90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor, Hedy Epstein, Arrested in Ferguson Protest

90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor, Hedy Epstein, Arrested in Ferguson Protest

by David Harris Gershon

Daily Kos 

Originally published in Tikkun Daily
Aug 18, 2014  
 
Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor and long-time human rights activist, was arrested today in front of Governor Jay Nixon's downtown office along with eight others.

Epstein, charged with failure to disperse, was protesting Nixon's actions in Ferguson, and said after her detainment, "I've been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn't think I would have to do it when I was 90. We need to stand up today so that people won't have to do this when they're 90."...

San Diego Reader recounts recent adventures of rogue cop Kenneth Davis--and the system that protects him

Murphy Canyon Mystery
"I thought I was being murdered."

By Joe Deegan 

San Diego Reader

July 2, 2014

Jeffrey Sakali returns to the Fry's parking lot where he had been in an physical altercation with two strangers, beaten by one of them, and then subsequently detained by Sergeant Kenneth Davis...

 ...After his continued insistence on going to the hospital, a second ambulance appeared, and attendants examined Saikali inside it. Sergeant Kenneth Davis then entered and issued Saikali a misdemeanor citation for “battery on a person.” Saikali says he requested of Davis several things, starting with an explanation of what the citation was for. But the officer refused to answer.

Was the man who beat Saikali also issued a citation? No. Could Saikali press charges against the man? No. 

Davis then left the ambulance but not before becoming candid on one point. “He told me that I deserved my injuries,” Saikali says. 

Sergeant Davis is already known in town for behavior ranging from questionable detainment to criminal stalking. In 2007, a lawsuit was filed against Davis in federal court for malicious prosecution. Southeast San Diego resident Melford Wilson had objected loudly and with obscene language to a drug investigation Davis was conducting in the neighborhood. The officer arrested Wilson for obstructing the search. After Wilson sued, the city attorney’s office was able to have the charges dismissed. But a 2011 appeal in the U.S. Appellate Court’s Ninth Circuit resulted in the judgment being reversed. A key issue in the case was Wilson’s constitutional right of free speech. But after the case was remanded to the district court, a second jury exonerated Davis again.

That same year, however, Davis didn’t fare as well. In the spring, he was charged with felony stalking against fellow officer Robin Hayes and was put on a three-year administrative leave. In a preliminary hearing, Hayes testified that Davis had also threatened to kill her. Through plea bargaining, Davis was eventually allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor stalking. On October 13, 2011, after his trial concluded, NBC San Diego ran a story headlined, “Officer Stalks and Walks Free.” Davis soon was back at work on the streets...

After Saikali arrived at the Sharp Memorial Hospital emergency room, he overheard the woman he says attacked him talking in a nearby enclosure. She was bragging again, he says, this time to a nurse, about how her male companion in the Walmart parking lot was an expert in martial arts. Saikali could hear that she was being treated for a broken wrist. He figured she had broken it when he flung her off his back. The first ambulance at the crime scene must have brought her there, he thought. 

Before Saikali left the hospital, he had the nurse attending him take pictures of his injuries. Within days, he also wrote a three-page account of what happened both inside Fry’s and outside Walmart. He then went to the U.S. attorney’s office, where he was told there was nothing they could do. “I wanted them to see my injuries firsthand,” he says.

Saikali also called Fry’s and Walmart to ask that they save the surveillance video of the night he had been beaten. They promised to do it. When he called Walmart’s security department three weeks after the incident, he was told that only police could view the video. Had police come to look at it? No, they had not, he says the Walmart spokesperson told him...

After 30 Years In Prison, Judge Releases Inmate Whose Testimony Was Beaten Out Of Him

After 30 Years In Prison, Judge Releases Inmate Whose Testimony Was Beaten Out Of Him
By Nicole Flatow
ThinkProgress
December 13, 2013

More than a decade ago, a special prosecutor undertook an investigation that revealed a longtime Chicago Police Department detective and commander had routinely tortured black men to coerce them into confessions or false testimony. Some of the convictions were reversed. A few others were pardoned by then-Governor Ryan. And Jon Graham Burge was convicted on related perjury charges and sent to jail.

But Burge’s misconduct is still taking its toll on many of the 148 people who claimed abuse. Just this week, a man who spent more than 30 years in jail was released after Judge Richard Walsh found that officers had lied about beating Stanley Wrice with a flashlight and a 20-inch piece of rubber, and about imposing similar treatment on a witness in Wrice’s case to elicit false testimony against him.

Wrice was sentenced to 100 years for a sexual assault he says he falsely confessed to after police beatings. Others with similar claims remain behind bars, hoping to seize on precedent from Wrice’s case to expedite their appeals. Lawyers will argue next week that these inmate should be certified as a class so they can argue together that they should be granted new trials.

Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993, after an internal investigation found that his abuse was “systematic” over more than a decade. More than 148 individuals — mostly black men — came forward to report that Burge had smothered them, imposed electric shock, and forced them into a hot radiator. Burge’s misconduct led to the state’s death penalty moratorium in 2000. But it took another decade before a special prosecutor embarked on an extensive investigation of Burge’s behavior. It found foul play, but said it would not pursue action against Burge, in part because the statutes of limitations had expired in the cases. Then in 2008, prosecutors developed another way to snag Burge in a civil trial. They charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about his actions at trial, and in 2011, he was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison.

At sentencing, U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow lamented, “How can one trust that justice will be served when the justice system has been so defiled?” She added, “Perhaps the praise, publicity and commendations you received for solving these awful crimes was seductive and may have led you down this path. On your behalf how I wish that there had not been such a dismal failure of leadership in the (police) department that it came to this.”

While Burge’s case is extreme, this reward system exists in any of a number of police departments and law enforcement agencies, accompanied by rare punishment for wrongdoing. False confessions alone account for about 25 of wrongful convictions exposed by DNA, and many others derive from testimony by witnesses who are coerced through both poor treatment and incentives.