Jesse Jackson Pushing voter participation in Virginia Governor's Race

From [HERE] The Rev. Jesse Jackson is encouraging Virginians to vote in the state's closely watched race for governor.

The Richmond-Times Dispatch reports that the civil rights activist visited Trinity Baptist Church in Richmond Sunday to encourage voter participation.

Jackson said his Rainbow PUSH Coalition will be active in voter registration and turnout in Virginia. He was joined Sunday by church leaders and state lawmakers from the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus.

The Old Dominion is one of only two states electing new governors this year and the contest is viewed as a potential early referendum on President Donald Trump. Democrat Ralph Northam is facing Republican Ed Gillespie in the gubernatorial contest.

Democrat Ralph Northam has an early eight-point lead over Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia governor’s race, according to a new survey released last month.

The poll by Quinnipiac University found 47 percent of Virginia voters backed Northam, the state’s sitting lieutenant governor, while 39 percent backed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. [MORE]

Northam (born September 13, 1959) is an American doctor, U.S. Army veteran, former Virginia state senator, and current Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Northam has pledged to "stand up against" Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Northam has remained neutral on the building of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. He has also avoided taking a firm stance on other pipelines such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Northam voted against a constitutional amendment to make Virginia a right to work state.

Laziest President in History Starts 17-Day Golf Vacation

Trump's 16-day golf vacation aircraft-ban security zone [MORE]

MJQ: Pyramid (Blues for Junior) (European Concert Version)

19th-Century Diary Suggests Slaves Are Buried in Brooklyn Lot

NY Times

From 1828 to 1830, a Gowanus landowner, Adriance Van Brunt, paused several times a week to record in a diary the events of that day he deemed worthy of mention. The diary, in neatly inked handwriting stretching from edge to edge, offers a detailed portrait of farm life near what was then the Village of Brooklyn.

There is a summary of a preacher’s Sunday sermon — “ye are my witness” — and the dutiful accountings of purchases and sales. “Little Albert took some potatoes and pears to market,” Van Brunt wrote one day in 1828. On another: “Rained first time since the 4th August.”

But other entries in the diary disturb the quaint veneer of a bygone era and remind the modern reader of how tangible and ingrained the legacy of slavery was in New York in the early 19th century.

More urgently, the diary may complicate the city’s intent to build a new school on part of what was the Van Brunt farm, with its hint at the possibility that slaves are buried in unmarked graves on the lot.

“Buried old Mr. Bennet Aged 80,” Van Brunt wrote in September 1828. “Also a Black woman.” The following month, he wrote: “Buried Oct. 1 Nancy (Black girl) aged about 12 years.” [MORE]

Accountability for Public Servants Unnecessary: Portland Cops Now Get 48 Hours to make a Statement after Shooting Civilians

Katu

The Portland City Council met Thursday night to discuss proposed changes to officer accountability agreements with the community and police.

That included debating the so-called "48-hour rule," which refers to how soon after a shooting that officers should give a public statement.

Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill said every use of deadly force case against an officer goes to a grand jury. But he's concerned about what could happen if an officer was indicted for murder.

"The indictment is at substantial risk of being challenged and quite possibly dismissed if involved officers are compelled to give statements on the administrative side hearing matter," Underhill said.

"I can tell you what you're being asked to support is a smack in the face to community members who want accountability, who want justice," said Jo Ann Hardesty, president of Portland NAACP.

"The politically brave thing to do would be to require compelling testimony right away, and let a legal challenge play out -- not write a draft policy and let the court weigh in," said Dan Handelman, director of Portland Copwatch.

Several community leaders spoke in support of the 48-hour rule. Some even suggested it be shortened to 24 hours.

Commissioners are still accepting community input via email on the police accountability ordinances.

Retired Police Detective: Trump's Comments Endorsing Police Brutality are "Treasonous"

New civil rights chief at Justice Department has spent his career undermining civil rights

ThinkProgress

Thomas Wheeler, the Assistant Acting Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) division that handles policing, discrimination, and voting rights cases, announced he would be leaving his position after just 6 months.

John Gore, a Republican lawyer in Washington, will serve in the interim until Trump’s nominee for the position, Eric Dreiband, secures a hearing. Gore most notably represented the University of North Carolina system after it was sued by the Obama administration over the state’s HB2 bathroom bill. Gore is a former partner at Jones Day—the law firm from which the Trump administration has pulled at least 14 attorneys from to join the president’s team, including the White House Counsel Don McGahn. According to Election Law Blog, Gore’s now-deleted bio on the Jones Day website stated Gore had been “actively involved in redistricting litigation” in private practice and listed six cases in which he defended state governments accused of violating the Voting Rights Act through gerrymandering.

Gore represented Florida Governor Rick Scott in a case over his administration's attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls of potential noncitizens before the 2012 election. The move disproportionately affected Florida’s Hispanic community, which made up only 13% of the 11.3 million active registered voters in Florida at the time, yet were 58% of those identified as potential noncitizens. A federal appeals court ruled in 2014 the purge was found to have violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which prevents purging of voter rolls 90 days before an election.

Many believe the Trump administration, with its recent creation of a Voter Election Commission urging states to turn over large amounts of voter data, will gut the NVRA. In a June photo with Trump, chair of the Voter Election Commission and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was photographed holding a memo of desired policy goals, including a bullet point to amend the NVRA.

Gore will not permanently maintain the job: Trump nominated Washington labor lawyer Eric Dreiband to serve as assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, but hasn’t yet been confirmed. Dreiband, however, also has a poor record on civil rights, and many activists have already voiced their opposition to Dreiband’s nomination.

“Whoever leads the ‘crown jewel’ of the Justice Department must have deep relationships with stakeholders and marginalized communities, and have a deep, abiding faith in our nation’s civil rights laws,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a former leader of the civil rights division under President Obama. “They must respect the laws that touch everyone, rights that people have literally died for. They must respect the role of what has been called the conscience of the federal government. In all those regards, Eric Dreiband is woefully unqualified to lead the Civil Rights Division.”

Dreiband, also a former Jones Day attorney, has represented a tobacco company in an age discrimination case and Bloomberg in a pregnancy discrimination case. In his most high-profile case, Dreiband defended Abercrombie & Fitch in a Supreme Court case when the clothing retailer was sued for refusing to hire a 17-year-old Muslim woman because her headscarf was in violation of the company’s dress code, a case which Dreiband lost.

Racist Election Criminal Kobach Appears In Federal Court For Deposition

HPPR

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is also vice chairing a presidential commission on elections, was due in federal court Thursday morning to give a deposition in an ongoing voter registration case.

Kobach tried to avoid the deposition, but his last-minute appeal for a stay was denied Wednesday.

The ACLU sued Kobach on behalf of voters who registered at the DMV. The “Motor Voter” provision of the National Voter Registration Act makes that easy – voters just have to attest to their citizenship. Kobach is defending a state law that requires documentary proof of citizenship.

A judge ordered the secretary to hand over documents he shared with President Trump during the transition that suggest changes to the National Voter Registration Act. Those documents remain sealed.

Outside the federal courthouse in Kansas City Kansas, an aide said Kobach would not comment on the case.

Nearly 50 Senators Want to Make It a Felony to Boycott Israel

The Nation

In 1966, the NAACP of Claiborne County, Mississippi, launched a boycott of several white-owned local businesses on the basis of racial discrimination.

It was so impactful that the local hardware store filed a lawsuit against the individuals and organizations who coordinated the boycott. After 10 long years of litigation, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in favor of the white businesses and ordered the NAACP to pay for all their lost earnings.

Years later, in 1982, the US Supreme Court ruled 8-0 to overturn the lower court’s decision, on the basis that nonviolent boycotts are a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. In announcing the unanimous decision, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “One of the foundations of our society is the right of individuals to combine with other persons in pursuit of a common goal by lawful means.” [MORE]

US to probe Harvard University's admission process after racism complaints from Indian-Americans

FirstPost

New York: US President Donald Trump's administration is preparing to probe a complaint by four Indian-American organisations and other Asian groups that Harvard University discriminates against students from the communities in its admission process.

Justice Department Spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said on Wednesday the department wants to investigate the "administrative complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations in May 2015 that the prior Administration left unresolved".

Flores said, "The complaint alleges racial discrimination against Asian-Americans in a university's admission policy and practices."

The Global Organisation of Persons of Indian Origin (Gopio), National Federation of Indian-American Associations, American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin, and BITS Sindri Alumni Association of North India were among the 64 Asian groups that jointly filed the federal complaint.

The complaint said: "Many Asian-American students who have almost perfect SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, top one percent GPAs (Grade Point Average), plus significant awards or leadership positions in various extracurricular activities have been rejected by Harvard University and other Ivy League Colleges while similarly situated applicants of other races have been admitted."

SAT is one of the common entrance exams for college admission.

Though officially the affirmative action programmes are meant to aid African American and Latino students, in reality the quota system - similar to reservations in India - has expanded to also helps white students at the expense of Indian and other Asian students.

To ensure diversity, elite universities set academic standards for Asian students that are higher than that for even whites to prevent high-scoring Asians dominating the universities if admissions were based solely on merit.

A study by a Princeton University academic found that Asian-American students had to score 140 points more than whites in the SAT to gain admission to elite universities.

If a comparison is to be made to the Indian situation, Asians would be classified as "most forward" over the "forward" category. [MORE]

ACLU Asks Court To Force Government To Fight Fairly In FOIA Lawsuit Over Drone Strike Docs

TechDirt

The ACLU is headed to the Second Circuit Appeals Court, hoping to force the DOJ to be more... realistic about the government's drone strike operations in Pakistan. It's an FOIA lawsuit, with the ACLU seeking drone documents and being told -- in so many black bars -- that this publicly-acknowledged program is too secret to disclose.

The ACLU goes into this battle fighting blind:

In August 2016, the government blacked out a court ruling against government secrecy (yes, really), hiding from the public its reasons for why the ruling should remain secret. Then, it also hid its reasons for appealing that ruling to a higher court.

The DOJ argues the Pakistan drone strike program has never been officially acknowledged or disclosed. Going from there, it argues it shouldn't have to turn over the information the ACLU is requesting. But, as the ACLU points out, there's plenty of public knowledge about the program's existence. From the ACLU's filing [PDF]: [MORE]

New Book - "Chokehold: Policing Black Men." An unyielding justice system built for the oppression of blacks

WashPost

My first exposure to Paul Butler’s writing was at a legal conference in 1995. I volunteered at the last minute to review a law review article of his when the person assigned to the paper could not attend the meeting. In the now-famous piece, Butler detailed the harsh criminal sentencing blacks face. He reviewed the centuries-old practice of nullification — in which juries vote not guilty because they think a law is unfair — and boldly encouraged jurors to nullify in cases involving blacks accused of low-level drug offenses. When I finished, I scribbled, “Well done” and “Tenure?” on the first page. After publication, the article generated a firestorm of controversy, including calls for Butler’s job.

With “Chokehold: Policing Black Men,” his new book, Butler has hit his stride. This is a meditation, a sonnet, a legal brief, a poetry slam and a dissertation that represents the full bloom of his early thesis: The justice system does not work for blacks, particularly black men. With this performance, though, Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University, layers in statistics, quotes from academics, rap lyrics, research findings and personal narratives. It’s a raucous mix, drawing on a range of voices, including Michelle Alexander, Susan Sontag, the movie “The Mack,” Derrick Bell, James Comey, Black Star, Ronaldinho Gaucho, Michel Foucault, Langston Hughes and Touré.

In Butler’s usage, the chokehold, the sometimes fatal neck lock police use to coerce submission, is a metaphor for understanding how racial oppression functions in the U.S. justice system. The chokehold is the invisible fist of the law, a shapeshifter that represents iterations of racial oppression, including slavery, Jim Crow, racial profiling and mass incarceration — and all the other ways the law works to keep black men down. “Efforts to fix ‘problems’ such as excessive force and racial profiling are doomed to fail,” Butler writes. The system works as it was designed to work: The chokehold persists, regardless of the century, the race of the president or good intentions. Butler’s goal is to define, describe and ultimately dismantle the chokehold’s grip. [more]

ACLU investing millions of dollars in Florida to restore ex-felons’ voting rights

Wash Post

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has stepped up its political engagement as its Trump-era membership has swelled, is getting behind a campaign to end Florida’s felon disenfranchisement law by changing the state Constitution. The decision will put substantial financial and activist resources behind an ongoing campaign to put a “Voter Restoration Amendment” on the November 2018 ballot.

“It’s going to be at least [a] $5 million commitment, maybe more,” said Faiz Shakir, the ACLU’s national political director, in an interview. “We’ll build through the end of the year, and to get the signatures we need to get on the ballot, we’re looking at a million.”

The voter restoration campaign is one of the most ambitious outgrowths of the ACLU’s “people power” project, announced four months ago with a rally in Florida. The idea of bringing new ACLU members and donors into grass-roots politics was on display that day, as local organizers walked around the college sports arena the ACLU had chosen for the launch, gathering signatures for the voter restoration effort.[MORE]

Black women picking up firearms for self-defense

Detroit News

Sitting in a classroom above a gun range, a woman hesitantly says she isn’t sure she could ever shoot and kill someone, even to protect herself. Couldn’t she just aim for their leg and try to maim them?

Her instructor says self-defense is not about killing someone, but is instead about eliminating a threat.

If the gun gets taken away by a bad guy, the instructor says, “I promise you they’re not going to be having any sympathy or going through the thought process you are.”

Gently she adds that if the student isn’t comfortable with the lethal potential of the gun, buying one might not be for her.

Marchelle Tigner is on a mission: to train at least 1 million women how to shoot a firearm. She had spent no time around guns before joining the National Guard. Now, as a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, she wants to give other women of color the training she hadn’t had.

“It’s important, especially for black women, to learn how to shoot,” Tigner said, noting that black women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence. “We need to learn how to defend ourselves.”

It’s hard to find definitive statistics on gun ownership, but a study by the Pew Research Center released this month indicated that just 16 percent of “non-white women” identified themselves as gun owners, compared with about 25 percent of white women. Other Pew surveys in recent years have shown a growing acceptance of firearms among African-Americans: In 2012, one found that less than a third of black households viewed gun ownership as positive; three years later, that number had jumped. By then, 59 percent of black families saw owning guns as a necessity.

A recent study by gun-rights advocate and researcher John Lott showed that black women outpaced other races and genders in securing concealed carry permits between 2000 and 2016 in Texas, one of the few states that keep detailed demographic information.

Philip Smith founded the National African American Gun Association in 2012 during Black History Month to spread the word that gun ownership was not something reserved for whites. He figured it would ultimately attract about 300 members, a number achieved in its first month. It now boasts 20,000 members in 30 chapters across the country.

“I thought it would be the brothers joining,” Smith said. Instead, he found something surprising — more black women joining, most of them expressing concerns about living either alone or as single parents and wanting to protect themselves and their homes.

In recent months, he said politics also have emerged as a reason why he finds more blacks interested in becoming gun owners.

“Regardless of what side you’re on, in the fabric of society right now, there’s an undertone, a tension that you see that groups you saw on the fringes 20 years ago are now in the open,” he said. “It seems to me it’s very cool to be a racist right now, it’s in fashion, it’s a trend.”

On top of that, the shootings of black men and boys around the country have left Smith and others concerned that racism can make a black person a perceived threat, even when carrying a firearm legally.

“The pain that I initially feel for Philando Castile is the same pain I felt for Alton Sterling or Trayvon Martin and the list goes on and on and on,” Smith said.

He and his organization take pains to coach members on what to do when stopped by police, but not everyone is comforted.

“It’s disheartening to think that you have everything in order: Your license to carry. You comply. You’re not breaking the law. You’re not doing anything wrong. And there’s a possibility you could be shot and killed,” said Laura Manning, a 50-year-old payroll specialist for ADP from Atlanta. “I’m not going to lie. I’m just afraid of being stopped whether I have my gun or not.”

At the training session in Lawrenceville, just outside Atlanta, about 20 students gathered on a recent Saturday morning to go over basic safety lessons and instructions. They started with orange plastic replica guns as Tigner demonstrated proper stance and grip. They are taught not to put a finger on the trigger until it’s time to shoot and to keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. Tigner plays to their protective instincts by telling them always to know what is beyond their target so they don’t accidentally shoot a young child or another innocent bystander.

After about an hour in the classroom, the women walked downstairs and into the Bull’s Eye Indoor Gun Range. Some flinched as the crack of gunfire blasted from a series of bays. They were each shown how to load a magazine and given the chance to do it themselves — several of them struggling to get the bullets into the spring-loaded magazine with their long fingernails. Then they took turns firing a Glock 19 semi-automatic 9mm at targets about 5 yards down range.

“The bad guy’s dead. He’s not getting back up,” Tigner tells one student who beams with pride as they look over a target riddled with bullet holes.

Jonava Johnson, another student, says it took her a long time to decide to get a gun. For years she was afraid of them after an ex-boyfriend from high school threatened her and shot and killed her new boyfriend in front of her. She was just 17.

Flash forward about 30 years and her daughter was sexually assaulted in their home. At the time, she thought about getting a gun for protection but decided to get a guard dog instead. But she has since changed her mind.

“I think that’s the way it’s always been in the black community: It was never OK for us” to own a gun, said Johnson, 50. But now? “I hope I never have to kill anybody, but if it comes down to me or my children, they’re out.”

Washington state courts may shield non-white immigrants' status amid Trump fears

Guardian 

The assault took place in March. Ariella and her family were new arrivals to the US, but her husband didn’t know her real reasons for coming: her secret conversion to a religious group that was brutalized in their home country. Ariella had already filed for asylum.

When her husband found out, he screamed that he would kill her and began to rain blows down on her.

Police in Seattle charged her husband with felony harassment and two counts of domestic assault. And that’s when Ariella was confronted with an impossible choice: safety from her husband, or safety from the risks of revealing the particulars of her immigration status in open court.

Ariella is far from alone in facing such a choice. But that could soon change in the state of Washington, where a groundbreaking effort is under way to limit what juries hear about a witness’s immigration status. Prosecutors and immigration rights activists say the information can bias jurors and discourage immigrants, especially the undocumented, from using the legal system.

In June, the state supreme court agreed to consider a unique proposal: a new rule making immigration status inadmissible in court “unless status is an essential fact to prove an element of a criminal offense or to defend against the alleged offense or to show bias or prejudice of a witness”.

The rule, first proposed several years ago, would make Washington the first state in the country to place special limits on the mention of immigration status in criminal cases, and only the second state, after California, to impose similar limits in civil court. After hearing public arguments, the court could adopt, modify or reject the rule as early as September.

A study suggests that black Americans are unfairly fined by police

Economist 

WHEN a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot an unarmed black teenager dead three years ago, the killing set off outrage across America over violence committed by police. (Barack Obama’s Department of Justice concluded that the officer acted in self-defence.) But with greater public scrutiny of racial disparities in the use of force, better-disguised forms of inequality soon came to light as well. In March 2015 the department published a report on law enforcement in the city, which found that Ferguson’s criminal-justice system seemed to focus more on generating income for the government than on ensuring public safety. Nearly a quarter of the city’s general revenues came from criminal fines, fees and court costs. Moreover, black residents paid a far greater portion of these expenses than either their share of the population or their share of total crimes committed in Ferguson would indicate. The investigators concluded that the police had displayed “unlawful bias” against blacks.

react-text: 10186 The city appears to have heeded the Department of Justice’s message: fines and fees are down 77% from their peak in 2013. However, Ferguson was unlikely to be a unique outlier, and other cities engaging in similar practices might well have continued outside of the national spotlight. A new /react-text paper react-text: 10188 by Michael Sances of the University of Memphis and Hye Young You of Vanderbilt University published this month in the /react-text Journal of Politics react-text: 10190 found that Ferguson was indeed more of a rule than an exception. After examining data on 9,000 American cities, they found that those with more black residents consistently collected unusually high amounts of fines and fees—even after controlling for differences in income, education and crime levels. Cities with the largest shares (98%) of black residents collected an average of $12-$19 more per person than those with the smallest (0%) did. [MORE]

[white people who claim not to be racist can reveal &] Root out more City Hall racists: Taxpayers funded this orgy of prejudice

ChicagoTrib

It started with a complaint that a Chicago water department superintendent was using a city email address to conduct private firearms transactions. The inspector general's investigation turned up a lot more. Besides negotiating to buy or sell four guns and five cars, Paul Hansen traded racist emails with other supervisors and visited websites not related to his job — some containing sexually explicit materials — on "thousands of occasions" in a four-month period.

On city email, on a city computer, on city time.

He also forwarded a confidential workplace violence complaint filed by a subordinate to the employee accused in the complaint, according to IG Joseph Ferguson's report.

The top bosses who were looped in on some of those emails didn't put a stop to them. Sometimes they even joined in. Photos of naked women, jokes about fried chicken and watermelon, a picture of an African-American baby in a bucket described as a swimming pool, a message with the subject line "U Know U Be In Da Hood" — it was all just another day at the office at the Department of Water Management.

A trove of emails obtained earlier by the Tribune contained more of the same: a Confederate flag, a reference to "negro midgets," a crude joke about an employee needing "an inflatable doughnut on the chair" after a Gay Pride weekend. It's the kind of stuff you'd expect from fourth-grade boys with pigs for parents. And it was all happening on your dime, taxpayers.

Here's the other outrage: Nobody is surprised. The water department is larded with workers that somebody sent. In 2006, the department was the focus of a federal corruption trial that showed how then-Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration rewarded campaign workers with jobs, promotions and overtime. Daley's patronage chief, Robert Sorich, maintained the secret "clout list," rigged interviews and falsified documents to grease the hires.

In one of the emails, Hansen, the son of ex-44th Ward Ald. Bernie Hansen, bragged about his ability to "swing elections."

"The water department has been staffed at its highest levels by persons whose social or political connections were their chief or only qualification for the job," Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th, chairman of the City Council's black caucus, said this week. "The emails have exposed that these individuals hold black Chicagoans in contempt."[MORE]

White LA County Sheriff Lee Baca Denied Bond Ahead of Conviction Appeal

SCV News

Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has been denied bond pending the appeal of his conviction for obstructing a federal investigation into county jails.

In a ruling on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson said Baca did not “raise a substantial question likely to result in reversal or new trial” after the convicted ex-official introduced six grounds to support his case.

Earlier this year, Anderson sentenced Baca to three years in prison for obstructing an FBI probe into corruption and civil rights abuses at two county jails.

Baca said Anderson should have let him introduce evidence during retrial that he had aided a civil rights investigation into deputies accused of harassing minorities in Section 8 housing in Antelope Valley, as well as his work with the Office of Independent Review.

Baca also pointed to excluded evidence that he had ordered deputies to undergo training to defuse violent situations with inmates, as well as evidence related to his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

But Anderson said none of the six grounds merited a retrial and that Baca had not persuaded him that the appeal was “not for the purposes of delay.”

“Both individually and collectively, the court’s evidentiary rulings were not in error and did not deprive defendant of his constitutional right to present a defense,” Anderson wrote in the nine-page order.

Earlier this year, a jury found that over six weeks in August and September 2011, Baca conspired with his underlings to thwart an investigation into inmate abuse at two jails by hiding inmate-informant and violent felon Anthony Brown within the jail system.

The conspiracy began after jailers discovered a covert FBI operation into Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, after pulling a smuggled cell phone out of a potato bag from Brown’s belongings.

Baca has been ordered to surrender to authorities on July 25, but could renew his request for bond with the Ninth Circuit.

Anderson has presided over 10 cases connected to the scheme that has led to 21 convictions, according to U.S. Attorney Office in LA. Baca was the 10th member of the Sheriff’s Department convicted in the scheme. Former Undersheriff Paul Tanaka is also serving a five-year sentence in federal prison.