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A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.
A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.
The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.
Officer Joanna Piña, who took the call, reported Perez Jr’s demeanor as “suspicious”, claiming he seemed “distracted and unconcerned with his father’s disappearance”.
Perez Jr sat for hours of initial questioning while officers obtained additional search warrants allowing them to access devices they had seized.
During the interrogation, Perez Jr started pulling out his hair, hitting himself and tearing off his shirt, nearly falling to the floor, at which point the officers laughed at him and told him he was stressing his dog, the judge summarized.
I grew up in New York City. We heard a lot about Unions in our history classes, because most of our parents [and all the teachers] were in a Union. Figured that was the norm for the whole country, because what kid really thinks about how text books are chosen?
Recently heard from another poster that their books siad that Unions were useful in the past, but were bad now because they interfered with the global economy.
There might've been a sort of "Golden period" where Union membership dropped off and benefits and working conditions were still good, but the longer you go without protections the more ground you lose. The global economy statement is also laughable. Are teleconferenced teachers from China taking the American teachers jerbs?
I suppose it's a good thing nobody really reads the textbook. /s
This truly sucks, because it's cutting off a valid source of information, but given how prevalent the issue is on the internet and how kids have access at a younger age than these ghouls ever did, it's like trying to stop a river with a single stick.
Not every kid has equal access to internet or technology at home which is why keeping resources in schools is really important.
Personally I found that being responsible for a textbook for a whole semester helped me as well because I knew I had to take care of it, not lose it, and return it in good condition at the end of the semester which helped me grow more personally responsible.
A good point. It's why I will always be a proponent of books and libraries. Everyone deserves access to the wealth of information we've discovered as a species.
The wave of book bans sweeping the US, typically reserved for works of fiction deemed controversial, has hit textbooks used in public schools, marking the next step in Republicans’ war on education.
The board of trustees for the Cypress Fairbanks independent school district in Houston voted 6-1 earlier this month to redact certain chapters in science textbooks, including those about vaccines, human growth, diversity, and climate change.
Blasingame, who has served on the board since 2021, did not give a specific explanation for the decision, but said the subjects go beyond what the state requires to teach and creates “a perception that humans are bad”.
Education experts say the move could have far-reaching consequences, prompting similar decisions to omit information in other subjects, and public school districts across the country.
“To ban entire chapters of textbooks and withhold that information from students is not only unconstitutional, but it is taking away their access to real-life ideas that exist in this world,” said Laney Hawes, co-founder of the group.
Kasey Meehan of PEN America, the national non-profit organization committed to free expression, said school board members – who are often publicly elected and do not necessarily have an education background – are increasingly having an outsized influence on the instruction being delivered to students.
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The state they are from now should counter sue Texas if they try to allow it. 100 billion per attempt to violate their people's rights should start sending a message.
There is an actuall section of the american constitution stating that a state cannot prosecute their citizen for something they legally did in another state
As soon as the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade two years ago, anti-abortion activists started debating if and how they could limit Americans’ ability to cross state lines for legal abortions.
The man, Collin Davis, said in court records that when he learned his former partner planned to get an abortion in February 2024, he hired an attorney who would “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child”.
However, activists determined to end abortion nationwide have launched a series of legislative and legal volleys to undermine that right, often by targeting groups and individuals who may help patients travel.
Alabama’s attorney general has threatened to prosecute groups that help women leave the state for abortions – a threat that a federal judge beat back forcefully earlier this week.
Court records in Davis’s case also repeatedly cite the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that, in the eyes of some abortion opponents, bans the mailing of abortion-related materials nationwide.
Such an interpretation of the Comstock Act, which the Biden administration disagrees with, would result in a de facto national ban on abortions, because clinics rely on the mail to obtain the drugs and equipment they need to do their jobs.
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The encampment began on 3 May when pro-Palestinian protesters set up dozens of tents in Fellows’ Square, similar to actions in the US, Europe and India in response to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
In the UK, vice-chancellors from some of the leading universities will meet at No 10 on Thursday to discuss action to address the rise in antisemitic abuse on campuses and disruption to students’ learning.
“A vocal minority on our campuses are disrupting the lives and studies of their fellow students and, in some cases, propagating outright harassment and antisemitic abuse.
The Dublin campus, which is in the heart of Ireland’s capital, closed to the public, costing the college an estimated €350,000 (£300,000) in forfeited revenue because visitors could not view the Book of Kells, a medieval manuscript and tourist magnet.
“It shows the power of grassroots student and staff fighting for a just cause of Palestinian liberation and to end complicity with Israeli genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism.”
“We abhor and condemn all violence and war, including the atrocities of October 7th, the taking of hostages and the continuing ferocious and disproportionate onslaught in Gaza.
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We had a far more robust fifth estate 24 yeas ago, and that election is as much as anything what got us started down this path. Before 2000, election results were simply accepted.
The protests in support of Gaza are testing the bounds of students’ rights to free speech
This was not the viewpoint that led to the creation of the first amendment and all. The actual viewpoint of the founding fathers was that certain things are just inseparable parts of being human -- you're going to talk with people around you, if you're so inclined.
It's not for a government to "regulate" what people are and aren't allowed to say to one another, any more than they could regulate how many bones are in the body. A lot of those foundational documents weren't meant to lay out what the government would and wouldn't allow people to do and the boundaries of government's permissible control -- they were simple acknowledgements of the reality that they were outside the possible control of any government, and that a government that tried to tell people they could say certain things to each other but not other things, was engaged in an impossibility (as well as betraying its own illegitimacy to govern).
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While semesters at other schools speed toward a violent close – complete with canceled classes and commencement celebrations, scenes of brutal yet unsuccessful attempts at quelling the protests, and aggression from opposing groups that has heightened already inflamed tensions – Brown is one of several universities that have sought a more amicable solution.
The protests in support of Gaza are testing the bounds of students’ rights to free speech and shining a spotlight on the deepening political divides over the culture on college campuses.
It’s an issue the GOP-led House has pursued with vigor, launching an investigation into federal funding for schools where protests have lingered, and scrutinizing presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities whom they allege have allowed an escalation in antisemitism.
In an interview with the Guardian late last year, Roth – who is Jewish and a critic of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement largely driving these protests – championed debate and disagreement.
Even with a more open approach, discussions of a divisive issue firmly rooted in identity, religion and ethnicity have at times devolved into rhetoric that has left some students and members of the broader campus communities feeling targeted or unsafe at some schools.
The Evergreen State College agreed on Tuesday to set up a taskforce that will map out its “divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories”.
theguardian.com
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