These were days of marches.

Huge marches. 

That wrapped themselves around the capital, Caracas

And, in particular, the higher-class eastern side of the city.

It was April 2002.

President Hugo Chavez had been elected four years before. 

He’d promised a revolution. A Bolivarian revolution—named after South America’s greatest Independence leader, Simon Bolivar.

And Chavez decreed dozens of laws hoping to turn the tides on the concentration of wealth in the country. They would hand large estates over to small farmers and redirect the profit from the state oil company to social services.

But the businesses and the elites did not want Chavez’s revolution.

Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce, Fedecamaras, led strikes, marches, and protests.

And now, those marching in the streets promised to take down the government. 

Some even carried the American flag.

But as they approached the presidential palace toward the west of the city, shots began to ring down upon them.

Snipers sat high on rooftops firing into the crowd. 

One person fell. And then another. 

18 deaths. Almost 70 injured.

The news cameras captured the chaos. The people cowering. 

They filmed people being carried away. 

They said the supporters and troops of president Hugo Chavez were firing on unarmed protesters.

This was the message spread on the mainstream TV channels across Venezuela and abroad.

The message that spread like wildfire.

But those carrying out this bloodbath were not the supporters and troops of president Hugo Chavez.

They were members of the metropolitan police. And they were carrying out a coup.

Rebelling officers in the Venezuelan military used the killings as the pretext to detain the president

And accuse him of ordering the massacre.

The leaders of the coup said there was a vacuum of power. They said Chavez had resigned. 

Pedro Carmona, the head of Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce, swore himself in as the de facto president.

Flanked by supporters, Carmona, dissolved the National Assembly, the Supreme Court. 

He suspended the attorney general, elected mayors and governors.

Carmona and his allies would rule the government on their own.

His de facto government led a violent witch hunt after Chavez government officials.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press looked away and played cartoon reruns.

But the people were not having it. 

Those from Venezuela’s poorest communities had seen their lives improve under the short four years since the election of president Hugo Chavez.

And they had seen their hopes dashed by the unelected leaders of the country’s business class and ruling elites.

So they descended from the hillsides of the poorest communities across Caracas and amassed outside of Miraflores, the presidential palace. 

They refused to recognize Pedro Carmona’s de facto government. 

They would not leave until Chavez had returned.

And that is what happened…

On April 13, Chavez’s presidential guard expelled Carmona and the coup leaders from the presidential palace. Pressure from both the people and loyal military forces led to the collapse of the coup government. It was unprecedented. The people and the military united together to defend their democratically elected leader. 

They rescued president Chavez

Who was flown back to Miraflores and returned to power.

The people would not be silent.

The people had overturned a coup.

###

Hi folks. Im your host Michael Fox.

Today in Venezuela, April 13, is remembered as El Dia de la Dignidad, the Day of Dignity. A day of grassroots resistance.

Some people in Venezuela are still confused about what happened between April 11 and April 13, 2002. The media manipulations was so great that it left a tremendous legacy of confusion.

But there have been in-depth investigations, including the documentaries, The Revolution Will Not be Televised and Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre. This last film, I actually helped to translate and narrated into English more than 20 years ago. If you are interested in watching or learning more, I’ll add links in the show notes. 

This is episode 19 of Stories of Resistance, a new podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, leave a review, or tell a friend. You can support my work and find exclusive pictures and background information on my patreon… patreon.com/mfox.

As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.

On April 13, Chavez’s presidential guard expelled the coup leaders and returned Chavez to power. 

Pressure from both the people and loyal military forces led to the collapse of the coup government. The people and the military united together to defend their democratically elected leader.

If you’re interested in more background, you can check out the following documentaries:

The Revolution Will Not be Televised (2003)

Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre (2004): Host Michael Fox helped to translate and narrate this documentary in English.
In English: https://vimeo.com/40502430
In Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9jE1c0XPE

This is episode 19 of Stories of Resistance — a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

France’s Supreme Court has overturned a judgment imprisoning pretrial in mainland France Kanak pro-independence leader Christian Tein, who is widely regarded as a political prisoner, reports Libération.

Tein, who is head of the CCAT (Field Action Coordination Unit) in New Caledonia was in August elected president of the main pro-independence umbrella group Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS).

He has been accused by the French authorities of “masterminding” the violence that spread across New Caledonia in May.

• READ MORE: Can New Caledonia’s first female congress president bridge the divide amid civil unrest?
• Kanak activist Christian Tein’s imprisonment reversed by France’s highest court
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The deadly unrest is estimated to have caused €2.2 billion (NZ$3.6 billion) in infrastructural damage, resulting in the destruction of nearly 800 businesses and about 20,000 job losses.

In this new legal twist, the jailing in mainland France of Tein and another activist, Steve Unë, was ruled “invalid” by the court.

“On Tuesday, October 22, the Court of Cassation in Paris overturned the July 5 ruling of the investigating chamber of the Noumea Court of Appeal, which had confirmed his detention in mainland France,” reports NC la 1ère TV.

“The Kanak independence activist, imprisoned in Mulhouse since June, will soon have to appear before a judge again who will decide his fate,” the report said.

Kanak activists’ cases reviewed
The court examined the appeal of five Kanak pro-independence activists — including Tein – who had challenged their detention in mainland France on suspicion of having played a role in the unrest in New Caledonia, reports RFI News.

This appeal considered in particular “the decision by the judges in Nouméa to exile the defendants without any adversarial debate, and the conditions under which the transfer was carried out,” according to civil rights attorney François Roux, one of the defendants’ lawyers.

“Many of them are fathers, cut off from their children,” the lawyer said.

The transfer of five activists to mainland France at the end of June was organised overnight using a specially chartered plane, according to Nouméa public prosecutor Yves Dupas, who has argued that it was necessary to continue the investigations “in a calm manner”.

Roux has denounced the “inhumane conditions” in which they were transported.

“They were strapped to their seats and handcuffed throughout the transfer, even to go to the toilet, and they were forbidden to speak,” he said.

Left-wing politicians in France have also slammed the conditions of detainees, who they underline were deported more than 17,000 km from their home for resisting “colonial oppression”.

Total of seven accused
A total of seven activists from the CCAT separatist coalition are accused by the French government of orchestrating deadly riots earlier this year and are currently incarcerated – the five in various prisons in France and two in New Caledonia itself.

They are under investigation for, among other things, complicity in attempted murder, organised gang theft with a weapon, organised gang destruction of another person’s property by a means dangerous to people and participation in a criminal association with a view to planning a crime.

Two CCAT activists who were initially imprisoned have since been placed under house arrest in mainland France.

Tein, born in 1968, has consistently denied having incited violence, claiming to be a political prisoner.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A magistrate judge ordered a legal journalist on June 20, 2024, not to publish the name of a plaintiff that had mistakenly appeared on court documents in a revenge porn case. The ruling was overturned a month later.

Eugene Volokh — co-founder of the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, a law professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — was singled out in the ruling by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth S. Chestney as the only person who was barred from using the plaintiff’s name.

The case, initially filed in 2019, involves a woman who ended an extramarital affair with a man, who she said then posted revenge porn to several adult websites. The case was sealed to protect her privacy. She and the defendant later settled, but the question of whether the case was improperly sealed remained.

Volokh told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he initially noticed the case in an alert from Westlaw, a database of legal documents, and thought it raised First Amendment questions that he might want to write about, given his expertise as a free speech scholar.

Even though the case was sealed, the names of both the plaintiff and defendant were published in an opinion available on Westlaw, along with other documents that should have been sealed under the judge’s order. It’s not clear exactly why they were published, but Volokh said it appeared to be an error.

“It was just a simple mistake,” he told the Tracker.

Volokh moved to intervene in the case and have it unsealed. Chestney, the magistrate judge, agreed on July 18, 2022, to let him intervene but ruled that Volokh could not write about the case until a decision was made on unsealing the case.

“Professor Volokh may not blog or write about this case until any renewed motion to unseal has been granted,” the ruling ordered.

Volokh appealed the case to District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, who on Aug. 3, 2022, vacated the prior restraint language and said the entire case should be unsealed. Volokh then published the plaintiff’s name in a blog post in August 2022 since, he said, it was also the name of the case.

The plaintiff appealed the unsealing of the case to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that it should be partially sealed with certain personal information redacted.

The case then returned to Chestney to determine what exactly should be redacted and whether the plaintiff could retroactively use a pseudonym, Jane Doe.

In her June 20, 2024, ruling, Chestney ruled in favor of the retroactive pseudonym.

“And then to my surprise, she says that even though I don't have to take down past writings that mention the plaintiff’s name, I cannot use her name in future writings,” Volokh told the Tracker.

The ruling stated: “Professor Volokh may not, however, publicly disclose Plaintiff’s name or personal identifying information in any future writings, speeches, or other public discourse.”

Volokh again appealed and on July 16 Rodriguez vacated that prior restraint language.

“The order restricts Volokh from sharing information that is publicly available through his prior writings but allows for any of Volokh’s readers to share that same information,” Rodriguez wrote. “As such, the language at issue here is an unconstitutional prior restraint.”

Volokh detailed the ruling in a post on The Volokh Conspiracy.

The plaintiff could still appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit.

Volokh said he was deciding whether to go back to his August 2022 article and redact the name.

But whether he uses her name in future articles, he added, should be a matter of editorial discretion, not a judge’s ruling.

“I think it’s important that this be a decision for the individual journalist, the individual speaker, and not something that they’re ordered to do,” Volokh told the Tracker.

Volokh said he sees this case as an example of the system working. But he noted that he was uniquely positioned to fight these instances of prior restraint.

“I should also acknowledge that maybe if I weren’t a law professor, if I weren’t a specialist on the subject, if I had to pay a lawyer to challenge the prior restraints, maybe the situation might not have come out as well,” he told the Tracker.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

A Papua New Guinea MP, Peter Isoaimo, who had been ousted by the National Court in an alleged bribery case, has been reinstated by the Supreme Court on appeal.

A three-member Supreme Court bench found that the National Court had erred in finding that Kairuku MP Isoaimo had committed bribery and ousting him in a Court of Disputed Returns trial in June last year.

The National Court judge, Justice Teresa Berrigan, then ordered a byelection. However, this was overturned last Friday on appeal.

• READ MORE: Other PNG politics reports

Outside court, Isoaimo’s lawyer George Kult confirmed that Isoaimo can now return to Parliament and continue serving the people of Kairuku district in Central province.

Justice Susan Purdon-Sully handed down the decision on behalf of the two other judges, Panuel Mogish and Jacinta Murray. She said the earlier decision by Justice Teresa Berrigan last year had been quashed.

The three-member bench found that the petition had a “pleading deficiency” in that the bribery was done with the knowledge and authority of Isoaimo and that he had aided his campaign coordinator Maso Makuri in committing the offence.

They found that the petitioner, Paru Aihi, had failed to notify Isoaimo of the facts of the allegation which he could have responded to. They upheld Isoaimo’s appeal in that Justice Berrigan erred on mixed law and fact.

‘Basic yet fundamental’
“Pleadings draw evidence which is the most basic yet fundamental feature of a petition,” Justice Sully read.

“Where an allegation is serious in nature the onus is on the petitioner to prove to the entire satisfaction of the court.”

The judges found that the failure to plead facts of the allegation contravened section 208 (a) of the Organic Law on National and Local Level Government Elections.

Outside court, a teary-eyed Isoaimo said it had been embarrassing to deal with the wrong National Court decision which had then “seemed like the truth”.

However, he said his two decades of reputation built through parliamentary leadership had gained him loyal supporters.

“I am thankful for my supporters, now it’s time to get back to work as we have a lot to do,” he said.

Isoaimo is a member of the National Alliance and will bolster the NA’s ranks in government.

Melyne Baroi is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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As members of the New York City Council convened last month to discuss the Law Department’s budget, they asked the city’s top lawyer to account for the rising cost of police misconduct.

The topic had been driving headlines for weeks. In February, an analysis of payout data had shown that the city shelled out $121 million in NYPD-related settlements and judgments in 2022, a five-year high. Weeks later, officials announced that millions more in taxpayer dollars would go toward what lawyers for demonstrators called a “historic” deal to settle claims involving the NYPD’s violent response to racial justice protests in 2020. Of particular concern to some members of the council’s Committee on Governmental Operations was reporting by ProPublica and New York Magazine on how city lawyers aggressively fight these kinds of misconduct claims, even in the face of compelling evidence that officers crossed the line.

“I found it really troubling,” said Council Member Lincoln Restler of ProPublica’s reporting, which focused on the unit that handles the most high-profile police misconduct cases, the Special Federal Litigation Division, or Special Fed. “And I am concerned about the approach of the Law Department over many years.”

In response, Sylvia Hinds-Radix, the head of the Law Department, told Restler and the committee that she “vociferously” disagreed with any characterization that agency lawyers fought claims tooth and nail “without evaluating what is before us.”

“We have the obligation to defend those things we do,” she said. “And the cases that need to be settled, we evaluate them and settle them.”

Left unmentioned in Hinds-Radix’s March 22 testimony was any reference to Jawaun Fraser, whose case provided an almost textbook example of her department’s hardball approach, a strategy that confounded even the judge overseeing the lawsuit. Just a day earlier, a federal jury in Manhattan had awarded Fraser $2 million after city lawyers spent the previous three years fighting him in civil court.

Fraser had sued New York and three NYPD detectives after spending two years in prison on a robbery conviction that was later overturned. A jury found not just that officers had fabricated evidence against him but that the city itself was liable for massive failures in NYPD training. Yet for years, city lawyers had treated it as what’s called a “no-pay” case, steadfastly refusing to settle while labeling Fraser a “drug dealer” who was unworthy of “a dime.”

They maintained that position even as Fraser’s lawyers revealed numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the arresting officers’ own testimonies — and as evidence mounted that the NYPD had, for decades, failed to properly train its 35,000-officer force on their legal obligations to disclose certain material, like past lawsuits, that could impact officers’ credibility in court. That violation flew in the face of bedrock legal protections codified by Supreme Court rulings from a half-century ago, beginning with the marquee 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, which requires the government to turn over information favorable to the accused.

Amid the revelations, the senior district court judge overseeing the case took the rare step of declaring that she’d “never understood why this was a no-pay case, and I understand it less now.” The judge, Colleen McMahon, went on to say that in her 22 years on the bench, she’d never seen documentation of the city’s constitutional failures “like the evidence I’ve heard in this case.”

“I am pretty appalled by what I have heard,” the judge said.

A Law Department spokesperson defended Special Fed’s litigation of Fraser’s lawsuit, saying in a statement that after evaluating “all the facts and evidence” agency lawyers “challenged this case all the way to trial.”

“While we are disappointed with the verdict, we respect it,” said department spokesperson Nick Paolucci.

But Thomas Giovanni, who served as a top official in the Law Department from 2014 until last December, said the agency’s police defense practice too often seeks to justify misconduct after the fact, rather than proactively identifying problems, settling them early and pushing its client to reform.

“Are we the oncologist,” he asked of the city lawyer, “or are we the janitor?”

Some civil rights lawyers in the city say the Law Department’s conduct in the Fraser case suggests the latter.

Fraser’s civil lawsuit centered on a botched buy-and-bust operation that NYPD narcotics officers conducted in a Manhattan public housing project on Oct. 21, 2014 — and the lawsuit history of the detectives who played key roles in Fraser’s arrest.

In sworn filings, the police said Fraser confronted an undercover police officer that day, robbing him of a fake New York state license and $20 in drug buy money. Fraser, then 18, denied this, saying that the officer offered up his ID as proof that he wasn’t a cop, and that the detectives framed Fraser for robbery after he merely took a photo of it.

Even though no drugs or buy money were discovered on Fraser that day, he was charged based on the detectives’ claims that he stole the undercover officer’s ID. The case hinged on the officers’ testimony versus Fraser’s, and a jury eventually convicted him of a robbery charge. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

What that jury didn’t know, and what Fraser’s appellate lawyers only discovered years after his conviction, was that six officers involved in his arrest had been named in a total of 35 civil lawsuits. Yet Fraser’s defense lawyer said he only received two cases from a prosecutor ahead of trial — a lack of disclosure that would later prompt a judge to overturn Fraser’s conviction in 2019. The following year he filed a lawsuit in civil court seeking accountability — and compensation — for the actions of the NYPD detectives who had put him behind bars.

In her opening statement last month, though, Special Fed attorney Caroline McGuire’s pitch to jurors was that Fraser was actually guilty of the robbery and was now trying to “trick you into awarding him money.” She pointed to comments Fraser had made to a parole board in which he appeared to accept responsibility for his “crime” — a position Fraser said he only took after older inmates counseled him to express remorse if he wanted to get paroled.

McGuire argued that Fraser had been lucky to get his conviction overturned, going so far as to say that his own defense lawyer was partly at fault for the whole ordeal because he hadn’t looked up lawsuits against the officers “despite the fact that it would have taken him only five minutes.”

McMahon stopped her. “My first instruction of law, under the Brady rule, a defense lawyer has no obligation to look for lawsuits,” the judge explained.

“You had better watch it,” she warned McGuire.

After the city lawyer finished, the judge went even further, excusing the jury and summoning to the podium the chief of Special Fed, Patricia Miller, who was watching from the gallery.

“Ms. Miller, do you have an explanation for why one of your assistants would come into my courtroom and suggest that a defense lawyer has an obligation to go look up material that he doesn’t have any obligation under Brady to look up?” she asked.

Miller told the judge that McGuire hadn’t intended to mislead the jury and was in fact trying to make a point about the relevance of the lawsuits — an argument McGuire’s co-counsel then reiterated. But the judge rejected the city’s position entirely: “I’m here to tell you what came out of Ms. McGuire’s mouth was not permissible,” McMahon said.

Over the next week, Fraser’s lawyers pointed out multiple inconsistencies in the various police accounts of Fraser’s arrest, casting doubt on the official narrative of events. Among them: The undercover officer claimed that Fraser had stolen his ID, but no officer testified seeing a detective recover it from Fraser. In fact, only a photocopy of it was later submitted as evidence.

Fraser’s lawyers also elicited testimony that went to several officers’ credibility, showing that the undercover officer and another detective had never told the prosecutor in Fraser’s case about a combined eight lawsuits they’d been named in, which alleged false arrest and other civil rights violations, and which settled for $246,500 in total. (The district attorney’s office, which has its own obligation to search for such material, also conducted an incomplete search in Fraser’s case, failing to turn up all the lawsuits the office knew about, a prosecutor testified in Fraser’s civil trial.)

As it turned out, the NYPD itself had for decades failed to train its employees on their legal duties to inform the people they arrest of important information that might help their cases. Thousands of pages of internal training materials turned over in the Fraser case revealed that it wasn’t until 2014 — 51 years after Brady was decided and only after New York’s highest court affirmed that records of civil lawsuits had to be turned over — that the NYPD put in writing officers’ disclosure obligations. And even then, the department at first mischaracterized them, not clarifying its instructions until 2017 to include not just information which could exonerate an accused person, but also material that goes to officers' own credibility, such as civil lawsuits.

The failure of basic disclosure became all the more remarkable when Fraser’s lawyers learned that the department maintained an extensive database of civil lawsuits against officers — though it would remain largely inaccessible to the cops referenced in it, as well as to prosecutors.

A top NYPD lawyer in charge of the database testified that officers and assistant district attorneys interested in finding out about lawsuits could email her. To raise awareness about its existence, she started giving oral presentations to cops about their obligations to know their lawsuit histories beginning in 2014, instructing them about “Googling yourself.”

The supervisors who received those training sessions were then supposed to tell rank-and-file officers at roll calls ahead of their tours about their legal responsibilities, the NYPD lawyer said on the stand, a scenario that Judge McMahon likened to the 1980s police procedural “Hill Street Blues.”

“I’m flabbergasted by what I have heard in the last two days, I got to tell you, I’m flabbergasted,” McMahon said on March 17.

In response to all this, Special Fed’s closing arguments to the jury were fairly straightforward: If they believed that Fraser had committed the 2014 robbery, and thus hadn’t been framed, the rest was moot. To bolster their position, the attorneys returned to Fraser’s two parole board appearances in 2017 and his comments there, including what seemed to be an acknowledgement that he was dealing drugs on the day of his arrest.

By his own admission, Fraser had as a teenager sold crack. But he maintained at his civil trial that he’d given up the trade by the time of his arrest and was proud to have landed a job as a sheet metal union apprentice.

The jury believed Fraser, and after the weeklong trial deliberated for about a day before finding unanimously in his favor.

The city’s approach to the Fraser case may now cost taxpayers more than double what they would otherwise have been liable for.

Two years before the jury verdict, Fraser’s lawyers say, they offered to put the matter to rest for $1.6 million, inclusive of attorneys fees. “From then until time of trial, they told us they had no interest in discussing settlement,” said Joel Rudin, one of Fraser’s lawyers. When he asked his adversary at Special Fed why, the answer that came back was revealing. According to Rudin, the city lawyer said he had been told that “higher-ups had made a decision it was a no-pay case,” and that the NYPD “didn’t want to settle.”

While the NYPD can offer its opinion on proposed settlements to city lawyers, former Special Fed attorneys say the decision to offer a deal is exclusively theirs — and the city charter gives the city’s chief financial officer, the comptroller, the ultimate authority on whether to cut checks. (The Law Department did not address ProPublica’s questions about the settlement discussions in Fraser’s case.)

With attorneys’ fees, the total city cost in Fraser’s case could now jump to $4 million, including a total of $425,000 in punitive damages assigned to three officers in the case.

The NYPD did not say whether the detectives have faced any internal disciplinary action or changes to their duties. In a statement, a department spokesperson said officials are “disappointed in the verdict, and remain committed to meeting our disclosure obligations.” The police and law departments also noted that the NYPD has enhanced its efforts to raise awareness around discovery rules in the past decade and took steps to ensure that disclosures are “complete and timely.”

As for its approach to civil litigation, the Law Department “takes seriously its obligation to carefully evaluate the merits of each case and challenge claims at trial as necessary,” the agency spokesperson said.

But to Fraser’s lawyers and others in the city’s civil rights bar, Special Fed’s posture — and its apparent deference to the NYPD — helps enable the kind of police misconduct at the heart of cases like Fraser’s. A report released this month by the city comptroller found that the NYPD accounted for a third of all tort payouts citywide last fiscal year and that its settlement costs — $237.2 million — were the highest among all city agencies.

“There’s still this kind of dismissive approach” in the NYPD about being sued, said Michael Bloch, another of Fraser’s attorneys. “And that is a really fundamental problem that, unfortunately, I think is going to continue to result in people like Jawaun being falsely convicted of crimes.”

Indeed, the verdict in Fraser’s case also exposes the city to additional liability in future cases involving NYPD officers’ failure to turn over impeachment material. (Fraser’s lawyers have already identified at least three convictions that were overturned in recent years because of such disclosure failures.)

Meanwhile, prosecutors are also dealing with the fallout from the civil case.

Given the finding that the undercover officer and another detective had fabricated evidence in Fraser’s case, a spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said officials in a post-conviction review unit are examining current and past cases that have relied on the officers. Defendants in about 20 open cases brought by the city’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor are being notified of the jury’s verdict, and officials in that office are reviewing past cases as well, a spokesperson there said.

Both officers are still on the job. A lawyer for their union didn’t respond to questions.

For his part, Fraser said measuring cost is harder than tallying amounts on a verdict sheet. The whole ordeal forced him to leave New York, which he said is no longer “my happy place,” and where he is wary of the police. He now lives in quieter surroundings in suburban New Jersey. He has no plans to return to the city that he called home before he was imprisoned.

But the worst part by far was losing those formative years with his children. From his son’s first day of day care to his daughter’s first song and dance at school, these are times with his kids that he said he can never get back.

“Sometimes the kids don’t remember it, but I don’t even have that memory to tell them about it,” he said. “Because we didn’t get to do it, because I was incarcerated.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jake Pearson, ProPublica, and Mike Hayes for ProPublica.

As we mark International Women’s Day on March 8, we look at the criminalization of abortion with filmmaker Celina Escher, who directed the award-winning documentary Fly So Far about abortion in El Salvador, which has enforced an abortion ban since 1998, and dozens of people have been convicted and imprisoned after having miscarriages, stillbirths and other obstetric emergencies. On Monday, women’s rights activists called for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to condemn El Salvador in a case brought a decade ago by a woman, Beatriz, who died after being forced to carry a pregnancy although the fetus could not survive. Escher says El Salvador’s current policies amount to “torture for the women and girls” forced to bring nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term against their will.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This Sunday marks what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. But the landmark decision was overturned by the ultraconservative Supreme Court just over six months ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. The court’s removal of the right to safe, legal abortions has led to total abortion bans in 12 states. Meanwhile, the push to ensure access to abortion has spurred new legal challenges and greater reliance on the abortion pill mifepristone, as medication abortions account for more than half of all U.S. abortions. We get an update from Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent at The Nation, whose most recent piece looks at how cities and states are acting to limit the damage from Dobbs. “There are an untold number of people staying pregnant against their will, despite the best efforts of activists,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On the eve of this week’s U.S. midterm election, Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared to acknowledge for the first time that he tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Prigozhin, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin, issued a blunt statement on Monday that said, in part, “We have interfered, are interfering and will continue to interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way.”

Prigozhin wasn’t admitting anything the Department of Justice didn’t already know. Special counsel Robert Mueller had detailed his meddling efforts as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the election. In 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Prigozhin for engaging in “information warfare against the U.S.,” and he was placed on a list of individuals wanted by the FBI, with a $250,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. U.S. officials also obtained a “red notice” from Interpol, requesting that the international police organization’s members arrest him if he came into their jurisdiction.

In 2020, Interpol quietly withdrew the notice. The only announcement of the move came from one of Prigozhin’s companies, though without an explanation of why it happened. Interpol and the Department of Justice remained silent. But now a hacked Interpol document reviewed by The Intercept reveals that the organization’s oversight body determined that the red notice requested by the U.S. was of a “predominantly political character” — and a violation of Interpol’s principle of political neutrality.

A wanted notice, issued by the FBI, for Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Photo: FBI

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Keeping the red notice in place, the CCF concluded, “would have significant adverse implications for the neutrality” of Interpol.

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“Now about why we did it. We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012. … 50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass.”

Visitors attend the opening of the “PMC Wagner Centre” building, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, in St. Petersburg, on Nov. 4, 2022.

Photo: Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Interpol’s General Secretariat assessed the U.S. request for a red notice and found it to be valid; the CCF reversed that decision.

“Just because you are a democratic state, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can never fall foul of the rules.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller makes a statement about the Department of Justice’s investigation into Russian election interference, on May 29, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

Three decades after Claude Garrett was accused of committing arson to kill his girlfriend, Lorie Lance, a Tennessee judge vacated his conviction, finding him innocent of murder and opening the door to his release. In an order signed on May 6, Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Monte Watkins found that Garrett had made a “clear and convincing” case that if jurors had been aware of new scientific evidence at the time of his trial, they would never have convicted him of setting the 1992 fire that sent him to prison for life.

The order comes one month after an evidentiary hearing in Nashville in which leading fire experts testified that the case against Garrett was based on a rush to judgment, a shoddy investigation, and junk science. The hearing followed a reinvestigation of the case by the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office — spurred by The Intercept’s reporting — which concluded last year that it could no longer stand by its conviction. Lawyers from both the Tennessee Innocence Project and the DA’s Conviction Review Unit subsequently asked Watkins to vacate the conviction in light of new scientific evidence that dismantled the state’s original theory of the crime. “If the state had been armed with the information that we now have,” Conviction Review Unit Director Sunny Eaton told the judge, “we would not have indicted this case.”

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.