DoJ Investigations

Chicago will pay a $3 million settlement to the family of a teenager shot and killed while fleeing police on a busy street, claiming he had a black object in his hand that made them fear for their lives.
The black object turned out to be an iPhone case.
And surveillance cameras do not show Cedric Chatman, 17, pointing the object at officers as he fled as police initially reported, although the videos are grainy.

The Department of Justice released a memo today announcing the end of federal contracts for all private prisons within the next five years.
Today, there are 14,000 federal inmates held in private prisons run by three corporations.
Last week, the Department of Justice released an inspector general’s report on private prisons that found for-profit detention centers to be substantially more dangerous for both the inmates and for the correctional officers, something it should have known all along.

South Carolina school resource officers arrest more than 1,200 students a year – some as young as seven and most of them black – on the questionable charge of “disturbing schools,” prompting the ACLU to file a lawsuit last week.
The lawsuit was filed the day after the Richland County Sheriff’s Department signed an agreement with the United States Department of Justice, settling a civil rights investigation into the agency’s practice of arresting students for infractions that should be handled by school administrators.

Two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were convicted this week for beating a mentally ill male inmate to “teach him a lesson” after he had mouthed off to jailers in March 2010.
Bryan Brunsting, 31, and Jason Branum, 35, were both convicted on counts of conspiracy, falsifying records and violating the inmate’s civil rights, marking a total of 21 Los Angeles sheriffs deputies to have been convicted of crimes since the federal government began investigating the largest jail system in the country in 2011.

The FBI quit demanding Apple do their jobs for them, and in a disturbing announcement said that they could now crack the previously secure iPhone 6 recovered from the San Bernadino killers.
Apple boldly announced their opposition to a court order to unlock the phone themselves.
Supposedly, cracking one iPhone would compromise security for the entire product line.
And it all happened because the FBI botched handling the phone.

An embattled Louisiana sheriff was indicted this week by a federal grand jury following guilty pleas by eight former deputies from his department.
Iberia Parish Sheriff Louis Ackal is facing ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for ordering the beatings of five inmates at the notorious Iberia Parish Jail.
The eight former deputies pleaded guilty to the deprivation of civil rights stemming from at least two separate incidents involving the beating of inmates in a plea deal that protects them from future indictments in exchange for their testimony against the sheriff.

The city of Miami is set to ratify a federal monitoring agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which will run for the next four years covering its 1,300 member force, protecting the Magic City and it’s more than 500,000 residents, which can be seen below.

As “affluenza” boy and his mother were caught south of the border Wednesday, once again the loopholes and bias of the United States legal system are making front page news throughout the world.