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    Detroit Mother Arrested And Sentenced For Protecting Her Daughter From Assailant

    This country makes me want to throw up sometimes. Once again, Detroit justice proves that when it comes to fairness, it's Just Us. Only in AmeriKKKa.
    Black Gun Owner Will Give Birth in Prison After Trying to Protect 2-Year-Old Daughter from Assailant

    Siwatu-Salama Ra used a legally purchased firearm to protect her family. She was sentenced to 2 years in prison.

    Robby Soave|May. 2, 2018 9:50 am

    BYP 100 / Twitter
    Siwatu-Salama Ra is a 26-year-old black mother who watched in horror as an angry assailant—a neighbor with whom Ra had a dispute—deliberately crashed her vehicle into Ra's car while Ra's two-year-old daughter was playing inside. Ra removed her unloaded, legally purchased handgun from the glove box and brandished it, scaring the neighbor off.

    The assailant, Channel Harvey, was never charged. Ra was arrested for felonious assault. She is now serving a mandatory two-year-sentence, even though Michigan is a Stand Your Ground state and Ra was clearly defending her family on her own property.
    Ra is pregnant, and she is expected to give birth in prison.

    The Detroit Metro Times, The Root, and Democracy Now! have all reported on the overwhelming criminal justice failures on display here. The jury in Ra's trial evidently ended deliberations early in order to wrap the case up before a major snowstorm hit—and that's not even the craziest thing about this case. The Detroit Police Department apparently treated Harvey as the victim, even though she rammed Ra's car, for the sole reason that Harvey beat Ra to the station and filed a police report first.

    According to Ra's attorney, Victoria Burton-Harris, Ra and Harvey's nieces attended school together. These two girls had a disagreement; Ra contends that Harvey's niece beat up Ra's niece at school. On that basis, Ra decided that Harvey's niece wasn't welcome at the Ra household anymore. Harvey brought her over anyway. As Burton-Harris told Democracy Now!:

    Siwatu called her sister herself and found out from her sister that there was no permission given for this young lady to be at the family home that day visiting, and therefore Siwatu informed the young lady that she needed to call her mother to come back and pick her up....
    And so, the mother arrived about 10 minutes later to pick the child up. She was very upset, irate even. She pulled back up to Siwatu's family's home. She started yelling, using profanity. She was very angry. She started demanding answers. "Why can't my child be here? These girls have made up. Your niece has come to my home over the last two weeks. I don't understand." And she testified at trial that she thought she had a right to be on that property and to demand answers as to why her child was not welcome there. And that's where this incident started.
    Harvey refused to leave, according to Burton-Harris, and eventually drove her car into Ra's, which was parked on the street with Ra's two-year-old daughter inside it.

    At this point, Ra feared for her child's safety—and also the safety of her own mother, who was on the front porch. Harvey continued to move her car forward and backward in an aggressive manner. Finally, Ra retrieved her handgun and brandished it at Harvey. Harvey then used her cell phone to take a picture of Ra holding the gun and raced off to the police station, where she filed a police report.

    Ra also filed a report, but Detroit police consider the first person to file a report to be the victim in a dispute. The Detroit Police Department has not responded to Reason's request for comment, but according to the Detroit Metro Times, multiple police detectives confirmed that this policy exists, including at the trial.

    Again, Michigan residents enjoy the legal right to use a firearm to defend themselves and their property. But since Harvey complained first, investigators didn't give proper weight to Ra's side of the story. Bafflingly, the authorities decided that Ra wasn't engaged in self-defense at all but was instead engaged in the commission of a crime. She was charged with two counts of felony assault: one against Harvey, and one against Harvey's daughter, who was in Harvey's car.

    Ra was arguably denied the right to a fair trial as well:
    The jury was told the trial would likely only last two days, but it didn't begin deliberations until midway through Thursday—the fourth day. The forecast called for a blizzard on Friday, and the judge told the jury that it would return to court regardless of the weather if it didn't arrive at a decision. [[It's worth noting that the court did close on Friday.)
    Burton-Harris adds that the jury wasn't aware that Ra would receive a two-year prison sentence were she found guilty of any of the felony firearm charges because juries aren't informed of mandatory sentences.
    When the jury began deliberations with the snowstorm looming, it could be heard hotly debating the case from the jury room, Burton-Harris says. Still, it quickly came to a decision—guilty on one charge of felonious assault against Harvey, acquittal on a second felonious assault charge against Harvey's daughter, and guilty on the felony firearm possession charge.
    This decision obviously makes no sense. How could a jury conclude that Ra's self-defense explanation was sufficient to dismiss the charge of assaulting Harvey's daughter, but insufficient to dismiss the charge of assaulting Harvey herself? A jury looking forward to a three-day weekend was apparently disinclined to consider this contradiction.

    Michigan's mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines require a two-year sentence, which means that Ra will have to give birth in jail. Her attorneys asked the court to delay her sentence until after the pregnancy was over, but this request was denied.

    The Sierra Club and Black Lives Matter have expressed serious concerns about how this case was handled. Given that it involves a legal gun owner protecting her family and her property, it would be nice to see the National Rifle Association speak up as well. Ra doesn't belong in prison for any length of time, let alone the next two years of her young children's lives.

    https://reason.com/blog/2018/05/02/b...birth-in-priso

  2. #2
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    Shit's crazy right? LOL!!!!

  3. #3
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    How did that even make it to trial, let alone wind up with her being convicted?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jerry Oz View Post
    How did that even make it to trial, let alone wind up with her being convicted?
    I don't know. I do know that a few years ago, the Detroit police broke in, raided a house. It was a "No Knock" raid so they just rammed the door down, came in and shot a little 7 year old girl who was asleep in her grandmother's lap in the head! It turned out that they were at the wrong address!

    The cop went to trial and was cleared.

  5. #5
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    If I recall, there was a case where some cops busted into a house in Georgia when one threw a flash bang grenade into a baby's crib and permanently scarred the kid that was sleeping in it. The courts determined that the cop had no responsibility to take more care in the situation to prevent such gross collateral damage. There was another when they broke into some old couple's home in the middle of the night, waking them up. The old man grabbed a shotgun was blown away by SWAT. It was the wrong house. The Supreme Court affirmed the fact that even if they screwed up, the police have no liability in such cases and are permitted to protect themselves.

    And then, there's what's going on in Barstow, California in the past three weeks:
    Police Kill Black Man With Barrage of Bullets Outside California Walmart

    By MATT STEVENSAPRIL 19, 2018


    Photo

    Mourners in Barstow, Calif., protested the killing of Diante Yarber this month.CreditJames Quigg/Daily Press, via Associated PressThe police in a small inland California city are facing criticism after they opened fire on a car in a Walmart parking lot this month, killing the black man who had been driving and injuring one of his three passengers.
    Video of the shooting in Barstow, recorded by a pedestrian and later posted by a racial justice activist, appears to show officers with the Barstow Police Department firing more than a dozen rounds. A lawyer for the family of the man who was killed, Diante Yarber, 26, estimated that the police had fired about 30 rounds.

    The shooting, on April 5, has ignited protests in Barstow, about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, among residents seeking answers from the police, according to The Daily Press of Victorville. The video, posted on Facebook by the activist Shaun King, has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

    The Yarber family’s lawyer, S. Lee Merritt, said he planned to sue the City of Barstow and its Police Department by the end of the week.

    “This is the worst case of excessive force that I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Merritt said. “From the sheer volume of rounds that were shot at the car, to the circumstances surrounding it.”tory


    Continue reading the main stor“Unless you know they are actively engaging you with gunfire, its hard to justify shooting at four people, when, at best, the driver was committing the criminal act,” he continueMr. Yarber, he said, “wasn’t complying — and they decided to execute him for it.”

    Photo

    Mr. Yarber, 26. CreditFamily PhotoNeither a Barstow police captain nor a city spokesman returned a phone message on Wednesday night seeking comment.

    In two separate news releases — one provided by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and the other from the Barstow police — the authorities say that the shooting occurred around 11 a.m.

    Barstow police officers had responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot of the Walmart, the authorities said. They believed the driver was “a subject wanted for questioning in a recent crime involving a stolen vehicle,” one of the releases said.

    When the officers got to the Walmart, they found the car, a black Mustang, in the parking lot. The car had been moving, but came to a stop in a parking spot. The officers got out of their vehicles and told the driver of the Mustang to do the same, the authorities said.
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    In their release, the Barstow police said Mr. Yarber first “began accelerating his vehicle in reverse, striking a police vehicle.”

    “The vehicle then accelerated forward toward the officers, and then accelerated in reverse toward officers and striking another patrol vehicle,” the Barstow police said. “Afterward, an officer-involved shooting ensued.”

    The video posted by Mr. King shows the shooting in real time for a total of about seven seconds. Mr. Merritt confirmed that the video is of the shooting involving Mr. Yarber.

    It was not clear what happened before the recording started or after it ended. In the video, rapid gunfire can be heard as a black car appears to drive slowly in reverse.

    A version of the same video that has been slowed down appears to show the car beginning to back up, just before two gunshots ring out; almost immediately after, the car appears to back into or swipe what looks like a police vehicle. [[Mr. Merritt claims that the police vehicle moved into the Mustang’s path.) The gunfire continues in rapid succession.

    Mr. Yarber, who Mr. Merritt said had been struck repeatedly, was pronounced dead at the scene, the authorities said. Another passenger, a woman identified by Mr. Merritt as Mariana Tafoya, was also struck by gunfire and was airlifted to a hospital, the police said. Mr. Merritt said she had been struck in the abdomen and the leg.

    The two other passengers, both men, got out of the Mustang during the episode, and one of them sustained what the authorities called “minor injuries.”

    The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s specialized investigations division is investigating the shooting. A department spokeswoman referred questions about it to the Barstow police.

    The episode occurred just weeks after the police in Sacramento fatally shot another black man, Stephon Clark. Mr. Clark’s death set off marches across that city.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/u...-shooting.html

  6. #6
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    I remember the case about the elderly man and the shotgun. If you want to know about probably the saddest and most well known case of "address" Google Eleanor Bumpus........

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    There are so many of these cases and they know full well that members of the KKK and other white supremacists groups have joined police depts. all over the country and they do nothing about it!

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    That's true. It wasn't widely reported, but one of the five cops killed by that asshole sovereign citizen a couple years ago had a lot of Aryan Nation images up on his social media walls. He even had a tattoo of an Aryan cross on his hand.

    I keep hearing our police chief talk about the community "trusting" the police but she makes excuses for her cops when they step over the line. This week in Columbus, there was a video that showed a cop kicking a handcuffed compliant suspect in the head as he lay on the ground. The news just announced that the cop who did it was kicked off [[not fired) of another police force eight years ago after he beat a teenager who was in custody. It's like it's a game.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jerry Oz View Post
    That's true. It wasn't widely reported, but one of the five cops killed by that asshole sovereign citizen a couple years ago had a lot of Aryan Nation images up on his social media walls. He even had a tattoo of an Aryan cross on his hand.

    I keep hearing our police chief talk about the community "trusting" the police but she makes excuses for her cops when they step over the line. This week in Columbus, there was a video that showed a cop kicking a handcuffed compliant suspect in the head as he lay on the ground. The news just announced that the cop who did it was kicked off [[not fired) of another police force eight years ago after he beat a teenager who was in custody. It's like it's a game.
    Jerry, wasn't in Columbus where a kid was shot running from the police? He was running through backyards I think. Oh, did I ever mention that the former Mayor of Columbus, Coleman that his Dad use to be my family doctor? LOL! The World is so, so small.

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    It probably was. I remember a guy called the cops when someone broke into his house. He grabbed his gun and chased the guy away. When the cops arrived, they saw him in his yard and instead of chase the perp, who was still in sight, they shot the home owner because he was carrying a gun. Three years ago, an undercover cop shot a kid standing on a corner, presumably selling drugs. Witnesses said the cop never self-identified but the only witness the "investigators" listened to was his partner. The same cop was caught on tape stomping on the head of a handcuffed suspect last Summer. The chief suspended him one day but the safety director overruled her and fired him. It went to arbitration and the pig got his job back with one day's suspension. It's crazy. None are held accountable.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jerry Oz View Post
    It probably was. I remember a guy called the cops when someone broke into his house. He grabbed his gun and chased the guy away. When the cops arrived, they saw him in his yard and instead of chase the perp, who was still in sight, they shot the home owner because he was carrying a gun. Three years ago, an undercover cop shot a kid standing on a corner, presumably selling drugs. Witnesses said the cop never self-identified but the only witness the "investigators" listened to was his partner. The same cop was caught on tape stomping on the head of a handcuffed suspect last Summer. The chief suspended him one day but the safety director overruled her and fired him. It went to arbitration and the pig got his job back with one day's suspension. It's crazy. None are held accountable.
    The cop that killed Tamir Rice joined the Cleveland Police Dept from another dept.

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