Dec. 19, 2016

Emmett Till Bill Reauthorized

Will it spur more of an effort to solve civil rights murders than the original legislation?

By Frederick Lowe

Emmett Till 

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - President Barack Obama has signed legislation permanently reauthorizing a law that expands prosecution of civil rights-era murders after an earlier version of the law failed miserably to live up to expectations.

The President, Dec. 16, signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Bill of 2007, which expands the authority of the Department of Justice and FBI to investigate and prosecute race-based murders.

The legislation is named in honor of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy who was kidnapped and murdered on Aug. 28, 1955,  in Money, Miss., by Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for allegedly whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a White woman.

The teenager’s beaten and horribly mutilated body, tied to a heavy industrial fan, floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River, where it was discovered by two boys swimming in the river.

An all-White male jury found Milam and Bryant not guilty, but the two admitted killing Till in a Jan. 24, 1956 interview with Look magazine for which they were paid. Bryant operated a store and it went out business after blacks launched a boycott.

The current Emmett Till legislation was scheduled to expire on Sept. 30, 2017, the end of the government’s fiscal year.  The legislation was passed in 2008, after being introduced by Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement. Lewis’ bill limited investigations to violations that occurred before 1970.

The original legislation failed to live up to its promise, according to a U. S. Senate review of the law. There has been only one successful prosecution as result of the bill. The Senate also noted other challenges such as the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy and a pre-1994 five year statute of limitations on federal criminal civil rights charges.

“Ultimately, a DOJ report stated that it is unlikely that any of the remaining cases would be prosecuted,” the Senate reported.

The Cold Case Justice Initiative of the DOJ last year closed 115 of the 126 cases on their list, often without pursuing potential witnesses or victims’ family members, the Senate said.

Last year, civil right activists testified before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, that the DOJ and the FBI have not done enough to solve the murders of civil rights workers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s despite the Emmett Till legislation.

The murders of black men, women and children have been extensive and almost no perpetrators have been brought to justice.

The Equal Justice Initiatve, which is based in Montgomery, Ala., reported that nearly 4,000 black men, black women and black children were lynched between 1877 and 1950.

Many lynching were extrajudicial but others were either organized or encouraged by law enforcement officials.

Congress passed the expanded Emmett Till legislation on Dec. 13th. The legislation was introduced into the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate bill, S. 2854, and House bill, H. R. 5067, require the Department of Justice to reopen and review cases closed without an in-person investigation conducted by the DOJ or the FBI. The DOJ also must establish a task force to conduct a thorough investigation of Emmett Till Act Cases.

“Perhaps most significantly to us is that the FBI will be required to travel to the communities to do their investigative work, not simply read over old files from a desk in Washington and make a couple phone calls,” said Janis McDonald, co-director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative, which is based at Syracuse University.

The DOJ must indicate the number of cases referred by a civil rights organization, an institution of higher education or a state or local law enforcement agency.  The bill also requires the DOJ to report the number of cases that resulted in federal charges, the date charges were filed and whether DOJ declined to prosecute or participate in an investigation of a referred case and any activity on reopened cases.

In addition, the law enforcement agencies must coordinate information sharing, hold accountable perpetrators or accomplices in unsolved civil rights murders and comply with Freedom Information Act requests.

The legislation also allows DOJ to award grants to civil rights organizations, institutions of higher education and other eligible entities for expenses associated with investigating murders under the Emmett Till Act.

Dec. 19, 2016

It’s Winter In America – Democrats Fail to Defend Democracy
By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon, III

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Legislators represent people not trees or acres.. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system. . .the weight of a citizens vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. . . the Equal Protection Clause demands no less than substantially equal state legislative representation for all citizens, of all places as well as all races.” U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren - Reynolds v. Sims 1964

Thomas Jefferson, building upon the works of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbs, Algernon Sidney and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that all men possess certain "natural," or fundamental rights; rights which all men are born with; rights that cannot be taken away.  Each of the natural rights emphasized a facet of what makes humans human. "That to secure these natural rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

The process that we in this country have instituted that enables the Government to exercise its power is the vote – suffrage, the political franchise.

The African-American community is very sensitive to the vote, the political franchise because of the torturous and bloody history that reflects the struggles and battles that have been fought in order to secure its right to vote. One-person – one vote, the concept that was articulated by Chief Justice Earl Warren in Reynolds v. Sims is the cornerstone of Jeffersonian Democracy.   Implicit in this ideal of one-person one vote is the assumption that if a person is registered to vote they will be allowed to do so and if they cast a vote – that vote will in fact be counted!

After all, what good is it – what sense does it make – why would a citizen take the time from their busy day to cast a vote if that vote is not going to be recognized and counted?  Why would Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer risk her lively hood, her life and the security of her family to secure the franchise if the vote that she risked her life to secure would not be counted? Mrs. Hamer did not risk her life so that she could vote. She put her life on the line so that America would live up to its fundamental precepts enabling all of its citizens to enjoy the freedoms found in the home of the free and land of the brave.  It was Mrs. Hamer who said, “One night I went to the church. They had a mass meeting… and they talked about how it was our right that we could register and vote… That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote… When they asked for those to raise their hands who'd go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine…I guess if I'd had any sense I'd've been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”

Why did Ms. Ruby Sales, Ms. Annie Pearl Avery, Mrs. Dorie Ladner, Willie Ricks and so many others in SNCC and other organizations risk their lives during those long hot days and dangerous dark lonely nights on those hate-filled treacherous back roads in Alabama, Mississippi and other parts of the South, convincing sharecroppers and other oppressed African Americans that it was worth the risk to register to vote and then to show up at the polls to vote?

Why have White supremacists used lynching, the burning of homes and churches and other tactics of domestic terrorism to keep people of color from exercising their 15^th Amendment right?  As investigative journalist Greg Palast has written, they’ve changed their tactics from white sheets to spread sheets but the motivation and outcome is still the same.

One-person one vote is the ideal that America has used time and again as a philosophical weapon against its enemies and the rational for undermining if not overthrowing tyrants, dictators and “evil” heads of foreign governments.

So, with this premise being true and I challenge anyone to challenge the accuracy of this premise –I have just four questions:

First, in the context of this recent 2016 presidential election, with the irrefutable evidence that is presented by Greg Palast and others, why is the Republican Party the party of voter suppression and election fraud? Why have 30 Republican Secretaries of State used Kris Kobach’s Crosscheck program to remove legally registered voters from the rolls.  According to Palast, “Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.”

Second, why is it that the Democratic Party is so conspicuously silent and so reluctant to use the irrefutable evidence that has been presented to challenge these crimes and pursue these criminals?  They should be fighting to the death to protect voting rights and count the votes of every citizen who cast or tried to cast a ballot.

Third, why has President Barak Obama and his Attorney General Loretta Lynch been conspicuously silent on this issue? It’s not that the election was stolen from Hilary Clinton; it was stolen from the American people and as president of  “all Americans” he should be using his bully pulpit to call attention to this fraud.  He swore an oath to protect this country from all enemies both foreign and domestic.  If the CIA can track Russian hackers why can’t the Department of Justice track Republicans?  You don’t have to go to the Kremlin, just go to Kansas!

President Obama has said that his pet project after he leaves office will be to restore the right to vote as a Constitutional right. Well, that's great and quite noble. Close the door after the cows are out of the barn and in the fields trampling the crops. Once Trump gets hold of the Supreme Court Obama's efforts will be moot.

Fourth, why has most of mainstream media failed to do half of the investigative reporting that Greg Palast has done on this issue?  Why is the Fourth Estate allowing this fraud to be perpetrated upon the American people?

Ensuring that every eligible voter can vote and every cast vote is counted should be the fundamental focus of every Secretary of State in this country regardless of their party affiliation.  Every vote that was cast in this 2016 election should be counted and the election should not be certified until they are.

Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…if every vote is not counted due to the fact that subversive tactics were employed to ensure that they would not be, then the powers that a President Trump will derive and exercise will not be just because the consent of the governed will not have been granted.

If one-person one vote is supposed to be the cornerstone of our democracy then those who engage in the acts of subverting that right are un-American.

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the Producer/ Host of the nationally broadcast call-in talk radio program “Inside the Issues with Leon,” on SiriusXM Satellite radio channel 126. Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. www.twitter.com/drwleon and Dr. Leon’s Prescription at Facebook.com

© 2016 InfoWave Communications, LLC

December 18, 2016

Dylann Roof Is Guilty  
By Frederick H. Lowe

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A federal grand jury on Thursday convicted Dylann Roof of murdering nine Black churchgoers last year who were attending a Bible study at the historic Emanuel A.M. E. Church in downtown Charleston, S.C.

The 12-member jury deliberated two hours before finding Roof, 22, guilty on all counts although he had admitted to the murders. He faces either life in prison or execution.

Federal prosecutors charged Roof with the Hate Crimes Act Resulting in Death, the Hate Crimes Act Involving an Attempt to Kill, Obstruction of Exercise of Religion Resulting in Death, Obstruction of Exercise of Religion Involving an Attempt to Kill and Use of a Dangerous Weapon and Use of a Firearm to Commit Murder During and in Relation to a Crime of Violence, according to the 15-page indictment. Roof pled not guilty.

In addition, he faces state murder charges bought by South Carolina, which is also seeking the death penalty. That trial is scheduled to begin in January.

Roof sat for an hour with Emanuel parishioners on June 17, 2015, before firing his gun, a Glock .45-caliber pistol.

Roof, 22, said he killed the churchgoers to incite a race war. The pistol was loaded with eight magazines of hollow-point bullets.

December 18, 2016

FHA Lending Violations Lead to $93 million Fine and Convictions
By Charlene Crowell

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A 2011 case that was filed in Manhattan’s U.S. District Court led to a 5-week trial in Houston and a unanimous jury decision against one of the largest FHA home loan originators.

Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corporation, also known as Allied Capital, Allied Home Mortgage Corporation and Jim C. Hodge, its president and chief executive officer. The corporations and Hodge were charged and convicted of violations of both the federal False Claims Act (FCA) and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 Act (FIRREA).

As a result of the convictions, the federal government will receive nearly $93 million from Allied Home Mortgage Capital and an additional $7.3 million from Hodge. Under the FIRREA, additional penalties will be assessed at a later time for each fraudulent violation ranging from a low of $5,500 to $11,000.

The additional penalties could be substantial. Over nearly a decade, Allied Capital originated FHA-insured home loans. Of these loans, at least 1,192 were actually ineligible for FHA insurance under HUD guidelines. When the loans defaulted, HUD incurred losses of $85,612,643.

According to an investigative article by ProPublica, Allied had the highest serious delinquency rate among the top 20 FHA loan originators from June 2008-May 2010. During these years, 9 states issued sanctions against Allied for its use of unlicensed brokers and practices of misleading borrowers.

“For years, Jim Hodge and Allied lied to HUD in order to fraudulently reap profits from the FHA mortgage insurance program”, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. “After a month-long public trial where all their misconduct was exposed, a jury has held Mr. Hodge and Allied responsible for their lives and has made them pay for losses the United States suffered on loans that would never have been insured by HUD absent their lies.”

FHA guidelines ensure that its loans can only be made to consumers who can afford to repay them. To protect the ongoing availability of FHA mortgage insurance funds, HUD is responsible for accurately assessing the risk of default on loans it insures. HUD relies on assurances from lenders that they and the loans they submit fully comply with program requirements.

Allied operated as many as 600 branch offices, but only a few locations had quality control employees to review loans. Allied Capital – with Hodge’s knowledge and approval – originated loans at more than 100 “shadow” branch offices that did not have the required authorization. The scheme included submitting loans from those branches to HUD using ID numbers of authorized sites.

When HUD auditors asked for quality control reports, Allied provided falsified information and Hodge directed employees to falsify quality control reports. Each year, both the firm and Hodge falsely certified to HUD that the business was in compliance with required quality control standards.

For Kenneth Magidson, Houston U.S. Attorney, the case represents an example of how fraudulent acts are aggressively pursued even when multiple U.S. Justice Offices are involved.

“Working together, we ensured a successful outcome following a lengthy trial and investigation against Allied and its CEO. We will continue to apply our resources whenever and wherever we can to ensure those that perpetuate such egregious fraud against the United States are held accountable for their actions,” said Magidson.

While the federal government and HUD can and should prosecute unlawful activities, the consumers who were snookered into these fraudulent loans deserve to be made whole.

For many consumers, a home represents the single largest investment of a lifetime. Its loss leads to several financial harms that affected consumers will suffer. Foreclosures dramatically depress credit scores and, as credit scores drop, the likelihood of new credit costing more is a near certainty. Some affected consumers will wind up paying a cumulative cost for receiving one predatory loan.

The Allied convictions also are a reminder of how the Justice Department can use its authority to take action when mortgage lending rules and laws are violated. The future of this vital federal office should be a focal point of the upcoming confirmation hearings. Senate Judiciary committee members must acknowledge that the journey towards fair housing has yet to reach its destination.

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Charlene Crowell is the communications deputy director with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..