southern Baptists, according to the official press arm.

The first reprimand was for remarks Land – one of the country’s most powerful evangelical leaders – made about the Martin case. The second was because Land lifted some remarks from another source on his radio show without using attribution.

The commission will move to terminate Land’s radio program, “Richard Land Live!” because of the controversy, the Baptist Press reported.

In March, Land spoke of African-American activists and the Rev. Al Sharpton as “racial ambulance chasers” in the Martin case, in which the 17-year-old was shot to death in Florida by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.

“When there is violence it’s going to be Jesse Jackson’s fault,” Land said on his show, according to the Religion News Service. “It’s going to be Al Sharpton’s fault. It’s going to be Louis Farrakhan’s fault, and to a certain degree it’s going to be President Obama’s fault.”

On Friday, the trustee executive committee said in a statement that Land’s comments were “very hurtful and offensive to the Trayvon Martin family and too many in the African-American community, including hundreds of thousands of African-American Southern Baptists.”

“Damage was done to the state of race relations in the Southern Baptist Convention,” the statement said.

The Religion News Service reported that many of Land’s remarks about the Martin case were lifted from a March column in the Washington Times.

“As a Christian, a minister of the Gospel of our Lord, and as President of the ERLC, Dr. Land should have conformed to a higher standard,” the statement from the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission said.

The statement went on to say that “plagiarism occurred because of Land’s carelessness and poor judgment.”

In announcing the planned termination of Land’s radio program, the committee said “the content and purpose” of the program are “not congruent with the mission of the ERLC.”

In a statement to the Baptist Press, Land – who earlier apologized for his comments – said he believes in “trustee oversight and governance” and that “this whole process was conducted in a Christian manner by Christian gentlemen.”

 Too bad Mr Land isn’t one of those Christian gentlemen.