Rights Violations

A Baltimore City woman has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Baltimore County, its Police Department, several officers and officials, claiming she was assaulted and her constitutional rights violated when she was arrested while recording an encounter with police near a Towson bar two years ago. Venus C. Johnson, 30, who lives in North Baltimore, argues in the 18-count suit seeking $1 million in compensatory and unspecified punitive damages...

Carl Snowden, the former director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Maryland Attorney General's Office, reported to jail Friday morning to begin a 10-day sentence for violating probation on a drunk-driving conviction. Retired Judge Diane O. Leasure found March 11 that Snowden, 59, had violated probation in his 2010 drunken driving case in Anne Arundel County because he had been convicted last year of possession of marijuana in Baltimore City. She ordered him to begin his jail term on April 12, but Snowden received permission to begin Friday.

THE IDEA WAS a novel one: To investigate the abuses of South Africa's white-supremacist apartheid era but not prosecute those whose guilt was established. For nearly two years now, the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation has been at work, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner."If the wounds of the past are to be healed, if a multiplicity of legal actions are to be avoided, if future human rights violations are to be avoided and, indeed, if we are to successfully initiate the building of a human rights culture, disclosure of the truth and its acknowledgment are essential," Justice Minister Dullah Omar explained as the panel was established.

Three years after an Arnold man was shot in his home during a scuffle with Anne Arundel County police, the trial of his lawsuit claiming officers overreacted and violated his rights is scheduled to begin Tuesday afternoon. Michael A. Housley, and his wife, Leah, claim that a team of officers used excessive force when they came to his home to return his wife to a hospital for an evaluation. The county and police have denied wrongdoing. Housley, 54, sued after he was fined $500 by Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Philip T. Caroom for hindering police by barring them from entering the family's home.

U.S. officials have freed a former Haitian paramilitary leader and one-time paid CIA informant wanted in connection with hundreds of human rights violations in Haiti, including murder and torture.The release of Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, former head of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), infuriated human rights groups, particularly on learning that his deportation is being delayed indefinitely because of "security risks" in Haiti.Although officials would not say where Constant went after his release Friday from the Wicomico County Detention Center, sources familiar with the release agreement said he flew unescorted to New York City, where he has family.

WASHINGTON -- As many as 600 Kuwaitis have been summarily killed and hundreds more tortured and held without trial in dozens of makeshift detention centers in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, human rights advocates told the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday.An estimated 5,000 Kuwaiti nationals have been arbitrarily arrested, according to human rights activists, who said they had collected information detailing the use of 38 methods of torture -- including beating, electroshock and hanging -- by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

MEXICO CITY -- The controversial head of Mexico's anti-drug program was removed yesterday, but a presidential spokesman denied that it was because of corruption and human rights violations within his department.A spokesman for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said Deputy Attorney General Javier Coello Trejo had been named to head the nation's consumer protection agency, a semi-Cabinet-level position.Once described by U.S. drug experts here as the J. Edgar Hoover of Mexico, Mr. Coello Trejo has drawn increasing fire since a top aide was found with more than $20 million in unexplained funds last summer and since several of his men were linked to a series of rapes and to various human rights violations.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- A defiant former state President Pieter W. Botha ignored yesterday his third subpoena to appear before the nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, risking imprisonment and a fine.The 81-year-old apartheid-era politician is refusing to testify on the workings of the State Security Council, which advised the white-minority government on strategy during some of the worst human rights violations by the security forces here.He was expected to be questioned about the killings by security forces of anti-apartheid activists and about South African military raids into neighboring countries fighting leftist insurgencies or harboring South Africa "freedom fighters."

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Seven members of Indonesia's special forces were convicted yesterday for their role in killing a prominent Papuan independence leader, but the longest any of them will serve in prison is 3 1/2 years. A military court in the East Java city of Surabaya found the four officers and three soldiers of the Kopassus force guilty of involvement in the assassination of separatist leader Theys Eluay, who was abducted on his way home from a party at a military base and strangled in 2001.

VIENNA, Austria -- Using some of the most forceful language by a senior American official in recent years on the issue, Secretary of State Warren Christopher has pledged a major new U.S. commitment to the cause of global human rights.Addressing yesterday's opening session of the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights, Mr. Christopher said the Clinton administration would use the issue to define trade and foreign aid relationships with other nations and would press for speedy Senate ratification of four international human rights conventions signed during the Carter presidency, but which have languished since.

A mother and daughter from Middle River have pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation for their involvement in an incident in 2010 in which a dead raccoon was hung by a noose from an African family's Middle River porch, prosecutors said Tuesday. Dena Whedlee, 42, and her daughter Brittany Whedlee, 20, admitted to encouraging their co-conspirators - including Billy Ray Pratt, 24, of Halethorpe, and Joshua Wall, 20, of Essex - to hang the raccoon from the family's porch after a boy in the family got into a fight with Dena Whedlee's son, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein.

An Essex man has been indicted on civil rights charges stemming from an April 2010 incident in which a dead raccoon was found hanging from a noose on a Middle River family's front porch. According to the indictment, which comes nearly two years after the incident, Joshua Wall conspired with four unnamed people to hang a dead raccoon from the familiy's porch on April 29, 2010.  Wall is the only person charged in the case; the other co-conspirators are listed only by their initials.

A Baltimore City woman has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Baltimore County, its Police Department, several officers and officials, claiming she was assaulted and her constitutional rights violated when she was arrested while recording an encounter with police near a Towson bar two years ago. Venus C. Johnson, 30, who lives in North Baltimore, argues in the 18-count suit seeking $1 million in compensatory and unspecified punitive damages...

A veteran Baltimore County police detective will receive $225,000, and his lawyer could get more in fees now that the county has lost a case in which the officer claimed that his rights were violated under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has upheld the $225,000 award to Detective William Blake delivered by a U.S. District Court jury after a six-day trial in Baltimore in April, 2010....

A group of workers laid off from the ESPN Zone say the company violated federal workplace protection laws when it suddenly closed the Inner Harbor restaurant in Baltimore two weeks ago — an allegation the company denies. More than 20 of the 140 people who worked at the sports-themed restaurant and entertainment venuegathered outside the Power Plant development Wednesday morning in a protest organized by the United Workers Association of Baltimore, an advocacy group for low-wage workers.

After a six-day trial, a federal jury awarded $225,000 on Wednesday to a Baltimore County police detective who suffered a seizure on the job in 1996. William Blake, 40, who remains in the department, contended in his suit against the county's government that it had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by ordering him to submit to neurological and fitness-for-duty tests 10 years after he had the seizure. Blake, a member of the department since 1987, was pronounced ready to work three weeks after becoming ill, returned to his duties and suffered no further epileptic episodes.

Wearing a bulletproof vest and surrounded by armed guards in a federal courtroom in Baltimore, a Haitian paramilitary leader announced yesterday that he was a presidential candidate in his country -- in hopes of avoiding deportation there and trial on charges of murder.Emmanuel Constant, who was leader of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, the militia better known as FRAPH, was seeking to use a loophole in U.S. immigration law to prevent his deportation. The paramilitary group has been accused of thousands of human rights violations, including rape, torture and murder.

WASHINGTON -- To prove his skill at foreign policy, Al Gore must look somewhere other than Latin America. The administration's vaunted democratization project there has all but collapsed and, despite its brimming optimism, the region appears more stressed today than when the Clinton administration took office. The White House obsessively touts free trade and drugs as if these important initiatives exhaust the list of pressing hemispheric concerns, which range from too little social justice and too much courtroom venality to corrupt legislatures and bureaucracies.

In a decision that ends one of the most controversial cases in Anne Arundel County, federal officials said yesterday they will not bring civil rights charges against six white men in the 2004 death of a black Pasadena teenager after a brawl. "We don't have grounds to prosecute," said Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice. To win a case, officials would have had to prove that 17-year-old Noah Jamahl Jones died in a racially motivated attack and because he was exercising a federally protected right.

A lawyer representing at least a dozen black families who owned homes in a Charles County community ravaged by an arson fire last year said yesterday that his clients plan to sue the suspects because he says their civil rights were violated. Homes in the Hunters Brooke subdivision in Indian Head were set afire early Dec. 6. The residential arson in Southern Maryland was one of the largest in state history, damaging or destroying more than two dozen unoccupied homes. No one motive can explain why arsonists set fire to Hunters Brooke and caused damages worth about $10 million, according to law enforcement authorities.