Feb 8th, 2010 - The recent decision by the US Supreme Court to send convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case back down to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, with instructions for a three-judge panel there to reconsider its decision to uphold the lifting of the prominent African-American journalist’s death penalty, is only the latest in a long string of examples of how courts at all levels have made special exceptions to precedent in order to try and kill this particular prisoner. The high court found on January 19, that Frank Spisak, a self-described Nazi and killer of three in Ohio, had been properly sentenced, because at the time the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his death penalty on appeal, 'settled law' was that the jury instructions given to his jury had been proper. And under the terms of the 1995 Effective Death Penalty Act, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have to defer to the judgements of state courts unless those courts’ decisions are deemed 'unreasonable.' Where it gets complicated though, is that subsequent to the conclusion of Spisak’s state appeals, the US Supreme Court, in a 1988 decision called Mills v. Maryland, ruled that ambiguously worded jury ballot forms and confusing or misleading jury instructions on sentencing by judges were grounds for reversing a death sentence. Mills was never made retroactive (one of the more repugnant features of many Supreme Court decisions), but Abu-Jamal’s state appeals didn’t even properly begin until after his 1995-96 Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing, and so the same finding made by the Supreme Court majority in Spisak’s case–that the confusing jury instruction standards were 'settled law' at the time–cannot be made in Abu-Jamal’s case. But the Supreme Court order sending Abu-Jamal’s case back down to the Third Circuit, right or wrong, hardly means Abu-Jamal’s battle is over, much less lost, despite his already having spent an astonishing 28 years in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s hellish death row. Even if the Third Circuit were to reverse itself, and decide against all logic that because of another Supreme Court decision made last month, reimposing the death penalty on Frank Spisak, the self-proclaimed Nazi killer of three men, Abu-Jamal should also die, it would not mean he can simply be marched off to a gurney for a lethal injection. As Hugh Burns, the assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who has been leading the effort by the DA’s office to have Abu-Jamal executed for the last decade and a half, noted in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, threre are at least three more avenues of appeal of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence that still need to be considered at the district Federal Court level (actually there are four). That’s because when Federal Judge William Yohn, way back in 2001, issued his historic ruling revoking Abu-Jamal’s death sentence on the grounds that the jury ballot form used to determine sentencing, and the instructions of trial judge Albert Sabo, had been confusing on the question of mitigating circumstances, he mooted those other avenues of appeal, saying that he didn’t need to rule on them. The sentence was already lifted. Now that Yohn has been reversed on that lifting of the death sentence, though, Abu-Jamal has a right to have Judge Yohn go back and look at the other three challenges to his sentence. And those challenges are very solid and serious. (Actually, I’ve always considered it a measure of how confident Judge Yohn was in the correctness of his decision on the jury instructions claim that he didn’t bother to deal with the other four appeals claims–something he could have done simultaneously.) The first unresolved appeal claim goes to the heart of a defendant’s right to representation and a fair trial. Abu-Jamal’s attorney, Anthony Jackson, testified under oath at a Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995 to the obvious truth that did absolutely nothing to prepare for the sentencing portion of the trial. He called no witnesses to testify to Abu-Jamal’s character, an astonishing lapse which left the prosecutor free and unchallenged in portraying Abu-Jamal as a cop-hating terrorist. Jackson prepared no witnesses, though Abu-Jamal’s siblings and mother were on hand and ready to testify, as were many others in the community. Jackson, astonishingly, didn’t even request a delay of a few days after the guilty verdict in order to prepare for the sentencing hearing. When the judge ordered the session to begin the next day, Jackson went along meekly. It didn’t help that on the morning of the sentencing hearing, Jackson was awoken first at 6 am by fire trucks at his home–the result of a 'prank call'– and that after he got to court, he received a frightened and frightening call from his 15-year-old son saying that someone had called his home telling the boy 'You are the one we want. We’ll be coming over to get you!' (Any bets on who was making those calls?) Abu-Jamal in his 1999 habeas appeal the federal court claims his constitutional right to representation was denied by Jackson’s dismal performance at the sentencing hearing. A second line of appeal, also mooted and left unresolved by Judge Yohn, was a claim that Abu-Jamal’s first, fourth, fifth and fourteenth amendment rights were violated when Prosecutor Joseph McGill improperly used Abu-Jamal’s membership, as a 15-year-old boy, in the Black Panther organization, in trying to portray him as a vicious cop-hater. McGill came to court with a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer in which the young Abu-Jamal, quoting Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Tse-tung, had told reporters that 'power flows from the barrel of a gun.' It didn’t matter that the article explained that Abu-Jamal had made that statement in the context of the murder days earlier of Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago Police, and that the context made it clear he was referring to the power of police. McGill took the quote out of context and made it appear as though Abu-Jamal was advocating war on the cops. In any event, the quote had been made 12 years before, when Abu-Jamal was just a boy. The reality was that, far from being at war with police, Abu-Jamal as an adult had a sterling record or no arrests or convictions. Here is a case where the Pennsylvania courts and federal courts in the Third Circuit have repeatedly overturned death convictions where membership in allegedly anti-social organizations was cited by prosecutors in an effort to tarnish defendants before a jury, but where a special exception has been apparently been carved out for Abu-Jamal. Judge Yohn has yet to rule on this line of appeal. Third, there remains to be considered an appeal on the grounds that prosecutor McGill improperly sought, in his final argument to the jury in the sentencing hearing, to diminish the jurors’ sense of responsibility for their decision. McGill told the jury, 'Ladies and gentlemen, you are not asked to kill anybody. You are asked to follow the law. The same law that I keep on throwing at you, saying those words, law and order. I should point out that it’s the same law that has for six months provided safeguards for this defendant. The same law, ladies and gentlemen, the same law that will provide him appeal after appeal after appeal.The same law, ladies and gentlemen, that has made it so because of the constant appeals…nobody at all has died in Pennsylvania since 1962 for an incident that occurred in 1959.' Again, the courts at all levels–in Pennsylvania, in the Third Circuit, and the US Supreme Court itself–have all overturned death penalty sentences based upon just such statements having been made to juries at trials. Indeed, another case prosecuted successfully by McGill himself was overturned because he made exactly the same statement to a jury, claiming jurors need not feel they are personally ordering a man’s death. So this appeal too needs to be considered in full by Judge Yohn. Finally, there is a fourth avenue of appeal which was also mooted and left unresolved by Judge Yohn. That is the claim that the prosecutor knowingly withheld evidence in police files which showed that Abu-Jamal had no criminal record and no propensity for violence. Specifically, Abu-Jamal, years after his trial, obtained his FBI file–largely composed of materials obtained by the FBI from Philadelphia Police and the Philadelphia Police Department’s so-called 'Red Squad.' That file, 600 pages long, shows that surveillence of Abu-Jamal ended in 1973. A 1974 memo at the end of the file states, 'In March 1973, per bureau instructions, captioned subject was deleted from ADEX [the list of people deemed subversive and slated as part of COINTELPRO to be rounded up and detained in the event of a national emergency] and no additionalinvestigation conducted concerning his activities.' Sources, however, have continued to report periodically on COOK [Abu-Jamal’s family name] and, although he has not displayed a propensity for violence, has continued to associate himself with individuals and organizations engaged in Extremist activities. Clearly this file, stating that Abu-Jamal did not appear to be a violent person, had been available to the prosecution, and should have been offered to the defense. This appeal of Abu-Jamal’s conviction based upon a claim of prosecutorial misconducdt must also be considered by Judge Yohn. Once the Third Circuit has reconsidered its decision on the jury instruction issue–and the outcome there is by no means certain, with Abu-Jamal’s attorney Robert Bryan planning a spirited argument that Abu-Jamal’s case is substantively different from the Spisak case–and if it were to rule against Abu-Jamal, there would first of all be a new appeal of that decision back to the US Supreme Court. Only if the high court were to uphold such a decision would these four other issues finally go back before Judge Yohn. It appears that even if the courts continue to rule against this now world-renowned journalist who has spent more than half his life sitting confined in a small cell on death row, his controversial case, dogged as it is by charges of judicial misconduct, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, purjured prosecution witness testimony and political interference, will continue to drag on unresolved for years to come.
http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m63070&hd=&size=1&l=e
> http://pubrecord.org/law/6857/mumia-abu-jamals-stuck-legal-limbo

The 'shock doctrine' for Haiti, The U.S. is reviving what Haitians call 'the plan of death.'
February 8, 2010 - One month after the devastating earthquake, Haiti continues to suffer under apocalyptic conditions. The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured 250,000 and has left over 3 million dependent on assistance for food, water and housing. Contrary to the puff pieces in the media, the relief operation has been a miserable failure. The United Nations admitted at the end of January that had only been able to feed 1 million people, leaving many more without access to food. Whole sections of Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns never even saw relief convoys. Amid this catastrophe, imperial powers and corporate vultures are circling, eying the profits to be made from reconstruction. The Street, an investment Web site, published an article, misleadingly titled 'An Opportunity to Heal Haiti,' that lays out how U.S. corporations can cash in on the catastrophe. 'Here are some companies,' they write, 'that could potentially benefit: General Electric, Caterpillar, Deere, Fluor, Jacobs Engineering.' Other commentators-like James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton-likewise see an opportunity to remake Haiti along free market lines. As he wrote in the New York Times, 'This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms.' As director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation, the reforms he advocates are not designed to meet people's needs, but to pad corporate profits through mechanisms like privatization. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff attempted to pass off the exploitation of cheap labor as a humanitarian initiative: All of this reads like a sick parody of Naomi Klein's arguments in her book The Shock Doctrine. There, she documents how the U.s. and other imperial powers take advantage of natural and economic disasters to impose free-market plans for the benefit of the elites and their corporations, and to the detriment of the victims. She writes: The U.S. actually had a Shock Doctrine for Haiti on hand-the same one that it has imposed for decades. During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. used the dictatorship of Baby Doc Duvalier to impose what the International Monetary Fund calls a 'structural adjustment program.' Haitians called it 'the plan of death.' Duvalier opened up the Haitian economy to heavily subsidized U.S. agricultural exports, especially rice, which undermined the ability of Haitian peasants to compete on the market. Dislocated peasants flooded into Port-au-Prince, swelling the population from 760,000 in the early 1980s to close to 3 million before the earthquake. The U.S. set up export processing zones in the capital city to take advantage of the new cheap labor. But with only about 80,000 jobs, the sweatshops could not meet the demand for employment. As a result, hundreds of thousands were reduced to desperate poverty in the sprawling shantytowns. They maintained a desperate existence based on irregular employment and remittances from relatives who fled abroad to the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. The U.S. and its multinationals also cut deals with Baby Doc to set up several resorts along the coast to cater to U.S. tourists and the Haitian elite. Club Med opened a swank facility in 1975, and it was joined by dozens of others, mainly around Port-au-Prince and in the country's north, especially around the famous Labadee beach. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton joined the party for their honeymoon in 1975 and have professed their love of the island's potential riches for decades. To finance the neoliberal plan, Baby Doc racked up enormous debts to international financial institutions. To Haitian workers, the urban poor and the peasantry, it was a social disaster. But out of the poverty, the Haitian masses built a mass movement, Lavalas, that drove Baby Doc from power in 1986. In 1990, in the country's first free and democratic elections, one of the leaders of Lavalas, Jean Bertrand Aristide, won two-thirds of the vote on a program to reverse the plan of death. The U.S., however, would not tolerate any kind of reform. So it backed two coups, one in 1991 and another in 2004 to stop even modest changes to the plan of death. Each coup regime, backed up by the U.S., other governments and the United Nations, attacked the Lavalas movement, killing thousands. The UN has occupied the country since 2004. Since 2006, a former ally of Aristide, René Préval, now the president, has overseen the reimplementation of the American neoliberal plan. The earthquake has exposed its social consequences. As David Wilson wrote at MRZine, 'The results were predictable: a decimated rural economy, a virtually nonexistent infrastructure, and an impoverished, overpopulated urban center so badly constructed that tens of thousands of people, at least, were certain to die when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck.' The U.S. has taken advantage of this natural disaster. It has deployed 20,000 troops to Haiti to buttress the UN occupation of 12,500 soldiers. Now secretary of state, Hillary Clinton convinced Préval to declare emergency powers, which have been largely delegated to the U.S.. From its position of power, the US has pushed for implementing a new version of the same old plan.

The U.S., a few other imperial powers, some lesser countries and the UN convened a meeting on January 26 in Montreal to profess their concern and promise to aid Haiti. The 14 so-called 'friends of Haiti' at the conference made sure to include Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive to at least give the illusion of respect for the country's sovereignty. But outside, a protest organized by Haiti Action Montreal challenged the meeting with signs demanding 'Medical relief not guns,' 'Grants not loans' and 'Reconstruction for people not profit.' Guardian columnist Gary Younge criticized the summit for failing to produce any solutions: By contrast, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas grouping of Latin American and Caribbean nations opposed to U.S. neoliberal plans has called for relief not troops and cancellation of Haiti's debt. On his weekly television show, Chávez declared that thousands of 'soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals-that's what the United States should send. They are occupying Haiti undercover.' While the Montreal summit offered few clues about what the U.S. aimed to do, Hillary Clinton spilled the beans before the meeting when she said, 'We have a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was done in conjunction with other international donors, with the United Nations.' The author of the plan is Oxford University professor Paul Collier. Collier wrote The Bottom Billion, a book widely read in development circles. In it, he advocates a neocolonial strategy for crisis-torn societies. He argues that to be effective, great powers and international bodies like the UN must intervene militarily and occupy failed states. After setting up shop, they then can impose development plans to reconstruct their economies. In Jean Bricmont's apt phrase, Paul Collier is a 'useful idiot for imperialism,' providing intellectual justification for conquest and exploitation. Before the earthquake, Bill Clinton, named by Barack Obama to be a special envoy to Haiti, was already pushing for the implementation of Collier's plan as he outlined it in a paper titled 'Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to Economic Security.' Collier and Clinton call for-surprise, surprise-investment in the tourist industry, re-development of the sweatshop industry in cities, export-oriented mango plantations in the countryside and construction of infrastructure to service this development. Each of these projects serves the interests of multinational corporations and the Haitian elite at the expense of the workers and peasants. The tourist industry is especially infamous in the Caribbean. As Polly Patullo documents in her book, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, the industry is completely controlled by multinational corporations, mainly from the U.S. Patullo quotes one critic of the tourist industry, who argues: The Clinton and Collier plan for sweatshops is even less appealing. Collier practically celebrates the poverty wages that corporations can get away with in Haiti. 'Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market,' Collier writes, 'Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark. Haitian labor is not only cheap, it is of good quality. Indeed, because the garments industry used to be much larger than it is currently, there is a substantial pool of experienced labor.' Given the abolition of tariffs on many Haitian exports to the U.S., Haiti is primed, according to Collier, for a new sweatshop boom. But this is no sustainable development plan for Haitian workers. At best, Collier promises 150,000 or so jobs. As anthropologist Mark Schulman argues, 'Subcontracted, low-wage factory work does not contribute much to the economy besides jobs. Being exempt from taxes, it does not contribute to the financing of Haiti's social services.' The jobs themselves don't even pay enough to support life-they pay for transport and lunch at about $1.60 a day. The U.S. will want to keep wages low, since that is the profitable basis for investment. Already last year, the U.S. pressured Préval to prevent an increase in the Haitian minimum wage. For the peasant majority in Haiti, Clinton and Collier advocate construction of vast new mango plantations. According to them, such new plantations will both create an export crop and aid the reforestation of the country. While it may create jobs for poor peasants, such plantations won't rebuild the agricultural infrastructure of the country so that it can return to the self-sufficient food system it had before the 1980s. Such self-sufficiency goes against the grain of U.S. policy to control the international food market with its subsidized crops. Finally, Collier argues for investment in infrastructure-airports, seaports and roads-not so much to meet people's needs as to service the new investments in tourism, sweatshops and plantations. As a result, Collier's plan will actually increase infrastructural inequities. Businesses will get what they need to export their products, while the needs of the Haitian masses-for navigable roads, for example-will be left unaddressed. Even worse, Collier advocates increased privatization of Haiti's infrastructure, especially the port and the electrical system. In reality, this 'new plan' is the same old plan-'the plan of death' that Haitians rose up against in the 1980s. Nevertheless, in the wake of the disaster, Bill Clinton is pressing ahead. At a joint press conference with Bill Clinton, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon declared, 'We have three priorities. First, continuing to provide the humanitarian assistance with effective mechanisms to deliver all these relief items to the people who need it. Second, provide security and stability for people. Thirdly, the reconstruction of the Haitian economy.' The U.S. and UN have failed largely in their relief operation, but have succeeded in establishing military control of the country-effectively seizing control of the country and bypassing the Haitian state. Beyond this, the Economist magazine argues for the U.S. to set up 'a temporary development authority with wide powers to act. Given the local vacuum of power, this is the best idea around. The authority should be set up under the auspices of the UN or of an ad hoc group (the United States, Canada, the European Union and Brazil, for example). It should be led by a suitable outsider (Bill Clinton who is the UN's special envoy for Haiti, would be ideal, perhaps followed by Brazil's Lula after steps down as president in a year's time) and a prominent Haitian, such as the prime minister.' With its intervention in Haiti, the U.S. is sending a signal to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean-where masses of people have rejected neoliberalism and elected reform socialist leaders like Hugo Chávez, who aim to tame the excesses of capitalism and pass reforms to address social needs. The U.S. already toppled Aristide in 2004. The U.S.-backed coup in Honduras last year is another step down the same road. Washington has expanded its network of military bases in Latin America-especially in Colombia, where it has opened seven new bases. 'Barack Obama's administration,' writes Greg Grandin in The Nation, has disappointed 'potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.' The U.S. intervention in Haiti shows that the US wants to reverse its setbacks of the last decade, reassert its geopolitical dominance and re-impose its economic program-the 'plan of death'-throughout the region.
http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m63071&hd=&size=1&l=e
> http://socialistworker.org/2010/02/08/shock-doctrine-for-haiti