Trial begins this week in Superior Court for Capt. Gualter Botas, 39, of Pawtucket, and Lt. Kenneth J. Viveiros, 56, of North Providence. The two ACI Correctional Officers face seven counts and four counts, respectively, of simple assault involving four inmates.
Edward Fitzpatrick reports for the ProJo:
During Superior Court testimony on Wednesday and Thursday, former inmate Matthew S. Gumkowski testified that Botas “sucker-punched” him after he made a vulgar suggestion to the captain on June 8, 2005.
At the time, Gumkowski, 27, of East Greenwich, was serving sentences on drug delivery and weapon possession charges, and he was caught with a $20 bill at the minimum-security facility. Paper currency is prohibited at the prison unless inmates are on work release. […] Gumkowski said the punch landed near his right eye and cheek bone and he began bleeding. “It was split open,” he said. “He threw some napkins at me and said, ‘Go ahead and do something and I’ll call a code.’ […]
In February 2007, District Court Judge Madeline Quirk found Botas, Viveiros and correctional officer Ernest Spaziano guilty of assaulting Gonzalez, an inmate who was serving a sentence on a drug conviction. The three officers appealed their convictions to Superior Court. Spaziano, 40, of Burrillville, was the first to go to trial in Superior Court, and earlier this year he was found not guilty of assaulting Gonzalez. Now, Botas and Viveiros are receiving a Superior Court trial. Originally, the trial was to include allegations that Botas forced inmate Michael Walsh to taste his own feces.
But Michael J. Healey, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said Procaccini granted a defense motion to sever that allegation from the others. He said the judge told prosecutors they could either try all the allegations at once while not using evidence that Walsh was “allegedly made to eat his own feces” — or they could use that evidence and try the Walsh allegation separately. Prosecutors chose to have a separate trial.
So, yeah. COs, meet my friend, Justice. Play nice, boys.
The New York Times has
a piece today on a
RI Training School program that puts juvenile offenders to work restoring old New England diners through the
New Hope Diner Project. The youths restore the diners’ decrepit buildings, work the griddles and cash registers, and will (eventually, hopefully) manage the actual businesses sometime in the future. Pam Belluck writes:
“The whole poetry behind it is that these are kids who have been pretty much cast away emotionally and criminally, getting a chance to restore beloved eateries that have been cast off from society, too,” said Daniel Zilka, the acting director of the American Diner Museum, who rescues decrepit diners and helps run the project. “If they continue on the path that they’ve been moving upon they would end up in an adult correctional facility. This is probably their last opportunity.”
The offenders at the detention center, some as young as 13, have been convicted of crimes like sexual assault, armed robbery, breaking and entering, and drug offenses, and sentenced to serve 6 to 18 months. The center, the Rhode Island Training School, also has maximum security for offenders including murderers, but offenders qualify for the project only if they behave well enough to move to the regular detention population. They must also have, or nearly have, a high school equivalency diploma.
Work release is an important reentry mechanism for many offenders, but should these youths be encouraged to spend their time studying and developing more general skills before jumping into this line of work? Or do programs like this create order, stability, and options for young people with seemingly no way out?
Prisons are supposed to make us safer, right? Prisons are supposed to be places of rehabilitation, reflection, and order, right?
The AP reports:
CRANSTON, R.I. (AP) - An inmate at the state prison is facing a felony assault charge for allegedly beating another prisoner. George Ortiz is scheduled to be arraigned in District Court in Warwick on Monday afternoon on a charge of felony assault. He’s serving a sentence for domestic assault.
Ortiz is accused of assaulting Robert Bainter during a fight Friday in the prison’s minimum security building. Bainter was taken to Rhode Island Hospital with a serious head injury and was listed in critical condition. The Rhode Island State police are investigating the incident and say some kind of argument between the two led to the assault.
State police Maj. Stephen O’Donnell said yesterday that on July 4, Ortiz and Robert Bainter, 20, got into an argument, and then Ortiz hit Bainter in the head three times. Bainter fell, striking his head and suffering severe head trauma, O’Donnell said.
Apparently, Ortiz assaulted Bainter with a sock full of Combination Locks. Do our inmates have rights to life, safety, and security? Yes, and this tragedy underscores the ways in which the hollow austerity of the ACI does little to rehabilitate offenders and disregards the well-being of it inmates.
Last night, Ari and I watched Elia Kazan’s 1947 classic
A Gentleman’s Agreement, the story of a journalist, P. Schuyler Green (Gregory Peck), who pretends to be Jewish for a magazine series on anti-Semitism. When his son, Tommy, faces hateful words at school, Green is forced to explain to him what it means to be a Jew, and the importance of the separation of church and state. His simple words in explaining the Jeffersonian idea to Tommy drive home the simplicity of this idea, even in 1947. Have we made backwards strides?
Tommy: What’s anti-Semitism? Phil: Well, uh, that’s when some people don’t like other people just because they’re Jews. Tommy: Why not? Are Jews bad? Phil: Well, some are and some aren’t, just like with everyone else. Tommy: What are Jews, anyway? Phil: Well, uh, it’s like this. Remember last week when you asked me about that big church, and I told you there are all different kinds of churches? Well, the people who go to that particular church are called Catholics, and there are people who go to different churches and they’re called Protestants, and there are people who go to different churches and they’re called Jews, only they call their churches temples or synagogues. Tommy: Why don’t some people like those? Phil: Well, that’s a tough one to explain, Tommy. Some people hate Catholics, and some hate Jews. Tommy: And no one hates us ’cause we’re Americans? Phil: Well, no, that’s another thing again. See, you can be an American and a Catholic, or an American and a Protestant, or an American and a Jew. But look, Tommy, it’s like this: one thing’s your country, see like America or France or Germany or Russia. The flag is different, and the uniform is different, and the language is different. […] But the other thing is religion, like the Jewish or the Catholic or the Protestant religion, see that hasn’t anything to do with the flag, or the uniform, or the airplanes. Got it? Tommy: Yup!
Now change “Jew” to “Muslim,” and we’ve got a lesson pertinent to most present-day Americans.
I’ve often seen gentrification as a difficult problem to tackle. For many of my friends—young, working people trying to live in diverse areas and support themselves on small, non-profit or public service salaries—it is a struggle to find housing without becoming an agent of gentrification. But a
New York Times piece today about Mount Morris Park, a traditionally-black Harlem neighborhood, explores one of the uglier examples of that phenomenon.
Timothy Williams chronicles the recent dispute over the neighborhood’s Marcus Garvey Park where, since 1969, drummers from Africa and the Caribbean have played an important role in shaping the social fabric and dynamic of the place. “The musicians,” he explains, “who play until 10 p.m. every summer Saturday, are widely credited with helping to make the park safer over the years.”
Across the street from the park however, at 2002 Fifth Avenue, is “a new seven-story cream and red brick luxury co-op with a doorman, $1 million apartments and a lobby with a fireplace.” Predictably, there have been some disputes about the character of the neighborhood.
As I mentioned in
a prior post about the Garrahy Judicial Complex, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in that facility’s Courtroom 4C, where arraignments for RI’s 6th District take place. The judges at arraignment give a shpiel about the meaning and consequences of a plea whenever someone pleads out at that stage of the game, and I often take much of that shpiel for granted.
An important part of what they must instruct the defendants is that any criminal conviction or guilty plea will affect any immigration status or proceedings. For many, this means that deportation is inevitable. One thing missing from the shpiel, however, is consideration of how a guilty plea and prison sentence will affect the defendant’s status in Family Court. All too often, defendants are counseled to accept a shorter sentence with time served only to be served with Family Court subpoenas on charges of neglect—neglect that occurs while these parents are behind bars—or deportation papers.
Colorlines magazine has a great piece this month on the intersection of systems—namely immigration, incarceration, and foster care. In “
When an Immigrant Mom Gets Arrested,” Julianne Ong Hing and Seth Wessler write:
Immigrant mothers are not the first to deal with the ways that different government agencies intersect, usually to their detriment. The experiences Black families have had with child welfare and criminal justice policy make clear what can happen to communities when family policy intersects with a set of other punitive policies.
On last night’s broadcast, a repeat from June 16, Colbert did the kind of thing that I almost never rely on white media figures to do. He was interviewing Kenneth Miller, who wrote a book about how the proponents of “intelligent design” are trying to teach creationism at schools. At one point, Miller compared creationists to women who fraudulently collect welfare checks, saying they’re asking for a government handout, “I would compare them to welfare queens,” he said.
Or so read the headline yesterday on one of my favorite blogs,
History Is a Weapon. And when you look at the late Senator’s resume, he’s left us little reason to mourn. Here are a few of his most remarkable achievements:
Fighting integration;
Opposing Martin Luther King day;
the Helms-Burton act, the centerpiece of the embargo against Cuba;
Disputing ALL Affirmative Action programs;
Voting to bail out the savings and loan industry AND to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families;
Hating all gay people;
Supporting apartheid in South Africa;
Routinely fighting against AIDS research from the beginning, blaming people suffering from the disease for it;
Leading the fight to discontinue Pell Grants for inmates;
And, in 1993, singing Dixie to the first African American senator, Carol Mosely-Braun, and promising to make her “cry.”
I think HIAW sums it up well, when they proclaim: “Hell burns hotter tonight.” Want some more inspiring food for thought? Check out “
The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” a speech given by Frederick Douglass in Rochester on July 5, 1852.
The honorable Matt Jerzyk has a post to this effect over at
RIFuture, as does Sir Ian McKellen Donnis
at N4N, but I feel the need to reiterate: what’s up with the AG? While 42 other attorneys general signed on to support the Free Flow of Information Act, which would create a qualified federal shield law for reporters, Patrick Lynch did not. Lynch, who on June 19 was elected president of the
National Association of Attorneys General, does justice (no pun intended) to that organization’s alias: the
National Association of Aspiring Governors.
I think a lot of Rhode Islanders take for granted an important lil’ Rhody anomaly: most states have
district attorneys and
attorneys general, these being two distinct positions and offices. We’re small enough that the two positions are lumped into one office. Our attorneys general, therefore, spend the majority of their time and energy prosecuting criminals and upholding severe criminal justice policies rather than representing the larger interests of all our citizens.
In March, I was privileged to attend the
11th Annual Liman Public Interest Colloquium at the Yale Law School. In keeping with the topic of the conference—”Liman at the Local Level: Public Interest Advocacy and American Federalism”—we had the opportunity to hear from Connecticut Attorney General
Richard Blumenthal, Ohio Solicitor General
William Marshall, San Francisco City Attorney
Dennis Herrera, and
James Tierney, Director of the National State Attorneys General Program. These four fellows have used their positions as state and city attorneys to compensate for the failings, negligence, and misguided decisions of the federal government and judiciary.
I understand one of his many vetoes this legislative session: the courthouse construction bill, a piece of legislation pledging $88 million to the construction of a new Blackstone Valley courthouse.
According to the ProJo, Carcieri said in his veto message, “Never, not even once, has any Rhode Islander — save a legislator or a judge — ever spoke to me of the pressing need to build a court-house in the Blackstone Valley.”
On the urgency of the project, however, Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams declared in an April speech:
The need to better serve our citizens in northern Rhode Island and to decongest a severely overcrowded Garrahy Judicial Complex in Providence by building a Blackstone Valley Courthouse is not going to go away.
As a legal intern with the
RI Office of the Public Defender, I may not be privy to every aspect of life at the Garrahy complex. I do, however, work there 4 days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and I’m a bit perplexed by the congestion with which the Chief is concerned. In fact, things can get pretty slow around there, and I’ve taken to reading
The New Yorker in between Judge Higgins’ arraignments in Courtroom 4C, where I am usually stationed.
Those of us who missed Mayor Cicilline at Saturday’s Pride festivities should be placated by news of how he spent that day. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, gathered for their 76th Annual Meeting in Miami from June 20-24,
unanimously passed a resolution calling for city-coordinated drug overdose prevention efforts.
The Resolution championed
several strategies to reduce fatalities from drug overdoses, including:
Supporting the distribution of naloxone – an opiate antagonist medication effective in reversing the respiratory failure that typically causes death from opioid overdose;
Urging state governments to adopt “Good Samaritan” immunity policies that shield people who experience or witness an overdose and contact 911 from prosecution;
Calling on the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fund research to evaluate the effectiveness of overdose prevention interventions and develop model programs; and
Calling on the FDA to take steps to facilitate the testing and approval of nasal and/or over-the-counter formulations of naloxone and to consider recommending prescription naloxone concurrent with strong opioid analgesics.
While I applaud Loury’s defense of hip-hop and appreciate McWhorter’s defense of Obama, I take issue with the false dichotomy these scholars have erected between the two. Loury says hip-hop is politically-charged and Barack Obama’s message is destructive; McWhorter says hip-hop is destructive in a way that counters the positive message of Barack Obama. But hip-hop, at its roots, is political, and many of its leaders have long championed Obama’s message and agenda through their words and rhymes. Obama, in kind, has become one of few mainstream voices for the ideology that underlies hip-hop.
Does it count as shameless self-promotion to promote my promotion of a friend’s event? Hopefully not. Scope my piece in this week’s Phoenix on the upcoming criminal justice reform festival, Justice or Just Us?, taking place at AS220 real soon.
On Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,
James Carville recently quipped: “If she gave him one of her cojones, they’d both have two.”
It was far from the first time that a political pundit used testicles as a metonymy for power, courage, boldness, or guts. In fact, Hillary’s “balls” have been the subject of much praise (and disdain) throughout the course of this exhausted Democratic primary.
Introducing Clinton at a rally in Indiana, Paul Gibson, president of a steelworkers local union,
proclaimed that the nation needed a leader like Clinton with “testicular fortitude.” Clinton thanked him for the compliment, though she did note that women, too, can have fortitude.
Reporting on the incident, Salon editor
Joan Walsh wrote, “Clinton does indeed have … fortitude. Hell, she has balls.”
Walsh says that Clinton handled the situation as best as she could and did not employ a double-standard by accepting this incredibly sexist “compliment.”
Many of you know that, for the past two years, I have been facilitating arts and writing workshops at the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) through Space in Prison for the Arts and Creative Expression (
SPACE).
This Sunday, May 4, SPACE will be opening its annual exhibit of art and writing from the ACI. The exhibit will take place in the Youth Gallery at
AS220, 115 Empire Street from 4 PM to 7 PM.
In addition to displaying art and writing, we will be reading selections of poetry written by the men and women who participate in our workshops. We will also be distributing our annual Zine, a collection of their work. Refreshments will be served. If you can’t make it on Sunday, the exhibit will be up in the AS220 Youth Gallery through July; please stop in and check it out!
Entries
Trial begins this week in Superior Court for Capt. Gualter Botas, 39, of Pawtucket, and Lt. Kenneth J. Viveiros, 56, of North Providence. The two ACI Correctional Officers face seven counts and four counts, respectively, of simple assault involving four inmates.
Edward Fitzpatrick reports for the ProJo: 
