The Daily GRRR! - March 6th, 2015 - Waves Through Walls: Prison Radio

Welcome, I am your host Dan Kellar and you are listening to The Daily GRRR! Waves Through Walls: Prison Radio, on 100.3fm, CKMS in Waterloo, Ontario. Soundfm.ca on the web, today is Friday March 6th, 2015.

We are broadcasting from the centre of the Haldimand Tract, the occupied Grand River Territory of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations).

The Daily GRRR! is a project of the Grand River Media Collective; and is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada and CKMS.

The clip that kicked off the show is from Mumia Abu-Jamal with his piece entitled Feeding the Fear. Check prisonradio.org for more of Mumia’s podcasts.

Today’s feature is a read of an article from Ottawa based Lawyer Michael Spratt that was first posted on iPolitics.ca. The article is called is Life Behind Bars: The Politics of Despair and looks at the canadian government’s attempt to implement the “slow death-row” of life sentences in prison, without the possibility of parole.

Before we go with the feature, we will start with today’s headlines:

The Daily GRRR!
HEADLINES for March 6th, 2015 
1. Whistleblower Matt DeHart Deported from Canada on Sunday
2. Quebec Man Fighting Cell Phone Search Obstruction Charge
3. Hamilton Police Undertaking Stop-and-ID Interactions With Residents
4. Cops Kill Less People When Being Watched and Scrutinized
5. Anarchists Absolved of Federal Charges in Mexican Molotov Attacks
6. Six Nations Man Fighting Contempt of Court Charges in BC
7. Former Prisoner Targeted in a SWATting
8. Harper Wants “Slow death-Row” For Murder Convicts

1. Whistleblower Matt DeHart Deported from Canada on Sunday
Former American soldier and now-activist Matt DeHart was deported to the US last Sunday March 1st, where he was taken into custody by the FBI and imprisoned. DeHart’s deportation occurred swiftly following his denial of asylum protection by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, which he applied for citing torture at the hands of FBI agents. In response to the deportation WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: “Canada’s actions are shameful. It may as well not have a border.”

On March 2nd the Courage Foundation named Matt to be the 3rd courage beneficiary and they will fundraise for legal defense for Matt and advocate on his behalf as he battles through an espionage investigation wrapped in a sham child-porn charge. DeHart brought a USB thumb drive with sensitive information into canada in 2013.

Despite finding no “credible and trustworthy evidence” to support the charges Matt faces. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board turned down the family’s asylum claim in March 2015.

In a press release the Courage Foundation stated
“Courage has accepted Matt as its third beneficiary in order to raise awareness about his case, prevent him from experiencing further mistreatment in detention and to raise urgently needed funds for his legal defence. DeHart’s legal team have confirmed that they intend to launch legal action against the US government as well as defend Matt from the charges he currently faces.”

The release added the voice of Sarah Harrison, Courage’s Acting Director, who said:
“The FBI has ruined Matt’s life to cover up what he knew and to punish his support of WikiLeaks and Anonymous. Objective judges have agreed that the child porn charges are a ruse to smear him in pursuit of national security information.”

A re-launched support website at mattdehart.com will provide regular updates on Matt’s case and raise public awareness about the threats he faces.
Donations to the Matt DeHart defence fund can be made at: https://mattdehart.com/donate

2. Quebec Man Fighting Cell Phone Search Obstruction Charge
A Quebec man who flew back into the country via Halifax on Monday night is facing charges of obstructing a border services agent after he refused to give the password to his cellphone, which the agent wanted to search, for still undeclared reasons.

Alain Philippon, 38, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec was returning from a trip to the Dominican Republic when the CBSA agent demanded the password.

Philippon has been charged under section 153.1 (b) of the Customs Act for hindering or preventing border officers from performing their role under the act.
The CBSA claims that the minimum fine for the offence is $1,000, with a maximum fine of $25,000 and the possibility of a year in jail.

Rob Currie, director of the Law and Technology Institute at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University told the CBC that "This is a question that has not been litigated in Canada, whether they can actually demand you to hand over your password to allow them to unlock the device," he said. " one thing for them to inspect it, another thing for them to compel you to help them."

3. Hamilton Police Undertaking Stop-and-ID Interactions With Residents
While claiming the practice allows for "building rapport with our community" through communication, the constitutionally-questionable carding policies of the Hamilton police have been targeted by human rights and anti-racist activists.

While the Hamilton police admit they keep a database of the interactions, the CBC notes that “to what degree Hamilton police record racial or ethnic identifiers in cases of people not involved in a crime is still not clear. In Toronto, the inclusion of racial details have led to analyses showing the "carding" practice disproportionately affects visible minorities.”

While Toronto has suspended its carding program in January, Hamilton cops have been ramping up their program with new street teams of “friendly cops”. Rachael Edge who runs the NGEN Youth Centre downtown said the lack of clarity about what the police are doing with the information they collect in pedestrian stops could worsen the lack of trust she's noticed between community members and the police. "I worry about if the information of someone being stopped can be used against someone again.”

Ken Stone, a longtime anti-racism activist in Hamilton told the CBC

"I think the fact that the police keep statistics and information about people who have not been charged, have not been arrested, have not gone to court, is an invasion of privacy."

4.Cops Kill Less People When Being Watched and Scrutinized
A telling graph produced by the Mapping Police Violence project, a grassroots effort in the US, shows that after wide-scale protest broke out in the US following the police killing of unarmed youth Mike Brown, america saw the largest drop in the killing of black people by the police in the past few years.

The site mappingpoliceviolence.org has been compiling data of police killings of black people in america over the past several years and have produced an easy to navigate webpage. The numbers show that following the protests which started in Ferguson Mo, and spread internationally, protest which garnered constant media attention, the cops sharply reduced the numbers of people, and in particular, black people they shot dead. The monthly average of police killings of all people across the US has settled into a new average of about 80 people/month, down from around 100/month before “Ferguson”.

The maps produced by the mappingpoliceviolence.org project are powerful visual tools illustrating the police terror state that is america.

5. Anarchists Absolved of Federal Charges in Mexican Molotov Attacks
The Stimulator passed on the info that Amelie, Carlos and Fallon, currently locked up in Mexico, have been absolved of their federal charges relating to a Molotov cocktail attack against a government building in Mexico City in 2014.

His translation of the reports is as follows: “We have been informed at the last moment, by one of the lawyers of our comrades Amelie Trudeau, Fallon Roullier y Carlos López Marin, who were accused on the 6th of January 2014, for throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the buildings of the Secretary of Communications and Transportation, have been notified that they have been absolved in the federal process that condemned them to seven years six months of prison time. That would leave an appeal to the local process that has a sentence of two years four months. ”

While still being targeted for their political beliefs the anarchists now face a less desperate situation and may soon find their way to freedom.

6. Six Nations Man Fighting Contempt of Court Charges in BC
A Cayuga man,Sino General, is facing contempt of court charges in BC, and possible fines and jail time if found guilty of “impersonating a public notary”.

General has been providing free Notary services in BC for indigenous people who need someone to certify that what they are saying is true, but the Notary office is not happy with his actions and has demanded he stop.

Claiming that he is not a Notary, the notary office is seeking punishment for General, who will be defending himself in court through a treaty relationship defense which argues the crown has no place in saying General can’t be a Notary for other Indigenous people. The defense will be based on the Two Row Wampum agreement where Onkwehon:we and non- Onkwehon:we were to honour and respect each other’s laws and customs, without the interference of the other.

General told the Two Row Times “I follow the law of peace and the governments of the (Six Nations) nation,” he said. “Our government’s system was here thousands of years before they (Canadian government) got here. I am exempt from Canadian law.”

More on this case will be reported as it develops, and in the mean time check out an interview with Sino General undertaken by the Two Row Times:
http://www.tworowtimes.com/news/national/six-nations-man-faces-jail-time...

7. Former Prisoner Targeted in a SWATting
Hours before former prisoner Drew Butler was to speak at a public panel criticizing Canada's prison system in Halifax, his apartment was raided with guns-drawn SWAT members arresting him, his sister, and her boyfriend. The raid happened after an anonymous tipster told police that Butler had a 9mm pistol and was going to kill people at the MicMac mall that day.

Butler had recently been featured in an investigation undertaken by the Halifax based paper “The Coast” looking at solitary confinement in the province. Everyone arrested in the raid was released after NO evidence of the allegedly planned crime was found, including no sign of the alleged gun.

In a piece for the Halifax Media Co-op Laura Sheperd covered the Panel Butler was supposed to speak at. She noted that prison abolitionist and prisoner ally Jean Catherine Steinberg said that prisons “intersect so many social justice issues”. Steinberg also posed a series of paradigm questions – “How do we embody abolitionism every day?” and “What does it look like to imagine a world without prisons?”

Finally, calling prisons “tools of the colonial state”, Steinberg raised questions about the under-scrutinized economy underlying what others have termed the prison-industrial complex. “People are making money from putting people in cages and we need to talk about who benefits from this system.”

For 24-year-old Drew Butler, who had spent a depressing amount of time in the hole while incarcerated, having his house raided on bogus charges said ‘“I'm just kind of pissed off... My house is destroyed, all my sister's shit is destroyed. They f*cked everything up. What happened? I don't even know what to do.”

8. Harper Wants “Slow death-Row” For Murder Convicts
In an effort to take action on his 2013 promise to implement life-without parole for some murder convictions, the Harper government is pushing for changes to the criminal code. Inviting the families of murder victims to parliament hill for his announcement, Harper seeks to push the boundaries of the constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment”.

While his efforts so far have been resisted in the house of commons and by judicial experts, Harper is moving forward nonetheless in his “tough-on-crime” agenda and new changes would build on the 2011 decision to remove the “faint hope” clause for convicted killers which would allow for parole eligibility after 15 years, instead of the 25 years that Harper now seeks to expand indefinitely.

The proposed changes, says Archie Kaiser, a professor specializing in criminal law at Dalhousie University’s Schulich law school in Halifax,“seem to be a function of crude instrumental politics, an effort to appeal to base impulses of vengeance.” Studies have shows that the 1% of “lifers’ who actually receive parole are less likely than other former prisoners to be found in breach of their parole conditions or to be re-arrested.

We will be taking a deeper look at these proposed changes after a break.

Thats all for the headlines, now for some
Midway Musichere is M1 throwing down live with the tune Sacrifice

And we are back, you just heard M1with Sacrifice from the BBC’s Fire in the Booth show.

You are listening to Waves Through Walls edition of The Daily GRRR! Today is March 6th, 2015, my name is Dan Kellar and we are now moving into the feature portion of our broadcast.

Today’s feature is a read of an article from Ottawa based Lawyer Michael Spratt that was first posted on iPolitics.ca. The article is called Life Behind Bars: The Politics of Despair and looks at the canadian government’s attempt to implement the “slow death-row” of life sentences in prison, without the possibility of parole.

That was a read of an article from Ottawa based Lawyer Michael Spratt that was first posted on iPolitics.ca. The article is called is Life Behind Bars: The Politics of Despair and looks at the canadian government’s attempt to implement the “slow death-row” of life sentences in prison, without the possibility of parole

This has been the The Daily GRRR! for March 6th, 2015. We are on weekdays from 9-10am on 100.3fm CKMS in Waterloo region, and http://soundfm.ca on the web. Check out all our past shows and other Grand River Media Collective work on our webpage http://grandrivermc.ca

The Daily GRRR! is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada and CKMS.

Stay tuned in for more Grand River Radical Radio after we close the podcast with another piece from Mumia, here is Other brothers in Angola. Visit http://freezulu.org for more on the ongoing, politically motivated 35-year solitary incarceration of Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore.

Thanks for Listening.

END OF SHOW