On a rainy night five years ago, Officer Coleman “Duke” Brackney set off in pursuit of a suspected drunk driver, chasing his black Mazda Miata down rural Arkansas roads at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. When the sports car finally came to rest in a ditch, Brackney opened fire at the rear window and repeatedly struck the driver, 41-year-old James Ahern, in the back. The gunshots killed Ahern.
Prosecutors charged Brackney with felony manslaughter. But he eventually entered a plea to a lesser charge and could ultimately be left with no criminal record.
Now, he serves as the police chief in a small community 20 miles from the scene of the shooting.
Brackney is among 54 officers charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University.
This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with law enforcement, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every officer who faced charges for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.
In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.
When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.
Forty-three cases involved at least one of these four factors. Nineteen cases involved at least two.
In the most recent incident, officials in North Charleston, S.C., filed a murder charge Tuesday against a white police officer, Michael T. Slager, for gunning down an apparently unarmed black man. A video recording showed Slager repeatedly shooting the man in the back as he was running away.
Excerpt, read Thousands Dead, Few Prosecuted
Tucked away in a recent New York Times story on military operations against ISIS by Iraqi special forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga was a brief description of what these troops discovered when they entered a village in Iraq that had been occupied by ISIS fighters. A naked woman, tied to a tree, who had been repeatedly raped by ISIS fighters. Another woman was discovered in a second village, similarly naked, tied down and repeatedly raped. The fighters, it appears, are “rewarded” by being allowed to have their way with captured women.
ISIS has received considerable world attention for its savage beheadings, executions of captured soldiers and men in conquered towns and villages, violence against Christians and Shiites, and the destruction of non-Sunni shrines and places of worship. But its barbarity against women has been treated as a side issue. Arab and Muslim governments, vocal on the threat ISIS poses to regional stability, have been virtually silent on ISIS’s systemic degradation, abuse, and humiliation of women. To the men of ISIS, women are an inferior race, to be enjoyed for sex and be discarded, or to be sold off as slaves.
From ISIS-captured territory in Syria, we saw a photograph of a line of women, covered from head to toe and tied to one another by a rope, as they were being led to a makeshift slave market. Little girls, who were going to school and playing with dolls before ISIS fighters arrived at their doorstep, were married off to men many times their age. ISIS set up marriage bureaus in captured Syrian towns to recruit virgins and widows to marry fighters, and also called on fellow jihadists in other countries to recruit brides for the fighters and send them to Syria. It is hardly likely that these “marriages” were based on consent, as is required in Islam. Where women are concerned, consent does not appear to exist in the lexicon of ISIS fighters.
When ISIS moved into Iraq, a similar set of atrocities followed. In ISIS-conquered towns, reports of women and girls having to undergo female genital mutilation spread like wildfire, until denied by ISIS’s savvy social media. Iraqi NGOs reported that scores of women of the Yezidi sect—an amalgam of Zoroastrianism and Islam—were taken captive. The older women were sold off as slaves and the young ones were kept as brides for the ISIS fighters. The nature of these forced marriages remains obscure.
Zakia Hakki, an Iraqi judge and a woman herself, says that the fighters leave behind pregnant women who, as “soiled goods,” are ostracized by their own societies, while their children are treated as illegitimate. These raped women become targets for honor killings in their own families and communities. The governments of Iraq and Syria have also failed to protect these women and give them any assistance; nor have Western NGOs been effective in looking after these abandoned women and children. ISIS’s men not only leave behind dead bodies in their wake but also women and children who are scarred for life.
In its propaganda, ISIS emphasizes women’s modesty and piety. It created the al-Khansaa female brigade to protect the morality of women and to ensure they appear totally veiled in public. The irony will not be lost on anyone.
Volunteer fighters from around the world, including from Western countries, who have joined ISIS are complicit in these crimes against women. These young men who grew up in Western cultures seem to have absorbed nothing regarding the value of human life and respect for women. Why are there are no demonstrations in Western and Muslim societies against this barbaric onslaught on women and girls? How much longer will the Muslim and Arab world watch these horrors against women and children before speaking out and acting forcefully to protect them and rid the region of the ISIS calamity?
Haleh Esfandiari directs the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison in Tehran for 105 days in 2007. This article was originally posted in the Washington Post. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
Indian students of Saint Joseph Degree college participate in an anti-rape protest in Hyderabad on September 13, 2013.(NOAH SEELAM/AFP/Getty Images)
By Terrance McCoy, Washington Post
One of the girls wore crimson, the other emerald. They had long black hair. They were barefoot. They were cousins and of a low caste. As shown in gruesome photographs, they were barely more than children.
One was 14 and the other was 15, police said. Without a toilet in their home, they had gone outside to relieve themselves the night before and had now been found dead, hanging from a mango tree framed by a rising sun.
A crowd of villagers swelled underneath the bodies Wednesday morning. Reports said they wouldn’t allow anyone to cut down the girls until arrests were made, so for hours, they waited in near silence. Then came news that four men had been arrested for the crime. Two of the accused were villagers who lived in Katra in Uttar Pradesh state. The other two, the Associated Press reported, were police officers.
Autopsy reports confirmed the children had been raped and strangled. News of the attack splashed across nearly every major publication in India. Even in a country where a rape occurs every 22 minutes, according to Indian government statistics reported by the AP, the gang-rape and killing was shocking.
Shocking because of its sheer brutality. Shocking because two suspects are police officers. And shocking because even after 2012′s fatal gang-rape — in which a woman’s insides were mangled with a metal rod — and tightening of national anti-rape laws, men in India have committed the crime again.
Excerpt, read more here.
When an icon of the 20th century’s strivings against oppression passes away, it is an appropriate time to take freedom’s audit.
“The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality and universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before,” President Obama said in his eulogy of Nelson Mandela last month, “but they are no less important.” And United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the world to be “inspired” by Mandela’s spirit. “His death has awakened in all of us,” he said, “the flame of human rights and the beacon of hope.”
Their message was clear: We have come far, but there is a great deal left to do.
Yet despite this rhetoric of rededication and hope, the ground of human rights is crumbling beneath us. If we seem to have moved beyond “drama and moral clarity,” it is only because we no longer know where we are going. In fact, a 150-year experiment in creating global rules to protect and defend individual human beings is coming to an end.
Excerpt, read more: The End of Human Rights -By Stephen Hopgood |Washington Post
