Police Officer Shoots Unarmed Black Man at Point Blank Range

Police Officer's light sentence sparks public outrage

By Tom Carter

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Perry on Friday threw out part of a jury verdict and sentenced police officer Johannes Mehserle to only two years in prison. Mehserle was convicted in July of this year of criminal homicide for the point-blank shooting of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black youth who was lying face down, in Oakland, California.

The shockingly light prison sentence will be further reduced by double time served and possibly early parole. Mehserle will be eligible for release in seven months. This compares to the maximum sentence possible from the jury verdict of 14 years.

The judge’s decision resulted in an explosion of public outrage in the Oakland area. Hundreds have gathered in protests around the city of Oakland that are ongoing as of this writing and are expected to continue into the night. Protesters carried pictures of Grant and signs that read, “I am Oscar Grant” and “Stop police terror.”

The police have responded in force. Pictures uploaded by eyewitnesses show riot police forcing dozens of protesters onto the ground face first. Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts held a press conference at the city's Office of Emergency Services to denounce protesters engaged in “dysfunctional illegal activity.”

When the verdict was announced, Oscar Grant’s mother Wanda Johnson cried out in surprise and ran from the courtroom, exclaiming, “He got nothing! He got nothing!”

Oscar Grant's grandfather, Oscar Grant Sr., said, “It’s a bad decision. [Mehserle] should have served some time. Otherwise, they’re telling the public, though he went to trial, a policeman can shoot someone and go free. These guys have a license to kill.”

“Two years is just a slap in the face," Grant added.

The shooting of Oscar Grant took place on a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train platform early in the morning of New Years Day 2009. On videos taken by bystanders with cell phone cameras, uniformed police officers are seen roughly handcuffing a number of young men, including Oscar Grant, and forcing them onto the ground. The young men all appear to be cooperating and make gestures as though to pacify the officers. Mehserle attempts to handcuff Grant, who is lying face down on the pavement, and then suddenly and inexplicably draws his pistol and shoots Grant in the back. The bullet enters Grant's back and exits his abdomen, bouncing off the concrete platform and reentering his chest, killing him. (A video can be seen here ).

While police brutality, torture and murder are not uncommon in the US, police officers are prosecuted reluctantly and only rarely by the state. Prosecutions are generally only initiated when the incident is caught on tape, provoking an overwhelming public response.

The trial of Johannes Mehserle was a travesty. From the beginning, Judge Perry gave indications that he was sympathetic to Mehserle. (See “The Oscar Grant verdict: some political lessons ”) The July jury verdict of involuntary manslaughter (accidental killing) was itself lenient, the product of a number of judicial rulings favorable to Mehserle and a less than enthusiastic prosecution.

Following the July verdict, Mehserle faced two to four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter in addition to a three- to ten-year “gun enhancement” resulting from the jury finding that he intentionally used his pistol to complete the crime. At the sentencing hearing yesterday, Judge Perry went out of his way to intervene on Mehserle's behalf, calling the shooting “accidental” and the jury's verdict “inconsistent.”

Perry threw out the “gun enhancement,” flouting the democratic legal presumption in favor of the legitimacy of jury verdicts, and sentenced Mehserle to the minimum sentence of two years.

“Mehserle's muscle memory took over in this moment of great danger and stress,” Perry claimed. “No reasonable trier of fact could have concluded that Mehserle intentionally fired his gun.”

Perry also made provocative statements during the course of the sentencing, criticizing those who wrote to the court demanding a harsh sentence, including a school principal who denounced Mehserle’s crime as “murder.”

The California state judicial system is one of the most brutal in the world. Judges routinely hand out extreme prison sentences to working class youth who are convicted of the most petty crimes. Under California's notorious “three strikes” law, one can be sentenced to jail for life merely for shoplifting. However, in the rare case when it is a police officer being prosecuted, the judges bend over backward to impose the lightest sentence possible.

Oscar Grant was 22 at the time of his shooting. Like many young people in California, he grew up in poverty, did not graduate high school, and had held a number of low-wage jobs. At the time of his death, he was employed as a butcher at Farmer Joe's Marketplace in Oakland. He is survived by his mother, sister, girlfriend, and their four-year-old daughter.

Jon Stewart's Big Do Nothing

Jon Stewart promotes sanity by doing, nothing.

By Medea Benjamin

When Jon Stewart was on Larry King's show talking about his Rally to Restore Sanity, he likened himself to Alice in Wonderland and the rally as the Mad Hatter Tea Party.
But is Jon Stewart really Alice, trying to find sanity in an upside-down world? Or is he the March Hare, the ultimate reactionary who encourages people to sit back and mock attempts by others to change things.
All Jon Stewart is interested in is promoting himself. His jokes are closer to slapstick than satire. "The Daily Show" makes us comfortable, even happy.
It reinforces our sense of superiority to those 'crackpot' Republicans. Stewart's role is to create a young, hip audience to increase advertising revenue for Comedy Central.
"The Daily Show" is like comfort food consumed night after night in place of broccoli. We are gorging ourselves on what feels good instead of processing what feels so bad - and doing something about it.
The 10-30-10 rally on the capital's mall is looking more and more like a celebration of do-nothingness. Stewart is courting people who do not want to open their window and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
As he says in the Rally for Sanity website, he's looking for the people who've been "too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs)."
So let's get this straight: people who were so horrified when the U.S. invaded Iraq that they joined millions of others to protest are not sane?
We shouldn't speak out against Wall Street bankers whose greed led to millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes?
It's irrational to be angry when you see the Gulf of Mexico covered in oil because BP cut corners on safety?
Don't get upset when the Supreme Court rules that corporations are people and can pour unlimited funds into our elections?
Stewart often roasts the war-makers and corporate fat-cats on his show, but he seems to think that his viewers should be content to take out their frustrations with a good belly laugh.
[Read the rest of this article.]

Pssst! Fire Fox Users, Want to Fix That Memory Leak?

I noticed a lot of my visitors use Fire Fox. I use it too, and I love it. However, you've no doubt wrestled with Fire Fox 3's annoying memory leak; sometimes taking up to 1 GB of your memory. You know just as well as I do, that it doesn't take 400 MB of RAM to open Google.com!

Anyway, if you're looking for a fix, I have one for you, Memory Fox. I use it and it works spectacularly!

PS
Just remember, after you install it, to turn it on! Uff da! Dat vas an oversight on Ole's part, Ja!

Knock Knock. Who's There? Left. Left who? The Left left Obama.

There's a little knock knock, joke going around

By Paul Krugman

Unsurprisingly, America's 'state' media claims that Democratic losses were due to the party moving too far to the left. As Paul Krugman wrote the day after the election:
"So, we’re already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of … well, there weren’t any, but he should stop them anyway.
"What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street.
"And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck."
Eventually, Obama is going to have to figure out that the capitalist media are far from being his friend.
The media will continue to be stenographers for the Republicans, uncritically repeating as fact whatever lying talking point the Republicans push that day (like how he "nationalized" the country's health care system).
That means when the inevitable showdown and shutdown comes, the corporate-controlled media will put the entire blame on Obama -- unless he starts now to speak out forcefully when they report Republican lies as facts.
The other lesson from this election is that a awful lot of Americans are too busy trying to survive in our trickle-down economy to pay attention to what's going on.
They don't know the difference between the federal debt and the federal deficit and they only hear the news "teasers" that play before "American Idol" comes on.
But they like strong leaders who stand up for what they believe in -- even if what they believe in is a fantasy world based on badly-written books by an elitist Russian immigrant.
That's how Dubya got re-elected when most everyone thought he was not very bright and was heading the country in the wrong direction. They voted for him because he was heading the country in the wrong direction with confidence..
So man up Barack. It's going to be a knife fight. You'll have to leave the feather duster at home.

 

Tea Party Focuses on Wrong Target

 Capitalism is the word, of the neocons, have you heard?

 By Henry A. Giroux

Tea Party candidates express anger over government programs, but say nothing about a government that provides tax breaks for the rich, allows politicians to be bought off by powerful lobbyists, contracts out government functions to private industries and guts almost every major public sphere necessary for sustaining an increasingly faltering democracy.

Tea Party members are outraged, but their anger is really directed at the New Deal, the social state and all those others whom they believe do not qualify as "real" Americans.

At the same time the American public is awash in a craven and vacuous media machine that routinely tells us that people are angry, but offers no analysis capable of treating such anger as symptomatic of an economic system that creates massive inequalities, rewards the ultra rich and powerful and punishes everybody else.

liberal pundits argue that the rich and powerful are indifferent to poor people and, of course, he is right, but only partly so. In actuality, it is much worse.

Today's young people and others caught in webs of poverty and despair face not only the indifference of the rich and powerful, but also the scorn of the very people charged with preserving, protecting and defending their rights.

We now live in a country in which the government allows entire populations and groups to be perceived and treated as disposable, reduced to fodder for the neoliberal waste management industries created by a market-driven society in which gross inequalities and massive human suffering are its most obvious byproducts.