Tag: Santa Rita County Jail

Oakland, Calif. – Lawyers with the Public Defender’s Office in collaboration with the sheriff, prosecutors and courts have secured the release of more than 300 people because of the threat of COVID-19 in Santa Rita County Jail. Most of those had 45 days or less to serve in jail.

“Nobody should be put out alone into this cold night,” said Benita Turner, mother of Jessica St Louis, who died after being released from Santa Rita County Jail at 1:30 a.m. on July 28. “We want to make sure that we are gathered here to remember that a woman lost her life because this institution thought it was OK to release a young woman at 1:30 in the morning,” said community organizer Sister Krea Cristina Gomez to the large crowd that gathered for the vigil.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) and a for-profit health care provider it contracted to provide medical services to inmates at the Santa Rita county jail are being sued for failure to provide medical care to a pregnant inmate, locking her in an isolation cell even as she was in “the throes of childbirth” and ignoring her screams for help, according to a new federal civil rights lawsuit filed here Aug. 20.

In 2017, Federal District Court Judge Charles Breyer denied the habeas appeal of DeWayne Ewing, an innocent man, based on the timeliness of his appeal rather than on the facts of the case, because of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), passed in 1996 – the Senate voted 91-8 – and signed by Bill Clinton. Part of the way Congress tried to make the death penalty “more effective” was to limit the ability of prisoners to appeal, especially to have multiple appeals.

The snow shined against the afternoon sun. The multicolored flags bearing the images of our ancestors rippled and flapped in the afternoon breeze as the “Po’ Folx Delegation” from POOR Magazine and Decolonize Academy rode in on a rented four-wheel drive car. After a long, harrowing journey from Huchuin, Ohlone (Oakland, California), in two planes and a rental car we finally arrived to find an avenue of flags from hundreds of nations across Mama Earth, including our favorite, where we piled out of the car to take our first picture, the RBG flag of Black liberation.

In January 1994, 23-year-old DeWayne Ewing and a girlfriend discarded a condom as they left a park in the Oakland hills. A rape took place in the same park a few days later, and three days after the rape, police found the condom under a bush and put it with the rape kit. Thirteen years later, in June 2007, police pulled DeWayne over for an illegal turn and arrested him for rape on a cold hit DNA match.

We, as members of activist and community organizations in the Bay Area of California, send our support and salute you for making history as your strike has become the largest prison strike in the history of this nation. We recognize the potential that your action has to improve the lives of millions subject to inhumane treatment in correctional facilities across this country.

The place was the historic Black Dot Café in West Oakland; the event, a "Town Bizness" town hall meeting hosted by the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC) with the presence of Chairman Fred Hampton Jr.