Category: Uncategorized

Baku writes at Austin IndyMedia: “Just in the past week we have seen resistance to a KKK meeting in Tomball, Texas. Austinites have been threatened by self-identifying Nazis. Last week, bricks were thrown at the windows of KPFT during a Latino literary radio program. And a few days ago, an unarmed Chicano youth was shot and killed by the Austin Police Department.”

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Activists Take on Klan at Tomball

Houston IndyMedia

Protests of June 11 draw on diverse traditions: faith and reconciliation, Anti-Racist Action, and the New Black Panther Party.

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Police Take on Activists at Tomball

Houston IndyMedia

how would u like to have your backpack held against your face and you cant move at all with a gun pointed at your knee ready to take you down if you do move?

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Activists Take on Police in Austin

Austin IndyMedia

One witness on Austin IndyMedia video says the 18-year-old victim had dropped his belly to the street just prior to being shot in the back and killed. Protests continue Monday 5pm outside Austin Police Headquarters.

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Activists Call on Police in Austin

Austin IndyMedia

The police confiscated the chains and arrested one of the Nazi’s for outstanding warrants. The other two were allowed to walk.

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Activists Discourage Calling On Police

Austin IndyMedia

Maybe try acting as if the cops didn’t even exist.

The big win

Thursday, January 20, 2005
By Tim Sullivan

As a teenager in Sài Gòn in the 1970s, Hubert Võ envisioned himself one day becoming a lawmaker in South Việt Nam’s democratic government. But the country’s fall in 1975 to communists vetoed that idea.

Fortunately, there was a place called Texas.

Full Story at Nguoi Viet Online (California)

By Greg Moses
Texas Civil Rights Review

Indymedia Austin / NorthTexas

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund is ready to take its school funding case to the Texas Supreme Court says attorney David Hinojosa. But MALDEF is worried that the legislature is once again failing to meet several school-funding standards already set by the courts.

On Friday the Supreme Court announced that it would take probable jurisdiction of the school funding case, setting a hundred-day calendar for pre-hearing briefs. MALDEF had resisted moving the case to the Supreme Court until an Austin trial court strengthened its ruling on funding equity, but now Hinojosa says MALDEF is not expecting to hear anything more from the lower court.

“We’re ready to go forward,” said Hinojosa when contacted by telephone at his San Antonio office. “We feel we have precedent to support our case, and if the court will apply the facts to that precedent, it will rule in our favor and in favor of the children of Texas.”

Meanwhile, Hinojosa says that the legislature is trying to answer “constitutional questions with political answers” and is therefore missing an opportunity to directly address solutions that are needed.

“MALDEF would be more than pleased to assist any of these legislators to craft a finance plan that will make it possible to never, never file another lawsuit,” says Hinojosa. But he doesn’t see such a plan in the works yet.

“It seems simple to put 100 percent of Texas students inside a single equitable system that offers equitable and adequate funding for everyone,” said Hinojosa Tuesday evening. “But the legislature is answering constitutional questions with political answers, and that’s where the problems occur.”

Hinojosa says the school funding plan now being considered by the legislature would increase the total percentage of students included in a fair system. But the smaller percentage of students left out will result in more dramatic disparities between the richest and poorest districts.

“The equity gap will grow,” says Hinojosa, “giving some students so much more of an advantage. Yet these are public schools we’re talking about.”

“The legislative plan is lacking in many elements,” says Hinojosa. “It is not addressing root problems identified by the trial court, especially when it comes to the inadequacy of state funding for students who are bilingual or economically disadvantaged.”

“And this plan doesn’t even include facilities, which are grossly inadequate and grossly inefficient,” added Hinojosa. “The plan fulfills a legacy in the legislature of failing to fulfill the educational needs of the children of Texas.”

March 13, 2005

After eleven years as a continuous student of the
law in the dungeons of America, and a graduate of one
of the most constitutionally oriented, conservative
Texas law schools (Baylor School of Law), I am unable
to prepare the necessary post-conviction remedy defense
for the re-opening of my federal case.

By administrative policy of the Bureau of Prisons, we are only
entitled to telephone communications of 300 minutes per month, or the
equivalence of ten minutes per day. At times, due to the importance of
the legal matter in which I am involved, I have used my entire 300
minutes in the first two weeks of the month, thus leaving me without
communications with the free world.

I ask that every attorney and/or professor
and scholar of law to place themselves in my present
position, and immediately react to the truthful and factual
matter of the application of one’s constitutional rights
under the Constitution of the United State of America.
The only legal reaction to my present constitutional law
situation is that it is in violation of the Due Process
Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of
the United States of America.

Presently, I am 62 years of age, and have been
imprisoned in one of the harshest core penitentiaries
(Leavenworth USP) for the last eleven years, facing the
essence — the actuality of a death sentence (life sentence
without parole). It is extremely difficult for me to
accept the violations and actions of the prison administrative
policies on the limitation of my right to counsel and my
constitutional right to prepare my defense in accordance
with all my constitutional rights within the practice and
rules of the federal courts.

I am not a criminal. I am a Mexicano political prisoner
of the 21st century. In order to present to the appropriate
jurisdictional federal court why my case should be reopened,
I must communicate by phone, in person, and through
correspondence. I must communicate with different attorneys,
investigators, politicians, constitutional defense rights
committees, legal constitutional professors, scholars,
and different law student associations involved in the
violation of human rights.

I am not requesting the
determination of my present legal position. I am demanding
that the laws and rights from the written constitution of
this country be applied to my case. Without a doubt, if
I were allowed to prepare an adequate defense with
the fulfillment of my constitutional rights, then I would
become a free man. Until the Bureau of Prisons or the
Federal Courts of the United States permit me to communicate
using unlimited telephone time, my constitutional rights
are in violation at this very minute of the night.

In other
words – to make it clearer – an injustice of the law applies
to my life every day and night in this mode of darkness.
Americans must realize that I am not confined in Iraq, but
here in the United States of America. Or am I?

I will immediately share further information pertaining
to this illegal cloud of injustice on my life…

Sent by Irma Muniz via email. March 23.
For more on Ramsey see: http://freeramsey.com/