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Topic: Rev Pinckney imprisoned broke no law

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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

rev. pinkney, home from prison, people of benton harbor vow fight ...
voiceofdetroit.net/.../rev-pinkney-home-from-prison-people-of-benton-harbor-vow-fi...
May 31, 2018 - Benton Harbor—Rev. Edward Pinkney, home from two and one half years in prison, and supporters from Chicago, New York, and Columbus, ...
Post Sat Sep 22, 2018 3:10 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

ICE OF DETROIT: The city's independent newspaper, unbossed and unbought Local, national and world news from a people's perspective
MONDAYS LANSING, MI JUNE 11, 2018 →
REV. PINKNEY, HOME FROM PRISON, PEOPLE OF BENTON HARBOR VOW FIGHT BACK DURING PGA GOLF FEST
Posted on 05/31/2018 by Diane Bukowski


Police occupy the PGA, prevent march

Police murdering, molesting, and framing up Black citizens

Berrien County prosecutor Sepic has recommended that all 100 of the county’s “juvenile lifers” be re-sentenced to LWOP, violating U.S. Supreme Court decisions

Juvenile Lifers for Justice leader Efren Paredes, Jr. of Benton Harbor fights back

By Diane Bukowski

Including special video presentation by Mac Speaking (Leona McElvene)

May 30, 2018

Benton Harbor—Rev. Edward Pinkney, home from two and one half years in prison, and supporters from Chicago, New York, and Columbus, Ohio joined with the people of Benton Harbor Sat. May 26 to celebrate the Michigan Supreme Court’s reversal of Pinkney’s fraudulent conviction May 1. Standing on the steps of the Benton Harbor City Hall, they chanted “FIGHT BACK” against the corporate takeover of their city by Whirlpool, the racist police state and courts, the destruction of the city’s public education system, and the city’s 49.2 percent poverty rate.

(See Michigan Supreme Court opinion exonerating Pinkney at: http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Pinkney-supreme-court-victory.pdf.)


Many youth attended the rally May 26, an increase from numbers at earlier demonstrations.

The rally was held as hundreds of wealthy golfers and fans, 99 percent white, descended on this 86 percent Black town to watch the 77th Senior PGA Tour held at the luxurious Harbor Shores Jack Nicklaus golf course, which abuts the city’s gorgeous Lake Michigan beaches off Jean Klock Park. The park is publicly-owned land, but Whirlpool and its subsidiary Kitchen Aid have claimed it and the surrounding areas for the golf course and multi-million dollar housing development.

“OCCUPY THE PGA,” the rally theme, became “police occupy the PGA,” as squadrons of Benton Harbor and Berrien County police turned marchers back from any downtown outlet approaching the golf course. “Parking for the PGA” signs were posted everywhere as travelers entered, even in the poorest stretches of this state’s poorest city.

Whirlpool long ago closed its plants in Benton Harbor, depriving residents of their main source of jobs, and then seized publicly-owned assets, with the help first of the state’s Emergency Manager law, then with the continued collaboration of “elected” officials. Pinkney was targeted as he led a campaign to recall the mayor. Prosecutors produced no evidence that he had altered several dates on a recall petition, but an all-white jury convicted him anyway. He was sentenced to 2.5 to 10 years in prison, but was released after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that he had violated no law.

Speakers at the rally included family members of two young men murdered by Berrien County police in 2016, Martell Walker-Hadley, 26, and Darius Wimberly, 28.



Walker-Hadley’s mother LaDona Walker-Hadley addressed the crowd demanding justice for her son, who died Feb. 27, 2016 at the age of 26 in the Benton Harbor jail. Police alleged the father of a two-year-old son hung himself after he was arrested for “fleeing and eluding” police, and sentenced to one to two years in prison. But the family insists that Martell was murdered.

His mother noted that a second autopsy showed he had blunt force trauma to his chest in addition to the presence of suspicious chemicals in his system, not consistent with the official autopsy results of “asphyxiation.

They have established a GoFundMe page for Martell at https://www.gofundme.com/dvrvtmhw.



Darius Lamar “Karate” Wimberly, 28, was killed Oct. 18, 2016 by Benton Harbor police, who alleged he fired at them, on Pavone St., only a block away from the site where Benton Harbor youth rose up against police killings in 2003, carrying on a rebellion for three days.

Berrien County Prosecutor Michael Sepic cleared the cop who killed Wimberly. Sepic also prosecuted Rev. Pinkney and has recommended that all 100 of Berrien County’s “juvenile lifers” be re-sentenced to life without parole. Sepic and most other county prosecutors in Michigan are thus in violation of two Supreme Court rulings outlawing juvenile life without parole as unconstitutional.


Wimberly’s mother spoke at the rally, saying neighborhood residents wanted to rise up again after police killed her son, but that she asked them not to do so because police would kill others. She said although police claimed Wimberly fired two guns at them, there was no gunshot residue on his hands.

A friend of his, Canvas Smith, earlier told Benton Harbor’s TV 16, “This was really brutal, like really, because if it was that bad, no officer got shot…nobody’s hurt. You just got a dead body. I do know the whole investigation sounds like a load of crap. If he was trying to shoot and kill somebody, why was he the only one that got shot? No other officer was hurt. Haven’t said anything about there was a bullet hole in the car anything. Just that he’s dead out on the street and they didn’t even have the decency to call the fire department or anyone to wash his blood up. His family had to get out there and wash the blood up. They treated it like it was nothing.”

Rev. Pinkney addressed the ongoing police war against the people in Benton Harbor, including drug frame-ups of 300 men and molestations of 20 women in the city, as seen below.



A speaker from Chicago said that so-called “gang” members are trying to come together there in order to stop killing each other and direct their anger at the forces that are impoverishing Black and Latin neighborhoods in Chicago and throughout the country.



The crowd then began a silent march led by a coffin symbolizing the death of Benton Harbor, but were immediately turned back by Berrien County and Benton Harbor police at every access point that would have led to the golf course. In 2012, Pinkney led the march through the city’s streets all the way to the gates of Harbor Shores and the golf course
Post Sat Sep 22, 2018 3:13 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Rev. Edward Pinkney Imprisoned for Fighting the Whirlpool Corporation
BY
Victoria CollierBen-Zion Ptashnik Truthout
PUBLISHED
December 16, 2014
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2014.12.16.Pinkney.1
Rev. Edward Pinkney and his lawyer Tat Parish (Photo: John Madill)
“Here, Whirlpool controls not only Benton Harbor and the residents, but also the court system itself. They will do anything to crush you if you stand up to them. That’s why it’s so important to fight this. I’m going to fight them until the end. This is not just an attack on Rev. Pinkney. It’s an attack on every single person that lives in Benton Harbor, in the state and around the country.” – Rev. Edward Pinkney

On December 15, Rev. Edward Pinkney, a leader in the struggle for social and economic justice for the residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, was sentenced to serve up to 10 years in prison, on the basis of thin circumstantial evidence that a few dates had been altered on a recall petition against the city’s mayor, James Hightower. The recall was prompted by the mayor’s continued support for tax evasion by the Whirlpool Corporation, the Fortune 500 company and $19 billion global appliance manufacturer, headquartered in Benton Harbor.

As we wrote last week in depth, the politically motivated prosecution against Pinkney killed the petition to recall Hightower, who many believe would have been ousted due to his ongoing protection of Whirlpool’s interests at the expense of impoverished Benton Harbor, which is over 90 percent African-American.

There was absolutely no evidence to convict Pinkney, and, legally, the altering of a petition document should have been a misdemeanor offense. Instead, they charged him with felony forgery – though no signatures were forged and all signatories testified that they signed willingly on the correct day. A forensics expert for the prosecution testified that there was no way to determine who changed the handful of dates. Incredibly, the all-white jury was urged by the prosecutor to believe that direct evidence was not required; they only had to “believe” that Pinkney was motivated to cheat and that he “could” have changed the dates while circulating the petitions.

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Mary Alice Adams, a Benton Harbor commissioner stated, “Rev. Pinkney was accused of writing and changing my date on a petition when, in fact, I wrote my own date and changed it after realizing I had put the wrong date down.” The jury at Pinkney’s trial rejected Adams’ testimony.

Witness after witness stood up to the prosecutor who put not only Pinkney on trial, but also his community organization, BANCO. The prosecutor hounded the witnesses to “confess” that somehow the dates were altered, and questioned if they were card-holding members of the BANCO organization. The scene held shadows of a McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunt.

2014.12.16.Pinkney.2
Rev. Edward Pinkney (Photo: Dorothy Pinkney)
Pinkney had helped organize the petition to unseat Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower, who residents consider a “yes-man” for Whirlpool. Instead of supporting a tax that would make Whirlpool pay its fair share for city services and employees, the mayor signed a $3.2 million loan that the residents of Benton Harbor, one of the poorest cities per capita in the United States, would now have to pay. Meanwhile, Whirlpool pays absolutely no income taxes to the federal government or to Michigan.

Pinkney was also a leader in the fight against what he called an “illegal” ceding of a Benton Harbor public park to Whirlpool and a development firm which privatized the park and gentrified that prime real estate into a golf course and wealthy gated community on Lake Michigan – excluding the people that the property was deeded to serve. Pinkney led a protest against the PGA Senior golf tournament at the private new golf course, sponsored by Kitchen-Aid, a division of Whirlpool.

And so, with the complicity of a white, “highly political” right-wing prosecutor, Whirlpool reached into the court system and publicly “lynched” the town’s most prominent and outspoken black community activist who dared to stand up to the powerful company and the state’s elite. Pinkney’s sentencing is as blatant a kangaroo court as seen since Hurricane Carter, a black power advocate, was framed by New Jersey prosecutors decades ago – a typical case of the white power structure icing an “uppity Negro” with trumped up charges. In Carter’s case, the witnesses were two men facing charges for burglary, who were enticed to provide false testimony with reduced charges.

Pinkney says he was similarly set up to take a fall for a paltry smattering of election fraud charges in 2006 during an attempt to recall a city commissioner. He was finally convicted of possessing four absentee ballots, but pointed out that the women who fingered him – all members of a family – mysteriously avoided jail time for the multiple criminal charges they were facing, including a drive-by shooting and kidnapping.

“I’m not angry with them for doing that,” Pinkney said. “It’s a deal that’s hard to pass up.”

Pinkney was put on probation at the time, until he had the audacity to quote a particularly scathing section of Deuteronomy to the judge, who then sentenced him to three to 10 years in prison. During his seven months in the county jail and four months in prison, Pinkney ran for a seat in the US House and received more than 3,500 votes as a Green Party candidate. The American Civil Liberties Union finally got him released on an appeal bond, and he was allowed to return home under house arrest. Later the appeal court overturned Pinkney’s conviction, and reversed his sentence of 3-10 for quoting verse 28:15 of the Fifth Book of Moses.

But if Pinkney is a man who’s hard to keep down, his enemies are just as determined to put him away for good.

“It’s a modern day lynching,” said Adams, the Benton Harbor commissioner, of Pinkney’s latest conviction. “After hearing the ‘evidence’ it would seem that the decision was made before the trial began. They are looking at Michigan as a glove for dictatorship. And the predominantly black communities are the test tubes. When you stand up against the largest manufacturer of appliances in the world, of course there will be a backlash.”

Pinkney was straightforward in his description of his conviction:

Here, Whirlpool controls not only Benton Harbor and the residents, but also the court system itself. They will do anything to crush you if you stand up to them. That’s why it’s so important to fight this. I’m going to fight them until the end. This is not just an attack on Rev. Pinkney. It’s an attack on every single person that lives in Benton Harbor, in the state and around the country. We got to fix this jury system. There was not one person from Benton Harbor, not one person from Benton Township on the jury. Anytime a Black man is sitting inside that courtroom and the jury is all white, that is a major problem.

Michigan is a state where virulent racism followed the Great Migration of southern blacks into northern industrial states in the 20th century. With more than two dozen racist hate groups still active in the state, Michigan has essentially turned into the Mississippi of the North. In fact, Pinkney organized his community against the KKK when they began to hold rallies in Benton Harbor in the 1990s.

Pinkney points out how class intersects with race, when it comes to the oppression of the people of Benton Harbor. “It’s a class war,” he said. “It’s us against them. Rich against poor. That’s what it adds up to. The point is we have to take a stand. It’s about you, your children, and your grandchildren. I never thought for a minute that the system could be this broken and would go to this extreme. They could care less about you, me or anybody else. They only have one thing in mind. That is to make sure they protect the rich.”

Judge Schrock denied Pinkney’s lawyer’s request for release pending his appeal. Pinkney was handcuffed and hauled off to jail from the county courthouse as his wife, Dorothy, and supporters stood aghast, having witnessed US justice for an African-American minister at its racist best.

Concerned activists and clergy associated with People Demanding Action, a national social justice organization, are circulating a petition to ministers and various organizations. The petition is to be forwarded to the US Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder, asking for an investigation into the circumstances of Pinkney’s trial and sentencing.
Post Sun Sep 23, 2018 8:19 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Forged signatures raise concerns about ballot petition efforts in Michigan
Bill Laitner and Christina Hall, Detroit Free Press Published 6:00 a.m. ET Sept. 17, 2018 | Updated 9:29 a.m. ET Sept. 17, 2018


It's been a great summer for petition campaigns — most of them, that is.

After hundreds of thousands of Michiganders signed petitions, ballots this fall will list three momentous questions — whether to legalize marijuana; whether to end gerrymandering with a nonpartisan method of carving political districts; and whether to expand voting rights in several ways that include allowing straight-party voting, again, as well as allowing "no-reason" absentee voting.

To get on the November ballot, these big statewide campaigns had to leap numerous legal hurdles and turn in truckloads of signed petitions that were flyspecked by lawyers or trained volunteers.

But some petition efforts didn't go as well. In Oakland and Macomb counties, two local campaigns — one in Troy, another in Warren — used paid circulators to gather signatures and both ended with cries of "forgery!" That's giving fuel to the fire of critics who say Michigan should tighten regulations on petition campaigns.

In Troy, a ruling by the Michigan Court of Appeals this week was the last hurrah for a group of marijuana business operators fighting a new city ordinance. The ruling vindicated the Troy city clerk’s decision in August to toss out hundreds of questionable petitions. Surprisingly, many listed the names of prominent residents who told the Free Press their signatures had been faked. County detectives are investigating, according to the Oakland County Prosecutors Office.

In Warren, a petition drive behind a ballot question that was aimed at keeping Mayor Jim Fouts from running again ran afoul of similar allegations — seemingly faked signatures and other problems. That led to a unanimous vote last month by the Warren City Council calling for a criminal investigation.

The gathering of signatures often takes voters by surprise, as they walk up to a post office or leave a courthouse, only to be assailed by cheery strangers requesting signatures. Many of those seeking petition signatures, called circulators, are professionals. They typically earn $2 or $3 per signature, according to political consultants.

Others are volunteers committed to a cause, like the roughly 3,000 unpaid circulators who collected signatures for Voters Not Politicians, the anti-gerrymandering question, said Elizabeth Battiste, a spokeswoman for the group.

Read more:

Pot petition signatures may have been faked

Could Legislature pre-empt ballot proposals?

The group's performance was impressive, and letter-perfect, Battiste said.

"We were required to gather 315,654 signatures and we turned in over 425,000. We also had 180 days to collect those and we did it in 110, from all of Michigan's 83 counties," she said.

Petition campaigns for ballot questions, whether local or statewide, operate under a strict 180-day deadline imposed last year by state lawmakers. And even if a group gathers more than enough signatures, election officials disqualify those not belonging to registered voters, and they use technicalities to eliminate others. So it’s not easy to get on ballots.

Still, the rules were flouted by Troy’s marijuana petitions and by the effort in Warren to end Fouts’ tenure, said city clerks in both cities. If Troy had accepted the questionable petitions, or if judges in two courts had, the marijuana operators could have carried to voters their quest to overturn a new city ordinance that's going to curtail or close many cannabis-growing facilities, Troy City Clerk Aileen Dickson said.

Troy didn't eliminate small-scale cultivation, "but under this ordinance we opted out of allowing the bigger commercial grows" with hundreds or even thousands of plants, Dickson said.

Last Tuesday’s adverse court ruling shouldn’t have surprised the cannabis cultivators.

Not only did they lose on technicalities — many of their petitions lacked state-required notary stamps and had "inconsistent dates," their own lawyer Jim Kelly admitted. But also, some petitions contained obviously forged signatures of prominent city leaders. Several city officials, including Oakland County Commissioner Wade Fleming, burst into laughter when informed by the Free Press that their signatures appeared on the group's petitions because all said they were foes of the marijuana question.

In Fleming's case, he purportedly signed twice, in radically different handwriting — a clear violation of state petition rules. Fleming is a long-standing foe of easing laws on marijuana. The apparent forgeries in Troy triggered a criminal investigation of at least one paid petition circulator, a 52-year-old Shelby Township woman, Troy police said.

In Warren, the petition drive aimed at blocking Fouts from running to be mayor for a fourth term also ended in disarray, with the Warren City Council voting 7-0 in August to request a criminal investigation.

Fouts said he’d finally found grounds for agreement with his arch enemy, former city councilman Mark Liss, because they agreed that many of the petition signatures gathered by Liss’ group – in an effort to dethrone Fouts -- were invalid and likely forged.

Neither the Michigan Attorney General's Office nor the Secretary of State's Office has received a request yet from the city. Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams said city officials would need to refer the matter to local law enforcement, such as city police or the sheriff's office, or to the county prosecutor's office.

City Attorney Ethan Vinson said his office has copies of all the petitions and is going through them to determine if there were any violations of the city charter or city ordinance. He said the charter mandates the petitions be notarized "and it appears half of them are not."

Vinson said that could be a misdemeanor offense for the person who circulated the petition. He said city police may be getting involved in the matter.

City Clerk Paul Wojno said that more than 7,000 signatures came in on the petitions, which were turned in by the July 31 deadline. Only 2,249 signatures were valid -- qualified voters in the city, he said.

Another 1,631 were valid but not counted because there were problems with the sheets they appeared on, such as the sheets were not signed or were not notarized, Wojno said. The 2,249 valid signatures would not have been enough to get the measure on the ballot.

The Committee to Restore Accountability in Warren filed the petitions.

Wojno said the job of his office was to match signatures to the qualified voter file. However, the office noticed that printed names, though different, on a sheet looked like, perhaps, they were printed and signed by the same person "though we can't say that for certain." But, he said, the signatures didn't match the qualified voter file and were invalid.

Although three bills are pending in Lansing to regulate signature gathering for petitions, state lawmakers should keep in mind Michigan's long history of using the process to good effect, said Eric Lupher, president of the Livonia-based Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonprofit think tank.

The group did a deep dive several years ago into whether Michigan's process needed tweaking, deciding it didn't, Lupher said. And judges have ruled that lawmakers can't hamstring the petition process.

"The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states may not forbid the paying of petition circulators and can’t require that they live in a certain area," Lupher said. In addition, the Michigan Supreme Court "has been pretty stern in saying, yes, we want the petition circulators to be up front with describing the petition, but it’s really the voters’ responsibility to know what they’re signing," he said.

Every state but Michigan requires ballot campaigns to distill a proposal to a 100-word summary on each petition, matching what might appear on ballots, so that potential signers can quickly size up the issue, Lupher said. Michigan makes petitioners print their entire, often lengthy, proposal on the back of each petition. That leads circulators to become carny barkers, sometimes pitching their campaigns with exaggerations to entice signers who don't take the time to digest a petition's every word.

If Michigan joined the other states in requiring the 100-word summaries on petitions, "that could counteract a lot of this misrepresentation that goes on when people are trying to get voters to sign," Lupher said.

Contact: blaitner@freepress.com. Free Press Staff Writer Kathleen Gray contributed.
Post Sun Sep 23, 2018 1:26 pm 
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