Huffington Post: Beaten, Tortured And Sentenced 25-To-Life For Minor Drug Offense

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/108021/beaten%2C_tortured_and_sentenced_25-to-life_for_minor_drug_offense

Beaten, Tortured and Sentenced 25-to-Life for Minor Drug Offense
By Randy Credico, Huffington Post. Posted November 22, 2008.

Enough is enough. It's time to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws, a 36-year failed experiment in racism, injustice and government waste.

"Woe to those who make unjust laws,

to those who issue oppressive decrees,

to deprive the poor of their rights,

and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people"

- Isaiah 10:1

Often, during days that never seem to end, Anthony Williams will repair to a corner of his dark, dank, cell in the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York. This is where he ponders, meditates, and prays. And prays and prays, using his faith to rekindle fading dreams that someday, soon, his nightmare will come to a merciful end. Then he rises to write yet another pro se motion, casting it like bread upon the waters of justice, hoping this will be the one that will not be denied by yet another faceless judge.

We of the outside world, even in our wildest imaginations, might never fully comprehend the life of Anthony Williams. Among the many cases chronicled by this office over a dozen years -- and we sometimes imagine that have seen it all -- none causes more loss of sleep than knowledge of the dreadful plight of Anthony Williams.

- snip -

From the onset, Williams' criminal justice journey has been a horror show. Prior to even being charged, he was sequestered for eight hours in a motel room, where his arrest took place. During this ordeal, he was tortured and beaten senseless by rogue elements of the Albany Police Department's "Special Investigation Unit." Long before the degrading excesses of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, these police "interrogators" tried to forcibly extract "information" that Williams could not provide. Ultimately, he had to be rushed by ambulance from the motel to the county hospital for emergency care.

Fearful of having their brutal tactics exposed, the police then fabricated their alleged "big case "against Williams. After a painful recovery from extensive and severe wounds, his broken body and tattered soul were transported to the county courthouse, where the African-American youth was quickly convicted by an all-white jury and then punted to the state's dangerous prison system by the late, notorious "hanging judge," Thomas Keegan.

Williams' woeful tale reads like an Americanized version of a Russian novel -- a tome written in four full boxes of records concerning his arrest, interrogation, trial, incarceration and appeals.

Anthony Williams' best hope for relief came, and went, a few years ago, in 2004 and 2005, when minor "reforms" to New York's notorious "Rockefeller Drug Laws" provided him with zero relief.

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[formercia]

1. Rockefellers, capo di capi. n/t

[OneBlueSky]

2. one has to wonder how many Anthony Williams' there are . . .

in America's penal system . . . probably far more than we care to even imagine . . . and unless Obama does something to overturn the worst of Bush's policies (e.g. abandoning habeus corpus), more and more could soon find their way into our prisons and the new FEMA camps . . .

[Hissyspit]

3. .

[pacalo]

4. Infuriating.

We should all write a letter to Andrew Cuomo, asking why he's forgotten his campaign promise to repeal this bad law.