Jacqueline Luqman, 13 Sep 2023

(quote)
A racist capitalist carceral state explains why progressive and left-wing
organizers working for years to stop the financing and building of a militarized
police training center in a Black community that doesn't want it are deemed
terrorists involved in a mob-like conspiracy and are considered particularly
dangerous since they allegedly got together and planned their activities on the
day George Floyd was publicly executed by Minneapolis police. Georgia's
particular RICO law makes criminalizing legitimate acts for clearly political
reasons possible.

Georgia's version of the RICO Act is modeled after the federal RICO statutes and
was passed in 1981, but differs in defining racketeering more broadly. It allows
a district attorney to introduce evidence that would not reflect a criminal act
on its own. It also allows a prosecutor to use crimes committed outside the
state to prove a wider conspiracy. This aligns with the catchall indictment
against the Stop Cop City protesters. Aside from the outright self-serving
misdefinitions of collectivism, solidarity, and mutual aid in the indictment,
classic support efforts like organizing a bail fund and reimbursing organizers
for expenses are categorized as money laundering, and speech and associational
activities like flyering and using the acronym ACAB are considered actions to
further a conspiracy.

Yet the same RICO statute was used in the same state to indict Trump a week
earlier. Rather than believing that the statute was appropriately applied in
Trump's case, the dubious nature of the charges in the Stop Copy City
indictments should instead cause healthy skepticism about the Trump indictment
too. The law that is used in both cases is manipulated so easily for political
and ideological purposes. How does it make sense to trust the just application
of the law in one case and not the other?

For many supporting the Stop Cop City protesters, the Republican Attorney
General leading that prosecution is the Bad Guy. But the same law was also used
by Black woman Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, now hailed a hero
for securing the RICO indictment against Trump and Company, against mostly Black
teachers in the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal in 2015. Her office
accused them of changing the standardized test scores of public school students
under the punitive and unreasonable requirements established by the Bush-era No
Child Left Behind policy. Despite the widespread unpopularity of NCLB by 2015
because of how it scapegoats educators for not doing enough to close the
"achievement gap" between students of different racial groups and class
backgrounds instead of addressing the material conditions that contribute to
that gap such as poverty and systemic racism, and its over-emphasis on measuring
student achievement with regular standardized tests, the RICO law was used to
criminalize teachers who struggled to teach to the frequent tests, risked losing
funding for their schools, as well as their own pay raises or even jobs if they
did not, while none of the social issues that actually cause the "achievement
gap" were ever addressed. What justice was served by the RICO law being used
against teachers in such a grossly unequal educational system and unjust policy
that persists to this day?

These cases show that not only is there a multi-tiered system of so-called
justice in this country, but how that justice is meted out and why it is
influenced by individuals with political and other biases.
(/quote)
-- Cont'd at https://blackagendareport.com/justice-system-not-fair-and-just-everyone-not-fair-and-just-anyone