"Sixteen-year-old Sabera, with a pretty yellow head scarf, frets that she is missing school. 'I was about to get engaged, and the boy came to ask me himself, before sending his parents. A lady in our neighbourhood saw us, and called the police,' she explains. She was sentenced to three years but, in an act of mercy, it was shortened to 18 months . . ."
The BBC reports from an Afghan women's prison. [more inside]
posted by Jaltcoh
on Jun 30, 2010 -
57 comments
Robert King spent decades battling for his release from the 'hell-hole' of America's notorious Angola Prison. Now free, he's still crusading for its inmates.
The late Anita Roddick was the powerhouse behind the making of the Documentary
In Land of the Free.
Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King were charged with murders they did not commit and encarcerated in solitary confinement, for nearly 37 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
Angola not only has solitary confinement it has the prison within solitary confinement –
The Hole [more inside]
posted by adamvasco
on May 26, 2010 -
33 comments
Loving v. Missouri: In February, Olivia Shelltrack and Fondrey Loving were denied an occupancy permit because they have three children and are not married.
"This ordinance is outdated. We are a family," says Shelltrack, 31. "There's a mom, there's a dad, there's three children. We are a family." Whether Shelltrack, a stay-at-home mom, and Loving, 33, who works for a payroll-administration company, are married "should not be anybody's business, if I pay my taxes, if I'm able to buy the house,"
she says.
posted by dash_slot-
on May 17, 2006 -
50 comments
"Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist," prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan earlier this year
. "Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence." So why is Yousry now awaiting sentencing in March, when he could face 20 years in prison for translating a letter from imprisoned Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman to Rahman's lawyer in Egypt?
posted by dash_slot-
on Jan 16, 2006 -
63 comments
Chika Honda, falsely imprisoned for ten years by Australian authorities for heroin smuggling, and never pardoned,
tells her story in her own words [Real Audio] in this
Walkley Award-nominated documentary. This is a wrenching story of incompetence by the federal police, legal aid services, media-influenced juries and the problem of translation in legal investigations. Listen to her story and decide on her innocence for yourself.
posted by DirtyCreature
on Jan 16, 2005 -
6 comments
In 1992
Chika Honda was a 36-year-old Japanese woman who accepted an offer from a regular customer, Mistuo at the pub she worked nights in, to join him and his brothers on a
holiday to Australia - her first ever overseas trip. During a stopover in Kuala Lumpur their suitcases were stolen. Charlie, a business associate of Mistuo, offered to sort everything out and returned the next morning with their belongings in a new set of suitcases, claiming their luggage had been slashed with a knife. When the group arrived in Melbourne, customs found 13kg of heroin in the lining of their suitcases. Chika and the others were
arrested, investigated, charged and later tried and sentenced.
Chika was eventually released and
deported in 2002 after having served 10 years in Victorian prisons. She still maintains
her innocence. Several documentaries about this case, known in Japan as the Melbourne Incident have been aired in
Japan but very little coverage has been given in
Australia. In one of the documentaries,
Charlie completely exonerates Chika (PDF : See page 5). In 2002, her
Japanese lawyers filed a
submission to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to clear her name. Two years later and nothing has yet been achieved. The Australian government
still admits no miscarriage of justice.
But she'll be right mate, we Aussies
know
what we're doing.
posted by DirtyCreature
on Dec 11, 2004 -
34 comments
Janklow Gets 100 Days for Manslaughter
A career of willful and flagrant disregard for traffic laws and other people's safety that ended in the death of a motorcyclist.
Must be nice to be pals with the president. Although I'm sure that had nothing to do with his slap-on-the-wrist sentence. I was just saying that it must be nice to be pals with the president.
posted by fenriq
on Jan 22, 2004 -
41 comments
Framed for defending herself. On August 28th, 2002 in Las Vegas, Nevada a woman named
Kirstin Lobato was sentenced to life in prison. She was the victim of an attempted rape in May 2001, and had defended herself against her rapist. prosecutors used this "confession" of self defense to convict her of a murder that happened months later and in a town where
she didn't even live. How "innocent until proven guilty" can you be if prosecutors are willing to use known perjurers and refuse to allow expert testimony?
posted by dejah420
on Nov 26, 2003 -
17 comments
A crackdown in Texas. America - land of the free. And to guarantee that freedom, everyone has to be constantly watchful. Like the photo store clerk from
Eckerd who dutifully reported a Peruvian-born couple's lewd shots of their infants to the Richardson (Dallas/Texas suburbs) police. The photos showed the parents' two infants bathing naked, lying together in bed with their mother (again naked) and the 1-year-old Rodrigo suckling his mother's (naked) breast. So the couple was arrested -- the maximum prison sentence for the crime in question being 20 years -- and the children taken away. (verbatim
k5)
posted by The Jesse Helms
on Apr 20, 2003 -
77 comments
Cesar Chavez Day With our focus on the war lets not forget what DOES make this country great, its people! I have to confess ignorance of this mans accomplishments until I turned my calendar today. Read,enjoy, learn something about a man who fought injustice with the most powerful weapon...his mind!
posted by hoopyfrood
on Mar 31, 2003 -
10 comments
Stephen Downing , aged 17, was arrested and interrogated for 8 hours by the police without caution and without legal counsel. Despite having the reading age of an 11 year old, he was allowed to sign a confession to the brutal slaughter of typist Wendy Sewell. 27 years later at the UK Court of Appeal, he
became today the victim of the longest miscarriage of justice in the Britain's history.
posted by dlewis
on Jan 15, 2002 -
7 comments
Chandra Levy disappearance solved? A deaf man with a serious mental illness who cannot speak was wrongly jailed for nearly two years in the nation's capital even though minor charges against him were dismissed, prison officials said on Friday...
Department of Corrections Director Odie... was ... quoted as telling the Post: ``It was kind of unbelievable to me that we could hold a guy for nearly two years who should not have been there,'' he said.
Color photographs with arrows and pictures and a paragraph on the back to follow...
posted by dchase
on Aug 31, 2001 -
7 comments
Fatima Polattas filed charges against Turkish police for raping her while she was in their custody; she's now
facing charges for insulting the security forces and her country's moral integrity for talking about what happened to her, and could spend up to six years behind bars. This is easily the most disturbing thing I've read all day.
posted by lia
on Apr 4, 2001 -
8 comments
