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| THE MORNING AFTER - EPISODE 6 |
"There are a lot of ways in which it sucks to be a light or white-presenting Native American.
I’m often not recognizable, even to people of my own nationality. Sometimes, I even have to perform to be seen by myself, as if by wearing turquoise and beadwork, I won’t get so lost in the Western world. Of course, it’s so much deeper than that, but it can help to have outward reflections of an inner truth. If I’m not performing for myself, it can feel as if I’m performing to others.
At times, (though very rarely) others with mixed-Native heritage have compared themselves to me, as if I were on the bottom of the scale for Native-presenting-ness.
“Oh, I look mixed, but I look more Native than Mistylynn, right?”
....Because I am Indigenous and I do face a great deal of challenges specific to my nationality, I have often wrongly believed that I don’t have white privilege. That isn’t true, because the larger world views me as a white woman...
"Though the Black Lives Matter Movement is led by black women, stories of their experiences with law enforcement have been largely overshadowed by the narratives of black men. But the national outcry over Sandra Bland’s death has been unusual. Her name trended on Facebook and Twitter for days. #JusticeForSandraBland trended on Twitter for just as long. Perhaps her own outspokenness on racial justice issues through her video series #SandraSpeaks made the story behind her death more compelling for mainstream news outlets to pick it up."
"What happened is, there’s a term we hear in the criminal law field-- “somebody failed the attitude test.” And when somebody fails the attitude test, things escalate.
Again, there is no “attitude test” that’s permissible as a basis for police encounters, meaning police officers don’t get to harass you because you have a bad attitude, or you don’t show them the proper deference.
You see in that moment where he orders her to put out her cigarette, a breakdown in police training. Basically, being a police officer, you’re going to run into people having a bad day, not wanting to engage with you, not wanting to chat and not wanting to continue an encounter beyond the legally permissible scope of the encounter. And that’s what happened here. She’s allowed to leave at that point, and he’s like "hey put out your cigarette."
He has no lawful basis to order her to do so under the facts of this case. If she was doing something that was interfering with him conducting the traffic stop, the officer may issue a lawful order for her to stop doing that. But officers continue encounters with people smoking cigarettes all the time. She’s not doing anything unlawful, she’s not doing anything that increases the danger to the officer.
But beyond that, the question becomes, why is he telling her that? Why is he telling her to put out her cigarette? What is his lawful authority to do so?
Because his right to detain her ended the minute he was done with his traffic investigation and written the ticket or warning. At that point, the detention became unlawful.* At that point, he is no longer acting in his capacity as a police officer, rather he is just a man in uniform harassing a woman stopped alone in her car by the side of the road.
Again, this is where the Fourth Amendment controls the encounter. Once the investigative detention relating to the traffic stop was complete, he had no basis to detain her, no basis to order her to put out her cigarette, and no lawful basis to order her out of her vehicle.
ATTN.COM
*Rodriguez vs. United States (April 2015)
The court took the case Rodriguez v. United States ...Ginsburg got to write the majority opinion. She didn't overturn the 2005 Caballes case, in which she had dissented -- doubtless she didn't have the votes to do so. Instead, she noted that Stevens, writing in Caballes, had said that a traffic stop could become unlawful “if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a warning ticket.”
Ginsburg was this time prepared to concede that an officer could perform “certain unrelated checks” during a traffic stop. But, she said, the officer could not perform unrelated checks “in a way that prolongs the stop.”
Driving While Black Assaults wouldn't be nonexistent. But they would be greatly reduced.
Mike Brown might still be here if Darren Wilson had known there would be consequences.
Sandra Bland might still be here, too.
Skip Gates would likely still be led out of his own home in handcuffs, but the officer abusing his authority would know he had one strike against him and two left to go before he lost his job.
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| Encinia's Incomplete and/or False Arrest Affidavit Of Sandra Bland |
"Rodriguez v. United States held that police could not extend the length of a routine traffic stop, even for just a few minutes, absent a safety related concern or reasonable suspicion to believe that the driver may have committed an additional crime. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in the opinion of the Court, “[t]he tolerable duration of police inquiries in the traffic-stop context is determined by the seizure’s ‘mission’ — to address the traffic violation that warranted the stop, and attend to related safety concerns.” A police stop “may ‘last no longer than is necessary to effectuate th[at] purpose.’ Authority for the seizure thus ends when tasks tied to the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been — completed.”
By the time Encinia asks Bland to put out her cigarette, the “mission” of his encounter with Bland is almost at completion. He has already written the citation and brought it to Bland.READ MORE: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/07/22/3683281/supreme-court-say-sandra-blands-arrest/
Read More On Black Women And The Expectations of Invulnerability - To suggest that Sandra Bland was not the type of person to commit suicide results not only in the absolving of any accountability/responsibility police have in leading people to committing suicide, but can also lead to a really victim blaming narrative of ‘she did it to herself”. An empire of white supremacy and police terror predicated upon anti-black racism killed Sandra Bland. Being a black woman in the United States who is living through inherited and embodied instances of state-induced trauma for lifetimes is what killed Sandra Bland. The carefully calculated last moments of Sandra Bland’s life of getting pulled over for a minor traffic violation on her way to work, being brutalized by law enforcement officers, and subsequently seized and held in captivity for being a Black woman is what killed Sandra Bland. THE STATE DID THIS TO HER. Whether she committed suicide or not THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE.
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| Alexandra Pyle In The Cell Next Door, Could Only Speak to Sandra Through A Hole |
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| EPISODE 5 - THE DATE |
"They've got this thing wired....Too often, we live within their games, so why would you not study what works? Take away the bad stuff — because there’s a lot — and use the savvy interesting stuff and figure out how they can apply...
The Selma helmer continued to the ballroom of female bloggers, "Women have been trained in our culture and society to ask for what we want instead of taking what we want.
We've been really indoctrinated with this culture of permission. I think it’s true for women, and I think it’s true for people of color. It’s historic, and it’s unfortunate and has somehow become part of our DNA. But that time has passed.
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| Dorothy Gaines Piper Kerman, creator of OITNB was in jail with her. |
In 1994, Dorothy Gaines was a nurse technician and PTA parent raising her younger sister and brother and three children alone in Mobile, Alabama after the death of her husband. Local drug dealers, desperate to reduce their own sentences, named her as an accomplice in their sale of crack cocaine. Their self-contradictory testimony was the only evidence against her, yet her court-appointed lawyer failed to cross-examine them or raise a defense. She was found guilty of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Her 9-year-old son Phillip jumped in the judge's lap at sentencing and begged the judge not to take away his mother
"The lawyer representing Bland’s family said the stop for a routine traffic violation became confrontational when Bland was asked to put out her cigarette. The lawyer, Cannon Lambert, told NBC News that the state trooper “looked to force her to get out of the car by way of opening the door and started demanding that she do.” "
"There were law enforcement violations during the traffic stop of a woman who ultimately was found dead inside a Waller County jail cell. That's according to a preliminary review by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
According to the DPS, authorities spotted violations of the department's procedures and courtesy policy in dash cam video showing a state trooper's interactions with Sandra Bland on July 10 in Prairie View
The deputy involved has been assigned administrative duties pending the outcome of an investigation."
Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said at a Friday afternoon press conference that Bland’s body was not discovered for up to 90 minutes. Under the commission’s guidelines, every inmate should be checked on hourly....
Mathis said he will take the case to a grand jury. The earliest that could happen, he said, would be in August.
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