By RUWAN MUNASINGHE — HARTFORD, Conn. — On Dec. 14, 2017, Hartford lost one of its greatest legends when 20-year-old Zoe Dowdell—also known as Gangstalicious—was shot and killed by New Britain police. Caleb Tisdol and Noah Young (also known as “Skinny), the others in the car, were convicted on various charges and are currently incarcerated.…
By JOHN LESLIE The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office continues to stonewall in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. At a court hearing on April 30, prosecutors failed, once again, to produce a memorandum allegedly signed by former Philadelphia District Attorney and retired Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille. Under the 2016 Williams v. Pennsylvania…
By KEITH COOK Reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer (May 1, 2018). I was stationed in Europe 37 years ago when I received the call that all black families dread. My little brother, Mumia Abu-Jamal, had been shot by the police and was fighting for his life. Mumia was the kindest and gentlest of my five…
By BARRY SHEPPARD The most effective way to counter Donald Trump’s reactionary policies is through mass action. The Democratic Party hopes to steer movements and individuals opposed to Trump into support of its candidates. While this trap of “lesser evil” politics has proved to be a failure over and over again for the past eight…
By JOHN LESLIE Two Baltimore police detectives, Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, were convicted in a federal trial last month that resulted from an investigation into the police department’s corrupt “Gun Trace Task Force.” A total of eight members of the Baltimore police department were originally accused, with six of them pleading guilty before going…
By MOBILIZATION FOR MUMIA Mumia Abu-Jamal will have another hearing in open court on Wed, Jan. 17 at 9 a.m. at the Criminal (in)Justice Center, 1301 Filbert Street, Philadelphia before Common Pleas Court Judge Leon Tucker, courtroom 1108. In a court case that could eventually lead to Mumia’s freedom, Judge Leon Tucker has ordered the District Attorney’s…
By JOHN LESLIE In mid-November, federal agents arrested a Philadelphia police officer, Eric Snell, for allegedly acting as a middleman for a drug ring run by a Baltimore police firearms task force. In addition to the drug charges, Snell is accused of possession of illegal firearms and threatening the children of one of the accused…
By JOHN LESLIE On Nov. 3, 1979, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (ANP) attacked an anti-Klan march in Greensboro, N.C., that was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP). Five members of the CWP were murdered and 10 others were wounded with the collusion of federal and local law…
By JOHN LESLIE On June 9, 2017, a Philadelphia police officer, Ryan Pownall, shot David Jones multiple times in the back as he ran away. Pownall had stopped to search Jones, who had been riding a dirt bike. While police claim that Jones had a gun, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he “had already dropped…
By JOHN SCHRAUFNAGEL — ST. PAUL, Minn. — Four to five thousand people rallied at the State Capitol and marched through the streets of St. Paul on June 17, outraged over the unfair trial and unjust verdict in the case of Officer Jeronimo Yanez. Many said they had been hopeful but were not surprised that…
By JOHN LESLIE On May 13, Jimmy Dennis was released after more than 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The crime and the frame-up On Oct. 22, 1991, Chedell Williams and her friend, Zahra Howard, went to the Fern Rock Transportation Center in Philadelphia to buy a transpass. Outside of the…
By JEFF MACKLER “The evidence is in,” say gleeful Democratic Party cheerleaders. Donald Trump was elected president because his Russian spy collaborators stole 20,000 secret e-mails from Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer servers, including e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s national campaign chair, John Podesta. The stolen e-mails demonstrated proof positive that the Democratic Party, violating its…
By CHRIS HUTCHINSON The police shooting of 18-year-old Ra’Shamel Rogers on March 9 in Waterbury, Conn., has mobilized community members in support of his family to demand answers and a transparent investigation. Ra’Shamel was unarmed and shot three times, twice in the abdomen and once in the lungs. Police are trying to justify the shooting…
By JEFF MACKLER “It’s a Knock Out Punch,” says Mumia. “We did something that’s never been done before,” says Pam Africa, chair of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. On Jan. 3, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Mariani granted the motion filed by innocent political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal for a preliminary injunction ordering the…
By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL MINNEAPOLIS—The show trial dubbed by our local capitalist media, “Minnesota’s Terror Trial,” ended in November with the sentencing of the nine young men (eight Somali and one Oromo) who pled to or were convicted of charges relating to alleged attempts to join the “designated foreign terrorist organization” ISIS (the Islamic State). The…
By MARK UGOLINI — UPDATED, Oct. 6 — The deeply racist character of police operations in Black communities is again on display with four more horrific murders by cops occurring within just 15 days of each other. The latest victims are Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Okla.; Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C.; Alfred Olango in…
By MARK UGOLINI On July 27, Baltimore prosecutors dropped remaining charges against three cops awaiting trial for involvement in the death of Freddy Gray. Gray, a 25-year-old Black youth, died of injuries sustained while in police custody a week following his arrest on April 12, 2015. Officers Garret Miller, William Porter, and Sgt. Alicia White…
By JEFF MACKLER — Jeff Mackler is the 2016 presidential candidate of Socialist Action. — Five hundred and seventy one and counting have been killed by U.S. cops this past year, an all-time high in recent decades, according to figures posted in the U.S. edition of the British-based Guardian newspaper.* The majority murdered were Black,…
By KAREN and JOHN SCHRAUFNAGEL — MINNEAPOLIS — On the morning of Wednesday, March 30, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced there would be no charges brought against the Minneapolis police who murdered Jamar Clark on Nov. 15 of last year.
By ROBBIE MAHOOD On Oct. 30, 2015, revelations of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spying on my father, Ed Mahood, almost 60 years ago, recently came to light courtesy of a phone call from an Ottawa journalist to my sister. A small group of journalists in Ottawa are reviewing the heavily edited RCMP intelligence reports from that era…
By RACHEL WOLKENSTEIN Below are excerpts from a report by attorney Rachel Wolkenstein on the fight of Mumia Abu-Jamal to obtain necessary medical treatment. Mumia, a noted political commentator and innocent political prisoner, was convicted in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia police officer. He received the death penalty, a sentence that was later reduced to…
By ADAM SHILS — CHICAGO — On Oct. 20, 2014, Laquan McDonald, 17, was fatally shot by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke. McDonald, who had been suspected of stealing car radios, was only armed with a knife. The police car dash-cam video shows McDonald some yards from the police officers and not moving toward them…
By KAREN and JOHN SCHRAUFNAGEL “To us, he was a loving young man. America has a criminal record. Minnesota has a criminal record against Black people. So if we are judging people against their past, let us start at the head.” —Kenya McKnight, spokesperson for Jamar Clark’s family, Nov. 17, 2015. — MINNEAPOLIS — UPDATED REPORT,…
By JEFF MACKLER Edward Snowden, renowned for his 2013 exposure of all pervasive U.S. government Internet and telephone spying on virtually all Americans, if not the entire world (no exaggeration), has once again blown the cover off corporate America’s collaboration with the nation’s top super-spy entity, the National Security Administration (NSA). Snowden’s most recent revelations—once…
By JOE AUCIELLO “In my career, my only training in the Constitution was how to get around it,” (Sue Rahr, former sheriff, executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, and member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing). Drivers on their way to work, zipping by one of the predominantly…
