Author: mopress

NAACP reviews Cotton situation
By Mary Madewell
The Paris News

Published March 25, 2007

The Paris Branch of the NAACP called for a timely release of Shaquanda Cotton from the Texas Youth Commission after a four-hour executive committee meeting Saturday.

The group also asked that an emergency item be placed on Monday night’s Paris City Council agenda to consider naming a diversity task force.

The group also called for an expedited appeal of the Cotton case by the Texarkana Court of Appeals in motions approved unanimously by nine board members at Saturday’s meeting.

Tensions have mounted here in recent days since a Chicago Tribune article appeared March 12 about the Cotton case. … ************

To some in Paris, sinister past is back

In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.’

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 12, 2007

PARIS, Texas — The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.

There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.

Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the “black” side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she’s begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself “the best small town in Texas.”

“Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston,” Cherry said. “They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s.”

There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims’ family.

There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.

The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor–a 58-year-old teacher’s aide–was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

“All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?” said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. “It’s like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated.” …

Children Removed From Immigrant Shelter

Friday March 23, 2007 10:31 PM

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL

Associated Press Writer

EL PASO, Texas (AP) – Everyone has been cleared out of a federal shelter for child immigrants amid allegations that a single staff member sexually abused some of the youngsters.
The employee, who was not identified, was suspended and later fired from his job at the shelter in Nixon, a town of 2,200 people about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio. Federal officials would not discuss how many children were abused or their ages.

Joshua Trent, associate director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, said officials visited the facility days after learning of the abuse investigation in mid-February.

The children, who were being held at the Away From Home shelter after trying to cross the border alone, were removed to “err on the side of caution,” Trent said.

The last child left the shelter March 7.

It was unclear whether the federal government would cancel its contract with the shelter or whether the shelter would be used again, Trent said. … Full story at Guardian Unlimited

For more on Ramsey Muniz, click the Aztlan jaguar.–gm

Dear Friends:

We seek letters from congressmen and organizations. Please forward this email to those who are members of LULAC, the GI Forum, and other civic organizations and ask them to send a letter from their organization.

The letter will be sent to Geraldo Maldonado, Regional Director of the South Central Region Bureau of Prisons. A sample letter is shown below, and thank you in advance for your assistance.

Irma Muniz
*******************

March 27, 2007

Gerardo Maldonado, Jr.
Regional Director
South Central Regional Office
Federal Bureau of Prisons
4211 Cedar Springs Rd.
Dallas, TX 75219

Re: Ramiro R. Muniz # 40288-115

Dear Mr. Maldonado:
Mr. Muniz has been told that he will be transferred out of the Federal Correctional Institution in Three Rivers, Texas due to medical reasons. We ask your assistance in preventing this transfer.

When Mr. Muniz was sentenced in 1994, Judge Paul Brown recommended that he be incarcerated in Three Rivers, Texas. We ask that the Bureau of Prisons consider the recommendation made by Judge Paul Brown along with the qualifications of Mr. Muniz. He merits placement in a Federal Correctional Institution and we ask that he remain at Three Rivers.

Mr. Muniz is now told that his transfer out of Three Rivers FCI is due to medical reasons, yet nothing indicates a need for this move. He arrived at Three Rivers, Texas in good health. He has not made a
visit to the infirmary, nor has he requested any type of medication for physical ailments in 13 years.

After spending many years of incarcerated in maximum security penitentiaries, Mr. Muniz has proven to be a model prisoner. He had no incident reports and because of his low point classification, the North Central and South Central Regional Offices for the Bureau of Prisons recommended his transfer to Three Rivers, Texas.

We ask your assistance in keeping Mr. Muniz in Three Rivers, Texas.

Sincerely,

With the sounds of traffic swooshing by him, and accompanied by John Neck, Ken Koym, and Juan Torres, Jay Johnson-Castro kept walking as he gave the following update via cell phone. The reference to the federal judge comes from Juan Castillo’s story below in which Austin Federal Judge Sam Sparks is quoted as saying convicted felons have more rights than immigrant detainees. Here is what Jay says on the morning of the Raymondville vigil, scheduled for 1:00 pm.–gm

A lot of my suspicion is being reconfirmed after talking to the attorneys and a couple of fellow journalists. The newspapers here are basically anti-immigrant and we are not going to get any coverage down here.
I asked them is it political? Are political favors being asked? One said yes. The other said it was more due to apathy. They just quit covering stuff like that.

Looking at the big picture with the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, and the Rolling Plains prison at Haskell, then coming down here, we’re making gains.

If a federal judge sides with common sense and moral values of grassroots America, I guess some of us feel we’re on the right page. But really this is not about legal or illegal, it’s about moral or immoral, conscionable or unconscionable. The fact we made gains on Hutto means that layer by layer we are going to peel the onion back and get to the core of this thing.

I have also heard that the International Educational Services (IES) school is more kindly than it was two years ago when it was under immigration authorities. The kids do rotate through every 2-3 months, but nobody knows where they go.

At Raymondville, the biggest concern of attorneys is the lack of food. And that’s a result of running these camps for profit. The people are in windowless cells 23 hours a day.

They agreed the greatest vulnerability to ICE was the children in Hutto as far as exposing the source of this human tragedy. Which brings us back to the prisons for profit concept, and how the guarantees of prison detention boosted the stock value of these companies.

This is a time of darkness in our country’s history. Hopefully, it will be better exposed. What will it take to trigger outrage. Smokestacks? Who cares enough to skip breakfast or their favorite tv program before they say the people running these camps should not be committing these crimes or even be in power. That’s where we are at in all reality.

I love the little letter from Thailand. If in other places people are feeling a sense of what we feel, I consider it an accomplishment itself. Now, when do we get these things shut down?