Grand Jury Indicts South Carolina Ex-Cop After His Defense Of A Fatal Shooting Was Debunked By Video

BY NICOLE FLATOW/Think Progress

A man holds a sign during a protest for the shooting death of Walter Scott at city hall in North Charleston, S.C.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHUCK BURTON

Video captured former Officer Michael Slager firing deadly shots at into Walter Scott’s back as he ran away in North Charleston, South Carolina. And now, Slager will likely face a murder trial for his actions.

A grand jury took the rare step of opting to indict Slager for murder, officialsannounced Monday. While grand juries indict the vast majority of defendants brought before them, it is incredibly rare that they indict officers in police brutality cases.

But Slager’s case was distinct from so many others in that a narrative initially painted in his favor flipped against him, after video revealed that he had misrepresented what happened that day and aimed to skew the case in his favor. The initial statement from police said Scott was attempting to grab a Taser from the officers, and that the shooting occurred in the struggle for a weapon. Media outlets initially reported this version of events. But video released later revealed that Scott was actually shot in the back as he was running away, unarmed, about 15 feet from Slager. The video appears to show Slager planting an object next to Scott. Many believe Scott was running because he owed child support money.

As the Atlantic reported, after the video was released, Slager retained little of the same support other officers had received even in the cases deemed most clearly egregious. Slager was fired. Police Chief Eddie Driggers said he was “sickened by what he saw.” And even the popular crowdfunding site GoFundMe that rejected a campaign to support the officer.

And Solicitor Scarlett Wilson moved quickly to file murder charges against Slager. Black leaders were wary, and called for Wilson to recuse himself from the case in favor of an independent prosecutor, because of a perceived unwillingness for her to prosecute similar cases in the past. Local prosecutors are typically perceived as carrying a bias in favor of their own police. But Monday’s grand jury indictment suggests this case has already had more success than most.

While the video provided more objective evidence to the Charleston County grand jury, similar evidence in Eric Garner’s case was not enough to secure a grand jury indictment for a fatal chokehold by New York Police Department officers.

In fact, over the past year, South Carolina has shown particular willingness to hold police officers accountable when they shoot suspects under dubious circumstances. Just after grand juries elsewhere failed to indict the officers implicated in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, a South Carolina grand jury indicted a white cop for shooting a black man. That indictment in December was at least the third of a police officer in the state last year.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after a grand jury also decided to indict six Baltimore officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray over a spinal cord injury. The prosecutor in that case, Marilyn Mosby, distinguished herselfas a strong proponent of police accountability.

Thus far, however, these cases appear to remain anomalies. One Bowling Green University study found that just 41 officers were charged in all with murder or manslaughter in a seven-year period ending in 2011, while 2,600 justifiable homicides were reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during that same period.

South Carolina Senate Candidate Suggests Teachers Should Be Able To Carry Machine Guns In School

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

South Carolina state Sen. Lee Bright (R), who is challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the GOP primary, said on Friday that school teachers should be able to carry machine guns to protect students from gun violence.

Appearing on Fox News Radio’s The Alan Colmes Show, Bright expanded on his proposed bill to create high school courses on how to use a fire arm by agreeing with Colmes that the government cannot legally restrict gun ownership on school grounds:

COLMES: So [teachers] shouldn’t have machine guns?

BRIGHT: I would think a teacher protecting a school grounds should be able to carry whatever she can carry legally.

COLMES: So should machine guns be legal to carry?

BRIGHT: The Second Amendment is pretty clear. It says the right to carry arms should not be infringed. [...]

COLMES: So you should be able to have any gun you want?

BRIGHT: Well, I don’t see how the government can regulate it.

In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can limit ownership of “dangerous and unusual” weapons that are not in “common use.” As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia concluded in the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller — which held that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to carry a firearm under certain circumstances — “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms…in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Congress significantly limited the sale of machine guns in the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which prevents the sale to civilians “of all machine guns made after the law took effect.”

Sorry, Republicans, Your Own Investigation Proves No Dead People Voted In South Carolina

By Rebecca Leber/Think Progress

South Carolina never found a single dead voter in recent elections. At least, that is thefinal word from the State Election Commission investigation into whether 900 people voted using a dead person’s name, according to the Columbia Free Times.

The report found that whatever issues existed were usually due to human error, like a clerical mistake or scanning problem, and not because anyone intentionally impersonated a deceased person. For example, hundreds of errors were due to mistakes like confusing a father and son who share the same name.

When Attorney General Alan Wilson demanded the original investigation, he cited “an alarming number” of cases reported by the DMV that “clearly necessitates an investigation into criminal activity.” The initial report surveyed 200 “suspicious” names and found nothing, but Wilson insisted “no one in this state should issue any kind of clean bill of health in this matter” until officials “finished with their work.” Republicans, including Wilson, held up the initial claim that the voting rolls were packed with dead voters to argue for a voter ID law. Rep. Alan Clemmons (R) wrote at one point, “It is an unspoken truth in South Carolina that election fraud exists.”

Even though South Carolina has never found any election fraud, that will not prevent state Republicans from redoubling strict voter ID efforts, invigorated by the recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act. In fact, Wilson celebrated the decision, calling the Voting Rights Act an “extraordinary intrusion” and pledging to implement voter ID “without some having to ask for permission or being required to jump through the extraordinary hoops demanded by federal bureaucracy.”

How South Carolina Republicans Belittle Elizabeth Colbert Busch

By Adam Peck/Think Progress

Former South Carolina Governor and current Republican nominee for Congress Mark Sanford has his work cut out for him if he wants to win the special election on May 7th, his first attempt at staging a political comeback after being forced to resign his governorship following a very public affair. But that didn’t stop one local county party chairman from adding another: the looks of the female Democratic nominee.

Sanford is running against Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a successful South Carolinian businesswoman who easily won her Democratic Party primary last month. But rather than challenging Colbert Busch on policy or credentials, Republicans seem focused on her physical appearance:

“Everybody is really concerned because she’s not a bad-looking lady, she is a good speaker and she’s got some money,” said Jerry Hallman, chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Party. “In politics, those things are important.”

This is not the first time a female candidate for office has been dismissed as little more than a pretty face with a nice speaking voice, but in the case of Colbert-Busch, who is the older sister of Comedy Central personality Stephen Colbert, she has been subjected to an unusual amount of sexist coverage by all corners of the media.

“Why Stephen Colbert’s Sister Could Beat Mark Sanford,” read one headline yesterday, “Stephen Colbert’s sister to run for office” was another. “Right now, the one thing that people know about her is that she is Stephen Colbert’s sister,” was how Sanford himself spoke about his opponent to Morning Joe during an interview yesterday. “Well, at the end of the day, Stephen Colbert is a very popular, well-regarded comedian, but at the end of the day he’s not on the ticket.”

Whether intentional or not, every one of these headlines poses a problem: they continue to define Colbert-Busch not based on her own successes but by the successes of her famous brother. In doing so, it allows readers — and, more importantly, voters — to do the same. Which of course isn’t fair to Colbert-Busch, who has the right to be judged on her own merits.

White House blocks South Carolina voter ID law

By Muriel Kane/Raw Story

In a move with significant implications for the 2012 elections, the Obama administration on Fridayblocked a South Carolina voter ID law from taking effect because of concerns that it would have a disproportionate effect on minority voters.

The law, which was passed last spring by the South Carolina state legislature and signed by Governor Nikki Haley, requires voters to present some form of photo ID, such as a driver’s license, passport, or military identification, along with their voter’s registration.

According to Reuters, “The Justice Department said the requirement could harm the right to vote of tens of thousands of people, noting that just over a third of the state’s minorities who are registered voters did not have a driver’s license needed to cast a ballot.”

“The state’s data demonstrate that non-white voters are both significantly burdened … [and] disproportionately unlikely to possess the most common types of photo identification,” the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Thomas Perez, wrote to the state.

Perez also noted that South Carolina had not offered evidence of any type of voter fraud that could not be handle by existing laws but would be “deterred by requiring voters to present only photo identification at the polls.”

South Carolina is one of a number of states with a history of institutionalized discrimination which continue to be required under 1960′s civil rights legislation to obtain approval from the Justice Department for any redistricting or changes in state voting laws. Changes in Florida and Texas are currently under review for the same reason.

The Justice Department has indicated that its decision may be reconsidered if South Carolina provides a satisfactory plan to provide exemptions to the photo ID requirement.

Study Shows South Carolina Voter ID Law Hits Minorities Hardest, Violating Voting Rights Act

By Marie Diamond/think progress






As ThinkProgress has been reporting, a slew of Voter ID laws pushed by Republican legislators in several states are a transparent attempt to disenfranchise core Democratic voters, especially the poor, college students, and minorities. In May, South Carolina became the 10th state to adopt this legislation.

The ACLU warned that “nearly 180,000 voters in South Carolina – most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low-income voters – will be disenfranchised as a result of this discriminatory bill.” The NAACP added that it “immediately disenfranchises eight percent of registered voters in the state.”

Those predictions are already coming true. A study by the Associated Press finds that South Carolina’s law hits minority precincts the hardest:

A new South Carolina voter identification law is impacting majority-black precincts more than others in the state, according to a study by the Associated Press.

The measure requires that every person have photo ID of some kind when they vote, whether it is a driver’s license, military ID or passport, the AP wrote. The law has been under review by the Department of Justice to see if it violates the Voting Rights Act.

The AP found that many voters in majority-black counties in South Carolina do not have proper identification — and the percentage of minority voters without the right identification is higher in those areas than other precincts statewide.

In Richland County, the state’s second-most populous county, there are 11,087 nonwhite voters without ID, and 4,544 in Orangeburg County. According to AP, this means that half of those impacted in Richland — and 73 percent in Orangeburg –are non-white voters.

Under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the burden of proof is on southern states with a legacy of racial oppression to prove that legal changes will not have a discriminatory impact on minority voters. The AP study appears to confirm that South Carolina’s Voter ID law violates the VRA.

Voter ID laws have been widely denounced as the reincarnation of a Jim Crow system that systematically disenfranchised black voters. When the South Carolina House looked as if it would pass the legislation last year, “members of the Legislative Black Caucus and others stood up and walked out of the House chamber to show their collective disgust.”

Democrats say it’s no coincidence that Republicans renewed their disenfranchisement efforts after Barack Obama was elected president. “In 2008, we had too many black folk, too many brown folk, too many poor folk voting,” said South Carolina state Representative David J. Mack III. “They (Republicans) can’t have that in 2012.”

Random late night: Republicans stupid or crazy?

M.C.L Comment: I suspect my right wing troll Honkey is feature in this video.

GOP Rep. Bob Inglis slams Republicans for being led by hate radio, ‘preying on fears.’

By Lee Fang Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC), who lost recently in his primary run-off for the Republican nomination to keep his seat in Congress, is speaking out about the influence of hate radio and right-wing fear mongering in the Republican Party. In an interview with the AP, Inglis called out reactionaries like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck for spreading “demagoguery” and hatred in society:

– Noting that Palin had spread the “death panel” smear, Inglis said, “there were no death panels in the bill…and to encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership.”

– Inglis slammed GOP leaders for following hate radio talkers, rather than leading on principle: “I think we have a lot of leaders that are following those (television and talk radio) personalities and not leading [...] What it takes to lead is to say, ‘You know, that’s just not right.”

– Inglis on the right-wing’s effort to divide America: “It’s a real concern, because I think what we’re doing is dividing the country into partisan camps that really look a lot like Shia and Sunni. It’s very difficult to come together to find solutions.”

– Although Inglis did not hear the racial slurs hurled at Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) at a tea party protest on Capitol Hill during the health reform vote, he did see threatening and abusive behavior. “I caught him at the door and said, ‘John, I guess you’ve been here before,’” said Inglis, referring to Lewis’ role in the Civil Rights movement.

Like Inglis, Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) lost his GOP primary, despite a similarly conservative voting record. Bennett later slammed the GOP for being held captive to far right-tea parties and Fox News, noting, “I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas.” Inglis, who stood out as one of the only Republican lawmakers to publicly criticize Glenn Beck, warned that voters eventually will discover that the GOP is “preying on their fears” and turn away.

M.C.L comment: It seems the only time the Republicans tell the truth about their side is when they're retiring or they just lost something to another Republican.

Vic Rawl: ‘Systemic’ failures in South Carolina voting systems

By David Edwards

Update: CREW asks SC AG to probe whether Greene was 'induced' to run

A press release sent to RAW STORY states,

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), took two significant actions against the questionable Democratic candidate for South Carolina Senate, Alvin Greene. In a letter to South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, CREW asked for an investigation into whether Mr. Greene was induced to run for the Senate in violation of South Carolina law.

CREW also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that primary-winner Greene and three other candidates in the June 8, 2010 Democratic primary in South Carolina: Gregory Brown, Ben Frasier and Brian Doyle and their campaign committees, violated the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and FEC regulations by failing to file mandatory disclosure reports prior to the election.

Melanie Sloan, CREW's Executive Director, said “The people of South Carolina have a right to fair, transparent and fraud-free elections. Paying candidates to run for office and concealing the sources of campaign funds undermines the integrity of the electoral process and threatens our democracy.”

The inducement to run complaint stems from questions regarding Mr. Greene’s ability to pay the filing fee for his candidacy. Mr. Greene originally attempted to pay the $10,440 filing fee with a personal check, which the South Carolina Democratic Party rejected. He returned later that same day, March 16, 2010, with a check with the name “Alvin M. Greene for Senate” handwritten as payor. Mr. Greene claims the funds came from a personal savings account, but has refused to provide documentation of the account.

More at CREW's website, including links for the FEC complaint and the complaint’s exhibits, plus the letter to South Carolina Attorney General McMaster.

(Original story follows)

A candidate in South Carolina's Democratic Senate primary has called for an investigation into his defeat. Former Rep. Vic Rawl announced Monday that he was protesting the election that resulted in Alvin Greene as the Democratic candidate.

"There is a cloud over Tuesday's election. There is a cloud over South Carolina, that affects all of our people, Democrats and Republicans, white and African-American alike," according to a statement released by the Rawl campaign.

"The strange circumstances surrounding Tuesday's vote require a thorough investigation. For better or worse, this protest process is the only platform currently available for that investigation," said Rawl.

In the statement, Rawl suggested that the voting systems in South Carolina were in question. "And let me be clear: regardless of the outcome of this protest, a full and unblinking investigation of this election and the overall integrity of South Carolina's election system must go forward."

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown Monday night, Rawl furthered a theory that voting systems are suspect.

"There are numerous complaints. Everything from having my name show up on a Republican primary ballot to all sorts of issues with regard to the computer cards, with regard to the difference between the absentee votes versus the actual vote during the day of the machine voting. We are convinced that there is something amiss with regard to either the software or the machines themselves," Rawl told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

"My understanding is they're machines that have been -- there have been serious problems with them in Arkansas and Florida and Louisiana and other places. They have a history. The biggest problem, of course, they didn't have a paper trail whatsoever," Rawl continued.

Since the election, Democrats have become increasing convinced that something was amiss with Greene's unlikely win.

Greene handily defeated opponent Vic Rawl in Tuesday's primary, winning with 59 percent of the vote to Rawl' 41 percent, despite not having run any sort of visible campaign, not having set up a campaign Web site, and being unemployed. And it quickly emerged that Greene is facing a felony obscenity charge over an incident in which he allegedly showed a college student obscene photos from the Internet.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) suspects Greene is a "plant." Clyburn is familiar with dirty tricks in South Carolina elections. "I know a Democratic pattern, I know a Republican pattern, and I saw in the Democratic primary, elephant dung all over the place. So I knew something was wrong in that primary. And this result tells us that," Clyburn told CNN Sunday.

NBC's David Gregory asked Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod Sunday if Greene was a legitimate candidate. "It doesn't appear so to me. It was a mysterious deal," said Axelrod.

The Brad Blog's Brad Friedman has also theorized that voting machines may have been tampered with. Green managed to receive more votes than were actually cast in 25 counties. And while Rawl won the absentee ballots by 68 points, Greene won on election day by 18 points.

The vast majority of ballots cast on voting day were on unverifiable electronic voting machines, according to Friedman.

South Carolina uses ES&S' 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, in this case touch-screen) voting machines at the polling place. The machines, also used in many other states (such as Arkansas, where we recently reported exclusively on the disappearance of thousands of votes on May 18th, which neither state nor local officials are able to explain to this day) are both oft-failed and easily manipulated in such a way that it's almost impossible to detect the systems have been gamed.

Rawl has assembled a panel of experts to advise him on filing the protest.

"We feel from the three different sets of experts that we're dealing with, one, of course, is dealing with the statistical analysis of the data. The second of course is the political outcome of the races historically and the third group is dealing with the software and computer science aspect of it. All three groups indicate that there are difficulties, and it appears to be systemic," said Rawl.

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast June 14, 2010.

Defending Raghead Comment, South Carolina State Senator Says ‘We’re At War’ With Foreign Countries

By Alex Seitz-Wald As many bloggers have noted, South Carolina state Sen. Jake Knotts (R) has been taking heat for calling an Indian-American gubernatorial candidate a “raghead.” “We already got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion,” Knotts said of state Rep. Nikki Haley (R).

The South Carolina Republican Party quickly condemned Knotts’ slur, and he eventually issued an apology. “My ‘raghead’ comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest,” Knotts said in a statement. He made the comments during an interview with the webcast Pub Politics, and defended himself by saying, “Bear in mind this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It’s like local political version of Saturday Night Live.”

Pub Politics disagreed, saying Knotts’ hateful rhetoric “does not fit with our program and its goals.” They’ve announced that they won’t release the audio, but a better decision would be to post the clip of Knott’s comment on the Internet without airing the episode so that there’s a public audio record of Knott’s comment.

Knotts’ apology seems insincere. He “defended his remarks” immediately following the interview while talking to reporters, and upped his rhetoric then by calling Haley a “f**king raghead.” He then avoided retracting the comment, clarifying to say “he did not mean to use the F-word.” He also repeated his line about the “raghead in the White House,” and said, “This isn’t the first time I’ve said it.” Knotts went on to say that Haley — who was raised as a Sikh but later converted to Christianity — was not Christian enough to govern South Carolina, and that she was being directed by a secret cabal of Sikhs:

Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it. [...]

“We need a good Christian to be our governor,” he said. “She’s hiding her religion. She ought to be proud of it. I’m proud of my god.”

Knotts says he believes Haley’s father has been sending letters to India saying that Haley is the first Sikh running for high office in America. He says her father walks around Lexington wearing a turban.

“We’re at war over there,” Knotts said.

Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with “foreign countries.”

Knotts’ hateful slur may cost him his career. Former Lexington County GOP chairwoman Katrina Shealy told CNN today that “Knotts’ ‘raghead’ remark prompted her to make a very early entry into the race that won’t happen for two years.” “The political climate out there is so ugly. I am sick and tired of the negative politics,” Shealy said. Eighty percent of people on a local TV station’s poll said Knotts should be “officially reprimand.”