Friends of Justice

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A new prison post from my good friend, Gunther Fiek.

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The juggernaut of what has become a remorseless child abuse industry rolls on, with parents being framed by protection agencies and wrongfully convicted on the basis of speculation and conjecture.

Read the article by Dr. James Le Fanu in the Sunday Guardian.

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From my good friend, Gunther Fiek

A Time for a Change

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The next time you shop on Amazon, go to smile.amazon.com. You will be asked to select a charity. Use the search mechanism at smile.amazon.com to locate the National Center for Reason and Justice.

The next time you shop, shop via smile.amazon.com and (for eligible items) a portion of your purchase price will go to the NCRJ.

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…to help the National Center for Reason and Justice and receive a tax-deduction for 2016.

NCRJ works to free the wrongfully convicted and to prevent future injustices through rational criminal-justice reform.

You can make a credit-card donation via PayPal (you don’t have to have a PayPal account to do this) by clicking here.

You can also send a check, payable to NCRJ, to

NCRJ
POB 191101
Roxbury MA 02119

Date your check 12/31/16 or before for a 2016 deduction.

For those of you who have already given, we thank you again.

And we wish you all a very Happy New Year!

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“I looked forward to the weekends and holidays because my window gave me a view of family and friends that were coming in to visit their loved ones. I could see individuals of all ages, families, elderly, children, …etc. I wondered: that is someone’s mother, father, wife, girlfriend, or kid. Needless to say, the time I really took advantage of that sight was when my family was coming to visit me. Sometimes I could see them drive in and park. I could see them going through the main front gate, walk through the open walkway to the main building where they would go through a security check and register. A few minutes later I was being summoned to the visitation room.”

Read Gunther’s full post.

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“Research shows that keeping some families together after children are abused can result in safety for the children and united families, when proper assessment and interventions are made. Even so, the usual suspect ‘child-protection professionals’ scapegoat the approach.”–Debbie Nathan

Read the article by Richard Wexler in The Chronicle of Social Change.

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“When we as a community reprimand or condemn a judge for engaging in such a holistic analysis and for exercising discretion, such efforts can have a chilling effect on judicial courage and compassion,” the letter states. Punishing him, the defenders explain, will “deter other judges from extending mercy and instead encourage them to issue unfairly harsh sentences for fear of reprisal.” The Santa Clara County Bar Association has also released a statement saying that removing Persky would be a “threat to judicial independence.”

Read the article by Maurice Chammah at the Marshall Project.

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Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the nation’s leading expert on the use of snitches, said the fact that Orange County officials engaged in unconstitutional behavior similar to what made headlines years earlier in Los Angeles County reveals the “entrenched” nature of the practice of using snitches in questionable ways. “We see it from the outside as a scandal that should not be repeated. But apparently Orange County officials didn’t see it that way,” she said. “They saw it as business as usual.”

Read the article in The Intercept by Jordan Smith.

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“Prosecutors who bend or even break the rules to win a conviction almost never face any punishment. But even given lax controls, the blatant and systemic misconduct in the Orange County district attorney’s office in Southern California stands out. In a scheme that may go back as far as 30 years, prosecutors and the county sheriff’s department have elicited illegal jailhouse confessions, failed to turn over evidence that is favorable to defendants and lied repeatedly in court about what they did.”

Read the editorial by the editorial board of the New York Times.