The Justice Department’s Inspector General and Bureau of Prisons are probing fresh allegations that federal prison employees abused Muslim inmates, according to a new department report.
The report, which is required by the USA PATRIOT Act, disclosed several new complaints by Muslim inmates who allege they faced discrimination from BOP employees.
The Inspector General reportedly referred five new complaints to the bureau, including that a prison chaplain tried to deny Muslims access to the prison’s religious facilities, that prison staff told others to stop helping Islamic inmates, and that an employee sprayed a Muslim inmate with chemicals while he was “physically and mentally tortured, provided meals containing pork products contrary to his religious diet and placed in the [special housing unit] for no reason.”
The report does not detail the locations or individuals involved in the allegations.
The IG’s office is also investigating two BOP employees who allegedly said they hated a Muslim inmate because he is Arab and insulted his religion. The inmate also said they told the other inmates to assault him and prevented him from receiving immediate medical treatment after the attack.
Several closed cases have ended in sanctions against BOP agents, according to the report. In one case, a bureau employee resigned and another received a written admonishment after sending a racially inflammatory email. Another BOP officer retired after throwing an prisoner’s Quran into the garbage and later lying about his actions.
Several other investigations of alleged discrimination involving Muslim inmates were closed by either the BOP or IG’s office after the agencies couldn’t gather enough evidence to substantiate the prisoner’s claims.
Attorney General Eric Holder spoke Thursday at a gala luncheon honoring pioneers of the civil rights movement as part of a series of events leading up to the dedication of the newly opened Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall this Sunday.
“This moment has been a long time coming. It has been too long,” Holder said. “Although more than four decades have passed since his tragic death, it is clear that Dr. King’s spirit lives on.”
Attorney General Eric Holder speaks at a luncheon honoring civil rights pioneers.
The $85-a-plate event honored those who have participated and lived through the movement that King embodied.
And while Holder paid homage to the powerful impact the civil rights movement had on social opportunities for African Americans – with the audience breaking into applause as he counted himself and President Barack Obama as beneficiaries – he also highlighted the challenges still facing racial and economic minorities in the U.S.
“I say this fully aware of the fact that a direct beneficiary of the civil rights movement is now in the White House and that another direct beneficiary has the honor of leading our nation’s Department of Justice,” he said. “We must seize this unique and important opportunity to rededicate ourselves to Dr. King’s vision of racial and social equality, to revitalize his efforts to expand economic opportunity and to reaffirm the values that were at the heart of his sermons, the root of his actions, the core of his character and the center of his life.”
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, praised Holder during his introduction of the event’s speakers and suggested that the Attorney General has not received enough credit for his work in advancing King’s legacy.
“Under his leadership the idea of enforcing the laws that Dr. King and others got on the books … has reemerged as the policy of the Department of Justice, and Eric Holder has not gotten enough credit for his role,” Morial said.
Holder added that he was proud that King’s memorial will join the “five towering giants of our history” honored on he National Mall.
“On our National Mall, Dr. King – not a President, and yet far more than an ordinary man – will be honored among men who are, in a historical sense, his peers,” he said. “And his legacy will, if we work to make it so, inspire generations to come.”
Federal lawyers and a coalition of civil rights groups asked a federal judge Wednesday to block Alabama’s new immigration law from taken effect, saying it infringes on basic rights like free speech and free travel, the Associated Press reported.
But attorneys for the state argue that the new law gives the state the ability to regulate illegal immigration at a time when the federal government refuses to act and that opponents of the law have overestimated the its ramifications.
At a hearing before District Judge Sharon Blackburn, Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General William Orrick urged Blackburn to block sections of the law that he said conflict with federal law.
“There’s no room for the states to be legislating in this area,” Orrick said, according to the AP.
Among its effects, Orrick said a part of the law that requires schools to report the immigration status of students would discourage parents from sending their children there.
He argued the law criminalizes people who rent houses or provide transportation to undocumented immigrants, adding that the law harms the U.S.’s reputation with other countries.
“It corrodes the reputation of the United States for American values like openness and welcoming others,” Orrick said.
But Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange argued that the law wasn’t a sign that the state was trying to discourage foreigners from coming to the state, pointing to the state’s recent recruitment of foreign-owned businesses like Hyundai from South Korea and Mercedes from Germany.
Strange also said the law’s opponents have exaggerated predictions of what will happen if the law takes effect as planned on Sept. 1.
Blackburn repeatedly interrupted the attorneys and suggested that she would provide an in-depth examination of the issues in her written ruling, but she didn’t say when the ruling would come, according to the AP.
The Justice Department is investigating possible phone hacking of Sept. 11 victims by News Corp. journalists, Attorney General Eric Holder told family members of victims in the terrorist attack Wednesday.
During a 75-minute meeting with about 10 victims’ relatives, Holder “broke protocol by acknowledging there is an investigation,” New York attorney Norman Siegel told reporters after accompanying the family members to the meeting in Washington.
“[Holder's] words with regard to the allegations, he said they were ‘very disturbing’ and that it is a priority for him and the DOJ,” Siegel told Fox News. “We didn’t get the specificity that we would have liked, but did not realistically expect. We are not accusing anyone of wrongdoing at this point. Hopefully the allegation turns out to be not true.”
Family members offered to give the department old cell phone numbers and computer data used by the victims to help with the probe, Siegel said, adding that he also expects government lawyers to enlist the help of cell phone carriers like Verizon and AT&T.
But Siegel said he didn’t have any evidence of hacking, and neither Holder nor Assistant FBI Director Kevin Perkins, who also attended the meeting, indicated having such evidence.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that FBI investigators haven’t found hard evidence that News Corp. employees might have hacked phones connected to the victims of the 9/11 attacks and that they have broadened their inquiry to look for other cases of potential phone hacking by the company.
Holder had agreed to meet with 9/11 family members after allegations that their phones or the phones of their family may have been hacked by employees of News Corp. surfaced in the British media.
Jim Riches, a former deputy chief in the New York Fire Department whose son, Jimmy, died in the attacks on the World Trade Center told reporters he would hate to know that people were listening to calls he received after the attack.
“I received many phone calls after 9/11 concerning body parts and my son,” Riches said. “These are things that people don’t realize that 9/11 families had to go through. And I would hate to know that people were listening
The Justice Department announced Wednesday that search engine-giant Google has agreed to pay $500 million to settle charges that it illegally displayed ads for online Canadian pharmacies in the United States.
The non-prosecution settlement is one of the largest criminal forfeitures ever, according to a department release, and covers revenue Google earned for the ads as well as sales earnings that the Canadian pharmacies received from U.S. customers.
Google entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the department and acknowledged that from 2003 to 2009 its advertising service, known as AdWords, improperly aided the foreign pharmacies, which violated U.S. law by selling counterfeit drugs or failing to require a prescription.
The company also agreed to several compliance and reporting measures going forward, including updating electronic screening and reporting periodically to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the next two years.
“We banned the advertising of prescription drugs in the U.S. by Canadian pharmacies some time ago,” Google told the New York Times’ Bits blog in a statement. “However, it’s obvious with hindsight that we shouldn’t have allowed these ads on Google in the first place. Given the extensive coverage this settlement has already received, we won’t be commenting further.”
The investigation of Google started as part of a separate probe following a fugitive suspected of financial fraud who fled to Mexico, according to the department. While in Mexico, the target began to advertise the illegal sale of drugs through Google’s Adwords, eventually leading the government to probe the program and establish “undercover websites” that unlawfully advertised through it.
Most ads placed by Google are handled electronically without any human oversight, according to the settlement. But the company previously used two third-party services to check whether the online pharmacies were licensed in the U.S. and Canada, hiring Square Trade Inc. from 2004 to 2006 and then switching to PharmacyChecker.com LLC.
But several pharmacies not licensed by either service were still able to place advertisements in the U.S., either by posting ads in other countries first and then switching to the U.S. or avoiding certain “keyword” terms flagged by the certification services.
Google learned of an investigation into the ads by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Rhode Island and the FDA in 2009, the settlement said. At that time, Google began requiring online pharmacies to show certification by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy before placing ads on its service.
Google has also hired an independent company to screen its advertising service for flaws in its screening systems, the release said.
The investigation was first revealed in May when Google said in a filing that it had set aside $500 million for a potential settlement with the DOJ.
“This settlement ensures that Google will reform its improper advertising practices with regard to these pharmacies while paying one of the largest financial forfeiture penalties in history,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole said in a statement.
While Tuesday’s East-Coast earthquake shook up the Washington, D.C., area and prompted some employees to leave for the day, Justice Department personnel were minimally effected.
Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said in an email Wednesday that no official evacuation was issued for any DOJ buildings, though some employees voluntarily left for a brief time.
And spokeswoman Jessica Smith told the Blog of Legal Times that department employees had returned to the Main Justice building about 20 minutes after the earthquake and had resumed work shortly before 3 p.m. yesterday.
Hornbuckle declined to answer questions about safety measures taken for Attorney General Eric Holder during the earthquake, but Fox News’ Fox Nation reported Tuesday that he was evacuated from the department.
No structural damage to any department buildings was reported, Hornbuckle said.
All federal executive branch departments and agencies in Washington were open on Wednesday, according to a U.S. Office of Personnel Management release. But some government buildings remained closed and workers were given the option to work from home or take unscheduled leave.
The list of closed buildings within the district as of Wednesday morning included the U.S. Drug Administration’s Yates Building, The National Building Museum, the Agriculture Department’s James D. Whitten and Agriculture South buildings, the Department of Homeland Security’s Nebraska Avenue buildings No. 1 and 19, and the Interior Department’s headquarters and south buildings.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation has filed a motion this week seeking to block new gun reporting rules from continuing to affect the four states bordering Mexico.
The NSSF’s motion asks District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer to issue a preliminary injunction preventing the new measures from operating during the group’s suit against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The gun organization sued the ATF earlier this month on behalf of two Arizona firearms dealers, J&G Sales LTD of Prescott and Foothills Firearms of Yuma.
The reporting requirements were announced by the Justice Department in July and took effect Aug. 14. They require an estimated 8,000 gun dealers to report multiple sales of high-caliber, semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole has said that the new rules are intended to combat gun trafficking to Mexico. But in its complaint, the NSSF alleges that the ATF exceeded its legal authority to regulate gun sales under the Gun Control Act.
“This is the proverbial ’slippery slope.’” Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF’s senior vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. “Our industry abhors the criminal misuse of firearms, whether on the streets of El Paso or in Juarez, Mexico. Though we can understand ATF’s motive is to try to curtail violence in Mexico, Congress simply has not granted ATF regulatory carte blanche.”
The motion also includes a footnote saying the new gun regulations affect “many of the most commonly used firearms for sporting purposes, including target shooting and hunting.”
The ATF’s adoption of the rules prompted near immediate criticism from firearms groups and several Republican congressmen, some of whom succeeded in attaching an amendment to a House appropriations bill that would block the new rules last month.
A federal judge in Boston has ordered the government to pay the legal fees of four men wrongly convicted of a 1965 mob murder, Tickle the Wire reported.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the government to cover the $700,000 legal expenses of Peter Limone, Enrico Tamelo, Louis Greco and Joseph Salvati, denouncing the government as having acted in “bad faith” and describing the conviction as a result of “secrecy gone awry.” The ruling follows a 2007 lawsuit that resulted in the government paying $101 million to the four men and their families.
The men were initially exonerated 30 years after their convictions, when a Justice Department investigation in Boston unearthed documents that proved that the FBI had framed the men. Included in the evidence was a report that revealed an FBI informant at the center of the prosecution’s case had named others allegedly responsible for the killing of Edward “Teddy” Deegan.
In 2001, the murder sentences of all four men were vacated. By then, Tamelo and Greco had already died in prison, and Limone was released after spending 33 years behind bars. Salvati had been paroled after serving a 30 year sentence. He was the only one not initially sentenced to die by electrocution before Massachusetts banned capital punishment.
In issuing her ruling ordering the government to cover the legal fees of the men, Judge Gertner blasted the FBI.
“The record revealed FBI agents ‘hiding the ball,’ not disclosing critical exculpatory information in the Deegan murder case for nearly forty years, information that would have exonerated the plaintiffs,” she remarked.
The fund that is compensating victims of the gulf coast oil spill has paid more than $5 billion in claims and has succeeded in its main goal, fund Administrator Kenneth Feinberg says in the group’s first annual report.
“The GCCF has largely succeeded in its primary objective — to compensate those individuals and businesses who can demonstrate financial harm due to the Oil Spill,” the report states.
However, others, including Attorney General Eric Holder have criticized the fund for its speed and transparency in processing claims. Holder has called for an independent audit of the fund — a request that Feinberg says he will honor.
In the report, Feinberg acknowledges that there have been some problems, but he says that those are being corrected. “The compensation program has not been perfect; but several midcourse corrections have been made in an effort to deal with the constructive criticism offered by victims of the Spill, public officials, and others,” he wrote.
He said that claims processing is current and that 97 percent of the 947,892 claims received by the fund have been processed.
However, some disputed Feinberg’s claims. “The only success Mr. Feinberg has had is in coercing desperate victims of the spill to have to accept whatever was offered,” Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood told Bloomberg News. “It looks like he did a good job for BP, not for Mississippians.”
Attorneys for bicyclist Lance Armstrong have asked a federal judge to provide them with an edited version of a Justice Department response to their allegations of misconduct by prosecutors.
Earlier this week, DOJ officials filed a response to those allegations under seal, a move that Armstrong’s attorneys argue is “repugnant to our adversarial system of justice.”
But Justice officials argued that the allegations made by Armstrong pertain to matters before a federal grand jury.
In July, Armstrong, a seven-time Tour de France winner, accused DOJ officials of attempting to ruin his legacy by leaking details of a grand jury probe into doping allegations.
In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, John W. Keker, the star trial lawyer of Keker & Van Nest LLP, said that, “Someone in this district with regular access to grand jury information is routinely flouting the law requiring grand jury secrecy.”
DOJ officials filed their response this week, but would not provide Keker with a copy of their response. Armstrong’s attorneys said that DOJ officials had asked them to agree to the seal, and they refused. But DOJ officials then filed the sealed response anyway.
In their response to the prosecutors’ arguments, Armstrong’s attorneys called the DOJ move “disingenuous, troubling,” adding that Armstrong can’t even know what arguments are being made to justify the DOJ’s response. They argue they should be provided a version of the response that omits any material before the grand jury.
