Category: Uncategorized

The following item previously appeared in the announcements section of TCRR–gm

This message is from Antonio Diaz of the Texas Indigenous Council in San Antonio. He and his sisters and brothers have been leaders in the campaign against the TDH immigrant family prison since early in the protests, which began in December, 2006:

“Native people celebrate death as it is apart of the circle of life, there is no need to fear physical death, the death of innocence on the other hand is a sad thing indeed. We will be going to Taylor on Sat. Nov.1st to recognize the Death of innocence of the Children Detained at T.D.Hutto Prison, Nov.1st is known as “Dia de los Inocentes”.

“Dia de los Muertos from Nov 1st to Nov 2nd. This loss of innocence due to incarceration because of greed of private prison corporations like Corrections Corp. of America must be addressed and the policy of fear and division that allows for rampant greed to dictate immoral immgration legislation must come to an end. Reinstating the Catch and Release program will be the first step to bringing justice into immigration reform. Join us if you are able 6 to 8 pm in Taylor TX. at T.D.Hutto Res. Ctr. — for more info (210) 396- 9805
Antonio Diaz”

T. Don Hutto is at 1001 Welch St., Taylor, TX (map). From Austin, take I-35 north to Round Rock. Exit Hwy 79. Turn right on 79 and drive east to Taylor. Just before you enter Taylor, go right on the 79 bypass (sign says to Rockdale). Take the first left onto S. Edmond St. Edmond ends at Welch. Go right on Welch and you can’t miss the prison.

Solidarity,

Leslie Cunningham

“Las luchas obreras/No tienen fronteras.”

From the MALDEFian

Judge orders improvements in programs for English language learners

AUGUST 14, 2008 – Citing “palpable injustice” a federal court found that the State of Texas is failing to overcome the language barriers faced by tens of thousands of English Language Learner (ELL) students in the State’s public school secondary programs. MALDEF’s victory in United States v. Texas represents the most comprehensive judicial decision concerning the civil rights of ELLs in a quarter century.

The case was born out of long-standing discrimination against Latino students in Texas schools, which resulted in their inclusion in a 1981 Order that required the State of Texas to, among other things, provide appropriate and effective language educational programs for ELL students. Twenty-five years later, MALDEF and Multicultural Education Training and Advocacy, Inc. (META) filed a Motion under the Modified Order to enforce its terms. MALDEF argued that the State had failed to implement and monitor the bilingual and English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for ELL students in the state, resulting in the denial of equal educational opportunities for those students.

In July 2007, District Court Judge William Wayne Justice ruled that MALDEF was not entitled to the relief it sought. After MALDEF and META persisted in the case on behalf of ELL students, Judge Justice vacated his earlier ruling in its entirety. Finding that “[s]econdary…students in bilingual education fail terribly under every metric,” he ordered the State to create a language program for ELL secondary students and a monitoring system that met the requirements of the federal Equal Education Opportunity Act.

This ruling was a tremendous victory for ELL students in a state that has one of the highest percentages of ELLs in the country. In the 2004-05 school year, more than 15 percent of the student population in Texas’ public schools were identified as ELL. Ninety-three percent of those were Hispanic. According to the Texas Education Agency, only 13.1 percent of those students are recent immigrants.

The education system has significantly failed these students, allowing them to continue to experience the effects of the discrimination that first brought MALDEF to court on their behalf nearly 30 years ago. The court found that not only does the Texas Education Agency under-identify ELL students, but the “achievement standards for intervention are arbitrary and not based upon equal educational opportunity; the failing achievement of higher grades is masked by passing scores of lower grades; and the failure of individual school campuses is masked by only analyzing data on the larger district level.”

“Failed implementation cannot prolong the existence of a failed program into perpetuity,” the court concluded. Texas now has until January 2009 to come up with a revamped monitoring system that actually measures equal educational opportunities and an improved educational program for secondary ELL students. The new system will be introduced in the 2009-10 school year.

“This decision gives hope for the future of thousands of young Texans. Its importance cannot be overstated,” said MALDEF Staff Attorney David Hinojosa who, along with META, brought the case on behalf of LULAC and the American GI Forum.

Our quarter-year of absence at the Texas Civil Rights Review has coincided with the electoral revolution led by Barack Obama, so we couldn’t be more pleased to have a picked a season during which little more needed to be said.

Yet the time of absence wasn’t chosen so much as it was delivered with a bundle of priorities that left not a spare minute to type in. At one point, it was only thanks to a delayed airplane that I was able to hammer out a fast note to a contributor. The competing priorities this past quarter were entirely welcomed, so worry not; our energies are well, our spirit intact.

In the short time I have to write tonight, I’d like to reflect upon what usually goes on here, and why we miss it.

The Texas Civil Rights Review was founded in 1997 as on online archive dedicated to racial equity in the Land Grant system of higher education in Texas, and, by proxy, across the USA. Thanks to that work in the 1990s some real progress was made for some real people. And as we look forward to Change, please remember Mr. President that equity in the Land Grant system is still possible, still worthy, and perhaps more than ever a timely theater for economic and democratic renewal of ourselves and our posterity.

After a few years of exile from Texas politics (perhaps not unrelated to our successes in the Land Grant establishment) we returned in 2003 with a hopping mad interest in what had happened to affirmative action policy, and we proudly outed a blue-ribbon report from a Land Grant college committee that recommended affirmative action in admissions. (We still like to call it integration, remember?)

As Summer turned to Fall in 2004 we covered the trial for public school funding in an Austin District Court, and documented the courageous struggle of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to uphold the principles of equitable funding, especially for impoverished Hispanic children.

On Christmas Eve 2004 we posted our first of many letters from federal prisoner Ramsey Muniz. We still say it would be a righteous act to pardon Ramsey and set him free.

In the opening months of 2005 we covered the hearings that officially certified the election of Hubert Vo to the Texas House of Representatives. We followed up on the Vo hearings with a massive review of the hearing documents. (Rep. Vo has since been re-elected twice. In 2008 he won a comfortable 56 percent of the vote.)

In April of 2005 we reported on thousands of pages of documents that we reviewed at the office of the Texas Secretary of State regarding the construction of a statewide voter database that was built to satisfy the so-called Help America Vote Act (VAWA).

During the summer of 2006 we filed an open records request with the Texas Governor seeking documentation for the deployment of the Texas National Guard to the border with Mexico. We were told there were no documents. Later that year, we followed a rising flood of immigration issues that culminated in the federal roundup of several Palestinian families from the Dallas area who were cruelly treated regardless of age or pregnancy status.

In 2007 we let fly a few thousand words over the converging issues of immigration injustice in Texas, symbolized by the Hutto family prison and the border wall reflex. If Change means anything, it should make a difference on both of these issues.

Earlier this year we covered the federal harassment of Albanian refugee Rrustem Neza, who was finally released to live with this wife and children after a year of meaningless imprisonment at Haskell. And we reported on the shocking detention of Bujar Osmani who was nabbed by federal agents while taking a bathroom break at a law office.

As the summer of 2008 turned into record swelter, we reported the death, the federal documents, and the dreams of Riad Hamad, ebullient champion of Palestinian children.

In these stories and others, we have been very nearly alone in our commitment to documentation and detail. So yes, there was something to miss when we were absent during the Fall quarter of 2008. If you missed us, you weren’t alone. We kind of missed us too.

As for the future, we remain realistic. The amount of time devoted to the Texas Civil Rights Review these past five years will not be sustainable, but the reasons for this are good ones. Your editor has not given up or burned out. I’m just busy.

Whenever I do have a few spare hours, you’ll know it. I’m here. I keep my eyes open. I may be out of the office a lot, but I ain’t giving up the lease. — gm

Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Wouldn’t it be horrible to be 50 and have been in prison for the last 25 years, missing out on seeing your children mature and have children of their own?

Well, that is the story of Steven Phillips from Dallas, a new grandfather who was just freed. He had been accused of sexual assault and burglary in two different cases and convicted in two different trials. (Once the police nailed him for one, they charged him with another one.)

Phillips got 30-year sentences at both trials. While in prison he was then asked by the authorities if he would confess to nine other sexual assaults which fit the pattern, and hoping for some mercy if he cooperated, he confessed to them.

The Dallas police, 25 years ago, were so thrilled to be nailing Phillips for eleven cases of sexual assault that they didn’t pay attention to authorities in Kansas City who also had a suspect, one Sidney Goodyear. Because Phillips had been positively identified by Dallas victims, the police did not bother telling his lawyer about Goodyear and something quite important.

After the Kansas City police sent down a picture of Goodyear, the Dallas police had shown the picture to one of the victims, who said that Goodyear could be the rapist, but the police never told Phillips’ lawyer about the conflicting evidence.

Luckily, one of the cases in which Phillips was tried involved some stored material which could be DNA tested. When the tests were run a year ago, the evidence did not match Phillips’ DNA. But it did match Goodyear’s! It is now conceded by all that Goodyear was the serial rapist in Dallas and Kansas City.

Should we feel pleased that justice has finally been done and Phillips is home? Yes. Should we be pleased that the system has proven itself to work, that bad decisions of the past continue to be corrected? No. The system does not work. At least not well enough to deserve praise. There are millions in prison, but only rare cases, like Phillips’ case, have appropriate specimen material available for DNA testing. And the Steven Phillips case alone reflects three widespread and lingering problems.

First, our old nemesis: eye-witness misidentification. Some backward “red meat” prosecutors still dramatize eye-witness identification as a slam dunk. And juries fall for it. We now know that Phillips did not commit the eleven crimes, but ten witnesses identified him! The national Innocence Project which defended Phillips said in its press release, “It is impossible to know [twenty five years later] how those identification procedures were conducted or how certain the victims were in their identifications. In addition, police circulated Phillips’ name and biographical information widely in the media before most of the victims identified him — this made their identifications highly unreliable.”

Most overturned convictions in Texas have fit the Phillips pattern. Of the 32 total DNA exonerations in Texas — where there is no doubt the accused were innocent — 25 of those cases involved eyewitness identification, sometimes from multiple witnesses.

The Phillips case reflected a second pattern: overzealous prosecutors who ignore conflicting evidence. Dallas alone has had 15 DNA exonerations, and the new prosecutor there has been working with the Innocence Project to undo the damage of a ferocious and racist predecessor. (Texas Monthly, Sept. 2007)

A third pattern: plea bargainings and false confessions. The Phillips case was really bizarre: Although Phillips did not confess to the two crimes he was tried for, the prosecutor bargained him into confessing to nine other ones. Because we have the Innocence Project statistics now, we know a lot more about confessions. Of the 200 people convicted whose innocence has subsequently been completely established by DNA tests, one in four had confessed!

Why so many confessions? Well, interrogation has become a science. (Google “Reid Technique” and you will cringe.) Interrogators are taught techniques like standing too close to you, controlling your space, cutting you off anytime you start to declare your innocence. Interrogators can lie to you legally, make up evidence against you; they can yell at you, insult you, keep you a long time, and suddenly turn friendly and “understanding.” The spare interrogation room is designed scientifically to keep you off balance, while the experts — they practice the techniques and get good at them — list the things you might be charged with.

Emily Horowitz, a criminal justice professor, has a nice piece on false confessions in the latest Counterpunch; she mentions people who have become depressed, abject and “dependent” in a crisis situation. They are nervous wrecks before they are interrogated, and they are no match for scientific accusers. “Just admit you made a mistake, and maybe we can go easy on you,” can be a very enticing line at just the right moment.

Horowitz continues: “According to a raft of social science and psychology research done over the past two decades, techniques like these [check the now common “Reid Technique”] are especially likely to produce false confessions when used on juveniles, the mentally ill, the poorly schooled, immigrants, and those with impaired cognition.” (There is also some evidence that those who have been sexually abused when they were youth are quite susceptible to making false confessions, since part of their survival mechanism was to blame themselves rather than those they admired.)

Steven Phillips, now 50 years old, is fully exonerated now, and we should be joyous. But the current system of vigorous police work and prosecution is still dangerous to society, and we have a lot more work to do.