According to reports in the Detroit Free Press and Channel 4 News. On January 28, a police dash cam captured an incident involving the police and another human…being… beaten into submission. The activities took place in Inkster, Michigan.
According to reports the police officers began following the vehicle that night after seeing it stop at the Motown Inn, an area they claim has high drug trafficking. The driver later identified as Floyd Dent, who worked for Ford for 37 years with no criminal record says he stopped to visit a friend on the way home and took the friend a bottle of alcohol.
After pulling him over the two officers approached with their guns drawn. As Dent opened the door, they pulled him out and shoved him to the ground.
Dent did not appear in the video to be resisting arrest.
While on the ground, a police officer later identified as William Melendez had him in a choke hold, and was repeatedly punching him in the face and head while another officer is attempted to handcuff him…but Dent had his right arm up, trying to protect his face and head against Melendez. Another officer arrived and kicked him, and then for good measures another officer allegedly tasers Dent as he is handcuffed. Dent said he was hospitalized for two days for the injuries.
Police initially charged him with assault, resisting arrest, and possession of cocaine, insisting they found cocaine beneath the passenger seat of his Cadillac. Dent says police planted the drugs at the time of his arrest. Dent said a blood test revealed he didn’t have any drugs in his system.
An Inkster district court judge, after reviewing the tape, tossed the assault and resisting charges, but Dent faces an April 1 hearing on the drug charge.
But his attorney, Gregory Rohl, said that a close review of portions of the video show police planting the drugs.
The video appears to contradict official police reports of the incident.
According to police reports, Dent, who had a suspended license, ran a stop sign and they turn on their overhead lights, but he drove a few more blocks before he pulled over. Dent opened the driver’s door, then turned his body toward the interior of the car and appeared to be reaching for something in the console. The police said they demanded to see his hands, but he just turned to them with a “blank stare as if on a form of narcotic” and then said, “I’ll kill you.”
But the video shows the police officers walking up to the open door, then one immediately shoving the gun at Dent, then dragging him out onto the pavement. There is no audio. Not one of the many officers there was equipped with a microphone – or turned one on..
Dent says the police officer yelled, “Get out of the car! I’ll blow your head off!”
The police officer doing the choking claims Dent was biting him, although in police reports he acknowledges there were no bite marks and says that was due to several layers of clothing he was wearing.
One of the officers involved, William Melendez, has been accused of misconduct before, during his time with the Detroit Police Department. In 2004, Melendez was among eight Detroit Police officers acquitted in a federal trial for civil rights abuses, including planting evidence on criminal suspects. Hmmm…
Dent is still facing possession of cocaine charges. He was offered a plea deal that included probation and expunging his record after six months, but he turned it down. He said he won’t plead guilty to something he didn’t do.
Would you take that? If it all wasn’t caught on video he would be facing much more, paying all the costs, fines, fees, jail time, probation, driver responsibilty fees, license suspension, reinstatement fees, lawyer fees, victim restitution fees, etc…
Save your judgement till the facts are all in…The Michigan State Police are investigating the incident.
Inkster Police Beating An Alleged Suspect On The Ground
Be sure to read the related articles and watch channel 4 video below
The Inkster police officer (William Melendez) shown beating a motorist following a traffic stop has been involved in 12 lawsuits related to his conduct as an officer over the years, including similar allegations in a civil rights suit now pending in federal court.
According to a Detroit Free Press report…
William Melendez assaulted Deshawn Acklin in a home in Inkster during a drug investigation, according the 2013 lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit. As Acklin lay handcuffed face down on the floor, Melendez “began to choke him and beat him until he was unconscious,” and defecated in his pants, according to the suit. Melendez would later claim that Acklin resisted arrest and he was forced to subdue him. Acklin, who was hospitalized for his injuries, was never charged with a crime, even though Inkster police kept him in custody for three days, according to the suit.
Photos in the court file show Acklin with “serious injuries to his head and face.” Acklin was never charged with a crime.
Melendez, a former Detroit police officer, is currently at the center of an investigation into the Jan. 28 beating of motorist Floyd Dent, 57, who was shown being dragged from his 2011 Cadillac, choked and pummeled by Melendez, then Tasered and kicked by other Inkster officers.
Thursday, Inkster Police Chief Vicki Yost said an independent investigation by Michigan State Police is under way.
Vicki Yost
The Acklin case is among 12 federal lawsuits filed against Melendez dating to 1996, alleging, among other things, that he planted evidence, assaulted people in their homes, fabricated police reports, and wrongly arrested people. Some of the suits were dropped, and some settled out of court. In one case, the city of Detroit paid $50,000 to the family of a man shot to death in his kitchen. The suit alleges Melendez — then a Detroit police officer — was involved in the killing.
Melendez also was among eight Detroit police officers indicted by a federal grand jury in 2003 on civil rights violations, charged with fabricating evidence, planting guns and drugs, lying and assaulting people. Federal investigators at the time said Melendez was known on the street as “Robocop.” The officers were acquitted in 2004. Melendez resigned from the Detroit force in September 2007. It is not clear when he joined Inkster.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain refused to throw out the case against Melendez and several other Inkster officers, noting that there was “sufficient evidence that Melendez’s purported actions were objectively unreasonable in light of Acklin’s clearly established constitutional rights.”
Former Police Chief Hilton Napoleon, who resigned last summer after a 31/2-year tenure that included internal strife and two officers’ union votes of no confidence, told the Free Press on Thursday that he’d known officers who would lie under oath.
“I’ve had complaints of Inkster officers taking money off of people and planting drugs,” he said.
“You have officers there that have questionable integrity, and they should not be wearing the badge, and they should not be out there policing people,” Napoleon said, as he’d also said during his time as chief. “You can’t change a person’s heart. And you can’t make a person do the right thing and be moral.”
Napoleon, who is the brother of Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon, said union and administrative bureaucracy made it difficult to fire officers during his short time there.
Unlike some other organizations who have become judge and jury. It is suggested you wait till the investigation is complete then decide personal judgment. It’s also understood…politicians, judges, cops, prosecutors and everyone on the planet lies at some point in their life. Some more than others and most in self preservation scenarios, self glorification and… career boosting… of course.
According to a report in the Hartford Courant and a Yahoo News Report dated 3/16/15, a Supreme Court ruling that people convicted in Connecticut for Marijuana possession now have the right to get their convictions erased.
The Supreme Court ruled that the violation had ben downgraded to the same level as a parking ticket.
“The 7-0 ruling came in the case of former Manchester and Bolton resident Nicholas Menditto, who had asked for his convictions to be overturned after the Legislature decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot in 2011.”
“It’s a topic multiple states will have to be facing,” said Aaron Romano, Menditto’s attorney. “Because marijuana is being decriminalized across the United States, this issue needs to be addressed.”
Connecticut and 22 other states allow marijuana for medicinal purposes, and 18 states have decriminalized possession of varying amounts.“The appeal involved the 2011 decriminalization and another state law that allows erasure of convictions of offenses that have been decriminalized.
A three-judge panel of the Appellate Court, the state’s second-highest court, agreed with prosecutors when it ruled in 2013 that convictions before the 2011 law took effect should stand.”
“The judges said the term “decriminalization,” as used in the state law allowing erasure of convictions for offenses that are decriminalized, means legalization. They concluded the state has not legalized possession of less than a half ounce of marijuana.”
The Supreme Court disagreed and stated that the legislature determined that such violations are to be handled in the same manner as civil infractions, such as parking violations. The state has failed to suggest any plausible reason why erasure should be denied.
We the people of Michigan should initiate an action such as this.
A study from The Journal of Neuroscience dated January 28, 2015 was recently released with results from research on brain morphology of daily adult and adolescent users of marijuana.
Here are a few quotes from the study…
“The United States has seen changing trends concerning the acceptance of marijuana. As of 2013, 20 states had either decriminalized marijuana or legalized medical use. Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska have now legalized its recreational use. Concurrently, the popular press has shown significant interest in scientific studies on the effects of marijuana use.”
“Recent research has suggested that marijuana use is associated with volumetric and shape differences in subcortical structures, including the nucleus accumbens and amygdala, in a dose-dependent fashion. Replication of such results in well controlled studies is essential to clarify the effects of marijuana. To that end, this retrospective study examined brain morphology in a sample of adult daily marijuana users (n_29) versus nonusers (n_29) and a sample of adolescent daily users (n_50) versus nonusers (n_50).”
“No statistically significant differences were found between daily users and nonusers on volume or shape in the regions of interest. Effect sizes suggest that the failure to find differences was not due to a lack of statistical power, but rather was due to the lack of.”
“In sum, the results indicate that, when carefully controlling for alcohol use, gender, age, and other variables, there is no association between marijuana use and standard volumetric or shape measurements of subcortical structures.”
There is so much more in depth scientific data and information in this study that can be reviewed. If you are interested take a look.
Study from The Journal of Neuroscience- January 28, 2015
Michael Komorn is recognized as a leading expert on the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act. He is the President of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association (MMMA), a nonprofit patient advocacy group with over 26,000 members, which advocates for medical marijuana patients, and caregiver rights. Michael is also the host of Planet Green Trees Radio, a marijuana reform based show, which is broadcast every Thursday night 8-10 pm EST. Follow Komorn on Twitter.
All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more.
Big Business or a New Form of Slavery
Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.
What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?
“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP
According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:
Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years’ imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams – 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years’ imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.
The passage in 13 states of the “three strikes” laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.
Who is investing?
At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.
Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.
[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here).”
PRIVATE PRISONS
The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton’s program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.
Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, “the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners.” The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for “good behavior,” but for any infraction, they get 30 days added – which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost “good behavior time” at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES
Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state’s governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.
After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 – ending court supervision and decisions – caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering “rent-a-cell” services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.
STATISTICS
Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.
