Chicago's Dark Legacy Of Police Torture.

Liliana's article demonstrates that America is a brutal, lawless rogue state and has no place in today's society.


Author Liliana Segura

On January 25, 1990, the Chicago Reader, the free alternative weekly, published a cover story, nearly 20,000 words long, titled “House of Screams.” Written and reported over the course of a year by journalist John Conroy, the investigation exposed, in meticulous detail, a long and chilling history of abuse by police against suspects on the South Side of Chicago. At the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit, Police Commander Jon Burge had overseen and participated in the systemic torture of an untold number of African-American men, dating back to the early 1970s. They had been beaten, burned against radiators, suffocated with plastic bags and, most disturbingly, had their genitals subjected to electric shocks. “Fun time” was how Burge referred to the electrocution sessions, which, Conroy would later reveal, drew on his experience as a military police officer in Vietnam.

Despite its bombshell revelations, the story did not spark immediate or widespread outrage. Even the local dailies failed to run with it. So over the next seventeen years, Conroy would write twenty-two more articles about Chicago’s police torture regime—stories that laid bare the extent of the abuse and decried the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. Among those who knew about the torture was former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley, sworn in as mayor months before “House of Screams” was published. (Some fifty men claim to have been brutalized in the eight years he served as state’s attorney.) In 2003, out of concern that innocent men had been convicted and sentenced to die based on confessions that had been tortured out of them, Governor George Ryan famously emptied Illinois’s death row, commuting 167 sentences and pardoning four men.....read more

http://www.thenation.com/article/168965/chicagos-dark-legacy-police-torture

Texas:Execution Of Mentally Impaired Yokamon Hearn With Animal Drugs.

Yokamon Hearn executed in Texas‎

A 33-year-old man with alleged mental impairments was executed by the state of Texas on Wednesday after being administered a single narcotic by lethal injection — the same drug commonly used by veterinarians to kill dogs and cats.

Despite requests for authorities to reconsider the mental functions of Yokamon Hearn, the convicted car jacker and murderer became the sixth death row inmate executed in only seven months by the state. And although the execution occurred in a state unarguably infamous for its routine capital punishment procedures, the case is continuing to raise questions about why and how Hearn was put to death.

Not only had attorneys argued that Hearn suffered severe mental impairments brought on by his mother’s incessant prenatal drinking, but a long history of neglect and abuse from his parents painted a picture of a defendant mentally scared and unfit for execution.
The assistant district attorney argued, however, that honoring this appeal "would be a free pass for anyone whose parents drank."

Only a day before he was set to die, an official with the United Nations wrote the US to beg for state authorities to reconsider the killing.

“[T]here is evidence to suggest that he…suffers from psychosocial disabilities,” Christof Heyns, the special rapporteur on arbitrary executions for the UN, wrote from Geneva, Switzerland. Heyns also reintroduced the fact that experts clearly opined that Hearn’s mother abused alcohol before his birth, an act that caused him to be “affected by structural brain dysfunction” while still in the womb.

Even after the UN’s pleas, Texas went forth with the execution on Wednesday, killing Hearn by way of lethal injection shortly after 7:00 p.m. local time.

What raises additional scrutiny, however, is how the state went about the killing. For the first time in history of Texas, authorities induced death by injecting the inmate with a single drug — pentobarbital — instead of the standard cocktail of narcotics regularly used in the past. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed one week earlier that their supply of one of the drugs previously used in executions — the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide — had expired and that they’d be forced to find another way to carry out the execution.

After the European Union banned the export last year of the barbituric acids regularly used in a three-drug cocktail favored by American prisons, officials in the States were forced to find alternative means of executing their inmates. In September, authorities in Florida used pentobarbital to kill a death row inmate, despite pleas from the drug’s manufacturer that demanded otherwise.

Before the September execution of Manuel Valle, Lundbeck manufactures wrote to Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) to say that using their product to kill people “contradicts everything Lundbeck is in business to do — provide therapies that improve people's lives.”
Lundbeck has banned the export of the drug to the US, but a surplus of supplies in some states is forcing authorities to use the narcotic to kill inmates, especially in instances where the components of the three-drug cocktail are unavailable.

“While the company has never sold the product directly to prisons and therefore can’t make guarantees, we are confident that our new distribution program will play a substantial role in restricting prisons’ access to Nembutal for misuse as part of lethal injection,” Lundbeck wrote last year.

By switching to a single dose of Nembutal — the product name of pentobarbital — Mr. Hearn’s execution cost the state $1,286.86 instead of the normal $84.55 for a three-drug cocktail. Before a string of recent executions across America, pentobarbital was used primarily in lethal injections administered to pets that were put to sleep by veterinarians.

Before being administered the narcotic on Wednesday evening, Hearns offered a final statement to his loved ones.

"I'd like to tell my family that I love y'all and I wish y'all well. I'm ready," the inmate said. He was pronounced dead a full 25 minutes later.

Ohio, Arizona, Idaho, and Washington have already switched to using a single dose of pentobarbital to execute death row inmates. On Tuesday, officials in Georgia revealed that they’d be implementing it as a means of execution as well. It has yet to be confirmed, however, if that will be how the state goes about a planned execution of Warren Hill, a death row inmate scheduled to be killed this week despite being declared “mentally retarded” by the court. Mr. Hill was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday as well but the state has since put the killing on hold to reconsider its means of lethal injection. The UN has asked for an appeal in that case as well.

Since 1982, Texas has formally executed nearly 500 death row inmates. Mr. Hearns was the first person to be killed with a single drug. Texas officials note that they currently have "an adequate supply of pentobarbital to carry out all scheduled executions,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

http://rt.com/usa/news/texas-execution-hearn-animal-583/

UN urges Texas and Georgia not to execute the mentally disabled

The United Nations is asking authorities in the states of Texas and Georgia to intervene in the cases of two American death row inmates who are slated to be executed this week despite having known mental disabilities.

Christof Heyns, the special rapporteur on arbitrary executions for the UN, has written the American government this week in hopes that his plea, penned all the way in Geneva, Switzerland, will convince the United States to reconsider killing two death row inmates scheduled to die on Wednesday. Although both cases involve putting to death inmates who have long been imprisoned for murder convictions, Heyns says that their documented mental states should be considered by the court before their executions are carried out.

In his memo, dated Tuesday, Heyns says the executions of Warren Hill and Yokamon Laneal Hearn are a "violation of death penalty safeguards" and that anyone suffering from "psychosocial disabilities" should have their death sentence commuted.

Mr. Hill, 52, was slated to be killed on Wednesday by the state of Georgia, even though the court previously agreed that he is “mentally retarded” by a “preponderance of the evidence.” In Georgia, however, the state court says that such a mental condition needs to be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

"Executing Warren Hill, a 52-year-old man whom a court has found to be more likely than not mentally retarded, would be a terrible miscarriage of justice,” Mr. Hill’s attorney recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Georgia Department of Corrections said on Tuesday this week that they would temporarily postpone the execution of Mr. Hill so that they could make changes to its lethal-injection protocol, the Wall Street Journal reports, but the UN hopes that his death sentence is commuted entirely. Heyns argues that if an appeal is not honored, putting Hill to death “would be a fatality in violation of international as well as domestic law.”

Hearn, 33, is slated to be executed Wednesday evening in Texas for a 1998 murder he has been convicted of, although his attorney argues that the presiding jury in that case was never informed that he suffered brain damage as a child, was neglected by his parents, and was diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Pleading for the state to reconsider the execution, the UN’s Heyns writes that “there is evidence to suggest that he also suffers from psychosocial disabilities” and mention that is the opinion of experts that his mother’s alcohol abuse caused him to be “affected by structural brain dysfunction” before birth.

Amnesty International reports that the United States is the only member state from the Group of Eight leading economies that participated in capital punishment last year. The Death Penalty Information Center’s records reveals that the US has executed 23 prisoners so far in 2012.


http://on.rt.com/zalh4h 

Documentary: Secret CIA Prisons In Europe.

Uploaded by messiandread on 11 Sep 2011

WWW, September 2011 - In Eastern Europe, people thought they became free when the German Wall and the iron Curtain fell. Freedom was the buzzword. After 9/11, however, the American based CIA began planting secret prisons in Poland and Lithuania. The Russian-based RT channel investigates two claims of the existence of these prisons and cam with a remarkable documentary as a result which the Babylon Observer presents to you with permission.
It's called "rendition": a nice little word which hides the true meaning. People are being kidnapped and brought to secret prisons all over the world, including several European countries. In Lithuania and Poland, for example. Government leaders fall over it, parliaments do not get the right information, and journalists trying to uncover the facts often engage people who are unwilling to speak about it.

In this documentary, a crew from the Russian based RT station tries to unravel just what's been going on in the two mentioned countries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcIS_lZTSsI&feature=related

Documentary: Torture Inside America's Brutal Prisons. (Videos 1-5)

 

Texas: Clips From America's Brutal Prisons.

Prison Rape:Author T.J. Parsell talks about his time spent as a youth in a Michigan prison. Lecture and Reading at UCLA Law School.

Uploaded by tjparsell on 2 May 2007

Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison