Tag Archives: torture

Aaron Swartz Day 2014, Aaron's Grand Jury, Audio, Video

Brewster Kahle: Plea Bargaining and Torture

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Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive’s Aaron Swartz Day Celebration, San Francisco, California, November 8, 2014

Audio Clip:

Link to video of Brewster’s talk (Direct link to Brewster’s talk from within the complete video of all speakers from the event.)

The transcript below has been edited slightly for readability.

Complete transcription:

Welcome to the Internet Archive. I’m Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian here, and welcome to our home.

For those that haven’t been here before… The little blinking lights on the 5 petabytes of servers that are in the back, are actually serving millions of people a day, and being kind of a digital library. The little sculptures around are people who have worked at the Internet Archive, including one of Aaron Swartz up toward the front. In the front because he was the architect and lead builder of OpenLibrary.org, which is an Internet Archive site. And also worked on putting Pacer into the Internet Archive (RECAP), Google Books public domain books, and other projects that we’ve worked on over the years. So with this, we’d like to say, “Happy Birthday Aaron, we miss you.”

I’m going to talk about a cheery subject: Plea Bargaining and Torture. When I was trying to think through the approach that was used to bring down Aaron Swartz and to try to make a symbol out of him, I typed these words into my favorite search engine (“Plea Bargaining and Torture) and back came a paper on the subject, that I am going to summarize and also elaborate on.

I found this wonderful paper, by a Yale Law Professor, in 1978, comparing European Torture Law and current Plea Bargaining. This might sound a little bit far fetched, but stick with me for a minute.

European Torture Law, I had no idea, was actually a regulated, implemented, part of their court system. It started in 1215, when they stopped going and saying “you’re guilty because God said so.” They had to come up with something else. So they basically had to come up with something that was *that sure.* And they said you either had to have two eyewitnesses, or, you had to confess. And this was actually an unworkable system. And instead of changing that, they tried to force confessions, and they had a whole system for how to do it. They had basically how much regulation, how much leg clamping you had. How many minutes of this, for different crimes.

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So you can see in this diagram, and you can see this guy getting tortured here, but he is surrounded by court clerks. So, it’s not this, sort of, the Spanish Inquisition, as Monty Python would have it. This was actually a smart people state-sponsored system that was trying to fix a bug in their court system, in that it was too hard to convict people. So they tortured them into confessions.

Sound familiar?

So, in the United States, now, we have between 90 and 99 percent. It depends whether you are in Federal or State court, or which county you’re in. 97% of all convictions at the Federal level are done with plea bargaining.

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So you have basically no chance of having a jury before your peers. This is basically a threat system. They actually did studies in Florida where they jacked up the sentences, and the number of people that plea bargained went up. It’s a system to handle convictions outside of the Court System. Outside of the Jury System. Unfortunately, our Constitution actually has something to say about this that’s in pretty direct contradiction:

“The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury;…”
– Article III.2 U.S. Constitution (http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html)

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But as another thinker on this has said, basically Plea Bargains have made jury trials obsolete.

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When Aaron Swartz was threatened with 35 years, it’s got to have hit a young, idealistic person pretty hard. 35 years for downloading books too fast from the library? This doesn’t make any sense. Yet that’s a pretty big threat, and may have had something to do with it. When this sort of played out, after his death, I just found that these quotations notable enough that I’m going to sort of, bore you, with putting them up.

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So he was faced with 35 years, thanks to Carmen Ortiz. Wonderful. And the Justice Department had never intended for this. No more than a three, four, or potentially five-month range,” said the top attorney in the United States. And we shouldn’t really judge what the prosecutors were doing, based on what they threatened him (with), just by what they were going to do if he pled guilty.

So I think we’ve got a real problem with this. So what’s to do?

Well, I say we should make some noise about it. I think some of the reasons that we don’t make noise about it is it doesn’t happen to our friends. This sort of thing happens to a lot of “other people.” But, in this case, it did happen to our friend, and I think that it’s important for us to respond to it.

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I think John Oliver has been on a roll, in terms of some of these unbelievable sorts of diatribes of going and actually doing research and bringing it in front of people in an interesting way. I’d also like to pitch: “is there a documentarian in the house, say?” That we should go, and really go and put this type of behavior in front of more people.

There are others that are trying by not pleading, but it has its downsides. Basically, gum up the courts. At least for me, I take off my… I don’t go through the surveillance device in the airports, and yes it gums them up a little bit, and I feel like that’s my part to help. Would I actually, if it came right down to it, not plead? To help move this forward? I don’t know. By enlarge, we’ve got ridiculous catch-all laws, and we’ve got sentences that are just outrageous, and these have just got to come under control, as well as let’s actually hire some judges.

Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manning Responds to United Nations Rapporteur’s Call For Her Release

For Immediate Release: 8AM EST, January 2, 2020

Contact: Andy Stepanian, 631.291.3010, Andy@sparrowmedia.net

Chelsea Manning Responds to United Nations Rapporteur’s Call For Her Release

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture: Release Chelsea Manning immediately

Alexandria, VA — This week Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment published a letter to the U.S. government dated November 1, 2019, condemning the incarceration of Chelsea Manning, calling such coercive confinement “torture” in violation of international law, and recommending her immediate release. He also recommends that any disproportionate fines levied against her be cancelled. The letter was made public following a customary 60-day window pending any government response.

Said S.R. Melzer:

“…I recommend that Ms. Manning’s current deprivation of liberty be promptly reviewed in light of the United States’ international human rights obligations. Should my assessment regarding its purely coercive purpose be accurate, I recommend that Ms. Manning be released without further delay, and that any fines disproportionate to the gravity of any offence she may have committed be cancelled or reimbursed.”

The letter was announced by Melzer via Twitter late December 30, 2019, stating:

“…the continued detention of @xychelsea is not a lawful sanction but an open-ended, progressively severe coercive measure amounting to torture & should be discontinued & abolished without delay”

In the letter, Melzer also condemns the United States’ practice of what he considers to be “prolonged coercive confinement” which “involves the intentional infliction of progressively severe mental and emotional suffering for the purposes of coercion and intimidation at the order of judicial authorities.” He added that “victims of prolonged coercive confinement have demonstrated post-traumatic symptoms and other severe and persistent mental and physical health consequences.”

 

According to Ms. Manning:

“My long-standing objection to the immoral practice of throwing people in jail without charge or trial, for the sole purpose of forcing them to testify before a secret, government-run investigative panel, remains strong.

“Nearly every other legal system in the world condemns coercive confinement, and long ago replaced secret grand juries with public hearings. I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards. Regardless, even knowing I am very likely to stay in jail for an even longer time, I’m never backing down.”

 

Moira Meltzer-Cohen, Manning’s attorney, said:

“Special Rapporteur Melzer has issued a legally rigorous condemnation of the practice of coercive confinement, and of Ms. Manning’s confinement in particular. While the United States has so far failed to live up to its human rights obligations, I remain hopeful that the government will reconsider its policies in light of the UN’s admonition.

“In any case, there can be no further doubt that Ms. Manning has the courage of her convictions, and will never agree to testify before a grand jury, even at great personal cost. As S.R. Melzer notes, since her confinement is not having the intended coercive effect, she must be released.”

Although S.R. Melzer has requested a clarifying response from the United States, he makes clear his settled conclusion that the practice of coercive confinement violates international human rights law, and recommends Ms. Manning’s immediate release pending any response or investigation. In the two months since the letter was conveyed to the United States, Ms. Manning has remained confined, and the daily fines imposed upon her have continued to accrue.

###

Note to Editors:

  1. Definition of “torture” — as outlined in Article one of the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), as described by S.R. Nils Melzer in his letter:

“torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity, it does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions”. (Note: Melzer clarifies, in the letter, on page 2, that he does not think such practices fall under CAT’s “lawful sanctions” exception.)

  1. List of international human rights laws that the U.S. practice of coercive confinement is in violation of, as described by S.R. Nils Melzer in his letter:
  • Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) (Articles 1, 2, 15 and 16)
  • International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); ratified by the United States of America in 1994 and 1992 respectively (Articles 2, 7 and 9)
  • Human Rights Council Resolution 16/23
  • Human Rights Council Resolution 34/19
  • Human Rights Council Resolution 25/13
  • General Assembly Resolution 68/156