Local judge stands up to lying cops

~ susie

Made in America Festival 2014 3 twitter

And takes much criticism as a result, of course. Pretty shocking story, even to me. I can’t stand Lynne Abraham, she was a stain on the city’s reputation and I’m glad she’s gone:

“There’s an enormous inequity in a system that permits a police officer’s testimony to be unassailed and have absolutely no repercussions,” he warned. “No one man’s testimony should be elevated by any status in his life. It’s a charge we give regularly to our juries.”

Betts was not the first officer to have his testimony called into question by Rau. After taking the bench in 2001, she quickly became, the Inquirer reported, “one of Philadelphia’s most controversial judges — developing a reputation for refusing to believe sworn testimony from police officers and for throwing out key evidence.” It’s a reputation that’s rare among city judges.

District Attorney Lynne Abraham’s office, according to media reports, began to collect a “dossier” on her objectionable rulings. In 2002, she criticized Rau’s conduct as “horrible” and “grotesque,” accusing her of having an “institutional bias against police officers” and for handing out lenient sentences.

In one case, Abraham contended that Rau had not sufficiently explained her decision to suppress evidence of a handgun allegedly seized from a 23-year-old West Oak Lane man. But the two officers’ accounts of the incident differed, and Rau questioned their credibility.

“Judge Rau and others, they show no safe haven for any citizen in the city,” Abraham told the Daily News. “Sometimes the only thing to do to get them to do the right thing is to embarrass them.”

Critics say that Abraham wanted to instill fear in judges like Rau who dared to cross her and question police.

Another reason to despise 9/11 hysteria

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

dronepainting

Insane legal cases like this, where a man is serving a 65-year-sentence for charity work:

Yesterday, on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, I received an email from my father saying that the photos affixed to the walls of his prison cell were ripped down and called “contraband” by the officer who took them.

My father is a political prisoner, convicted of terrorism charges in the vacuum of post-9/11 hysteria and incarcerated at a federal prison in southern Illinois—all under allegations stemming from his indisputable philanthropic work.

Until recently, the walls of my father’s 9-by-5-foot cell were covered with eleven photos of children from all over the world—children who were injured or killed during recent political events. My father wrote my family, heartbroken, to say that even though he had collected these images from The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and other publications, they were still seized—with no notice.

My father, Ghassan Elashi, is currently serving a 65-year-prison-sentence at the Communications Management Unit in Marion, Illinois for conspiracy to send Material Support in the form of humanitarian aid to charities in the West Bank and Gaza that prosecutors claimed were associated with designated terrorists; our biggest defense thus far (and the reason my father may be vindicated in due time) is that his charity, the Holy Land Foundation, used the same exact Palestinian charities that our own government agency —the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—used to distribute its aid.