In one of the best selling books of this season, the heroine, Lizabeth Salander, a hardwired, brilliant young computer genius is shot and buried by the antagonist.  He is a prototype of the cruel, greedy, mysoginistic,exploiter.  She claws herself out of her premature grave and indomitable and focused, defeats him  .Finally by the end of volume 3 she has triumphed, using her own brains and relying on  her friends and comrades,  over the entire corrupt corporate, governmental, military power structure that had been trying to oppress and suppress her her whole life. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sentencing of Lynne Stewart
by Michael Steven Smith

“At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.” — Karl Marx

Lynne Stewart is a friend.  She used to practice law in New York City.  I still do.  I was in the courtroom with my wife Debby the afternoon of July 19th for her re-sentencing.  Judge John Koeltl buried her alive.

We should have seen it coming when he told her to take all the time she needed at the start when she spoke before the sentence was read.  It didn’t matter what she said.  He had already written his decision, which he read out loud to a courtroom packed with supporters.  It was well crafted.  Bulletproof on appeal.  He is smart and cautious.

After about an hour into his pronouncement, he came to the buried alive part.  He prefaced it by citing the unprecedented 400 letters of support people had sent him, all of which he said he read.  He noted Lynne’s three decades of service to the poor and the outcast.  He stressed that she is a seventy-year-old breast cancer survivor with high blood pressure and other serious health problems.  And then he laid it on her: 120 months. Read the rest of this entry »

Darkness in America: Lynne Stewart’s Resentencing: Gets 10 years imprisonment for doing her job honorably, ethically.
by Stephen Lendman
Friday, 16 July 2010

Describing Lynne Stewart, one of this writer’s previous articles said the following:

“She worked selfishly, tirelessly, and heroically for 30 years as a human rights champion, defending America’s poor, underprivileged, and unwanted – people never afforded due process and judicial fairness without an advocate like her. She knew the risks, yet took them courageously until bogusly indicted on April 9, 2002 for:

* “conspiring to defraud the United States;
* conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity;
* providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and
* two counts of making false statements.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read Red: Oscar Grant, Juanita Young, Fred Hampton Jr. & Lynne Stewart

http://redguard.tumblr.com/post/790127375/read-red-oscar-grant-juanita-young-fred-hampton-jr

We, the crowd gathered at Judson Memorial Church last night, hadn’t yet heard about the “involuntary manslaughter” wrist-slap verdict in the Jan. 1, 2009 Oakland, Cal. police murder of Oscar Grant. If someone had announced the news, my guess is that we would have ended the event with a march into the streets to protest this latest in the long, endless succession of racist outrages in which killer cops get away with murder.

How can I be so sure? Because the event was a fundraiser/rally for Lynne Stewart, the wonderful, courageous people’s lawyer who is now a political prisoner railroaded into jail for the crime of representing her clients, and it was a rip-roarer. People rose to their feet time after time as speaker after speaker, including more than one who personally knows the reality of racist police violence all too well, spoke truth to power, speaker after speaker calling out their praise of this activist and advocate for justice and struggle.