jumblejo:

jalwhite:

uvgotfemale:

Come ON people, I have seen posts about shopping get more attention than this petition. Please help get this message out there. Post on Facebook and other sites. This is a grave injustice.

A reminder of who Marissa Alexander is and why this is an urgent issue:

PARDON MARISSA ALEXANDER WHO WAS JAILED FOR 20 YEARS IN FLORIDA FOR TRYING TO PROTECT HERSELF AGAINST AN ABUSIVE EX-

Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Marissa is the victim here. Her husband beat her while she was pregnant. After yet another beating, Alexander fired a warning shot which traveled through a wall and into the ceiling. That shot saved her life. She didn’t kill anyone. Prosecutor Angela Corey did not take into account that Marissa Alexander had a court injunction against her crazed husband. She had given birth 9 Days earlier and was trained to use a weapon and earned a concealed weapons permit. Whilst the Stand Your Ground Law has been successfully used by other people in the State of Florida, that law didn’t apply to Marissa Alexander although she was a victim of Domestic Abuse.

Here’s the original article.

(via mujeristaxicana)

socialismartnature:

Nation journalist Liliana Segura reports on Pennsylvania’s drive to execute Terrance Williams, who was convicted as a juvenile for killing men who abused him.

===

EIGHTEEN-YEAR-old Terrance Williams “did not fit the mold of a typical street criminal,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September of 1984. “He was a bright, talented college student, former star quarterback of the Germantown High School football team. His friends, teachers, coaches and neighbors could not believe that he would be involved in murder, or any sordid activity.”

Yet Williams, who is African American, had committed two grisly killings. One victim, the Inquirer reported, was 50-year-old Herbert Hamilton, who had been found naked, with a knife through his throat, on his kitchen floor. The other, Amos Norwood, who led the altar boys and directed the Youth Theater Fellowship at Philadelphia’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, had been beaten with a tire iron, set on fire and left in a cemetery.

“The problem I find with you, Mr. Williams, is you are a Jekyll and Hyde, apparently,” one judge told him. Tried as an adult for the Hamilton murder despite being 17 at the time, Williams was already in prison when he was sentenced to die for killing Norwood. “We were glad we did it,” one juror told the press.

Today, Williams, 46, is facing death by lethal injection. This August, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett signed a warrant scheduling his execution for October 3. But in the meantime, the same jurors who sealed his fate have had a dramatic change of heart.

At least five say that if they could go back, they would never have sent Williams to death row. That’s because they were never told a salient and deeply disturbing detail about his relationship with his victim. Williams, it turns out, had been violently and systematically raped by Norwood, beginning when he was 13 years old.

In fact, behind the image of Williams as a model student athlete was a childhood marred by horrific physical and sexual abuse that began from the time Williams was just 6 years old. Relentlessly beaten by his mother (herself a victim of abuse) and his alcoholic stepfather and gang-raped at a juvenile detention center when he was 16, by the time Williams killed Norwood he was regularly cutting himself, abusing drugs and alcohol, and had endured more than a decade of abuse.

Among the others who sexually assaulted him: his other victim, Herbert Hamilton.

socialismartnature:

MORE THAN two years have passed since Detroit police murdered 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones.

She was asleep on a sofa in her grandmother’s living room when she was shot to death by officers of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), as a reality TV crew filmed the tragic incident. Today, the Jones family has still not seen justice and continues to be brutalized by the DPD.

Detroit police raided the Jones family’s duplex around midnight on May 16, 2010. Police believed a suspect in a murder that happened a few days earlier was hiding in the home. Rather than wait for the suspect to leave the house, as police officers have since told the media is standard protocol, the cops chose to storm the house in a nighttime raid—bringing camera crews with them—despite the children’s toys scattered across the lawn.

Cops approached the home and threw a flash grenade into the living room through a first floor window, temporarily blinding the occupants inside. According to attorneys for the Jones family, video evidence shows that at that point, Officer Joseph Weekley, a regular guest on reality television, shot inside the home, killing Aiyana. The film has still not been released to the public.

The cops’ version of events has been inconsistent. First, they claimed that Weekley’s gun went off when Aiyana’s grandmother, Mertilla Jones, tried to grab it in a scuffle with Weekley. But Mertilla was arrested, drug tested and examined that night for gunpowder residue on her hands. All of the tests came back negative.

The police have since backed off that story, and now claim that Mertilla brushed against Weekly as she ran from the room, causing his gun to misfire. But there was “no contact with any cop,” Mertilla told reporters. “None. They’re lying.”

 … IMMEDIATELY AFTER the incident, the media set out to cover for the police and blame the Jones family for the tragedy. The day after Aiyana’s murder, Rochelle Riley, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, wrote that Detroiters “need to stop harboring criminals and averting our eyes to thuggery.”

The Free Press ran a profile of Officer Weekley the next day, saying that he “helmed several charitable endeavors…including one that raises money for children of domestic violence victims.” The profile neglected to mention that a group of Detroit cops, including Weekley, were under federal investigation for a 2007 incident in which police raided a home, shot two dogs to death and pointed guns at children, including infants.

Weekley was arraigned in October 2011, 17 months after the fatal raid, and charged with involuntary manslaughter. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. The family is still waiting for the trial, which begins in late October.

Meanwhile, Charles Jones, Aiyana’s father, has been accused of aiding in the murder that police were investigating. He has been charged with first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison.

Detroit’s millionaire Democratic Mayor Dave Bing released a statement following Weekley’s arraignment, saying that the city “must use this difficult moment to continue bringing our community and police department together.” But the Jones family has seen what it looks like when the police come together with—or rather, against—the community: terrorism.

In spite of the court system’s foot-dragging, the Joneses have not given up hope for justice. In April 2012, Mertilla Jones made a statement to the press, saying, “I know it’s people out there praying for us…While they’re reaching out, I’m going to grab a hold of their hand. It’s time for us to stand up and speak out for Aiyana.”

(via thatfeministdyke)

amodernmanifesto:

AFTER NEARLY two years, authorities in San Joaquin County, Calif., have finally broken their silence surrounding the police murder of 16-year-old James Earl Rivera Jr., but predictably their 27-page report finds that police were “justified” in their use of lethal force against the African American teenager.

Rivera died in a hail of police gunfire on July 22, 2010, one day before his 17th birthday, but until July 11, Rivera’s family had been denied access to all police reports, coroners’ reports and “dash-cam” footage from the incident. If it wasn’t for relentless public pressure organized by the family and their supporters—including weekly personal appeals to the city by Rivera’s mother Dionne Smith-Downs—it’s unlikely this report would have ever been produced.

Needless to say, the conclusions issued by San Joaquin County District Attorney James Willett haven’t satisfied Smith-Downs’ demand for justice for her son’s death.