Federal prison in Kansas recorded hundreds of attorney-inmate meetings, court investigator finds

CJOnline

A privately run federal prison in Kansas recorded video of hundreds of meetings between inmates and their attorneys, a court-led investigation has found after defense lawyers first raised concerns months ago about possible violations of client privilege.

The detention center in Leavenworth, operated by Corrections Corporation of America, possessed video recordings of all attorney-inmate meetings reviewed by the court investigator, who examined 30 randomly chosen visits that took place in spring 2016 and concluded hundreds were recorded. The extent of the recordings hasn’t been previously disclosed.

Leavenworth CCA and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas have been at the heart of a monthslong drama in the region’s legal community over recordings of attorney-inmate meetings at the prison, as well as recordings of attorney-inmate phone calls. The ability of lawyers to meet with clients privately is a bedrock principle of the American legal system, and this fall, a federal judge named a special master to investigate.

Defense attorneys first raised concerns last summer over video recording of meetings with their clients. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is prosecuting a handful of inmates, accusing them of engaging in an elaborate smuggling ring within the prison.

The inmates’ attorneys put forward evidence that meetings had been recorded and have since provided evidence that inmate phone calls with attorneys also were recorded, even when attorneys had requested their numbers be blocked from recordings.

The special master, David Cohen, told Judge Julie Robinson last month that while reviewing all of the video from all rooms where attorney meetings took place would prove prohibitive, he reviewed a smaller sample of meetings to determine that every meeting that took place in a room with a camera was recorded.

The attorney visitor logs for the 12-week period last year where recordings occurred showed more than 700 attorney visits to rooms equipped with cameras, Cohen wrote in a filing.

“It appears all of these attorney-inmate meetings were recorded,” Cohen said. “Of course, this analysis does not address whether any person ever viewed these recordings.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office obtained the video and, while acknowledging missteps, has denied suggestions of impropriety. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has said “no employee of the United States Attorney’s Office or law enforcement officer” has viewed any recording provided by CCA.

“I made a very serious mistake … but I want the court to know I did not intend to gain that footage,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Tomasic said in September.

Parallel to the video recordings, Cohen also has been investigating the extent of attorney-inmate phone recordings at the Leavenworth facility. In December, Cohen reported he had analyzed 48,333 telephone audio files from the facility and that a little more than 200 of those calls were made to a known attorney number.

In a follow-up report, Cohen said the more than 48,000 recorded phone calls came from about 1,400 numbers involving 58 inmates.

CCA uses the prison technology company Securus to operate its phone system. Securus has said Leavenworth CCA was responsible for designating attorney numbers as private, nonrecorded numbers. The company acknowledged allegations have been made in other places in the past regarding recording but said it rechecks its system each time and has always found it works properly.

Melody Brannon, the federal public defender for Kansas, said Cohen’s findings exposed unanswered questions. She urges Robinson to expand the special master’s authority.

“Specifically, the defense asks the special master to determine the policy and practice of the Kansas (U.S. Attorney’s Office) in obtaining, reviewing and disseminating attorney-client communications, regardless of whether the USAO classified the communication as privileged or not,” Brannon said in a January court filing.

She added the special master should also identify cases where the material was used and “mark the possible constitutional, statutory and ethical implications.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office is fighting the public defender’s request for additional power for the special master. Assistant U.S. Attorney Debra Barnett argues Brannon hasn’t offered any evidence warranting an expanded investigation.

Barnett has said prosecutors didn’t anticipate receiving recorded attorney-client calls from the facility during their investigations. Prosecutors had “no intent or desire” to obtain attorney-client calls, she has said, adding they weren’t used by prosecutors.

“When discoveries of these calls occurred, appropriate steps were taken by the United States,” Barnett said in a January filing. “Despite everything that has occurred in this case, the United States has not sought to hide the discovery of these calls, and would not do so.”

Prosecutors also argue the phone recordings aren’t privileged because the facility warned inmates their calls may be recorded. By continuing their calls and not taking steps to have calls with attorneys exempt from surveillance, the inmates waived their right to keep the conversations from being monitored, they argue.

Depending on how far Robinson allows Cohen to go, the outcome of his investigation holds potentially significant consequences in ongoing cases. Only a handful of people have been charged in the Leavenworth smuggling investigation, but prosecutors indicate they believe upwards of 90 inmates may be involved, as well as a number of workers.

The current controversy is also drawing attention to Securus, which has faced scrutiny in other places over attorney-client recordings.

A Kansas and Missouri attorney filed a federal lawsuit against CCA and Securus in January. They argue Securus and CCA record confidential attorney-client communications, despite no legitimate reason to record.

Attorneys have sued Securus before. The company settled a 2014 lawsuit in Texas, agreeing to provide additional safeguards.

The settlement required implementation of a system to allow attorneys to register their phone numbers on a “do not record” list for calls with clients.

White Judge says: "I sentenced criminals to hundreds more years than I wanted to. I had no choice"

WashPost

Shira A. Scheindlin, a former federal judge in the Southern District of New York, is a mediator and arbitrator with JAMS and a lawyer at Stroock, Stroock & Lavan. Peter Dubrowski, an associate at the law firm of Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello, assisted in the preparation of this essay.

In the fall of 2007, Steven Fabre appeared in my courtroom. He was a 29-year-old New York native there to plead guilty to a single count of possession with intent to distribute crack. Fabre was a typical street dealer who found business by approaching cars or pedestrians. He used the proceeds from his sales to feed his own addiction; he’d been using drugs since he was 14. Fabre had a number of convictions for very minor offenses, plus one for selling a small quantity of a controlled substance, for which he received five years of probation when he was 18. He never graduated from high school and had worked only for a short time, stocking his parents’ small grocery store.

Fabre’s life was troubled, but he was not a leader, a manager or an organizer of drug sales. Nor was he the source of any of the drugs he peddled — in fact, he didn’t even know how his supplier got them. This time, though, he’d sold more than five grams of crack, which meant he faced a mandatory five-year sentence. With no choice in the matter, that is the sentence I imposed. Prison destroyed his relationship with his girlfriend and separated him from his infant daughter. It exposed him to far more sophisticated criminals than he knew on the street. Most important, it is doubtful that prison provided much in the way of treating his drug addiction, which I viewed as the real source of his problems. I would never have imposed that sentence if I hadn’t been forced to. Our laws failed Steven Fabre.

In my nearly 22 years as a U.S. district judge in New York, I sentenced roughly 1,000 defendants. Thankfully, not all were subject to “mandatory minimum” sentences — in which Congress has imposed a required statutory punishment for a particular crime. But many were; 145 federal crimes still require a minimum sentence, including distribution of narcotics, immigration violations and identity theft, just to name a few.

Every first-year law student learns that sentencing has four goals: retribution, incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation. Yet thanks mostly to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, I was often prohibited from assessing a defendant’s history, personal characteristics or role in the offense. In sentencing, where judgment should matter most, I could not exercise my judgment. I felt more like a computer than a judge. And I was not alone. Over the years, many of my colleagues on the federal bench felt the same frustrations.

This problem upset me as soon as I was appointed in 1994. Mandatory minimums were almost always excessive, and they made me feel unethical, even dirty. After seven years, my patience had run thin and my conscience was troubled; I began to consider resigning. I sought the advice of a revered mentor, a federal judge with more than 30 years of experience. He pointed out that quitting would serve nobody, as another judge would be required to impose identical sentences anyway. He also said that if I left, the bench would lose a judge who could advocate for criminal justice reform through her decisions. So I remained. But to this day, I am pained by many of the sentences I was required by law to impose. While I bore the title “Honorable Judge,” I felt less than honorable and more like a complicit tool of an unjust system.

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners is largely due to mandatory minimum sentences.

Beginning in the 1970s, ostensibly to fight the war on drugs, Congress and many states passed legislation (like New York’s infamous Rockefeller laws, adopted in 1973) requiring judges to impose harsh minimum sentences for drug offenses. While there were once three co-equal branches of government, there were now two, with the judiciary becoming the less equal branch: The legislative branch had eliminated judicial discretion in sentencing, and prosecutors in the executive branch decided when to charge a crime that carried a strict minimum punishment. This regime resulted in a steady rise in the prison population from 338,000 in 1970 to 2.2 million in 2010.

Mandatory minimums were not the only limit on a judge’s discretion. Before 2005, federal judges were required to follow guidelines developed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. These rules were intended to eliminate disparities in sentencing that often resulted from the unconscious biases of judges. As early as the 1970s, federal trial judges — including Marvin Frankel, the intellectual father of the Sentencing Commission — noted that judges tended to impose lighter sentences on defendants who looked like them and harsher sentences on those who did not: minorities, undocumented immigrants and drug addicts who appeared in court looking poor and ragged. Unfortunately, the new rules codified some of these disparities: At one time, defendants received five years in prison for possessing five grams of crack, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to warrant the same sentence. This 100-to-1 asymmetry was reduced to 20-to-1 in 2010.

The guidelines assign every crime a place on a grid, with one axis for the seriousness of the crime and the other axis for the number and nature of any prior convictions of the defendant. The guidelines permit some adjustments, such as an increase in offense level when the victim of the crime is especially vulnerable, or a decrease in offense level when the defendant accepts responsibility. The grid produces a range of months in prison that a judge previously was, almost without exception, required to impose. Thankfully, in 2005, two decades after the guidelines took effect, the Supreme Court found them unconstitutional; they could be only advisory. This returned discretion to judges — except with respect to mandatory minimum statutes, courtesy of Congress, which are still very much alive.

Judicial discretion in sentencing matters. Many judges, including me, routinely sentence below the guidelines, particularly for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders. Indeed, in 2015 only 36.5 percent of all drug offenses nationwide resulted in a guideline-compliant sentences. Between 2005 and May 2016, when I retired from the bench, I sentenced more than 200 defendants convicted of narcotics offenses and imposed a lighter-than-advised sentence more than 80 percent of the time. Had I sentenced at the top of the guidelines’ range, these defendants would have served more than a millennium of additional prison time.

After I left the bench, Peter Dubrowski — my last law clerk — and I decided that we would review the sentencing protocols for each of those 200 defendants. As I expected, we found strikingly similar storylines. The overwhelming majority of the defendants were indigent. Seventy-two percent had children to support, and many of the defendants were under the age of 25 — barely adults themselves. More than half had not graduated from high school, most had not obtained a GED, and barely 5 percent had attended college. A majority battled alcohol addiction, drug addiction or both, and had begun abusing substances by age 14. Most were unemployed. Most came from single-parent homes, and most had at least one parent who was, or had been, incarcerated.

These common characteristics suggested that the defendants needed a brand of justice that would allow them to get their lives back on track, rather than deprive them of future jobs, roles supporting their families and chances to become productive in their communities. The right punishments would have given them a chance to achieve those goals. But many of the defendants in my courtroom were charged with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum sentence. As with Fabre, there was nothing I could do other than impose the required term. [MORE]

Border agents searched 23,000 phones, laptops in 2016

WashTimes

The number of electronic device searches conducted by border officers surged some 500 percent in 2016, as the agency said a changing threat environment caused more people to trip their radars.

The number of searches was still small. More than 1 million people entered the U.S. per day, while Customs and Border Protection searched 65 electronic devices on the average day, a senior agency official said Friday.

Those searches included both U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents returning to their homes, as well as visitors and new immigrants arriving. 

The senior official said searches netted everything from child pornography to evidence of terrorism ties — though the official couldn’t say how many of the 23,877 device searches conducted in 2016 did lead expose criminal behavior.

A year earlier, CBP reported just 4,764 device searches, or just 13 a day.

“That’s a big jump,” said Nathan Wessler, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech privacy and technology project. “They shouldn’t be able to do that on a hunch, or just because they feel like it. It should be based on actual suspicion of criminal wrongdoing based on fact.” [MORE]

Susan Rice Says Trump’s Black Caucus Remarks Are ‘Offensive’ [for real, Fuck Trump]

HeatStreet

Former national security adviser Susan Rice has called President Trump’s response to a question posed by a black journalist during Thursday’s dizzying press conference “notably offensive.”

During the conference, April Ryan, White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, asked President Trump whether he was planning on including the Congressional Black Caucus—which she initially referred to by its acronym ‘CBC’—and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in his conversations on ‘inner cities’ and his broader urban agenda.

A visibly flummoxed Trump retorted: “Am I going to include who?”

After Ryan repeated her question, Trump aggressively suggested she should go and set up the meeting herself, despite her insisting that although she knew some of its members, she was “just a reporter,” and as such had no affiliation with the organization.

“Are they friends of yours?” he asked “Let’s go. Set up a meeting. I would love to meet with the Black Caucus. I think it’s great, the Congressional Black Caucus. I think it’s great.”

Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser in the Obama administration and was also the first black woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, retweeted a post from Vox editor Ezra Klein pointing to a piece criticizing Trump’s monolithic treatment of all people of color.

“This is a cogent summary of why @realDonaldTrump’s answer to April Ryan was so notably offensive” she wrote on Thursday evening.

The article in question highlighted Trump’s repeated use of the determiner “the” when talking about ethnic minorities—”the blacks,” “the Latinos,” “the African Americans” —as if all of them formed an uniform and dangerous cabal.

Following the second presidential debate in October, during which the then candidate had said that Hillary Clinton had “done a terrible job for the African-Americans” the hashtag #TheAfricanAmericans began trending on Twitter, with many sarcastic takes on Trump’s use of words.

At the time, educator and activist Kelly Wickham Hurst wrote: “Wondering if #TheAfricanAmericans are meeting up tomorrow somewhere in the inner city. Let a sister know where to be. I’ll keep the minutes.”

In his Thursday tweet, Ezra Klein called Trump’s comments on race “the lowest moment” of his press conference.

This sentiment was widely echoed elsewhere, including by Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland:

“I don’t think he [Trump] knew what the CBC was” the Democratic lawmaker told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Thursday evening in response to Trump’s remarks.

“A lot of people assume that all black people know all black people” he added “But the idea that the president would ask somebody in the press pool to set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus… he’s the President of the United States of America. He can make that phone call himself.”

Study finds significant racial disparities in police treatment during San Jose vehicle stops

Kron4

Black drivers in San Jose are almost three times as likely to be curb-sat than white drivers and nine times more likely to be interviewed after a vehicle stop, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso.

The Police Department responded positively to the study, saying in a statement that the analysis showed “fewer racial disparities than expected.”

Hispanics were shown to be over three times more likely than whites to be interviewed after a vehicle stop and about twice as likely to be stopped compared to their overall representation.

Blacks and Hispanics were about twice as likely as whites to be searched during a vehicle stop and more than twice as likely to receive a criminal citation, despite that Hispanics, like Asians, were less likely than whites to be found carrying contraband.

Hispanics were more than twice as likely than whites to be handcuffed during a pedestrian stop, and more likely than white pedestrians to be stopped at all.

Black and Asian pedestrians were both stopped less frequently than whites, and less often than would be expected given their representation among violent crime suspects reported to police.

Michael Smith, a UTEP criminologist and former police officer, led the study of vehicle and pedestrian stop data recorded between September 2013 and March 2016 after San Jose police contracted with UTEP to conduct the study last year.

In the study, Smith recommends that police identify racially disparate stop patterns by individual officers and address them early, explaining that racial profiling is often driven by the practice of a relatively small number of officers in the department.

Researchers on the study also recommend that the department adopt evidence-based training for improving police-citizen interactions and disseminate better information about crime patterns as they intersect with

race in the city.

Smith is quoted in the police statement as saying that the department has “no apparent cultural issues,” despite the disparities published in his analysis.

Rep. Jeffries says Bannon 'is a stone cold racist'

Politco 

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries said Friday that any meeting between the Congressional Black Caucus and President Donald Trump should not include senior adviser Steve Bannon — because he's "a stone cold racist and a white supremacist sympathizer."

"We're looking forward to an open dialogue, but Steve Bannon should not be in the room," Jeffries said on MSNBC Friday afternoon.

Asked why Bannon ought not participate, Jeffries said: "Well listen he's a stone cold racist and a white supremacist sympathizer. It'd be hard for me to participate in any meeting with Steve Bannon that normalizes his presence in the White House."

The former Breitbart News leader's inclusion in the Trump administration has drawn strong opposition from minority groups and Democrats alike, and many have leveled charges of racism against him. [MORE]

Snyder's Civil Rights Commission says ‘Systemic racism’ at root of Flint water crisis [but it doesn't say Snyder is part of the racism]

Spokesman

“Systemic racism” going back decades is at the core of problems that caused a lead-contaminated water crisis in the majority black city of Flint, according to a Michigan Civil Rights Commission report issued Friday.

The report says the commission did not unearth any civil rights law violations and that nobody “intended to poison Flint.” But the 130-page report based on the testimony of more than 100 residents, experts and government and community leaders at public hearings and other meetings last year concludes that decisions would have been different had they concerned the state’s wealthier, predominantly white communities.

“We are not suggesting that those making decisions related to this crisis were racists … (but the) disparate response is the result of systemic racism that was built into the foundation and growth of Flint, its industry and suburban area,” the report says. “Would the Flint water crisis have been allowed to happen in Birmingham, Ann Arbor or East Grand Rapids? We believe the answer is no, and that the vestiges of segregation and discrimination found in Flint made it a unique target. The lack of political clout left the residents with nowhere to turn, no way to have their voices heard.”

To save money while under state control, the impoverished city with a 57 percent black population used water from the Flint River for 18 months without treating it to prevent pipe corrosion. As a result, the water caused lead to leach from old pipes and into homes.

Elevated levels of lead, a neurotoxin, were detected in children, and 12 people died in a Legionnaires’ outbreak that has been linked to the improperly treated water. Flint’s overall lead level no longer exceeds the federal limit but authorities still require residents to use faucet filters provided by the state.

Michigan has allocated roughly $250 million toward resolving the disaster. Thirteen current or former government officials have been criminally charged in the crisis, including two emergency managers who were appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder to run Flint.

The commission’s report notes the local, state and federal action to help Flint that began in late 2015 but criticized the timing, noting that by that time residents “had been reporting heavily discolored and bad tasting water for well over a year.”

“Even after some tests showed there was a problem, decision makers questioned the tests, not the water,” the report said.

The commission’s findings build on a report released last year by a bipartisan task force created by Snyder that determined the crisis was a case of “environmental injustice.” This week, Snyder announced the members of a new Environmental Justice Work Group aimed at improving state guidelines and policy regarding environmental and health hazards.

Snyder spokeswoman Anna Heaton said the governor “takes the reporting of each of these panels very seriously, and appreciates the public input that was shared.”

The commission recommends replacing or amending the state’s emergency manager law to analyze the root causes of a community’s financial problems and allow for more local representation and oversight. The bipartisan task force and others also recommended changes to the law in the wake of the water crisis, but none has been made.

Flint resident Claire McClinton said she’s grateful for the efforts but finds the report “underwhelming.” She said the emergency manager law needs to be abolished, the Army Corps of Engineers should replace the old pipes, and Medicare needs to be made available to “all impacted residents.”

“It didn’t match the severity of the situation we’re in,” said McClinton, who attended the previous public hearings as well as Friday’s meeting where commissioners presented the report. “I think they talked themselves into being timid.”

The commission, created by the Michigan Constitution, is directed to investigate allegations of discrimination. If it finds violations, it can order the violator to stop and take corrective action. That order can be appealed to circuit court. The commission pledges “to be more resolute” in its role in “giving greater voice” to residents to prevent such crises from happening again.

Commission Co-chairman Agustin Arbulu said he seeks stronger civil rights laws that deal with “disparate impacts” on communities like Flint. He encouraged residents to file claims with the commission as well as federal agencies.

The commission first conducted hearings in Flint 50 years ago to investigate problems associated with urban renewal, particularly access to decent housing. The 1966 probe found a “rigidly segregated” city with people living in “squalid conditions.”

Its Impossible to Provide Service to People You Have Contempt For: Education Dept. misspells name of NAACP co-founder in tweet

The WashPost

It’s not just the White House that seems to have a problem with spelling. Someone at the U.S. Education Department, now led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, does, too.

At 8:45 on Sunday morning, the department’s official Twitter account misspelled the name of W.E.B. Du Bois, a black sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. Du Bois was misspelled as DeBois — an error that might be understandable from a young student, but the U.S. Education Department?

Hours after the tweet was posted — and after the error was lampooned by a number of people on Twitter, it was corrected, with an apology:

Post updated – our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo. — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017

The department fixed that tweet quickly, changing “apologizes” for “apologies.”

It wasn’t the first embarrassing spelling error of the young Trump administration. A recent White House list of 78 terrorist attacks that it said the media had deliberately “underreported” was riddled with errors, explained by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank like this:

The list didn’t expose anything new about terrorist attacks, but it did reveal a previously underreported assault by the Trump administration on the conventions of written English.

Seattle Judge Declines ACLU Request to Halt City and State Seizures of Homeless People's Belongings

From [HERE] After a hearing Monday in which the judge was openly skeptical of their case, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington has lost its first effort to change the way the city and state clear homeless encampments and trash homeless people's belongings in the process.

U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo S. Martinez issued a written ruling today denying the ACLU's request for a temporary restraining order restricting the ability of the City of Seattle and Washington State Department of Transportation to trash people's belongings without a robust process for notifying them and storing these belongings.

The restraining order request was part of an ongoing lawsuit over the city's sweeps of homeless encampments. The ACLU has argued that by not doing a good enough job storing homeless people's personal belongings after sweeps, the city and state are violating their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

In his decision today, Martinez wrote that the ACLU failed to prove that allowing the city to continue sweeping homeless encampments as it has been doing would cause irreparable harm. While he emphasized that his decision is "preliminary," the judge also expressed skepticism about the ACLU's claims that the city and WSDOT are violating homeless people's constitutional rights.

"While sympathetic to the circumstances in which these Plaintiffs find themselves," Martinez wrote, "the Court ultimately concludes that on this record Plaintiffs have not satisfied their burden to show a high likelihood of success on the merits of their constitutional claims at this time."

After the hearing Monday, Todd Williams, a lawyer who argued on behalf of the ACLU and the homeless plaintiffs, said the ACLU would continue the lawsuit regardless of the outcome on the restraining order.

In arguments to the court, the city and WSDOT have defended their existing practices for clearing encampments, promising they store people's belongings and offer a way to get those belongings back.

The ACLU and other advocacy groups have disputed those claims, arguing that not only are the city's policies for clearing encampments insufficient but that the city and state often don't follow their own policies in the first place. According to the ACLU, city records show that from January 2015 through early April 2016, the city participated in 733 encampment sweeps but only stored belongings 55 times

"Even if rules were perfectly constitutional," Williams told the court Monday, "it's not clear the city and state will actually follow those rules."

Matthew Segal, a lawyer representing the city, disputed the ACLU's numbers in court Monday.

"The City of Seattle is not a recalcitrant city. The city is not denying… that persons have rights to property," Segal told the judge. "We’re not saying that just because you’re trespassing, you have absolutely no rights. We’re saying we’re trying to balance the important issues the city must undertake and balance every day." (Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and the mayor's counsel, Ian Warner, were in the courtroom but didn't argue before the judge.)

Judge Martinez was openly friendly to the city's case in court, prefacing one question to the city about its sweeps policies with, "I know you're trying to address the problem and come up with rules and regulations that would make sense for everyone." At another point, he said of people camping near roadways, "When I drive in town... I've seen people doing things that might very well put them in danger and put traveling motorists in danger as well."

During discussion of the ACLU's argument, Martinez questioned how realistic it is to expect city and state workers to be able to differentiate between homeless people's personal belongings and trash. Martinez told Williams that homeless people who are "suffering mental illness [and] drug use" could be "commingling" their personal belongings and trash. "And you want to put that responsibility [for separating trash and important belongings] on the defendants here?" the judge asked.

While today's decision affects only the ACLU's request for a temporary restraining order and the case will continue, it is also a sign of just how difficult this case will be for the ACLU to win. A date has not yet been set for the next hearing in the case.

San Francisco to offer free higher education at Community College

Criminalization & Trump's ICE Raids on Non-Whites: Two Immigrant Rights Organizers Facing Deportation Speak Out

In Real Bowling Green Massacre, a White Supremacist Planned Attack Against African Americans & Jews

Surviving Death Row - Witness

White House canceled ICE immigration meeting with Hispanic Caucus & Offer "Bullshit" Reason

From [HERE] and [HERE] A meeting between members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) and the country's top immigration enforcement officer was canceled at the behest of Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and the White House, according to House Democrats.

The closed-door meeting, scheduled for Tuesday following a series of high-profile immigration raids, was canceled at the last minute.

"I will confirm that in my conversation with [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas] Holman, he made it clear to me that this decision came from higher up and I believe I’m accurately reflecting his statement when he said, ‘Kelly and the White House,’" said Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), chairwoman of the CHC.

CHC members and other Democrats with a special interest in immigration were expected to ask Holman to produce specific data about people detained in ICE raids over the past two weeks, including why they were prioritized for removal.

A representative for ICE told The Hill the meeting had been canceled because the attendance had nearly tripled in size, forcing ICE to contact House leadership to coordinate a bipartisan meeting. But Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.) didn't buy that explanation. 

"Bullshit," said Napolitano.

Democrats at a press conference held to address the cancellation all agreed there is no House rule that requires meetings with administration officials of a certain size be cleared by leadership. 

"Unless it's a new Trump rule," said Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.)

Lujan Grisham said Holman had confirmed to her that ICE reached out to House leadership to request the bipartisan meeting, tentatively scheduled for later this week.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Gillian Christensen later confirmed the decision to postpone the meeting had been taken because of the growing number of attendants. 

“ICE leadership agreed to meet with six Democratic Members of Congress who signed a request on Friday, February 10, with the purpose of updating them on ICE’s recent enforcement operations.  Because the attendees list grew substantially, DHS reached out to the House leadership staff to arrange a bipartisan, in-depth briefing, which the Speaker’s office arranged and scheduled for Thursday of this week.  ICE looks forward to sharing information on its enforcement operations and how they are humanely and professionally enforcing U.S. immigration law,” said Christensen

Still, Democrats said they were "more than disappointed" by the decision to cancel Tuesday's meeting, which they saw as an opportunity to provide clarity to immigrant constituencies in panic over the changes in immigration enforcement.

"It’s disappointing that we’re having this press conference. We hoped to have a press conference to express further clarification as to what ICE is doing," said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Caucus, "and instead we’re left in the lurch here and I’m being told they want to have a bipartisan meeting."

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), long a proponent of comprehensive immigration reform, warned that the Trump administration's aggressive immigration tactics would eventually backfire.

"It is really immoral to divide and destroy families, especially to make cheap, cowardly, political points at the expense of those families. Yeah, you lost in court, but you’re going to lose in the most important court, the court of public opinion," said Gutierrez.

Rep. Nannette Diaz-Barragan (D-Calif.) said ICE agents in her Los Angeles-area district confirmed to her people who had not committed crimes had been arrested.

"I want answers because my constituents in particular are getting picked up," said Diaz-Barragan.

Trump's executive orders on immigration expanded the definition of criminality for immigration cases and the rules for considering an immigrant a deportation priority.

"The definition in the executive order broadens the concept of crime in an amazing way," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).

"If you did an act that would be considered a crime, you would be a target for enforcement. Well, what does that mean?"

Lujan Grisham said the group wasn't opposed to a larger, bipartisan meeting, but a meeting with the enforcement agencies directly targeting its constituency was the CHC's right.

"The request to have the meeting was to get real information, data about who was apprehended, who were the targets, where and confirm that information with our constituents for several reasons, but not the least of which is to make sure we’re following the law, that we’re clear people are getting due process, that they know their rights and in effect that we’re not causing, which we are, fear and panic in our communities," she said. 

Racist Suspect Bimbo Kellyanne Conway’s Tweet Is Another Gift To The White Nationalist Media

MediaMatters

Kellyanne Conway, who serves as one of President Donald Trump’s main media surrogates, tweeted -- and subsequently deleted -- a Valentine’s Day message to a white nationalist Twitter account that has posted anti-Semitic and racist messages. Conway’s message is yet another example of the Trump team sending a nod to its supporters in white nationalist media.

As Media Matters has documented, Trump and his advisers have engaged in a disturbing courtship with the racist white nationalist movement. They have repeatedly retweeted white supremacist messages and accounts, such as “WhiteGenocideTM”; surrogates have directly courted white nationalists by giving interviews to white nationalist media outlets; and Trump’s team gave press credentials to a “pro-white” radio host to cover a rally. Trump has also appointed officials who are popular among members of the movement, including senior adviser Stephen Bannon.

The courtship has had its desired effect with white nationalist media: They have heavily defended Trump and his policies and harassed journalists who have questioned the president. White nationalist writers have also cited Trump and his team’s Twitter messages -- whether later deleted or not -- as a signal that the administration agrees with white nationalist policies.

The account @TrumpTrainNoBrk tweeted at Conway on February 14: “Your strength & resiliency in face of vile hatred, bigotry, & sexism of the unhinged Left is a daily inspiration! Love you!” In a since-deleted tweet, Conway responded:

In an interview with BuzzFeed, Conway implied she didn't send the tweet, claiming she didn’t “know who had access to my account. ... Let me see who sent this.” She added, “I denounce whoever it is. It will be immediately deleted. Everybody makes mistakes.”

The account’s white nationalist orientation is clear from just a cursory glance. The account has a cartoon frog next to its name. The frog represents Pepe, which has become the mascot for white nationalists and anti-Semites. The account's bio also says "#WhiteIdentity." As the Southern Poverty Law Center noted, members of the racist “alt-right” movement have been claiming “that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”

@TrumpTrainNoBrk responded to a BuzzFeed reporter noting that Conway had just retweeted “a white nationalist” by writing, “#WhiteIdentity is a right, not bigotry, despite how much Marxists like you hate it.”

@TrumpTrainNoBrk has repeatedly tweeted or retweeted white nationalist themes about Jewish people, African-Americans, and “white genocide.” The account claimed: “By far the angriest, most aggressive tweets I get are from low-IQ black women... I wonder why?” and wrote that it posts “black on white violent crime stats” so African-Americans “will stop murder/raping us.”

Justice Department delivers CIA ‘Torture Report’ to federal court

Miami Herald

The Trump administration said on Friday it delivered to a federal court vault in Washington, D.C., a Justice Department copy of the so-called Senate Torture Report on the CIA’s secret prison network during the George W. Bush administration.

The Obama administration had balked at turning over a copy to any court.

But Acting Assistant Attorney General Chad A. Readler, who joined the Justice Department on Jan. 30 from the Jones Day firm, notified the court that “the government deposited for the Court Information Security Officers (CISOs) for secure storage a complete and unredacted electronic copy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

The damning 6,700-page report documents abuses in the CIA program that waterboarded some captives, rectally abused others and held at least 119 foreign prisoners out of reach of the International Red Cross or attorneys during the Bush administration.

Lawyers at the Guantánamo war court had wanted military judges to obtain and preserve copies of the report for use in the Sept. 11 and USS Cole death-penalty cases of six men who spent years in the CIA prisons called Black Sites. The chief judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, refused but eventually ordered the Pentagon to safeguard one of its copies.

MORE NEWS: Quick, 9/11 lawyers argue, preserve Senate ‘Torture Report’ before Trump takes office

So attorneys turned to the federal court, where judges handling the mostly dormant unlawful detention cases of two Guantánamo captives — Abd al Rahim al Nashiri and Zayn al Abdeen Mohammed al Hussein, known as Abu Zubaydah — ordered a copy sent to their safe.

At issue had been concerns that, once the Democrats who created the report in 2014 lost control of the Senate, the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Richard Burr of North Carolina, would scoop up and make disappear copies that his predecessor, Dianne Feinstein of California, had distributed to select departments during the Obama administration. [MORE]

Private prison companies Owned by Whites likely to be big beneficiaries of Trump's plan to detain more Non-White Immigrants

ChicagoTribune

When John Chavez peers through chain link and razor wire into the vast tent city that once housed one of the nation’s most notorious prisons for immigrants, he does not see a failed experiment. 

Two years ago, inmates set fire to the sprawling complex in protest of poor medical conditions, slashing holes in their tents and forcing the government to shut it down. Yet many people in this struggling south Texas county— like Chavez, who once worked as a security guard at the privately run prison — have high hopes the abandoned detention center will reopen.

“If Trump is going to crack down on immigrants, we’re going to have to process them somehow,” the stocky 55-year-old said as he stood outside the empty shell of his old workplace. “Maybe there’s a shot I could get my job back.”

Stocks for private prison companies have surged in the two weeks since President Trump signed an executive order calling for expansion of immigrant detention facilities at or near the border with Mexico, specifically authorizing the use of private contractors “to construct, operate, or control facilities” in what is expected to be a substantial ramp-up of the massive detention system that thrived under the Obama administration.

With the number of immigrant detainees already at historic levels, critics warn that rapidly expanding prisons will only exacerbate squalid living conditions and substandard medical care. The big beneficiaries, they say, will be stockholders and executives of for-profit prison companies.

Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, predicts “an enormous boondoggle for the private prison industry.”

“The immigration system already lacks rigorous oversight and transparency,” he said, “and now there’s this perfect storm — a push to rapidly expand the system, a lack of existing oversight and the profit motive driving these companies.”

Private companies provide immigrant detention at a lower cost: about $144 per inmate a day, versus $184 in federally run Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Immigrant attorneys and human rights groups have long argued the profit motive spurs private companies to cut corners and cram inmates into shoddy and overcrowded facilities.

For critics, Raymondville’s Willacy County Correctional Center is Exhibit A in the case against private detention centers. Not long before it was forced to close in 2015, the ACLU dubbed it a “physical symbol of everything that is wrong with enriching the private prison industry and criminalizing immigration.”

Officials in Willacy County are still banking on being a place to lock up immigrants, even though the county has filed a lawsuit against the private company whose “abysmal management,” it claims, caused inmates to riot.

“Everybody here wants it back because they need jobs,” Eliberto “Beto” Guerra, a Democratic Willacy County commissioner, said of the facility. “It means security for a lot of families.”

Well-paid jobs are scarce in Raymondville, a Rio Grande Valley hub of cotton and sugarcane fields whose main street is dominated by loan stores and pawn shops. More than a third of Willacy County residents live below the poverty line.

The idea for an immigrant detention center was born 15 years ago, when a large construction company approached local officials with a pitch to revitalize their economy: borrow $65 million from the public debt markets to build prisons.

In 2006, as President George W. Bush pushed to crack down on illegal immigration, the county hired a Texas construction company to build the detention center on a cotton field on the outskirts of town. It then contracted with a Utah-based company, Management & Training Corp., to run the complex.

This has become a common arrangement. As ICE detention has exploded in recent years — reaching more than 41,000 beds last November — about 65% of ICE detainees are now held in facilities operated by private, for-profit contractors.

As Joe Alexandre, Raymondville’s former mayor, remembers it, county officials were assured they would earn more than they needed to recoup their multimillion-dollar investment.

Built in just a few months, the sprawling complex, dubbed Tent City, could hold 2,000 inmates and was the largest immigrant detention camp in the country. Ten huge tent domes, made of Kevlar stretched over metal frames, were erected over concrete pads. Each oval tent held 200 men or women, with no partitions dividing the toilets or showers.

Almost immediately, there were problems. Inmates complained of rotten food, unsanitary conditions, poor medical care and limited access to the law library and telephones. [MORE]

Court Refuses to Reinstate Trump's Muslim Ban, Says "No Evidence" of Attacks from 7 Listed Countries

Democracy Now

In a major victory for civil rights advocates, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously refused to reinstate Donald Trump’s executive order that banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States and sparked nationwide protests. The judges ruled that the administration "has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States." Trump has vowed to appeal the case, possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court. We get reaction from Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It is the veracity of the administration that is at stake," Warren says.

U.S. court curbs solitary for Pennsylvania inmates no longer facing execution

Reuters

A federal appeals court on Thursday said Pennsylvania prisons cannot keep housing inmates in solitary confinement on death row after their death sentences had been vacated, without meaningful reviews of whether such conditions remained necessary.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said the inmates have a constitutional due process right against such confinement, unless it was required for security and safety reasons, and could be justified on a case-by-case basis.

"Inmates in solitary confinement on death row without active death sentences face the perils of extreme isolation and are at risk of erroneous deprivation of their liberty," Circuit Judge Theodore McKee wrote for a three-judge panel.

"Accordingly, they have a clearly established due process right under the Fourteenth Amendment to avoid unnecessary and unexamined solitary confinement on death row," he said.

The appeals court nonetheless agreed with two lower court judges that prison officials who were sued over the old policy deserved qualified immunity, because they interpreted that policy reasonably and might not have known it was suspect.

Thursday's decision arose from lawsuits by Craig Williams and Shawn Walker, respectively convicted of first-degree murders in 1988 and 1992.

They each sought damages for having spent several years in solitary confinement after their death sentences had been vacated, but before they were resentenced to life in prison.

The office of Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, which defended the prison officials, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

James Bilsborrow, a lawyer for Williams and Walker, in an interview said that despite the qualified immunity finding, the decision "should give prisons pause before confining inmates in solitary confinement indefinitely."

Many critics of solitary confinement fault what the appeals court called its "dehumanizing effect," quoting a 2015 opinion from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

The more conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a separate 2015 opinion with regard to solitary confinement that "years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price," and the judiciary might eventually consider "whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist."

McKee said solitary confinement can trigger "devastating psychological consequences," and side effects such as anxiety, depression, panic and suicidal thoughts.

He said Williams and Walker were kept in their cells at least 22 hours a day, and when allowed out Williams was often put in a locked cage while Walker faced invasive strip searches.

Pennsylvania argued that such treatment fell within the "normal range" of permissible conditions, and was no more harsh than what similar inmates faced.

The cases are Williams v. Secretary Pennsylvania Department of Corrections et al, 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 14-1469; and Walker v. Farnan et al in the same court, No. 15-1390. 

Florida Legislature Taking Steps to Resume Death Penalty Cases

NBC

With death penalty cases grinding to a halt across the state, the Florida Legislature is finally taking its first - and probably only steps - to fix the law so prosecutors can resume cases once again.

]Legislators are moving ahead with a measure that would require a unanimous jury verdict in cases where the death penalty is being sought.

Just a year ago legislators rejected the idea, but the state Supreme Court last October struck down a 2016 law that said the death penalty could be imposed after a 10-2 jury vote.

A Senate panel on Monday approved a bill requiring a unanimous jury verdict and a similar measure is being considered in the state House. The legislation could be among the first bills passed and sent to Gov. Rick Scott when the session officially kicks off in March. [MORE]