Author: mopress

By Nick Braune

Charged with assaulting two officers at Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, Texas last June, Rama Carty went to trial this week. I sat in the courtroom on Friday to hear the closing arguments and waited around for four hours to hear the verdict.

The Federal District Court in Brownsville is in a beautiful modern building, well lit, with a bright, spacious center stairway luring you to walk up. From a circular railing on the third floor, you can look down on the second and first floor. Because each floor has high ceilings, it is quite a distance. I accidentally dropped my pen over the railing, nearly hitting a security guard. He stared up at me for a second as I tapped my head apologetically and made an “I’m so dumb” facial expression. An attractive building, it has some artistic touches and some fascinating century-old photographs of Brownsville: onion carts, with horses and a few cars on the streets, and with many poor working people just like today. (I noticed Brownsville once had an inter-city trolley.) Still the court building had too much cement, marble and power for my taste, another face of the militarized border.

If you haven’t heard the trial results, I won’t make you wait: after three hours, the jury notified the judge that they were too divided, would never agree. The judge instructed them to keep trying, but within another hour they all gave up. A mistrial was declared. It puts Carty in limbo for a while, waiting to hear if prosecutors will retry the case. He will remain out on pre-trial release, probably wearing an ankle bracelet, until prosecutors decide.

On the bright side, it was a black eye for current immigration enforcement (ICE). The federal judge and the prosecutor, judging from their facial expressions in court, had anticipated a routine ICE slam dunk. Two detention officers had testified that Rama was in an intimidating fighting stance, refusing to comply, so they had to jump on him to take him down. And a professional, calm ICE investigator had testified perfectly that ICE had investigated and found the officers to have acted correctly. What more information could jurors need?

The prosecutor opened her closing arguments, appealing to common sense. The Port Isabel facility houses dangerous persons from all over. (She is partially right, it has people from all over — Carty for instance was born in Africa, although the government tried unsuccessfully to depart him to Haiti for some reason. He was living and working in Massachusetts when he was picked up and shipped to Texas. But the prosecutor should have told jurors that detainees are not being held at Port Isabel on criminal charges, but civil charges. Some are out of compliance with immigration paperwork, some were picked up in workplace raids, some are waiting for refugee status documentation, etc.)

The prosecutor asked the jury what would happen if violent inmates did not comply with the detention guards and ICE agents who are assigned to control the institution. “What if everyone just did what they wanted there?” It would be chaos, obviously. The jurors sat stone-faced, so I figured they were swallowing her rant. (She dramatically sneered and pointed at the defendant.)

What split the jury, I can only guess. Maybe three things. First, although there are 140 cameras in the detention facility, the only film the prosecutors could show the jury simply showed Carty on the ground being handcuffed. The camera technician apparently had made some error, having the camera off during the disputed minutes that could explain why and how guards knocked Carty down.

Secondly, there was a confusing story about a razor Carty had, which supposedly cut one of the guards when they jumped him. (Carty was not accused of using it as a weapon.) Rama was awakened at 5 A.M. and told to prepare immediately to go to another facility. (This happened the day after he had spoken to Amnesty International about bad conditions at the center. He had also spoken to Democracy Now previously and was known to be a leader among the inmates.) Half-awake, but complying, he went into another area to wash, dress and shave.

Coming back, he said he wanted to speak to a lawyer and had a right to speak again to Amnesty. Then the guards jumped Carty — the public defender suggested in his closing argument that guards don’t like prisoners who read law books — and somehow they lost the alleged injurious razor. It was never found, tested for blood, etc.

A third thing possibly influenced the jurors: Carty genuinely seems quiet, bookish and concerned.

The Brownsville Herald reporter interviewed jurors afterward: six believed Carty was not guilty. I doubt ICE will retry it.

One further reflection: Although I was disappointed and nervous that Carty had to have a public defender, the attorney, Paul Hajjar, was pretty good. He portrayed Carty as an thoughtful “library man” who wanted his legal rights honored. And he responded to the prosecution’s picture of Carty as “intimidating” quite well. It is true, he said to the jurors, that if you were alone on a dark street and a large black man was walking on the sidewalk your way, you might feel intimidated. But that is not an instance of someone “knowing and forcibly” intimidating you. Hajjar effectively planted the idea in the jury that there are prejudices that work against someone like Carty.

[This article also appears in the Mid-Valley Town Crier. A previous article on Rama Carty appeared in TCRR in July 2009.]

EDITORIAL

Thanks to help from our friends at Rembrandt-We-Ain’t Web Services, we’re getting a clearer picture of what’s happening at the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). See the visualization here.

One obvious flaw in the democratic structure of the TSBOE is the way it purports to represent Travis County, the premiere educational community of Texas.

Dallas and Houston each have urban districts which reflect Democratic and minority voices. South San Antonio is appended to South Texas for a fair representation of party and ethnicity, Even El Paso is able to claim long-standing representation. But not Austin.

Not only have liberal Democrats been robbed of fair representation to the Texas State Board of Education as part of the Travis County voter pool, but urban Black and Hispanic children of Travis County are now paying the price of this democratic oversight with the prospect of an increasingly hostile curriculum.

We’re not lawyers here, but we think there are clear Constitutional principles involved, including the God-given rights of children, affirmed in Brown v. Board, to be treated to educations that are respectful and uplifting, not demeaning to their aspirations of leadership, responsibility, and self-esteem.–gm

The Democratic candidate for Texas Governor Bill White on Wednesday complained in an email to supporters that incumbent Governor Rick Perry was not asserting leadership for a more “mainstream” approach to school standards.

“I respect the sincerity of Texans who hold different views of what our students should and should not be taught,” said the email from White’s campaign. “But we should have a governor who finds common ground and moves our state forward, rather than appeasing people intent on pursuing partisan agendas in public offices.”

White’s objection to the cultural extremism of Anglo Republicans on the Texas State Board of Education–who last week dismissed Thomas Jefferson from the standard curriculum on Enlightenment–echoes a theme that he introduced when lamenting the Anglo bias of Republican voters during the March primary election. Republican voters ousted the sitting Chair of the Texas Railroad Commission because he had a Hispanic name.

If White, who served as Houston Mayor, can wage a campaign of urban tolerance vs. suburban cultural supremacy, he may be able to motivate a winning moderate-liberal coalition against Perry in the November elections.

However, the morning headlines out of Houston suggest that White is already on the ropes at the start of an eight-month campaign. While Mayor of Houston he also served on the board of directors for a “fracking” company, BJ Services, that has apparently admitted to federal investigators that it injected diesel into the ground near water supplies after promising not to.

Foul water or cultural extremism? We’re betting that the ghost of Thomas Jefferson is happy to be relieved of responsibility for this sort of history, whatever you want to call it or whichever way it goes.–gm

Here’s a snip from PhD candidate Matthew Crow’s response to the sacking of Thomas Jefferson by the Texas State Board of Ed–gm

At the time of this writing, the plan of the board is to replace Jefferson with John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, and William Blackstone. Especially in light of the prevalence of religious fervor today and the consequent growth of writing religious history, Calvin is actually the most timely and interesting suggestion. He should have been on the list anyway, provided we include outbursts of revolutionary politics before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Aquinas, a Catholic cosmologist and political philosopher who lived in the thirteenth century, while certainly an important part of the history of natural law ideas, was simply not the source of the arguments about natural rights that emerged out of the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 1700s. Americans of the time, by and large, would hardly have had, nor wanted to have had, recourse to the writings of a medieval Dominican friar.

Blackstone, the great English jurist, systematized the development of parliamentary sovereignty in the constitution of the British Empire in his massive Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769. A powerful critic of colonial claims to enjoy the rights of Englishmen, he would no doubt be shocked to find himself remembered in the tender young minds of the Lone Star State for supporting and influencing revolutionary claims against the authority of law and government, concerned as he was to use both natural and common law arguments to curtail claims of customary and natural rights. Greater familiarity with British constitutionalism would be a favorable improvement in historical education. But a fountain of revolutionary fervor Blackstone was not, nor would his Commentaries be my first choice for high school summer reading.

Finally, to conclude a night’s wayward browsing on topics of Calvinism, Christianity, and Fascism, we clip two paragraphs of a theological commentary by Richard T. Hughes at The Huffington Post

We want now to offer some possible ways to resolve the riddle, posed in part 1 of this article, of why so many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians — people who clearly honor the Bible — so often disregard the two requirements that are central to the biblical vision of the kingdom of God, namely peacemaking and justice for the poor.

Most of the answers to this riddle are rooted in the fact that millions of conservative Christians in the United States read the Bible through a variety of American perspectives that are utterly foreign to the biblical text. And they read the Bible in this way because they so often identify the kingdom of God with the United States of America. Based on that conviction, many confuse the principles of the Bible with the principles of the Constitution, biblical morality with capitalism, defense of the Christian religion with militarism, and fidelity to the kingdom of God with patriotism. Indeed, they often view the Bible as a manual on how to live one’s life as a good American. With those convictions, it’s no wonder they read the Bible through distinctly American perspectives.