[cure-news] TO: POLICE BRUTALITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ADVOCATES AND ORGANIZERS

[Ida Hakim]

TO: POLICE BRUTALITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ADVOCATES AND ORGANIZERS


RE: The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) 
needs your input on racial profiling and police brutality against people 
of color in the US!

Dear Fellow Police Brutality and Misconduct Accountability Advocates and 
Activists,

As you may already know, the US government recently submitted a report 
to the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racism regarding 
its compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of 
All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States government 
ratified with reservations in 1994.  

The US government report claims that, while racial profiling and police 
brutality and abuse of people of color may happen sometimes in the US, 
it is not a systemic problem, and cites to occasional prosecutions of 
police officers as evidence that it is addressing the issue. This claim 
flies in the face of the reality that racial profiling, police brutality 
and law enforcement abuses are experienced by people of color in the US 
on a widespread and daily basis -- and we need to speak up on the 
international stage to let folks know that the US violates human rights 
at home and abroad.

A group of organizations and individuals working in various arenas 
covered by the Convention - police accountability groups, prisoners' 
rights organizations, and immigrant rights advocates, to name a few -- 
have begun meeting to develop a coordinated response to the US report in 
preparation for the UN Committee's review of the US government's report 
in March 2008.

Some of you may be familiar with or have been a part of similar 
processes last year involving the UN Convention Against Torture and the 
UN Human Rights Committee.  We had tremendous success in highlighting 
ongoing and pervasive human rights violations by police and other law 
enforcement agents, and obtained several key recommendations from the UN 
Committees which have lent tremendous support to local and national 
organizing efforts over the last year in support of the Chicago Police 
Torture cases, imposing a moratorium on the use of Tasers, and 
monitoring and punishing law enforcement abuse.

If you would like to be a part of developing a national report on racial 
profiling and racist and race-based policing in the US that will be used 
for local organizing efforts, and to counter the US government's 
statement to the world that police brutality against people of color in 
the US is not a systemic problem, please contact Andrea Ritchie at 
andreajritchie at aol.com or Joey Mogul at... JoeyMogul at aol.com

We will have an initial conference call to discuss the particular 
issues, trends and cases we want to raise and organize around on

Friday, August 17, 2007 at 3 p.m. (EST)/ 2 p.m. (CST)/1 p.m. (MST) and 
noon (PST).  

Conference Dial-in Number: (712) 432-9998 and the participant Access 
Code: 721612#

For more information, feel free to contact either of us.  The CERD 
convention and the US report and information relating to the shadow 
reporting process are available at: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/page227.cfm


Sincerely,
 
Andrea Ritchie, Esq., Brooklyn, New York
Joey Mogul, People's Law Office, Chicago, Illinois
>From hakimida at reparationsthecure.org  Sun Aug 12 09:24:00 2007
From: hakimida at reparationsthecure.org (Ida Hakim)
Date: Sun Aug 12 08:21:16 2007
Subject: [cure-news] TO: C URE Members, Allies and Reparations Supporters
Message-ID: <46BF2610.90205 at reparationsthecure.org>

Dear Members, Allies and Friends:

It doesn't happen often, but it has to happen sometimes - Caucasians 
United for Reparations and Emancipation (CURE) is making a call for 
contributions to support our vital work.

I trust that like me you receive many appeals from worthy organizations 
doing important work in a wide range of fields, on a wide range of 
important issues. But of those groups, few are working for justice for 
the descendants of enslaved Africans and fewer still are doing that work 
within the white community; working to educate those privileged by the 
injustices suffered as a result of the legacy of slavery, working to 
build white support for the Black-led movement for Reparations.

No government grant will support this work. No corporate philanthropists 
are lining up to underwrite CURE projects. If our work is to continue, 
it will require your support to make it happen.

I want to highlight four CURE projects that need your urgent financial 
support. Besides the media interviews and speakers bureau we offer to 
show a white face in support of Black Reparations, besides our online 
'Dialogue with White America', besides the self-funded educational 
membership conferences, besides the news lists and action lists in 
support of Black Reparations, besides providing our assistance when NGOs 
address the issue of slavery Reparations before the UN and other 
international bodies, there are four initiatives we are currently 
seeking funds to support.

1) On June 20th our organization filed a Friend of the Court (Amicus 
Curiae) Brief in support of the plaintiffs in Farmer-Paellmann v. Brown 
& Williamson. Though attorney Craig Alan Webster and project manager 
Hugh Esco (a CURE member) undertook this project on a pro bono basis, 
the cost of printing and filing the document was met by borrowing $1,200 
from funds set aside to reprint our book. For more information about the 
brief, see CURE-news distribution, "White Advocates File Brief in 
Support of Corporate Restitution Claims." If you haven't received a copy 
of this press release, let me know and I'll send it to you. Deadria 
Farmer-Paellmann informed CURE of the opportunity to give support at 
this vital moment, and we responded. This is the sort of support that 
CURE was organized to provide to the Reparations Movement. We eagerly 
await the new term of the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning this coming 
October, when we should learn whether the Court will hear this important 
appeal.

2) We want to put some funds in the bank so we can respond to requests 
to present at conferences and to table at gatherings. On June 27th CURE 
conducted a workshop at the U.S. Social Forum which attracted nearly 
10,000 to Atlanta this past June. We created two panels with the first 
being made up of leaders from All For Reparations and Emancipation, 
National Coalition Of Blacks for Reparations in America and the National 
Commission for Reparations. The second panel consisted of CURE members. 
As a result of our workshop and four others that were held on the topic 
of reparations, a promising petition was written which we circulated on 
the CURE-news list. This project cost roughly $400 in registration fees 
and for duplication costs for handouts prepared for the event. Again 
these funds were borrowed from funds set aside to reprint our book.

3) We are making plans to upgrade the CURE website, making it far more 
interactive. We want a vibrant dialogue section, a place where CURE 
press releases and news posts can be viewed
as they are distributed, a place where the public can sign-up for the 
CURE-news list-serve, member only features to provide a space where CURE 
activists can post directly, helping us
build our web resources, and more. Our current web format is several 
years old, and as our primary point of contact for the general public, 
you'll probably agree it could use a facelift. We anticipate $1,200.00 
in costs for a new design, installation and hosting for the first year.

4) CURE's book, "The Debtors: Whites Respond to the Call for Black 
Reparations," has nearly sold-out its first printing. CURE activists are 
already at work preparing not just a new printing, but a second edition. 
It'll have revisions, completely new chapters and a new cover. Our book 
has been a great success, reaching organizations and classrooms as well 
as libraries, bookstores and individuals. We're anxious to get the 
second edition into print and into the hands of the public. The 
estimated cost of doing so is $4,000.00.

CURE needs to raise $6500 within the next three months in order to move 
its plans into action. CURE has more than 120 members, friends and 
allies, so we believe this goal achievable.

We printed 100 extra copies of the Amicus Brief because we want to share 
this document with the people whose support made its filing possible. 
We're prepared to send a copy to each contributor who donates $75.00 or 
more in response to this appeal. This is a piece of history. I know that 
as an advocate for reparations, you must be proud of CURE as well as 
grateful to the persons who helped to make it happen. I know that I am.

Please consider making a gift to CURE. I'm sure you'll agree that we are 
working hard to fulfill our mandate of educating white America on the 
long-standing need for justice through full and complete reparations.

There are two ways to donate. You can send a check via mail to CURE in 
care of:

Ferrell Winfree
P.O. Box 58
Kingston, TN 37763

*Please indicate that the check is a contribution.

Or, you can donate online via Pay Pal. There is a link on the CURE 
website that makes it easy for you. Go to 
http://www.ReparationsTheCURE.org/.

Please open your heart, mind and wallet in response to this request. 
Your commitment to this work makes our work possible and our country a 
better place.

In Solidarity,
Ida Hakim
CEO, CURE
>From hakimida at reparationsthecure.org  Tue Aug 14 13:10:28 2007
From: hakimida at reparationsthecure.org (Ida Hakim)
Date: Tue Aug 14 12:07:41 2007
Subject: [cure-news] The Israeli Suit By the Children of Holocaust Victims
 Against the German Government: Can It Succeed?
Message-ID: <46C1FE24.9020800 at reparationsthecure.org>

The Israeli Suit By the Children of Holocaust Victims Against the German 
Government: Can It Succeed?
By ANTHONY J. SEBOK

Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2007

On July 16, a lawyer in Israel filed a class action suit against the 
German government on behalf of "second-generation" victims of the 
Holocaust. The suit seeks compensation for thousands of persons who were 
born after the Holocaust, on the ground that the German government is 
responsible for the psychic injuries inflicted by direct victims of the 
Holocaust onto their children.

In this column, I will examine the legal roots of this extraordinary 
claim and consider what it might teach us about the potential reach--or 
limits--of reparations for historical wrongs.

The Genesis of the Idea for the Suit, and the Remedy That Is Sought

Even though the suit was brought in Israel, I think that it may have 
much to teach audiences in other countries. Israel's tort law is based, 
in part, on British common law, since the British set up a court system 
in Palestine in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. In 
addition, Israel's class action rules were borrowed quite 
self-consciously from the United States.

As with American class action suits, it is important to distinguish the 
underlying liability claim from the class action structure. In this 
case, I want to focus primarily on the former, asking the following 
question: Even if the lawsuit were being brought as an individual case, 
by a single plaintiff against the German government, does it make any 
sense from a legal point of view?

The lawyer who crafted the suit, Gideon Fisher, claims that he first 
thought of bringing a claim on behalf of the children of Holocaust 
survivors after representing their parents in claims relating to their 
wartime suffering. He noticed that the children who accompanied their 
parents to his office suffered from a variety of symptoms reflecting a 
condition that he believes is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His 
suit describes the medical condition of five representative plaintiffs, 
and contains an opinion by a psychiatrist who claims that clinical 
research shows a high frequency of emotional disorders which he 
identifies as PTSD among the children of direct Holocaust victims.

Fisher wants the German government to establish a fund to pay for the 
mental health treatment of the thousands of children of Holocaust 
survivors. The suit estimates that the treatment program would last 
three years, and cost approximately $30 million. It does not seek any 
other compensation for the plaintiffs.

The Simple Part of the Suit: The Right to Recover for Remote 
Consequences of Past Torts Is Well-Established

The tort principles upon which Fisher is basing his suit are both simple 
and very controversial. Let's take the simple part first: It is 
well-established that a person who engages in an intentional tort can be 
held responsible for consequences that are very remote indeed.

For example, a person who tries to shoot another person can be held 
liable for the consequences of the bullet's ricocheting in a freak 
manner and injuring persons far away. Of course, the Holocaust was a 
uniquely horrible event, but it was also a bundle of intentional 
torts--the Nazis engaged in massive numbers of acts constituting 
battery, assault, false imprisonment, or intentional infliction of 
emotional distress, as well as acts constituting a variety of 
free-standing torts rooted in customary international law, such as 
genocide and slavery. Thus, it stands to reason that the current German 
government, as successor to the Nazi government, could be held 
responsible for a lot of "ricochet" injuries that extend beyond the 
deaths of the people taken to camps to be gassed.

The More Difficult Aspect of the Suit: An Attempt to Recover for Pure 
Emotional Distress

Now for the controversial part: The tort law has always been very 
skeptical of recognizing claims for pure emotional distress, and has 
done so over the last century quite grudgingly. Where psychic injury 
accompanies physical injury, tort law has always been willing to allow 
compensation for the former, once the latter is proven, on the theory 
that they are naturally paired. For example, a person who suffers mental 
shock as a result of an accident that causes even very slight physical 
injury has always been able to receive full, and often generous, 
compensation for the shock, even if the damages for the physical 
accident were slight.

The law of intentional torts originally allowed compensation for pure 
psychic injury only if the defendant intended that the victim be afraid 
of a physical contact. It was only in the 1960's that courts first 
recognized the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress, 
which allows the victims of outrageous mental abuse to receive 
compensation, even if they never feared that they would be touched by 
their abuser.

(Most of the Nazis' horrific activities will be rightly classified as 
intentional torts. But it is conceivable that some could also be swept 
within negligence law. However, this would not improve the plaintiffs' 
situation. In the law of negligence, meanwhile, the scope of recovery 
for pure psychic injury is even narrower. Courts have disallowed 
compensation for pure psychic injury, except where the victim was afraid 
that he or she would be physically struck and fortuitously was not, and 
in a very narrow range of cases, where the victim witnessed a close 
family member suffer a physical injury.)

In sum, then, even if tort law makes intentional tortfeasors liable for 
a large range of unintended consequences, those consequences still must 
be the sort of injuries that the tort law typically recognizes as a 
compensable harm. PTSD is not usually the kind of harm that, on its own, 
is compensated in tort law; it must typically be associated with a 
physical injury or the threat of a physical injury.

Other Plaintiffs Have Recovered Damages for Torts Preceding Their Birth

The plaintiffs in the second-generation Holocaust victims suit do have 
one strategy they could employ, however. They might argue to the court 
that the distinction between personal injury and psychic injury is 
specious, and undercuts a key principle courts have developed since the 
1960's: While the wrongfulness of a tortious act may not manifest itself 
immediately, this fact should not excuse the wrongdoer.

The best example of this modern principle is the DES case, where 
defendant pharmaceutical companies were held liable for cancers caused 
in the daughters of women to whom a defective drug was prescribed. The 
defendants arguably breached a duty to the mothers, not the daughters 
(who were, at the relevant time, in utero and not yet legal persons). 
There, however, courts had no trouble linking the wrongful conduct 
before the vicitms' birth to a right to redress after their birth.

Readers may point out that, unlike the second-generation Holocaust 
victims, the plaintiffs in the DES cases were at least conceived when 
the defendants acted wrongfully. But from a legal point of view, I think 
this distinction is likely to be considered irrelevant. As the recent 
lead paint litigation around the country shows, courts are willing to 
hold defendants liable for wrongful conduct that poses a risk of injury 
to persons who are not yet conceived - and indeed, were not conceived 
for many decades. In those states that have permitted the lead paint 
suits to go forward, the paint industry is being held liable for the 
mental retardation of children who ate lead paint chips that allegedly 
were wrongfully manufactured seventy years before the children were 
harmed, and thus many decades before they were born.

Should It Make a Difference if the Pre-Birth Tort Causes Psychic, Not 
Physical Injury?

It follows that if there is any reason to categorically exclude the 
"Second Generation Holocaust" victim suit, it must be because pure 
psychic injury is different in some way from physical injury--so 
different that we cannot allow tort system to handle it the way it might 
handle a claim about cancer (as in the DES cases) or blood poisoning (as 
in the lead-paint cases).

Under this analysis, a strange consequence follows: A person born in 
1963 to a Holocaust victim who was the subject of a medical experiment 
that produced a physical deformity in the child would have a valid claim 
in tort. However, the same person would not have a claim if the parent's 
psychic wounds from the terrible experiment were so great--and the 
subsequent home life so poisoned--that the child developed not a 
deformity, but rather PTSD.

What might be a ground for drawing this line? I must admit, I am 
personally torn on this issue. As the child of two Holocaust survivors, 
I can easily see the logic of the argument that psychic wounds can 
affect subsequent generations. And yet, I also can see the practical 
concerns that claims based on "ricochet psychic injuries" pose for the 
courts.

The most obvious one is causation. The defendants in the DES cases never 
seriously tried to deny that the cancers suffered by the plaintiffs 
were, in fact, caused by their product--the science supporting the 
causation claimed by the plaintiffs was too strong. The same could not 
be said, however, for other second-generation claims, such as those 
involving suits by children with birth defects whose mothers had taken 
Bendectin. The tort system was embarrassed when, after a number of 
blockbuster damage awards, it was realized that, in the Bendectin cases, 
the causal claims of the plaintiffs were not provable.

Psychic injuries pose even larger, more difficult causation problems. 
How can we know to what degree the emotional problems described by the 
40- and 50 year-old representative plaintiffs in the Israeli suit are 
the result of what happened to their parents in the 1940's, as opposed 
to factors that may have come from outside the home? Israel itself is an 
environment filled with unique stressors.

But what if these practical problem of proof could be overcome? Skeptics 
raised many of the same practical objections to the DES cases when they 
were first brought, and the world did not come to an end when courts 
allowed them to go forward. Practical solutions were found, and rough 
justice was done. After all, why should the German government fight over 
$30 million dollars, when it has already paid out over $60 billion in 
Holocaust reparations since the 1950's?

The Repercussions of the Second Generation Holocaust Suit for the U.S.'s 
Suits By Descendants of Slaves

The significance of the "Second Generation Holocaust" suit is less for 
Germany and Israel, than for the United States. As I pointed out in a 
column last year, the Seventh has Circuit revived a massive class action 
brought by African-Americans who claim they were injured in the present 
day by the consequences of slavery, and want the corporations who 
benefited from slavery to compensate them for these injuries.

The lawsuit focused primarily on the economic benefits that living 
African-American claim they would have received, had their enslaved 
forbears been paid fairly. However, one can easily imagine that the 
plaintiff class could also make a credible argument similar to those 
made by the children of Holocaust survivors, for there is a sizable body 
of research that suggests that the consequences of slavery are as much 
psychic as economic. While African-Americans today might not be able to 
prove that they suffer PTSD, perhaps the principle that underpins the 
Israeli suit could be refashioned to fit the psychic injuries suffered 
by fourth- and fifth-generation relatives of victims of the African 
slave trade.

Comparisons like the one to slavery show why the claims of the children 
of Holocaust survivors pose an interesting challenge to tort law not 
only in Israel, but also around the world. The problems of adjudicating 
such claims in the context of a class action (problems that I have 
chosen not to address in this column, make the challenge even greater). 
But at the core of the case is a problem about the limits of redress for 
psychic harm transmitted over generations - a problem that cannot be 
ignored, but is not easy to solve.