Politics

Prosecutor in Eric Garner Chokehold Case Elected to Congress

Published

10 years ago

May 6, 2015

Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan thanks supporters while giving an acceptance speech during an election night gathering, Tuesday, May 5, 2015, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Through a special election held Tuesday Donovan won the 11th Congressional District seat vacated in January by former Congressman Michael Grimm, who resigned after pleading guilty to one count of federal tax evasion. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press
JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A U.S. House seat in deeply Democratic New York City will remain under Republican control.

Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan — who empaneled the grand jury that declined to indict a white police officer who placed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a fatal chokehold — on Tuesday captured a vacant congressional seat that spans Staten Island and a small part of Brooklyn.

Donovan was shadowed by the Garner case throughout the campaign, but he won easily, much like his indicted predecessor Michael Grimm did last November. The seat became empty when Grimm resigned in January after pleading guilty to tax fraud.

The district, which is considerably more conservative than others in the city, is mostly drawn from Republican-heavy Staten Island. After investing heavily in the Grimm race, national Democrats largely declined to help City Councilman Vincent Gentile’s campaign. Local powerbrokers including Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo did little more than offer perfunctory endorsements.

Donovan becomes the lone Republican to represent the city in Congress. His victory will put an end to the tally on the front page of the Staten Island Advance newspaper, which noted the number of days the area was without congressional representation — more than 100.

Donovan, 58, joked during his victory speech that it was the second most important night of his life, trailing only the birth of his first child, due to arrive in two weeks.

“We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, we wanted a surprise,” he said. “But we know it’s a Republican.”

Donovan came to national attention last year after a cellphone video showed Garner being placed in a chokehold during a street confrontation with police. The December grand jury decision led to protests among those who say blacks are systematically mistreated by police.

It was a perpetual presence as Donovan campaigned, even as he took pains to avoid the subject. At a debate between Donovan and Gentile, a former state senator, someone in the audience yelled, “I can’t breathe!” a reference to Garner’s last words.

In an interview, Donovan said he had people ask him how the grand jury’s decision could have happened. He said it was a misconception that he could have determined the outcome.

“I always try to correct people when they say, ‘You failed to get an indictment,'” he said. “That means that our goal should have been to get one. And our goal is to present fair and impartial evidence to 23 members of our community.”

Donovan didn’t mention Garner in his victory remarks Tuesday night. But the specter of the grand jury decision didn’t hurt Donovan on Staten Island, home to a significant number of police officers, firefighters and working-class white people.

Democratic officials have suggested they will mount a fiercer challenge in 2016, when a presidential election could bolster turnout. Grimm will be sentenced next month and could face more than two years in prison.

Also on the ballot Tuesday was a quirky race for the 43rd state Assembly District seat.

The district, in heavily Democratic Brooklyn, didn’t feature a candidate on the Democratic line, because the candidate chosen by the local party didn’t file the required paperwork on time. Instead, three Democrats ran on other party lines in an effort to represent Crown Heights and East Flatbush neighborhoods.

Diana Richardson, who was on the Working Families line, beat Shirley Patterson on the Independence Party line, Republican Menachem Raitport and Geoffrey Davis on the Love Yourself party line.

Democratic state Assemblyman Karim Camara left the position after he became the executive director of Cuomo’s Office of Faith-Based Community Development.

___

Associated Press writer Eileen AJ Connelly contributed to this report.

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

7 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.