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Alan Dershowitz Remembers His Good Friend Jeffrey Epstein

The sex trafficker’s lawyer pays tribute to his client and the free massages he gave him.

A Better Beto: Former O’Rourke Organizers Rally Behind New Texas Senate Candidate

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez’s campaign wants to mobilize young voters and voters of color around progressive issues against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

The post A Better Beto: Former O’Rourke Organizers Rally Behind New Texas Senate Candidate appeared first on The Intercept.

10 Years of Death by Border Patrol

In 1994, Border Patrol implemented its “Prevention Through Deterrence” strategy, ramping up enforcement at popular entry points along the U.S.-Mexico border and funneling migrants into more dangerous desert areas. This strategy intensified under President George W. Bush with a hiring surge of roughly 8,000 Border Patrol agents from 2006 to 2009.

As a direct result, significantly fewer of those who cross into the United States from Mexico have lived to tell the tale: An untold number have died of thirst trying to traverse the deserts that flank the border. Responding to this crisis, the Tucson-based group No More Deaths began organizing brigades of volunteers to leave jugs of water in the Sonoran Desert for dehydrated migrants.

As In These Times reported in September 2009, what is lifesaving liquid for migrants is a crime against the state for others. In “Litterers or Life-Savers?” Kari Lydersen wrote: 

Walt Staton faces up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine for littering.

Though he doesn’t expect to actually get jail time, the 27-year-old Tucson web designer still thinks the charges are ironic and disproportionate. Staton says that when he was cited in December 2008, he was actually picking up trash while also leaving full water jugs in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge along the Mexican border.

Staton is a member of No More Deaths/ No Más Muertes, a border activism group that leaves water along trails for migrants crossing through the harsh, unforgiving Sonoran Desert. About 50,000 migrants cross through the wildlife refuge each year, down from about 250,000 since a seven-mile stretch of a 12-foot-tall fence was built along the border there, according to refuge manager Michael Hawkes. ...

In February 2008, No More Deaths volunteer Daniel Millis found the body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl. (The cause of death is unclear.) Two days later he was cited for littering while leaving water jugs on trails. He refused to pay the $175 ticket. ...

In early August, a judge sentenced Staton to one year of “unsupervised probation.” During that period, he “must complete 300 hours of community service focusing on trash removal from public lands.”

Fast forward to 2019. In These Times reported that, on January 18, federal magistrate judge Bernardo Velasco found four more No More Deaths volunteers guilty of littering, or, as he put it, defiling “pristine nature.” One of the so-called litterers, Zaachila Orozco, testified during the trial: “I didn’t understand that humanitarian aid was criminal.”

Apparently it is. Separating children from their parents and locking them up in cages, however, is perfectly legal.

Every American Should Be Guaranteed a Job. The Green New Deal Could Make That Happen.

fed•er•al jobs guar•an•tee

noun

1. A government policy to provide a job for anyone who wants one

We’ve been talking about this for a while, right?

Yes! President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a “second Bill of Rights” in his 1944 State of the Union, a list of economic and social rights including “the right to a useful and remunerative job.” 

“Full employment” has been the official goal of the U.S. government since 1978, with the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act following advocacy from labor groups as well as Coretta Scott King. Early versions of the bill included an actual jobs guarantee, which was cut out of the final legislation.  A jobs guarantee was also part of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential platform.

Are any of this year’s presidential candidates supporting a jobs guarantee?

Several! Cory Booker (N.J.) introduced a Senate bill—co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.)—to create a three-year pilot program in up to 15 “high-unemployment communities” to provide jobs with at least a $15 wage.

Bernie Sanders (Vt.) arguably goes further, invoking FDR’s call for a second Bill of Rights and a full jobs guarantee.

If the point is to keep people out of poverty, why not just give people money or provide better social services?

Why not all of the above? A universal basic income is preferred by some, but there’s no need to choose just one policy to answer economic inequality. Jobs advocates argue there is plenty of fulfilling work to be done and that a jobs guarantee would strengthen the bargaining position of workers in the private sector. The Sanders campaign website, for example, suggests childcare, elder care and green infrastructure as areas to emphasize.

Speaking of which, isn’t a jobs guarantee part of the Green New Deal?

That’s right—a Green New Deal could fund millions of jobs to dramatically scale up clean energy production, build and run public transportation, and prepare communities to adapt to the realities of a warming planet. While a jobs guarantee is already popular—52% of Americans support it, according to a poll by Civis Analytics—polling commissioned by the Sunrise Movement indicates that a jobs guarantee focused on green jobs and climate protection is even more popular.

Saving the planet and ending poverty at the same time? Certainly sounds worth a try! 

Asian carp capable of surviving in much larger areas of Lake Michigan than previously thought

Asian carp are capable of surviving and growing in much larger portions of Lake Michigan than scientists previously believed and present a high risk of becoming established, according to a new modeling study.

All the talk about GDPR making identity theft easier, but people fail to see that companies shouldn't have the data in the first place. And if a company leaks your data because of a takeout request, is that the fault of GDPR or just shoddy security?

Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism

In the wake of the El Paso shooting it’s clear Trump inspires mass shootings.

The Second a Teenager Gets Their First Phone

Protected from having an online presensce since she was born, it’s time to log on.

The Real Fascism

America’s big problem: violent white nationalists or Antifa milkshakes?

On the Heels of Another Massacre, Texas Is Loosening Gun Laws

New, looser gun laws will go into effect in the state of Texas in September, just before the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting that killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart. Texas already has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation. But for Republican lawmakers during the state’s last legislative […]

Border Patrol Arrest Reports Are Full of Lies That Can Sabotage Asylum Claims

The Intercept found erroneous or fabricated information, inconsistencies, and boilerplate language included on forms filled out by immigration officials.

The post Border Patrol Arrest Reports Are Full of Lies That Can Sabotage Asylum Claims appeared first on The Intercept.

Expanding the Powers of the FBI Is Not the Solution to White Supremacist Violence

On August 3, a white supremacist attacked a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing at least 22 and wounding dozens more. Espousing racist conspiracy theories about a “Hispanic invasion,” the killer’s murderous rampage was cold-blooded—and appeared to target Latinx people. It’s only the latest high-profile act of white supremacist violence. And it comes at a time when Donald Trump and other Republican politicians are mainstreaming racist rhetoric.

Faced with this climate, many well-meaning people are looking for a way to counter the very real danger of white supremacist violence. Some Washington Post columnists, CNN guests, the FBI Agents Association and presidential hopeful Joe Biden are touting one particular "solution": to create a new law countering “domestic terrorism.”

The argument is simple: Due to a lack of a domestic terrorism statute, the FBI is somehow powerless to stop these acts of violence. Such a law would grant the FBI more surveillance powers. A new domestic terrorism statute would allow the agency to investigate and prosecute far-right violence.

But this approach is misguided—and dangerous. First of all, the FBI is not an ally in the fight against racism. It has, in fact, often thwarted racial justice advocates and continues to be defined by deep-seated institutional racism. With many activists rejecting the carceral state or counterterrorism framework, and embracing police and prison abolition, whether a law enforcement agency can ever counter white supremacy is a subject of debate.

What is extremely clear is that the FBI has extraordinary tools at its disposal. It operatesundertheloosest guidelines at any point since the post-Hoover era reforms. These current guidelines allow the FBI to investigate an individual without any factual predi­cate that the person has committed a crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI is allowed to attend public meetings without disclosing its participation. The FBI has conducted counterterrorism investigations into nonviolent leftwing groups, including civil rights organizations. In other words, the FBI is hardly powerless to investigate and surveil activities it labels “domestic terrorism.” The FBI’s history of abuse, in fact, raises a troubling likelihood: A domestic terrorism law would almost certainly be used to silence leftwing dissent.

Sweeping powers

In addition to having the power to investigate domestic terrorism, the FBI also has plenty of statutes it can rely on. While it is true that “domestic terrorism” is not a stand-alone offense under U.S. law, neither is “international terrorism.” It is a crime to provide material support to a State-Department-designated “Foreign Terrorist Organization”—a statute frequently invoked by those claiming the FBI is powerless to fight domestic terrorism.

This, however, is not the only terrorism-related law. Dozens of laws apply to domestic terrorism, making the claims about the lack of domestic terrorism laws specious. One statute makes it a crime to provide material support for the commission of “federal crimes of terrorism.” This statute explicitly lists 57 preexisting laws as federal crimes of terrorism. An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that, of these 57 federal crimes of terrorism, “51 of them, or 89 percent, are applicable to both international and domestic terrorism.” This is on top of multiple hate crimes statues and numerous other basic criminal laws, like those against racketeering or conspiracy, that clearly would apply to white supremacist violence.

There also exists a highly specific domestic terrorism law, which illustrates how such legislation can be designed specifically to thwart dissent. Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which makes it illegal to damage or interfere with an animal enterprise causing it to lose profits. This law has been used to prosecute animal rights activists who free mink destined to be slaughtered on commercial fur farms.

Making up the rules

In order to understand how the FBI conducts investigations, it’s important to realize that the Bureau plays by its own rules. There is no charter from Congress defining how much evidence is required for the FBI to open an investigation. While some of the most intrusive surveillance techniques, like wiretaps or national security letters, are regulated by statute, Congress has little else to say about when and why the FBI can use specific investigatory techniques. Although a statute authorizes the FBI to investigate crime, many of its national security powers instead come from executive orders. For the last four decades, the questions of when, why and how the FBI conducts investigations have been largely regulated by the Attorney General. While this move was ostensibly intended as a reform, leaving such authority to the Attorney General has allowed for a gradual expansion of FBI powers.  

In the mid-1970s, the public, the media, Congress and even the Comptroller General of the United States, began to scrutinize the FBI’s use of its domestic intelligence authorities to surveil and even disrupt lawful, political activity. As part of an effort to rein in the FBI’s political surveillance and stave off public criticism, in 1976 Attorney General Edward H. Levi issued guidelines to regulate the FBI’s investigatory powers. Levi’s guidelines have since been succeeded by new guidelines promulgated by subsequent Attorneys General. However, the Attorney General Guidelines remain the main mechanism for defining and regulating the scope of the FBI’s authorities.

As part of a these reforms ostensibly meant to move the FBI away from broad “political intelligence” investigations and reorient it towards investigations of violations of the federal code, the FBI in 1976 moved the responsibility for investigating domestic terrorism from the FBI’s Intelligence Division to its Criminal Investigation Division. International terrorism, on the other hand, was considered to be a “foreign counter intelligence” matter. Until 2008, there existed separate guidelines for general crime, racketeering and domestic security/terrorism investigations on the one hand, and foreign counterintelligence investigations on the other hand. In other words, domestic and international terrorism were to be treated differently. Since the foreign counterintelligence guidelines were supposedly largely meant to deal with foreign spies, saboteurs and terrorists, they were less protective of civil liberties and partially classified.

When it comes to spying on dissent, the FBI is remarkably resourceful and inventive—and it has used its powers to violate civil liberties in foreign terrorism cases to crack down domestically. Take, for example, the FBI’s surveillance of opponents of Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy. In the 1980s, the FBI surveilled the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador’s (CISPES). Even though CISPES was a domestic group, involved in domestic political activity, and the investigation took place entirely in the U.S., the FBI argued that CISPES might be connected to armed groups in El Salvador’s civil war. As a result, the FBI classified its investigation as an international terrorism investigation and used the looser guidelines (no connection to terrorism was ever discovered).

Attorney General William French Smith under Ronald Reagan and Attorney General John Ashcroft under George W. Bush both rewrote the guidelines to make them significantly less protective of civil liberties. The most dramatic changes came in 2008, when in the waning months of the Bush Administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey created radically new guidelines—which remain in place today. Explicitly arguing for the need to “eliminate the remnants of the old ‘wall’ between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement," Mukasey issued a unitary set of guidelines for general crime, national security and foreign counterintelligence operations. Thus, the FBI agents no longer operated under differing standards for opening and carrying out domestic terrorism versus international terrorism investigations. (The internal structure of the FBI has also been reorganized since the reforms of the 1970s. Both international and domestic terrorism are now handled by the Counterterrorism Division, which is part of the FBI’s National Security Branch.)

The current Mukasey guidelines create two overarching types of FBI investigations of individuals: predicated investigations and assessments. While predicated investigations require having a factual reason to think the subject has some nexus to criminal activity or a national security threat, an assessment requires no such justification. Thanks to the Mukasey guidelines, the FBI can investigate people without any evidence of a crime.

In addition to the current loose standards for opening an investigation in general, the FBI's own domestic terrorism investigations show how easily the agency manipulates the term, in stark contrast to those who say the FBI lacks enough authority. Using its domestic terrorism authorities, the FBI has surveilled both Occupy Wall Street and the School of Americas Watch, even though it acknowledged both groups were nonviolent or had peaceful intentions. The FBI reasoned that a future, hypothetical “lone offender” or “militant group” could infiltrate the movements to carry out unspecified threats. The FBI’s domestic terrorism investigation of School of the Americas Watch carried on for 10 years. A 2010 Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report looked at FBI monitoring of domestic advocacy groups from 2001 to 2006, including PETA, Greenpeace and the Catholic Worker movement.

One of the terrorism investigations reviewed involved a 2003 incident where an alleged member of the Catholic Worker movement smashed a glass window and threw red paint at a military recruitment station. An email claiming responsibility stated the act was carried out “on behalf of the people of Iraq who suffered under Saddam Hussein and now suffer under the United States.” The OIG decided that since the act involved a “use of force or violence” (throwing red paint and smashing window) to achieve a political goal it, was—under FBI policy—proper to investigate it as domestic terrorism.

The OIG made a similar conclusion about a 2004 act of civil disobedience at a military recruitment station, determining that protesters spilling blood on the walls, an American flag and pictures constituted a use of force or violence for political ends.

The FBI is hardly hamstrung in investigating domestic terrorism. Instead, the FBI has overly broad powers that it routinely relies on to surveil dissent.

Institutional racism

During a 2016 rally organized by the white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party, white supremacists stabbed counter-protesters with the civil rights group By Any Means Necessary (Bamn). The FBI responded by opening up a domestic terrorism investigation—into Bamn. Additionally, the FBI misidentified Traditionalist Worker Party as the Ku Klux Klan and considered opening an investigation into Bamn for conspiring to violate the rights of the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI’s documents describe the Ku Klux Klan as a group that “consisted of members that some perceived to be supportive of a white supremacist agenda.”

That the FBI would respond to an incident of white supremacist violence by investigating the victims as terrorists doesn’t merely illustrate how the FBI doesn’t need any new powers to investigate terrorism. It illustrates how the FBI uses those powers to police political activism and has a deep-seated problem with institutional racism.

The Bamn investigation is part of a much larger picture. The FBI issued an outrageous and baseless intelligence assessment in August of 2017 on the threat of “Black Identity Extremism.” According to this analysis, African-American perceptions of racism are likely to lead to violence against police officers. By treating opposition to racism as a precursor to violence, this analysis is inherently criminalizing of Black dissent. Former FBI Director James Comey publicly touted the Ferguson Effect, an entirely debunked theory arguing that protests against police brutality lead to an uptick of crime. Historically, while the FBI had tasked informants with infiltrating and disrupting the Ku Klux Klan, it knew in advance about planned violence against the Freedom Riders and took no action.

The FBI’s institutional racism is further demonstrated by its own distinction between domestic and international terrorism. Federal statutes define domestic terrorism and international terrorism as identical, except for one key difference. Domestic terrorism takes place in the US, international terrorism does not. The FBI, however, ignores these statutory definitions. Instead, the FBI classifies as international terrorism any acts inspired by “foreign ideologies.” The FBI considers Jihadist ideology to be a foreign ideology. Therefore, nearly any terrorist act in which the alleged perpetrator is Muslim is classified as international terrorism. This is true even if the alleged perpetrator is a U.S. citizen, has no contacts outside the country, and carries out the alleged act in the U.S.

Hatem Abudayyeh is the executive director of the Arab American Action Network, a social justice organization based in Chicago. He tells In These Times, “If more funding goes to the feds, that expansion of the state is going to go after us. It's going to come down on our communities—Arab, Muslim, Latinx, Black, Native—all the social justice organizers around the country who come under attack by law enforcement because we're resisting Trump's policies and trying to build a better world.”

Abudayyeh has reason to be concerned. Donald Trump has tweeted that Antifa should be labeled a terrorist organization, and Ted Cruz has sponsored a nonbinding resolution urging that Antifa be declared a domestic terrorism organization. Antifa, which is short for Anti-Fascism, is an ideology, not the name of an organization. Further, technically speaking, no mechanism exists to classify domestic groups as terrorist organizations. The Obama Administration cited this when responding to a WhiteHouse.Org petition urging it to classify Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization. While this may not be a statutory designation, politicians and law enforcement conflating political movements with terrorism is far from harmless. It demonizes these movements, greenlights repression, and chills people from engaging in protected political activity for fear of being associated with terrorism. In the past, when the FBI declared animal rights and eco-terrorists the number one domestic terrorist threat, this contributed to a climate of repression, surveillance and aggressive prosecution.

White supremacist violence is real. It threatens some of the most vulnerable communities amongst us. But expanding the powers of the FBI or creating a new domestic terrorism law is not a solution. Contrary to the handwringing of cable news guests, reviews of existing statues or the FBI’s own domestic terrorism investigations show the claim that the FBI is lacking in powers is patently false. New laws aren’t only unnecessary, they would be actively harmful. The FBI has a long history of acting as the political police, including against civil rights groups. A new domestic terrorism law will only be used further repress these groups.

In the words of Fatema Ahmad, deputy director of the Muslim Justice League, a civil rights organization, "We need to get serious about addressing violence by starting at the root causes, like white supremacy, rather than attempting to predict individual instances or expanding the power of institutions that have long upheld white supremacy.”

We Talked with One of the Central Park Five About Netflix’s “When They See Us”

Yusef Salaam: the name may not automatically ring a bell, but his story likely does—especially if you have seen When They See Us. Last month the miniseries directed by Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay snagged 16 Emmy nominations and currently reigns as the most-watched U.S. series in Netflix history. Salaam, 45, was just 15 years old when his life was turned upside down. He and four other African American and Latino teens were falsely accused and later convicted in connection with New York’s infamous “Central Park Jogger” case, in which a 28-year-old white woman was assaulted and raped while jogging in the park in 1989. A central focus of the case and the miniseries is that, after prolonged periods of police interrogation, NYPD officers asserted that the accused boys had admitted to "wildin’" at the park on the night of the attack, supposedly a teen slang term that meant acting crazy or violent.

“The Central Park Five,” as they came to be known, spent between five and 13 years in prison before serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the crime in 2002; DNA evidence ultimately exonerated Salaam and the four others. Salaam and his wife, Sanovia, who have 10 children, relocated to the metro Atlanta area after he and his cohorts won a $41 million settlement from the state of New York in 2014. He recently spoke with In These Times’ Leonard Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting Fellow Chandra Thomas Whitfield about the impact of the wildly popular Netflix miniseries, life after exoneration, what helped him through the hardest times while doing hard time, and the role that former New York-businessman-turned-President-of-The-United-States Donald Trump played in nearly taking his life.

Chandra Thomas Whitfield:Wow, DuVernay’s series is provocative, emotional and also covers a lot of ground. What do you personally want people to know about how this case affected your lives?

Yusef Salaam: There were over 400 articles written about us when this first happened. That tsunami of media reports really did a devastating job. They were painting this picture about who we were. The pointing of the finger caused everybody who had an opinion–especially a person like Donald Trump–to say, “Let me take out a full-page ad in New York City newspapers. Let me put my money where my mouth is: These folks need to be executed.” A bounty was placed on our heads.

I want people to know the depth of what [the prosecutors and New York Police Department] did. This was the so-called criminal justice system. In reality, it was the criminal system of injustice. They inserted me and the rest of the five into this horrific experience. We wanted the American dream, but as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Malcolm X said, we woke up to the American nightmare.

Chandra: Your friend Korey Wise was the focus of the final episode of the miniseries. He endured a particularly hellish ordeal, and you two are closely intertwined in this case. How did seeing Korey’s experience unfold in film form affect you? 

Yusef: One of the most magical components of our story is this young man changed his name from Kharey to Korey. If you ever get an opportunity to speak to him, he says things like, “This is [my] life after death.” That young man died in prison. I’m fighting for folks like him who didn’t have someone like me to fight for him.

Our brotherhood switched from a brotherhood to a sacred brotherhood because [of the film.]

One of the best things about this film is that we didn’t know each other’s story; we found out just like everybody else found out in When They See Us. We didn’t know what Raymond [Santana] was going through: that at home his stepmom was calling him a rapist. He was scared to death, he didn’t even want to be at home with her alone; she might say he touched her. This is the reality that was placed upon [him], and a lot of [us] were going through similar types of things.

Chandra: Many fans of When They See Us have said it does an amazing job of covering the many hardships you all endured, particularly while in prison. What were some sources of inspiration that you leaned on during the toughest parts of your ordeal?

Yusef: I wrote this book of poetry called Words of a Man: My Right to Be. Most of the poetry was written while I was incarcerated between 1989 and 1997. From the unbelievable accusations from the start, to the “wildin’” convictions of the media, to Donald Trump’s full-page ad calling for the state to kill us, to the final judgement and imprisonment; the system wasn’t treating me like I was a man. So, because I knew I was a man, a human being and a son of God, I had to remind myself, and these words were a big part of that. I had to grow up very, very fast, but I wanted [people] to know, that if you ever find yourself in so-called dark places, there’s always a light somewhere in the darkness. And even if that light is inside you, you could illuminate your own darkness. Shine your light on the world. Young people need to know without a shadow of a doubt that they were born on purpose, and that they were born with a purpose.

Chandra:What was the media reaction to your exoneration?

Yusef: It was almost disrespectful, the way I came home. [My release after seven years got] little to no attention, which was a good thing in a way. I didn’t want nobody looking for me now that I was out.

But 13 years after we were accused and convicted of the crime, they found out we didn’t do it. My mother testified in City Hall that [the coverage of the exoneration] was a whisper juxtaposed in comparison to 1989. She wondered if the rats in New York City had heard. Even to this day, there are folks that’ll be like, “Who’s the Central Park 5?” I’ve been places and people are like, “Are you guys a part of a music group?”

Chandra:You’ve been speaking about your case and systemic flaws in the American criminal justice system for 20 years now. Have you been able to utilize DuVernay’s miniseries and  Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five documentary on your case as a teaching tool?

Yusef: One of the things that I loved about it was that these young people [who portrayed us in the movie] are able to give our future generation a seed of understanding [about] where they need to be in this life. [One time] in California we were about to [screen Ken Burns’] The Central Park Five documentary and a young woman stepped up and says, “I’m 13, I’m a cadet [and] I want to be a cop. What advice can you give me?”

Now, I’m in a room full of folks that have had some experiences, right? And so, in my mind I’m like, “Get out, get out, get out! Abort mission!”

And then something just popped into my head, which was crazy, it was like, “Tell her about what you’ve seen as it relates to the criminal justice system.” And very quickly and succinctly, I said to her, “You know, as I’ve travelled around the nation on the side of cop cars you have these words; in almost every single city I’ve been in, it says ‘to serve and protect.’ That sounds honorable. In New York City, they go a step further: on the door; it [also] says ‘courtesy, professionalism and respect.’ We’ve all watched Eric Garner get his life snuffed out by [New York Police Department officers] on TV; he was in Staten Island in New York State. He kept saying [to those officers] ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’”

So, I tell this young lady, “I submit to you, that they didn’t give that young man the first letters off of those three ideals on the cops’ door. They didn’t give him CPR. My advice to you, is that you do your job. We all know that there are bad apples, but there’s only a small, minute [number] of those. The reality is that if you do your job, you’ll be one of the best cops out there. And we need that.”

Chandra:This movie sheds light on the persistent systemic flaws of the criminal justice system that activists have called out for decades. What do you want people to know about this system that they may not?

Yusef: This film brings to light that there are so many facets to the criminal justice system. You’ve got the jurors. When you get that letter in the mail that says you have been called to serve on a jury, many of us say, “Man, I’m trying to get out of this,” right? They tell you you’re going to be judged by a jury of your peers. I swear when I heard that, I looked up [in that courtroom] and I said, “Where’s my man Bobo and Raheem at? I don’t know these folks.” You see what I’m saying? We need people to understand that non-participation is participation, even in the voting process. Non-participation is participation.

Chandra: There’s a lot to unpack in this miniseries. When it is all said and done, what do you want people to know about you all, now known as the Exonerated Five?

Yusef: The truth about what happened to us. I want folks to look at us and understand we survived. A lot of people are just finding out about the Central Park Jogger case through this film. But this is 30 years later. We had to deal with all of this that went on and we were [eventually] able to get the recognition of a superpower like Ava DuVernay—who once had a T-shirt on that said, “I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams.” With the tremendous work that she’s doing and she will do, for her to say, “I want to do this [film],” was beyond our wildest imagination.