The news that the NBA will stage its first-ever exhibition game on the continent in South Africa later this year comes amid a wave of anti-immigrant violence that is engulfing the republic.
At roughly the same time Wednesday that the league announced a matchup to be played this August in Johannesburg, President Jacob Zuma vowed to deal with the “underlying issues,” including a jobless rate that hovers around 25%, that have contributed to attacks on foreigners.
The NBA didn’t comment on the attacks, which have left at least seven people dead and forced thousands of immigrants from Malawi, Zimbabwe and elsewhere to seek shelter in camps.
But Fikile Mbalula, South Africa’s minister of sport, who attended the NBA’s announcement, condemned the xenophobia and mistreatment of migrants.
“We have here in South Africa coexisted with people who have oppressed us for more than 300 years,” said Mbalula. “And yet there are criminals who can’t tolerate their own blood, and their own brothers and sisters. And we say, as South Africa, not in our name.”
The exhibition is slated to feature a contest between a squad composed of African players and an outfit made up of players from the U.S. and elsewhere. Luol Deng, a forward for the Miami Heat who was born in South Sudan, will captain Team Africa. Chris Paul of the L.A. Clippers will skipper Team World.
A state appeals court will accelerate review of a trial judge’s decision not to unseal grand jury records in the case of Eric Garner.
Briefs by the New York City Public Advocate, The Legal Aid Society of New York, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Staten Island branch of the NAACP and The New York Post will be due May 5, the Appellate Division, Second Department, said in an order released Monday.
The reply brief from the Staten Island District Attorney will be due by May 26, with any responses due June 5.
“Very pleased our motion was granted,” tweeted Public Advocate Letitia James. “The public has the right to know what happened behind closed doors.”
On April 14, James filed papers seeking expedited appeal of a decision by Judge William E. Garnett, who ruled last month that the parties who sought release of grand jury minutes in the Garner case had failed to establish a sufficient need for the disclosure.
Eric Garner died on July 17 following a confrontation with police officers. Video of the confrontation, which included an officer placing Garner in a chokehold, circulated widely and led to protests calling on the district attorney to open the grand jury records.
By law, grand juries in New York State operate in secret, in part to protect witnesses and jurors. “In addition, those who were not charged by the grand jury have a reputational stake in not having their conduct reviewed again after the grand jury had already exonerated them,” Garnett wrote in an order released March 19.
According to Garnett, one who seeks release of grand jury minutes must show a compelling need for the material and explain the purpose for which that person seeks access to the minutes.
The police cannot rely on a warrant they did not know about to later provide a legal basis for an arrest, a New York State appeals court has ruled.
The appeal arose in connection with the arrest of Malvin Omar Urena, who was arrested without explanation nearly two years ago while standing with friends in the courtyard of his apartment building in the Bronx.
Police later charged Urena with interfering with a so-called buy-and-bust operation by shouting “Police, police, police.” He was detained for more than a day before the District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute, citing a lack of probable cause for his arrest.
Urena later sued the city for false arrest and imprisonment. A trial judge dismissed the claims, finding that a warrant issued in December 2011 for Urena’s arrest provided a basis for police to apprehend him.
Not so, says the court’s appellate division.
“Since the police were unaware of the warrant when they arrested plaintiff, the arrest cannot be found to have been based on the warrant,” wrote a panel headed by Associate Justice Angela Mazzarelli in a decision published Friday.
“Plaintiff correctly argues that the warrant that had been issued for his arrest in December 2011 does not render his May 2013 arrest ‘privileged’ so as to preclude his claims,” the panel added.
In general, the law permits police to arrest suspects without a warrant provided the police have probable cause. That means there’s a reasonable basis for finding that a crime has been committed.
Protesting the death of Eric Garner, who died after a police officer placed him in a chokehold.
A terrific piece by Jill Lepore about the Magna Carta that appears in the latest issue of The New Yorker traces that charter’s contribution – both real and imagined – to the advent of the rule of law and leaves me reflecting on the idea of due process in the wake of shootings of unarmed black men by police in North Charleston, Ferguson and elsewhere.
Due process underpins constitutional law and, as Lepore notes, has factored heavily into U.S. Supreme Court decisions ranging from Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that affirmed a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion, and Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 ruling that struck down state laws against sodomy.
But the idea of due process has been on display more recently in connection with the fatal shooting of Walter Scott by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina and the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri last August.
As Lepore, a professor of American History at Harvard, recounts, the Magna Carta was sealed by King John in Runnymede, a meadow along the Thames about 23 miles southwest of London, 800 years ago this May. The King was there to meet with barons who had rebelled against his despotic rule, which included levying taxes higher than any monarch had before and holding hostage the sons of noblemen who fell into debt.
The barons presented the King with a series of demands, including one that read, in relevant part, “No free man is to be arrested or imprisoned…save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
Over the centuries, the Magna Carta has come to be viewed by as a bedrock of liberties, even if, as Lepore explains, the reality is that the charter “is on occasion, taken out of the closet, dusted off, and put on display to answer a need.”
Still, Lepore notes, “Such needs are generally political. They are very often profound.”
One of those needs has been the development of due process, or the idea that before taking a citizen’s life, liberty or property the state must follow fair procedures.
Dispossession factors heavily into land and property, of course. With his powers unchecked, the King could seize someone’s estate for any reason. But dispossession also factors into life and liberty, as in, the state has dispossessed you of your liberty, or your life, without due process. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, in relevant part:
“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a grand jury…nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself nor be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
The Fifth Amendment, together with the 14th Amendment, which applies the Bill of Rights to the states, reflects, as Lepore explains, “a revision of the twenty-ninth Article of the Barons,” which had been adopted by a series of states both before and after 1868, when the 14th Amendment became law.
Fast forward to North Charleston, where Scott, a 50-year-old black man, was shot and killed by Patrolman Michael Slager, a 33-year-old white police officer, following a traffic stop on April 5. Slager was charged with murder after a cellphone video showed him shooting Scott eight times in the back as Scott ran away.
During the week that ensued, supporters of Scott and his family rallied against racial injustice although they praised the rapid response by law enforcement in the matter. In a statement, Reverenced Jesse Jackson, addressed due process:
The punishment for traffic violation is not death. Police officers are sworn to serve and protect…not to act as judge and jury in the street…We should also release internal affairs records of proven police misconduct and reform tort laws to make it easier to obtain civil judgments against cities that retain officers known to violate citizens’ right to due process and equal protection under the law.
Similarly, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, two days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson last August, editorialized:
“Michael Brown didn’t get due process. The still unnamed police officer who shot the 18-year-old black teenager dead in Ferguson will get plenty of it. This is the root of the frustration that is driving the African-American community to the streets in north St. Louis County over yet another senseless killing of a young black man.”
As it turned out, a lack of due process factored heavily into the fatal shooting of Michael Brown but in ways that may be less apparent than the encounter between Brown and Officer Darren Wilson that ended in Brown’s death suggests. According to the Department of Justice, the City of Ferguson’s focus on generating revenue via its courts led to a pattern of unconstitutional policing and procedures that disproportionately harm African-Americans and undermine public safety.
“The large number of municipal court requirements being issued, many of which lead to arrest, raises significant due process and equal protection concerns,” DOJ found in a report published in March, quoting from decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court in several cases. “In particular, Ferguson’s practice of automatically treating a missed payment as a failure to appear – thus triggering an arrest warrant and possible incarceration – is directly at odds with well-established law that prohibits ‘punishing a person for his poverty.’”
Of course, the use of force by police officers in the absence of behavior that doesn’t pose a threat also contravenes due process. “Officers often use force in response to behavior that may be annoying or distasteful but does not pose a threat,” DOJ writes, quoting from a 2002 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. (“The Due Process clause protects pretrial detainees from the use of excessive force that amounts to punishment.”)
What’s more, the idea of due process extends to protestors. Writing in Slate, Dalia Lithwick and Daria Roithmayr noted that mass arrests of protestors who assembled last summer in Ferguson violated more than their rights to freedom of speech and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment.
“We’ve seen very little coverage of the use of tear gas and rubber bullets as constitutional violations,” wrote Lithwick and Roithmayr (emphasis in original). “But the due process clause bans the police from using excessive force even when they are within their rights to control a crowd or arrest a suspect.”
As Lepore observes and as the protests in North Charleston, Ferguson, New York City and elsewhere remind us, the conception of due process may have a foundation in the Magna Carta but that doesn’t mean it was cemented there. Lepore notes the contradiction between the Supreme Court’s citing the Magna Carta in a 2008 ruling finding that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had been imprisoned unlawfully and the reality today in the U.S., where one in every hundred and ten people is behind bars.
“Due process is a bulwark against injustice but it wasn’t put in place in 1215,” concludes Lepore. “It is a wall built stone by stone, defended, and attacked, year after year.” The deaths of Scott, Brown and others demonstrate as much.
At around 4:00 p.m. on Sunday the power went out here in the part of South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal province that we live, one in a series of rolling blackouts by the republic’s main utility, which struggles to meet demand.
The weather outside was 75 degrees with a light breeze that carried a trace of smoke. My significant other and I heard a beep that signaled the shutdown, then the appliances kicked off.
The outage seemed like a good time to get out of the house. We resolved to bicycle around the village, a circuit that takes about an hour.
Others had similar thoughts. On our road, a neighbor walked her beagle. A couple from the cul-de-sac at the end were out with their two retrievers. Our ridgebacks, Tala and Juma, raced to them. The wife, who happens to be the vet who cares for our dogs, pushed their infant daughter in a stroller.
Later the sun set and the stars appeared. One burned a bright yellow.
That’s how it’s been here the past 10 days, when a combination of power cuts and spotty Internet conspired to connect me more closely with the days and nights.
Internet in the village comes from Telkom, a state-owned monopoly that serves most of the republic. Our house receives Internet via so-called ADSL, a pre-broadband era technology that, in theory, delivers Internet over copper telephone lines at speeds of around 5 gigabytes per second on a good day.
The ADSL here gives out at sundown sometimes. The house receives about one bar of cellphone service, which means you can’t use your phone as a hotspot.
Service delivery can be spotty in South Africa. Of course, we’re well off compared with most people. Nearly 65% of households in South Africa have no access to the Internet, according to the latest census.
Our spotty Internet connection feels like a throwback to the mid-1990s in the U.S., when the World Wide Web had just appeared and most of us dialed into the Internet via modems.
You connect when you can.
That leaves plenty to discover when you can’t connect. A week ago we biked along the beach in Durban, from the city front to the Blue Lagoon, where on Sundays Indian families, three and four generations strong, gather. We read a book of drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and watched a documentary about the artist in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s. We hooked up the speakers to the stereo that had been unconnected for years and listened to jazz. I began reading “The Fear,” a chronicle by the journalist Peter Godwin about Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.
Most days the dogs and I walk together at a farm nearby. They wake me in the morning.
Internet and more
If I want to work with an Internet connection, I head to the village library, where I can pick up a cellphone signal from Vodacom that registers four or five bars.
The library, which occupies a low-slung building, has sections in English, Zulu and Afrikaans. It also displays the latest local newspapers and periodicals. One day recently, I read the Mercury, a daily from Durban, flipped through an issue of GQ’s South Africa edition, and lost myself in an collection of essays by Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who died last year.
The place is pin quiet. Sometimes the librarians chat softly in Zulu.
Had Rolling Stone adhered to some basics of journalism the magazine might have avoided publishing the story of a student at the University of Virginia whose account of being raped at a fraternity on campus proved to be unreliable.
That’s the conclusion of a report published Sunday by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Rolling Stone commissioned the school to investigate its handling of the story, which the magazine published in Nov. 2014.
“Rolling Stone’s repudiation of the main narrative in ‘A Rape on Campus’ is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable,” write Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz, the report’s authors. “The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing [the woman’s] narrative so prominently, if at all.”
“The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from,” they add.
The report is illuminative for anyone who performs acts of journalism. Over the course of nearly 13,000 words, the authors recount the process by which Rolling Stone reported, edited and checked — or failed to check — the story, which details an assault on a woman named Jackie that she charged took place in Sept. 2012.
According to the report, Jackie told the reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdeley, that she was assaulted by a group of men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Jackie told Erdeley that she was invited to the fraternity by a co-worker named Drew, who according to Jackie coached seven others as they raped her one by one. Like Jackie, Drew is a pseudonym. Jackie became unresponsive to Erdeley when the latter asked Jackie about Drew’s identity. Eventually, Erdeley and her editors stopped trying to find him.
A similar reliance on pseudonyms undermined Rolling Stone’s failure to contact three friends of Jackie’s who Jackie claimed found her in the early hours of the morning immediately following the rape. For the story, Erdeley attributed quotes to each of the friends that Jackie had supplied. Erdeley noted as much in a draft of the story she filed with her editors.
Despite discussions between Erdeley and her editor about the need to confirm the account with the friends, the editor eventually approved the pseudonyms, not wanting, he told the Columbia reporters, to protect the friends from being identified with the “self-involved patter” that Jackie said they engaged in.
The Columbia report ends with a series of recommendations that, while specific to Rolling Stone and the story at issue, underscore practices that make sense for journalists everywhere.
They include an obligation to provide the subjects of our reporting with sufficient details that allow them to respond fully to charges, to surface and address inconsistencies, and to forbear from using pseudonyms, which can relieve reporters from asking questions that accuracy demands and distance readers from the identity of a source.
More generally, the report recommends that news outlets balance the sensitivity to alleged victims of sexual assault with the demand to verify information. In the end, verification aids survivors. According to the authors:
Because questioning a victim’s account can be traumatic, counselors have cautioned journalists to allow survivors some control over their own stories. This is good advice. Yet it does survivors no good if reporters documenting their cases avoid rigorous practices of verification. That may only subject the victim to greater scrutiny and skepticism.
None of the above is to suggest there’s anything intuitive or easy about the story that Rolling Stone set out to report. Or that the magazine doesn’t have journalists who work hard to report stories accurately and who, in most instances, report them well. As the investigators at Columbia write, “the pattern of [Rolling Stone’s] failure draws a map of how to do better.”
Though the lapses may belong to Rolling Stone, the lessons seem like a reminder for all of us.
