One of the very first flyers Arise ever made-- back in the day when we scratched off presstype letters that were never even-- was about a memo from Welfare that had fallen into our hands. The language in the memo was very strange-- instead of saying families, we were called "Assistance Units!!!"
We simply have got to change our Arise board meeting so it's not on the same night as Springfield City Council speak-out!James J. Ferrera, III
33 Palmyra Street, 01118
Home: 351-6657
Email: jferrera1@verizon.net
William T. Foley, President
221 Wildwood Avenue, 01118
Home: 783-2201
Patrick J. Markey
17 Oxford Street, 01108
Home: 746-5512
Email: pmarkey@ogklaw.com
Website: www.patmarkey.com
Rosemarie Mazza-Moriarty
95 Osborne Terrace, 01104
Home: 781-3908
Email: moefamily@netzero.com
Timothy J. Rooke
50 Overlook Drive, 01118
Home: 747-1825
Bruce W. Stebbins, Vice President
19 Mattoon Street, 01105
Home: 734-6216
email: BStebbins@nam.org
Jose Tosado
22 Birch Glen Drive, 01129
Home: 782-2678
Kateri Walsh
42 Magnolia Terrace, 01108
Home: 781-8042
Email: kwalsh@springfieldcityhall.com
Website: kateriwalsh.com
Bud L. Williams
71 Joanne Road, 01119
Home: 783-9592
The following are updates on the case as well as the grassroots movement. Please read this and stay updated by going to our website at www.justiceforjason.org Thank you for your continued support for Jason.
MOTION TO DISMISS
On Monday, December 29th, Jason Vassell's defense submitted a motion to dismiss Vassell's indictment, No. 08-56, "on the ground that the defendant has been selectively prosecuted because of his race, in violation of the rights guaranteed him by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Articles I and XII of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights." Click here to read the motion : http://www.justiceforjason.org/motion
A HEARING ON THIS MOTION WILL BE ON WEDNESDAY FEB. 18TH AT 2PM
(15 Gothic St, Northampton MA)
YEAR ANNIVERSARY
February 3rd 2009 marks ONE YEAR that Jason has been victim of a racist hate crime and a horrific racist prosecution. As the prosecution continues its violent attack on Jason's life, we are calling on people throughout the region to join us for a DAY OF SHAME.
MARCH WITH US ON TUESDAY FEB 3 FOR THE DAY SHAME (for details click here: http://www.justiceforjason.org/dayofshame) Meet us outside Mackimmie Dorm (Southwest) UMASS at 11:30AM
CAN'T MARCH? JOIN US IN A CALL-IN DAY TO THE DA'S OFFICE or do BOTH (for details click here: http://www.justiceforjason.org/feb-3-national-call-in-day )
HELP US GET PETITION SIGNATURES-if you've already signed it get 5-10+ of your friends to sign. Please help us get 10,000 signatures before Feb.3rd. Forward this link to as many people as possible http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/J4JDismissalofcharges/
WANT TO GET MORE INVOLVED?
Interested in working towards our national campaign? Have national contacts i.e. organizations, friends, family, or coworkers in other states? If you want to help continue raising awareness and mobilizing support for Jason please get in touch with us at mobilizingforjason@gmail.com College Valley students please email J4JValleycolleges@gmail.com
WEBSITE
Our website is constantly being updated and has recently been improved. Please visit it for more updates on the case and upcoming events: www.justiceforjason.org
Thank You again for your support.
In strength,
The Committee for Justice for Jason
ALSO!!!!
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21 ’09 6 P.M. Grace Episcopal Church Parish Hall, Amherst
A COMMUNITY AUCTION & community action for Justice for Jason...
Our goal: to help Jason Vassell and his family w/ his legal fees.
CAN YOU DONATE AN ITEM OR SERVICE?
Original art & crafts, gift certificates, food baskets et.al, getaways, jewelry, services: home, professional, babysitting, gardening, music, recreational, dinners - get the idea?
This auction is community sponsored & supported.
SUPPORT JASON & SUPPORT JUSTICE IN THE VALLEY!
CALL SOON !
Louise: 413-549-3630 louise.antony@gmail.com or
Emily:413-256-1760 lewis.emily@comcast.net
He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words “Raised American” tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection.
His family and fellow detainees say the infection went untreated, despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death. Instead, after his calls for help grew insistent, detainees said, guards at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va., threw him to the floor, dragged him away as he cried out in pain, and locked him in an isolation cell.
Mr. Newbrough, a construction worker who had served jail time for molesting a girlfriend’s young daughter, was found unresponsive in the cell several days later, on Nov. 27, and died at a hospital the next day without regaining consciousness. An autopsy report last week cited a virulent staph infection as an underlying cause of his death from endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves that is typically cured with antibiotics.
Accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s last days echo other cases of deaths in immigration custody, including one at the same jail in December 2006, which prompted a review by immigration officials that found the medical unit so lacking that they concluded, “Detainee health care is in jeopardy.”
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement never released those findings, even when asked about allegations of neglect in that death, of Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born mechanic with no criminal record whose kidneys failed over several weeks. Instead, officials defended care in that case and other deaths as Congress and the news media questioned medical practices in the patchwork of county jails, private prisons and federal detention centers under contract to hold noncitizens while the government tries to deport them.
The 2006 report — and a set of talking points the agency produced for its press officers to use when discussing deaths in detention — were only recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act; the group provided copies to The New York Times, which first reported Mr. Sall’s death.
“This facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervision and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees,” the six-page report concluded shortly after he died. “The medical health care unit does not meet minimum ICE standards.”
The report said the jail had failed to respond adequately as Mr. Sall grew sicker, and that even when he was found unconscious on the floor, employees “stood around for approximately one minute” before trying to revive him. The jail’s superintendent, who said he never saw the report, adamantly denied those conclusions this week.
But Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the civil liberties union’s National Prison Project, said the new death at the same jail underscored the lack of accountability in immigration detention nationwide.
“Piedmont is a facility that was understaffed and underresponsive to clear medical needs,” Mr. Jawetz said. “The reports of Mr. Newbrough’s death raise serious questions about whether those failures were ever remedied.”
Asked Monday what measures it had taken after Mr. Sall’s death, the immigration agency promised a response but did not provide one. Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman, said earlier that an investigation of Mr. Newbrough’s death was under way.
The 780-bed Piedmont jail, run by governments of six Virginia counties, typically houses about 300 immigration detainees, and is now down to fewer than 150. But Ms. Nantel denied rumors that the agency was pulling them out, as it did last month at a detention center in Central Falls, R.I., where a Chinese computer engineer’s extensive cancer and fractured spine went undiagnosed until shortly before his death on Aug. 6.
In that case, investigators for the federal immigration agency found that the engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, had been denied proper medical treatment, and dragged from his cell to a van as he screamed in pain six days before his death.
The parallels with detainee accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s treatment are striking to Jeff Winder, an organizer for the grass-roots Virginia group People United, who was contacted by several inmates at Piedmont who also spoke to a reporter. The latest death has heightened the group’s opposition to plans by private developers and city officials to build another immigration detention center in Farmville, with 1,000 to 2,500 beds.
“ICE has no obligation to send detainees there after the next detainee dies,” Mr. Winder said. “Farmville could be left with the reputation as a place where detainees die of medical neglect.”
Ernest L. Toney, the jail superintendent, denied accounts that Mr. Newbrough had been mistreated, saying, “That is not our protocol here.” He referred all other questions about his death to the federal immigration agency.
But Dr. Homer D. Venters, an expert in detention health care who learned about the case from Mr. Newbrough’s family and reviewed the autopsy, said available evidence showed violations of detention standards that let the detainee’s treatable local infections rage out of control. Dr. Venters, a public health fellow at New York University, was critical of the medical care in immigration detention when he testified last year at a Congressional subcommittee hearing, and is on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement advisory group.
“First, Mr. Newbrough’s medical complaints were apparently ignored,” he wrote in a preliminary analysis of the case for Mr. Newbrough’s parents. “Second, Mr. Newbrough was placed in a disciplinary setting while ill and despite having voiced medical complaints. Third, Mr. Newbrough was not adequately (if at all) medically monitored” in the isolation cell.
During those last days, Dr. Venters added in an interview, even guards should have noticed that Mr. Newbrough was in critical condition as the bacteria colonizing his heart broke loose, creating abscesses in his brain, liver and kidneys. “When endocarditis is not treated, it kills people,” he said. With modern hospital care, the death rate is 25 percent or less.
“We were sitting here, powerless,” said Mr. Newbrough’s stepfather, Jack Newbrough, 70, a former Air Force sergeant who met Guido’s mother, Heidi, and Guido, then 2, when he was stationed in their native Germany. “I am just so disappointed in my country, this homeland security system they got set up.”
Mrs. Newbrough, 65, said her son, who had an estranged wife and three American-born children, had quit drinking after serving 11 months for molestation and, on probation, moved back to his childhood home in Manassas, Va., from a trailer park in Stafford. A 1999 article about life in the park, in the first issue of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, featured him prominently — under the rubric “Dialing America.”
“Nobody knew he wasn’t American,” his mother said. “Even he didn’t know. He found out the day they picked him up here.”
His arrest last February, immigration records show, was a result of Operation Coldplay, which combs probation records to find past sex offenders whose immigration status makes them deportable. Mr. Newbrough had taken what is known as an Alford plea to charges of “indecent liberties with a minor,” and aggravated sexual battery in 2002 — denying his guilt, but acknowledging that prosecutors had evidence that could cause a jury to convict him of molesting his girlfriend’s 4-year-old.
Mr. Newbrough, who spoke no German, would have automatically become a citizen if his American-born stepfather had formally adopted him when he was a child, or if his mother had been naturalized while he was a minor, rather than just four years ago.
While Mr. Newbrough waited at Piedmont for nine months, an immigration lawyer argued that he had derived citizenship from his stepfather. An immigration judge disagreed. The appeal was pending in mid-November when Mr. Newbrough began to complain in phone calls of terrible back pain and stomach aches, his family said. When they urged him to tell the medical staff, they said, he replied: “ ‘I did. They just don’t care.’ ”
Several detainees interviewed by telephone last week said that in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, Mr. Newbrough’s back pain grew so bad that he began sobbing through the night, and some in the 90-man unit took turns making him hot compresses. By the Sunday before Thanksgiving, he was desperate, two detainees said, and banged at the door of the unit’s lunchroom, yelling for help. They said by the time guards responded, he was seated at a table.
“They told him to get up, and he said he couldn’t get up because he was in a lot of pain,” said Salvador Alberto Rivas, who identified himself as Mr. Newbrough’s bunk mate, awaiting deportation to El Salvador. “Because of the pain, he started crying, and he was trying to tell them he had put in requests for medical and didn’t get any. And then one of the guards threw him to the floor.”
“They drag him by his leg, in front of about 30 people,” said another detainee, who gave his name only as Jose for fear of retaliation, adding that many witnesses had since been transferred to other jails or deported.
“We didn’t know that he was dying,” added Jose, who wrote about the case in a letter published online by a Spanish weekly. “They took him to the hole. He was yelling for help in the hole, too.”
That information, he said, came from a detainee in the isolation section at the same time, but since deported, who was so upset by Mr. Newbrough’s death that he left his name and alien registration number — Rene Cordoba Palma, No. 088424581 — in case anyone wanted his testimony.
New York Times BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests. There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.”
When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”
But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.
“Are there differences? Yes,” said Barry M. Lester, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University who directs the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a large federally financed study of children exposed to cocaine in the womb. “Are they reliable and persistent? Yes. Are they big? No.”
Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.
Surveys by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006 and 2007 found that 5.2 percent of pregnant women reported using any illicit drug, compared with 11.6 percent for alcohol and 16.4 percent for tobacco.
“The argument is not that it’s O.K. to use cocaine in pregnancy, any more than it’s O.K. to smoke cigarettes in pregnancy,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrician at Boston University. “Neither drug is good for anybody.”
But cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a health problem, Dr. Frank said. Pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were prosecuted and jailed.
Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.
At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children — 4,419 in all, ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at age 7 than those of unexposed children.
In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with tasks that require visual attention and “executive function” — the brain’s ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to focus on the task at hand.
Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.
But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize. “Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Family Center in Baltimore.
And Michael Lewis, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said that in a doctor’s office or a classroom, “you cannot tell” which children were exposed to cocaine before birth.
He added that factors like poor parenting, poverty and stresses like exposure to violence were far more likely to damage a child’s intellectual and emotional development — and by the same token, growing up in a stable household, with parents who do not abuse alcohol or drugs, can do much to ease any harmful effects of prenatal drug exposure.
Possession of crack cocaine, the form of the drug that was widely sold in inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods, has long been punished with tougher sentences than possession of powdered cocaine, although both forms are identically metabolized by the body and have the same pharmacological effects.
Dr. Frank, the pediatrician in Boston, says cocaine-exposed children are often teased or stigmatized if others are aware of their exposure. If they develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like illness or abuse.
“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social meaning” of the drug.
Research on the health effects of illegal drugs, especially on unborn children, is politically loaded. Researchers studying children exposed to cocaine say they struggle to interpret their findings for the public without exaggerating their significance — or minimizing it, either.
Dr. Lester, the leader of the Maternal Lifestyle Study, noted that the evidence for behavioral problems strengthened as the children in his study and others approached adolescence. Researchers in the study are collecting data on 14-year-olds, he said, adding: “Absolutely, we need to continue to follow these kids. For the M.L.S., the main thing we’re interested in is whether or not prenatal cocaine exposure predisposes you to early-onset drug use in adolescence” or other mental health problems.
Researchers have long theorized that prenatal exposure to a drug may make it more likely that the child will go on to use it. But so far, such a link has been scientifically reported only in the case of tobacco exposure.
Teasing out the effects of cocaine exposure is complicated by the fact that like Yvette H., almost all of the women in the studies who used cocaine while pregnant were also using other substances.
Moreover, most of the children in the studies are poor, and many have other risk factors known to affect cognitive development and behavior — inadequate health care, substandard schools, unstable family situations and exposure to high levels of lead. Dr. Lester said his group’s study was large enough to take such factors into account.
Ms. H., who agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her last name and her children’s first names not be used, said she entered a drug and alcohol treatment program about six years ago, after losing custody of her children.
Another daughter, born after Ms. H. recovered from drug and alcohol abuse, is thriving now at 3. Her oldest, a 17-year-old boy, is the only one with developmental problems: he is autistic. But Ms. H. said she did not use cocaine, alcohol or other substances while pregnant with him.
After 15 months without using drugs or alcohol, Ms. H. regained custody and moved into Dayspring House, a residential program in Baltimore for women recovering from drug abuse, and their children.
There she received psychological counseling, parenting classes, job training and coaching on how to manage her finances. Her youngest attended Head Start, the older children went to local schools and were assigned household chores, and the family learned how to talk about their problems.
Now Ms. H. works at a local grocery, has paid off her debts, has her own house and is actively involved in her children’s schooling and health care. She said regaining her children’s trust took a long time. “It’s something you have to constantly keep working on,” she said.
Dr. Belcher, who is president of Dayspring’s board of directors, said such programs offered evidence-based interventions for the children of drug abusers that can help minimize the chances of harm from past exposure to cocaine or other drugs.
“I think we can say this is an at-risk group,” Dr. Belcher said. “But they have great potential to do well if we can mobilize resources around the family.”
The phone number for the office of Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel is (413) 586-5150 . You are welcome to call anytime. We respectfully ask that your calls be respectful in tone.
In order to help us coordinate the National Call-In Day, we would appreciate if you and/or your organization made a commitment by signing the pledge here:
http://www.justiceforjason.org/pledge
The Strongest Weapon of All
What if we had a mechanism that stopped the spread of HIV that experts had speculated would work even before the cause of AIDS had been identified and that subsequent scientific enquiry confirmed was effective? We do, that mechanism is syringe exchange.
What if we had national governments dating back to President Ronald Reagan that knew what worked and yet fought against it, lied to the public, bullied local governments and generally saw the spread of HIV as justified, purely because the population that was affected was drug users, and drug use is addressed in the United States by making it as dangerous as possible?
What if men, women and children had been needlessly infected with HIV purely to teach them the "evil of their ways?" And what if we knew that the majority of these people were African American or Latino? Sadly, this is an exact description of the political response to syringe exchange and to the HIV epidemic among injection-drug users in the United States.
A ban on syringe exchange has existed in the United States since 1988, when Congress prohibited funding to support syringe exchange. In order to overturn the ban, it had been incumbent on the surgeon general to determine that syringe exchange prevents the spread of HIV and does not increase drug use. Evidence to support these conditions has been met repeatedly.
In 1998, under President Bill Clinton, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala certified scientific evidence in support of syringe exchange as a valid public-health intervention, however Clinton did not act to have the ban lifted. The irony is that because of the ban, syringe-exchange research exists in abundance, and it is irrefutable that it is an effective means to stop the spread of HIV.
Not only is syringe exchange effective in halting the transmission of HIV, evidence from New York demonstrates that hepatitis C (HCV) transmission rates among injection-drug users can also be significantly lowered. The incidence of HCV infection among drug injectors has begun to drop from 80 percent to below 40 percent among newer injectors.
Harm-reduction services, such as syringe exchange, promote the prevention of HCV, as well as make medical treatment and social services more readily available to people who are living with HCV. The maintenance of the ban on syringe exchange callously excludes drug users from receiving essential prevention-and-intervention services and carries a symbolic dimension that delegitimizes syringe exchange and undermines public health advocacy efforts.
Regardless of how one might feel about drug users, syringe exchange is effective, is essential and there is momentum for change.
During the recent presidential campaign, each of the Democratic candidates endorsed removing the federal ban during their term in office. One of the candidates was elected president, and another was appointed secretary of state. President-elect Barack Obama's HIV platform says he will "support legislation that would lift the ban on federal funding for syringe exchange as a strategy to reduce HIV transmission among injection-drug users and their partners and children." On Jan. 6, 2009, Bronx Democratic Congressman Jose Serrano, along with 28 sponsors, introduced into Congress a bill -- HR 179, the Community AIDS and Hepatitis Prevention Act of 2009 -- to lift the ban.
The time to act is now. We need to call and to write our congressional members. We need to insist that the United States joins the rank of syringe-exchange-enlightened countries such as Australia, Holland, Canada, the U.K., Iran (yes, Iran), Moldova, and others. The damage that has been wreaked over the last 20 years cannot be undone, but a new direction can be forged. It is imperative that we participate in cultivating a new course of action and participate in the righting of wrongs.
Help lift the federal ban on the funding of syringe exchange.
Allan Clear is the executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition.
People have graciously been bringing in gloves and we get them out as fast as they come in. Still looking for gloves, scarves, hats and socks. Help if you can! You can call us at 413-734-4948; our address is Arise for Social Justice, 467 State St., Springfield, MA 01105. Thanks!
