This Just InThe New York City Council
is liberal:
Infuriating law-enforcement organizations and his colleagues, a City Council member, Charles Barron, introduced a resolution yesterday urging clemency for a convicted and escaped cop-killer, Assata Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard.
On May 2, 1973, Chesimard was involved in a roadside shoot-out with New Jersey State Police after the vehicle in which she and two companions were traveling was pulled over because of a malfunctioning taillight. During an exchange of gunfire, a New Jersey state trooper, Werner Foerster, was wounded. Chesimard, then a member of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party, was convicted of first-degree murder in 1977 for seizing the incapacitated trooper's side arm and using it to shoot him in the head.
While serving her sentence at New Jersey's Clinton Correctional Institution for Women, Chesimard, with the help of fellow members of the Black Liberation Army, staged a prison break in 1979. She escaped to Cuba, where she was granted asylum and is now shielded by the island nation's communist dictator, Fidel Castro. On May 2, New Jersey law enforcement announced that the Justice Department raised the bounty on Chesimard, 57, to $1 million from $50,000, and added her name to the list of wanted domestic terrorists.
Mr. Barron's council resolution, which he announced yesterday at a press conference on the steps of City Hall, calls on the New Jersey State Police and the Justice Department "to cease portraying Assata Shakur as a terrorist, and ... to rescind the reward for Shakur's capture and grant her clemency." The Brooklyn council member's resolution praises the convicted murderer as "a social justice activist, a poet, a mother, and a grandmother."She wrote poetry? Well, in that case, she must be innocent!
Here's a good site on
Chesimard from a Law Enforcement point of view. The good news is that the million dollar reward may spur
some bounty hunters to take up the chase. I strongly suspect the push for clemency is coming as a result of the increased reward money.
Here's an interesting post where
three liberal bloggers take on the Chesimard case, and a communique from Mos Def, musician and actor, proclaiming her innocence. I don't know the real facts of the case, obviously, but I am suspicious of the claim that she didn't have any gunpowder residue. There's an aroma of "Mumiamania" about this case.
