[Peace-discuss] Convicted With No Evidence by an All-White Jury, Black Community Leader Rev. Edward Pinkney Faces Life in Prison

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

Convicted With No Evidence by an All-White Jury, Black Community Leader Rev.
Edward Pinkney Faces Life in Prison 

Friday, 12 December 2014 12:12 By
<http://www.truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/49635> Victoria Collier and
Ben-Zion Ptashnik,  <http://truth-out.org> Truthout | News Analysis 

Description: Rev. Edward Pinkney. (Photo: Dorothy Pinkney)Rev. Edward
Pinkney. (Photo: Dorothy Pinkney)The fight in Benton Harbor is a war, it's
not a conflict. It's a war over whether America will have prosperity and
democracy, or live in poverty under the heel of open corporate rule. - Rev.
Edward Pinkney

As reports escalate of police assaults and murder of unarmed black men for
"suspected" crimes, a jury trial certainly sounds like welcome justice.

Not so for many in Michigan, where a 66-year-old black activist, Rev. Edward
Pinkney, convicted of felony election fraud by an all-white jury, faces a
life sentence, amid accusations of trumped-up charges and no direct evidence
of wrongdoing.

When an all-white jury is chosen to try a prominent black community leader
of an impoverished city with a 90 percent black population, when the powers
that be have numerous reasons to want him discredited, when the evidence is
entirely lacking and the punishment is draconian, there is ample cause to
suspect another egregious breach of justice - one as blatant as
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/08/it-would-have-be
en-very-simple-to-indict-darren-wilson-and-daniel-pantaleo-heres-how/>
refusing to indict the police who killed an unarmed teenager in Ferguson,
and choked a father of six to death in Staten Island.

To be clear, there is nothing illegal about trying a black man with an
all-white jury in the United States. In the 1986 Supreme Court ruling,
Batson v. Kentucky, the court held that a defendant is not entitled to a
jury containing or lacking members of any particular race. But in this case
of activist, Reverend Edward Pinkney, his supporters believe it is
equivalent to a white mob lynching an "upstart negro."

For decades, Rev. Pinkney has been a highly irritating thorn in the side of
the Whirlpool corporation and the power structure in Michigan; a state where
racial and economic divisions are ugly and stark. In recent years,
democratic governance of six low-income, majority African-American cities
has been forcefully suspended by state "Emergency Management."

No direct evidence was presented to the all-white jury to implicate Rev.
Pinkney, who was charged with altering data on public petitions to recall
Mayor Hightower.

Pinkney is founder of BANCO, the Black Autonomy Network Community
Organization, and is arguably the loudest, most outspoken activist in Benton
Harbor, which fell under the dictatorship of emergency management in 2010.
His organization holds spirited rallies and takes political action against
what the group claims is
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/896:democracy-on-hold-in-benton-harbor>
rampant government-corporate collusion, police corruption, economic
injustice, and a discriminatory - even "genocidal" - plan for gentrification
of the city.

Rev. Pinkney has also taken on the dominant power in the city of Benton
Harbor - the Whirlpool Corporation. The criminal charges against him stem
from his attempt to recall Mayor James Hightower for foisting a
multimillion-dollar loan on the citizens of the city to balance the budget,
while refusing to tax Whirlpool, a $19 billion Fortune 500 behemoth that
pays absolutely no taxes to Benton Harbor, where it is headquartered.

A majority of city commissioners
<http://michiganradio.org/post/benton-harbor-emergency-manager-asks-state-lo
an-city-commissioners-reject-plan> voted against the loan, but they were
simply overruled by the "emergency manager."

According to Rev. Pinkney, the recall petition against Mayor Hightower was
due to his support of the loan and lack of support for a proposed city
income tax, which could have produced $3.5 million annually to pay off the
city's debt, forcing corporations - including Whirlpool - to pay their fair
share. While the income tax vote lost in a public referendum in November,
2013, Rev. Pinkney believes more voters would have supported it had they
known about the upcoming loan.

The charges against Rev. Pinkney derailed the petition to recall Mayor
Hightower, who many believe would likely have been ousted had the election
taken place, including former Benton Harbor City Commissioner Trenton
Bowens, who just retired.

"I've never seen this many citizens so frustrated. They feel the mayor is
for big business and not about people. Pinkney is a radical, he wasn't on
anyone's payroll, he was protesting at the hospital, the courthouse, the
mayor's house, city hall. If the status quo does not like you, they will do
anything to get rid of you. It's a sad day."

There was a palpable sense of something being done wrong to everyone in the
room as we watched the proceedings in both events, as basic rights were
being violated.

No direct evidence was presented to the all-white jury to implicate Rev.
Pinkney, who was charged with altering data on public petitions to recall
Mayor Hightower. The charge was that some signatures were made one day prior
to the 60-day window required by state law, and that dates were later
changed to make the signatures valid.

The signatories testified that they had signed the petition on the correct
date in question, and no one claimed that they saw Rev. Pinkney change any
dates. Mark Goff, a forensic document examiner with the Michigan State
Police, stated the dates were written with two different inks, but that he
could not determine who made the changes, or when they were made.

The crime itself of altering data on petitions is only a
<http://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Ini_Ref_Pet_Website_339487_7.pdf>
misdemeanor offense under Michigan law. Despite all this, the white
prosecutor decided to charge Rev. Pinkney with five counts of felony
election fraud "forgery." The 66-year-old activist was convicted on November
3 and now faces a up to a maximum life sentence; he will be sentenced by a
white judge on December 15.

Rev. Pinkney's arrest began with similar overkill in May, when neighbors
reported that an armed police team had stormed into his house to arrest him.
"They could have just called me on the phone," says Rev. Pinkney, who had
taken his wife out to dinner for her birthday. His attorney, Tat Parish, had
already informed the state that his client would turn himself in. "They put
me under house arrest and said they would monitor me by satellite. Very
unusual for a recall petition."

In stark contrast, the surprise write-in victory of white outsider candidate
Mike Duggan as Detroit Mayor in 2013 was riddled with public accusations of
fraud and numerous submissions of evidence, but that highly questionable
election was never even officially investigated. Jean Vortkamp, former
Detroit mayoral candidate and Election Integrity activist, presented
evidence of Duggan's write-in ballots, with clearly identical handwriting to
elections officials, but was completely ignored.

"The common point between Reverend Pinkney's prosecution and the Duggan
recount," says Vortkamp, "is that in both places these people felt free to
do anything, no matter how downright ludicrous. There was a palpable sense
of something being done wrong to everyone in the room as we watched the
proceedings in both events, as basic rights were being violated. It was
something you could almost touch. These people live without shame or fear,
with a pathological righteousness grown from hatred."

Since 2000, the state has installed "Emergency Managers" with nearly
dictatorial powers in nine economically struggling cities, including Flint,
Detroit and Benton Harbor. The purpose is to implement corporate- and
bank-led financial "restructuring," which has included forced bankruptcy,
privatization of public assets, slashing city budgets, disabling unions,
cutting worker's pensions, and - in Detroit this summer - shutting off water
to thousands of low-income families in what the UN called a human rights
violation and public health crisis.

Promising to create jobs by the right-wing playbook, Republican Governor
Rick Snyder has lowered state corporate taxes overall, raised individual
taxes, cut public education, and in 2012, Republicans used a lame-duck
session to rush through a union-busting "right-to-work" bill.

Yet, while unemployment in Michigan has lowered along with national levels,
analysts point out that job creation has
<http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2014/10/michigan_governor_2014_
did_ric.html> dropped every year of Snyder's administration. Today the state
remains saddled with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.
Once a vibrant manufacturing center, Benton Harbor is now one of the state's
poorest cities, where over half the population survives with public
assistance.

Though blaming the poor for their plight is a central tenet of
far-right-wing ideology, the reality,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/poverty-poll_n_5167460.html?utm_hp
_ref=politics> as most Americans agree, is rather more complex. But how much
does white America really understand about the myriad unequal underpinnings
of our poorest minority communities?

As with other similarly distressed cities, Benton Harbor's demise must be
examined in light of the long-term
<http://www.epi.org/blog/detroits-bankruptcy-reflects-history-racism/>
government-sanctioned structural racism in housing, schooling, lending and
employment throughout the 20th century. Combine this with corporate economic
policies - radically accelerated in the past 40 years - explicitly designed
to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor and working class.

We certainly cannot expect to see white Wall Street bankers in a deadly
police chokehold over their "suspected" crimes against millions of defrauded
Americans.

Neoliberal trade agreements have decimated manufacturing in Rust Belt states
like Michigan, while Tea Party-driven politics undermined collective
bargaining and support for increases in the minimum wage. Add predatory
corruption to the mix: In 2008, Michigan was among the states hardest hit by
the financial crisis, where criminal lenders had targeted low-income,
predominantly African Americans for loans they could not afford.

Those criminal banks and lenders, as we know, have yet to fall under the
purview of American justice - of any kind. We certainly cannot expect to see
white Wall Street bankers in a deadly police chokehold over their
"suspected" crimes against millions of defrauded Americans.

As minority cities like Benton Harbor sank over generations into poverty,
drugs infiltrated neighborhoods. The explicitly
<http://www.drugpolicy.org/race-and-drug-war> racist war on drugs thus
commenced its relentless persecutions of the poor - particularly young black
men - while turning a blind eye to the rampant drug culture of the wealthy
elite, who are not subjected to daily harassment, frisks, beatings, home
invasions or demonization for their myriad -
<http://www.thefix.com/content/12-craziest-celebrity-drug-stories-2013-0#sli
de0> sometimes celebrated - addictions.

Over time, this galling prejudice undermines respect for law enforcement in
poor communities. The lack of trust is only compounded by police criminality
including planting evidence, falsifying search warrants, and stealing money
and property from residents - some of which got two Benton Harbor officers
<http://www.fbi.gov/detroit/press-releases/2010/de030510.htm> convicted and
jailed in 2010, including the head of the narcotics unit. "Benton Harbor has
the most corrupt police department in the nation,"
<http://www.fbi.gov/detroit/press-releases/2010/de030510.htm> wrote Rev.
Pinkney of the nearly all-white law enforcement in the nearly all-black
town.

The same dangerous racial imbalance is found on the Ferguson, Missouri,
police force, and
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/14/where-minority-c
ommunities-still-have-overwhelmingly-white-police/> many more across the
country.

Growing public outrage and mass demonstrations is allowing racist police
corruption to be more safely exposed by whistleblowers, such as former St.
Louis cop, Redditt Hudson, who
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/i-was-a-st-louis
-cop-my-peers-were-racist-and-violent-and-theres-only-one-fix/> writes in
The Washington Post:

"The problem is that cops aren't held accountable for their actions, and
they know it. These officers violate rights with impunity. They know there's
a different criminal justice system for civilians and police. Even when
officers get caught, they know they'll be investigated by their friends and
put on paid leave. My colleagues would laughingly refer to this as a free
vacation. It isn't a punishment. And excessive force is almost always deemed
acceptable in our courts and among our grand juries. Prosecutors are tight
with law enforcement, and share the same values and ideas."

Finally - and not least - the drive to corporate privatization of the
American prison system has
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21694-shocking-facts-about-americas-for-
profit-prison-industry> turned poor and minority citizens into fodder to
fill for-profit target quotas of 100 percent cell occupancy. Over 2 million
people are currently behind bars in America, providing a source of third
world-style prison labor for major corporations from Starbucks to Victoria's
Secret, to the United States Military.

Such complex social malignancy is poorly understood by the affluent classes
and never discussed by the white, 1%-owned corporate mainstream media. Today
this means that blighted minority communities are easy pickings for the
wealth-engorged vulture-capitalist class. Using unequal media access to
defend their brazen land and resource grabs, they spout simplistic, racist
justifications that "those people" are
<http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/07/31/2387681/rush-limbaugh-detroit-w
ent-bankrupt-because-blacks-forced-white-people-out/> lazy and cannot govern
themselves. Some even promote the "post-racial" theory, denying that racism
plays a fundamental part in shaping present American society.

In fact,  <http://michiganradio.org/post/report-35-hate-groups-michigan> 26
racist hate groups are known to be operating in Michigan today, and the
state was a major hub of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, targeting black
people  <http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration> in the
Great Migration north from southern states to industrial centers. In the
late '90s, when the Klan appeared in Benton Harbor again, it was Rev.
Pinkney who organized citizens to avoid their demonstrations and "deprive
them of an audience."

But if Rev. Pinkney has taken the role of David in Benton Harbor, he clearly
sees Goliath as the Whirlpool Corporation. The multi-national appliance
giant has closed factories and
<http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/28/news/companies/whirlpool_jobs/> cut five
thousand jobs nationwide in recent years, outsourcing some manufacturing to
Mexico, citing the
<http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/28/news/companies/whirlpool_jobs/>
race-to-the-bottom of free-trade economics as the grounds for abandonment of
American workers. Though Whirlpool closed its last
<http://www.wndu.com/home/headlines/95347334.html> Benton Harbor plant in
2010 and laid-off hundreds, it remains the primary industry in the area.

Whirlpool is among many Fortune 500 companies that have pulled the "Get out
of Taxes Free" card. Congress has authorized hundreds of millions in tax
credits for Whirlpool, whose
<http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2013/03/16/corporations-record-hug
e-returns-from-tax-lobbying-gridlock-congress-stalls-reform/omgZvDPa37DNlSqi
0G95YK/story.html> total income taxes - including foreign, federal and state
- were (negative) -$436 million in 2011, -$64 million in 2010, and -$61
million in 2009, according to The Boston Globe. The company carries forward
federal credits as "deferred tax assets" that it can use to lower future tax
bills. "Multinational companies and banks, including General Electric,
Citigroup and Ford Motor Co., with investment earnings from overseas
accounts, won tax breaks collectively worth $11 billion - a return on their
two-year lobbying investment of at least 8,200 percent," according to a
Globe analysis of lobbying reports.

Rev. Pinkney writes, "Whirlpool should pay taxes. Whirlpool is among the
wealthiest, greediest corporations in the world. Somebody needs to ask the
Whirlpool Corporation and Mayor Hightower how they can sleep at night. Mayor
Hightower continues to support and enable the greed at Whirlpool at the
expense of Benton Harbor residents.  Because of his corporate collusion, he
joins all of the giant corporations who are directly responsible for the
severe poverty in the city of Benton Harbor."

Whirlpool begs to differ, citing the Habitat for Humanity homes that its
employees helped build, the Whirlpool Foundation's funding for a Benton
Harbor Boys and Girls Club and large grants to the city's poorly performing
public school system.

Countering that Whirlpool exploits the poor using
<http://www.bhbanco.org/2014/12/whirlpool-copies-model-of-predatory.html?spr
ef=fb>  the model of predatory home loans, Rev. Pinkney points to the 1999
conviction of Whirlpool Financial and one of its dealers in Alabama, caught
in a fraudulent state-wide, door-to-door sales scheme. Peddling drastically
overpriced satellite dishes on so-called "Whirlpool Credit," with a 22
percent interest rate, according to law firm
<http://www.beasleyallen.com/news/whirlpool-preying-on-the-poor/> Beasley
Allen, Whirlpool bilked millions of dollars out of thousands of people. "A
former agent testified that Whirlpool specifically targeted illiterate and
unsophisticated people, and that he had trained others to lie about the
terms of the financing."

Today a bitter source of contention between Benton Harbor residents and
Whirlpool is what many see as the hostile take-over of Jean Klock Park, a
green- and dune-scape, bequeathed to the city solely for public use in 1917.
The real estate fronts gorgeous Lake Michigan. In 2008, a consortium of
Whirlpool Foundation and two other nonprofit groups privatized the heart of
the park as part of a $500 million development called Harbor Shores, a
planned enclave of high-end homes, shops and hotels, including a "Jack
Nicklaus Signature" golf course. Harbor Shores Community Redevelopment
promised to attract business, tourists and new middle- and upper-class
homeowners.

In May, 2012 Rev. Pinkney organized
<http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/05/occupy_pga_marches_in_downtown.
html> Occupy PGA, boisterously marching 100 protesters to the Golf Club at
Harbor Shores during the 73rd Senior PGA Championship, a $2.1-million golf
tournament. Occupy PGA demanded that 25 percent of the Senior PGA profits be
provided to the city. They also called for boycotts of KitchenAid, the
Senior PGA's presenting sponsor, and Whirlpool.

Today this means that blighted minority communities are easy pickings for
the wealth-engorged, vulture-capitalist class.

Additionally, Rev. Pinkney and others claim the 530-acre Harbor Shores deal
violates the 1977 Land and Water Conservation Fund Act protecting the Jean
Klock park under the condition that the land remain forever open to the
public or, if closed, be replaced with land of equal fair market value and
reasonably equivalent recreational use. However, according to two citizen
<http://www.savejeanklockpark.org/Mapproposals.html> opposition groups, the
land given in exchange is scattered and  <http://www.protectjkp.com/>
contaminated with industrial chemical waste.

Reporting on both Harbor Shores and a new $68 million, 270,000-square-foot
corporate campus for Whirlpool (subsidized with millions in tax credits),
The New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/magazine/benton-harbor.html?pagewanted=al
l&_r=1&> stated:

"The juxtaposition of Benton Harbor's impoverished population and its two
rising monuments to wealth - all wedged into a little more than four square
miles - make it almost a caricature of economic disparity in America. But at
the same time, it offers a window into one possible future for towns across
the country, places that can no longer support their own economies or take
care of their citizens and may ultimately have no choice but to turn their
fate over to private industry and nonprofits. The way things are going, more
and more states may start to look like Michigan, and more and more towns may
start to look like Benton Harbor."

The Times noted that the Harbor Shores proposed economic and cultural
revitalization in Benton Harbor included a free, 10-week course called
Bridges Out of Poverty, designed to "prepare residents culturally to join
the middle class." The course description states:

"Moving out of the culture of poverty requires more than an increase in
financial means . . . and accepting achievement as the driving force in
one's life. It will require one to learn and use middle-class language and
behaviors."

But many residents fear that Whirlpool and wealthy developers are planning
to turn their town into an expensive vacation resort that in truth can only
exist by driving out current low-income population. Benton Harbor officially
exited Emergency Management and returned to local control in March, 2014,
with a small transition team comprised in part by former Whirpool managers.

Local social justice activists are proffering a radically different,
grassroots-driven vision for Benton Harbor and other cities. Seeking
post-industrial solutions for the Rust Belt and beyond, they include - in
fact, require - greater democratic empowerment of poor communities in
building their own future.

Prominent activist leader Charity Hicks was beloved in Detroit for her
capacity to articulate this hopeful vision; an "irresistible narrative" of
societal transformation that affirms human dignity, inspires tolerance and
diversity, rebuilds the commons and challenges gentrification, corruption,
and centralization of power. "Repeat after me," said the always colorful,
strikingly beautiful Hicks at  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG1I4eThoAA>
McGill University in 2013, "Resistance. Resilience. Restoration.
Reimagining."

Hicks was killed in 2014 by a hit-and-run driver. The loss of her leadership
is deeply felt among Michigan activists, struggling to find paths forward
into a future made more uncertain by the undermining of democracy in their
communities.

The loss of Rev. Pinkney would also leave a deep hole in the activist
community of Michigan, but it wouldn't be the first time. A recall attempt
of a city commissioner in 2005 also landed Rev. Pinkney in court, where
after an initial mistrial he was convicted on March 22, 2007, of five counts
of election fraud including possession of four absentee ballots, which he
denies, insisting he was framed to silence his political activism. Speaking
of the new charges Rev. Pinkney says, "I didn't see this coming. I just
didn't think they could do this to me again."

Appealing for support in his case, Rev. Pinkney writes in his well-known
rabble-rousing style:

"This is not a thing of Blacks against Whites. It is Rich against Poor and
the Haves against the Have-nots. Corporate fascism is here now. We must
stand together and fight this Police State. Together we stand, divided we
fall. There is more Power in the People, than the People in Power."

 

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