Arizona

Arizona to kill prisoner with illegal drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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Arizona to kill prisoner with illegal drugs

The state of Arizona is preparing to execute a prisoner with drugs that were obtained illegally, records obtained by the Bay Guardian and the ACLU of Northern California show.


Donald Edward Beaty is set to die by lethal injection early in the morning May 25. However, DEA records show that the sodium thiopental that will be used in the execution was not imported legally — and may not meet U.S. standards for drug quality.


“Arizona is about to execute someone with an illegal substance, and the federal government is ignoring its responsibility to enforce the law,” said Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director for the ACLU of Northern California.


Documents obtained recently show that the Drug Enforcement Administration is investigating the illegal importation of the death drugs, and has seized thoipental stocks in several states. But Arizona’s prison system still has custody of the sodium thiopental that it imported.


And documents released May 24 show that Arizona — along with Nebraska, South Dakota and Arkansas — imported the drugs from either the U.K. or India without filing the proper DEA import declarations. That means the prison systems violated federal law.


“The DEA records demonstrate that Arizona and other states broke the law,” Minsker said. “We cannot understand why the DEA has failed to act but has allowed the states to keep these illegal and dangerous drugs. When state officials break the law in order to carry out an execution, it makes a mockery of our justice system and puts us all at risk. State and federal officials must follow and enforce the law—that’s their duty and what the public expects and deserves.”


 

Perception of lost integrity costs police

Mary Magee
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Perception of lost integrity costs police

Reporting by Sarah Phelan. Photograhy by Luke Thomas.

At the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office’s May 18 Justice Summit, the ethics of law enforcement were a central topic. And not surprisingly, the latest incidents of alleged police conduct in which SFPD officers are caught on surveillance video, which the Public Defender’s Office released, as they apparently steal personal property from suspects whose homes in the Julian Hotel they searched for drugs under possibly illegal circumstances, were on everyone’s minds, along with the crime lab and Henry Hotel scandals.

Asked if District Attorney George Gascón, who was Chief of Police until January, is considering a special prosecutor to look into these latest incidents, Sharon Woo, the D.A.’s Chief Assistant of Operations, said the D.A. looks into each case as it comes in. “We are trying to enhance the videos that came in from the Public Defender’s Office,” Woo said in a pre-summit interview. “Some are not as clear as we’d like.”

Earlier this year, when Gascón first became aware of the allegations against officers at the Henry Hotel, he directed the D.A.’s office to open an investigation into the officers and their alleged conduct. The move got David Onek, who is running against Gascón in the D.A.’s race, urging Gascón to turn the investigation over to an independent prosecutor.

But for a week, Gascón maintained that there was no conflict, and when he did finally announce that he was turning the investigation over to the to the U.S. Attorney’s Office – he claimed it was about “resources”. “New information has come to light that indicates it is better to turn over this investigation to the FBI,” Gascón said. “I have spoken to the U.S. Attorney, Melinda Haag, and she has agreed to take over the full investigation. We will of course cooperate fully with the FBI, and provide whatever assistance they need from us.”

At the time, Onek noted that Gascón’s decision was correct step. But he criticized Gascón for not making it his policy to recuse himself from any investigations that relate to his own tenure as chief. And Alameda Assistant D.A. Sharmin Bock, who recently sprung into the D.A.’ race, described Gascón’s situation on this matter as being “between a rock and a hard place.”

But yesterday, Woo noted that while it’s true that Gascón was SFPD Chief when many of the recent misconduct scandals occurred, Mayor Gavin Newsom had already appointed him D.A. when the Julian Hotel incidents occurred in February.

And Peter Herley, former chief of the Tiburon Police Department, told the Guardian that there “is always the Attorney General” to refer cases if D.A.’s feel conflicted. “George Gascón is a very upstanding individual who has also worked for the Los Angeles Police Department and was Chief of Meza, Arizona, and has done a good job in every place he’s been,” Herley said during a pre-summit interview. “So, if he sees a conflict arise, he’d probably recuse himself. It’s the public perception that’s key, that’s paramount.”

During the summit’s panel on ethics, retired San Francisco Superior Court judge Lee Baxter grilled panelists with incisive questions—as befits any self-respecting judge, retired or otherwise–on whether police misconduct is the product of a departmental culture. Noting that there had been a seemingly non-stop string of alleged police misconduct scandals in the Bay Area from drug thefts, dirty D.U.I cases, stolen drugs and setting up a brothel, Baxter observed, “If I saw a movie that included all those things, I’d think that this is not realistic.”

And there was a perhaps surprising amount of stated consensus about what needs to happen next from panelists Woo, Herley, defense attorney Stuart Hanlon, newly sworn-in SFPD Chief Greg Suhr, Anne Irwin, an attorney at the Public Defender’s Office, and John Burris, an Oakland-based civil rights attorney who is renowned for representing plaintiffs in police brutality cases.

Baxter asked the panelists why abuse of power happens, and whether, when we see media accounts of alleged police misconduct, we see the most extreme cases.

Hanlon kicked off by referring to the case of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a former high ranking member of the Black Panther Party, who was tried and convicted of the kidnap and murder of Caroline Olsen in 1972, and spent 27 years in prison, eight in solitary confinement, until 1997 when his conviction was vacated on the grounds that the prosecution concealed evidence that might have exonerated him. In particular, the government had not disclosed that a key witness against Pratt, Julius Butler, was an informant for both the FBI and the LAPD. Pratt eventually received $4.5 million as settlement for false imprisonment—the city of L.A. paid $2.75 million, the U.S. Department of Justice paid $1.75 million.

“We learned that law enforcement officers had hidden evidence, let people commit perjury, and destroyed evidence to convict someone who was innocent, “ Hanlon recalled, noting how when he first worked on the case, folks wondered if Pratt’s claim of innocence was simply part of a big conspiracy theory. “But it was not, it was men and women who thought the ends justified the means” Hanlon said, noting that the “bad apples” theory is typically trotted out during investigations into alleged police misconduct. “But officers see people who they think are bad people, and they feel they must whatever it takes,” Hanlon continued. “Primarily, most law enforcement people are good, but sometimes you get good cops lying to protect bad cops. It’s a dilemma, this concept of ‘what we do we need to do, this ‘us versus them’ concept.”

Hanlon claimed that officers don’t think citizens who live in SROs (single room occupancy hotels) have the same rights as folks in Pacific Heights.
“They think it’s OK to break down doors because these are drug dealers,” he said. And he noted that the recent string of back-to-back scandals are unusual in their proximity but are not unusual, generally speaking. “I’m not an apologist for (Chief) Suhr or the D.A., but I’ve seen these problems forever, and without trust law enforcement doesn’t work,” Hanlon concluded.

Next, Baxter put Suhr in the hot seat by asking him what to do about the “ends justify the means concept”. At which point Suhr, who has been Chief for less than two weeks, observed that the summit, which was packed to the gills with defense and civil rights attorneys, was “a bit of an away game for me, but it’s O.K., I can handle it.” He noted that only 1 in 11 applicants make it through the SFPD Police Academy, where folks undergo 1,100 hours of training, including sessions on abuse of power and responsibilities. “But if something is proven, it’s my intention not to have those officers in the SFPD any more,” Suhr said.

Retired Tiburon Chief Pete Herley revealed that during his decades-long police career, he blew the whistle when three officers nearly beat a gay man to death. “I suffered the consequences for many years,” he said. “It’s very lonely getting death threats, it’s very lonely when you don’t get the backing of fellow officers.”

Herley claimed times have changed a lot. “Change starts in the Academy and the selection of officers, and you have no other law enforcement officers that get more scrutiny, background checks m psychological checks and an 18-month probation period,” he said.

He noted that police chiefs inherit a departmental culture, whether they come into the post from the inside or the outside of the department. And that while the number of officers involved in misconduct is small, “it makes good press.” 

“I really feel one needs to be more loyal to integrity than to people,” Herley continued, noting that his parents were Holocaust survivors, and that his father was aghast when he decided to become a police officer. “But I had certain values and I don’t expect anything less from other people. I expect that every department has something in their rules and regulations that directs their officers that if they see misconduct, it’ll be stopped and the action will be reported immediately to the Chief.

Baxter asked Woo what the D.A. should do, if there is a problem.“All we are is our integrity, our ability to communicate and put forth evidence to juries “ Woo observed, noting that she has been on the frontlines as allegations about the crime lab, the Henri Hotel, and now potential theft, surfaced. “We find ourselves very reactive,” Woo observed, noting that if officers are not being truthful, the D.A.’s office has to look at all the cases they were involved in. “So it really impacts public safety and how all of us view the criminal justice system,” Woo said, noting that officers involved in the Henri Hotel allegations taken off the street.“But we have no interest in prosecuting individuals if it’s not based on solid evidence,” Woo said.

She recommended proactive steps like getting involved in Police Academy training on the law, and what officers can and cannot do, and giving officers tools to make good decisions and arrests, so there is integrity in the system. “If there isn’t, we all lose, not just the criminal justice system, but the entire community,” Woo observed, noting that as SFPD Chief, “Gascón instituted lots of policies to make sure people are doing an appropriate level of review.”

Baxter asked Anne Irwin, an attorney in the Public Defender’s Office, about their office’s role in bringing abuse of power to the attention of the public. “The Public Defender has a unique and natural role as a messenger,” Irwin replied. “We have more meaningful interaction with the victims of police misconduct than anyone else in the criminal justice system. We get into the intimate details of their lives, we develop a relationship of trust, so they confide their stories about police misconduct. And those stories are commonplace.”

Irwin noted that these stories include a disrespect for the Fourth Amendment, perjury and theft. “When you hear those stories over and over, there’s a ring of truth, a consistency,” Irwin said, noting that this is not the first time officers have been captured on camera. “We didn’t say, let’s amass a bunch of evidence. We just basically did our job. Residents told us what someone said in a report is not what happened, so we got videos from Dec. 23 and Jan. 5, and lo and behold, every word was true, two for two.”

Irwin noted that there are many good officers in the SFPD, but questioned whether a culture develops in certain departments, including the plain-clothes units, that allows misconduct to happen. “Without the videos officers would not have had to answer for their conduct,” she observed.

Baxter asked Suhr what it is about the culture that makes some cops go rogue. “Did they work there too long, were the temptations too much?” she asked.

Suhr replied that he worked in narcotics for a long time, and recovered $1.4 million in cash from an apartment in the Western Addition. “I never took a dime, and I am confident that the officers I worked with were of the highest caliber,” he said. “To paint a 2,000-person organization with a broad brush is unfair,” he added. “In the legal profession, every once in a while, you see ugly stories there too.”

Burris, who filed a $25 million wrongful death claim against BART on behalf of Oscar Grant’s family, noted that he has been involved in about 1,000 police misconduct cases in the Bay Area. “A culture exists about how you treat minority communities, “ he said, noting that he had represented black and brown clients for over 20 years. “A culture where you beat people and nothing is done, and you get away with it.”

Burris believes the problem lies in how policies are imposed, as he claimed that when officers join departments they are told to forget what they were taught in the Academy.“This is what you do on the streets,” he said.

Baxter observed that she has seen movies about the code of silence and wondered if it actually exists in police departments. “I don’t think so generally,” Suhr said. “There’s peer pressure to be sure. A regular citizen has a right not to self incriminate, and in the Police Department you can say that, but you are immediately sent to Internal Affairs, where you are told, tell me what happened or you are fired. So, today, the light is shining on us 100 percent of the time.”

Herley noted that his concern lay with situations in which officers see something, but don’t say anything. “I never thought I’d sit here and agree with every word John Burris says, but it starts at the top, and has to be enforced throughout the organization.”

Herley said the two best tools to prevent indiscretions and ensure responsibility are tape recorders and video cameras. “There’s certification of exactly what happened.” As for questions of how much it would cost to outfit officers with this recording equipment, Herley said, “ What is the cost of a lawsuit, the cost the perception of a loss of integrity to a department?”

DEA investigates illegal import of death drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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DEA investigates illegal import of death drugs

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration is conducting a multistate criminal investigation into the actions that prison systems have taken to obtain a death drug no longer produced in the United States, documents obtained by the Bay Guardian indicate.


The documents don’t reveal the specific targets of the investigation, but federal agents have siezed drug shipments in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee and are apparently also looking into drug procurement policies in California, Arkansas, Alaska and Arizona.


The states have been scrambling to obtain sodium thiopental, a drug used in executions, after the lone American manufacturer, Hospira Corp., stopped producing it last year.


Georgia and Arizona both received shipments of the drug from Dream Pharma, a British wholesaler that, according to the Associated Press, “shares a building with a driving school in a gritty London neighborhood.” And California sent agents on a secret mission to get some of Arizona’s supply.


Several other states, including Georgia, obtained the drugs from a different British supplier, Link Pharmaceuticals. According to the Associated Press, Nebraska’s supply was imported from India.


Most of the states imported the drugs without the proper DEA paperwork, a federal crime, the documents show.


The documents are the latest released as the result of a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Northern California and the Bay Guardian seeking access to all records related to the import of the death drug. The DEA this week released 71 pages of documents, but withheld 160 pages, justifying the withholding by saying that some of the records are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.


A May 16 letter from Katherine Myrick, the DEA’s chief Freedom of Information Officer, states that there are “two active investigations” and that release of the records could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement procedings.”
The documents reveal how desperately state prison authorities were trying to find a way to procure the drug — and how concerned the DEA was about the import of a controlled substance by agencies that had no medical or research functions.


Among other things, they show that the Obama administration was taking an active role in the process: “The White House is involved and is trying to sort things out,” a Nov. 11, 2010 memo from the Office of Diversion Control states.


Another Nov. 11 memo notes that “states have been importing the lethal drug regimen from England … the UK has written the State Department (and the FDA?) asking the U.S. to end the importation of the drug, which is being used in lethal injections.”


A Nov. 9 memo notes that “FDA [the Food and Drug Administration] is concerned about importation of non-FDA approved sodium thiopental used for executions …. Safety, efficacy and indication are FDA issues. So is the matter of off-label use (which was also brought up.”


The memo from the Liason and Policy Office explains that “DEA requires a valid DEA registration as an importer and a properly executed declaration in order to import controlled substances.”


A Nov. 12 memo confirms that “only two import declarations have been filed for sodium pentothal” — meaning that all the other states obtained their supplies illegally. The identity of the two states is blacked out.


Sodium thiopental is part of the three-drug mix used for lethal injections in most states that allow capital punishment. It renders the subject unconscious before the other drugs stop the heart and lungs from operating.


If the drug isn’t effective — that is, if it’s an improper formulation or an off-market product that doesn’t meet U.S. standards — the condemned inmate could suffer horrible pain, something the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear is not legally tolerable.


The drug isn’t used very often in hospitals; it’s been replaced by other drugs. And California had to put all of its executions on hold last fall when the state’s last batch expired.


Arizona has an execution date set for May 25 and Nebraska has an execution scheduled for June 14.
But the documents are so heavily redacted, and so many pages are missing, that it’s impossible to tell exactly which states are doing what — and whether any of the upcoming executions would be using illegally obtained drugs.


 “The DEA is making it impossible to know whether the states are complying with the law and whether DEA is fulfilling its obligation to enforce our nation’s drug laws,” said Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director for the ACLU of California. “Importing sodium thiopental without informing the DEA is a crime. We now know the DEA was poised to go into the Arizona Department of Corrections and seize their drugs, as they did in Georgia, but for some unknown reason they did not. Why did the DEA seize drugs in some states but not others?”


Calls and emails to the California Department of Corrections seeking information on whether the department is the target of a federal investigation were not returned.

Rep Clock

Maria Poblet
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Schedules are for Wed/18–Tues/24 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-7. “Other Cinema:” “Graham Connah Combo’s Travelogue Tone Poems,” Sat, 8:30.

BALBOA 3620 Balboa, SF; www.balboamovies.com. $20. “Opera, Ballet, and Shakespeare in Cinema:” Don Quixote, Wed, 7:30. Performed by the Bolshoi Ballet.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. Regular programming $7.50-10. The Women (Cukor, 1939), Wed, 2:30, 5:15, 8. •Raising Arizona (Coen, 1987), Thurs, 7, and The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998), Thurs, 8:50. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Marshall, 2011), May 20-26. This film, $10-12.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-15. Potiche (Ozon, 2010), call for dates and times. The Princess of Montpensier (Tavernier, 2010), call for dates and times. Queen to Play (Bottaro, 2009), call for dates and times. The Double Hour (Capotondi, 2010), call for dates and times. 13 Assassins (Miike, 2010), May 20-26, call for times. My Brother Mike (Sheridan), Thurs, 7:15. This event, $15; benefit for Bukelew Programs. “Shorts in Brief: A Family Film Festival,” Sun, 2. The Power of the Powerless (Taylor, 2009), Sun, 7.

CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO Diego Rivera Theater, 50 Phelan, SF; www.cityshorts.tumblr.com. Free. “City College of San Francisco’s Cinema Department Presents: City Shorts Film Festival,” Thurs, 7.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; www.lntsf.com. $10. “Asian Movie Madness:” •Tempation Summary (Ho, 1990), and Dirty Doll, Thurs, call for times.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: Elizabeth Taylor, Tribute to a Star:” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols, 1966), Fri, 6.

111 MINNA 111 Minna, SF; www.sfcinema.org. $25-45. “SF Cinematheque: Cinematheque at 50,” screening and benefit party, Thurs, 8.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. Programming resumes June 10.

PARAMOUNT 2025 Broadway, Oakl; 1-800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com. $5. A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 1951), Fri, 8.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1996), Wed, 2, 7, 9:25. Big in Bollywood (Meehan and Bowles, 2011), Thurs, 7:15, 9:15. Paul (Mottola, 2011), Fri-Sat, 7:15, 9:30 (also Sat, 2, 4:15). Corner Store (Bruens, 2010), Sun-Tues, 9:15 (also Sun, 2, 4:15; Mon, 7:15). The Annual (Gillane, 2011), Tues, 7:15. Tuesday screenings benefit the Red Vic.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. “I Wake Up Dreaming 2011: The Legendary and the Lost!:” •Whispering City (Otsep, 1947), Wed, 6:10, 9:55, and Ruthless (Ulmer, 1948), Wed, 8; •Smooth as Silk (Barton, 1947), Thurs, 6:40, 9:30, and Customs Agent (Friedman, 1950), Thurs, 8; •Café Hostess (Salkow, 1940), Fri, 6:40, 9:40, and Dangerous Blondes (Jason, 1943), Fri, 8; •I Love Trouble (Simon, 1948), Sat, 2, 5:45, 9:30, and Ride the Pink Horse (Montgomery, 1947), Sat, 3:45, 7:30; •The Web (Gordon, 1947), Sun, 2, 5:45, 9:30, and 711 Ocean Drive (Newman, 1950), Sun, 3:45, 7:30; •Dance Hall Racket (Tucker, 1953), Mon, 6:40, 9:20, and The Violent Years (Morgan, 1956), Mon, 8; •Chain Gang (Friedman, 1950), Tues, 6:30, 9:30, and Cell 2455, Death Row (Sears, 1955), Tues, 8. “Sex Worker Movies,” Sat, 2-midnight. This event, $8-10; for programming info, visit www.sexworkerfest.com.

VICTORIA 2961 16th St, SF; www.countercorp.org. Visit website for ticket info. “Tipping Man 6: Anti-Corporate Film Festival,” Thurs-Sat.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.newpeopleworld.com. $10-25. Eatrip (Nomura, 2009), Sat, 3, 5, 7.

VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; www.myspace.com/thevortexroom. $5 donation. •Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966), Thurs, 9, and Baba Yaga (Farina, 1973), Thurs, 11. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Three-Way: A Trilogy of Vintage Erotica:” Camille 2000 (Metzger, 1969), Thurs and Sat, 7:30; A Labor of Love (Flaxman and Goldman, 1976), Fri, 7:30 and Sun, 2; The Wild Pussycat (Dadiras, 1969), May 26, 7:30.

The case for local taxes

Zelda Bronstein
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The case for local taxes

When state Sen. Darrell Steinberg introduced SB 653, a bill that would allow cities to impose an income tax, a car tax and excise taxes, I called his press office and asked if the senator was serious. Me, I thought this was one of the best ideas I’d ever heard of out of Sacramento, but I couldn’t believe Steinberg was actually going to push it.


After all, Steinberg has been in heated discussions with the Republicans over the state budget, and they’ve been refusing to bend, even an inch, on new revenue. And the Democrats can’t pass a budget alone; the two-thirds requirement for new taxes means at least four members of the recalictrant GOP have to go along.


But if Steinberg could threaten the jerks with a bill that requires only a majority vote but would open the door to all kinds of new taxes up and down the state, maybe they’d start to come around. That seemed like the theory.


But his staff told me that he was entirely serious — and to my astonishment (and perhaps his) the bill is moving forward. We did an editorial endorsing it two weeks ago, and all of a sudden, it’s getting a lot of attention. And it’s exposed a fascinating political debate in the state and raised a lot of questions that ought to be part of the political conversation.


Jerry Brown’s been talking for months about “realignment” — sending more state services back to local government. It’s part of the populist side of the guv, and it flies in the face of 50 years of liberal thought. The federal government used to be our friend — the feds enforced civil rights laws in the racist South. The feds put money into inner cities. The state of California enforced equality, too — the famous Serrano v. Priest decision, in state court, guaranteed that public schools in all areas, not just rich ones, had the resources to provide a quality education to all. “State’s rights” was the cry of segregationists; rich people in conservative communities wanted school funding to be a local decision.


But things are different now, and the political stars are realigned. The most important civil rights moves are coming from cities (see: San Francisco, same-sex marriage) and progressive communities are defying the feds on issues from immigration to medical pot. (The flip side is also happening, see: Arizona and SB 1070).


Right now, today, the single most important issue in the United States (with the possible exception of stupid foreign wars) is the wealth gap and taxation. So much flows from that — the collapse of social services, the cost of health care, unemployment, the crisis in state budgets, the decline in public education … name an issue, and it has at least some roots in the way the nation handles money. And two things have happened in the last 15 years or so, at least at the national level:


1. The Republican Party has been taken over by the far right.


2. The Democratic Party has been taken over by Wall Street.


So nothing good’s going to happen in Washington. And in California, thanks to our two-thirds rule, nothing good’s going to happen in Sacramento as long as a tiny minority of really bad Republicans can hold the state hostage.


Which means that the only hope for progressive economic policy is going to come from local government — and the best thing the Democrats can do in the state Legislature is to stand back and allow it to happen. Which is exactly what the Steinberg bill would do.


Now, the San Francisco Chronicle has come out against the Steinberg bill, saying it would


mark a regrettable retreat from the notion that Californians of many lifestyles and cultures – city dwellers, beach-goers, farmers, ranchers, techies, loggers, entrepreneurs – share a common bond. The delegation of a greater tax burden and government duties to 58 counties and hundreds of cities would only compound the disparities that make this state nirvana for some and Appalachia for others.


The problem is, that notion — that romantic vision of One California — is already gone. California isn’t one state any more; it’s too big to be a state, and it ought to be at least three states. The Democrats control both houses of the Legislature and the governor’s office — and it’s almost impossible even to pass a state budget. There’s nothing resembling a political consensus in California, and we might as well admit it.

I understand the problem of economic disparity — but you can’t address it under the current system. There are, indeed, a few counties that have very little tax base, and that will need substantial state aid; I’m good with that. I’m happy to have my tax money go to the poorest counties. But I’m not seeing the Steinberg bill as a reason to cut state spending; I think we ought to increase state spending. I just think that what comes out of Sacramento should be a floor, not a ceiling. If people in San Francisco want to spend more on their public schools — and do it in a progressive way — what’s wrong with that?

The problem with local taxes is that the most progressive, fair revenue solutions aren’t available to cities. Income taxes are far better than sales taxes; ad valorem property taxes are better than parcel taxes. But cities can’t impose traditional income taxes, and are hobbled by Prop. 13 on property taxes. So when cities DO try to impose their own taxes, the results aren’t fair — the poor pay more than the rich.

Interestingly, Dan Walters of the SacBee, who is by no means considered a liberal, likes the Steinberg bill:

California’s experiment in centralized budgeting, the unintended consequence of Propostition 13’s approval in 1978, has been an abject failure. California is simply too diverse for one-size-fits-all decision making from Sacramento, especially when the Capitol can’t even decide what that size should be.

And City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who is running for mayor, likes the idea, too:


California communities that view government as a needless intrusion into people’s lives are morally entitled to limit their local government, and to pay less for fewer services.   Conversely, California communities that see government’s potential to improve the lives of their residents deserve to fully realize the benefits of the public services they’re paying for.


But the notion that we must bind the fate of 37 million Californians to the governance of lowest common denominator is absurd. 


Steinberg’s bill isn’t perfect — it doesn’t include corporate income taxes. But it’s a lot better than what we have now.

I realize that we’re in tricky territory here — should counties where 80 percent of the voters want mandatory prayer in schools and a curriculum that says God doesn’t like homosexuality have the right to overrule state and federal law and ignore the Constitution in the name of local control? Of course not.

But I think you can argue that local government, after meeting the basic federal and state requirements, has the right to go a step further in the pursuit of civil and Constitutional rights. Just as cities, after receiving their minimum allotment of stae money, have the right to raise more. And do it in a fair way.

At the very least, the bill creates a discussion that we all ought to be having. Cuz the way we’re running the state right now isn’t working.

Coal company gets punked by the Yes Men

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Coal company gets punked by the Yes Men

The Yes Men, that prankster-activist group that has ruined many a corporate exective’s day, have struck again. This time their target is the notorious Peabody coal company, which operates environmentally devastating mountaintop removal mining sites in West Virginia and has strip mining operations in Arizona.

It may take a minute to realize that Coal Cares is a fake. Designed to look like a website for a Peabody-funded nonprofit, the faux charity offers free “Puff-Puff” designer inhalers for kids living within 200 miles of a coal plant. The site features a “Kidz Koal Korner” (an interesting spelling choice that could be meant as a subtle reminder of the environmental racism issues associated with coal-fired power plants), and a selection of inhalers with themes ranging from “Miley Cyrus” to “The Bieber” to “Punk / Emo.”

The humor is dark. For example, a kids’ game page features a maze with a drawing of the character “Jimmy” at the beginning and an inhaler at the end. It’s titled, “Help! Jimmy is having trouble breathing. Help him find his inhaler, quick!”

A section called “‘Clean’ Energy” features some over-the-top misinformation about wind power: “Wind technology is another ‘alternative’ wild card. Every single year, gargantuan wind turbines kill literally thousands of birds—especially when the turbines are located in the middle of migration paths. Exploding bats are also a growing problem, as vibrations from turbines causes the rodents’ lungs to burst apart in mid-flight.”

But a press release on the Yes Men’s website reveals that the issues that inspired this hoax are no laughing matter. Peabody was targeted for lobbying against new pollution standards for power plants that have been proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency — rules that the agency has calculated could prevent 120,000 cases of childhood asthma per year in the United States.

The press release noted that the action was dreamed up by a small environmental and public health group called Coal is Killing Kids (CKK), which aims to challenge coal industry lobbying against rules that would strengthen the Clean Air Act. “We don’t have their millions, but we do have a knack for incredibly tasteless jokes,” said Veronica Tomlinson, a pediatrician and member of CKK.

“Sure, it’s kind of tasteless to say that ‘Bieber’ inhalers are a solution to childhood asthma,” said Janet Bellamy, a spokesperson for CKK. “But it’s a great deal more tasteless to cause that asthma in the first place, as coal-fired power plants have been proven to do.” Added CKK spokseperson Justin V. Bond: “It’s even more tasteless to disproportionately kill poor people.”

ACLU, Guardian sue over secret death drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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1
ACLU, Guardian sue over secret death drugs

The ACLU and the Bay Guardian have filed a federal lawsuit demanding the release of secret documents related to the scramble in California and other states to secure lethal-injection drugs for executions. And we’ve asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction ordering the Drug Enforcement Administration to release the documents quickly.


Both Arizona and Nebraska have recently scheduled executions — and apparently they plan to use drugs that were not obtained in the United States, may have been imported illegally and may not meet American medical standards.


Here’s the ACLU’s statement:


“The DEA has already acknowledged that the public has an urgent need to view records regarding states’ efforts to import execution drugs and the role of federal officials in that process,” said Linda Lye, staff attorney with the ACLU-NC. “We are dismayed that for nearly four months DEA has not released a single document.  The public has a right to these records before imported drugs that may have been illegally acquired are used to execute another inmate.”


Here’s the background:


On January 4, 2011, the ACLU-NC and The Guardian submitted FOIA requests to three federal agencies seeking records related to the federal government’s role in assisting – or failing to oversee – efforts by states to acquire controlled substances from outside the United States to carry out executions. The requests, submitted to the DEA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), sought documents that would reveal whether state officials violated any laws in the states’ scramble to acquire execution drugs and the role of federal agents in the process.


The ACLU-NC and The Guardian sought these records after public records disclosed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) revealed that California prison officials engaged in a worldwide “secret mission” to acquire sodium thiopental, a controlled substance used in California’s execution process that is no longer legally available in the U.S. The records from the CDCR and other state prisons eventually revealed that six states imported sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma, a drug distributor that operates out of the back of a driving school in the United Kingdom. Records also revealed that two other states imported a controlled substance purporting to be sodium thiopental from an Indian Company that states publicly it is not authorized to import drugs into the U.S.


The DEA granted the ACLU-NC and The Guardian expedited processing of the FOIA request submitted in January. In so doing, the DEA acknowledged that the records relate to an issue of significant public importance and that the public had an urgent need for the information contained in the records. Yet, for nearly four months, the DEA failed to produce any records and failed to even provide a timeline for when records would be produced.


In the interim, based on questions surrounding the drug’s legality, the DEA has taken possession of the sodium thiopental imported from Dream Pharma from five states. This includes Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, which imported the controlled substance directly from the United Kingdom. DEA also took possession of drugs from and Kentucky and Alabama, which acquired the illegal drug from other states. Only Arizona, California, and Arkansas continue to maintain possession of drugs imported from Dream Pharma, while Nebraska and South Dakota continue to possess drugs imported from India.


I’ll keep you posted.

Challenging the “rogue cell” theory of cancer

Mary Magee
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0
Challenging the “rogue cell” theory of cancer

The GuardianUK has an interesting piece about a new theory on cancer:
”Rather than cancers being rogue cells degenerating randomly into genetic chaos, they are better regarded as organized footsoldiers marching to the beat of an ancient drum, recapitulating a billion-year-old lifestyle,” writes Paul Davies, who runs the cancer research center at Arizona State University. “As cancer progresses in the body, so more and more of the ancestral core within the genetic toolkit is activated, replaying evolution’s story in reverse sequence. And each step confers a more malignant trait, making the oncologist’s job harder.”

Green days

Andrew Lam
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0
Green days

news@sfbg.com

1892: The Sierra Club is established by John Muir and a group of professors from UC Berkeley and Stanford in San Francisco. In its first conservation campaign, the club leads efforts to defeat a proposed reduction in the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

1902: After two years of intense lobbying and fundraising, the Sempervirens Club, the first land conservation organization on the west coast, is successful in establishing Big Basin Redwoods State Park — the first park established in California under the new state park system.

1910: The first municipally owned and operated street car service commences in San Francisco.

1918: Save the Redwoods League is established in San Francisco. A leader in proactive land conservation, SRL would go on to assist in the purchase of nearly 190,000 acres to protect redwoods and help develop more than 60 redwood parks and reserves that old these ancient trees in California.

1934: The East Bay Regional Park is established as the first regional park district in the nation. This radical Depression-era idea would much set the tone as the Bay Area land conservation vision expanded.

1934: The Marin Conservation League is founded by wealthy Republican women. Three years later, at the league’s behest, the Marin County Board of Supervisors adopts the first county zoning ordinance in the state in 1937. Over the next 10 years, the league helps create State Parks at Stinson Beach, Tomales Bay, Samuel P. Taylor, Angel Island, and expand Mt Tamalpais State Park.

1956: San Francisco activists, led in party by Sue Bierman, launch a campaign to stop a freeway that would have run through Golden Gate Park. It marks the first time city residents successfully block a freeway project and launches the urban environmental movement in America.

1958: Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks is founded. It becomes People for Open Space in 1969 and morphs in 1987 into the Greenbelt Alliance. Their efforts lead to the creation of the Mid-Peninsula Open Space District in 1972 and Suisun Marsh in 1974.

1960: Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower launches a brand new organizing and educational concept, the exhibit format “coffee table” book series, with This Is the American Earth, featuring photos by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhalland. These elegant coffee-table books introduced the Sierra Club to a wide audience. Fifty thousand copies are sold in the first four years, and by 1960 sales exceed $10 million. The environmental coffee table book emerged as part of a campaign to persuade Congress to enact the Wilderness Bill, legislation that would guarantee the permanence of the nation’s wild places.

1961: Save San Francisco Bay Association is founded by Sylvia McLaughlin, Kay Kerr and Ester Gulick to end unregulated filling of San Francisco Bay and to open up the Bay shoreline to public access.

1961: Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announces plans to build a nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay. Rancher Rose Gaffney, UC Berkeley professor Joe Neilands and others mount what will become the first citizen movement in the country to stop a nuclear plant. The Bodega Bay campaign marks the birth of the antinuclear movement.

1965: Responding to Bay Area citizens’ demands for protection of the bay’s natural environment, the California state legislature passes the McAteer-Petris Act, which establishes the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and charges it with preparing a plan for the long-term use and protection of the Bay and with regulating development in and around it.

1965: Fred Rohe opens New Age Natural Foods on Stanyan Street in San Francisco. He goes on to open the first natural foods restaurant in 1967, Good Karma Cafe on Valencia Street. Rohe would go on to open the first natural foods distribution company in Northern California, New Age Distributing in San Jose in 1970 and found Organic Merchants (OM), the first natural foods retailer trade group.

1967: The Human Be-in is held Jan. 14 in Golden Gate Park (as a prelude to the Summer of Love) with as a major theme higher consciousness, ecological awareness, personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization.

1967: Alan Chadwick comes to UC Santa Cruz and establishes the Student Garden Project and training program, which would train hundreds of today’s organic farmers.

1968: The Whole Earth Catalogue, published by the Point Foundation and edited by Stewart Brand out of Gate 5 Road in Sausalito is introduced, providing tools, philosophy, and reviews to the growing back-to-the-land movement, helping promote ecological living and culture alternative sustainable culture decades before those words became mainstream.

1969: Brower, after losing his job at the Sierra Club in part because of his opposition to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, founds Friends of the Earth, the cutting edge activist group that would eventually have affiliates in 77 nations around the globe and become the world’s largest grassroots environmental network.

1970: Peninsula resident Neil Young writes and sings the lyrics “Look at Mother Nature on the Run in the 1970s.”

1970: Berkeley Ecology Center opens.

1971: Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund is established, marking the beginning of an explosion in environmental law.

1971: Alice Waters opens Chez Panisse, serving up California Cuisine and altering the Bay Area diet helping to create a market for local fresh organic fruits and vegetables. 1971: Berkeley resident Francis Moore Lappé publishes her best-selling book Diet for a Small Planet. Two million copies are sold and as the first book to expose the enormous waste built into U.S. grain-fed meat production, for her a symbol of a global food system creating hunger out of plenty; her effort alters millions of diets.

1971: San Francisco dressmaker Alvin Duskin launches a campaign to limit high-rise office development in San Francisco, creating new allies and a new coalition for urban environmentalism.

1972: The Trust for Public Land, a national, nonprofit land conservation organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, gardens, historic sites, and rural lands, is founded by Huey Johnson, Doug Ferguson and Marty Rosen in San Francisco. TPL would go on to protect 2.8 million acres of land and is key in getting land trusts started in Napa, Sonoma, Marin, Big Sur, and around the state.

1972: The Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, first urban wildlife refuge in the United States, is established, encompassing 30,000 acres of open bay, salt pond, salt marsh, mudflat, upland and vernal pool habitats located in South Bay.

1972: The Save Our Shores campaign, developed in part by Bay Area residents, results in a state initiative, the Coastal Act of 1972, which is passed by the voters and establishes the first comprehensive coastal watershed policy in the nation.

1974: Berkeley Ecology Center starts the first curbside recycling approach in California, one of first such programs in the nation.

1974: The Farallones Institute in Berkeley begins building the first urban demonstration of an ecological living center with the Integral Urban House, a converted Victorian using solar and wind technologies, a composting toilet, extensive gardens, and energy and resource conservation features. It serves as an early model for the emerging Appropriate Technology Movement.

1975: Berkeley resident Ernest Callenbach self publishes Ecotopia after a round of rejections from New York publishers; it ultimately sells more than a million copies and becomes an environmental classic.

1975: San Francisco’s first community gardens are established at Fort Mason and elsewhere.

1975: The Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit veterinary research hospital and educational center dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of ill and injured marine mammals, primarily elephant seals, harbor seals, and California sea lions, is established in the Marin Headlands.

1978: Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg coin the term Bioregionalism in the publication of Reinhabiting a Separate Country, published by Berg’s Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco. It represents a fresh, comprehensive way of defining and understanding the places where we live, and of living there sustainably and respectfully through ecological design.

1979 Greens Restaurant opens at Fort Mason in San Francisco and quickly establishes itself as a pioneer in promoting vegetarian cuisine in the United States.

1980: The Marin Agricultural Land Trust is established by Wetland Biologist Phyllis Faber and diary farmer Ellen Straus.

1980: Berkeley resident Richard Register coins the term “depave” — to undo the act of paving, to remove pavement so as to restore land to a more natural state. Depaving begins to spread to create many inner city urban gardening projects.

1981-82: Register and other activists, bring about the first urban day lighting of a creek in Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek Park where a 200-foot section of the creek is removed from a culvert beneath an empty lot and transformed into the centerpiece of a park.

1982: Earth First, a radical environmental group founded by Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle, sponsors the first demonstration against Burger King in San Francisco for using beef grown on land hacked out of rain forests. The demonstrations spread, turn in to a boycott, and after sales drop 12 percent, Burger King cancels $35 million worth of beef contracts in Central America and announces it will stop importing rainforest beef.

1983: Local residents Randy Hayes and Toby Mcleod release the documentary film The Four Corners, A National Sacrifice Area? , which conveys the cultural and ecological impacts of coal strip-mining, uranium mining, and oil shale development in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona — homeland of the Hopi and Navajo. The film wins an Academy Award and illustrates serious environmental justice issues 10 years before that term is coined.

1985: The Rainforest Action Network, established in San Francisco, emerges from the Burger King action.

1986: Fifteen years after Duskin’s first anti-high-rise initiative efforts, San Francisco finally passes Prop. M, the nation’s most important sustainable growth law.

1988: Register invents a stencil to be used next to street storm drains that says “don’t dump — drains to bay.” The wastewater pollution mitigation education concept spreads around the region and nation and then becomes an international volunteer effort to lessen pollution in urban runoff, which generally flows untreated into creeks and saltwater.

1989: Carl Anthony, Karl Linn, and Brower establish the Urban Habitat Program in San Francisco, one of the first environmental justice organizations in the country.

1989: Laurie Mott of the National Resource Defense Council’s SF office rattles the apple industry by engineering a suspension of the use of the pesticide Alar by the Environmental Protection Agency. A national debate ensues.

1992: Berkeley writer Theodore Roszak coins both the term and field of ecopsychology in his book The Voice of the Earth. The movement he helps found asks if the planetary and the personal are pointing the way forward to some new basis for a sustainable economic and emotional life.

1992: The first Critical Mass bike ride (initially called a “Commute Clot”) is held in San Francisco. Similar rides, typically held on the last Friday of every month, began to take place in more than in over 300 cities around the world.

1993: The U.S. Green Building Council is founded by David Gottfriend in Oakland. The council becomes the most important environmental trade organization in the world. In 1998, the council develops the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System, which provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction and design.

1995: The Edible Schoolyard is established by Chez Panisse Foundation at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. It serves as a model for similar programs in New Orleans and Brooklyn, and inspires garden programs at other schools across the country.

1999: The Green Resource Center starts as a joint project of the City of Berkeley, the Northern California Chapter of Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), and the Sustainable Business Alliance.

2000: Wendy Kallins, working with the Marin Bicycle Coalition, begins a Safe Route to Schools program in Marin to encourage students to walk or bicycle to school. The program is so successful that Congress allocates more than $600 million for similar efforts across the country.

2001: The first Green Festival is held in San Francisco.

2001: Berkeley becomes first city in nation with curbside recycling trucks powered by recycled vegetable oil, thanks to a campaign by the Berkeley Ecology Center.

2002: San Francisco adopts a greenhouse gas reduction initiative that aims to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

2003: Bay Area Build It Green is formed by a number of local and regionally focused public agencies, building industry professionals, manufactures, and suppliers. Its activities are focused on increasing the supply of green homes, raising consumer awareness about the benefits of building green, and providing Bay Area consumers and residential building industry professionals a trusted source of information.

2005: San Francisco passes the Precautionary Principle Purchasing Ordinance, which requires the city to weigh the environmental and health costs of its $600 million in annual purchases — for everything from cleaning

supplies to computers.

2006: Bay Localize is launched in the East Bay with the aim to work to build a cooperative, inclusive movement toward regional self-reliance and increase community livability and local resilience for all while decreasing fossil fuel use.

2007: In an effort to meet the challenges of global warming, carbon pollution and job creation, East Bay activist Van Jones declares that the nation is going to have to weatherize millions of homes and install millions of solar panels. His best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy, stimulates a national movement and a new organization, Green For All.

2007: San Francisco begins collecting fats, oils and grease from residential and commercial kitchens, for free, to recycle into biofuel for the city’s municipal vehicles, the largest biofuel-powered municipal fleet in the United States.

2008: San Francisco becomes the first U.S. city to establish green building standards.

2010: The Green Building Opportunity Index names San Francisco and Oakland the top two cities in the nation for green buildings.

2010: San Francisco becomes home to the Sunset Reservoir Solar Project, the largest solar-powered municipal installation in California.

 

SFBG Radio: What if we stopped shopping?

Zelda Bronstein
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83
SFBG Radio: What if we stopped shopping?

Today, Johnny offers a fascinating idea. The GOP in Arizona has been forced to back down on some of its worst immigration policies — purely because of the economic impact. What if the 26 million or so American consumers who fall into the general category of the Left (and the anti-war Right) just stopped spending money on anything beyond essentials for one week — a boycott against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in favor of taxes on the rich. Would it make anyone in Washington listen? You, of course, can listen all you want, after the jump.

sfbgradio3212011 by endorsements2010

The unseen enemy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The unseen enemy

Trevor Paglen’s photography has always been about making the unseen visible. His luminous chromogenic prints unsettlingly reveal that the machinery of war and surveillance controlled by the military-industrial complex is more often than not hiding from plain sight; one need only have the right high-powered lens to gaze back.

One of the ironies of Paglen’s work, owing largely to the great distances from which he must photograph his purposefully obscured subjects, is how minuscule and non-particular they appear within the photographs themselves (this is also why Paglen’s work, in particular, suffers in reproduction). Test sites are twinkling oases amid vast surrounds of rock and sand, orbiting satellites are often no more than streaks of light, and unmanned planes are but black flecks against large expanses of sky. The human element is absent or left implied.

“Unhuman,” the title of Paglen’s second solo show at Altman Siegel, is thus quite appropriate, calling to mind the unmanned and auto-piloted craft that he repeatedly shoots while also drawing attention to the reality that much of this technology will continue to exist and perhaps, one might speculate, even continue to operate long after we have vanished. The recent work in “Unhuman” zeros in on both concerns.

Take the black and white photograph, Dead Military Satellite (DMSP 5D-F11) Near the Disk of the Moon, in which the titular forgotten object, lighted only by a half-veiled moon, is barely visible amid the surrounding darkness of space. The shot could easily be mistaken for a matte painting from Alien, and its seeming impossible vantage point makes Paglen’s dogged tracking of the dead satellite somehow all the more poignant.

Other photographs are less subtle. In the diptych Artifacts, a black and white photograph of the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Park hangs next to one that captures the glowing traces of spacecraft perpetually orbiting thousands of kilometers above the equator. Although the score-marked cliff face in the first photo forms a nice formal counterpoint to the hatch-markings of time-lapsed stars in the second, the pairing (perhaps a nod to Kubrick’s bone-satellite?) offers too heavy-handed and easy a comparison.

But Paglen doesn’t need to spell things out so directly. The show’s most stunning pieces are a series of lush skyscapes in which reaper and predator drones hover mote-like amid large, gaseous swathes of color seemingly lifted straight from a Rothko or Turner. The abstract beauty of these images is held in tension by the near-unseen menace that their titles call attention to. It’s a tension exacerbated by the limits of Paglen’s own machine-enhanced vision, such as when he photographs a similar type of dronecraft in a blurry, enlarged “close-up” two miles from the Indian Springs, Nev., site where it sits parked.

 

TENDERLOIN SATORI

For her debut at Silverman, local Deva Graf looks to both midcentury Minimalist sculpture as well as her ongoing studies at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California’s ski country. The pairing isn’t so unlikely, and the two installations Graf has created on either side of the small space evoke both the simple shapes and natural materials of de Maria and Smithson sculptures as well as those of objects used in Zen practice.

To the right is Mother’s Vigil, an arrangement of three small stone sculptures of Buddhist deities surrounded by lighted candles (around 40 are used for the piece each day) set into earthenware bowls filled with sand. In Bindu, on the opposite side, a lighted pyramid-shaped candle on stone pedestal sits below an eye-level framed piece of paper with a black India ink square at its center. An arc, also done in India ink, is traced on the wall above both painting and candle.

The features and iconography of each installation overtly solicit the viewer’s contemplation and concentration. Alas, that’s a tall order when floor-to-ceiling windows are the only thing between you and heavily-trafficked Sutter Street.

TREVOR PAGLEN: UNHUMAN

Through April 2

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary, Fourth Floor, SF

(415) 576-9300

www.altmansiegel.com

DEVA GRAF: GOOD MORNING

Through March 12

Silverman Gallery

804 Sutter, SF

(415) 255-9508

www.silverman-gallery.com

 

Police Commission braces for another Taser debate

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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14
Police Commission braces for another Taser debate

The San Francisco Police Department, police commissioners, and community advocates are gearing up for another debate about whether or not SFPD officers should carry and use Tasers. The hearing will be held at tomorrow’s Feb. 23 police commission meeting.

Interim Police Chief Jeff Godown — carrying forward a plan that originated with his predecessor, former police chief George Gascon — called for a hearing on the Taser proposal, according to a Police Commission spokesperson. If it wins approval, the SFPD will begin conducting research to develop training and policy guidelines for the SFPD to implement Tasers. The issue has ignited fierce debate in the past, and resistance is likely to be revived on this go-round.

Last year, the commission rejected Gascon’s proposal to add Tasers to police officers’ use-of-force options. Now, Commissioner Angela Chan, who was appointed last year by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors after the proposal had been defeated, is emerging as a voice of dissent.

Chan submitted a handful of reports published by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, and other sources critical of Tasers for commissioners to review prior to the meeting. She’s also preparing a 45-minute presentation highlighting concerns about the weapons.

The SFPD will give its own 45-minute presentation to try and convince commissioners that it should be allowed to move forward with the plan this time. “It’s another tool for officers to use when encountering violent persons,” noted Sgt. Mike Andraychak, a police spokesperson.

Andraychak said it was too soon to provide any details about whether the Taser proposal would take the form of a pilot program, or be implemented all at once. He did not have specific information about how training would be developed, how the department planned to solicit input from various communities, or how long the department expected to be working on a draft policy if the police commission granted approval. Chak did note that if the SFPD moves forward, it may host town hall meetings about Tasers.

The Feb. 23 police commission meeting is likely to bring vociferous community opposition. The Coalition on Homelessness (COH) and a number of other community-based organizations are encouraging people to attend the meeting and speak during public comment.

In a letter submitted to the police commission, Asian and Southeast Asian Societies, Causa Justa (Just Cause), The Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, COH, and other community advocates point out that Tasers have been declared a form of torture by a UN torture panel, and cite a University of Calfornia San Francisco study finding that police shootings more than doubled in the first full year of Taser implementation.

The community organizations also pointed out that Tasers are manufactured in Scottsdale, Ariz. — and San Francisco is still boycotting Arizona for enacting SB 1070, a bill that has drawn widespread criticism for encouraging racial profiling. Meanwhile, in a lean budget year, the cost of implementing Tasers is estimated at around $2 million, according to the letter.

Despite being turned down last time, the department has revived its Taser proposal in the wake of two officer-involved shootings early this year, including one that struck a mentally ill, wheelchair-bound man who was brandishing a knife. That case came under scrutiny after it was caught on a phone camera and posted to YouTube.

Following that incident, Gascon suggested that the outcome may have been different if officers had the option of deploying Tasers.

Yet Allen Hopper, police practices director at the ACLU, questions the idea that deploying a Taser would have been the correct response in that circumstance — especially in light of a recent Police Commission vote to strengthen SFPD practices when encountering people with mental illness. The Commission recently directed the SFPD to establish a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), based on a policing model that emphasizes deescalation. Yet Hopper says deploying a Taser would achieve just the opposite.

“We think it’s putting the cart before the horse to give the police Tasers before they put that plan into effect,” Hopper said. People with mental-health problems, he added, are more likely to be on strong medication, or prone to excited emotional states and rapid heart rates — all of which could place them at a higher risk for serious injury or even death if struck with a Taser.

Counted among a class of weapons called conducted energy devices, Tasers deliver a painful electric jolt when deployed, temporarily immobilizing a subject by disrupting the central nervous system and causing involuntary muscle contractions. While they tend to be hailed by law enforcement as non-lethal alternatives to firearms, human-rights organizations have criticized Tasers because accidental deaths have been linked to their use. According to a report by Amnesty International, more than 330 people were reported to have died in the last decade after being struck by police Tasers. While not all of those deaths were directly attributed to the Tasers in coroners’ reports, many of the people who died were found to be in “excited states of delirium” or under the influence of illegal drugs or prescription medications when they were Tasered.

More questions about death drug

Zelda Bronstein
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7
More questions about death drug

The Food and Drug Administration has finally released some more documents about the state’s procurement of its death drugs. The Guardian and the ACLU requested the material under the Freedom of Information Act. You can see the latest here.


A lot of it is just dry correspondance between agencies; the FDA was apparently a bit slow at releasing the imported drugs from customs. But there’s some interesting details in the mix.


For one thing, California and Arizona aren’t the only states that bought death drugs from England. A U.K. company named Dream Pharma also got orders from South Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia. And that pipeline is now shut off; the U.K. will no longer allow companies to export drugs for executions. (Civilized nation there.)


There’s also the interesting issue of whether the stuff that California bought is up to U.S. standards. The records show that the U.K. company doesn’t know if the Sodium Thiopental it sells meets U.S. standards; the company isn’t approved by the FDA. That means a hospital would have trouble buying and using the stuff for clinical purposes — but apparently it’s okay to use on condemned prisoners.


The issue is more than academic. The thiopental is supposed to render the prisoner unconsious and unable to feel pain before the next two drugs paralyze his breathing and stop his heart. If the stuff doesn’t work, then death could be very painful; imagine being awake as your lungs seized up and your heart stopped beating. In fact, the courts have been very clear on this point: Injecting the two final drugs into a person who is consious amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and is illegal.


So how do we know if the stuff the state bought works as advertised? How do we know what the proper dose is (you can’t exactly test it on someone first)? Is CDCR going to pay for a full chemical analysis to make sure they’re using the right amount of the right stuff?


Man, this is grisly. No wonder most civilized countries reject capital punishment.


 


 

The price of mental health cuts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The price of mental health cuts

By Hetty Beth Eisenberg

OPINION The massacre in Tucson is a tragic wake-up call for the public mental health system of our own county. Among the many pressing angles to the story, it is vital to consider the severe cuts to mental health services in Pima County last year.

Although only a small fraction of the mentally ill commit acts of violence, we must contemplate the larger issue of what happens when a community fails to prioritize mental health. Acute mental health services are such an essential tool for caring for the severely mentally ill that one is staggered by the low priority they’ve been given by our forward-thinking community in San Francisco.

Throughout the nation, the mentally ill are among our most disenfranchised constituents. In San Francisco, a considerable fraction of our severely mentally ill populations are indigent, homeless, and without health insurance. Acute care services for the mentally ill therefore lose money. In these hard financial times, city officials, like those in Pima County, are making painful decisions. Over the past three years, mental health services in San Francisco have been cut to austerity levels.

To see the short-sightedness of these cuts, one must consider not only the most drastic scenarios. For every Jared Loughner, there are thousands of individuals whose profound burdens could be alleviated with the help of these services. Inpatient psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital provides the highest level of mental health care in our county. Unlike private hospitals, SFGH takes all patients, regardless of their insurance, and regardless of the risk of violence. The inpatient service at SFGH provides the only safety net for those patients who are the most extreme danger to themselves and others.

From 2008 to 2010, the number of acute psychiatry beds at SFGH was cut from 84 to 42. The consequences of the cuts were palpable. They led to the disintegration of the Cultural Focus Program, a nationally-recognized model of ethical inpatient psychiatric care. The most ill patients were crowded onto two remaining acute units. The staff was then put in the position of having to move patients to understaffed units, so-called subacute, before they were clinically ready.

In January, one of two remaining acute psychiatry units at SFGH was cut. This leaves 21 acute beds available to the entire city. It’s now impossible to separate the most violent patients. The unit has become hyperacute, with an increasingly agitated population amplifying itself. Staff feel unsafe and cannot provide adequate care for their patients. As they grapple with understaffing, many cite what happened at Napa State Hospital recently when a psychiatric worker was murdered — an incident attributed to understaffing.

Meanwhile, there is considerable pressure to discharge these patients quickly. A vast number end up on the streets, in jails, overwhelming outpatient programs, or bouncing back to the emergency room — racking up even higher costs.

Due to budgetary pressures, the Department of Public Health insists that our unstable patients should be funneled into outpatient services. While outpatient programs provide vital means for supporting the chronically mentally ill when they are stable, they are also being cut — and are insufficient to protect acute patients.

These budget cuts make it plain that we are dealing with a clumsy model of mental health — one that lacks essential mechanisms. Such a model reflects a poor understanding of mental illness.

Arizona provides a clarion call to California: we must hear the implicit warning. These cuts to acute mental health services in San Francisco, a city with a large mentally ill population, must be reversed. Each day that they persist heightens the very real tragedy for our patients, our healthcare workers, and our entire community. *

Hetty Beth Eisenberg, MD, MPH, is a resident physician in psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital.

George Gascon, longtime Republican

Mary Magee
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51
George Gascon, longtime Republican

One thing I didn’t know when I wrote about former police chief George Gascón’s shocking Jan. 9 appointment as San Francisco’s next district attorney is that he has Republican roots. But then I came across a January 10 Los Angeles Times article that revealed that in 2008, Gascón described himself to the L.A. Times “as a longtime Republican.”

Gascón is now registered as “decline-to-state” but his Republican leanings could become an issue in the D.A.’s race this November, depending on what happens between now and then, in terms of decisions Gascón makes, especially around cases the San Francisco Police Department refer to his new office.

Paul Henderson, who was D.A. Kamala Harris’ chief of staff before she won the Attorney General’s race, was rumored to be Harris’ preferred choice as her replacement. But he now finds himself in the awkward position of reporting to the man he will be running against this fall.

“I respect Gascón as a law enforcement officer and I appreciate that he called me personally to inform me of the mayor’s decision,” Henderson told me. “D.A. Gascón and I will be discussing next steps and I stand ready to help him address the pressing issues facing the office.”

Henderson said the atmosphere over at the D.A.’s office is “a little crazy these days.”

“Everyone is trying to figure out what is going to happen,” Henderson said.  “All of this happened out of the blue, out of left field.”

Or right field, if you consider Gascón’s former voter registration.

“I think a lot of people were expecting something and someone different,” Henderson observed. “That’s the reality and the truth. I know I have a lot of support, but I need a little time to weigh and evaluate things.”

Political consultant Jim Stearns told the Guardian that he believes Gascón and Newsom when they say Newsom’s offer of the post to Gascón was a spur-of-the-moment decision

“I know for a fact that [Board President] David Chiu was offered the D.A. position and that Chiu and Newsom were genuinely confused about whether Chiu was going to take it or not,” Stearns said. “Chiu had discussed it at length a long time ago and rejected the notion. But then, when the offer was actually made, he said ‘I don’t know’ for a few days. Then, when he turned it down, the Mayor’s Office was in a quandary. So, I think Newsom was trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat, but this is one of those appointments that you might not make, if you really thought about it.”

As Stearns notes, Gascón had only been SFPD Chief for 18 months, and before that he was chief in Mesa, Arizona, which as Stearns puts it, “is not what you’d call a big city.”

And while Gascón, who was former high-ranking official in the Los Angeles Police Department, has since scored high marks for reducing violent crime, there were a lot of issues between SFPD and the D.A.’s office during his tenure, leaving him at risk of being accused of conflict of interest in his new role.

Perhaps the biggest of these conflicts is the question of police misconduct, which became a political hot potato during the Attorney General’s race, when attention was brought to a law that’s been on the books since 1963, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brady vs. Maryland that the government has a duty to disclose material evidence to the defense which could tend to change the outcome of the trial.

In 1972, “Brady” was expanded to require District Attorneys to turn over any information that could impeach the credibility or veracity of a police officer’s testimony, or if an officer has a past record of falsifying reports or other conduct that could impact their truthfulness. But it turned out that San Francisco had never formalized a “Brady” policy. It’s true that Gascón as SFPD Chief requested that searches be done as far back as 1980 for any sustained discipline actions that could be interpreted as possible “Brady” issues, but his move to D.A. raises the issue afresh.

“What better way to keep a lid on it,” Stearns opined.

So far, the D.A.’s office has not released a statement on how Gascón intends to handle potential conflicts of interests, but I’ll update this post, if it does.

Stearns speculates that part of the decision to appoint Gascón was a result of the foot-dragging that went on as a result of Chiu’s indecision, allowing lots of competing camps to canvass for their preferred picks.

“The Gettys were pushing Bock,” Stearns said, referring to Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Bock, an expert in human trafficking. “Others were pushing for [Assistant D.A.] Andy Clark, Paul Henderson, and [Deputy City Attorney] Sean Connelly [who represented the city in police excessive force cases].”

Other names floated were Chief Assistant District Attorney David Pfeifer, David Onek, senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice; and San Francisco attorney John Keker.

“Newsom may have concluded that if he pushed for any of these folks, he’d be taking sides, and that if he went for Gascón, he wouldn’t be pissing anyone off,” Stearns said.

But now it seems the whole law enforcement world in San Francisco is in an uproar, as folks start to try and figure out how the appointment impacts the D.A.’s race in November.

‘The politics of a D.A.’s office is unique,” Stearns observed. “You can be thrown a curve ball at any moment. You never know what crime is going to be committed, and all of a sudden you have to make a decision that can impact the race.”

Stearns notes that Gascón has some positives going for him.
“He has fairly well-known name recognition, he had good grades, mostly, from the mainstream press for the work he has done as police chief, and it sounds like he is a pretty good manager and administrator.”

On the downside, there’s his statement that he’s “not philosophically opposed to the death penalty,” and the latest shocker that he’s been a longtime Republican.

And then there are the vagaries of running for elected office under San Francisco’s instant run-off voting (IRV) system.
“He could end up like Don Perata,” Stearns said, referring to Perata’s recent loss to Jean Quan in the race for Oakland mayor. “He could have the most money, the most endorsements and even the most votes, but no second and third place votes, and therefore he loses. But that depends on who else is going to run against him.”

Calls to David Onek, who filed in the D.A.’s race last summer and has already raised over $130,000 and collected a ton of endorsements, went unreturned, but if he gets back, I’ll be sure to post his comments here.

And as Henderson previously stated, he doesn’t plan to make any decisions until he has a substantive conversation with Gascón.

“Paul is pretty anti-death penalty, but like Gascón he came out in favor of sit-lie,” Stearns said, noting that Gascón may not feel he has to actively campaign to win in November.

“It’s a shock to the system what you have to go through to campaign in this city, especially if you believe in authority and hierarchy, and all of a sudden you have to go to every Democratic Club in town and listen to everyone’s questions and comments. But he sounds pretty serious about running, and I certainly believe that every election is competitive, so it remains to be seen what kind of candidate Gascón is and the deals he makes”.

A (not so brief) history of hate

Mary Magee
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9
A (not so brief) history of hate

Since the horrific shooting of Rep. Giffords and the loss of Judge Roll, Christina Green, and four other innocent bystanders, folks have been grappling with the role of violent rhetoric in triggering the tragedy. And now the National Day Laborer Organizing Network has set up A History of Hate: Political Violence in a Rogue State to chronicle political violence and intimidation in Arizona since 1987, which is when U2’s Bono received a death threat because of his stance on Martin Luther King.

“Something strange happened toward the end of the Joshua Tree tour,” Bono noted in a 2006 interview. “We had campaigned for Martin Luther King Day in Tempe, Arizona, where the tour opened back in April. There was a governor there called Mecham who was holding out against it, and we had got involved in local politics there and took a stand. We went back to Tempe at the end of the tour, in December, to play the Sun Devil Stadium.”

“I was getting death threats throughout the tour,” Bono said. “This character was a racist offended by our work, he thought we were messing in other people’s business and taking sides with the Black man. One night the FBI said: ‘Look, it’s quite serious. He says he has a ticket. He said he’s armed.’… So we played the show, the FBI were around, everyone was a little unnerved. You just didn’t know, could he be in the building?”

A History of Hate’s stated mission is “collecting evidence of intolerance that have been brewing and boiling over in this country.” And it’s asking folks to  contribute their story to this growing archive, “so we can turn the tide from a history of hate to a future of progress.”

 “Our hearts go out to the victims and their families in this horrible tragedy,” NDLON director Pablo Alvarado stated. “We mourn alongside them in part because as day laborers, we understand deeply the experience of being targeted by violent hatred and extremism. If there is one lesson from those who have built the historical rights and privileges we enjoy, it is this: hate must be confronted so it can be overcome by love. It cannot be ignored and the world needs to know,” Alvarado continued. “What Arizona needs, and what all of us need, is to confront the hard truth of our current political environment with unifying steps. After we have paused to comprehend the immeasurable tragedy in Arizona, we must now do our part to make a more just society.”

Sounds like a good idea. Hey, maybe immigrant rights advocates and the communities they represent can submit all the hate mail and death threats they regularly receive –a burden they have so far largely borne alone and in silence.

 

 

2010 Offies!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
2010 Offies!

tredmond@sfbg.com

When a major conservative political movement starts using a name that typically refers to the act of scrotal fellatio, you know it’s morning again in America. In 2010, the teabaggers came home. They nominated candidates who think masturbation is selfish and wonder why monkeys aren’t still evolving into humans. They held rallies urging the government to “get out of my Medicare,” which happens to be a government program. Their leaders praised dictators and urged women who had been raped to look at the bright side of things.

And those were just the headlines.

It’s hard to imagine a year that could be worse than 2010 — but it was a great vintage for the Offies.

Presenting the Off Guard awards for the silliest, most insane, and absolute worst of the year that was.

AND SHE FIGURES IF WE ARREST EVERYONE WITH BROWN SKIN, WE CAN FINALLY GET THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR UNDER CONTROL

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer told reporters that illegal immigration resulted in beheadings in the desert.

BUT AS LONG AS YOU DON’T TOUCH YOURSELF WHEN YOU THINK OF THE DEVIL, IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY

Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware who decried masturbation as a “selfish act,” said she only dabbled in witchcraft and had just one date on a satanic altar.

EXCEPT THAT WE ALREADY ARE, AND WE ALREADY ARE

Jerry Brown said he opposed the state’s marijuana legalization measure because “we can’t compete with China if we’re all stoned.”

LOOK BUSY

A Pew Research Center poll showed that 41 percent of Americans think Jesus will return in the next 40 years.

HEY, IF WE’D JUST CREATED THE WORST ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER OF THE DECADE, WE’D WANT A LITTLE BREAK, TOO

A few days after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward complained that he wanted his life back.

BUT HE SWEARS HE’LL STOP AT BEHEADINGS

Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said if he were governor he’d give the National Guard live ammunition to shoot at immigrants on the border.

AFTER ALL, IF THEY’RE NOT IN AN AIRPLANE, THEY CAN’T DO ANY DAMAGE

GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said that people on the federal no-fly list should have the right to own guns.

OOH, WHEN YOU TALK TOUGH LIKE THAT YOU ALMOST SOUND LIKE SOMEONE WHO COULD STAND UP TO THE REPUBLICANS. OR MAYBE NOT

President Obama asked whose ass he should kick at BP.

IT’S OKAY, THOUGH, AS LONG AS THEY WEREN’T ENGAGING IN ANY SELFISH ACTS

Staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission got caught spending as much as eight hours a day downloading porn at the office.

AND SOMETIMES GOP CANDIDATES ARE NITWITS

Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for his efforts to privatize that country’s retirement system, saying “sometimes dictators have good ideas.”

YEAH, COME ON, WHY CAN’T YOU LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE OF THINGS?

Sharron Angle said that women who have become pregnant as the result of rape or incest should “turn lemons into lemonade.”

DAMN GUMMINT TRYING TO INTERFERE WITH PRIVATE BIDNESS

GOP Congressman Joe Barton of Texas apologized to BP for a White House “shakedown.”

YES, AS A MATTER OF FACT I DO OWN THE WHOLE GODDAM SCHOOL

Meg Whitman’s son threw softball equipment over a fence to kick a group of computer science and physics students off the Princeton rugby field.

NICE, SINCE THOSE GROUPS ALL GOT ALONG SO WELL

GOP Senate candidate Chuck DeVore compared Palestinian activists to Nazis, Fascists, and Communists.

AND OF COURSE, THAT WORKS SO WELL WITH MODERN MANAGED CARE

Nevada banned chicken costumes from the polls after Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden said that people should barter with doctors for health care the way “our grandparents would bring a chicken to the doctor.”

ANOTHER GREAT MOMENT IN THEOLOGY FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU THE PEDOPHILE PRIEST COVER UP

Pope Benedict said it was okay for male prostitutes to wear condoms.

SO HE’S GOT THAT GOING FOR HIM. WHICH IS NICE

Formerly classified State Department cables revealed that the premier of Korea is still an excellent drinker.

ACTUALLY, THEY TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE TEA PARTY AND DECIDED THEY WERE BETTER OFF AS THEY ARE

Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that evolution was a myth; after all, she wondered, “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS BEEN KNOWN FOR ITS SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

The Vatican announced that the ordination of women and the abuse of children were both “grave crimes.”

THAT’S OKAY, IT WILL LOOK GOOD ON HIS RESUME

Gavin Newsom decided to run for lieutenant governor after saying he didn’t know what the job was.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK, CIA EDITION

The United States held high-level negotiations with a supposedly senior Taliban operative who turned out to be a Pakistani shopkeeper.

BUT WAIT — HOW WILL WE KNOW IF WE’RE SUPPOSED TO WORRY OR NOT?

The Department of Homeland Security abandoned color-coded safety alerts.

THE INTELLIGENCE AND CULTURAL TASTE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IS SIMPLY STAGGERING

Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, made it to the final round of Dancing with the Stars.

WHICH MAKES HIM ENTIRELY QUALIFIED TO SERVE AS A REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN

Dan Quayle’s son ran for Congress in Arizona and admitted that he had been posting on “dirty Scottsdale” under the name of Brock Landers, a sidekick to porn star Dirk Diggler.

IS HE ONE OF THE NAZI FASCIST COMMUNISTS, TOO?

Rand Paul said Obama’s criticism of BP was “un-American.”

WAIT — WAS THAT A BROWN ALERT?

The California Highway Patrol shut down its South Lake Tahoe office after officers found an anal vibrator and thought it was a bomb.

HONESTY IS JUST PART OF THE PROCESS OF RECOVERY

Tiger Woods admitted that he sucked.

EXCEPT THAT IT MOSTLY BENEFITS THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Vice President Joe Biden called the health reform bill “a big fucking deal.”

IT’S THOSE CUTE WOODEN SHOES, YOU SEE

NATO Commander John Sheehan said Dutch soldiers were too gay.

DAMN, AND HE’S SUCH AN ATTRACTIVE MAN. I’M SURE THE TSA FOLKS WERE REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO IT

John Tyner told Transportation Security Administration officials in San Diego that if “you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.”

AND HE WASN’T EVEN TALKING ABOUT HER

Sarah Palin demanded that Rahm Emanuel apologize for using the term “fucking retarded.”

 

SINCE WE ALL KNOW THOSE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC

MSNBC Host Chris Matthews was so excited by an Obama speech that he said he “forgot he was black.”

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spent $50 million on a ballot initiative to stop public power, and lost after getting soundly defeated in every county where the utility has customers.

YOU MAY BE PART OF THE FAMILY, BUT WHEN IT COMES TO MY POLITICAL CAREER, HONEY, YOU’RE OUT THE DOOR

Meg Whitman fired her housekeeper when she found out she was in the country illegally.

BUT THEY’RE ALIKE ANYWAY, RIGHT?

Sharron Angle defended a campaign ad depicting menacing-looking Hispanic men by telling members of the Hispanic Student Union at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that many of the members looked Asian.

OF COURSE, SHE SKIPPED THE FIRST FEW AMENDMENTS — BOOORING!

Christine O’Donnell said she couldn’t find anything about the separation of church and state in the Constitution.

BECAUSE IN A FIREFIGHT, THE FIRST THING ANYONE WOULD BE THINKING ABOUT IS HIS SERGEANT’S CUTE ASS

Sen. John McCain said he opposed ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” talked about all the soldiers and Marines who lost limbs, and said that “when your life is on the line, you don’t want anything distracting.”

SINCE WE ALL KNOW THAT HEALTH INSURANCE MAKES YOUR PEE SMELL FUNNY

Federal judge Henry Hudson asked Obama administration officials whether the new health care plan was similar to forcing all Americans to eat asparagus.

SO IT’S JUST AS WELL THOSE PEOPLE ON THE NO-FLY LIST HAVE THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

Sharron Angle said that the Obama administration’s policies might require “Second Amendment solutions.”

IT’S PERFECTLY FINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS TO ATTEND MARRIAGE CEREMONIES, AS LONG AS THEY’RE JUST THE HIRED HELP

Sir Elton John played at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding.

SURE, GREAT FUN. JUST LIKE SHOOTING YOUR FRIENDS WITH A HUNTING RIFLE

Dick Cheney said he had been a “big supporter of water boarding.”

DAMN, SUPERVISOR, THE OFFIES WILL MISS YOU

Chris Daly vowed to say “fuck” at every single board meeting in 2010.

Year in Music: K. Flay’s Top 10 of 2010

John Elberling
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Year in Music: K. Flay’s Top 10 of 2010

– These New Puritans, “We Want War” video. Slow motion videos can either be awesome or insanely awesome. “We Want War” is the latter.
– Girl Talk, All Day. We played this a bunch on tour and it made me feel like I didn’t have a job but also would never need one. Which is probably one of the top ten life scenarios of 2010.
– Liz Phair at The Independent, October 10, 2010. Liz Phair > egg sandwiches. No, really.
– Kid CuDi, “Don’t Play This Song.” I first heard this track while driving through crazy fog on Interstate 8 in the Arizona foothills at 2 a.m., which was probably the best possible context I could have imagined. CuDi perfectly captures a sense of calculated self-destruction.

– Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. As soon as I heard the title of the new Big Boi album I knew I would like it. “Tangerine” and “Ain’t No DJ” are my favorite cuts.
– Sleigh Bells, “Riot Rhythm.” This track is filthy. And I mean that in the best way. Make sure you are at least ten feet away from my face when the drums drop.
– Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. A phenomenal album from one of the most innovative musicians of our generation. Production-wise, this is my favorite Kanye record to date.
– Usher feat. Nicki Minaj, “Little Freak.” This song is my guilty pleasure. The fact that a classic Stevie Wonder synth line can peacefully coexist with Usher’s persistent ménage à trois requests never ceases to blow my mind.
– Arcade Fire, “We Used To Wait.” A friend of mine told me I would cry when I watched this video and I didn’t believe her until I was sitting in front of my laptop choking back nostalgia sobs.
– Big KRIT feat. Yelawolf, “Hometown Hero.” “Hometown Hero” features two of the most talented lyricists to blow up this year. I’m just waiting for someone to make a movie based on this song.

The video for “Coastin'” by Zion I feat.K. Flay:

K. Flay, “Crazytown”:

Mysteries of the death-drug scramble

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Mysteries of the death-drug scramble

news@sfbg.com

The California prison system finally released some documents on its efforts to procure the chemicals it needs to execute prisoners, and the 1,000 pages show the desperate lengths state officials have gone to procure the death drugs.

At one point, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation looked at importing drugs from Pakistan. In October, prison officials sent agents on a secret midnight mission to Arizona to acquire sodium thiopental, one of the drugs used in executions, from that state’s supply.

In the end, CDCR wound up buying an extraordinary quantity of the stuff from a supplier in London — potentially putting California in the disturbing position of serving as the death-drug dealer to the rest of the country.

The protocol for lethal injections in California, and 33 other states, calls for three drugs — sodium thiopental to put the condemned inmate in a coma; pancurium bromide to paralyze the muscles; and potassium chloride to stop the heart.

But sodium thiopental, also known as Sodium Pentothal, has been in short supply in this country, in part because the one company that currently makes it, Hospira, has production backlogs. There’s not a whole lot of need for the drug in modern medicine — it’s largely been replaced with other anesthetics — and Hospira has made it clear in repeated press statements that it doesn’t want its product used in executions.

So when the last batch of the stuff in the state’s hands expired in October, California had to put executions on hold while prison officials scrambled to find some more.

 

HIDING THE TRUTH

The whole process was cloaked in secrecy. Nobody at CDCR would tell us where they were looking for the sodium thiopental, who would be procuring it, or how the supply chain might work. That, of course, is crucial, in a grisly way: If the anesthetic didn’t perform properly (that is, if the state got a bad batch from an unregulated supplier), a prisoner could go through unspeakable agony as the second batch of drugs made it impossible to breathe.

The Guardian filed a request in October under the California Public Records Act seeking details on the purchase attempts, but CDCR stonewalled. The American Civil Liberties Union, also seeking the documents, filed a lawsuit, and a judge ordered the release of a large volume of material.

Those documents, now available at aclunc.org, is heavily redacted, and much of the material we expected to see is missing. But the documents contain some remarkable revelations.

For starters, there’s an internal timeline going back to 2007 showing that CDCR officials knew back then, while the drug protocol was being developed, that there would be problems. The Drug Enforcement Administration will only allow a doctor to order the class III controlled substances. And the federal receiver overseeing the prison system wouldn’t allow any of the three doctors on staff at San Quentin State Prison to sign the order forms, although the documents didn’t say why.

In January 2007, CDCR tried to recruit outside doctors to order the drugs — but physicians in California have traditionally declined to assist in executions. Indeed, the American Medical Association policy bars doctors from participating in capital punishment in any way, including “prescribing or administering tranquilizers.”

It wasn’t until May 2010 that CDCR was able to find doctors willing to order the deadly drugs; the names of those physicians are not in the documents.

The timeline shows that in June 2010, CDCR became aware that there was a shortage of sodium thiopental, but there was no public discussion of the situation. Plans to execute Albert Greenwood Brown, a convicted murderer set to die in September 2010, went forward.

But the courts weren’t rushing the execution — and the last batch of sodium thiopental in CDCR’s possession expired Oct. 1.

As the clock ticked down toward that expiration date, the documents show, CDCR officials — all the way up to Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate — were involved in an all-out scramble to get more of the drug.

At one point, a Sept. 16 e-mail — from an official whose name is blacked out — notes that CDCR had contacted between 80 and 100 hospitals to try to buy some sodium thiopental, but “none of them have a drop.”

The documents note that CDCR officials even suggested that there were supplies of sodium thiopental in Pakistan. An Aug. 17 e-mail from John McAuliffe, a contract worker helping CDCR with executions, says the agency is trying to get federal government approval to import the drug.

One e-mail even suggests that an unnamed CDCR employee was in the area and could make a side trip to Pakistan to pick up the stuff.

 

THE LONDON CONNECTION

There are, of course, serious issues with importing controlled substances into the United States, and the documents show efforts by CDCR to get the DEA to approve imports. The Pakistan deal apparently went nowhere — but later e-mails show CDCR officials contacting a supplier in London. The name of the supplier is blacked out on all the documents, but CDCR’s deputy press secretary, Terry Thornton, later confirmed that the manufacturer was Archimedes Pharma.

Immediately after the California order for 521 grams of sodium thiopental went through, Britain’s secretary of state for business, Vince Cable, issued an order barring any further exports of the drug for use in executions.

Like most of the civilized world, the United Kingdom does not allow the death penalty.

In the meantime, Scott Kernan, CDCR’s undersecretary for operations, was trying to get enough of the death drug domestically to carry out at least one execution. A series of e-mails show contacts between California and Arizona, which recently had imported its own supply — and there are indications that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was willing to call his counterpart in Arizona to help consummate the deal.

“I’m sure either the secretary or even the governor could make a call,” a Sept. 9 e-mail from Kernan to McAuliffe notes.

Then on Sept. 29, Kernan sent an e-mail to Assistant Secretary Anthony Chaus discussing a “secret and important mission.” Kernan wanted Chaus to send a team to a state prison complex in Florence, Ariz., a desert town about 40 miles southeast of Phoenix, to pick up 12 grams of the death drug.

At midnight Sept. 30, the warden in Florence gave the CDCD agents 24 vials, each containing half a gram of sodium thiopental. The agents drove it to Bakersfield, where another team picked up the vials and drove the rest of the way to San Quentin.

In a stomach-turning e-mail, Kernan sent a note Sept. 29 to an unnamed Arizona official saying “you guys in Arizona are life savers” and offering to “by [sic] you a beer next time I get that way.”

By then, a federal judge had delayed Brown’s execution until 2011.

Among the most startling revelation was the sheer quantity of sodium thiopental California eventually ordered from the firm in London. Even with training supplies and backup, it only takes between six and 12 grams of sodium thiopental to render a prisoner unconscious — meaning that the 521 grams that CDCR purchased for $36,413 are enough to kill between 43 and 86 people. The expiration date on the chemical is 2014.

It’s highly unlikely, given the legal hurdles and time involved in even one execution, that California would schedule more than three over the next three years. What possible use could the state have for so much death drug?

Thornton, CDCR’s press person, wouldn’t respond to our queries. But Natasha Minsker, the director of the ACLU’s Death Penalty Project, said she’s concerned that California will try to become a supplier for other prison systems. “It certainly raises questions,” she told us.

There’s a lot missing from the documents. In many instances, the names of the officials who sent and received e-mails are redacted. And there are obvious pieces of the puzzle missing from the files CDCR has released.

“There’s no e-mail from the DEA or the FDA,” Minsker said, “although CDCR was clearly contacting them. There’s nothing from the governor’s office, although it’s likely they were also involved.”

Overall, Minsker said, the documents “show how sneaky CDCR was trying to be about all of this.”

The ACLU filed another suit Dec. 13 seeking the release of some of the redacted material as well as records of CDCR’s efforts between October and December.

If those documents are ever released, they may address some of the looming questions about the material the state uses to kill people.

Pass the DREAM Act, now

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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11
Pass the DREAM Act, now

by Eric Mar and Eric Quezada

news@sfbg.com

OPINION Imagine for a moment that you are 14 years old. Your parents, stuck in perpetual poverty and unemployment (or perhaps worse), move your family to a foreign country to begin a new life.

You work hard, struggle to fit in, study constantly, and fill your spare time with school activities. Maybe you even work a little on the side to chip in. You are a parent’s dream, and a model of young citizenship.

Except that you’re not a citizen. And one day, even as you’ve mastered English and flourished in school and in the community, you are stopped like a criminal by federal authorities.

This is what happened to Steve Li, an engaging and industrious 20-year-old student at City College of San Francisco and a graduate from George Washington High School. He always thought he was an average San Franciscan until the morning of Sept. 15, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents suddenly raided his home and arrested him and his parents. Steve was incarcerated in Arizona for more than 60 days, far from his friends and family. Through a full-court legal and legislative press, and a groundswell of immigrant community organizing leading to a private emergency bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Li has temporarily staved off deportation. But Li and thousands of other hard-working young immigrant Americans could soon be summarily tossed out of the country if Congress doesn’t act now to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.

The DREAM Act is a common-sense, bipartisan measure that is urgently needed to avoid countless other Steve Li cases. Despite congressional wavering on comprehensive immigration reform (which a consistent majority of Americans support), everyone should be able to agree on the basic right of undocumented immigrant minors, who are moved here by their parents, to gain steps toward obtaining citizenship.

In brief, the DREAM Act would enable some immigrant students who have grown up in the U.S. to apply for temporary legal status and to eventually obtain permanent status and become eligible for U.S. citizenship if they go to college or serve in the U.S. military.

According to the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), about 65,000 U.S.-raised high school students could qualify for the DREAM Act’s benefits each year. As NICL puts it, “These include honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists, homecoming queens, and aspiring teachers, doctors, and U.S. soldiers. They are young people who have lived in the U.S. for most of their lives and desire only to call this country their home … they face unique barriers to higher education, are unable to work legally in the U.S., and often live in constant fear of detection by immigration authorities.”

It makes no moral, economic, or social good sense to continue tearing apart families and communities and disrupting young people’s lives — all at great expense to the American public and taxpayers.

The time to act is now: please call your congressional representatives today and urge them to vote yes on the DREAM Act — without any amendments that might undermine its effectiveness. Although Nancy Pelosi and most Bay Area Democrats support the bill, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Stockton) and the Republicans are either on the fence or opposed. There’s no time to waste in giving hard-working young immigrant students this most American ideal — the opportunity to make their dreams a reality.

Eric Mar is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Eric Quezada is executive director of Dolores Street Community Services in San Francisco.

Secrets of the state’s death-drug deal

Zelda Bronstein
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Secrets of the state’s death-drug deal

After weeks of grilling the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on the source of their newly acquired sodium thiopental, we are finally getting some answers.

Deputy Press Secretary of the CDCR Terry Thornton verified to the Associated Press yesterday that the state has acquired 521 grams of the lethal injection component from a British manufacturer, Archimedes Phrama.


Thornton said that the state paid $36,415 for the drug, “its chemicals, all legal and processing fees, and shipping and handling.”


So CDCR has finally given the public some information to work with — although many of the details are still sketchy. We filed a formal public records request in October asking for information on the procurement, and the agency still hasn’t turned over the documents.


But at least we know that California has obtained its death drug from overseas. And apparently, British officials aren’t thrilled about it. No European nation has the death penalty, and officials across the pond are dubious about helping other nations kill their own citizens.


Earlier this week, Britain’s secretary of state for business, Vince Cable, issued an order adding sodium thiopental to the list of items that must be licensed for export — effectively banning its sale to institutions that will use it for executions. Although Cable issued the order after Arizona inmate Jeffrey Landrigan’s execution on October 26, the British media commended him for putting an end to the export of the death drug.


According to the UK Guardian, Cable realized that the sodium thiopental “was not being sent there to help save lives, only to take them.”


The London paper also noted that since California uses just 3 grams of the drug to execute each individual— and keeps an additional 3 grams as backup — the state has acquired enough of the stuff to kill 86 people.


California’s executions have been on hold until the state could acquire more of the drug — and the legality of using thiopental in the first place is still a matter of debate. And given the fact that this new batch will expire in 2014, why does the state need so much of the drug for just three years? Does CDCR really expect to kill almost 30 people a year, one every 10 days or so — between now and 2014?


Actually, that’s not even remotely possible — executions involve long legal proceedings, and there are no more than a handful of cases that could possible reach that state in the next 36 months. So will California be reselling this stuff to other states? Will we become the default death-drug dealer for America? Who in Sacramento approved that policy? We couldn’t get an answer from Thornton on that.


Thornton told AP that the state’s fresh shipment is currently on the East Coast waiting to be approved by the FDA, and is already authorized by the DEA to be sent to the prisons.Facing lawsuits from the ACLU, the CDCR must soon release its documents, which include most of the details of the drug’s acquisition.


 “We’ve been as transparent as we can be,” Thornton said.


Well, not exactly.


 

DREAM on

Andrew Lam
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2
DREAM on

sarah@sfbg.com

Spurred by congressional Democratic leaders’ promises to hold a vote on the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act before the end of Congress’ lame-duck session this month, immigrant and civil rights advocates are pushing for the passage of bipartisan legislation that would give undocumented youth a shot at citizenship if they go to college or serve in the military for two years.

On Nov. 29 in San Francisco, several undocumented young people joined members of the Bay Area Coalition for Immigration Reform outside Mission High School — where as much as 20 percent of the student population may be undocumented, according to principal Eric Guthertz — to explain why it makes sense to give youth who grew up in the United States a shot at legal status.

“We are not asking you to give us a green card,” Anna, a student from Guatemala, said at the event. “All we want is a chance to succeed and give back to this country. We live here, we pay taxes, we’re smart, we go to college, but afterward we can’t work and give back.”

Mario, a 22-year-old gay student who was born in Peru to a Chinese father and Peruvian mother, graduated from UC Berkeley with a civil engineering degree. He explained that because of his lack of documentation, he can’t get a job to pay his bills or save up to pursue a master’s degree, and fears being deported to a homophobic country.

“It would be a waste of talent because I’ve learned California-specific engineering rules and the U.S. building code,” Mario said. “Sometimes I wake up from a nightmare about being detained. I came out here, but in Peru, I’d probably be back in the closet.

Joining Anna and Mario was Shing Ma “Steve” Li, a nursing student at City College, who was released Nov. 19 after two months in federal detention, shortly before he was to be deported to Peru. San Francisco Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to halt his removal, saying it would be “unjust” to deport Li before a DREAM Act vote takes place.

Li, who speaks Cantonese, English, French, and Spanish, grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and dreams of opening a clinic to serve low-income San Franciscans. But recently, federal immigration authorities flew him 800 miles to a jail in Arizona, all because his parents brought him here when he was 12 and he lacks documentation.

“We were handcuffed and shackled to our seats, and I wondered what would happen if the plane went down,” Li recalled.

Li believes the main barriers to the legislation’s passage is lack of accurate information. “People need to know the facts, see the people, and hear their stories,” Li said. “Then they’ll know it is a human rights issue.”

Guthertz said that as principal of Mission High, every year he sees undocumented youth who have great grades and lots of advanced placement classes “hit the wall” of their status. “Over and over, I’ve seen the heartbreaking effect of their situation,” Guthertz said. “The DREAM Act is yet another avenue to help these students.”

Eric Quezada, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, noted that congressional leaders did not agree to the DREAM Act vote “out of the goodness of their heart — it’s because of the hard work of immigrant advocates.”

Quezada said the push to force a DREAM Act vote in Congress this year began when undocumented youth staged a sit-in in Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) office in May. “And the vote of Latinos saved the Senate from a Republican takeover on Nov. 2,” he said.

“But we understand this window is closing,” Quezada added, referring to the reality that Republicans will take control of the House in January. “So we’re not taking one vote for granted. And this is the first step. If we are able to pass the DREAM Act, it will be a downpayment for comprehensive immigration reform.”

Sup. John Avalos says the DREAM Act recognizes the contribution immigrants make to the community, and to the creation of economic opportunities for everybody. “Immigrants here support themselves and their families across the water, so it makes sense that we make proper investments and support,” Avalos said. “Education is one way to make the world a more stable place.”

Sup. David Campos, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala as an undocumented teenager, sees the DREAM Act as a piece of commonsense legislation.

“It’s so modest,” Campos said. “Even those who are against comprehensive immigration reform should be for something that recognizes that young people, who came here not by choice but because of their parents’ issues, should be given a chance to give back.”

Campos said his father was able to gain legal status for his whole family because of his employment, but that many undocumented youth aren’t so lucky.

“We open the doors to our public schools, we invest in their education, and then, when they are ready to give back to us, we say, ‘No, we don’t want you here,'” Campos said. “The best and brightest, the risk-takers, come here. As a country, we cannot go forward unless we realize that this influx of creativity and entrepreneurship made this country what it is.”

Released, Steve Li urges passage of DREAM Act

Mary Magee
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8

On a cold and sunny morning in late November, as sharp winds stirred up fallen leaves, and most folks were beginning to slow down in anticipation of Thanksgiving, Shing Ma “Steve” Li, a 20-year-old nursing student from San Francisco who narrowly avoided deportation to Peru, whipped the local media into a energized frenzy by advocating for the passage of the DREAM Act during a press conference at the Asian Law Caucus, whose offices sits close to the Transamerica Pyramid, and a stone’s throw from the lantern-decorated streets of Chinatown and the neon-lit strip clubs of North Beach, in San Francisco.

The purpose of the press conference was to give thanks for Li’s release four days earlier from a federal detention facility in Arizona, outline why a hardworking student who has lived in San Francisco since he was 12, has no criminal record, and speaks Cantonese, English, French and Spanish, was incarcerated for two months and threatened with deportation. And ultimately, the event was aimed to stir up support for the DREAM ((Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, bi-partisan legislation that leading congressional Democrats plan to put to a vote this month.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised to move to a vote on the DREAM Act on November 29, during Congress’ lame duck session, a brief window of opportunity to complete action on stalled bills, before Republicans take charge of the House, and Democrats see their majority in the Senate shrink, come January 2011.

Li, his family and his legal counsel Sin Yen Ling, a senior staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, kicked off the press conference by acknowledging the many supporters whose phone-calling, letter writing and protesting outside Sen. Barbara Boxer’s offices in San Francisco, helped secure Li’s Nov. 19 release from a federal detention center in Arizona, after Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced a private bill to delay Li’s deportation.

“I believe his removal would be unjust before the Senate gets to vote on the DREAM Act,” Feinstein said in a Nov. 19 press statement. Feinstein’s bill guarantees Li protection for 75 days after Congress’ lame-duck session end. And Li’s attorney Ling says Feinstein may reintroduce her private bill next year, and that ICE isn’t likely to deport Li in future, now that he is no longer considered a fugitive.

“We don’t feel that Feinstein’s private bill will pass, because of the result of the Nov. 2 election and the reality of partisan politics, but it’s unlikely that Steve will get deported again,” Ling said.

If passed, the DREAM Act would grant undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship, if they entered the United States before age 15 and have attended college or served in the military for two years.

Li’s ordeal—and his ensuing conversion to an ardent DREAM Act advocate—is happening against the backdrop of an increasingly anti-immigrant mood in the United States, as witnessed in Arizona, where state legislators passed SB 1070 earlier this year, and now in California, where a Tea Party member from Belmont wants California voters to weigh in on a similar initiative in 2012. And then there’s the sobering reality that come January, congressional Republicans, who are facing challenges from the far right-wing Tea Party,  take control of the House and are unlikely to advocate for immigration reform.

But Li, who is ethnically Chinese, and was born and raised in Peru until he was eleven years old, after his parents left China in the 1980s to escape its one-child policy, remained optimistic, as he drew on his recent experience to illustrate why Congress needs to passes the bi-partisan DREAM Act now.

“I’m still at risk of being deported,” Li said, noting that, each year, about 65,000 U.S.-raised students graduate from high school and would qualify for the DREAM Act, which addresses the fact that federal immigration law has no mechanism to consider the circumstances of youth who were brought here as minors and call the U.S. home, but can’t work legally, face barriers to accessing higher education, and live in constant fear of deportation.

“We have to work to do something to stop these students from being deported,” said Li, who wasn’t aware that a final deportation order had been issued against his family, when he was 14 years old and the U.S. denied his parents’ application for political asylum. “It’s important we push Congress, so no other student has to go through the same thing I did.”

“How many future doctors, engineers and scientists will the US lose,” Li added, questioning whether the US could end up deporting geniuses who might otherwise have discovered a cure for cancer, or invented ground-breaking sustainable energy technologies. “We are America’s future and we want to make a difference,” he said. “I still believe America is a great nation, a moral nation, and that Americans, if given all the information, will do the right thing.”

Li’s legal counsel Ling, recalled how Li and his parents were arrested on Sept. 15 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and detained at ICE’s offices in downtown San Francisco, before being transferred to a jail in Sacramento County. “They were arrested as part of ICE’s fugitive operations program, which targets people who have failed to comply with final deportation orders,” she said.

The family was held there for three weeks, Ling said, before Li’s parents were released back to San Francisco, wearing electronic monitoring anklets. But Li was involuntarily transferred to a federal detention facility in Florence, Arizona, where he remained until mid-November. His transfer also made it impossible for his parents to visit, since, under the terms of their electronically monitored release by ICE, they are not allowed to leave San Francisco.

Ling said ICE blames a lack of bed space in the Bay Area for why they must transfer folks from San Francisco to Arizona, Texas or a facility near Bakersfield, California. But either way, the practice serves to isolate immigrant detainees from family and friends as they await deportation.

“Steve was released from Florence, Arizona, on Friday, Nov. 19, and then took a Greyhound bus, which arrived in San Francisco Saturday afternoon,” Ling said, noting that ICE wasn’t planning to notify her or Li’s family of his release, and that they typically drive folks to Phoenix and drop them off at the bus station.

Li’s mother Maria addressed the media in Cantonese, as she thanked Sen. Feinstein for allowing her son “to return to his mother’s embrace.”

And then Li, who says he is “a huge Giants fan” and “grew up reciting the pledge of allegiance at school, just like everybody else”, described his ordeal
.
“I always viewed myself as an American,” Li said, recalling how that perception was challenged when ICE raided his home and threw him in jail, this fall.
“I was shocked and confused, I felt it must have been a mistake” Li said, recalling that he was in the bathroom getting ready for school when the doorbell rang on Sept. 15.
“I didn’t expect anyone, so I woke up my mother, and she answered the door,” Li said.“Next thing, immigration agents came into the house. I didn’t know what was going on.They said they had to take me somewhere, that I had to be deported. “

Li said he was immediately separated from his mother and not allowed to ask ICE questions.
‘They searched me, threw me in the car, handcuffed me and took me to the immigration center,” Li said, referring to ICE’s office in downtown San Francisco.
“It was intimidating. I was scared of what was going to happen to me,” Li continued, describing how he was held for the rest of the day in a cell that contained 20 other people, some of whom had been transferred from other detention facilities and were already wearing prison clothing.

“I was fingerprinted, my photograph was taken and my situation was explained to me,” Li said, describing his shock at then being transferred in handcuffs and shackles by bus to a jail in Sacramento County with his parents, who were also handcuffed and shackled.
“It was traumatic to see my parents, who are hard-working people, be treated like that,” he said,

In Sacramento County, Li and another detainee were placed in a cell that contained bunk beds, a small table, a toilet and a sink.
“We could only go to the day room and watch TV for one hour a day,” he said. “The immigration authorities didn’t tell me anything, they just threw me from place to place.”

After three weeks, Li thought he was going to be released, when the prison authorities returned his clothes and got him to sign some paperwork. But instead, he was transferred to ICE’s San Francisco office on Sansome Street, put him in a holding cell, and told him he was being sent to Arizona to be processed for deportation,

“My whole world came down,” Li said. “I couldn’t talk to my parents, who had already been released. I thought of never being able to see my family and friends again. It was depressing.”

Things got worse when he was shackled, handcuffed, and loaded onto a bus which took him to Oakland airport, where he was put on a plane with a bunch of other deportation detainees.
“We were handcuffed and shackled to our seats, and I wondered what would happen if the plane went down,” Li said, describing a seemingly interminable journey to Arizona, which involved making landings in Los Angeles and San Diego.
“In San Diego, they took Mexicans off the bus, presumably to drive them to the border,” Li said.

Arriving in Arizona the following morning, Li was driven to an isolated federal detention facility in Florence, which is about 800 miles from San Francisco, where he was only allowed outside his cell for an hour a day.
“We were incarcerated all day and body searched multiple times in a facility, where there were three toilets and four showers between 64 people,” he said.

Locked up with 400 fellow detainees, Li heard a lot of stories that were similar to his: students who’d received a higher education and were very talented, but didn’t have legal status.

In particular, Li remembers one student he met during his Arizona incarceration.
“Like me, he came here with his parents and had no say in that decision, but was picked up as a result of new legislation in Arizona, “ he said.

Li’s arrest means he missed a semester of school, but he vows to continue his studies. And despite his traumatic experience, Li says he is not bitter.
“It went through my mind,” he said, “But I have learned a lot, including the fact that we have a broken immigration system. I urge everyone who qualifies for the DREAM Act to use their voice. They need to find the courage to use it and fight to change the law.”

 
 

 

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