Louisiana inves­ti­ga­tors are comb­ing through evi­dence in the shoot­ing death ear­li­er this week of a 6‑year-old autis­tic boy after author­i­ties charged two law enforce­ment offi­cers in the shoot­ing. Col. Mike Edmonson, in a late night press con­fer­ence Friday, said the two offi­cers were being booked on charges of sec­ond-degree mur­der and attempt­ed sec­ond-degree mur­der in the Tuesday shoot­ing death of Jeremy Mardis and the wound­ing of his father, Chris Few, in the cen­tral Louisiana town of Marksville. Edmonson vowed to con­tin­ue the inves­ti­ga­tion wher­ev­er it leads.

“Let’s make tonight about Jeremy Mardis. That lit­tle boy was buck­led in the front seat of that vehi­cle and that is how he died,” Edmonson said. “He did­n’t deserve to die like that.” Speaking of the body cam­era footage that was recov­ered from the offi­cers, he said: “It is the most dis­turb­ing thing I’ve seen, and I will leave it at that.” The two offi­cers are Norris J. Greenhouse Jr., 23, of Marksville and Derrick Stafford, 32, of Mansura, Louisiana. Both were work­ing sec­ondary jobs in Marksville as mar­shals when the shoot­ing hap­pened, Edmonson said. State police have been inves­ti­gat­ing the Tuesday night shoot­ing that raised ques­tions almost from the start. State police are comb­ing through foren­sics evi­dence, 911 calls, con­duct­ing inter­views and review­ing the body cam­era footage, Edmonson said. Two oth­er offi­cers were involved in the inci­dent. When Edmonson was asked whether he antic­i­pat­ed any more arrests, he said: “We’ll see where it takes us.” It’s still unclear what led police to pur­sue Few and what trig­gered the shoot­ing. The parish coro­ner said ear­li­er this week that the offi­cers were serv­ing a war­rant on Few when he fled, but Edmonson lat­er said he had no infor­ma­tion about a warrant.

6‑YEAR-OLD SON OF MAN FLEEING ARREST DIES IN POLICE-INVOLVED SHOOTING

Few’s 57-year-old step­fa­ther, Morris German, has accused the mar­shals of indis­crim­i­nate­ly open­ing fire on the vehi­cle. German said Few was heav­i­ly sedat­ed, unable to talk and has bul­let frag­ments lodged in his brain and lung. He described Few as a lov­ing father and added the man’s son “was his whole life.” German added that the 6‑year-old had been diag­nosed with autism, describ­ing him as a delight­ful child who “loved every­thing, every­body.” German said the boy had no sib­lings and the fam­i­ly had recent­ly moved to Marksville from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “I know a 6‑year-old should not have been shot,” German said. Louisiana Cops Arrested For Killing 6‑Year-Old Boy

Pennsylvania police officer acquitted in shooting death of unarmed suspect.

A Pennsylvania jury on Thursday acquit­ted a police offi­cer of all charges in the fatal shoot­ing of an unarmed sus­pect as he lay in the snow, knocked to the ground by her stun gun.

After delib­er­at­ing for close to 11 hours, the jury acquit­ted Officer Lisa Mearkle, a vet­er­an of the Hummelstown Police Department, of third-degree mur­der, vol­un­tary manslaugh­ter and invol­un­tary manslaugh­ter in the death of David Kassick, 59, of Hummelstown.

A cen­ter­piece of the case against Mearkle, 37, was a video­tape record­ed by the stun gun she used to bring down Kassick in February in the small town about 10 miles east of Harrisburg, the state capital.

The jerky video played for the jury in Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas in Harrisburg. It shows Kassick face down as Mearkle is heard repeat­ed­ly shout­ing, “Show your hands!” Afterwards, two gun­shots ring out and a red spot appears on Kassick’s back.

One of Kassick’s rel­a­tives shout­ed “mur­der­er” after the ver­dict was read, local news site PennLive​.com reported.

In the cour­t­house lob­by, Mearkle told reporters she hoped to return to the police force that sus­pend­ed her after the shoot­ing. The police chief was not imme­di­ate­ly avail­able for comment.

“I’ve been to hell and back,” said Mearkle, break­ing into tears.

“We were always con­vinced that cit­i­zens would not sec­ond-guess a law enforce­ment offi­cer under these cir­cum­stances,” added her lawyer Brian Perry, who said dur­ing the tri­al that Mearkle act­ed out of fear for her life.

Kassick’s nephew, Kevin Fetter, told reporters that he still con­sid­ers Mearkle a murderer.

“She feared for her life from a man who was lay­ing on the ground. I think she mur­dered him in cold blood,” Fetter said.

Prosecutor Johnny Baer was not imme­di­ate­ly avail­able for comment.

The shoot­ing took place after Mearkle attempt­ed to pull over Kassick for an expired vehi­cle inspec­tion stick­er and he fled. Mearkle used her stun gun to bring him down. Perry had told jurors that as Kassick lay in the snow, his left hand appeared to be reach­ing into his coat, pre­sum­ably for a gun, and that caused the offi­cer to shoot.

Police lat­er found no weapon on Kassick, who served 10 years in fed­er­al prison for a hero­in sale that result­ed in a death.

Mearkle’s arrest for crim­i­nal homi­cide came dur­ing a nation­al wave of con­cern over police shoot­ings of unarmed sus­pects, many of them African-American. Both Mearkle and Kassick are white.
Pennsylvania police offi­cer acquit­ted in shoot­ing death of unarmed suspect

Video cam­eras have trans­formed how we view police killings. First, there was the hor­ri­fy­ing homi­cide in July 2014 of Eric Garner, placed in a choke-hold for sell­ing loose cig­a­rettes and denied med­ical assis­tance for sev­er­al long min­utes despite plead­ing “I can’t breathe” eleven times. Then there was the shock­ing slay­ing in April 2015 of Walter Scott, stopped for a non-func­tion­ing third brake light and shot in the back in broad day­light while run­ning away from the police. Most recent­ly, there was the fatal shoot­ing this July of Samuel Dubose, stopped for a miss­ing front license plate and shot in the head while attempt­ing to dri­ve away. In all three cas­es — two of them caught by cit­i­zen videos and the third by police cam­era — the vic­tims were African-American.

In the wake of these events and protests that have done so much to focus pub­lic atten­tion on them, our knowl­edge of police killings has rapid­ly expand­ed. So, too, has the issue’s polit­i­cal salience. The videos — and the out­rage that fol­lowed — helped ignite the most pow­er­ful civ­il rights move­ment since the 1960s. Thanks to this move­ment, the issues of police killings and mass incar­cer­a­tion are now square­ly on the pub­lic agenda.

Like the move­ments against lynch­ing, state-sanc­tioned seg­re­ga­tion and the death penal­ty before it, today’s move­ment is part of a cen­turies-long strug­gle for racial jus­tice. These move­ments have repeat­ed­ly chal­lenged the tak­en-for-grant­ed prac­tices of the day and rede­fined them, step-by-step, as no longer moral­ly accept­able. As I will dis­cuss below, this pat­tern describes the strug­gle that led to the decline and ulti­mate elim­i­na­tion of lynch­ing, and it cap­tures as well the ongo­ing fight against the death penal­ty that may well cul­mi­nate in its abo­li­tion. Today’s move­ments aim at a sim­i­lar trans­for­ma­tion: to define rou­tine police killings and mass incar­cer­a­tion — prac­tices now tak­en for grant­ed as nor­mal fea­tures of American life — as nei­ther nor­mal nor moral­ly acceptable.

How Common Are Police Killings?

The cur­rent move­ment emerged out of mount­ing anger over the killing of unarmed cit­i­zens by police. When the ques­tion of how often such killings take place quite nat­u­ral­ly arose, the shock­ing answer was that no one knew — a state of affairs the FBI direc­tor James Comey has apt­ly described as “embar­rass­ing and ridicu­lous.” Though the FBI annu­al­ly issues a report that pro­vides fig­ures on “jus­ti­fied police homi­cides,” report­ing from local police forces is vol­un­tary and thou­sands of them turn in no infor­ma­tion. Investigations by the Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight deter­mined that hun­dreds of police killings went unre­port­ed annu­al­ly, but they could do no more than pro­vide rough esti­mates. This is in strik­ing con­trast to many European coun­tries, where every killing by the police is care­ful­ly record­ed; indeed, in Germany and Finland, each and every shot fired by the police is entered into a nation­al database.

In response to the upsurge in pub­lic inter­est in police killings, the Washington PostandGuardian have stepped in to per­form a task that should have been done by the gov­ern­ment: the record­ing of every police killing. Though the news­pa­pers use slight­ly dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies, both news­pa­pers draw on two cit­i­zen-ini­ti­at­ed sources, “Killed by Police” and “Fatal Encounters,” which col­lect news reports of peo­ple killed by law enforce­ment offices, and both include data on whether the per­son was armed.¹ In addi­tion to the time and place of the killings, both data­bas­es include basic demo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion, includ­ing race, gen­der, and age. Neither attempts to deter­mine whether the killings should be deemed “jus­ti­fied.”

As recent­ly as the sum­mer of 2014, when the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner thrust the issue of police killings into nation­al promi­nence, the most wide­ly used esti­mate of the num­ber of peo­ple killed by police was pro­vid­ed by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report: slight­ly more than 400 per year. But we now know that this fig­ure was a gross under­es­ti­ma­tion, for the actu­al num­ber is more than 1,100 police killings each year — about one every eight hours.²This is a lev­el of police vio­lence that is sim­ply unimag­in­able in oth­er wealthy demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try; in Germany in 2012, a total of sev­en peo­ple were killed by the police, and in England a sin­gle per­son was killed in 2013 and 2014 com­bined. And Japan, a nation of 126 mil­lion peo­ple that is as non-vio­lent as the US is vio­lent, had no police killings over the past two years.
Read more here :Police Killings Surpass the Worst Years of Lynching, Capital Punishment, and a Movement Responds

KINGSTON, Jamaica – Leader of the Opposition Andrew Holness says that the Government appears to be inca­pable of man­ag­ing crime.

In a release yes­ter­day on the posi­tion tak­en by the Opposition in the dis­cus­sions which fol­lowed Tuesday’s state­ment in the House of Representatives, by Minister of National Security Peter Bunting Holness said:

“The PNP [is] try­ing to cov­er up mur­ders and crime in Jamaica. The old PNP trick of attack­ing the mes­sen­ger in the hope that the mes­sage will die will not work. We are on to them this time. The facts are incon­tro­vert­ible. Whenever the PNP is in pow­er mur­der ris­es. Lawlessness and dis­or­der increases.

“No one is argu­ing that crime is not a nation­al prob­lem with many caus­es and we all have a role. National secu­ri­ty like health, edu­ca­tion, and all oth­er min­istries are the nation­al con­cerns and we all have respon­si­bil­i­ty. However, when we elect a gov­ern­ment we don’t expect them to turn to the pub­lic to say we can’t do any­thing about crime, it’s an all out respon­si­bil­i­ty. If that’s the case why have a government?

“Why pay Peter Bunting to tell us that the increase in mur­ders is a mere bump in the road and since then mur­ders have almost dou­ble. We all can pray for divine inter­ven­tion on our own we don’t need a paid Minister of Government to tell us that.

“The PNP has a nerve to talk about a bi-par­ti­san approach to crime fight­ing. We have facil­i­tat­ed every Bill that has been brought to Parliament to be fast tracked for pas­sage. However, when the great­est oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed itself to erode the crim­i­nal net­works in Jamaica by extend­ing the state of emer­gency in 2010, the PNP reject­ed the very bi-par­ti­san­ship of which they speak. The PNP have no moral author­i­ty to speak about crime giv­en their his­to­ry and lack of per­for­mance in this regard.

“I will not stop talk­ing on the mur­der issue… If mur­ders were reduced by almost 500 under the JLP gov­ern­ment, the pub­lic is jus­ti­fied in expect­ing a con­tin­ued decrease under the PNP. Instead this is not. Murders are now 24 per cent ahead of what they were last year. This Government sim­ply does­n’t care and is inca­pable of man­ag­ing crime.”
Holness explains posi­tion on crime situation

After a week of silence, the “Pulp Fiction” direc­tor has gone medieval at crit­ics of his anti-cop rants — and has tak­en a few swipes at NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

“You’ve got (Police Commissioner) Bill Bratton saying…’There are no words to describe the con­tempt I feel for him.’ Him being me,” Tarantino told the LA Times Wednesday. “Yet when asked about the Eric Garner case, his quote is: ‘I per­son­al­ly don’t think race was a fac­tor in that inci­dent.’ If you watch the tape, you can tell that it was absolute­ly a fac­tor in that inci­dent. But I’m the only one he has no words for the con­tempt because I was against police brutality.”

Being against police bru­tal­i­ty for (Bratton) is being against the police,” he said.

Tarantino’s royale with cheese smack down came on the same day Nassau County cops joined a boy­cott of Tarantino’s upcom­ing film “The Hateful Eight,” which hits the­aters on Christmas Day. Tarantino said he is not wor­ried that his movie is going to tank as a result. “The peo­ple who are scream­ing against me are the mouth­pieces for the police,” he told the west coast paper. “They can call for a boy­cott. That doesn’t mean that cops are going to respond. I actu­al­ly have a whole lot of fans that are police offi­cers. And they’re not going to take (Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President) Patrick Lynch’s word for what I said.”
Read sto­ry here…Tarantino fires back at cops call­ing for boy­cott of his new film: ‘Being against police bru­tal­i­ty for (Bratton) is being against the police’ 

Authorities say a 6‑year-old boy is dead and his father is in crit­i­cal con­di­tion after mar­shals for a city in cen­tral Louisiana shot at a vehi­cle they were flee­ing in. Officials say the two were shot about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday in the city of Marksville.

Avoyelles Parish coro­ner Dr. L. J. Mayeux iden­ti­fied the dri­ver as Chris Few and his son as Jeremy Mardis, a first-grad­er at a near­by ele­men­tary school. Mayeux says city mar­shals were chas­ing Few after he fled an attempt to serve a war­rant. The coro­ner says Few reached a dead end and was back­ing into the mar­shals when they fired. The coro­ner says the boy was “caught in the line of fire” and was killed. State police are han­dling the inves­ti­ga­tion, but they pro­vid­ed few details.
6‑year-old son of man flee­ing arrest dies in police-involved shooting

THE Tivoli Enquiry heard yes­ter­day that res­i­dents of Tivoli Gardens could not iden­ti­fy a num­ber of the men killed inside the com­mu­ni­ty dur­ing the May 2010 oper­a­tion to appre­hend Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke because they were “import­ed” into the area to defend the for­mer strongman.

This evi­dence was giv­en by Inspector Mario Pratt, who was one of the dri­vers pick­ing up bod­ies through­out the com­mu­ni­ty and in the neigh­bour­ing Denham Town between May 24 and 25 of 2010.

He tes­ti­fied that a total of 13 bod­ies were placed in his truck on May 25 and that res­i­dents told an accom­pa­ny­ing col­league of his that the men were import­ed so they would­n’t be unable to iden­ti­fy them.

He also tes­ti­fied that oth­ers refused to co-oper­ate with the police when asked if they knew the men. Pratt tes­ti­fied in his exam­i­na­tion-in-chief, led by attor­ney Deborah Martin, that the bod­ies were picked up in path­ways and on the road and that none was removed from hous­es or yards in the community.

Evidence had already been giv­en that upwards of 300 gun­men were in Tivoli Gardens to defend Coke and that they were paid hand­some­ly to be there.

A senior Jamaica Defence Force sol­dier tes­ti­fied that a num­ber of men with rur­al address­es were round­ed up in the area and some were even put out by Denham Town res­i­dents after mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces grad­u­al­ly took con­trol of the area. The men were unable to say what they were doing in the com­mu­ni­ty and were pre­dom­i­nant­ly dressed in white shirts and blue jeans. Evidence was giv­en that this was the mode of dress for gun­men, who had engaged mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces in the West Kingston area dur­ing the operation.

– Paul Henry

The enquiry, being held at the Jamaica Conference Centre in down­town Kingston, is look­ing into the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the deaths of more than 70 peo­ple dur­ing the oper­a­tion to appre­hend Coke and restore law and order to the area after gun­men bar­ri­cad­ed sec­tions of the com­mu­ni­ty and turned it into a fortress.

Questioned by Terrence Williams, who heads the Independent Commission of Investigation, Pratt agreed that he nev­er put in his state­ment the evi­dence that res­i­dents said the bod­ies belonged to import­ed men.

The cop, who was a sergeant back in 2010, said that his intent in November of that year when he wrote his state­ment was to give an out­line of what occurred in Tivoli Gardens when he entered the com­mu­ni­ty. Read more here : Cops say sev­er­al dead men iden­ti­fied as ‘imports’

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Andrew Holness has expressed con­cern that as many as 800 mem­bers of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) may be leav­ing the force this year. “Just today I did some research, and I am told that the attri­tion rate in the police force is over 800 this year. Eight hun­dred police­men have decid­ed to leave the police force,” Holness told the crowd at Sunday night’s JLP mass ral­ly in May Pen, Clarendon. “If you want to fight crime, you have to make the crime-fight­ers hap­py. If you want to fight crime, you have to make the police feel appre­ci­at­ed and moti­vat­ed,” Holness stated.

“And so the Labour Party makes a com­mit­ment that we will look very close­ly at the remu­ner­a­tion of police. We will look very close­ly at the con­di­tions and terms of ser­vice of police­men to ensure that they are com­fort­able in the fight against crime,” he added. Holness also referred to the armed rob­bery of the JLP coun­cil­lor for the Mocho Division of the Clarendon Parish Council, busi­ness­woman Henene Simpson, on Saturday, and com­ment­ed that not many Jamaicans are as lucky she was. “Not many Jamaicans are so lucky, because crime is out of con­trol in this coun­try. Whenever the People’s National Party is in pow­er mur­der ris­es; when­ev­er the PNP is in pow­er crime ris­es; and I keep telling peo­ple that you have a greater chance of being mur­dered in Jamaica than being hit by a car,” he said.

“We believe that there is a lot that we can do to solve crime in this coun­try,” Holness said. “There is a lot that we can do to bring down mur­ders in this coun­try. There is a lot that we can do to make you safer in your own homes and pub­lic spaces. “The first thing that we have to do is to let our police­men feel appre­ci­at­ed again. The morale among police­men is very low,” he added.

Balford Henry
See more here : Holness says Gov’t must moti­vate police to fight crime

CAMBRIDGE — As the lights rose, Ted Cruz held cen­ter stage, dressed in black and kneel­ing at a bed­side. The first-year stu­dent at Harvard Law School deliv­ered his lines with the emo­tions of a man gripped by anger, fear, and wor­ry for his reputation.

“Do you under­stand that I have many ene­mies?” he thun­dered. “There is a fac­tion that is sworn to dri­ve me from my pul­pit. Do you under­stand that?”
Cruz, then a devot­ed ama­teur thes­pi­an, was play­ing the role of the Rev. Samuel Parris in “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s alle­gor­i­cal play about McCarthyism.

The lines — and the part — seem prophet­ic today.

In the US Senate, the Tea Party Republican from Texas has con­tin­ued to seek out a spot at cen­ter stage. His ene­mies — and he has many, includ­ing some in his own par­ty — char­ac­ter­ize him as pow­er-hun­gry, self-right­eous, dri­ven by sin­gle-mind­ed polit­i­cal piety. He even mount­ed what detrac­tors called a ground­less witch hunt, against the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee for sec­re­tary of defense.

View Story
Where Ted Cruz stands on key issues
Cruz hopes to ener­gize the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the GOP and sup­ple­ment his already strong sup­port among tea par­ty and grass­roots conservatives.
Video: Cruz act­ing in ‘The Crucible’

None of which, to his for­mer Harvard Law class­mates, is surprising.

Interviews with more than two dozen alum­nae and pro­fes­sors fill in a por­trait of Cruz, in Cambridge two decades ago, that would be ful­ly rec­og­niz­able to those who know him now in Washington. He made a last­ing impres­sion as some­one both arro­gant and pre­ten­tious, as well as some­one unwill­ing to yield or compromise.

But he was also uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed for his intel­lect, described by friend and foe alike as bril­liant but with a hard edge.

“He nev­er real­ly had an off switch with his debater’s demeanor,” said Ted Ruger, who was pres­i­dent of the Harvard Law Review dur­ing Cruz’s third year. “We just real­ized that was the way a dis­cus­sion with Ted was going to go. If you expect­ed some­thing dif­fer­ent, you came away shak­ing your head.”

Some two decades lat­er, Cruz has deft­ly tapped into a rebel­lious, angry strain in American con­ser­vatism and emerged as a leader in the Tea Party move­ment. He was a pri­ma­ry force behind last month’s gov­ern­ment shut­down, and has been men­tioned as a pos­si­ble 2016 pres­i­den­tial candidate.

The man who prod­ded his col­leagues on the Harvard Law Review is now the one draw­ing the ire of his Senate col­leagues. He remains more noto­ri­ous than popular.

Looking back, Cruz said those three years at Harvard Law School, from 1992 to 1995, sharp­ened his polit­i­cal vision and trained him for the intense spar­ring with lib­er­als that has become his sig­na­ture style as a nation­al politician.

But he also said he has mel­lowed since then.

“I sus­pect I was not the first 21-year-old who thought he knew more than he did,’’ Cruz said in an inter­view in his Senate office. “And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of get­ting mar­ried and becom­ing a father, is it often leads one to take a more mea­sured approach to life.”

Born in Canada

Ted Cruz arrived in Cambridge as an outsider.

He was born in Alberta, Canada. His father fled per­se­cu­tion in Cuba, even­tu­al­ly set­tling in Austin, Texas, where he learned English and earned a col­lege degree.

After grow­ing up in the Houston area, Cruz stud­ied pub­lic pol­i­cy at Princeton, where he devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion as a quick-wit­ted nation­al debate cham­pi­on. His near-per­fect score on the LSAT helped him ful­fill a dream of going to Harvard Law School.

It was a long way from Texas. Cruz’s father called it “mis­sion­ary work,” a place that would allow his con­ser­v­a­tive son to preach to the lib­er­al élite. And Cruz’s stri­dent views stood out as much as the cow­boy boots he wore to class, or the large Texas flag in his dorm room.

“Going to school on a cam­pus where the fac­ul­ty over­whelm­ing­ly dis­agrees with you, and where the stu­dent body over­whelm­ing­ly dis­agrees with you, is chal­leng­ing,” Cruz said. “If you go in with­out a firm foun­da­tion, it can under­mine what you believe.”

Cruz enrolled in 1992, a year after President Obama left and just as Elizabeth Warren began teach­ing as a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor (she nev­er taught him). He imme­di­ate­ly stood out aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, even in a class of 560 of the country’s bright­est students.

“He came in with his right hand raised and basi­cal­ly kept it raised the entire semes­ter,” said Alan Dershowitz, who taught Cruz in a first-year crim­i­nal law class. “Every year you see two or three stu­dents who you know are nat­ur­al lead­ers. Everybody saw that with Barack Obama … Everybody saw that with Elena Kagan. There are stu­dents who come in with charis­mat­ic qual­i­ties who oth­er peo­ple fol­low. He was one of them.”

While talk­a­tive and out­go­ing, he struck some class­mates as naked­ly ambitious.

As they were enter­ing their sec­ond year in law school, Melissa Hart agreed to give Cruz a ride from New York, where Cruz was at the end of the sum­mer, back to Cambridge. She didn’t know him well, but he sought her out after she had been giv­en a pres­ti­gious award for first-year students.

“We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ,” Hart said. “When I told him I didn’t know, he asked, ‘Well, what’s your SAT score? That’s close­ly coör­di­nat­ed with your IQ.’ ”

“It went from, ‘Nice guy,’ ” she said, “to ‘uh-oh.’ ”

A for­mer room­mate told the mag­a­zine GQ recent­ly that Cruz pre­ferred to study only with grad­u­ates of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, dis­miss­ing the rest as “the minor Ivies.”

“It’s com­plete non­sense,” Cruz said. “It’s sim­ply not true.”

The five-mem­ber study group includ­ed one mem­ber, Jeff Hinck, who attend­ed Northwestern.

Law Review post

Cruz lived in Hastings Hall, a six-sto­ry brown­stone behind wrought-iron gates. The Hemenway Gymnasium, where he played intra­mur­al bas­ket­ball and vol­ley­ball, was 40 steps away; Gannett House, which housed the Harvard Law Review, was 70 more.

Occasionally he would ven­ture into Harvard Square for Mexican food or a movie. He avoid­ed Boston, although one class­mate recalls Cruz being the only one will­ing to shell out mon­ey to see Michael Jordan in the Boston Garden in his sec­ond game back from his brief base­ball career (Cruz can still recount the box score).

In his sec­ond year, Cruz joined the Law Review and became a prin­ci­pal edi­tor. He was also a found­ing edi­tor of the Harvard Latino Law Review (where he is list­ed as “Rafael E. Cruz”) and joined the con­ser­v­a­tive Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (“R. Ted Cruz”).

Cruz focused pri­mar­i­ly on his stud­ies, and the law jour­nals. But he stayed up late play­ing marathon ses­sions of “Super Mario Brothers” on the Nintendo, or cards. If the game was hearts, his sig­na­ture move was to “shoot the moon,” the game’s riski­est, showiest, and most aggres­sive maneuver.

“It’s hard to exe­cute,” said Charles Morse, a law school friend. “Ted was fond of that.”

If the game was pok­er, he put all his chips on the table.

“He would go all in some­times … and you’d nev­er know if he’s bluff­ing,” said Alexander Acosta, anoth­er friend. “He’s some­one who’s will­ing to take risks.”

He also enjoyed antag­o­niz­ing lib­er­al class­mates. Late nights at the Law Review were the scene of fierce debates. Cruz’s beliefs are no dif­fer­ent now, and when it came to tax­a­tion class­mates recall him argu­ing that the gov­ern­ment was steal­ing mon­ey from the rich and giv­ing it to the poor.

“Some top­ic would come up and it was a free for all,” said Dean Newton, a fel­low con­ser­v­a­tive on the Law Review. “All you’d have to do is say some­thing remote­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and it would catch people’s hair on fire. It was fun to goad them.”

Poking at turtles

Newton com­pared the spar­ring he and Cruz would engage in with Harvard lib­er­als to pok­ing at snap­ping tur­tles stuck at the bot­tom of a barrel.

“It didn’t take much of a stick,” he said. “And they would imme­di­ate­ly snap.”

But with Cruz, those argu­ments became heat­ed. It wasn’t just the sub­stance, but how Cruz pre­sent­ed his case. To his adver­saries, he was relent­less. To his allies, he was misunderstood.

“Some peo­ple think his lan­guage is hard,” said David Panton, Cruz’s long­time best friend, and his room­mate their first year at Harvard Law School.“But he’s a lit­i­ga­tor. He has strong views and he makes his points clear­ly and empathically.”

Ted Cruz was, and in many ways still is, an actor.

In high school, he says, he con­sid­ered drop­ping out and mov­ing to California to pur­sue an act­ing career. His par­ents talked him out of it.

Shortly after he got to Harvard, he audi­tioned for “The Crucible,” which the law school dra­ma soci­ety was stag­ing to mark the 300^th anniver­sary of the Salem witch trials.

Miller’s play was writ­ten dur­ing Senator Joseph Mc-
Carthy’s Communist witch hunt in the 1950s. Since becom­ing a sen­a­tor, Cruz’s crit­ics have likened him to McCarthy for sug­gest­ing, with­out evi­dence, that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel might have accept­ed mon­ey from extreme or rad­i­cal groups. The com­ment drew a rebuke from Senator John McCain, who lat­er called Cruz a “wacko bird.”

Cruz rejects com­par­isons of him­self to McCarthy, sug­gest­ing he is the one being judged.

“It’s a tremen­dous play,” he said. “And it is obvi­ous­ly a les­son against jump­ing to con­clu­sions and being unfair­ly and harsh­ly judg­men­tal of oth­ers. That is a les­son I wish a lot more in Washington would take heed of.”

To the play’s cast mem­bers, “The Crucible” is mem­o­rable for anoth­er reason.

After the suc­cess­ful first per­for­mance, Cruz spent the cast par­ty imbib­ing so much Everclear — a pow­er­ful grain alco­hol — that he couldn’t make it through the next night’s per­for­mance. His fel­low actors had to coax him into going onstage, but by Act III his con­di­tion worsened.

A video of the per­for­mance shows him sit­ting on a bench onstage, his head buried in his hands for near­ly five min­utes straight. After meek­ly deliv­er­ing a line, he walked off stage in the mid­dle of the scene, forc­ing cast mem­bers to impro­vise around the depar­ture of a lead char­ac­ter. He didn’t return for the remain­der of the play.

“I was not feel­ing well, which was unfor­tu­nate,” Cruz said, tak­ing a philo­soph­i­cal view of the expe­ri­ence. “The young are not renowned for their wis­dom. And that’s cer­tain­ly not a prin­ci­ple from which I was exempt.”

Asked if he’d had a sip of Everclear since, he replied, “I doubt it.”

It was a rare dis­play of weak­ness for some­one who oth­er­wise seemed deter­mined to succeed.

From the moment Cruz stepped onto the Harvard cam­pus, he was intent on win­ning a clerk­ship with Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a fast track to con­ser­v­a­tive legal prominence.

“From day one … that was his tan­gi­ble, near-term goal,” said Jeff Hinck, a study partner.

Cruz was so dri­ven to secure a clerk­ship that he resolved to learn ten­nis, since Rehnquist, an avid play­er, was known to orga­nize week­ly match­es with his clerks.

When he final­ly got an audi­ence with Rehnquist and was asked if he was will­ing to play, Cruz, while allow­ing that he was “not very good,” eager­ly agreed.

He got the job, but paid a price.

“What he didn’t real­ize until lat­er was that ‘not very good’ was an incred­i­ble boast,” Cruz said. “I was so hor­rif­i­cal­ly bad at tennis.”

Looking beyond campus

At Harvard Law, Cruz was a mem­ber of a small band of con­ser­v­a­tives whose pol­i­tics were out of step with most of their peers. But beyond cam­pus, con­ser­vatism was a gath­er­ing force.

As the 1994 elec­tions approached, with Newt Gingrich lead­ing the charge, Cruz and his friends threw a “Republicans Take Back the House Party,” in Hastings Hall. When Republicans tri­umphed, the cam­pus con­ser­v­a­tives erupt­ed in cheers — antag­o­niz­ing Harvard’s lib­er­als with their rau­cous celebration.

“I walked in and there were peo­ple going crazy,” said Matt Bodie, one of Cruz’s lib­er­al class­mates. “I said, ‘Oh I got­ta get out of here.’ But there were some very hap­py conservatives.”

By the time he left Cambridge, the right wing in American pol­i­tics was ascen­dant and Cruz, with his new­ly mint­ed Harvard Law degree, was one of its bright­est young stars.

Shortly after grad­u­at­ing magna cum laude, he took out a loan and bought his moth­er a new Saab con­vert­ible for her birth­day. Then he embarked on the series of pres­ti­gious clerk­ships that plant­ed the seeds for his polit­i­cal career.

Inside his Senate office, on a shelf with some of his writ­ings in Harvard law jour­nals, he keeps a base­ball cap that has the words “WACKO BIRD” on it, memo­ri­al­iz­ing the term McCain gave him.

As Cruz leaned back in his chair, nurs­ing a cold fol­low­ing a week­end trip test­ing the pres­i­den­tial waters in Iowa, he reflect­ed on the lessons he took from Harvard Law School. And that man who has so roiled the Republican Party, and upset Washington for his demeanor and his tac­tics, said there need­ed to be more civility.

“There is a depress­ing ten­den­cy in mod­ern polit­i­cal life to dis­par­age those who dis­agree with you as either stu­pid or evil,” he said. “’They’re either too dumb to know the right answer or, even worse, they’re smart enough and yet they wish suf­fer­ing on oth­ers and are just down­right evil.’ The truth of the mat­ter, most peo­ple are neither.”
SEE MORE HERE : Harvard Law out­sider became Tea Party hero

Excessive force may be the most com­mon­ly dis­cussed form of police bru­tal­i­ty but accord­ing to a new study from the Associated Press, sex­u­al mis­con­duct is among the most preva­lent type of com­plaint against law enforce­ment in the United States.

With the tri­al of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma City police offi­cer indict­ed for rap­ing at least 13 women while on-duty, set to begin today, an aston­ish­ing new report sheds light on the enor­mous scope of ram­pant sex­u­al mis­con­duct by police offi­cers across the U.S.

In a year­long inves­ti­ga­tion of sex­u­al mis­con­duct by state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, prison guards and school resource offi­cers, the AP uncov­ered about 1,000 offi­cers who were fired between 2009 and 2014 for “rape, sodomy and oth­er sex­u­al assault; sex crimes that includ­ed pos­ses­sion of child pornog­ra­phy; or sex­u­al mis­con­duct such as propo­si­tion­ing cit­i­zens or hav­ing con­sen­su­al but pro­hib­it­ed on-duty intercourse.”

And 1,000 is sure­ly an under­count as the state’s with the largest law enforce­ment agen­cies in the coun­try, New York and California, were not includ­ed in the count because they do not have a statewide sys­tem to decer­ti­fy bad cops. Neither does New Jersey. Three oth­er states did not hand over their records.

Only 25 states require a police depart­ment to tell the state board any­time an offi­cer is fired for mis­con­duct — or any­time an offi­cer is fired at all. And only 10 of the states that require police depart­ments to report fir­ings also require them to report res­ig­na­tions due to mis­con­duct. In fact, as has become painful­ly obvi­ous to even the most casu­al observ­er of the nation­al dia­logue on police mis­con­duct, there is no nation­wide data­base of offi­cers who have even been fired for any cause because the FBI does not col­lect such data.

So, the AP obtained records from 41 states that do keep records on police decer­ti­fi­ca­tion from 2009 to 2014:

550 offi­cers were decer­ti­fied for sex­u­al assault, includ­ing rape and sodomy, sex­u­al shake­downs in which cit­i­zens were extort­ed into per­form­ing favors to avoid arrest, or gra­tu­itous pat-downs. Some 440 offi­cers lost their badges for oth­er sex offens­es, such as pos­sess­ing child pornog­ra­phy, or for sex­u­al mis­con­duct that includ­ed being a peep­ing Tom, sex­ting juve­niles or hav­ing on-duty intercourse.

[…]

About one-third of the offi­cers decer­ti­fied were accused of inci­dents involv­ing juveniles.

[…]

even among states that pro­vid­ed records, some report­ed no offi­cers removed for sex­u­al mis­deeds even though cas­es were iden­ti­fied via news sto­ries or court records.

“It’s so under­re­port­ed and peo­ple are scared that if they call and com­plain about a police offi­cer, they think every oth­er police offi­cer is going to be then out to get them,” said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the prob­lem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

The AP’s report is, of course, only lim­it­ed to those offi­cers who were actu­al­ly stripped of their badges as a result of their sex­u­al misconduct.

As Truthout’s Candice Bernd sad­ly tracked, in the month of June alone:

[A] coun­ty sheriff’s deputy in Georgia was charged with fondling women involved in court cas­es; a deputy in Colorado was arrest­ed on a domes­tic vio­lence-relat­ed sex assault charge; a police deputy chief in Utah resigned after alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment; a woman in New York City filed a law­suit accus­ing an offi­cer of rape, assault and bat­tery after the offi­cer alleged­ly pres­sured her into a date by promis­ing to clear up her case; a for­mer Georgia offi­cer was sen­tenced to 35 years on child molesta­tion charges after he forced sex acts from two girls and a woman while on duty; an offi­cer in Texas was arrest­ed on domes­tic vio­lence charges, say­ing in a record­ing that his wife need­ed to be ‘cut by a razor, set on fire, beat half to death and left to die’; sev­er­al sex­u­al assault charges were filed against a for­mer California offi­cer who alleged­ly molest­ed a 14-year-old Explorer Scout; an offi­cer in North Carolina faces peep­ing charges; a for­mer Arkansas offi­cer plead guilty to five counts of sex­u­al assault of a 16-year-old girl; a for­mer DC offi­cer admit­ted in fed­er­al court recent­ly he forced under­age teenagers to work as escorts out of his apart­ment; and a for­mer Wisconsin police offi­cer, Steven Zelich, was arrest­ed for alleged­ly mur­der­ing two women and stuff­ing their bod­ies into suitcases.
See more here The police bru­tal­i­ty epi­dem­ic that goes unno­ticed: More than 1,000 police offi­cers fired over the last six years for sex­u­al misconduct

Updated | The South Carolina stu­dent flipped and tack­led by sher­if­f’s deputy Ben Fields is in fos­ter care, her attor­ney told the New York Daily News.

The stu­dent, who has not been iden­ti­fied by author­i­ties, refused to leave the room after dis­turb­ing a class on Monday at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Fields, a school resource offi­cer, entered the class­room to remove her after a teacher and admin­is­tra­tor was unable to do so. In a video filmed by anoth­er stu­dent, the offi­cer is seen flip­ping the girl over in her chair and throw­ing her across the room.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott fired Fields on Wednesday, say­ing it was the throw that com­pelled him to do so.

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In an inter­view on the Joe Madison Show on Thursday morn­ing, Todd Rutherford, the girl’s lawyer, said her bio­log­i­cal moth­er and grand­moth­er are both alive. His remarks clar­i­fied a sto­ry pub­lished in the New York Daily News on Wednesday sug­gest­ing the girl’s moth­er had recent­ly died. The Daily News updat­ed its sto­ry on Thursday morn­ing, but main­tains that the stu­dent is cur­rent­ly in fos­ter care. The girl’s rela­tion­ship with her father is unknown, and she has not spo­ken pub­licly about the inci­dent or Fields’s firing.

After the video went viral on Monday, author­i­ties said the stu­dent was not injured. However, her attor­ney Todd Rutherford told WLTX that she suf­fered neck and back injuries from the inci­dent. “He weighs about 300 pounds. She is a stu­dent who is 16 years old. Who now has a cast on her arm, a band aid on her neck, and neck and back prob­lems. There’s some­thing wrong here,” Rutherford said.

The stu­dent still faces charges of dis­turb­ing the peace, Lott said on Wednesday. “She was very dis­rup­tive, very dis­re­spect­ful. She start­ed this whole inci­dent with her actions.”

The inci­dent is being inves­ti­gat­ed by the FBI and U.S. Justice Department to deter­mine if any fed­er­al laws were vio­lat­ed. The offi­cer has not been charged. Report: South Carolina Student Flipped by Police Officer Is In Foster Care

More than 30,000 people have signed a petition calling on the news channel to fire bombastic newsman Don Lemon.

Another day, anoth­er dose of sour Lemon-aide for CNN.

More than 30,000 peo­ple have signed a peti­tion call­ing on the news chan­nel to fire bom­bas­tic news­man Don Lemon after he insist­ed that his col­leagues Wolf Blitzer and legal ana­lyst Sunny Hostin with­hold decid­ing whether South Carolina “resource offi­cer” Ben Fieldsused exces­sive force when remov­ing a stu­dent from a class­room ear­li­er this week.

With an aver­age of around 600,000 view­ers, that’s about 5‑percent of Lemon’s audi­ence call­ing for his ouster.

RNC ON NEXT DEBATE: ‘NBC-YA LATER!’

But his many of his co-work­ers are unfazed by the incident.

“Don Lemon is in trou­ble again? What else is new?” a CNN pro­duc­er said.

“The more he says out­ra­geous things, the more peo­ple tune in — most peo­ple here are not sur­prised at any­thing that comes out of his mouth anymore.”

A CNN rep said Lemon had declined to com­ment about the peition.

Ripping Lemon and the things the news­man says has become some­thing of a cot­tege indus­try for media watchers.

He drew fire last June while cov­er­ing Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol.

GOFUNDME STARTED FOR SPRING VALLEY HS GIRL THROWN IN VIDEO

On CNN Lemon held up a con­fed­er­ate flag and then a sign with the n‑word in big block let­ters and asked : “Does this offend you?

Last November, as Ferguson, MO erupt­ed into anger, bul­lets and flamesLemon ham-hand­ed­ly drew tear gas into his own gas mask, whined for water and a device to con­tact his pro­duc­ers, and then made a cul­tur­al­ly insen­si­tive com­ment about pro­test­ers smok­ing pot.

A few days ear­li­er Lemon was roast­ef ro

insin­u­at­ing that one of Bill Cosby’s alleged sex­u­al assault vic­tims should have bit­ten the com­ic instead of per­form­ing oral sex.

This week’s peti­tion, post­ed on change​.org declared:

“We, the peo­ple, want a jour­nal­ist and an anchor that will not be afraid to accept the facts that are occur­ring with­in the African-American com­mu­ni­ty and who will encour­age our peo­ple the same way that per­son will encour­age oth­ers across the board,” explains the Change​.org peti­tion. “We, the peo­ple, have no con­fi­dence in Mr. Lemon’s abil­i­ty to do that. Therefore, we are ask­ing CNN to remove him from his position.”