PROJECTS
No go GTMO
The President of the United States has issued an Executive Order to deport 30,000 undocumented migrants from the US to GTMO, the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, previously used as a prison in the so called “War on Terror” in an attempt to deny the people held there any constitutional rights.
Once again a president is describing the people he wants to send there as “the worst of the worst.” Undocumented migrants have already started arriving at the prison. Tents are being erected to hold more.
I am now working on challenges these deportations, based on the lessons learned from Guantánamo 1.0. I have been to the prison more than 40 times, I know the territory, both physical and legal and will partner with others to identify who has been sent there, on what basis, where this can be challenged, and who is profiting from the infrastructure and security contracts inevitably involved.
I am seeking support to pay for this work.
Post Mortem
“Post Mortem” is a project exploring the potential innocence of people who have been executed in the US since 1976. The project is inspired by the case of Edward Earl Johnson (shown with his family, just before his execution, left), whose case of innocence was explored in Paul Hamann's documentary Fourteen Days in May.
In the 2006 case, Kansas v. March, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia proclaimed that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” The notion that there have been no innocent people among those executed is improbable. Since the U.S. resumed executions in 1976, more than 190 people have been exonerated off death row – one for every eight people executed.
Justice League apprentices are creating a case repository that can be made available to journalists, academics, documentary makers, podcasters and drama producers so that these stories can be more widely told, and these men and women finally get the hearing in the court of public opinion that they were denied in the courts of law.