The Cafe' [Think Tank]

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — A man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row was freed Friday after prosecutors finally acknowledged that the only evidence they had against him couldn't prove he committed the crime. Ray Hinton, 58, walked out of the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham and hugged his tearful family members. "Thank you Lord, thank you Jesus said his sister, Darlene Gardner, as she embraced him. "I shouldn't have sat on death row for 30 years," Hinton told reporters. "All they had to do was test the gun." Hinton was convicted of the 1985 murders of two Birmingham fast-food restaurant managers. Crime scene bullets were the only evidence linking him to the crime. © AP Photo/Alabama Dept. of Corrections In this undated photo made available by the Alabama Department of Corrections, shows inmate Anthony Ray Hinton. Hinton, who spent nearly 30 years on death row will go free Friday, April 3, 2015, after prosecutors told a…  

attribution: Family Photos used with permission Meagan Hockaday and Alfonso Limon - both shot to death by Oxnard Police At 1 AM this past Saturday, Meagan Hockaday, a 26-year-old African-American mother of three, was shot and killed by an Oxnard, California, police officer after he arrived at her home to check out a reported domestic dispute. A knife was found near Hockaday's body, but it's unclear why lethal force was used on a mother with her children present in her own home. The shooting death of Hockaday must, though, be viewed in context with the sordid history of the Oxnard, California, police department. Less than a year ago, the city of Oxnard was forced to pay a record $6.7 million to the family of Alfonso Limon , an innocent man who was shot 16 to 21 times by Oxnard police as he was walking home from a high school gym. They claimed to mistakenly believe him to be a suspect in another crime. He wasn't. He was completely unarmed and just a few dozen

Why are big banks waging war against Senator Elizabeth Warren? Because Elizabeth Warren refuses to bow down to them. Since crashing the economy in 2008, the big banks on Wall Street have gone largely unpunished and have avoided being broken up into smaller pieces. Dodd-Frank instituted some regulations but not enough to prevent a repeat of the financial hole we have been climbing out of over the last seven years.    The banks, of course, would rather there not be any regulations at all, which is why they heavily opposed the election of Warren as the next senator from Massachusetts. When Warren captured victory, she immediately went to work to strengthen regulation and create protections for consumers in an effort to keep banks from being a threat to the economy and the financial well-being of Americans and their families. That didn’t make banks happy, especially JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who paid a visit to Warren’s office on Capitol Hill in 2013 to argue for less regu

Here’s a statistic for you: It's been 31 days since the release of the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing report , but the number of fatal police encounters is already  over 100 and counting . That’s an average of more than three people killed each day in March by police in America. Too many of this month’s victims fit a profile we know all too well – unarmed men of color, some of whom have psychiatric disabilities. Victims like Charly Keunang in Los Angeles, California; Tony Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin; Anthony Hill in DeKalb County, Georgia; and Brandon Jones in Cleveland, Ohio; confirm that the problems with policing are national in scope. This isn’t a problem concentrated in a few rogue police departments. Even those police departments with the best of intentions need reform. Take, for example, last week’s Department of Justice report that Philadelphia police shot 400 people – over 80 percent African-American – in seven years. This is in a city

In an extended interview conducted over the phone from SCI Mahanoy Prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania, journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal responds to a new Pennsylvania law that authorizes the censoring of public addresses of prisoners or former offenders if judges agree that allowing them to speak would cause "mental anguish" to the victim. Critics say the "Revictimization Relief Act," passed on October 21, will trample the free speech rights of prisoners. It was introduced after Abu-Jamal delivered a pretaped commencement address for graduating students at Vermont’s Goddard College earlier this month. The speech was opposed by the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the police officer whom Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania has criticized the new Pennsylvania measure, calling it "overbroad and vague," and unable to "pass constitutional muster under the First Amendment." AMY

download:   Feeds Imprisoned journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has been taken to the Intensive Care Unit of Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, after he was removed from prison for a medical emergency without any notification to his family, friends or lawyers. Abu-Jamal’s longtime friend Johanna Fernández said she only learned he had been transferred when she went to visit him Monday morning at SCI Mahanoy after worrying that he had sounded sick when the two spoke by phone last week. "Upon arrival I was told I could not see him," Fernández told Democracy Now! "We were told he was in diabetic shock and taken to the hospital." For the past three months Fernández says Abu-Jamal has complained of suffering from an "extreme eczema outbreak" and described his skin as "akin to that of an elephant’s." Watch Fernández’s interview on Democracy Now! "He tried to access whatever h

BE THERE Monday, April 6 Monday, April 6, 7 PM New York City St. Paul & St. Andrews Church West 86th Street & West End Avenue 1 train; M86 bus Learn more and get involved HERE . Come hear Cornel West and Carl Dix speak on April 6 about what needs to be done and massive outpourings on April 14. Special Messages from Alice Walker & others (to be announced) Stop Mass Incarceration Network www.stopmassincarceration.net stopmassincarceration@gmail.com 646-709-1961 After the protests of last year, after promises were made and investigations were launched, after hundreds of protesters were arrested… the police are still getting away with killing people, especially Black and Latino people. This must STOP! Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

A former Pennsylvania juvenile court judge is sentenced to 28 years in prison for so-called "kids for cash" scam. Disgraced Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for conspiring with private prisons to sentence juvenile offenders to maximum sentences for bribes and kickbacks which totaled millions of dollars. He was also ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution. abc.com In the private prison industry the more time an inmate spends in a facility, the more of a profit is reaped from the state. Ciavearella was a figurehead in a conspiracy in the state of Pennsylvania which saw thousands of young men and women unjustly punished and penalized in the name of corporate profit. According to allgov.com Ciavearella's cases from 2003 - 2008 were reviewed by a special investigative panel and later by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and it was found that upwards of 5,000 young men and women were denied their constitutiona

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Correction officials confirmed Monday that Cortez Berry, serving 8-years on a robbery charge, is the man kneeling in this photo taken at the Burruss Correctional Training Center. Officials are investigating the situation.  Disgusting.                                                                                                                    Barbaric.                                                                                                                          Who cares? Those are some of the comments surrounding what appears to be a degrading image smuggled out of the Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth, Georgia., of an 18-year-old prisoner. In one disturbing frame, the horrors of prison life are exposed, while also revealing the prison system’s ongoing struggle to keep facilities free of cellphones and other contraband. It looks like a scene from the television show “Oz.” Or som

By Christopher Bonastia | Originally Published at AlterNet. January 6, 2015 Touted as the cure for what ails public education, charter schools have historical roots that are rarely discussed. As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present. The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of th

Spiritually-conscious women and men of African descent will gather at 3:00 p.m. sharp on Sunday, March 29 — rain or shine — at Congo (Washington) Square, 7 th & Walnut Streets in Philadelphia for the Second Annual Sacred Libation Ceremony in remembrance of the 150 documented Black women who were lynched between 1870 and 1957. In March 2014, the First Annual Sacred Libation Ceremony to honor the women was conducted by Iya Marilyn Kai Jewett and a group of priests of Philadelphia’s African American Yoruba/Orisha community.  Although it rained that day, approximately 30 people came to witness the ritual — some from as far as New York and Washington DC.  The ceremony has now been instituted as an annual ritual on the last Sunday in March as part of Women’s History Month. In addition to libation being poured by Jewett in the Yoruba tradition, women from other traditions will also participate. The Queen Mothers of the Philadelphia Asante Nation – Nana Afua Afriyie Kyeiwaa, P

Ted Ginn used to coach football at Glenville High School in Ohio. He was also a security guard there. He watched the students struggle every single day because of the rising pressure to do well on tests and state-required exams. He watched students drop out, flunk out, and give up on themselves. He decided one day that he didn’t want to stand by and watch the male youth of the city lose all of their potential and end up in jail or worse. He wanted to do something about it. Ginn went to the school board and the superintendent and told them that he wanted to start a public all-boys academy that was for at-risk youth. The program would be based off of a mentoring model which is very different from regular public schools. The motion was approved and in 2006 Ginn Academy was born.  In its first three years of being open Ginn Academy attracted more than 300 students. While the city of Glenville itself had a dropout rate of 54%, Ginn Academy had a dropout rate of 0%. Not a single student

By Angela L. Braden For five consecutive years, all of the graduates of Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy have been accepted at four-year colleges and universities. The charter school has garnered national recognition for providing minority students with the academic skills necessary to be “college bound.”  Last spring, 240 students had college acceptance letters in their hands before receiving their diploma.  An accomplishment that Mayor Rahm Emanuel considers to be phenomenal.  The Chicago mayor delivered a moving speech at the 2014 graduation, congratulating the students for their hard work and achievements. As part of an Urban Prep ritual, when the high school seniors are accepted into college, they exchange their red tie with a red and gold tie. “The tie represents to me moving on from a boy to becoming a young man and actually doing something with my life,” graduating senior Dumar Harris said. While people all over the country are inspired and impressed with the accomplis

Kean University Cancels Common’s Graduation Speech For Paying Tribute To Assata Shakur It seems New Jersey’s Kean University has flipped the script. Yesterday, they announced that it would host Common as the institution’s graduation day speaker. And now, just a day later, the university has resent its invitation, citing Com’s heartfelt tributary “A Song For Assata” as incendiary and offensive to the state’s law enforcement regime for praising activist and former Black Panther Assata Shakur, who is currently laying low in Cuba after being convicted of the 1973 murder of NJ state police officer. Assata Shakur has always maintained her innocence. I see this as attempt silence those who want to empower and pay tribute to those by spreading knowledge of civil rights, and liberties. The Cafe' : When I was in college we invited Russell Simmons to speak at our BSU. We were told by the school that they didn't want him to come out. They pulled the funding, we raise so much hel

Patricia Dinkins Please help me find my son! His name is Khaleel he's 16 yrs old, 5'9", 160 lbs. Last seen wearing green hoodie like in this picture with grey jeans, an orange polo shirt and grey, orange and maroon Adidas. Please please this IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS' joke!!!! (443)271-8828 The Café: Please if anyone see this young man call: (443)271-8828 Immediately ask for Patricia Dinkins/ Or if you have any information concerning his disappearance call 911 immediately.